Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 20 of 92

As Employers Cut Their Own Throats: How They Could Save Themselves

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On September 6, 2021

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From the Washington Post:

You will remember that employers squealed they were having trouble finding workers, so Republican states ended extra EI benefits.

The end result? No more workers, but businesses were harmed by reduced spending.

Whoops?

One of the many fundamental “errors” in neoliberal thinking is that you want workers and recipients of government aid to not have a lot of money. After all, they’re a cost.

But every business’s employee is a bunch of other businesses’ customer, and every aid recipient is also a customer. Smart businessmen, or ones who have learned from experience (a.k.a., those who remembered the Great Depression) know this, and want high wages. It’s not a competitive disadvantage if everyone has high wages. Likewise, generous government benefits are good for business.

So smart businessmen want a high minimum wage without exceptions, and generous benefits.

One of the few real insights of modern economics is “marginal” thinking. For decision making, it doesn’t matter what the average cost of something is; what matters is the cost of the next unit — the next widget you make or the next employee. This means that supply matters a lot. For a job for which 100 people are applying, every open position puts employers in the cat seat.

If there are three, a lot less so. If there is one job-seeker per three open slots, well, you’re going to have to raise wages, both to compete and to increase the pool. I recently read an article where a homecare business was complaining that there was one person per ten open positions, but they also noted they paid a couple dollars less an hour than retail and menial labor jobs.

Anyway, even if the Covid death toll seems large, it’s the effect on marginal workers that matters. Add to that that many workers who kept their jobs are not going back to offices and the geography of jobs has also changed. People who run businesses in fancy, high-priced suburbs without any real transit, can’t expect nearly as many cheap workers, because they can’t afford to live in that suburb and traveling to it is hard. You create enclaves that price out blue collar and service workers, you need to go to them, and not vice-versa.

In the larger picture, an ongoing pandemic that just keeps killing and killing, and is killing the poor and minorities in much higher numbers, is naturally going to lead to a tighter job market. While the rich have gotten a lot richer because of Covid, the long-term affect is going to be higher wages.

There will be attempts to avoid this, as with making homelessness illegal, mass-evicting people, then throwing them in prison and using prison labor, but even that has its limits, when there are just less people.

This is a lesson Europe learned during the Black Plague (the people who survived were treated much better than those who lived before), but Europe didn’t fuck up the Black plague deliberately because it was making rich people richer.

Our wealthy are fundamentally stupid in fairly awe-inspiring ways, because they’ve spent the last 40 years destroying the very environment they will need — social, economic, and physical — for their own future prosperity, and indeed, survival. They think their money will protect them from the wasteland they’re creating, but that’s a bad bet.

Oh, I guess the older ones weren’t stupid, but if you’re filthy rich and not at least 60, I wouldn’t be fucking up Covid, destroying the social fabric of the West by encouraging right-wing authoritarianism, destroying democratic legitimacy, and crashing biodiversity while screwing up the climate.

Might come back to bite you on the ass. If you actually care about your kids (obviously you hate everyone else’s kids), you might find all this foolish, too, if you weren’t someone whose only talent is making money by hurting other people.

Anyway, one of the few silver linings coming out of this will be increased wages, unless the rich and their politicians can move hugely to forced labor. Understand that forced labor is the play: That’s why they’re cutting benefits, to force people back to work. It just didn’t work. That’s why they’re criminalizing homelessness, and there will be more policies along this line.

You’re a unit of production, expected to work for poverty wages, and they want to keep it that way even during a plague, even if they have to force poor people to keep working and send your kids back to schools w/out masks or proper ventilation.

This is who the rich are. Who we are, as a group, is people who accept this or even support it.

Meanwhile, employers of low-wage workers should be asking governments to increase the minimum wage significantly ($24/hour in the US, minimum, with automatic increases based on cost of living), not to help workers, but to help themselves. They could ask for transition subsidies for a couple years, and most of them would be fine, and making more money.

