Scotty or La Forge?

Jules Sherred asked the question, "Scotty or La Forge? Why?"

Well, the answer is obviously, "Scotty". I started listing reasons, and it's now become something of a mini-meme for me. So here are a few, and feel free to add yours in comments.

1. They actually did appear together, and even though 75 years out of the loop, Scotty STILL took Geordi's butt to school on transporter, impulse engine AND deflector shield theory.
2. Scotty's a miracle worker.
3. Geordi quoted impulse engine specs. Scotty wrote them.
4. Scotty could sport a kilt with nary a trace of embarrassment.
5. Scotty rocked the bagpipes.
6. Scotty could rule the Center Seat as easily as he ruled Engineering
7. Scotty was a badass. 
1. Quote: "Diplomats! The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank." ( A Taste of Armageddon)
2. Quote: "The Enterprise takes no orders, except those of Captain Kirk. And if you make any attempt to board or commandeer the Enterprise, it will be blown to bits along with as many of you as we can take with us." (The Enterprise Incident)  
3. Quote: "You mind your place, mister, or you'll be wearing concrete galoshes." (A Piece of the Action)
8. Never once in his career did La Forge utter something as cool as, "there be whales here!"
9. Geordi drank "synthahol" (ugh). Scotty drank whiskey.
10. Scotty could drink an Andromedan under the table (and did!)
11. Scotty managed to drink the hard stuff without ever going blind.
12. Scotty started a bare-fisted barroom brawl with Klingons rather than allow the name of his Enterprise to be besmirched.
13. Geordi started out as a navigator: Scotty was born an engineer.
14. The first thing the infant Scotty did was bypass the flow regulators on his mother's teats.
15. Scotty dated flesh-and-blood women and risked his life for them (romantic!): Geordi fell in love with a program (pathetic!)
16. Scotty faced off with a god. (Who Mourns for Adonis)
17. Step out of line and Scotty will beam your ass into space. Wide dispersal.
18. Scotty invented transwarp beaming. Trust me, it's cool: "The notion of transwarp beaming is like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse." Yet, he does it.
19. Scotty canna break the laws of physics... but he's found a few new ones to play with.
20. Scotty keeps the formula for transparent aluminum in his head.
21. Scotty can beam a life-form from one planet to another... and someday they'll find that beagle and prove it!
22. Sybok couldn't take Scotty's pain... because Scotty doesn't feel any.
23. The Enterprise-D took five minutes to get stuck in an alien Dyson sphere... it took Scotty to get them out.

On "Giving Back"

I’ve written before about how wealth is created. Regardless of how you earn your living -- whether you sell products, knowledge, opportunities, or labor -- you are engaging in a trade. The labor I'm do is worth so much per hour: I give you my work, you give me the money. The opportunities I provide through investment have value. Every individual transaction, fairly traded, is a zero-sum transaction. Something of value is traded for like value. Even in a profit-making situation every trade is value-for-value. Though I bought a product for less and sell it for more, the sale is to someone who values it more. I've added value by realizing an opportunity. I inject expertise or convenience into the equation, and that's where the added value comes from. There is a limited supply of labor and resources in the world, but a never-ending font of knowledge and creativity and effort. This is why the total value in the world far exceeds what can be calculated from all the mining and logging and manufacturing ever done. Every idea you have creates value. You add to the value of the world by having ideas. Note that I'm talking about a purely idealistic capitalistic society here, in which everyone is providing value for what they consume.

I've been amused by the phrase "giving back to the community". Lately that amusement has given way to annoyance at the way it's typically used. If you understand the above paragraph, and you work or trade for a living, then you realize that you cannot possibly give back to a community that never actually gave you anything to begin with. Every transaction is value-for-value. You can't "give back" that which you were never “given”.

But you CAN “give”. This isn't a subtle difference. Giving is a charity, giving is a virtue, giving is an expression of selflessness and concern. Giving is an expression of love.

“Giving back” is an onus, a responsibility. You have too much and you got it without providing fair value. You have to give it back. It is an expression of guilt, and a response to class envy. It's not yours, you don't deserve it. Give it back. (Keep in mind here that I'm not talking about “giving back” when used by an individual in the sense of voluntary giving. My complain is about the phrase when imposed.)

“Giving back” is one of the greatest success stories ever achieved by those who would pervert a healthy social system through ill-conceived good intentions. It's so successful that I'd be willing to bet that many of the people reading this are already offended by what I’ve written. They actually feel anger, and are thinking to themselves, “Wait! No! It's not like that at all!”

