naked capitalism

Middle Seaman says:

Fukuyama is amazingly parochial for a person with world wide reputation. His analysis can be found daily in most papers and liberal blogs. He seem to be clueless about the left in the US. Basically, there is no left left. Nothing does rise or doesn’t. The last activity of the more organized left was the election of Obama who ended up being way right of center and in many ways worse than W. Obama hit the last nail in the left’s coffin.

wunsacon says:

>> The New American Divide Charles Hugh Smith (hat tip reader May S)

>> I think he is correct in fingering Savior State “free money” as the primary cause of the dissolution of working-class America’s communities and households:

I love CHS’s work. But, c’mon, man…

Why do such smart people overlook the giant elephants in the room? It’s absurd.

First, internet-fueled globalization facilitated the mass migration of jobs to workers in China, India, Eastern Europe, and other locales. These countries probably quintipled the pool of workers available for hire globally. Surely, doesn’t CHS know the basic interplay between “supply and demand”? From reading his work, I know he does. But, he overlooks it here in his “search” to name the “Saviour State” (aka “nanny state”) as a root cause of our problems. Talk about missing the forest through the trees.

The fall of communism (in China, Russia, and Eastern Europe) had quite a dramatic effect. Previously, these communist governments educated their people fairly well but remained a separate eco(n)-system. When China/Russia/EasternEurope switched their economic systems to capitalism — state-organized, of course (just like here) — the influx of educated workers into the global pool was very sudden. What do people expect when “supply” quintiples in a short period of time?

Second, global population has doubled in, like, 30 years. But, we don’t need double the GE CEO’s or double the airline execs. Thanks to technology and M&A, we do more with less. Meanwhile, the importance of the positions at the top grows. Those who play by the “right” rules to secure one of these top positions grow rich by drinking from the adjacent income stream.

Third, the great facilitator of globalization — the internet — deserves some special mention, because it drives job loss within borders, too. The internet is disintermediating supply chains. Pure distributorship businesses — often small businesses — are being rolled up (into giants like Amazon), because of economies of scale. With technologies like cloud storage, Apple only needs to keep a few copies of an “Imagine” mp3 player and simply stream it out to anyone who wants to listen to it. Well, the same thing is happening with knowledge work, too. We don’t need as many tax accountants in the world if TurboTax is available more cheaply online. (In turn, we don’t need as many tax accountant professors either.)

In sum, these are *simple* observations. The factors creating job loss and wealth disparity are staring us in the face. No need to stretch for tenuous relationships. If there is, it’s likely bloggers, even CHS, are suffering from a bit of confirmation bias and distorting reality in order to make it fit their narrative.

(Nevertheless, CHS is often a great read.)

MichaelC says:

Re Bill Black’s Apple article.

Based on my calculations, using the wage cost differential estimate between Apple’s foreign workers and their western counterparts provided in the NYT article, approx 10.25B of Apples 13.B total 2011 profit derives from exploiting the workers.

Therefore the impact of the Gresham’s dynamic can be partially quantified, at least in this instance. The rewards are there for all to see in Apple’s profits and the value of that benefit reflected in its stock price.

kevinearick says:

Virtual Space Time: General

Open mind, open system, life. Closed mind, closed system, death. Aggregate.

If you are waiting for any public, private, or non-profit corporation to give you fusion, you are waiting for something that is never, ever going to happen; they exist in a closed loop, by design, which may only exist as ponzi reproduction over scarce, attenuating resources, to the end of geographic saturation. We are here; there is nowhere left to hide the losses in this dimension. The algebraic reduction of nature will do the rest.

If you do not take the conformers to space, in ponzi numbers, it’s going to get very, very ugly, and their authorities know it. That much math they know, because they have die-off precedents unwritten in their History. If you are expecting them to change their inbred behavior in real time, however, and negotiate in good faith, you are waiting for something that is never, ever going to happen.

The authorities would rather burn down their own empire than relinquish control, which is exactly what they are doing. They must, because an empire is a breeder reactor, designed to expend any and all resources required to kill anything it cannot control. What does that sound like in physics?

The nucleus accedes to the inevitable, and only to the inevitable. Time/speed/backlash depends upon how long you allow it to assume it may exist as a closed system with ponzi growth. The empire takes a byte out of the back end of the distribution and projects it as “reality” TV. Effective parents take an implicit byte from the front end and present to progeny as starting material. Middle class agency acts as a relay insulator. Time is a perception; life is what you make of it.

Fusion and fission are going on all around you, at any scale you care to examine, but you must remove the communication blinders, the anxiety limit switches, to see it. Not only does the empire naturally fear open source, but fusion applications also present a direct threat to the empire. You can replace the entire empire, and all of its participants, with a fusion machine. Human critters, bred to believe they are somehow a commanding species, do not want to hear that, even though it would free them from prisoners dilemma. You can lead a horse to water…

If you pick transportation up off the ground with distributed energy, you create another dimension, bridge, with relatively infinite opportunities, but what happens to the existing proprietary model? Why would anyone not expect a mindless product like Facebook to go viral under current circumstances, or its games not to result in the domestic “China/Japan/whatever” development model and associated finance system? What, you thought a melting pot wouldn’t behave homogeneously over time? Ever observe nature or Europe?

I like the Rubio comment about America becoming a nation just like the one its ancestors fled. An inelastic legal system only has one outcome. It’s insane by design. You have a bomb and a fuse. What characteristics do you want in each? Did you really think the German Trust accidently designed the periphery to collapse, or that Greece would not have a black/white swan economy ready to go? It’s all noise, the same noise, repeating.

So, you want to design the explicit circuits in your multiplexer to allow a change of course upon backlash coming out of virtual memory. Now, about that kid playing the matching game…It’s like the skating rink phenomenon. Programming intelligence is all about implicit circuitry. What are explicit dc conditionals?

Sometimes, the carnival barker running the shell game loses the pea all together…