Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 29dec17 (updated 30dec17)

George Rebane

Rural towns and big cities divide in their populations and prosperity.  While bigger cities have become more prosperous, smaller towns and rural communities have suffered.  The reasons are many and well summarized in an article by Paul Overberg that presents the relevant data in good graphical formats.  The piece begins with –

About 1 in 7 Americans lives in rural parts of the country—1,800 counties that sit outside any metropolitan area. A generation ago, most of these places had working economies, a strong social fabric and a way of life that drew a steady stream of urban migrants. Today, many are in crisis. Populations are aging, more working-age adults collect disability, and trends in teen pregnancy and divorce are diverging for the worse from metro areas. Deaths by suicide and in maternity are on the rise.

In our little county we suffer from most of the factors presented.  Unfortunately, these are data unknown to our progressive neighbors whose limited readings inform them that our problems are caused by our aging conservative population, the elimination of which will enable our return to happier days.

America has been the victim of public education’s and the media’s politically revised history for some two generations now.  We have covered and debated many of these deficits within RR’s commentaries and comment streams, which present recorded evidence of how the Left’s revisionist history impacts public outlook, understanding, and mood.  The beat goes on in two current movies – ‘The Crown’ and ‘The Post’.  Peggy Noonan argues convincingly (here) that “we often write of the urgent need for more truth in politics. A hope for 2018 is more truth in art and entertainment, too.”  This is doubly important for our tens of millions of lightly-read voters who get what little sense of history they have from the entertainment media.  A damning example presented by Noonan is in Spielberg’s ‘Post’ that portrays President Nixon as the villain in the Pentagon Papers story, the subject of the movie.  The bald historical fact totally destroyed by the film is that the Pentagon Papers documented the horrific lies told the American people by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, which all occurred before Nixon’s presidency and the papers make no mention of that administration.  The poor schlemiels watching this movie have no clue that JFK and Johnson started and disastrously prosecuted the Vietnam War, and that Nixon ended it.

Speaking of presidential lies.  More of the lightly-read are all worked up on ‘Trump’s lies’ as if these have achieved some historical pinnacle in presidential perfidy.  Again, the facts of the matter are quite different when the archives are consulted instead of misconstrued.  Comparing Trump’s malaprops to what continuously came out of the mouths of his Democratic predecessors, makes a joke out of present day accusations.  I mean, presidents like JFK, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama told lies that resulted in deaths by the tens of thousands and/or changed the course of nations, starting with America.  In that category of competition Trump’s a piker.

How come they let so many obviously stupid people pass the bar?  (... and then elect them?) The latest example is NY’s Governor Cuomo.  This law school graduate cum legal twit actually believes that the new tax law’s SALT provisions are unconstitutional, apparently having no idea what the constitution says about taxation and the states’ rights concerning such levies.  Making such ignorant and outlandish public statements for a public figure is the equivalent of an engineer submitting a design for a bridge that violates basic physics such as the sums of vector forces and moments must equal zero (i.e. balance) at all points in the structure.  If an engineer failed at that, he would find himself on the street with very poor prospects for another engineering job.  Clearly, some professions – e.g. in the law and journalism - are considerably more fault tolerant of their practitioners.

Civil service reform is fundamental to draining The Swamp.  By my reckoning and experience for every useful and functional civil servant, we support at least four or five who are in various forms incompetent, ignorant, stupid, spiteful, petty, crooked, terminally socialist, … .  The poster-children IRS and the EPA are but two of countless government agencies, big and small, that provide employment of last resort for about two million of the nation’s otherwise unemployables.  (Paying them the same wages for just staying home would be of untold benefit to the country.)  Some of the hopeful across the land believe that reforming this Deep State branch of government might be a candidate for bipartisan effort for 2018.  I don’t see the logic in that argument, since the Dems are totally invested in such a system to not only provide a reliable voting block, but also enforce socialist policies that may or not be supported in law or the constitution.  (more here)

[30dec17 update]  NPR’s daily Trump trashing focused on his NYT interview wherein he pointed out that there is no “evidence” of any “Russia collusion”.  For the reporters that was enough to prove the existence of conspiratorial collusion, the evidence for which is surely forthcoming.  IMHO special prosecutors should and do reveal indictable evidence when it is confirmed.  Such announcements need not stop further investigation, but they do put the accused on notice so that they can begin their defense in a timely manner.  But then again, we should do that only if we still believe that the accused is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, no longer a given under current American jurisprudence, especially as practiced in the media.

Vaunted money managers and financial analysts blew it again for 2017.  Still have no idea why these birds are ever taken seriously.  Last January their consensus was that 2017 would be a ho-hum year with markets mostly moving sideways.  Turns out that the security markets, home and abroad, had a banner year.  Yet smart money will be on everyone in the media sticking a mike into the faces of their favorite financial prognosticators to get another load of manure on the markets.  Who says modern cultures are too sophisticated to believe in witch doctors and shamans?  For these to be believed today, all they need do is wear a suit and keep a straight face.

Our hyper-progressive friends (actually our kids’ friends) sent out the annual summary of their ideological accomplishments for the past year.  They are a well-to-do professional couple ensconced on the beach in one California’s tony coastal communities.  Both are employed by large multi-nationals for which one of them is the exec in charge of environmental compliance (what else?).  Their moral equivalent (superior?) of a Christmas card details the politically correct list of activist activities, marches, protests, concerned consumption,  … in which they and their now adult offspring participated, at times travelling internationally to take part, all for the unquestioned benefit of Earth and its human interlopers.  The copy and included pictures are a prideful mix of a political leaflet and a self-adulation celebrating their unabashed largess derived from the hidden engine of crass capitalism which is the mortal enemy of every public policy they celebrate and promote.

