Amerimacka - The Cosmic Game

Amerimacka - The Cosmic Game
Thievery Corporation

I really like the horns that play early on then again at the 4 minute mark.

I'm thinking that everything we have built are all devices to expand the reach of the most savage animals on the planet. Humans, shoot, all living things are almost infinitely complex. No matter how much we have learned about the human body, we have only scratched the surface. Everything we have figured out is like a cheat code to get us past some obstacle. Someday, maybe, we will understand it all, but I suspect it will be more than one person can comprehend. We might need a hive mind to be able to really understand it all. Some people might be okay with being a member of hive mind, but I suspect most people won't be. Or maybe I overestimate the desire for independent thought.

I've been hearing the argument about capitalism versus socialism since forever. It occurs to me that the big problem with capitalism is that it makes no provision for anyone but the winners. As we develop new technologies, all those who learned a trade under the old ways will find themselves out of a job. Some of the new kids will learn the new ways and be incorporated into the capitalist hive, but because they are more productive, the hive won't need as many of them, so all the excluded are going to be pushed out to the edges. Problem lately is that productivity has been improving faster so we have new waves of technology constantly rolling over the landscape. These wave went from 10,000 years (think fire and ax) to 1,000 years (stone buildings) to 100 years (sailing ships) to ten years (rockets and satellites) to one year (smart phones) to monthly (I can barely keep up) to daily (I'm swamped) to hourly (we're all swept away).

All this talk getting rid of billionaires isn't helping. Take a billion dollars from one person and distribute it to ten million people and each person gets $100, which might buy a tank of gas and, if you're lucky, a six pack of beer. And a week later, where are you? Howling for another billionaire. You would need 50 billionaires to get everyone $100 a week for a year. That ain't gonna work.

We've seen that welfare doesn't really work. Giving money to the poor has just given us a permanent underclass. The biggest problem is that it is very difficult to organize a group of people into a productive operation. The problem is not that we have a shortage of organizers. We have plenty of organizers doing non-productive things, like running scam calling centers, or defrauding the government. To build a productive organization you need an idea that is a least plausible, and someone who is willing to take the gamble that it will pay off. It might work out and it might not, but someone has to be willing to try.

But all this fussing about jobs and housing and war is just avoiding the elephant in the room - the umpteen zillion old folks on social security and Medicare. All I can see is that inflation is going to continue to increase. I suspect it might be ten years before the rate starts going up monthly. About then the rate will start going up exponentially and within months we'll be using trillion dollar bank notes to buy groceries. That's when people will start using the Chinese Yen or Crypto-bit strings.

The Real Problem

Federal Budget

 From Why Firing 9% Of The Federal Workforce Didn't Move The Needle:

The total federal payroll— every salary, every benefit, for every civilian federal employee (excluding the military)— comes to about $336 billion a year— less than 5% of total federal spending.

In other words, you could fire every federal employee tomorrow— every bureaucrat, every regulator, every paper-pusher in Washington— and 95% of the spending would continue as if nothing happened.

That’s because around 60% of the budget is mandatory spending— Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid— programs that pay out automatically based on laws that were passed decades ago. Congress doesn’t vote on these expenditures each year. The checks just go out.

Gold Noise

Saw this chart from ZeroHedge on feedly and thought 'this looks ominous', but the image was too small to see the numbers clearly, so I opened in a new tab. Now I was able to clearly see the numbers in the enlarged image. 

The gold line is the spot price of gold. The other two lines are some obscure market bullshit, I'm not even going to try and figure out what they are.

Now look at the numbers on the gold scale (2nd from the right). It ranges from $5300 an ounce to $5550, a difference of 4%, not a catastrophic collapse. Now look the time scale along the bottom. It starts at 3:30 AM and runs till 7 AM this morning. That's like ancient history. Gold could be a thousand dollars higher or lower by now.

I suspect anytime you use a microscope to look at any kind of financial market you will find what look like apparent huge leaps in prices. I imagine there are people who thrive on this kind of minutiae but I ain't one of 'em.

The ZeroHedge article is paywalled. I suspect that the feedly link will not work for you.

Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo House

Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo House

Summary from Wikipedia: 

The Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo House (also 867 Madison Avenue and the Rhinelander Mansion) is a French Renaissance Revival mansion at the southeastern corner of Madison Avenue and 72nd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S. Built between 1894 and 1898, it was designed by Alexander Mackintosh of the architectural firm of Kimball & Thompson. Though the house was constructed for the heiress Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo, she never moved in. The mansion was converted to a commercial building in the 20th century, becoming the New York City flagship store of the Ralph Lauren accessory and clothing company in the 1980s. The mansion is a New York City designated landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

American Aristocracy has a page about this building. They give a couple of prices, so I thought I would compare the increase in the price of the house to what gold did in the same time frame. The house did much better.

Relative Inflation

Year	Price of Gold (USD per ounce)	House Price (millions of USD)
2005	500	80.0
1984	360	6.4
Percent Increase	39%	1150%

Doom & Gloom

1968 Experiment Predicted 2026: The "Behavioral Sink" Has Begun
World Economy Reborn

This video is a little long winded, but the speaker's voice and tone are agreeable. He might be AI generated. Whatever, the message kind of explains what's going on in societies all over the world. Just to check that this isn't just some nutball's fantasy, I ran a search on Google and it returns beaucoup de results.

The business about the economy booming is just bullshit. The prices of things like houses, cars and stocks aren't going up because they are becoming more valuable, they are going up because the dollar is worth less every freaking day. I want to make a graph of the S&P 500 divided by the price of gold. Lots of S&P numbers popping up, but not the ones I want. In any case I suspect the graph will show that the real value of the S&P 500 has been flat for the last 50 years.

Via Bustednuckles

Doom Loop

I've always enjoyed Willamette Week though I seldom read it. I would pick up a print copy whenever I was in Portland and saw one, but that didn't happen often, maybe a couple three times a year. I added it to Feedly a few weeks ago and while there is a lot of fluff, there are some stories that nobody else is talking about and Doom Loop is one of them.

Want to roll a grenade into holiday conversations in Portland? Bring up the “doom loop.”

At WW, we’ve decided it’s the term of the year. In the strictest definition, a doom loop starts when remote work frees people from commuting downtown. Office buildings tumble in value, shrinking property tax collection. Restaurants and stores that rely on the lunchtime trade go out of business. Foot traffic suffers.

The decline in government revenue means services get cut—like police and social work—so crime increases along with the number of homeless people per capita downtown. More people opt to work at home, many out of fear, and a kind of tornado spins into being, silent and unseen, but capable of great devastation.

One example:

On Dec. 15, the Morgan, a landmarked, eight-story building in the heart of downtown, sold for $6 million in cash, or $40 a square foot. Eight years ago, it fetched $27.6 million, or $184 a square foot. That decline is what doom loops are made of. Last year, Morgan’s owners paid $271,472.36 in property taxes on an assessed value of $13.6 million. 

The REAL Reason the US Is Betting on Tariffs

The REAL Reason the US Is Betting on Tariffs
Maxinomics

I knew they were tariffs, but I really had no idea what the overall picture was, so this is all new to me.

1971

WTF happened in 1971? Once we fully ended the gold standard, a LOT of things have went off the rails
jake explains

Joy - o - joy. One of my favorite topics to harp on: gold, inflation and Nixon. Don't know why I bother, it's not like anything substantive is going to change.

Why the 1st World is 1st

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics: Explained
Economics Explained

Something I have been wondering about for a long time. Their explanation makes sense to me.

Chinese Factory Automation

China’s Dark Factories: So Automated, They Don't Need Lights | WSJ
The Wall Street Journal

This story on ZeroHedge got me started:

'Most Humbling Thing I've Ever Seen': Western Business Leaders 'Terrified' After Touring Chinese Factories

 

Why Only Three Countries Bother Building Ships Anymore

Why Only Three Countries Bother Building Ships Anymore
Micro

This is something I have wondered about for a long time and, as he points out, I thought labor costs were the big reason. Turns out that is not the case. The video is a little long, but it is information dense, so much so that I didn't even notice how long it was. 

Most all I know about shipping comes from the news, and news organizations really give a poor description of what's going on in the world. They're too focused on scurrilous tidbits and give short shrift to whole picture.

