Reverie

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.

~Alexander Tytler, historian

From Rogoff's The Curse of Cash: "Any economist who takes income and wealth inequality seriously realizes that, despite the enormous progress of the past three decades, differences across countries simply swamp the within-country inequality that Thomas Piketty and others worry about. The 2015 Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, author of the 2013 book The Great Escape, has forcefully made this point. International migration from poor countries to advanced ones create massive welfare gains for the immigrants."

What is (was)....Awamiya?

Tesla is losing $8,000 a minute. Articles are being written that state the company is developing a concept that will benefit others, not itself or its shareholders. That is to say, Tesla's investors have taken a horrific loss to benefit "the commons."

Another slant from Sam Jaffe, battery analyst for Cairn Energy Research in Boulder, Colorado: The Tesla Roadster is promised to be the quickest production car ever built. But that achievement would mean squeezing into its tiny frame a battery twice as powerful as the largest battery currently available in any electric car. These claims are so far beyond current industry standards for electric vehicles that they would require either advances in battery technology or a new understanding of how batteries are put to use, said  Jaffe.
But Jaffe reaches an interesting conclusion. "I don't think they're lying. I just think they left something out of the public reveal that would have explained how these numbers work."

In a similar vein, I just saw an interview with an investor with a large short position on Tesla. He says the company makes no money, is years behind Ford and the Germans in engineering and is planning a car in 2020 for which no production facilities are yet built. He say the company is worthless. Worthless.

American survey:

Only 13% of people don’t think global warming is happening, and only 30% don’t believe it’s human-caused. 23% of people think scientists mostly believe global warming’s not human-caused, suggesting that most skeptics aren’t disbelieving scientists so much as unaware of them. Also, 39% of Americans say that there is a greater-than-even-odds chance that global warming will cause the extinction of the human race.

Saudi Arabia recently destroyed an entire civilian town, Awamiya,  in the country's Shia-dominated east in a sectarian driven campaign to crush dissent.

Black Friday 2017 was all about digital sales. American shoppers spent a record $5 billion in 24 hours of Black Friday, 2017. That is a 16.9% increase in dollars spent online compared with Black Friday 2016, according to data from Adobe Digital Insights, which tracks 80% of online spending at America's 100 largest retail websites... Meanwhile, malls and big-box retailers were left only slightly emptier. Early estimates from ShopperTrak, a data analytics company that measures the number of shoppers at stores, said foot traffic "decreased less than one percent when compared to Black Friday 2016."
Strangely Bitcoin was up as well.

A study on hiring and college experience is interesting.

The study's author tells The Street that companies are "[looking for] somebody who is just job-ready to just show up." The irony is that college graduates will ultimately be paid a higher salary -- even though for many jobs, the study found that a college degree yields zero improvement in actual performance.
The Street reports that "In a market where companies increasingly rely on computerized systems to cull out early-round applicants, that has led firms to often consider a bachelor's degree indicative of someone who can socialize, run a meeting and generally work well with others." One company tells them that "we removed the requirement to have a computer science degree, and we removed the requirement to have experience in development computer programming. And when we removed those things we found that the pool of potential really good team members drastically expanded."

If you are in love with a belief or process that has been shown over time to be untrue or unworkable, is that idealism or just plain dumb?

Meghan Markle, another free woman asteroid captured by the Royal gravity.

The interest the young have recently shown in socialism and communism is surprising; the nature of these destructive concepts have not  changed--but youth has. This generation is absolutely enamored with individual expression, with one's own definition and practice. So the rather obvious question of sexuality in this generation can actually be the subject for debate. Both socialism and communism have, as one single and overriding feature, the subordination of the individual to the state. In both of these economies, the autonomy of the individual is not just discouraged, it is anathema. How the modern young square this with their personal preoccupation with individual expression has yet to be explained.

The term “GULAG” is an acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution, Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei (Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps), that operated the Soviet system of forced labor camps in the Stalin era.

Arizona State fired Todd Graham. I am thrilled.

An interesting take on liberalism by Deneen:

While classical liberalism looks back to a liberalism achieved and lost—particularly the founding philosophy of America that stressed natural rights, limited government, and a relatively free and open market, “progressive” liberalism longs for a liberalism not yet achieved, one that strives to transcend the limitations of the past and even envisions a transformed humanity, its consciousness enlarged, practicing what Edward Bellamy called “the religion of solidarity.” As Richard Rorty envisioned in his aptly titled 1998 book Achieving Our Country, liberal democracy “is the principled means by which a more evolved form of humanity will come into existence.… Democratic humanity…has ‘more being’ than predemocratic humanity. The citizens of a [liberal] democratic, Whitmanesque society are able to create new, hitherto unimagined roles and goals for themselves.”

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/01/sunspot.html

Sunspot steeleydock.blogspot.com This is the Sun on January 6, 2014 with a "small" area at about ten o'clock off center. That is a sunspot about the size of the earth. Sun...

The Matt Lauer firing means something. Women are simply being taken more seriously and their complaints matter. This--and the surprising evolution of opinion on Bill Clinton-- is a big deal. But maybe not. Co-anchor Savannah Guthrie said: "I am heartbroken for Matt..."

San Francisco City Supervisor Jane Kim worries that automation, by eliminating large numbers of particular jobs in coming decades, will lead to chronic unemployment.  And so Ms. Kim wants to tax employers each time they replace workers with robots or algorithms. That is, essentially, a tax on innovation and productivity, sort of like taxing thumbs.

Oil prices are rising. At one point they were over $64 a barrel. Some of this is the result of rising interest rates which might impede fracking expansion but some might be the problems in the Middle East which, so far, have not merited much U.S. press attention. Iran and the Saudis are ratcheting up their religious war into a geopolitical one. Iran has the advantage of financing remorseless terrorism through various subsidiaries and one, the Houthis, recently fired a rocket at Saudi Arabia. Right now  the Houthis are mining the Bab el-Mandeb,  a narrow chokepoint separating Eritrea and Djibouti on the west and Yemen on the east. This narrow area is the exit point for oil transports from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. This area is seen to be so important to world trade that the Chinese have military units there.

This year alone, the U.S. Treasury has confidentially paid $934,754 to settle sexual harassment and other complaints against members of Congress and their staff.

"Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention — in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. In an important sense, therefore, faking is not something that can be intended, even though it comes about through intentional actions. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but his pretence is merely a continuation of his lying strategy. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. Understanding this phenomenon is, it seems to me, integral to understanding how a high culture works, and how it can become corrupted." This is Scruton writing about the decline of, what he calls, "high culture."

To command consumers by law, to force them to buy only in the national market, is to infringe on their freedom and to forbid them an activity, trade, that is in no way intrinsically immoral; in a word, it is to do them an injustice.--Bastiat

And this from Adam Smith: Whether the advantages which one country has over another be natural or acquired is in this respect of no consequence.  As long as the one country has those advantages, and the other wants them, it will always be more advantageous for the latter rather to buy of the former than to make. 

The Suffolk County District Attorney's Office in New York doled out $3.25 million in bonuses to prosecutors from its asset forfeiture fund since 2012, according to records obtained by Newsday through a Freedom of Information request. Amazing.

AAAAAaaaaannnnnddddd.....a picture: