Rebane's Ruminations

The Liberal Mind – Profits vs Jobs

        'Tax rates have no effect on the behavior of the taxed.' - deeply held liberal tenet

George Rebane

This week President Obama made another extremely important statement that reveals his understanding of how the world works.  At a campaign stop he took Romney's credentials to task, doubting that anyone who has focused on business ventures like reorganizing companies for the purpose of making a profit is suited to be President of the United States.  The better recommendation for such a candidate would be to have focused on creating jobs.  On hearing this I could not help but go slack-jawed.

To be sure, it is a tragedy to have such ignorance (or perfidy?) resident in the chief executive of a putatively capitalistic country, but the portents of making such a statement to the electorate should be our real concern.  Obama spoke those words knowing that a large fraction of voters would agree with him simply because of his position, abetted by their inability to understand the basics of economics beyond their own spending habits.  In other words, the man knowingly pandered to the complacantly ignorant.

The correct message should have been that in free markets all businesses are created to make a profit, and when successful, such enterprises also create jobs.  No business is started for the purpose of creating jobs.  You have to be successfully shielded from reality or just plain dumb not to know that labor – i.e. a job – is an element of cost that makes any product or service more expensive to the customer, makes the business less competitive, reduces profits and the ability to grow, and jeopardizes the survival of the company.  In short, a successful business does its best when it minimizes the jobs needed to function profitably, and thereby best guarantees that the jobs it does provide will be the most secure.

It is only the collectivist state with its twisted ideology that sets up organizations, which employ cadres of inept and inefficient workers to impede the increase of wealth and the quality of life for the most people.  And the collectivist state does this without regard to the unsustainability of the entire scheme, counting on increasing the wholesale level of equally applied misery to mask any alternative approach to creating and distributing wealth.  This is what our President has been successfully selling, and through his cadres, successfully imposing on the country.

Part and parcel of such a downward spiral is the notion of a nation, up to its eyeballs in debt, spending its way to economic recovery and wealth.  The Greeks are now demanding to spend more, instead of tightening their belts from profligate borrowing and spending.  The French just voted in a socialist who promises to put their country on the same road.  Spain and Portugal are ready to sign on.

This entire approach was recently given a mind-boggling justification by Hannes Swoboda, a member of the European Parliament and president of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in that ‘august body’.  In his ‘Europe Can Spend Its Way to Growth’ (21may12 WSJ) he advances some economic prescriptions for the EU that have yet to work on this third planet from the sun – nevertheless, member countries are exhorted to throw themselves into the breech one more time.

First and foremost, he recommends compelled borrowing by states and businesses for the purpose of job creation.  This, of course, requires some mysterious compelling of lenders, since prospects for profits that assure a payback are neither apparent nor a necessity.  He then appeals to la-la-land accounting to dictate that such debts “should not be integrated in calculations of structural deficits and hence be punished because (somehow) investment in growth generates income and taxes, and therefore revenues for the state.”

To achieve this new level of unsustainable indebtedness, Swoboda argues that “European institutions should enact legislation that requires all members to make public investments in growth and employement.”  A staple of economic activity in this direction is to re-ignite the efforts that “would finally lead us onto the path toward a seriously environment-friendly economy.”  This in the face of the disastrous recent history that EU countries have experienced in their pell-mell charge into green industries, an experience which subsequently caused everyone to beat a hasty retreat in order to save their national fiscs.

How will all this be accomplished?  Swoboda’s sure-fire approach spells out that “these additional investments need to be financed, one way or another.”  (No kidding, you can’t make this stuff up.)  And just to make sure that capital has every impediment to moving into its most productive use, he prescribes a new “financial transaction tax".   On top of that, the EU would establish additional regulations to “fight against tax evasion” which then would “channel additional funds into national treasuries.”

To put a nice bow on it, we can now all do a little anticipatory happy dance because “once growth takes off, tax revenues will start flowing.  Tax policy that favors lower-income classes and better regulation of financital markets would (then) already be fostering growth.”  Now, do you see how easy all that would be?  And do you finally understand why Team Obama wants to take us down that same road once “after (his) re-election (he) will have more flexibility”?

Agenda21 on cat’s feet (updated 24may12)

George Rebane

I just returned from the Nevada County Board of Supervisors meeting at the Rood Center.  I went there to hear the report on establishing a 2005 county baseline for CO2 emissions presented by the Sierra Business Council with some mysterious connection to ICLEI.  (You can check the details on the county’s website.)  The report consisted of a bunch of pie charts showing metric tons of “CO2 equivalents” emitted by various county activities and sources.  The numbers came from plugging SBC collected county data into a computer model supplied by ICLEI.