Well, YES. It is. It's EXACTLY like that.

You've been told a lie. You've been told you can achieve too much, can do too much, can be too successful. Rather than being encouraged to engage in a selfless expression of love, you've been guilt-tripped into paying extortion. You may even have believed it, and repeated it, and thought yourself socially progressive for it. The truth is that you can achieve whatever your imagination, talents, and adventurous spirit will allow, without limit. You don't owe anyone for the privilege of having worked hard, been creative, and achieved your dreams. Charity is still a virtue: it is not a ball and chain.

Nevertheless, you have willingly accepted that ball and chain by those who tell you incessantly how unworthy you are to keep that which you produced. I find it sad that people can be hoodwinked into taking such satisfaction from being so terribly destructive.

We don't live in a capitalistic ideal, and never will. There are people who are pure consumers. Some of them are by choice; others not by choice. Those people who can ONLY take can, in fact “give back”. They're the only ones who can, as they've incurred a debt to society through one-sided consumerism. We can even put exact monetary figures on that debt.

Criminals in prison literally owe a debt. A criminal, released from prison, may say, “I’ve paid my debt to society.” Well, not really. Such a phrase is a convenient legal fiction. Yes, he was stripped of his freedom for a time. And he was fed, and clothed, and housed, and taught. All of this accrues a continuing debt to society, which is only paid by his getting a job and not landing himself back in jail. For that small corrective action the debt is forgiven. Not repaid... forgiven. The debts incurred by criminals aren't just monetary, and some can never be repaid: there is no penance great enough. But they can be forgiven.

Technically, those on welfare incur a debt. We call welfare programs "entitlements", but they're really not. No one should ever be “entitled” to stop doing their best to contribute to society within the limits of their ability. No one should ever be “entitled” to live for free on someone else’s dime. Not everyone who's on welfare gives up, but some do, and they're not entitled to do so. On the other hand, anybody could find themselves in a position where they need help, and human beings have a responsibility to each other. We should provide welfare to those who can’t work not because they’re “entitled” to it, but because it’s the decent thing to do.

It's time to tell the Emperor he's naked. I don't care if the entire kingdom applauds his new clothes, he's still naked, and I'll say it. Only criminals give back, and honest success is not a crime. People who are successful should be charitable to a degree according to their success. Those who are very successful should be philanthropists. It is a privilege and a virtue and a moral responsibility[*] to give freely and unreservedly. Those who are pure consumers should respond with that measure of gratitude which common decency demands. You are not entitled. No one is. So a “thank you” and an attempt to better your own condition is in order. That’s all that should be demanded of you, and it’s not too much. It is never, never, ever demeaning to show gratitude for that which you’re given.

What bothers me most about the prevalent spin on social values is that it strips us of charity and love and gratitude, and replaces these honest virtues with theft and entitlement and greed masquerading as virtues. The difference is profound. A person who is robbed responds with resentment, and by securing his remaining assets, leading to miserly behavior. A person who is entitled responds by taking without gratitude and without incentive for improvement, leading to stagnation. On both sides, this approach results in a loss of civility.

So do not expect me to characterize charity as “giving back”. It’s with joy and love and enthusiasm that we should give, and not because it's "owed" to any person.

---

[*] There's a word in Hebrew: "mitzvah". This means a commandment from God, but it also means "a good deed" or "a blessing". How is a commandment a blessing? Because it is a supreme honor to be commanded by God, and the greatest, most profound privilege to perform that command. A mitzvah is never onerous. It is never a chore. It is often a very difficult thing for non-religious people to understand. 

Some Thoughts on Copyright

Note: this is a long article. A lot of folks will just say "TL;DNR" and move on. Frankly, I don't care if you read it or not. It needed to be said, and in one place. If you like any part of it and want to pass on the thought, fine. It's licensed under Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Attribution. Leave a comment to request any other use.

The RIAA, the MPAA, and other "industry associations" such as the BSA describe copyright infringement as "theft", "piracy", "plagiarism", and describe it as destructive of the original author's work. This applies to music, motion pictures, books, articles and news stories, and software.

"It’s commonly known as “piracy,” but that’s too benign of a term to adequately describe the toll that music theft takes on the enormous cast of industry players working behind the scenes to bring music to your ears. That cast includes songwriters, recording artists, audio engineers, computer technicians, talent scouts and marketing specialists, producers, publishers and countless others."