But we’ve trained our employers to be idiots, concentrating only the bottom line and not the top line.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Three Simple Policy Heuristics

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On August 31, 2021

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A number of people (and most of those who run our societies) don’t understand the policy default: “Be kind.”

There is a widespread belief that life is shit, “hard choices” have to be made, and those hard choices usually involve someone else suffering and dying.

Life may well be lousy, but most “hard choices” don’t have to be made, and those hard choices are one of the main reasons why life is lousy for so many people.

The most important thing to understand is this: Harm ripples, kindness ripples. People you hurt go on to hurt other people. People who are treated with kindness become better people, or more prosperous people, and go on to help others. Yes, there are exceptions (we’ll deal with those people), but they are exceptions.

First: Do no harm.

Again, people who are abused, go on to abuse others. Rapists were often raped before they raped others. People who have no money can’t buy other people’s goods. People who are crippled physically, mentally, emotionally, or socially cannot contribute fully to society and tend not to make those around them happier or more prosperous. Rather the reverse.

While it is necessary to imprison some people for committing crimes (though far fewer than most societies imprison), it is not necessary to make having been convicted an economic death sentence. People who can’t get living wage jobs (or any job at all) when they get out of prison gravitate back to crime.

We don’t want people raped in jails, because many become rapists themselves and virtually all are damaged by it. When they get out of jail, we have to deal with that damage. We don’t want them stuck in solitary confinement for long periods of time because brain scans show this inflicts traumatic brain damage, and, yeah, we wind up having to deal with those people when they get out.

If someone runs out of money, we don’t want them to lose their primary residence. Even if you are soulless, you shouldn’t want a society that creates homeless people; it takes far more money to support someone on the street than it does to pay for almost anyone’s mortgage or rent. We don’t want people who are sick to be denied health care because they become pools for disease. We’re treating these people eventually anyway (when they turn 65 or become so poor they qualify for Medicaid), which is far more expensive than dealing with their illnesses when they first present themselves.

We don’t want to destroy other countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.) because their people become refugees with whom we must then contend; this produces scads of angry people, some of who may wind up killing us, and it further ruins their economies, rendering them unable to buy our goods (except our weapons).

Damage to others who live on the same planet as you can comes back to haunt you. Damage to others in your own society will come back to haunt you.

So, first, do no harm. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are radically rare. Almost every bit of harm we do to others through government policy is a bad idea. The only common class of exception is covered in rule three.

Second: Be kind.

As the harm you do others comes back to you (insofar as you are “society”), so the good you do comes back to you. I almost don’t know what to say about this, as it is so brutally obvious. Happy people are better to be around. Prosperous people are better to be around. Healthy people are better to be around.

Only when goods are legitimately scarce is there reason not to help make other people better off, and, in those cases, it is only applicable to the scarce goods, and only until you can make the goods no longer scarce. Short on food? Ration and plant more crops.

But in today’s society, all the significant shortages of the goods which matter most are artificial; we have more than enough food to feed everyone. The US has five empty homes for every homeless person. Europe has two empty homes for every homeless person. Clothing is cheap as hell. Access to the internet is vastly overpriced. Our main sink is just carbon: We need to spew less of that, and we can do that. Our second main limitation is the destruction we are imposing on biodiversity, but we could produce our food with far less impact on the environment if we wanted to, and, even in the short term, we’d be better off for it.

People need stuff: food, housing, safety, education. None of these things should be in shortage anywhere in the world, including safety. They are in shortage because we choose to act greedy, violent, and selfish when we do not need to.

Third: Remove the ability or reason for people to do harm.

Humanity is not a race of saints. It does not need to be. Most people are neither good nor bad, they are weak. They do what the social and physical environment disposes them to do, with the social environment being far more important in the modern era.

Still, some people are bad. The hard core is probably around five percent of the population. And many other people are damaged, because our society has damaged them. They take that damage out on others.