Doom & Gloom

Dollar Value

Inflation is our enemy. Inflation crushes us all. The stock market goes up by leaps and bounds, but all this apparent gain is an illusion. The value of a pound of steel or wheat or oil has the same value it had yesterday, it's just that the dollars you are using to try and buy that stuff are worth less. The increase in the number of people not working is because companies are trying to survive in trying times. They are doing everything they can to cut costs, and workers are often the biggest expense. If they can't find a way to do more with fewer people, they are going to find themselves going down in flames because other businesses will find a way to cut costs.

Inflation is entirely due to our goddamn government, especially congress. They vote to spend more money than they raise through taxes, so we have more money flowing into the economy, but that just makes every dollar worth a little bit less.

Okay, none of this is new, this has been going on for decades. I don't know when it started, maybe when FDR became President, maybe WW2, maybe when Nixon let gold float. I dunno. Is it going to change? I don't see any signs of improvement, though maybe we are not sliding toward the abyss quite as fast as we were last year.

The part that bugs me the most about inflation is that it is impossible to tell what a good price is. Inflation has become so ingrained that nobody is surprised when things cost more, or at least you shouldn't be. It's still annoying though.

We have numerous propaganda campaigns currently running in this country, shaping the opinions of the great mass of people. Maybe what we need is a propaganda campaign aimed at Congress telling them to quit spending so much money. Since you are only talking about an audience of 500 or so people, it shouldn't be that expensive. Any right thinking billionaire should be able to finance it. 

Most Congress critters are more concerned about getting re-elected than stopping inflation, so a targeted anti-inflation campaign is going to have a tough row to hoe. We also need a campaign to target the voters. That one is going to be considerably more expensive, and is going to be even harder to sell because no one wants their favorite government program cut. In a country of morons, we are all doomed.

We've been trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty . . .

Stole this article about the Cambodia-Thailand conflict from The Geopolitics, mostly because their page is so loaded with ads that it's annoying to read. The reason I bothered with it is because of #4 in his list of reasons for the conflict:

4. Online Scams and the Criminal Economic Lifeline

We've watched a number of TV shows and movies, where large scale scam operations figure prominently in the storyline (The Beekeeper is one, The Black Swindler is another). It's one thing when you see it in a show, but how prevalent are they in the real world? I've heard about call centers in India that employ hundreds of people working for peanuts, calling people in America trying to sell extended warranties for cars. I was thinking that those operations are slimy, and sure, they will ensnare a few gullible fools, but how much damage are they really doing to society? And here we have a center in Cambodia that seems to be a crucial source of funds for the government.

It's not just gullible fools who get ensnared in these things. I suspect a good portion of their customers are people for whom the $29.95 a month for whatever-it-is is an insignificant expense, people who don't even bother to look at their credit card statement, and may not even pay their monthly bill. Someone with the gift of gab manages to get them on the phone and whatever their spiel is, it just happens to sound like a good idea, so they say sure, give up their credit card number and as soon as they hang up the phone they forget about it.

How many calls can a caller make in day? Given that half of the numbers they call don't go through (for any number of reasons) and maybe a tenth will connect them to a person willing to listen to their spiel, I'm thinking they can make a hundred calls an hour, or 800 calls a day, for which they get paid $20. If they manage to ensnare one client, that first months payment pays their wages for the day. But the operation might be able to collect that $30 a month for a year, so the operation is making bank.

If you have a hundred employees making a hundred calls a day, in a year they will have made roughly 3 million calls, which is only one percent of the population of the USA, so you will have barely tapped your market. Hiring staff for the call center is going to run you $60K a month, but when you add in the recurring payments, those calls will be generating $300K a month for a net profit of three million dollars a years. Shoot, you could afford to buy a Rolls, or a McLaren.

Here's the article:

Multiple Rocket Launcher (MRL), likely a BM-21 Grad or a similar Soviet-era system, being reloaded with rockets - Sima Rath

Regime Crises and Geopolitical Perspectives on the Cambodia-Thailand Conflict by Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s finance minister from 1993 to 1994, co-founder and acting leader of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP).

Since May 2025, Cambodia and Thailand have been engaged in an armed conflict of unprecedented intensity in recent decades. Officially triggered by border tensions in disputed areas, the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple territorial disagreement. It reflects a complex interplay of historical, political, economic, and personal factors.

The current Cambodian regime, dominated by Hun Sen’s family for over forty years, lies at the heart of this conflict dynamic. The war highlights the nature of power in Phnom Penh, while reviving age-old geopolitical logics in which Cambodia, throughout the centuries, has owed its survival to its role as a buffer state between rival powers. The crisis today raises a fundamental question: can Cambodia continue to cling to an authoritarian, dynastic mode of governance in a region undergoing profound transformation?