-- RIAA.com

At best this is hyperbole, and at worst an outright lie. So let's look at those claims.

• Is it theft?
• Is it piracy?
• Is it plagiarism?
• Is it destructive of the original author's work?

Is Copying theft?

No. Nina Paley (of QuestionCopyright.org) has illustrated this clearly with a simple one-minute animation:

Kindly note that this video does NOT state that copyright infringement is OK. If you interpret that to be the message, then you don't understand the issue at all. Keep reading. The message is quite clearly, copying is not theft. And it's not.

Copyright infringement is clearly distinct from theft. Furthermore, only some copying is copyright infringement. Here are some cases where it's not.

There is no infringement when the work is fairly used. Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 allows Fair Use for a number of reasons, including commentary, parody, educational purposes, and citation.

There is a vast body of work in the Public Domain. These ideas have no owner, as their copyright has lapsed (or never existed). Included in these are the Grimm Fairy Tales upon which Walt Disney based his vast entertainment empire. Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty... every single one of these were re-tellings of stories that were written by other people.

Likewise, there is a vast body of work that is in the Creative Commons. This means that the authors have explicitly allowed their use for exactly the purposes that the RIAA and the MPAA would claim are destructive. Why would an author do that? Because free play increases sales, despite what the RIAA say. More about that in a bit. The plain fact is that copying Creative Commons works is not and by definition cannot be theft.

But what about what the RIAA says about taking money from the songwriters and engineers, etc.? Doesn't copyright infringement have the same end effect as theft? Isn't it stealing from them?

No, it's not. My opinion is that it is the RIAA that is stealing from them. Follow the links in this previous post to see exactly how they do it. It's not my opinion alone. Courtney Love famously "Did the math" in this Salon article.  Film studios engage in similar "creative accounting" that asserts that the Harry Potter films have lost money, and ensures that any deal involving net profits is a sucker bet.

Is Copying Piracy?

Not in any of the senses where it's not theft.

The RIAA, et al. use the term "piracy" in order to evoke its common meaning, that of "robbery or criminal violence at sea". As we've already seen, it's not theft (robbery). That leaves violence. Nope, not piracy. Case closed.

Or it would be if this weren't common usage. The usage goes back to 1603, for copyright infringement. Just don't imagine black flags and cutlasses, and remember that mere copying -- minus infringement -- is not piracy.

Is Copying Plagiarism?

No. Plagiarism is passing off someone else's work as your own. Neither verbatim copying nor copyright infringement meet this description. In academia it's pretty clear: copying without attribution is plagiarism; copying with attribution is a citation. Plagiarism is forbidden; citations are required. Those who advocate Open Source software and Creative Commons works are very careful to promote proper and grateful attribution of the works that enrich the Creative Commons.

Here's an example, again by Nina Paley:



I can't stress enough that the Creative Commons community is intensely respectful of copyright. The purest expression of that deep respect is to say to someone, "if you will not share then I will not steal your product. I will not buy it, either. I will not read it in the library. I will grant you the anonymity you have demanded, and deserve. Instead, I will support independent artists, authors, and musicians."  Commercial copyright holders do their best to promote piracy by instilling a strong desire to obtain products that are over-priced. It is through exercise of will and conviction, and not by any assistance from the commercial interests, that the Creative Commons community respects their rights.

Not that the commercial interests are too concerned with returning the favor. It is a solid iron-clad fact that the Creative Commons community depend on copyright law to keep commercial ventures from stealing from humanity and claiming ownership of and profiteering from things that were not written by the corporations. Commercial interests that do not understand the difference between this and public domain often fall foul of their own rules.  Examples:

• Tandberg attempts to patent x264 algorithm
• Skype claims copyright over a researcher's code 
• SCO Claims ownership of all of Linux
• The many cases cited on OpenSourceLegal.org

Outside the realm of software, the RIAA claims that they have "the right" to collect "royalties" for Internet radio use of music for nonmembers as well as members, even when no royalties are due, as in the case of Creative Commons. I am one of those nonmember composers. My songs, poor though they may be, have been repeatedly played on Internet Radio. This is not theft. Royalties are not due. And the RIAA and SoundExchange have no right whatsoever to steal from anyone who plays my songs. And what they would like to do isn't something that can merely be "considered theft"... in my view, it IS theft, and it IS plagiarism when the RIAA claims ownership over that which they did not write and for which no rights were transferred to them by the legitimate owner. Is it possible that this practice makes the RIAA the single biggest copyright infringer on this planet? Think about it.