The longer term purpose of this baseline data is to set CO2 targets, pass future regulations and ordinances, and establish monitoring and enforcement procedures to further constrain and dictate the behavior of county residents.

ICLEI stands for International Council for Environmental Initiatives.  It is the NGO charged with implementing UN’s Agenda 21 plan for constraining and controlling ALL human activity on earth as soon as possible.  ICLEI, headquartered in Germany, is the coordinating arm for the distributed infusion of ‘smart growth’, ‘sustainability’, ‘energy efficiency’, ‘climate change laws’, … at local levels throughout the world.  USA, signatory to Agenda 21, has more than 500 national chapters of which over 100 are in, where else, California.

The SBC presenters professed singular ignorance of any of this or even any depth of the work they had done.  To them ICLEI was the supplier of the computer model into which they stuck their local data, period.  Supervisor Ed Scofield called me to the mike to explain ICLEI, and then expressed his deep concerns about the encroachment of ICLEI’s infusion of Agenda 21.

Supervisor Nate Beason asked some excellent questions re the presented ‘metric tons’ and the source of the computer model used.  Supervisor Beason wanted the quoted numbers to be put into some context which would establish their significance.  The SBC people were not able to do that either.   The question still to be asked is ‘how was the computer model validated and by whom?’

Knowledge Engines

George Rebane

Part of our rush toward Singularity involves the web becoming ‘smarter’.  In case you haven’t noticed, search engine technologies are rapidly evolving from providing ‘information’ to becoming so-called knowledge engines.  Wolfram Alpha was an early one into this functionality, and it is now being joined by Google’s Knowledge Graph Microsoft will soon upgrade its Bing to provide the same type of functionality.

My friend Dr Larry Press reports on Knowledge Graph here.  And this is a short video that gives you an idea of all this before you dive into the details.

As evident from my past posts on the topic, I’m looking forward to IBM offering its Watson technology on a broad basis to websites.  To do that though will require the installation of what I’d call server cities instead of server farms.  Today web related utilities already consume more than 5% of our electrical capacity.  With all of us starting to use Watson-derived knowledge engines will make the country’s lights dim.

 

Conspiracy Theories by the Dozen, Oh My! (updated 21may12)

George Rebane

[Correction: This is the submitted form of my column that appeared belatedly in the print edition of the 25may12 Union.  I was informed of the delay due to a rush of political columns and articles on the new marijuana ordnance.]

In this election year all the weird stuff we’ve been hearing about seems to be coming at us more loudly and from every direction.  Each piece by itself sounds like a purposed effort to drive America deeper into a place that most of us don’t want it to go; each piece sounds like the revelation of another quiet conspiracy at work.  And when you gather all the pieces together, they don’t look like separate pieces at all, but to many they appear to fit into one big concerted effort from somewhere by some people who are working together.

And what makes it even more curious is that the individual pieces have been promoted by people from all political parties – most certainly including Republicans and Democrats.  So we can’t just point our finger at one side and blame the whole thing on them.

We start with the International Democrat Union (idu.org) founded in 1983 by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Republican Party National Committee’s John Allen, and joined by VPOTUS George HW Bush.  It is a self-declared union of ‘centre and centre right’ parties with high sounding principles that include abiding by the anti-constitutional UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and calls for unspecified obligations between nations.  Who knows what the IDU does, but it meets every four years near the Republican Convention.

Then we have the notorious UN Agenda21 initiative to which President GHW Bush signed us up (http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml).  Reading its tenets and principles calls for a one world in which human activity is restricted to a fraction of the earth’s land surface, and everyone belongs to a wholesome, sustainable, inclusive, happy society of peacefully like-minded and sensitive people.  The progressive principles of this future UN-dominated world are being implemented through something called the ICLEI Global (iclei.org) which organizes “local governments for sustainability” and already has over 550 US cities as members.

Next we come to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 with its draconian Title X, Subtitle D.  There its anti-terrorism provisions give the President powers to do all kinds of spooky and unconstitutional things like constructing a gulag of stalags in the US for forcibly interning thousands of US citizens when the need arises.

Ruminations - 8may12

George Rebane

Happy VE Day!  On 8 May 1945 the Rebanes were in Liederberg - a small German farming village that just a few days ago was firmly brought under the control of Patton’s Third Army (more here) - and ready to be carted off to Augsburg and four years of internment in post-war displaced persons camps.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the world the battle for Okinawa was raging with Marine and Army divisions locked in a no-quarter-given combat with Japanese forces that had only one mission, die as slowly as possible while killing as many Americans as possible.  Okinawa was bigger than D-Day, but in America people were too busy celebrating Hitler’s downfall to notice.  That August the world would again change.