1. Historical Background: Cambodia Between Siam and Annam

For centuries, Cambodia’s very survival as a state depended on the antagonistic relations between its two powerful neighbors: Siam (modern-day Thailand) to the west and Annam (modern-day Vietnam) to the east. These two kingdoms/empires repeatedly sought to subjugate Cambodia, causing continuous fragmentation of its political authority.

A key episode is the Siamese expedition led by General Bodin in the 19th century, during which Cambodia, weakened and vulnerable, oscillated between competing hegemonies. It took French colonial intervention at the end of the 19th century to stabilize and preserve this small kingdom. Without the French protectorate established in 1863, Cambodia might have disappeared from the regional map.

2. Persistent Geopolitical Dependence Since Independence

The independence obtained in 1953 under King Norodom Sihanouk did not eliminate Cambodia’s geopolitical dependence. On the contrary, the Cold War turned the country into a proxy battleground for global and regional powers. Since then, Cambodia has constantly had to navigate the influence of Vietnam, Thailand, China, and the United States.

Hun Sen’s regime, installed by Hanoi in 1979 after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, gradually distanced itself from Vietnam and began a balancing act between Beijing, Washington, and Bangkok. However, these successive alignments never removed Cambodia’s fundamental vulnerability, as the country remains the region’s geopolitical weak link.

3. A Political and Familial Rivalry Between Phnom Penh and Bangkok

The current conflict is exacerbated by a personal rivalry between two political dynasties: the Hun family in Cambodia and the Shinawatra family in Thailand. Once close—Hun Sen once described Thaksin Shinawatra as his “adoptive brother”—the two clans are now bitter enemies.

On June 26, 2025, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra visited Sakaeo province and publicly labeled the Cambodian border town of Poipet a major hub for cross-border online scam networks. This comment directly targeted the Hun regime, widely accused of tolerating and even profiting from these operations.

The reaction from Phnom Penh was immediate. On June 27, Hun Sen delivered an unusually long and heated televised speech, accusing Thaksin of failing to “educate his daughter” and of disrespecting “the second most important person in Cambodia, after the King.” This verbal escalation laid bare the personal animosity driving interstate tensions.

For deeper analysis on this dynastic dimension, see my earlier article: Dynastic Politics and Governance Crisis in Southeast Asia: The Case of Thailand and Cambodia (The Geopolitics).

4. Online Scams and the Criminal Economic Lifeline

In recent years, the Thai-Cambodian border region has become the epicenter of online scam networks that defraud victims across Asia and other parts of the world. These scams are orchestrated from guarded compounds often operated with local protection, generating massive revenues.

For the Hun regime, this shadow economy has become an essential financial lifeline. In the face of international sanctions and declining aid, the illicit flow of money sustains Cambodia’s patronage system. Thailand’s efforts in 2025 to dismantle these networks have been interpreted in Phnom Penh as a direct economic and political threat.

Hun Sen’s regime has responded by reframing Thai enforcement measures as nationalist provocation, masking the real stakes of financial survival behind a rhetoric of sovereignty.

This connection between illicit economies and authoritarian survival was explored in my article: Criminal Networks, Not Patriotism: The True Source of Hun Sen’s Fury Toward Thailand (The Geopolitics).

5. Hun Sen’s Failed Strategy to Divide Thai Elites

In response to Thai pressure, Hun Sen has sought to exploit internal political divisions in Thailand. He has attempted to pit the royalist-military establishment against the Shinawatra-led Pheu Thai party, expressing hope for the return of General Prayuth Chan-o-cha as Prime Minister.

Hun Sen even began leaking alleged private criticisms of the Thai monarchy made by Thaksin during their past friendship. But rather than divide Thai elites, this maneuver backfired: it sparked rare unity among Thai political, military, and royalist factions, all now seeing Hun Sen as a vile and shared adversary.

6. A Conflict That Could Destabilize Hun Sen’s Regime

This conflict risks destabilizing the very foundations of the Hun regime. Built on dynastic control, personal loyalty, and entrenched corruption, the system in Phnom Penh is ill-equipped to manage a long-term crisis or negotiate a peaceful resolution.