Is Copying Destructive?

I'm going to refer you back to Nina's video. Really.

It's obvious that the original remains unchanged. In the case of re-mixing and derivative works, the worst you can say is that the original author doesn't like the changes. That's pretty much ALWAYS the case, even with licensed works. Alan Moore won't even look at what Hollywood did to The Watchmen. And I'm pretty sure that if Hans Christian Andersen were alive he'd look down his nose at the mess Disney made of his Little Mermaid.

What is Copying, then?

Copying is exactly what it says... making a copy. If you're looking for illegality, sorry to disappoint.

Copyright infringement is the violation of a specific set of laws dealing with the temporary grant of exclusivity to the works of certain authors. It is illegal, and there are certain penalties for infringing. However, infringement is not robbery, it is not violence, and as we've seen, shady accounting allows record labels to appropriate far more from artists than they pretend to save through "championship". When stripped of hyperbole the urgency disappears. That's why the hyperbole is used.


Some History About Infringement, and Other Thoughts...

Public domain is the "natural state" of any intellectual work. Intellectual works are simply ideas, and once communicated, they are incapable of being retracted, unlike physical property. This is a very basic logical fact, very well understood until very recently. The freedom of information was held in such high regard in ancient Egypt that Ptolemy ordered that visiting ships be searched for books that were copied by scribes. The originals were returned to their owners, and the copies placed in the Library of Alexandria. Throughout history it was the common practice of monks to exchange books between monasteries so that they might be copies, shared, and disseminated.

Only recently, through misinformation, has this attitude changed. But the truth remains: you have no natural right to control the use of an idea that you have communicated to another person. Go back and read that again, because it's a very fundamental fact of life. You have no right to control what another person, of free will, does with information that is in his possession. Merely thinking a thought does not make you a slavemaster. If you wanted to control the information entirely, then you should have kept it to yourself. This is known as a trade secret. Trade secrets are commonplace.

Learning from their environment is what humans do. It's what makes us human. Using what we've learned is not theft. Not now, not ever. However, our founding fathers were aware of a paradox: information is only valuable to society as long as it is shared; but when shared it loses value to the originator that his monopoly would have granted him. In other words, most processes would be trade secrets if the inventor were not given some incentive to share them for the larger benefit of society. So the U.S. Constitution states in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 that one of the powers of Congress is:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

There are three important concepts here:

1. The intent is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
2. Congress grants this right (it is not a natural right),
3. It is granted only for a limited time

Note particularly hat if a copyright law does not promote progress, it's not working as intended; If it asserts that there is such a thing as "intellectual property" to which someone can claim ownership other than as granted by in accordance with the Constitution, then it is wrong; and that if it has permanence, it is unconstitutional.

Congress originally granted a limited term of 28 years to copyright as a compromise to the the natural state of not existing at all. Today the law is so perverted that the default copyright for an individual work is the entire lifetime of the author + 70 years. For all intents and purposes, this is unlimited... for anything I write, it's my entire lifetime, plus another 70 years. There are plenty who would play word games with the Constitution and declare that "forever less one day" satisfies the Constitution. Really. 

"Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

-- Mary Bono, to the House of Representatives

So not only can they not do proper accounting, they also can't do proper math. To them, infinity minus one is less than infinity.

The RIAA uses their perverted notion of copyright to ensure that a controlled work is not "stolen" into the Public Domain... not even by copyright expiration if possible.

Nevertheless, the recording industry has release works for free since before the RIAA existed, and continues to do so today. They do it through radio, through licensing to clubs, and through television outlets like VH1.

If they did not do this, then no one would know the songs existed. People have always bought records because they heard the song for free from somewhere else. Before radio, "song pluggers" were employed by stores to play the sheet music so customers could get a free preview. The music industry claimed that radio would kill music sales because no one would need to buy music. They were wrong. When tape recorders were invented, the music industry claimed that it would kill song sales. They were wrong. Likewise, the MPAA declared that VCRs would kill cinema attendance. They were wrong, too. They have always been wrong, and continue to be wrong with regard to file sharing, according to an independent study. At least they're consistent.

The same core impetus for music sales remains unchanged... getting it out there so people can hear it, for free, without risk. If they like it, they'll buy it. Not everybody who likes it will buy it; but then again, that has never happened historically either. The recording industry would like to charge you for every listen of every song, and declare radio to be piracy, even though they have been known to pay radio stations to play their songs, thus inflating record sales. They make ridiculous demands because they can... at least they could. They're finding it harder to make their case.

