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Neofeudalism

I believe the economy of capitalism has evolved into what might be called a "neofeudal" state. We have come full circle through the industrial revolution and the oddity known as the "middle class" back to a social condition where a number of aristrocrats/landowners ("corporate owners") are supported by a huge number of serfs/taxpapers ("employees/citizens"). Not really a great stretch from Marxism, just different language, but it does fit the observations - disappearing middle class, increasing gap between rich and poor, and loss of any illusion of control of those in power by those who supposedly elect them. When we live in a state where those with the most coin by definition win elections, win court cases, and buy legislation, there is no real automonomy except to cecede from the system as completely as possible.

My understanding of Marxism is limited mostly to reading small portions of the communist manifesto and discussions thereof. I don't pretend to understand marxist communism completely. I do not believe anyone has executed it successfully. I do not believe communism is incompatible with democracy; in fact, i think democracy is necessary to successful communism. With that said, I don't believe communism is a viable economic system, mostly because humans are just not that evolved.

Socialism - again I'm not well enough to comment intelligently on socialism. I can compare it to many of the social services most of us would not complain about; police, fire, schools, libraries, post office, etc. etc. Living in a state (Massachusetts) where beaurocracy and social welfare programs are both out of control and badly run, I see what I consider to be the worst of both. This is not what I would hope for the country. I see it on a scale and with a design that creates dependency and discourages transcendence. On the other hand, I believe it can be done better. I just think we waste way too much energy fighting each other instead of working toward the common good. Socialism -- and I am not talking about a welfare state -- may be the only immediate pragmatic solution to the current shift from capitalism to neofuedalism.

Whether capitalism can be divorced from neofeudalism, I don't know. This seems to reflect the inner structure of human essence and human society. It' simply our economy and political system coming into alignment with our basest nature. It may be an inevitable derivation from a republican system. When I look around me, though, I don't see a people ready to govern themselves, but a mentally, emotionally lazy people looking constantly for someone else to herd them into a comfort zone. And it's apparent where that will get us; right into the figurative slaughter pen, but try to point that out.

Is money itself the root of the problem? Does shifting to currency somehow initiate the devaluation of human labor necessary to profitting concerns? I think there is a connection. I wonder if there is not some variation on the currency vs. barter continuum - or some place off the continuum - that might work better.
----------------
This is just a small brain dump. I have not addressed concerns or ideas about the saturation of markets, peak oil, religion, climate or immigration which are all influential or essential facets of the economy and our world condition. I have not addressed the merging of markets or the essential incorporation of world governments (welcome to the incorporation of america/china/europe etc.). I have not addressed semi-induced enslavement through inescapable debt or the illusion of property ownership in the U.S. And, I have not addressed my views on what freedom, liberty, prosperity, and power really are and how we can claim them. My words are chosen carefully and in many case precisely for their full metaphorical, intertextual, and sometimes metonymic value. Just talking and processing out loud. I am an entrepreneur, philosopher, worker, student, wife, mother and taxpayer in the U.S.

Why I’m Banned From Best Buy: By Jonah Rotholz

I have been banned from many things. I am banned from my little sister’s birthday parties just because I smashed the piñata so hard one of the party poppers inside went off and set the lawn on fire. I am banned from the go cart track at Frankie’s Fun Park just because I ran over 5 warning cones and crashed into the one spot on the track with no guard rail. I am banned from the U.F.O. ride at the state fair just because I stood up on the wall. I am also banned from the other U.F.O. ride because I vomited on the ride controller. That one I understand.

But probably the worst of my banishments is my banishment from Best Buy. I was only seven years old when that fateful trip occurred. I was a cute, squishy little seven year old with a pudding bowl haircut that I secretly hated. Who would have dreamed that this cute little kid could be banned from anything? I remember it like it was only 6 years ago…

“Hey Dad, where are we going?” “Hey Dad, can we go to Sonic?” “Hey Dad, can I drive the car?” “Hey Dad, can your cell phone bend real good?” “Hey Dad, do you remember your phone?” “What… a… bout… it…?” my father growled through gritted teeth. “It doesn’t bend too good” I said in a naïve tone of voice. Although I didn’t know it, I was gnawing away at my father’s patience like a hungry beaver on a tasty log. Fortunately for me we arrived at Best Buy before Dad committed homicide.