Newly elected Hollande promised to tax France to growth and balanced budgets.  And the French believed him.  Now nothing like that will happen, but what the hell, the French could frolic in the streets for a couple of days before they double down on their loudly proclaimed misery.  The French government's spending already accounts for more than 50% of the country’s GDP and it doesn’t generate any wealth.  All it is capable of doing is buying votes with tribute exacted from its private sector whose top marginal tax rates are now going to go above 70%.  The same silly people there as here believe that someone will actually risk their euros to build/expand businesses from which, if successful, the government will leave them 30 cents of every euro they earn.

Some writers view this latest installment of socialist failure in Europe as a golden opportunity for America (here).  They argue that America will be the only place left in the world for entrepreneurial and investment opportunity.  To me it seems that not everyone is paying attention to what Team Obama has accomplished, and what more they have in store for us should they win in November.  America’s crosshairs are focused squarely on being able to replicate the European toilet economy.  And some independents on this side of the Pond still ask, ‘why would we do that?’

The answer is that the socialist on both shores see none of this going on in Europe.  The EU and its subsequent eurozone are instead seen as triumphs in governance.  Happy dancing in the streets as national healthcare systems go broke, retirement ages are lowered (Hollande will return France to 60 from 62), endless vacations at every turn, can’t-get-fired jobs, minimum wages pushed above $20/hr, austerity measures reversed (no more spending cuts), … what’s there not to like?

No one there or here remembers nor has been taught that when governments have taken over the means of creating the country’s wealth, they have created the sorriest places for human existence on earth.  It has always started with taxing the bejeesus out of ‘the rich’, until everyone who earned a private paycheck found themselves suddenly designated as ‘the rich’.

This is also graduation season and our colleges are in the process of disgorging another million or so of young people (the entire US education system releases 4.3M onto the economy each year).  They are of the 'Me Generation', and the great part of them will land in the job market without marketable skills, and dumber than the proverbial 2x4 with a face painted on it.  Bret Stephens in the 8may12 WSJ writes the Class of 2012 a sobering letter; it begins –

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.

‘… to shift the burden of hardship to the rich …’

George Rebane

That promise is resounding worldwide as socialist/communist politicians promise to ease the long overdue payments for profligate government spending in countries facing financial ruin.  Today France elected Francois Hollande to be its new president.  How did Hollande beat Sarkozy?  by promising to shift the burden of hardship, naturally.

The rich are already paying more than the lion’s share, and could not supply the spending spigots if their earnings were confiscated in toto.  But none of this matters while the other half pays nothing into those tills, and still demands more.  No one among the sheeple is aware of the greater problem that has nothing to do with ‘the rich’ who are prominently dangled to fill their attention spans.

The same thing is happening in Greece, and soon in Spain, Italy, Portugal, …, and, of course, the United States which is already in the lead bringing such policies to the fore with messianic force.  In California, we have been ahead of that curve for years, and show no inclination to let slip our position of leadership.

How have you prepared for this future?

edX – ‘a revolution in education’ (addended)

George Rebane

MIT and Harvard have announced the launch of edX, a “disruptive” initiative in worldwide online education that will leverage the best teachers with interactive learning technology.  The promise of this newest of such initiatives that follow in the footsteps of the Kahn Academy is that it could well disrupt the careers of incompetent teachers, and maybe even the teachers unions.  MITnews reports -

EdX brings a “possibility of transformation through education to learners across the globe,” (Harvard president) Faust said. “We are privileged to be here today to mark the creation of a new partnership between two of the world’s great universities, a partnership that will change our relationship to knowledge and teaching for the benefit of our students, and students and would-be students everywhere.”

Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and president of the newly formed edX, called the new initiative a “historic partnership.” Online education, he said, is creating a “revolution” driven by “the pen and the mouse,” adding that edX is “disruptive, and will completely change the world.” The new possibilities afforded by today’s technology, he said, have created “the biggest change in education since the invention of the printing press.”

And that’s the good news, that we can leap over our dysfunctional (especially in STEM subjects) public education system and their cadres of union stultified deadwood ‘educators’.  Imagine how such course work will serve both home schooling and integrate with the full spectrum of brick and mortar schools.  I predict that the course certification processes adopted with online education will compete well with the diploma and degree programs now in the mainstream.  By ‘compete’ I mean compete in the job markets.

The bad news is how many American kids will tackle the offered course work, because it is hard and we know that worldwide kids from less developed countries will.