The most dangerous class of malefactors are incentivized to do evil. Think bankers, corporate CEOs, billionaires (almost all of whom do evil as routine). These people do evil because they profit greatly from it, BUT (and most of you will not believe this) what makes a profit in the modern world is overwhelmingly a social choice. The government chooses who can create money, what counts as profit, who is taxed how much, who is subsidized how much, what is property, how much it costs to ship by rail vs. road, etc., etc.

There are independent technological and environmental variables, but they are overwhelmed by social variables. Change the variables and you change the incentives.

The policy is simple: Take away incentives for people to do evil. Take away their ability to do evil (a.k.a., their excessive access to money.)

Those who continue to do evil, lock them up. Do it completely humanely, no rape, no violence, no solitary confinement. But make it so they can’t do evil. While they are in prison, try to rehabilitate them. Norway has half the recidivism rate of the US for a reason: Rehabilitation does work for some people.

When they get out, bring them back into society. Make sure they have housing, food, clothing, and so on. If they do evil again, lock them up again.

None of this is complicated, in principle. This is simple. This is straightforward. It is work, mind you, we must stay on top of incentives and ability, and not allow anyone to become so rich or so powerful that they are able to buy the rule-makers or be above the law.

None of this should be controversial, though it is. None of this is new, these strands of thought go back to Confucius, Ancient Greece, and beyond. They are only controversial because it is in the interest of many for these ideas to be painted as such. And many people, having done evil, develop a taste for it.

Running a society well is hard, in the details it is complicated, but in principle, it is simple. Do the right thing. Make it so that people do well by doing the right thing. Make it so people who do things that are harmful to others stop doing them.

When you want a good society to live in, inculcate these principles. Until then, know that you will only live in a good society briefly and by chance.

Originally Published September 3, 2015. Back to the top for a new generation of readers.

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Humanity’s Completely Broken Feedback Systems

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On August 10, 2021

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If you want to understand how we got where we are, it’s simple: our strongest feedback systems to our decision making people are telling them “everything’s great, stay on course!”

For over 40 years now the rich have gotten richer. Politicians have gotten richer. Corporate officers, CEOs and executives have gotten richer.

Money is reward, and the reward centers for our elites are going off like a slot machine that constantly pays millions. BLING! BLING! BLING!

Whenever someone says “you should do less of this thing that makes you more money and power”, which is essentially everything that needs to be changed from Covid (making them richer) to climate change (still more oil to pump, baby) to ending pharma patents (Bill Gates says NO) to fixing inequality or feeding hungry people or housing the homeless, well, their fortunes (or bribes) come from making these things worse.

Capitalism is supposed to provide a feedback system. It isn’t the best feedback system, but if forced or allowed to work (and only government can enforce it, which is why rich people can’t be allowed, as they always purchase the government) it makes individuals and corporations who can’t even make a real profit go bankrupt.

But in 2008, Bernanke, whose entire intellectual opus was “how do we make sure another FDR doesn’t happen by making sure the rich never lose their money and power again” started the process of shoveling money down the gullets of the rich. (Greenspan had been piping it in too, but maintained some pretense he wasn’t and tried not to actually print money obviously.)

Every major central bank in the world followed course and all the economic feedback systems broke. No matter what rich idiots did, they would never as a class be allowed to go bankrupt, or even not keep getting richer. Vast money funneled to the rich and inflation showed up exactly where one would expect it, in things the rich were bidding up (yachts, art, luxury apartments) and in whatever they were buying up to get a new revenue stream (housing, most recently, so rent will soon /really/ go thru the roof.)

Now, as I pointed out at the time, the problem with all of this is that the real world exists, and so does a real economy in which items must be manufactured, food grown and products delivered. All of that has to be done in a world with weather, climate, animals, plants and an atmosphere.

Since all the feedback systems put in place by humans had broken (no one in power cared or cares about UN climate reports), we then had to wait for the world to start smacking us around.