Sandbox – 26dec17

[Whouda thought that America’s urban killings would go up after the leftwing activists started accusing the police of a nationwide conspiracy to kill blacks and other minorities.  Even one of our own political leaders voiced her strong conclusion that this was the case.  Well, now that the post-police-pullback body count stats are coming in, I wonder if any of these liberal loonies will step up on the public podium and offer some contritious remarks about their role in helping blacks kill more blacks.  You can be certain that the marginal deaths of now minimally policed minorities can be laid directly at the feet of these pious progressive pricks.  Yet all we hear from the lamestream about this is the sound of silence.  (more here)  gjr]

A Holy Day not a holiday

Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.  Matthew 1:23

George Rebane

A merry and joyous Christmas wish from the Rebanes (this year we are joined by our Southern Tribe – the Esteys – and our Northern Tribe – the Fernandezs) to all who read these pages - God's annual promise reissued.  And to that we add the fervent hope that your new year will be healthy and fulfilling.

Scattershots – 21dec17 (updated 23dec17)

George Rebane

Shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere) – winter solstice, a time for all kinds of alternative belief systems to hold ceremonies honoring their deities, ancestors, dark spirits, …, and, of course, Gaia.  Here in Nevada County (lat 39.13 degrees) the sun will climb to only 27.37 degrees above the southern horizon because today the earth’s axis is tilted its full 23.5 degrees away from the sun.  (For you artillerymen who remember your hand calibrations, that’s about a stack of three fist widths at your arm’s length.)  The earth’s axis actually wobbles between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees over about a 40,000 year cycle.  That also contributes to climate change, the migration of the magnetic poles, and the wandering of Polaris, the pole star approximately at the North Pole’s zenith.

The Seattle train wreck.  How in hell does a train engineer drive his train into a 30mph curve at 80 mph??!  The engineering solutions to prevent or avoid these recurring dumbass disasters are too many to count.  But to answer the question, one need only begin with the most obvious and telling factor – this was a government-run (Amtrak) train.  And when we combine Friar Occam’s dictum for the simplest explanation with Rebane Doctrine’s ‘When something goes wrong, assume the government is the culprit until proven innocent.’, then these explain everything from the qualification of Amtrak’s train operators to the deficits of its various management levels who design and oversee planning and operations.  Bottom line – it’s no way to run a railroad.

Red China uses latest technology to keep tabs on its citizens.  George Orwell had nothing on what the Chinese communists are doing to nip opposition and dissent in the bud.  The newest citizen monitoring and tracking systems are being tested in Xinjiang province populated by the mostly Muslim Uighurs.  Using everything from AI-driven automated facial recognition, retinal scans, directional mike arrays, smartphone monitoring/tracking, combined with uncounted police checkpoints where IDs are required to pass from one part of town or jurisdiction to another, the authoritarian government is quickly perfecting the ‘compleat surveillance state’. (more here and here)  Much of the technology is already installed and in use in other major Chinese urban areas, and you can bet the ranch that our security apparatchiks are not far behind.  Oh, how the security vs freedom see-saw tilts.  But in the end, when the usual bad guys are eliminated, then from whose comprehensive embrace do we need to feel secure?  Not to worry, that can never happen in Amerika.

[22dec17 update] – A refreshing Trumpian Tornado has blown into our foreign policy dealings.  Our president told the world that under his administration the US was also going to start acting in its own best interests, just like the rest of the world’s nations are doing.  And those who aren’t doing that, President Trump advised them to start doing it.  This flies in tight formation with Rebane Doctrine’s foreign policy advisories in these pages.  To wit, ‘On the world stage the United States will unabashedly act in all matters to promote its own best interests.  We have made and continue to make those interests known to all.  We invite other countries to work with us in maximizing our mutually shared interests, and will support those with whom we are successful in doing that.  We will not support countries that oppose our interests, instead, we will actively counter such opposition wherever and whenever it arises.’  (For more on diplomacy, I encourage reading Hillsdale College President Dr Larry Arnn's 'Three Lessons of Statesmanship' wherein he goes over the serious challenges faced by Churchill both at the beginning and ending of WW2.)

UN ambassador Nikki Haley gave strong voice to that policy as she responded to the resolution condemning the US for announcing its embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  Taking no prisoners, the lady told the assembled, “The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation, … We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations.”  Then she got up and walked out of what Prime Minister Netanyahu called “the theater of the absurd.”

More still moving out of Kalifornia, than moving in, according to the AP.  This has been widely known for some time now by just about everyone save the local leftwing intelligentsia, who are merely doing their duty to discombobulate the lightly read and pre-educated.  The state that already houses more than one third of the nation’s welfare recipients within 12% of its population (more here) just added 300K more people last year, overwhelmingly contributed by our more fecund neighbors.  “More people moved out of California than in from other US states, but foreign immigration made up the difference.  Total net migration added 80K people.”  Anyone want to bet whether the state’s share of welfare recipients went up or down?