The personalized nature of power in Cambodia, the use of public institutions for private enrichment, and the reliance on criminal revenues form a model that is increasingly out of sync with regional dynamics that favor rule-based cooperation.

Conclusion: Toward a New Regional and Political Equilibrium?

Regardless of the military outcome or peace negotiations, Cambodia cannot return to the status quo. A new political balance is inevitable. This will likely require the formation of a new government acceptable not only to Cambodians but also to regional powers—Vietnam, Thailand, China—and to the United States.

This scenario echoes the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, which envisioned Cambodia as a neutral, independent, and democratic state. Preserving the spirit of those accords remains essential for achieving a durable peace.

Ultimately, the war now raging on Cambodia’s borders is also a war for political transformation. The era of unaccountable personal power may be drawing to a close. Cambodia is entering a new historical phase in which it must redefine its role among neighbors and rediscover sovereignty through law, transparency, and peace.

Probability or The Story of Google

What are Markov chains? And why are they so useful?
Veritasium

Does a good job of explaining how Google works, which is remarkably simple, all it takes is a bigger computer. If you are just looking at letters, you just need a simple array with room for 26 entries. If you are looking at words, you need an array with a zillion entries, because not only do you are you using all the English words, you're also using all words from all the other languages and all the names and acronyms. And numbers, and punctuation, and symbols. And then, after you have counted all the words and populated your data base, you need to be able to answer a zillion queries simultaneously, which I suspect means you need to make multiple copies of these data bases. No wonder they're building all these data centers in my neighborhood.

And do not forget that all of this is being paid for by advertising. A tenth of a cent times a billion clicks is still $100K, and that probably happens, what? Hourly?

A couple of people mentioned:

Masayoshi Son (1957 - )
Japanese Businessman

Andrey Andreyevich Markov (1856 – 1922)
Russian Mathematician

Pavel Alekseevich Nekrasov (1853–1924)
Russian mathematician

On the downside, he drops in a couple of lines about global warming. I don't know if global warming is a real problem, but I do know that all of the measures western environmentalists have proposed are worse than useless.

It ends with an ad for Brilliant at the 31 minute mark.

The $2 Jeep

The $2 Jeep... How Bad Can It Be?
Low Buck Garage

Vunderbar! Reminds me of my previous life as a mechanic in Houston. Definitely improved my attitude this morning. Low Buck Garage has appeared here before.

MMT - Modern Monetary Theory - is killing us

The Bitcoin Revolution with Quoth The Raven
Peter McCormack The good part starts at the 37 minute mark and runs for 5 minutes.Ignore the tattoos, he has a brain and knows how to use it.

Zohran Mamdani has been getting a lot of coverage on account of his being a dirty commie. Doesn't bother me, he's far away on the east coast. New York is basically a hell-hole, if it sinks even further into the pit it would be no more than it deserves. Okay, my opinion is a little colored by a steady diet of cop shows on TV, and right-wing conspiracy theorists. But then I came across this:

There's A Lot Of Honest Pain Out There by Quoth the Raven

But replacing broken monetary policy with socialism isn’t just wrong—it’s disastrously wrong. 

Yesterday, someone left a comment on my post about Zohran Mamdani that stuck with me in a way few internet comments ever do. It wasn’t defensive or hostile—it was sobering.

The commenter challenged me, not to just oppose Mamdani’s ideology, but to think about why his message resonates at all. Here's what they said:

“You really ought to ask yourself: why does his message resonate? Why did Russia have a revolution? People don’t wake up, make the espresso, make an omelet, look out the back window across their deck, the lake, the boat, ready for a day of country living, and say ‘You know what, honey… how about we start that revolution today?’ Nobody does that. Revolutions are made by very unhappy people. Why are they unhappy? Mostly because society largely doesn’t work for them… There is a lot of pain out there, and a lot of it is honest pain.”

They’re right. There is a lot of honest pain.

And if you’ve followed anything I’ve written over the last several years, you know I’ve been screaming into the void about how broken our monetary system is. We have created an economy where the top 10% get wealthier with each crisis, while the bottom 50% watches their standard of living deteriorate. I’ve described it here when talking about the GameStop crisis (33:40).

The frustration bubbling beneath the surface is not irrational. It's earned.