Now be aware that to a little kid like me a plain white refrigerator is not too entertaining. Therefore everything else in the store looked extra amazing that day. Now Dad’s orders to sit quietly in the corner while he and Mom looked at fringe after fringe grew old very quickly, so when they were speaking to a sales person I quietly slipped away towards the D.V.D. section.

There were so many of them. I HAD TO TOUCH ‘EM ALL!!! I selected a video. “Saw 2” said the cover. There was a picture of a severed hand with the Roman numerals “II” branded into it and placed on the cover. The hand had a revolting yellow tinge to it so I assumed it was a Sponge Bob movie. I then did what anybody would do in that situation: I stuffed it down my pants. “On to the digital cameras!” I thought to myself.

“PLAY THE SONG!!!” I roared! “BANG, BANG, BANG!” “BANG, WANG, CLANG!” “BANG, CLANG, BANG, WANG, CLANG!” After a minute of hitting a $1200 demo camera against a table I decided that no matter how loud I shouted or how hard I banged, it would not sing “Jingle Bells, or anything else except the funny beeping noise it kept making. Then I made an interesting discovery. When a $1200 camera’s anti-theft alarm goes off sales people come running. The first to arrive was a young man with fair hair and blue eyes. He was too busy staring at the broken camera in my hand to deactivate the alarm.

Once he turned off the anit-theft alarm and recovered from his initial shock, the unfortunate sales hand went to fetch my parents. “My tummy feels like it’s sinking down to my toes,” I thought to myself. Mom and Dad’s reactions to my destroying of a camera were unique. Mom’s eyeballs layered in on my forehead as if she was contemplating how best to kill me. Dad, on the other hand, had a funny expression on his face. He looked like either he was trying to burn a hole in my head or pass a large kidney stone. Parents don’t like it when their kids go missing.

There are many questions you can ask a parent who has to pay for a camera that costs more than the fridge they had come to buy, and who have just learned that their son tried to steal a horror movie. “Why are you guys so angry today?” is not one of them.

The first of my many punishments was to explain to the sales manager why I was such a terrible person. When he heard what I had done, the first thing out of his mouth was “SWEET MOTHER OF POTATOS! THIS CUTE LITTLE KID DID WHAT?!” The second thing out of his mouth was “YOU ARE BANISHED FOR LIFE!” I didn’t get to hear the third thing he said because my parents whisked me off to the car where no one could hear me scream. Mom and Dad didn’t say anything on the way home, however their faces began to turn back to their normal color. They didn’t even punish me; in fact, dad went to the drug store and got me a little tiny disposable camera. He told me that if I was going to break cameras, I might as well break one that cost 240 times less than the one at Best Buy. It turns out that my parents got their revenge three months later on December 25, 9:32 AM. When I went downstairs to open my loot I realized I had only gotten one gift: A large white refrigerator.

This was a school essay. If people like it then awsome. if not then someone else wrote it.

I appreciate the concern which is been rose. The things need to be
sorted out because it is about the individual but it can be with
everyone.

<a href="http://www.mortgageclassic.com" rel="dofollow">Classic Mortgages</a>

Nah, we posted 193 just because Scott said we wouldn't post many. Once he figures out how to monetize good old human grumpy cantankerous disagreeableness, he'll be richer than Buffett and Gates combined. I think he's going to buy Elbonia.

"My prediction is that there won't be a huge number of entries. Only the people who feel they have a legitimate chance of getting a high rank are likely to put in the effort. "

We're at 192 comments and counting. What does this prove? That people will do something if somebody asks them to do it, regardless of payoff?

THE LIGHTNING GRIEF

Bizarre scientific things seem to happen to me between 4 and 5 am.

