naked capitalism

DownSouth says:

Re: “Trucking Industry Says Economy Is Slowing”

The American Trucking Associations’ advance seasonally adjusted (SA) For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index decreased 1.4 percent in June, although May’s reduction was revised from 0.6 percent to just 0.1 percent. May and June marked the first back-to-back contractions since March and April 2009.

Does anybody remember what March and April of 2009 were like? Maybe this will help spur the memory.

kevinearick says:

No nation/state measures productivity/performance, and what they do measure is completely contrived.

At-Will Recap

California has one of the worst performing education systems on the planet, but K-14 gets 40%, because a black box economy may only perpetuate itself in an ignorant environment. Black box technology is like putting a loaded gun in the hands of an ignorant person with no other means of making a living.

As is so often the case, Whitman and Brown are two sides of the same coin. In Brown’s case, he was indirectly indispensible in the development of the Internet, by ensuring freedom of speech within the CA university system at the time, but both are intimately familiar with the corruption responsible for economic outcomes, and both must play to that corruption.

Make no mistake, the trapdoor has been sprung, and the noose around the empire’s neck grows tighter every time it moves. The economy is only recycling debt, at exponentially increasing cost to capital. Will the legacy interests choose to get on with the business at hand, or hang itself to death? Pick your poison. (Like the Fed said, you need a PhD in economics to appreciate pro-cyclic leverage into demographic deceleration)

The nexus participants are increasingly throwing each other off the bridge now, to maintain their position, and the flood is coming down the channel. In the dc world, the empire demands 75% of our income to subsidize the multinationals; wants to tell us what, when, where, and how to do our jobs; and confiscates our children at will. In the ac world, we watch while the empire struggles with that noose around its neck, ready to deliver two orders of magnitude more voltage from the planet to the empire, or replace the dc bus all together…

Think about it in terms of marginal utility. Could you increase your productivity beyond the increase in pay required (quality of life), if you were given the freedom to define your job? Of course you could, substantially, X 7 billion. What we have here is a dc bus control issue: economic slavery doesn’t work, which becomes more transparent everyday, and its history has run out of room for replication. MU machine maxes out straight downhill, but steering on a slope and starting up a slope from a dead stop are different matters.

The contract allows legacy interests to build a lottery/ponzi commerce system, to induce slave participation in the dc bus, paying top dollar to CEO slaves to algebraically reduce/liquidate those that choose the CAO slave offer of dependence, which continues until the pyramid begins to contract; however, it does not give any contrived majority of slaves, led by slaves, the right to vote others into slavery, although the dc bus attempts to do so every time it faces contraction, repeating its history.

Socrates / Pressfield–

“I was observing the young soldiers of the camp. Conformity to the norm is their overmastering impetus, is it not? Each unprompted wears his curls like every other, drapes his hem to the same length, and strides about and even postures in the identical attitude. Inclusion in the hierarchy is all; exclusion the paramount fear.

In fact they are slaves, are they not? They act not by the dictates of their own hearts, but to please others. There are two words for this. Demagoguery. And fashion.

Does there exist beneath heaven a spectacle more debased than that of a demagogue orating before the masses? Each syllable screeches of shamelessness, and why? Because we discern, hearing this vile wretch pimp himself to the multitude, that his speech springs not from the true conviction of his soul, but is crafted cunningly to truckle to the whim of the mob. He seeks his own advancement by their favor and will say anything, however wicked or infamous, to promote his stature in their eyes. In other words, the politician is the supreme slave.”

Others may choose slavery, but they may not choose slavery for the rest of us.

dearieme says:

Children running franchise businesses rather than studying to be parasites at Law or Business school is surely a Good Thing?

Sundog says:

For those with a strong stomach, here’s a panel discussion with Paul Ryan on creatively destroying America by promising five to six percent of GDP deficits through mid-century (but it will get better after that, trust us — we’re Republicans!).

http://www.brookings.edu/events/2010/0722_budget_deficit.aspx

Even if the news out of Mexico weren’t so bleak, I probably would still have a hard time getting around to Newt at AEI. It’s a must.

http://www.aei.org/event/100270
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/07/85-of-drug-traffickers-are-set-free.html