That has started, with wildfires and northern hurricanes and so on (and Covid, to some extent), and the logistics system has proven itself to be fragile and easily disrupted exactly as many of us pointed out, while power and water systems and so on show their fragility as well.

But it’s not enough yet, this is all stuff the rich can ignore: have more than one home, have them off the grid, travel by private jet, etc, etc…

So the feedback will continue until it becomes so severe either the Proles do a Versailles on unresponsive elites or the elites feel more endangered than their bank accounts can make up for. (A hundred million+ dollars can buy a LOT of immunity. You may be dead before they feel it.)

This story isn’t new to regular readers, though, but I want to splice it with another thread.

Incentives.

I hate incentives. Loathe them. Every place I ever worked, the incentives did more harm than good. But it’s the mantra, the mindless ideology of our age that incentives work and you should align incentives.

Since we re-engineered our entire society to appear to do that, our societies have gone to shit for everyone but the one to three percent or so, but since feedback to anybody but them doesn’t matter, we continue.

I recently read John Ralston Saul’s “The Unconscious Civilization.” Or, rather, re-read it, but last time I looked at it was in the nineties.

Saul wrote a bunch of non-fiction books and they’re all bad except “The Unconscious Civilization”, which is brilliant. (They’re bad because Saul is of the old humanist tradition that insists on putting in as many references to the greats of the past as possible.)

But Unconscious Civilization is the publication of a series of five lectures by Saul and the limited time forced him to get to the fucking point. So, read it. (It’s scarily right about almost everything.)

One point Saul makes over and over again is the “value of disinterest”. Social decisions cannot be made properly by people who have an interest in them. Cannot be. We have run a 40 year (arguably 200 to 500 year) experiment on this, and it has failed and failed and failed. Elites need moderate negative feedback and to be insulated from the effects of their decisions which benefit groups.

Our society, as Saul points out, is all organized into interest groups, which half the audience is probably thinking is insane, because they think of interests group as things like environmentalist and people who want food aid, and not as corporations. (Though NGOs are definitely corporatist by Saul’s definition.)

People who have a strong interest can’t make good decisions for anyone but themselves about anything they have a strong positive interest in. It’s that simple.

If we want out of this mess, we have to break strong positive incentives. No stock options, for example. No surgeons flying around in private jets.

When someone’s interest is so strong it makes sense for them to burn the world down (and be clear, it did, because most wouldn’t still be here, and many figure their wealth will protect them), interest has failed. Incentives have failed.

Elites must be subject to the effects of their decisions, yes, but primarily on the downside.

It’s hard to see a way out of this now, because there isn’t one.

Instead the way out will be forced. When fear rises to the necessary level, those who betray society as a whole for their own interest will be dealt with. If they’re lucky it will be thru democratic norms, if they aren’t lucky, it will be the justice of the mob. In either case it will be too late to stop the worst of climate change and ecological collapse.

For you, a reader, the point is to internalize what went wrong and why, so you understand the conditions in which it will change and do not waste time on actions which won’t help. Moral ‘suasion will not work. The elites will respond to power and fear and nothing else.

If you can’t apply enough of that, or any movement asking for your help indicates their strategy doesn’t involve power and fear, then you need to prepare in other ways. In fact, as an ordinary person, you just need to prepare, because while you can do  your bit you do not have enough power to be determinative.

Politics is unlikely to save you and what you do will not determine if it does. So you must, with others, save yourselves.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The New Age Of Vertical Integration

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On August 9, 2021

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When I was very young, conglomerates which controlled the entire chain of production were still somewhat popular. Companies didn’t like outsourcing or offshoring; if a widget went into their product, they wanted to own the factory, or eat least effectively control the supplier. Toyota had lots of suppliers, sure, but they were close the factories and they were under Toyota’s thumb: subsidiaries in all but name.

But business fashion changes, and the mantra of the day became “concentrate only on core business, get an expert to do everything else.” It often did reduce costs, but at the price of losing control. It didn’t work for everyone, General Electric under the over-praised but actually incompetent Jack Welch gutted itself. Following GE’s lead, other companies like the Big 3 auto producers started thinking they were financial companies and in the business of making money, not products.