A couple of nights ago, a thunderstorm rolled in around 4:30 am. The approaching storm woke me up, but basic laziness kept me from jumping out of bed to check for basketball-sized hail or untethered houses flying by. I laid in bed with my eyes closed, listening to the thunder getting closer and closer. Then something very strange happened – across my visual field (or whatever you would call it, given that I was "seeing" the darkness of the inside of my eyelids) a moving pattern of random black and white specks, very much like television snow, flickered for a fraction of a second.

My immediate reaction was "Oh oh, the next one is gonna be really clo…"

CRACK!

The damn thing sounded like it was right outside my window. It's a good thing that I have adequate bladder control.

A minute or two later, when the spike of adrenaline wore off, I started to wonder just what had occurred. Was my optic nerve, or the visual center in my brain, momentarily zapped by the nearby electrostatic field? Did I briefly channel a vision from an alien analog TV? Did I eat too much garlic the night before?

Recently, magnetically induced hallucinations were suggested as an explanation for ball lightning, so perhaps my visual cortex was temporarily overloaded by lightning-induced magnetic fields. Maybe lightning is attracted to garlic (sort of like an anti-vampire).

The next day, I did an Google search for "lightning" and "television snow" (and similar search terms) but didn't get any hits. So, I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this phenomenon. I ask my gentle readers, have any of you had a similar "TV snow" effect during a thunderstorm? Comment away.

THE PLUG

I'm an occasional contributor to the blog "Science Cheerleader". You can read more of my posts (and leave comments) at: http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/category/john-the-tourist/

WM:
The myth surrounding the start of your business is that you created a movie of John Wayne, shot in close-up, speaking directly to his widow 35 years after his death, and that the things he said to he were so moving and personal that she broke down and cried.

SC:
Well, partially true. Yes, we did create our first movie using John Wayne as the central character, and yes, Pilar Wayne did breakdown and cry. I felt very bad when that happened, but it was unintentional. I just had not envisioned that it would generate such strong emotions.
Actually, it was a short monologue about two minutes long, and it wasn’t because we had him say anything to play on her vulnerabilities. He did call her by name, but she told me that it was the realism, the fact that she believed that it was really him talking to her that triggered the emotions. I had him explaining in a rather technical way about the technology, and what this could mean to the movie industry. I guess I underestimated the emotional effect it would have on someone, and immediately I felt bad that she might have taken our pitch the wrong way. I had hoped that she would not react negatively, of course, or think it was unprofessional or foolish.
But after much discussion with her family, she decided to work with us to ensure that things were done right and that the end product would be an acceptable representation of how they thought the “Duke” should be portrayed. That is the hardest part, getting the people who control the image, or estate of someone to agree to contribute to the process.

WM:
Contribute to the process?

SC:
Yes the best movies come from data that is closest to the original source. Take for example a DVD. That is a copy of data from a film that is recorded on a set, using live actors, so it is in effect, a third generation source.
The problem is that when you are finished, it still looks like a computer generated image. While it’s very good, it’s not lifelike in the sense that footage of an actual person looks lifelike. The trick is to incorporate data that is very close to the original source.
The closer you get to the original source, the person the more real the new image will appear. If you think about all the reels of film that studios have that have John Wayne’s image on them, and if you gather enough of those images, that close to the source, you can create a new computer generated image that is very close to approximating that of John Wayne.
That’s where someone like Pilar comes in. She has numerous reels of home movies of the Duke being himself, not acting. That is the “spark-of-life” that allows these films to turn the corner to become a “real” image.

Scott Adams is a Genius

So this guy whose blog I read is having a writing contest. At first glance, this seems like a great opportunity for an aspiring (also known as "unemployed") writer like me. So all I have to do is come up with 500 words and add a plug at the end. This seems like such a wonderfully altruistic thing for someone to do for people he doesn't even know. Then I got to thinking about it.

It sounds a lot like the May 13th Dilbert comic. I think he's trying to outsource some of his work for minimum wage (or less?). Hopefully I won't make the same interviewing mistake. So far, his plan seems to be working. He hasn't written on his blog since Tuesday, and there have been quite a few really funny posts in his place. If he could find a way to harness the collective writing skills of his audience on a regular basis, he'd be set.