[Addendum]  Not to defocus the topic of online learning too much, but it seems to me there will be another benefit to the funders and consumers of k-12 education.  When the quality of teachers and teaching in public schools is criticized, left-leaning teachers leap to the fore with all kinds of denials and excuses.  The denials are not worth wasting bits to address.  However, the excuses for poor performance need airing.

Two obvious causes for poor performance in a classroom comprised of a cross section of students are 1) the out of control classroom due to bad behavior of kids whom the teacher cannot (may not?) control, thereby destroying the learning situation for everyone regardless of the teacher’s talents; and 2) the poorly prepared or incompetent teacher in a classroom of normally controllable kids – i.e. the learning environment is totally controllable.

From the national statistics on student performance and the fraction of uncontrollable classrooms in the country, it should be clear that the overwhelming source of student dumbth is due to #2 above.  There are no statistics indicating that ‘the blackboard jungle’ is the norm across the land.  Yet the (almost entirely leftwing) apologists for the state of public education overwhelmingly hide behind #1 as the reason for why our students don’t perform well, and why almost all of them going beyond high school have to be taught remedial basic skills in reading, writing, and math when they get to college.  (Their deficiencies in other subjects like history, economics, social studies, … are just ignored and the resulting ignorance is visible anywhere you see younger adults open their mouths in public.)

Therefore, there is reason to hope that as online education spreads through the land we will see lessening of the impact from #2 above.  And because more students can study in environments other than the classroom, there may also be a reduction in #1, the impact from disruptive students.  The dynamic this imposes on the legacy cohort of ‘professional’ teachers will be hard to predict because of the presence and power of their unions.  Thoughts?

Education, teacher meritocracy, and our national future

George Rebane

RR has long promoted the idea that education in wealth producing/sustaining fields is the ONLY solution to America’s economic and social problems.  Former SecState and now distinguished senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, George Shultz co-authors ‘Education Is the Key to a Healthy Economy’ with Eric Hanushek in which they acknowledge our broken K-12 public school system, and make the argument that quality STEM (Science, technology, engineering, math) education correlates strongly with and is a causal factor promoting economic growth – see nearby chart.  Their conclusion is that “An improved education system would lead to a dramatically different future for the U.S., because educational outcomes strongly affect economic growth and the distribution of income. ... (And) if we fail to reform K-12 shools, we'll have slow growth and more inequality."

The authors point out research that shows how per capita GDP is affected by STEM proficiency, and that –

Current U.S. students—the future labor force—are no longer competitive with students across the developed world. In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings for 2009, the U.S. was 31st in math—indistinguishable from Portugal or Italy. In "advanced" performance on math, 16 countries produced twice as many high achievers per capita than the U.S. did.

Continuing on this path, as is the current strategy promoted by the nation’s teachers unions, will guarantee to nail us to a slow growth future in which all the catastrophes from our indebtedness and unfunded liabilities will come home to roost in spades.  We will quickly become a second rate nation and all that entails in our ability to remain as the world’s most salutary and beneficent hegemon in history.

Ruminations - 1may12 (updated++)

George Rebane

It looks like getting your college education subsidized will now become a new ‘right’ across the land.  Neither party is willing to let student loan interest rates increase automatically as they were supposed to.  As a taxpayer, I want the government out of the student loan business (among many other businesses they are in), but as long as they want to play lenders (recall the last time they tried that in real estate) with my money, I want to be able to have a say what areas of study that I and fellow taxpayers will fund.  Most certainly I don’t want to be on the hook for defaulted loans by people whose majors only qualified them to gainfully ask ‘... and would you like fries with that?’ after graduation.

On the whole, our post-high school education system is a mess, which is just a continuation of the mess our high school system is in.  Both secondary and post-secondary school systems are scam operations on the national weal, each costing an arm and a leg, and delivering little brains.

But the President has now made student loans one of his campaign issues since he cannot run on his record.  Speaking of which, the latest poll has 49% of Americans wanting to overturn Obamacare, and 38% wanting to keep it.  The latter have no idea what’s in the legislation, and don’t really care because it just adds on to the other freebies that they already get from taxpayers.

The other big item brought up by the President is to garner the Hispanic vote by demagoguery on the illegal alien issue.  As I have repeatedly argued, the tragic mislabeling of the illegal entrants as illegal immigrants has totally muddied the debate and allowed the leftwing to bamboozle the lightweights with statements like Sen Dick Durbin's (D-IL) recent wail that the Republicans (especially in Arizona) are “considering people as criminals just because of their immigration status.”  Well hello Dick! We should consider them criminals because according to our laws, illegal entrants and aliens are.  And that sumbich regularly raises his hand to uphold the Constitution.