Didn’t work out well for those who followed the fad whose business model didn’t actually support it.

But it did work well for many, at least in terms of increasing CEO and executive stock compensation. Growth actually slowed in the economy overall, but the economy in neoliberalism exists for companies, not companies for the economy, let alone society.

This era is now ending. Climate change is here, and infrastructure in foolish countries like America is failing repeatedly. China and the US are gearing up for a Cold War, Covid revealed that world shipping is fragile and not always cheap, and that no one can actually understand modern supply chains.

Supply officers panicked and started stockpiling goods, putting further pressure on supply chains and driving up prices for both shipping and materials, BUT if we didn’t have an era where trade and shipping and even production will become more and more subject to shocks, it would just be a passing fad.

But smart CEOS will now be reeling in their supply chains: rationalizing them so they know exactly where all the parts are made; the parts are made close to where they are assembled (if not in the same plant complex) and insulating them from problems with  3rd party shippers. The smart ones will pursue both vertical integration AND will have some geographic distribution (but not too much) so that geographical problems (wildfires, marine inundations, hurricanes, food riots) don’t shut them down entirely.

Those who don’t stand to lose their business entirely if a shock takes out a key part of their supply chain they don’t control or understand, or which supplies generally and is not bound to them.

We’ve been thru a very stupid era, and it’s not over yet, but it’s ending. Central banks can print money, but they can’t print machines parts, oil or food, and the limits of their power to deal with actual, real, non-financial shocks to the system are about to become evident.

Indeed, central banks, by funneling money to rich people and corporations which would have otherwise gone bankrupt have done almost everything within their power to make the system more fragile and worse run.l

When the food riots hit your country, remember to pay a visit to the central bank officers, past and present, to see how they are doing and to express your appreciation for their service. Perhaps you could also see the welfare of neoliberal politicians.

(Accurate job feedback has been removed from our elites, and they need it badly. When you have the chance, remember to help them out by providing it.)

Midas was a fool, but electronic bits are even more worthless than gold when the real world comes knocking.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

And The Mass Evictions are ON

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On August 2, 2021

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So, the evictions moratorium expired Saturday at midnight.

Over a quarter of renters are behind in some states, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think-tank.

Southern states are some of the worst affected, though some 16 percent of US households owed rent — about double the amount before the pandemic.

This wasn’t necessary, but the choice was made to not pay people to stay in place, and the money given for relief has mostly not been administered, presumably because the bureaucratic hoops are ridiculous.

only $3 billion in aid has reached households out of the $25 billion allotted to states and localities in early February.

Rental properties and single homes are being snapped up en-masse by private equity and other big investors. Eviction is in their interest, as it makes it easier to raise rent.

This is a watershed moment for real-estate in America: this is where it moves to being owned more by smaller landlords and individual owners (for homes) to just another corporate owned means of, well, rent extraction.

Remember that after 2008 banks deliberately held houses off the market to drive up prices, and you’ll understand what is going to happen to rent, which has already seen ridiculous rises. With large amounts of rental property now in a very few hands, it will be easy for a few people to decide to hold just enough properties off the market to drive up rents. It’s better for big institutional owners to have higher rent prices and some empty if that works out to more rent, and given shortages already exist, I’m betting that will be the case.

The era of cheap housing has been over for a while, but it’s going to be thrown in a coffin and staked thru the heart if big investors have their way.

We’ll talk more later this week, probably, about how wonderful and useful the homeless are and why they are treated so badly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

A Great Idea About Capitalism That Was Wrong

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On July 27, 2021

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So, back in the 80s, when I was young, green and wet behind the years, one of the great thinkers about how to help poor people was a guy named Hernando DeSoto. (Great name, aces on parents!)