Scott Adams is a genius. He's been doing this for years with the Dilbert comic strip. He's acknowledged that a huge percentage of his ideas for the strip come from his readers. But he still has to make the stories fit into 3 boxes in 30 words or less without losing the humor. He was twittering before there was a twitter.

Writing is not an easy thing to do. Even for those who have a knack for it. Now that he has a new home and a family, it's probably been even more challenging. It's sometimes hard to maintain the drive, the enthusiasm, the passion. And priorities change. So I can understand why he's doing this.

Or, more likely, he's reading this comment and thinking "Stick to whatever it is you do, monkey brain."


Joe Walter poorly maintains his baseball blog at professionalhitter.com. He lists his influences as Clark Howard, Robert X. Cringely, and Neal Boortz. He is also known to take financial advice from cartoonists.

Why Cartoonists Are Great Lovers

If you'll bear with me for a bit, I'd like to begin with a quote from Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva:

“The country had no credit, had no working capital or financing or income distribution. What kind of capitalism was that? A capitalism without capital. I decided then that it was necessary to first build capitalism, then make socialism, we must have something to distribute before doing so."

This raises the question: Why is socialism incompatible with producing something to redistribute?

The answer begins with the fact that things are produced by people doing (usually) difficult and/or unpleasant work. People will only do this work if they get something out of it. Redistribution takes the fruits of labor away from the people who produce them, reducing their incentive to do the labor in the first place; this reduces the total amount of work done, and the total amount of stuff produced.

Consider an extreme welfare state, in which 100% of your income was taken (boo!) but in which you were guaranteed all the necessities of a middle-class life by the government (yay!). Would you work under those conditions? Probably not at the job you have now. In such a society people would work at whatever they damn well pleased. You'd get a lot fewer houses built, and a lot more Silhouette/Silk Spectre slashfic written. The problem with this happy picture is that it's questionable as to whether such a society could, in fact, produce enough stuff to fulfill its guarantees.

Such an unsustainable situation ends up looking something like Greece, where people who have been promised impossible benefits are rioting in an attempt to force the government to somehow, someway, raise the money to keep funding them. At least the Greeks have the Germans to rob.

So: back to Lula. He was quite right that, if you want to build your country's wealth, it's best to turn away from socialism; redistribution is best thought of as a luxury, which wealthy countries can afford a little bit of. What I think he and other socialists may not fully appreciate is that a lot of redistribution is more than capable of turning a wealthy country into one with "no credit, [and] no working capital or financing or income distribution". And the road from "a little" to "a lot" isn't that long.

Another way of thinking about this is that the logical consequence of eliminating income inequality is the impoverishment of society: If there's no (or not much) difference between the incomes of any two people, there's not much incentive to work hard, or at all. This leads to the same story: less stuff produced, less stuff consumed, poverty, boo, hiss.


Incidentally: I do hope that Mongo, who handles all my headline-writing and article-submission responsibilities, doesn't give this post a hopelessly misleading headline.

***

Michael Heyeck is a coder and software designer. He posts regularly at http://www.mlsite.net/blog about code, books, economics and (sometimes) boxing. Lately he's been reading and writing about "Rules for Radicals", which has reduced him to muttering "lousy commie" under his breath every few minutes.

I Am Nomad


We are nomads. We move from place to place, in something that more resembles a minivan than a starship, and we are accompanied on this journey by a cat. Instead of traveling at the speed of light, we just travel light, only enough to stuff the vehicle and still have room to see the back window. Our cannot-do-without list includes a laptop, the GPS, and catnip.

In another week we will be on the move again. Last month we were at a beach that stretched for !$%*!$ the month before was somewhere far north settled between the woods and the ocean. This month we are at a farm, and next month, probably some place that has more pavement than trees. But anywhere is fine, as long as we have an internet connection.

This is our 5 year mission, seeking out new life, new ideas, and to explore this strange world around us. We do boldly go where we have never been before. We do bathe, every now and again. We have not encountered Bigfoot, yet, but we have found out things that years of living together have not revealed, namely that the cat snores. Loudly.