People are watching the price of everything explode—housing, food, healthcare, energy—while wages stagnate. Meanwhile, Wall Street breaks records quarter after quarter. That disconnect doesn’t feel like capitalism to the average person. It feels rigged.

So when someone like Mamdani shows up and says “seize the means of production,” it doesn’t sound crazy to people living paycheck to paycheck. It sounds like maybe, finally, someone is taking their suffering seriously.

But here’s the part no one wants to talk about—especially not in polite political circles: the real culprit behind this pain is our broken monetary system. And both parties are to blame.

I laid this out in March, and it bears repeating. The U.S. is now at $35 trillion in federal debt. That number alone is alarming—but the speed at which we’re accumulating debt is what's truly terrifying. Since 2020, we’ve added over $12 trillion. No one in D.C. talks seriously about it because monetary policy is the third rail. Touch it and you’re finished.

Worse, Democrats have embraced a mindset that spending can and should be infinite—as if the dollar is magic and gravity no longer applies. They’ve adopted the pseudo-academic gospel of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which argues the Fed can just print money without consequences. This idea has infected the left's fiscal agenda with delusional confidence that everything can be free, deficits don’t matter, and taxes can rise forever.

But as I pointed out before: MMT doesn’t help the poor. It accelerates wealth inequality. I noted this in March 2025 using this chart:

Net personal wealth (U.S.)

The more the Fed prints, the higher asset prices go. Who owns the assets? The top 10%. Who gets wrecked by inflation? The working class. Every time the Fed steps in with more easing, more QE, more bond buying, the rich pull further away from everyone else. Look at the chart of wealth distribution over the past 30 years—it’s not just widening, it’s going vertical. And it’s not just happening by accident. It’s a direct consequence of our monetary policy.

Democrats say they care about “equity,” but their economic policy ensures the exact opposite. The bigger government gets, the more it feeds on debt, the more the Fed has to monetize it, and the more billionaires benefit. This is not some conspiracy. It’s math. It’s observable. It’s policy. And it’s failure.

I understand why people are drawn to Mamdani’s message. When you’re crushed by rising costs and watching others get rich doing nothing but holding assets, radical solutions sound appealing. But replacing broken monetary policy with socialism isn’t just wrong—it’s disastrously wrong. Every society that’s tried it has ended up worse off: Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, Venezuela, Cuba. The promises are always the same—fairness, justice, redistribution—and the results are always scarcity, repression, and collapse.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the problem isn’t too much capitalism. The problem is we don’t have capitalism at all. We have central planning by unelected technocrats who distort markets, crush price signals, and rob the average American of any real shot at building wealth. And Democrats, for all their talk of the working class, are pushing harder than ever toward a centrally planned future with no brakes.

The solution isn’t to seize the means of production. The solution is to restore sound money, shrink the size of government, and reintroduce real market discipline. That’s how you give people a shot—not by handing them utopian slogans, but by fixing the corrupt system that’s keeping them down.

There’s a lot of honest pain out there. And that pain deserves a real answer. MMT is not the answer. Socialism is not the answer. A return to true capitalism—not cronyism, not corporatism, but honest, competitive markets—is the only way forward.

He's right about all this, except for the part about blaming the Democrats. As the Big, Beautiful Bill illustrates, the Republicans are equally guilty.

Note: In case you don't know about the GameStop debacle:

The GameStop debacle refers to the unprecedented surge in GameStop's stock price in early 2021, driven by a massive influx of retail investors on platforms like Reddit's WallStreetBets. This surge was fueled by a short squeeze, where hedge funds betting against the company were forced to buy back shares to cover their positions, further inflating the price. The event highlighted the power of retail investors, the volatility of the stock market, and the potential for short squeezes to disrupt established financial practices. 

P. S. Blogger won't let me specify the start time for the video. It inserts amp; between the question mark and the t. When that happens, the browser gets confused.

Big Idea

A great idea: 

Mike Lee Proposes Constitutional Amendment to Oust Congress When Deficit is Too High

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has proposed a constitutional amendment that would make all members of Congress ineligible to run for reelection “whenever inflation exceeds 3%” or when the deficit exceeds 3% of gross domestic product (GDP).

The proposal revives an idea first suggested by Warren Buffett more than 10 years ago in which Buffett suggested he could “end the deficit in five minutes” by disqualifying lawmakers based on the nation’s economic health.