DeSoto, who was mostly concerned with Latin and South America had one big idea: the reason that poor people were fucked is they didn’t have clear ownership of what they actually owned: slum dwellers didn’t own their houses or the land they sat on, peasants often didn’t own their land either, and informal bus companies and the like operated without licenses or any rights to their routes.

Because they had no clear title, they couldn’t borrow against their actual property, couldn’t sell it and move, or in general use it as an asset.

This DeSoto said (and at the time, I believed, and so did many governments and NGOs and so on) was one of the reasons they stayed poor, not only couldn’t they access capital: they couldn’t even use the capital they already really owned.

The solution was to give them that clear title, which would allow a million new businesses to bloom, and so on.

Because we live in a far more cynical age (and because I gave it away in the title!) you know this didn’t work out. What happened instead, though it took a couple decades to become obvious, is that once they had title, they could lose it: sell it, have the government take it away, go into debt (which most poor people do) and have it seized in payment of debt, etc…

If you’ve ever been real poor (in the informal economy, unbanked, no assets) you know that perhaps the only good thing about it is the ability tell collection agents (generally the scum of the Earth) to go fuck themselves. “Take me to court, I have nothing you can seize!)

DeSoto managed to remove that one sliver a silver lining, so that slum dwellers could even lose their tin shacks.

Ah, capitalism! Truly the most glorious system ever developed to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands while pretending that it’s all voluntary. At least when feudal nobles or MOngols conquered you and took everything you didn’t have to pretend it was your free choice, or something.

Realism aside (I was going to say snark, but this is just how the system is meant to work) this is what happens when we are indoctrinated into thinking that capitalism is a system designed uplift everyone, and it just happens to require concentration of wealth. It’s also what happens when we assume that the uplift actually powered by industrialization happened because of capitalism instead.

It’s hard to disentangle these two because capitalism was in power when industrialization happened and the great challenge against it (state centralized “communism”) lost (largely because it had the inferior geostrategic position, I’d suggest.) So we mix the two.

But they aren’t the same, and capitalism, to the extent it has virtues, works best when it is kept under strict control and a lot of things are kept out of the market.

I assume DeSoto was sincere (though who knows), but because he bought the myth, and sold his myth so well, he wound up hurting exactly the people he wanted to help.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

How The Metaphysics Of Capitalism Destroyed The World

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On July 22, 2021

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Back in 1968 the book “Limits to Growth” stormed the world. Computer models predicted that humans would run out of almost every resource, overshoot carying capacity, then crash.

It was well known and widely discussed and combined with the oil crashes, made the 70s a ferment of practical and theoretical work on alternative energy, different ways of farming and so on.

Almost all of that came to an end in the 80s, with Reagan. Carter had put solar panels on the White House, Reagan had them torn down. A decision was made to crush wages and thus the oil consumption of ordinary people, while bringing new sources online as fast as possible. Obama, with fracking, made the same decision, by the way, but even more successfully, turning the US back into a HUGE producer of oil.

But what’s important today isn’t all of that, which I’ve discussed at tedious length in the past.

Instead I want to discuss the basic argument against the “Limits To Growth”.

“We will substitute away.”

In other words, alternate energy will step up and we’ll move away from oil and coil. We’ll find substitutes for steel and nickel and rare earths and anything else in short supply.

BUT what matters is the metaphysics of the argument. When the people making this argument said it would happen, they assumed “the market” would do it.

Which, it sort of has, but too late. Much too late.

There was a strong assumption that prices were information which stored in them all known information about the past and the future, and that therefore prices would drive self-interested people to make the necessary substitutions or find new sources.

To market disciples, the market’s “free hand” was like God, all-knowing and all-powerful and weirdly benevolent. All we had to do was let the market run and it would solve all our problems.

So why didn’t that happen?

Well, to start, the market doesn’t price the future well at all. Never has, and never will. People making decisions in 1970 will mostly be dead before all this stuff matters, and the same is true of people making decisions in the 2010s. Even if they aren’t dead, is there anything in human history which makes us believe humans are good at making very long term plans, over decades to generations?