[23dec17 update]  California wildfires are the latest human-augmented natural calamity that needs to be used for political purposes by the state’s command and control team led by our governor.  As argued in the WSJ (‘California’s Political Fires’), the decision comes down to spending billions on the bullet train, or properly managing the state’s forests, overgrown with underbrush and littered with millions of beetle-killed dead trees.  The state has become expert in the bait-and-switch tax/fee schemes in which it promises to dedicate these impounded funds for fire safety and management, and instead uses the monies to “backfill the budget” and spend on “high-speed rail, public housing and transit and electric-car subsidies.”  Of course, the Left’s constituencies have been well prepared for such arguments and sleights of hand, having neither the critical thinking skills nor knowledge base to conceive of anything beyond what they are told by California’s ensconced Democrats.

Sweeping Tax Bill Promotes Fake News (updated 22dec17)

'You get less of what you tax more.'  Alan Greenspan, et al

George Rebane

This morning on CSPAN I watched the House finally pass the long-fought tax reform bill, and send the legislation to President Trump for his signature.  The Republicans are breathing a sigh of relief while the Democrats are still breathing fire.  Actually, listening to the last floor debate cum kabuki dance, it is clear that this legislation has made every Democrat politician into a liar and/or a hypocrite.  The death and destruction that they claim the new tax law will rain down on the middle class, the economy, and all the poor people in wheelchairs is countered by their own leftleaning Tax Policy Center and the Brookings Institute.

Both outfits report that 80-90% of Americans will see tax relief, and about 1% will not.  The rest will stay about the same.  America’s small businesses that create the most jobs will definitely see benefits come their way.  Large corporations will be able to start bringing back already taxed overseas profits.  It’s hard to believe what kind of unproductive uses of cash our old tax code has borne over the years – today Microsoft has 95% or $132B cash sitting overseas, and Apple has a mind-boggling $252B or 94% of its cash off-shore.  The Democrats firmly believe that jobs are created by middle class and poor workers hiring each other, and that when those corporate monies come back to America, they will be spent for wine, women, and song in the biggest party ever for the rich.

Cooler and wiser heads know that about $1.5T of that repatriated cash will be spent for business expansion by people who actually know how to build/expand businesses and create jobs, instead of being taxed and spent (aka pissed away) through countless other non-productive government spending programs and regulatory costs.  Everyone who has taken Econ 101 knows that our only hope for keeping the country from going down the fiscal drain is growth and more growth.  And history shows that growth benefits from tax relief, and in capitalist America growth has even occurred in spite of taxes, but never because of higher taxes.

In the meantime, starting with Pelosi and Schumer, the Left has successfully sold the new tax law as a “tax scam” to their lamestream media lackeys who have dutifully repeated and reported the same to the public at large.  The bottom line here is that fake news is very much alive and it works.  People who haven’t a clue about what the bill contains believe it to be bad for them.  According to Pelosi, 86M US families will see their taxes increase, and 83% of the benefits will go to the notorious ‘1%’.  The bald fact is that over 47% of households pay no federal taxes at all, and this bill does nothing to reduce that fraction.

As a measure of how effective fake news is, we read from the latest WSJ/NBC News poll, 37% Americans believe our middle class will now pay more taxes, compared with 16% who believe they will pay less (the rest answered ‘don’t know’ or ‘about the same’).  About one third believe that they and their family will pay more tax, compared to one out of six who believe they’ll pay less.  And 56% believe wealthy Americans will pay less tax, to 6% who believe they will pay more.  You can’t make this stuff up; it proves that the nation’s dumbth is manufactured fresh and anew every day when the sun rises.

The Republicans have one hell of a job ahead of them next year to get the message out on their tax reform law; the only wind at their backs will be what the people can actually see in their paychecks and their reduced tax bill (if they pay attention).  And they better see a whole bunch of economic growth before they go to the polls next November.

Stay tuned for the presidential siggy.

[22dec17 update]  Well, the new tax reform act is signed and on the books.  The president did a “not fancy, rush job” signing the bill in the Oval Office with little fanfare, because there was enough of that yesterday.  It was a class act.  The Democrats are panicked out of their minds, hustling around the country telling anyone who would listen that their taxes were just raised, only the rich will benefit, and the economy will plummet taking jobs with it.  This is not exactly the way our trading partners see things.  From all over the world they are publishing sober assessments and informing their citizens that they will now have to travel on a rocky economic road because the American Eagle has had its ties loosened and will now soar again, higher than ever over the competitive world of international commerce.  Joseph Sternberg in ‘US Tax Reform has Europe Worried’ does an excellent job summarizing what the real impact of the new tax law will be.

But not to worry.  That rocky road can be avoided if EU’s economic giants also lower their corporate taxes to launch an economic boom that will lift the fortunes of all enlightened participants.  And here’s the problem for the socialists on both sides of the Pond – they have all been selling a zero-sum narrative preaching that high taxes don’t influence corporate behavior, and more taxing and regulations are the real pillars of thriving economies and a happy social order.  Reality gives lie to both of these ludicrous propositions.  In the US, our socialists again have nothing to fall back on save the dreadful state of their constituents’ (especially the minorities) ability to comprehend, which has been achieved through their more than half-century control of our public education institutions.  The demagogury of dumbth will reach new pinnacles in 2018; for the Democrats it simply has to, or Chuckie and Nancy will be sent home in tightly zipped political bodybags.