Like characters in a fairytale, there is a lesson learned at every stop. One lesson on trash is that a used spaghetti box, bean can, tuna can, paper towel tube, cat food container and egg carton, can all fit snugly into an empty jar of tomato sauce. I did not say the lesson was deep. Also, we are in constant search of a bed that is neither too soft, nor too hard, but just right. I miss my old mattress.

Our only permanent type of address is the email kind. We use the internet for watching the Simpsons, making movies on Youtube, and reading the Dilbert blog. Perhaps we are stuck in a logic loop, moving over and over, with no destination. Eventually, we will have to get back on track to living the American dream and owning a house with a white picket fence. Maybe one day we will have a real address, where we can have stuff shipped to us from Amazon. But please, not yet.



==
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http://youtube.com/DreadPirateCrew

Ten ways to help reduce the national deficit
The national debt & deficit are time bombs, ticking away at the heart of the American Dream. The dream is not a house, but actually supporting our own smug superiority that we are better than everyone else. Until there is a change, it is inevitable that what is happening to Greece will happen to us. Like any credit card debtor, there will come a day of reckoning. But we could be responsible, we could stop the spending, we could pay down the debt and live within our means. Here are some ideas that folks can pass along to their politicians.
1) Cut the Department of Education
a. This is duplicated in 50 states, who are much more familiar with the local situation anyways.
2) Raise the gasoline tax by a small amount, perhaps $.05 per gallon.
3) A federal sales tax on all online purchases, equivalent to an average of all lower 48 state taxes. Use tax reporting is unreliable.
4) Force a 2% layoff in the all government agencies. Every business accumulates deadwood, and a good lay off could make government more efficient.
5) Hire private consults to redesign government departments workflow & processes, with an eye to reducing headcount & inefficiencies.
6) Military spending must be reduced. Lately it has been seen as inviolate.
7) Reform the 2002 medicaid/medicare expansion passed by Bush.
8) Stop borrowing money. The interest on the debt is now a good proportion of the deficit.
9) Eliminate government pension plans and healthcare for elected officials. Force them to buy on the open market like any other American.
10) Restore tax burden on the top 1% income earners, but also find a fair way to tax the capital gains of folks like Warren Buffet who claims to pay much less in taxes than his secretary as a percentage of his income.

Hire me as a CEO for your company! I require no more than $1 million annual salary for ANY size company. Goldman-Sachs...I would be a bargain compared to Lloyd Blankfein. I'd find a way to return more value to investors and a lot less bonuses for the the employees. Act now, for I'm only signing 2 year contracts.

Free time isn’t free
I have 3 children, ages 1, 3, and 5. Free time is diminished compared to being single, or married without children. I have a house. Maintaining a house requires a time investment to repaint finger marks on the walls, mow the lawn, snow removal, etc. I have a job, which demands 40 hours a week, plus travel there & back. I sleep, nearly 1/3 of the time. When I have free time, it is spent on quality time with my wife, children, occasional TV shows, or reading. I often trade sleep for more discretionary time.
What time is left for me to keep tabs on the federal government officials & policies? What time is left for me to keep taps on state government & policies? What time is left over for yearly town meetings, school boards, etc? How can I keep up with investments? How can I think about starting a business, or designing an invention? How will I be able to learn the names of all my children’s friends and keep them off drugs or other evils?
I think this lack of time constrains the individual potential for a lot of folks. I think it’s no accident that entrepreneurs are eccentric, or that unemployment may lead to starting a new business for some folks. It may be that in the grip of the current recession, a new crop of ideas are coming forth in the minds of the idle folks.
Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone took their 30th year off from work? Time for family, play, travel, or romance? The cost of that year would be high, but it might be a very satisfying investment in ourselves. Alternatively, a 32 hour work week might be just as good. Not as materially enriching, but it could build the kind of value that is shared with friends and family.

I wrote this as an exercise. I enjoy this sort of thing when I have time, but I'm quite out of practice writing essays.