All of this doesn’t seem to be playing as well with the Hispanics because as of yesterday 45% of them support Arizona’s legislation to allow it to enforce federal law on illegal aliens.  43% don’t support it.  When all of our citizens are tallied, the support goes to 62%, and opposed are 27%.

Finally, on the anniversary of the Bin Laden hit we are still not allowed to see the photos that the Seal Team took of the raghead after they dispatched him.  Why?  Because it "may offend" some sensitive Muslims.  No one stops to consider that the willing exercise of power is the ONLY thing that the Islamists understand and respect.  And no one in the administration cares about the ongoing assaults and atrocious murders of Christians and Jews that continue wherever Muslims dominate.  No one checked to see how sensitive I was to the pictures of Danny Pearl’s decapitation, and I suspect that no one cares to this day.

But we are told to celebrate the “gutsy decision” the President made to take down the world’s foremost terrorist leader and accomplished enemy of the United States.  I am still puzzled about what part of that decision was gutsy, save the consideration of his political ass had the mission failed.  Last I saw, the man was still holding the title of our Commander-in-Chief.  Under the circumstances, what was he supposed to do?

However, the bottom line on this issue in this political season is President Obama's declaration that he won't politicize the Bin Laden killing, while at the same time claiming that Romney changed his mind and is now telling people that he too would have authorized the assassination raid.
 
Meanwhile, let's all enjoy the display of socialist solidarity that the Occupiers have promised us across the country on this annual celebration of international collectivism.

[update]  The news is in about California’s April revenues – state socialists surprised (again).  Turns out that corporate and personal income revenues have come in with a substantial shortfall from Moonbeam’s predictions.  The ‘rich’, on whom the state depends and promises to punish even more, are disappearing in greater numbers than anticipated ($2B fewer dollars last month from them alone).  Those who stay are reconfiguring their accounts to avoid confiscatory taxation.  The numbers on corporations are not in yet, but they have done all they can to either vamoose or move their earnings across the state line.

This sideshow is a continuing illustration of the progressive stasist mindset – raising taxes doesn’t matter, nobody will change their behavior.  RR readers have been advised of and discussing the realworld for the past five years, so no one here should be surprised.  Review assignment – Joel Kotkin’s ‘The Great California Exodus’.  But all said and done, don’t you wonder who are these faithful dumbasses whom the Sacramento Democrats continue to target with their BS?

[updated, one mo' time]  The Occupiers across the land, no matter how misguided in their protests, appear to protesting peacefully, and for that they are to be commended.  They have every right to get out there and proclaim their message.  It would be heartening to see them get a clue and put some people in front of the Capitol and the White House.  In the meantime, I'm showing my solidarity with the working man (with or w/o external plumbing) by doing some serious shopping this afternoon at local establishments so that they can continue providing jobs to these nebishes.

Singularity Signposts - The Coming Virtual Cloud

George Rebane

Today it is very difficult to reconfigure networks because you have to deal with hardwired components like routers, switches, and servers which have been manufactured by network suppliers like Cisco and Juniper to handle the stream of data packets in their own specific ways.  Modifying a network is a nightmare of hardware reconfiguration and clumsy/limited system programming.  Today network hardware operators are a highly paid group of technicians doing such things that few people understand.

The response to this growing friction in developing new networks with expanded capabilities comes from a Silicon Valley company called Nicira.  The company is built on the technology out of the 2007 PhD dissertation of its CTO Martin Casado.  Dr Casado invented a better way to ‘program networks’ on existing or cobbled together cheaper hardware.   These new architectures will be virtual networks operating virtual servers and using virtual storage on arbitrary and/or existing hardware configurations within an enterprise or out in the internet cloud.

The big deal is that the virtual networks - their configuration and operation - are totally under software control, and that means they can be quickly reconfigured (on the fly); and with even more smarts built in, they can reconfigure themselves to improve performance, be more facile in managing data, and interfacing with all kinds of other systems on the periphery of the network.  The online Wired has a good article on all this here.  Nicira is already working with some very big outfits in implementing this next phase of network technology.

To me the excitement here is that such reprogrammable virtual networks take us a giant step closer to what I believe is the most likely candidate for the Singularity event that I have described before in these pages.  And that is when the cloud spontaneously ‘wakes up’ and becomes sentient.  Dynamic reprogramming of networks to implement new processing algorithms, new data handling techniques, and whole new computing paradigms (mimicking human brain structures?) is a required capability for this event to happen.  Virtualizing networks will hasten the day when it says, ‘I’m here.’