A Little Puzzle (updated 30dec17)

George Rebane

This little puzzle recently came to my attention.  A ring of radius R is tossed randomly onto a large grid of unit squares as shown below.  The toss will score only if the ring intersects two or three squares – rings 1 and 2 will score.  If the ring intersects only one or more than three squares, it will not score – rings 3 and 4 will not score.  What radius ring will maximize the probability of scoring – i.e. compute the radius and the maximum probability?

Being able to solve 'puzzles' such as this is a skill fundamental to solving several large classes of problems in science and engineering.  And coming up with just the approach to its solution is a critical thinking skill that should make non-techies proud.  TechTest season is again upon us, and I gave this problem to one of the very busy students I have been mentoring.  He saw the challenge immediately, went home but couldn’t put it down, and had the correct answer back to me before sunset.  I thought some of our RR readers might also want to take a crack at it, or give it to their bright offspring ;-)

[30dec17 update]  Thanks to Mr Don Carrera of Irwin, PA for his detailed workout of the problem’s solution.  In subsequent private communications I promised to make available to readers both his solution and mine in PDF formats.  Mr Carrera has also demonstrated that his solution and mine produce identical numerical results.  Here are the downloads for Mr Carrera's solution, and my solution.

Sandbox - 19dec17

[Apologies for the delay and having to be reminded.  gjr]

Techshots – 19dec17

George Rebane

Programming was women’s work.  The WSJ has been running a series on the history of women in technology, and their being “pushed out” in the years following WW2 (more here).  During and after the war women were the workers who ran the early computers of the day and also programmed them.  Programming was then considered a kind of clerical work best suited for the fair sex.  This all brings back some interesting memories from my early engineering career.

In the mid-60s I was a young engineer, fresh out of the Army, working in aerospace, going to grad school, and raising a family with small children.  My employer was Singer-Librascope, a big defense contractor based in Glendale that was a major supplier of the Navy’s shipboard combat systems (specializing in nuclear submarines).  I worked in their bleeding edge R&D department where we were inventing new things every week, prototyping them for shipboard testing, and then analyzing the data from the test ranges and secret missions before incorporating some of the findings into the newest systems.  Pretty heady stuff that set the direction for the rest of my career.

During that time engineers were supposed to derive new algorithms from applicable science that would be incorporated into the Navy’s weapons and the systems that fired them.  We had equations and models coming out of our ears.  The company’s mainframe was the mammoth CDC3300, that computer took up the floor space of a small cafeteria and handled everything from accounting, inventory, and engineering.  Programs were coded (and stored) on punched cards and magnetic tape, and the output came back to you on reams of tractor feed paper.  Each punched card represented one line of Fortran code.  The company also maintained state-of-the-art keypunch and programming departments, these were ‘best practices’ at the time.

Engineers were required to coordinate with programming to get one or two programmers assigned to your project.  Programmers were all men, with a few women left over from the old days, to whom you explained the equations and the algorithmics you had in mind, and they would write the code.  Then you would go through laborious debugging, and finally specify the data runs that you had to make.  You could plan on two runs a day, and perhaps a third overnight if you talked nice to the computer people.

The programmers actually wrote down the lines of Fortran on 80-column sheets, precisely denoting where every character would go.  Then these sheets would be handed to the key-punch department that was staffed by all ladies (everyone knew that typing was women’s work) who would return a stack or boxes full of Hollerith formatted punch cards.

This was a long and laborious process, and in our department we young Turks soon took matters into our own hands.  All of us quickly learned Fortran, had a keypunch set up in our office area, and ‘fired’ the programming and keypunch departments.  Over time other engineering departments did the same, relegating the programmers to do Cobol programming for accounting, payroll, and inventory tracking.  The good programmers quickly left – going down the street to Disney where they started its Animatronics division – and from then on, all engineers did their own coding which became even easier when remote computing arrived (around 1970) that allowed us to write and upload both Fortran and Basic programs and get our output on teleprinters.  We now could make an unlimited number of runs per day – debugging became a breeze. 

A significant number of women started coming back to technology in the early 70s.  We then wound up with three degreed female engineers, but learning to work with them in a free-wheeling take-no-prisoners technical environment presented new challenges.  Technically they were our peers, but the ladies still had to be handled with kid gloves during project review meetings, and no-holds-barred technical critiques.

All this happened when men and women were still different, and before we all were mandated equal in the workplace.  That is until today, when we are again not equal in the workplace, and working with them, men again have to walk on eggshells lest … .

*****
We had a more recent technology related experience this summer when Jo Ann and I took our grown daughters to Estonia to experience the country, visit the ancestral farm, villages where my parents grew up, and my grandparents’ graves.  I have described my native Estonia as a small country on the Baltic that is acknowledged as perhaps the most advanced in its development of internet technologies and the adoption of these into its governance and the lives of its citizens.  (more in My Story)

To update these developments, I want to share a current article in The New Yorker that was sent to me by a reader and correspondent.  Entitled ‘Estonia, The Digital Republic’, the piece describes the most recent leap forward in implementing e-Estonia through a bevy of new online services and functions available to everyone from consumers and entrepreneurs to government administrators.  In Estonia broadband is ubiquitous, and everyone conducts their daily affairs on their smartphones, pads, and laptops.  As the leader in providing automation and utilizing the internet, that little country serves as a beacon as it demonstrates the art of the possible to more cumbersome larger countries like the US, and most certainly to technological backwaters such as own progressively punished Nevada County.