Why would you believe the market would do it based on a discipline which suggests humans are rational and know what is good for them and act rationally to get what is good for them? (If you believe all of that, you are more of a fantasist than some fanatic whipping himself while screaming for God to save him.)

Now I’m not concerned here with the hypocrites: the people who knew this was all bunk but expected to get rich off it (they were, in a real sense, very rational. A bad future they don’t see or don’t care about, “I get 50 good years and die rich when the bad times come, whatever” isn’t a reason not be rich now, if you don’t care about future people.)

But many many people really believed this bunk and the issue is that by believing that the “market” and “price signals” and *vague hand waving* would solve the problem: by saying “we have a system that solves these problems automatically by giving correct feedback” they made it impossible to solve to the extent that they were believed. (And remember, huge amounts of money were run on the markets for decades based on these ideas. People believed and put their cash on the line.)

In fact, of course, we could have taken the warning of “Limits To Growth”, “Peak Oil” and “Global Warming” and used them to make changes.

Ironically a lot of those changes would be exactly what the disciples of hand-wavy “market” crap suggested would happen automatically.

Use markets and public policy: massively subsidize alternative energy and research so that where we are with solar today is where we would have been in the 90s. Massively research alternatives to bottleneck resources. Stop over-fishing, by force if necessary. And, of course, put sharp limits on “planned obsolence” backed with death sentences for executives.

If you’d rather get more resources or if you want more than one strategy, massively fund space exploration with an eye to mining rather than defund NASA in waves (Obama, classically, did the worst cuts to NASA ever so that private industry/billionaires could make money, but NASA funding should have been increased in the 70s.)

Warnings only serve those who heed them and when you believe in metaphysical entities which don’t have the attributes they think they do (God, Markets), then you don’t act to save yourself. Markets were never, by themselves, going to miraculously do what needed being done in time. Oh sure, price feedback has eventually gotten us some decent solar, and so on, but decades later than we needed it.

Markets are human creations, like God, and to work correctly they have to be tuned for the problem at hand or, even (heresy) one has to consider that there are things that Markets or Gods can’t do, or are bad at, and find other solutions.

So here we are, and markets have not made everything good and the world’s forests are burning and we’re about to have another oil boom, as best I can tell.

Like God, mis-using markets or assigning them powers they don’t have, leads to terrible consequences, so get ready for the invisible hand to slap us silly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Quarantine Matters

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On July 21, 2021

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So, compared to a lot of other countries, Australia has done a pretty good job on Covid.

But they just had a Covid breakout in two major cities: Sydney and Melbourne. Those breakouts required them to then go back to shutdowns: closing and restricting businesses and movement.

Both outbreaks come from failures in the quarantine system: from hotel quarantine not working because hotels are not set up properly for quarantine due to not separately ventilating.

On July 7th I wrote that quarantine should be mandatory, with criminal penalties for violation, and…

We also do quarantine badly. Hotel quarantine is ridiculous in most hotels, because Covid is airborne and most hotels spread air between rooms.

This isn’t a difficult problem, however. Build a bunch of small huts in a field (you can even stack them), each with its own ventilation, and put people in there.

How has this been proved across the board in Australia?

I am tired of living in societies where we know how to do the right thing and simply refuse to do so because our elites are psychopathic, selfish and greedy and our population refuses to discipline or control the elites.

We KNOW what to do to stop Covid. We KNOW how to do it. We just fucking refuse.

This is goddamn pathetic. It’s just like climate change, but on a faster timeline so you can see it in weeks to months rather than decades. We may go extinct, we are certainly going to kill and impoverish billions and probably wipe out half the world’s species (which will hurt us terribly, not just them) all because while we KNOW how to do the good, non psychopathic, non criminally insane things, we REFUSE.

You discipline your elites, or most of  you and your children will die or be impoverished by their actions and lack of actions.

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