A Nation of Idiots

I claim that we’ve already gone past our peak as a nation, and are rapidly devolving into total ignorance. To support my position, I submit the following items entirely without substantiation.
Our wonderful school system with its insistence on making sure everyone is special and wonderful has created generations who actually believe that they have something important to say. So they say it on Twitter! We’re so happy to know that they’re on their way to wherever or doing whatever.
The country that sent men to the moon will now have to contract the next generation of vehicles to India or China as there aren’t enough competent engineers produced here any more. Same with computer engineers. Oh, they can produce a pretty web site, but if you want your computer to get you to the moon, look outside our borders.
Studies show that multi-tasking leads to less getting done, so we admire those who twitter, text, scan the web and answer email while driving.
Our religious leaders have confused faith with fact, so they promote ignorance to folks to lazy to think critically, or perhaps think at all.
Our elected officials no longer have any credibility at all. So naturally, incumbents almost always get re-elected. Of course we like “our” guy, but we want someone to vote the other fools out.
If you’re onboard with me now, you can think up many other examples of why we’re going to hell in a handbasket. If you’re not, you’ve already bailed! So I guess I can stop.

My Plug: I’m a fat old computer programmer with fantasies of being Bob the Dinorsaur.

Above the Line

‘Management’ has become a dirty word. Many people are exasperated at the highly paid lunacy that emanates from above as companies crash to the ground and in an effort to understand/explain what has led to the present situation and to add to the plethora of self help management books, I decided to start one on what I consider to be the reason for so much screaming and wailing and gnashing of gnashers.

Managers need accurate information in order to make strategic decisions about their businesses but I have found that those in power will often act only on filtered data that suits the end they wish to achieve. If you are driving a car, you need to be able to see all round if you are to avoid an accident but businesses seem to be run by people who limit their vision only to those parts of the road that they like (or that make them look good).

We are a species that loves to communicate. We even risk our lives in order to tell people what we think (we have all seen the driver talking on the mobile phone whilst carrying out some tricky manoeuvre). We seem compelled to communicate from an early age and our brains are hard wired for this. Whether it be by facial expressions, body language or just plain screaming, we must bond with others to survive. We spend huge amounts of money in order to tell people what we think in an attempt to influence them into our ways of thinking and by this method, we increase our very own tribe of ‘right thinking’ people. The explosion of TV channels, internet, mobile phones and the like all show that we like to tell people our thoughts and the communication companies are willing to take a great deal of our money for the privilege. Despite our love of talking, this book will show how communication failure can lead to the collapse of companies for whilst we are good at talking, we are very poor at listening. The pace of modern life has drowned out our ability to listen effectively
----------------------------
Plug: This is the start of a book I may one day attempt to publish from the UK. Who knows?

In November my company introduced a new workspace initiative called, “Teamwork is in the bag!” Everyone at work received a bag with some “team treasure” coupons. If you thought someone else at work was a team treasure, then you were supposed to take one of your team treasure coupons and give that person a coupon with their name, your name, and the reason why they’re a team treasure. Then they put those coupons in their bag, and when they get three coupons then they go to their manager for a piece of candy. Since we just had Halloween there were already several thousand candy buckets all over the office where one could have all the candy they wanted without even being a team treasure, but I handed out coupons to a few of my friends at work anyway.

I gave one coupon to a buddy who goes to lunch with me every day, and I gave another one to a coworker who actually came into work dressed up for Halloween, thanking them both for making my miserable job at least a little more enjoyable. “Thanks for going to lunch with me” and “Thanks for dressing up like a blueberry.” (His costume was actually supposed to be as a person who had frozen to death, but he looked more like a big blueberry to me). I was later reprimanded for not taking the team treasure initiative seriously, and my team treasure bag was taken away from me.

*************************************************************************

Plug: I self published a book about my year teaching English in Japan (Memoirs of a Gaijin: Emails from Japan). Here’s the link for the Kindle version, but paperback is also available, and it should be coming out on the Nook sometime this summer.

http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Gaijin-Emails-Japan-ebook/dp/B0011W4UIE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1274463988&sr=1-1