CAG’s Draft Pot Ordnance Examined

[The following email from Bob Hren, Nevada County Republican Chairman, was sent this morning.  In it Mr Hren comments on what the Community Advisory Group recommends about the number of marijuana plants to be permitted on various sized parcels.  It is posted as received.  gjr]

All,

The draft pot rules just released put Residential-Agriculture parcels into the same category as general agriculture, exclusive agriculture and forest lands.  There is no distinction for R-A "Estate" parcels located closer in to the cities, vs R-A "Rural" as in the present code.  Many neighborhoods will now go from prohibiting all outdoor grows to allowing commercial grows up to 100 plants (10,000 square feet) per 5 acre parcel.  Up to 25 plants in 2-5 acre R-A parcels.  In addition, in residential zones, outdoor personal grows of 3 plants if under 1 acre, and 6 plants if over one acre are allowed.

This is the worst possible outcome.  I will be fighting it.   And you should, too.

The CAG process was manipulated by the consultant to the exclusive benefit of the growers, ignoring many comments that were submitted from the public.  Many of the CAG members, I believe, will be also outraged by this result.  As will the public, in my opinion.  But, unless you express your outrage, this will be approved in our county.  Dead skunk odors everywhere.  What a nice place to live!

Bob

Scattershots – 15dec17

George Rebane

Economic growth is now impacted by the sins of the recent past, so argue economists Phil Gramm (former chair of the Senate Banking Committee) and Thomas Saving.  In their ‘A Booming Economy Will Challenge the Fed’, they present a very readable explanation of how today “the monetary excesses of the Obama era represent the greatest impediment to igniting and sustaining a full-blown economic recovery.”  Fiscally we are between the rock and hard place long anticipated in these pages and elsewhere.  And our central bank does not a have a precise model (i.e. transfer function) of the economy to support computing a proper (control) policy for raising interest rates and selling off the considerable assets it bought under Obama.  Important stuff that the well-read RR readers will want to know.

The Union’s pulp report on Nevada City pot dispensaries stimulated me to write them the letter below.  Their online report (paywalled here) is more informative and does include the applicant ratings misrepresented as rankings.  The ratings are uniformly high, averaging 86% of the maximum with a spread of about 6%.   This indicates that there’s not much difference between the three and, if there were a difference, then the rating factors were not chosen well enough to reveal such a difference.

Dear People – The 15dec17 article on Nevada City’s pot dispensaries because “rankings” were substituted for what actually were ratings.  The three dispensary applicants were numerically rated on a number of factors which were combined into a summary rating for each applicant.  Then these ratings were ranked in descending numerical order.  For example, published ratings would provide more information to the public because they convey compactly and clearly three important pieces of information – how well the applicants satisfied the evaluation factors, whether and how the applicants qualifications differentiated, and, of course, their rankings.  Out of a 100 maximum, say that applicants [A,B,C] received ratings of [92, 65, 31], or [92, 89, 88], or [39, 32, 29] – each case would tell a completely different story about the applicants that is totally hidden by their identical rankings.  Ratings are always more informative than rankings, and the two should never be confused.

The sexual harassment ambulance chasers are on the job and happy to help you, whether you need it or not.  Here is an example of their enthusiasm for cashing in on this new opportunity to litigate.

Who Are America’s Vilified ‘1%’? (Addended)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 December 2017.  As noted below this commentary was erecognized by KVMR last night during its annual awards ceremony held at the Miners Foundry.]

‘In these commentaries we have examined major trends like systemic unemployment, income inequality, and the notion of a Great Divide that may rend America across one of its ideological faults.’  This was the opening line of my KVMR commentary a little over four years ago (here).  In that piece we looked at the emergence of the new ‘cognitive class’ in America as studied and reported by renown sociologist and author Charles Murray in his book Coming Apart, published in 2013.  Much has happened in the interval as it affects our views of ourselves.  Today, we definitely have more than one picture of who we are and how we are composed.

The main take away from that analysis was that since WW2 we have generated a new and enduring merit-based upper class of people sharing educational achievements and an understanding of the world.  And for some odd reason, such people wanted to hang around with others like themselves, a process called homogamy.  They tended to live together, socialize, and do business with each other.  Through their hard work, they also wound up being financially more successful than the rest of the country.  And as their wealth grew they began to be noticed by those with political ambitions and careers representing the not so wealthy.

Economists, sociologists, and others of the bureaucratic bent in academe and government began to boost their own fortunes by pointing out that this cognitive class was enjoying the fruits of unjust inequality, while the rest of the country had to make do with the scraps that trickled down from them.  Something had to be done to restore social justice to the land, and government was just the agency to fashion public policies that would bring these people back to heel.  The underlying theory then, and still being promoted, was that these folks – now called the ‘1%’ – are a greedy bunch who were using underhanded loopholes to take money from the poor and middle class to fatten their wallets.  After all, everyone was taught in school that capitalism was no longer the engine of wealth creation, but the vehicle of greed and the foundation of the great zero-sum game – if they got more than you, then they must have taken some of what should rightly have been yours.

In the same year 2013, French economist Thomas Piketty wrote Capital in the Twenty-first Century, which became the most successful academic treatise in modern times and landed on the NYT best seller list.  Piketty argued that capitalism by its very nature causes inequality, and is a danger to democracy which only government can cure through massive reform.  The lynchpin of his argument was that ‘patrimonial capitalism’ – wealth garnered through inheritance – was the bogeyman that had to be exorcised through what Bastiat called ‘legal plunder’.  The collectivist world cheered, but perhaps a bit too soon, because by 2014 Picketty’s theory began to unravel as more economic and demographic data was analyzed.