In a post on X, Lee wrote, “It’s better to disqualify politicians than for an entire nation to suffer under the yoke of inflation.”

Great idea, but you know it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law.

 

 

Sectarian Strife

Musk vs. Trump

Once a big organization achieves some success, there are going to be conflicting factions. I don't know what they are arguing about and I don't want to know. I am willing to wait and see how this all plays out. I like the idea that they are cutting waste and fraud, but as I understand it, even though waste and fraud amounts to zillions of dollars, it is a miniscule portion of the federal budget. If we are ever going to rein in inflation, the budget will need to be cut, but that is going to be very tough to accomplish. There are too many powerful people with their noses in the trough, and they are not going to like being put on an allowance.

When FDR led us to victory in World War 2, he set the stage for the phenomenal economic boom of the 1950s. Never mind the details, the big picture is what I'm thinking about. FDR and his propaganda machine fostered a belief in the minds of many people that we were doing the right thing by going to war and spending zillions of dollars on building weapons of war. Basically, he built a religion.

But by the 1960s, people began to see that there were problems in paradise. So for the next 40 odd years we kind of staggered along, sort of fighting wars and trying various programs to try and fix the problems at home. Then Barack Obama came along and he sold the people a new religion. The upshot of this new religion is that it enriched his loyal supporters instead of the Military-Industrial complex. The thing about just giving money to your friends instead of actually buying stuff, is that different groups of people get the money. Your friends are going to either spend it on parties and useless junk, or invest it in the stock market, which might be why the stock market keeps going up. When you buy stuff, the company that makes it hires people, so the money gets spread around more and isn't so concentrated.

Temples

A rendering of the eastern approach structure from the 2014 report shows the complications involved with the massive project. OGS Project S6574

A story in the New York Post caught my eye yesterday. New York wants to rebuild the steps leading up to the entrance to the capital building. There are 77 steps, which is like four big stories, so it's substantial, and it's outside in the weather, so it needs to made of stouter stuff than your typical indoor staircase. However, rebuilding these stairs, which is essentially what they are doing, on account of they have been neglected for decades and were even fricking condemned back in 2015, rebuilding these stairs is going to cost like $80 million dollars, which is like a million dollars a step. So I had to look into a bit to see just what the deal was. As you can see in the above drawing, it's big and complicated, and it's all made of rock. So it's gonna cost.

Isaac Perry staircase drawing, ca. 1892

The building was originally built in 1899 for a cost of twenty-five million dollars. Back then gold was $20.67 an ounce. Gold is somewheres around $3,500 an ounce now, which means in today's money that building would cost four billion dollars, so maybe that $80 million isn't out line.

Fancy government buildings, built out of stone, from a hundred years ago are very impressive, especially if you consider all the work that went into cutting, hauling, finishing and fitting all those big stone pieces. Well, I'm impressed. Don't particularly like being in them, they frown on spitting on the floor.

Why would anyone do this? Because we're building temples, that's why, and we believe in what we are doing. What we believe in is not so important as the fact that we believe in something. In addition most everybody also needs to hold the same beliefs. How do you get a large population to all believe the same thing? You make sure everybody goes to a state school, and if the church and state are in cahoots, all the better.

Look at the pyramids. I wonder how they got all those people to work together for all that time, and now I think primary school indoctrination in their belief system is the answer.

I was looking at the pyramids recently, and I'm reading about all these passages, tunnels and secret compartments, both verified and speculative, and I'm having a hard time making a mental model of this thing (I guess most of this is about the big pyramid), and I got to thinking a scale model would be a big help. It would need to be a big one, like 4 or 5 feet across. Some of those passages are pretty small. A larger model would mean you would be able to see them, they wouldn't  be just pixelated into oblivion. Great idea, but I haven't gotten anywhere with it.

Federal Deficit

Federal Deficit

This is graph is a little odd, looks like everything is going down when everyone knows the debt is going up. Now look at the scale along the left hand edge and you will see that zero is at the top. So now it makes a little more sense. It's a little hard to read at the scale here. Click to embiggenate and that should make if legible.

Anyway, notice the green line, the one that descends the fastest, the one that goes from 750 billion to 2750 billion in three months. What's that all about? That was the $2 Trillion economic rescue package passed by Congress back in 2020. Thanks COVID lockdown.