Over these intervening years of re-evaluating Picketty, we now come to A Century of Wealth in America, the just released magnus opus of left-leaning NYU economics professor Edward Wolff, an expert in wealth and wealth disparity.  His treatise presents an in-depth analysis of how wealth is really generated and transferred from generation to generation.  For our socialist contingent, Dr Wolff’s inconvenient bottom line is that “in the US more than ¾ of all wealth is created anew in each generation, and the ‘1%’ is an overwhelmingly self-made group.”  There is much more to learn in Dr Wolff’s massive 865-page tome, but before diving in, you may first want to catch the high hard ones by reading the excellent review by UC Davis economist Gregory Clark, the link (here) to which is included in this commentary’s online transcript.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is expanded and posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  But I do thank KVMR and its News Director Paul Emery for recognizing this commentary, now in its eighth year, with a ‘Certificate of Excellence’, awarded last night at the annual holiday dinner for the station’s staff and volunteers.  And during this holy season Jo Ann and I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  It’s hard to include everything you want to say on a topic as complex as wealth dynamics in an economy in a 4-5 minute radio commentary.  My big concern with Wolff’s research is that the large cohort of impressionable lightly-read voters will either not get the message about the ‘1%’, or not understand the import of ¾ of all their wealth is created anew in each generation.  But the most important and untold part of this story involves how this new wealth is created, and then how it is managed by the 1% (we’ll use that label for the wealthier Americans).

For every dollar that accrues to the 1%, that dollar is the leftover profit from the founding of countless businesses that created thousands of jobs and supplied products and services demanded by countless other people across the country and the world.  Other sources of such profits came from properly allocating capital to enterprises (buying equities and making loans) in which it was most valuable and useful.  And these risky activities continue as a matter of course in the management of the 1%’s portfolios, none of which get converted into ‘stuff’ (e.g. gold bars) and un productively hidden under a mattress.  Wolff’s analysis demonstrates that more often than not much of this wealth is lost by last generation’s 1%, and dispersed into the economy to be gathered and assembled again for new enterprises.  It is the nature of the capitalistic system that wealth is a dynamic resource that is constantly recycled for the betterment of all, and that includes those who are not able or willing to actively partake in growing the economy.

As a coda to these observations, no one should expect the progressive (i.e. collectivist) faction of our society to understand and/or accept any of this, since doing so would utterly destroy their ideological narrative with which they seek an anti-capitalist alternative future for all of us.

Sandbox - 13dec17

[Well, let's really focus on what happened in Alabama, and how the Impeach Trump Initiative (ITI) will now proceed apace in Dem circles and in their coordinated lamestream.  2018 will be a mid-term election to remember.  gjr]

Numeracy on the rise? (updated 11dec17)

George Rebane

Has anyone noticed that the use of graphical presentation of data in the media has been on the rise for the last couple of years?  Led by the financial publications, as expected, newspapers have started featuring more and more charts and graphs to augment their reporting in areas such as political preferences, social policies, energy, medicine, … all far removed from finance and economics.  The charge has been led by the WSJ which has seen a flood of new graphics populating its pages.  (As a longtime subscriber, I was one of the little voices in the wilderness constantly calling for such an augmented presentation of news.)

What’s more, the kinds of data and information presented graphically has steadily become more sophisticated, as have the types of graphics used - some of these are new and very innovative.  What prompted me to comment on this was a graph (here) in the 7dec17 WSJ showing the aggregate (correlative) behavior over time of the SP500 sectors.  Now most readers know that correlation in the usual sense means how dis/similarly TWO measurements behave over time (or space).  A correlation value of 1.0 means that the two are flying in perfect formation, a -1.0 means that one is perfectly zigging while the other is zagging, and anything near 0.0 means that the two measurements are doing their own thing while not paying attention to the other.

But the referenced figure in Chelsey Dulaney’s article is a single measure (number) that communicates the cross-correlations between many (>2) measured sector performances.  There are several ways to compute such a cross-sectors aggregate correlation measure, and those of us who paid attention in our stat and estimation classes would have no trouble doing so.  But the point I want to make here is that the WSJ, a leading internationally known newspaper, now considers its readership to have enough smarts to benefit from such information displays, and understand the article in which Ms Dulaney expands on the correlative performance of the various sectors which has dropped precipitously in this decade.

However, the real (non-technical) news here is that intellectual inequality is rampantly rising given the published test and poll results that report on the aggregate knowledge of our general population.  In other words, such mass market publications as the WSJ, Barron’s, Investors Business Daily, … are telling us that there is a growing, yet still small, cohort of intellectual elitists (IEs) that is pulling away from the massive dumbth that has settled over the rest of the population.  The social problem here is that these IEs are the ones who understand how the world works, and are therefore able to work and invest more profitably to generate the wealth which overwhelmingly (and here even the progressives agree) funds our governments and industries, creating jobs that fuel consumerism and its over 70% share of our economy (more here).

But a closer examination of this separation of economic classes reveals that the rest of the population is also starting to grow restive as automation becomes a net jobs killer that creates new jobs which are harder to fill by the mis-educated, culturally crippled, and/or genetically disadvantaged.  The bottom line is that the overwhelming fraction of Americans remain innumerate, unable to qualify for the over two million jobs currently unfilled nationwide and unable to comprehend the vital details of the social issues before they enter the voting booth.

So I, along with many others, remain in a quandary as to how we will deal with this yawning inequality, not only here in America, but in all developed countries.  The Left’s siren song to the masses invokes liberal use of the government gun to force surrender of our liberties in exchange for guarantees of merit-free equality (more here, here, and here).  Such enforced equality has always come at the cost of ever lower levels everyone’s quality of life, which fact is carefully concealed from those who are focused on their daily affairs. 

[Addendum]  Here is a thoughtful information filled essay by economics professor Bryan Caplan on the utility of education in our society – ‘The World Might be Better Off Without College for Everyone’ – published in the Jan/Feb2018 Atlantic.  In these pages we have met Professor Caplan over the years (e.g. here).

[10dec17 update]  Before astute readers take me to task, I want to point out that there is a distinct possibility that numeracy is not on the rise, and may instead be declining as a fraction of our population.  WSJ’s epiphany about its readership’s cognitive abilities may be totally independent of the state of numeracy in the land.  Such a burst in their use of complex graphical presentations of data and information can also profitably be undertaken in a knowledge environment wherein the number of WSJ readers stays more or less constant, while the innumerate population surrounding them increases, thereby relegating the numerate cohort to occupy a smaller and more noticeably 'unequal' segment of Americans.  To resolve this, we await the next installment of the Longitudinal Study of Adult American Literacy that is conducted decadally by the National Center for Education Statistics in the Department of Education.

[11dec17 update] Kudos to George Boardman for his column in the 11dec17 Union that highlights the troglodyte ‘intellectuals’ who have and continue to oppose high speed broadband for western Nevada County based on their medieval knowledge of basic science (a component of numeracy).  As any piece of remote real estate in the country, NC needs to keep up with the technology that connects us to the rest of the world.  Our quality of life and economic development depends on nothing less.  Yet these leftwing primitives have done everything possible to oppose the erection of new transmission towers and other infrastructure that would support modern communications with the new G5 telecom protocols.  Their unfounded fears that such radio frequencies are supposed to cause harm include everything from brain cancer to the heartbreak of psoriasis.  The progressives like to characterize conservatives as hanging on to old, dysfunctional, and stultifying beliefs.  And the real truth has always been, that it is always the collectivists who are scared sans poop (that’s ‘shitless’ in French) of change because they know they can’t handle it as demonstrated by their perennial ignorance of what motivates human behavior.  It is the capitalists (not to be confused with the corporatists), on the other hand, who relish the freedoms that support change and the constant challenge of new horizons.  Even though Mr Boardman is no capitalist, his column (here) is worth a read to get an update of the liberals’ impact on our community.

Sandbox - 8dec17

[GregG's last comment in the 5dec17 Sandbox captured the bets made around the Rebane household and at a shindig we had here last night.  It seems that no one believes Sen Frankenstein will go quietly into that good night.  The most money is on his fervent hope that all this sex assault stuff will die down sufficiently in the coming weeks so that he can say 'Just kidding' about making a clean exit from the Senate.  gjr]

Scattershots – 8dec17 (updated 10dec17)

George Rebane

‘The Merge’ is the new label for progress toward transhumanism.  RR readers have been aware of this phenom for some years now.  Today such merging of Man and machine has entered the popular forums, and in some is starting to raise concerns about who will get to merge and to what extent such joinings will become ubiquitous or merely reserved for some elite cohort.  Here is what entrepreneur, programmer, and blogger Sam Altman writes about it. (H/T to reader)  Sadly, Altman, along with a growing number of other late comers, does not understand the original and precise definition of Singularity – they confuse a specific instant with an extended period of time (which deserves its own name).  More on the Singularity here and here.

Western culture is on the ropes; Islam has existentially achieved its early goals of changing what we believe and the way we live.  This morning on KXPR, Sacramento’s Capital Public Radio music station, declared that they now offer listeners “real alternative music – classical during the day and jazz at night”.  It was not that long ago when both classical and jazz were the mainstay music of western cultures; now it has become “alternative music” in the view of our progressive culture leaders.  I suppose that means that ‘throw-away music’ is now the new mainstay of the musical component of our new culture.  This kind of music has been gaining ground for at least the last half-century.  It consists of ‘songs’ that are here today, out of mode and memory tomorrow, and delivered into countless categories through countless channels, leaving the listener with no anchor in that dimension of cultural art.  This cultural disintegration is part and parcel of how placidly we have adopted to being searched for weapons at every turn of our daily lives, lest some of us decide to murder and maim in the service of God or some aberrant gollum.  Note the new norm simply portrayed as a point of humor in the accompanying Pepper & Salt cartoon from the 8dec17 WSJ.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, …"  President Trump is to be lauded for his recent recognition of the city as Israel’s eternal capital, a compelling reality that has been recognized in the west since biblical times.  I’m not sure as to why he did that now instead of earlier this year, but doing it is a latent sign of wisdom yet to be recognized by those who have succumbed to Einsteinian insanity.  The same may be said about the President’s policy toward the murderous fat kid in charge of NK.  Again, those counseling sclerotic and redundant rectitude must answer to the charge of their own form of Einsteinian insanity, as that rogue nation continues on the road to deliverable nuclear weapons sworn to be launched against the US mainland.

Should the government of a putatively free people, force a private business, under threat of prison or worse, to operate at a loss or raise prices to all of its customers in order to suffer the additional cost of providing some marginal product or service for the sole benefit of certain customers imposed under threat of force upon the business?  That again is the surprising question today roiling lamestream-managed public opinion when it comes to such issues as renting to the disabled who require special accommodations, and/or mandating the fashioning of custom made products to a certain cohort of customers, products that are distasteful and violate the religious beliefs of the business owner.

[10dec17 update]  America’s Deep State is very real, pernicious, cynical, and toxic to citizens who challenge its modus operandi let alone the legitimacy of its existence.  So argues Mark Steyn in a very persuasive article, ‘The Land of Mini-Coups’, wherein he analyzes the (non)workings of the Mueller investigatory roulette wheel.  Exhibit A is the recent mea culpa of Mike Flynn for lying to the FBI about a ‘non-crime’, which itself is a specious felony, that has nothing to do with Mueller’s commission to investigate Russia’s alleged influencing of the 2016 election.  Trigger warning – reading the piece will make your toes curl the wrong way if you are not a progressive for whom all this is simply water off the back of their established narrative.  (H/T to RR reader)

... and in the Poetry Department, we have a submission from a correspondent -

A Bayesian prof named Myers/ Says tenure is all he desires./ But his dreams won't be met,/ He'll be fired, I bet,/ When they catch him adjusting his priors.

 

Fair and Balanced?

George Rebane

I was going to leave be our little conversation on RL Crabb's blog (here), but subsequent defenders of Bob's political art motivate me to ask for someone to fill in the question on the right side of the little 'fair and balanced' see-saw below.  Bob has long maintained that he views the world from some pristine, non-ideological middle, as he doles out his wit and barbs equally at both sides.  The record does not support that assertion.  But then, I have never claimed the ability to properly place the fulcrum in these matters.  Everyone else seems to know how to do that; I must have been standing in the wrong line when that skill was being handed out.  In any event, what political art from the Right would balance such an assault on President Trump's whole family?

 

Sandbox - 5dec17

[Does anyone think that, absent Donald Trump's presidency, we would ever have heard anything more of Hillary's extended career of corruption and criminality?  Me neither.  gjr]

Ruminations – 4dec17 (updated 7dec17)

George Rebane

California’s land use and housing crisis continues in full swing, and is caused by Sacramento abetted by local loonies in county and city governments.  Here is a piece by some heavy weight economists at the Hoover Institution to give you a measure of the ongoing insanity in our state.

IRS scumbag Lois Lerner, guilty but unindicted for using the IRS to attack conservative political organizations, now wants the courts to seal her incriminating testimony, arguing that people will be so incensed by her admissions that her personal safety will be threatened.  (more here)

The proverbial ‘Man on a White Horse’ political savior appears more and more acceptable to our electorate when he decides to make an appearance to unify and save the nation, whether you like it or not.  One can draw this conclusion by looking at the rise of superhero movies, videos, TV series, computer games, etc that entertain, simplify the world, and give comfort to so many.

What most lefties miss about the Second Amendment is that, unlike the states’ national guards, militias were neither standing nor organized military units, but were spontaneously assembled when the need arose – ‘Grab your gun and come!’  Hence, one more reason to have an armed citizenry to counter both external and internal threats to our freedoms.

[5dec17 update]  The Left’s perpetual wrath against lowering corporate taxes ignores the benefit to working people’s retirement funds benefitting from higher corporate profits (the causal chain is too difficult for them to handle), and that includes retirement funds like CALPERS and CALSTRS taxpayers provide for terminally progressive government workers that have massive unfunded liabilities.  Those anticipatory benefits are already in the stock portfolios of such funds.

Religious freedom for all except the Christians.  In progressive America when minority religions (often speciously and/or gratuitously) argue lack of religious freedom, they are seen as the persecuted.  When Christians do so to oppose obvious government mandates against their beliefs, they are held up in the public eye as promoting “hatred”.  (more here)

Bob Crabb’s cartoon in the 5dec17 Union - filched, feted, and featured below - is a feeble attempt by RR to present readers some fair and balanced content, an editorial policy which it has decidedly rejected over its long residence in our community.  (And that  for the simple reason that watashi-wa, as opposed to other worthies in the blogosphere and the media, has no idea about what you, dear reader, consider fair or where to place the fulcrum.)

[6dec17 update]  RR reader and climate change skeptic Greg Goodknight lambasted by true believer Mick Tuttle in the 6dec17 Union (here).  Mr Tuttle believes that preventable man-made global warming is happening, and that there is a scientific consensus which confirms an ongoing catastrophic global warming trend caused by humans pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, a discharge, if greatly reduced, will prevent the impending temperature catastrophe.  Fortunately, such a comprehensive consensus neither exists, nor is there undisputed evidence for the much-publicized catastrophic portents, nor do we have a clue about how to prevent such a rapid climate change were it actually happening.

Millennials weigh in on capitalism and socialism (here), which they don't consider all that bad since they've learned that it really need not be connected to communism, which is also really not that bad.  Ahh, the joys of having educated our young.

[7dec17 update]  The House passed a bill that would make CCWs issued by one state legal in all states, just like drivers’ licenses.  The Democrats strongly object and instead want to expand their policy that limits concealed guns only to the criminal class.  For decades they have demonstrated the benefits of this policy in the cities and towns under their political jurisdiction.