Album sales have plummeted. But the reason is obvious to anyone who actually buys music. We bought albums because we pretty much had to. When vinyl singles were sold, they were incredibly popular at about a buck a disk. But singles disappeared with the advent of cassette and CD, because they weren't cost effective. Digital outlets like iTunes restored the supply of what people actually wanted... the single. No more did you have to buy 11 songs you didn't want to get the one you did. And revenues dropped accordingly, because you're now paying 99 cents for the single instead of $12.99 for the album you didn't want.

For that matter, no more do you have to buy music at all. For many years, the recording industry perpetuated a fiction that decent music was produced by only a smattering of people with Big Resources and Big Talent, and you could only get it through the Big Labels. Fiction indeed. There are plenty more artists where they came from, and with the technology available today, nobody needs to go through the big record labels. Not artists; not consumers. As a result, nobody with a brain wants to work for the big labels, and the talent they've offered as steadily declined as a result.

Many talented artists like Jonathan Coulton have begun to publish independently, and have found that they can make a living at it.  He publishes music for free, and people like it and give him money in return. Do they have to? No. But against everything the RIAA et al. will tell you, they do.

The same holds true for books. Authors like Corey Doctorow come to mind.

Likewise for software. Linus Torvalds, the author of the immensely popular Linux operating system, gives the software away. He'll never reach Bill Gates' net worth, but he's making $10 million a year, with a net worth of $150 million.

The Creative Commons is a way for artists to ensure that for the length of copyright a work cannot be "stolen" from the Public Domain. The author retains his copyright, but grants a license so that the work can be freely copied only so long as you agree to do likewise.

So forget piracy. Adopt the Zen philosophy of not desiring that which you cannot have, and allow the RIAA to fall kicking and screaming into the abyss. Stick with Creative Commons and copy with impunity.

Cookie Dough Christmas

This is my cat, "Cookie Dough", in the minutes leading up to Christmas. Although she posed for the shot, I have to admit that it's Omen who does most of the hunting.

Occupy Wall Street: the New World Order

I've posted a few essays on this subject, and hope to wrap it up this time 'round. Let's start by saying that I won't address the individual abuses of police or the Occupiers. So tazing, pepper spray, pissing in the bushes and violent anti-Semite hate rhetoric are all off the table. Just because someone else did something else that's wrong doesn't automatically validate your unrelated philosophical argument. So these topics are duly and summarily rejected. On with the show.

The "occupiers" are fond of philosophical quotes such as this one:

"It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined... that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities."

-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Likewise they're fond of Marx, who advocated "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need [or, alternatively, "contribution"]," though often filtered through other "progressive thinkers".

The problem here is that all of these thinkers... Marx, Rousseau -- even Adam Smith, who is often quoted (and mis-quoted) by conservatives -- are mired in the economic realities of their time, which are long obsolete. To use them in the present climate is exactly analogous to asking Sir Isaac Newton to explain quantum flux. For instance, in Rousseau's time the near entirety of the tax burden was shouldered by commoners... the "third estate"... as the "first estate" (the nobility) an the "second estate" (the clergy) had exempted themselves. Today we have no nobility, their economic successors shoulder the vast majority of the taxes in the USA.

One of the biggest differences between then and now is that "money" is no longer chained to a physical standard. We used to be on the "gold standard", meaning that each dollar bill printed represented a quantity of physical gold store in a vault (officially it means that the price of gold is fixed, but by that interpretation it necessarily follows that when you've run out of gold to buy, your money is worthless). "Money" no longer means that. It is now a pure concept of worth. It is an idea that measures the value of ideas. Here I'll use a graph from the xkcd comic in a way they may not agree with.. We couldn't go back to a gold standard even if we wanted to. The total value of all the gold ever mined in the history of mankind is a little over 9 trillion dollars. The public debt of the United States alone is now more than that. The public debt of the European Union is even higher. The only way to get back on the gold standard is to value each ounce of gold so highly as to make instant billionaires of those that have even moderate amounts. But gold has utilitiarian value in electronics and jewelry, which would be cost-prohibitive should we do that. A return to the gold standard would immediately devastate those industries. Money is no longer physical, nor is it possible to be made so without using a currency so common as to make a mockery of its use as money.

In past essays I've mentioned a couple of other things that have changed. Productivity, for example, used to be a measure of labor. That time is also long past. Automation and data processing have made it possible for one person to be, for all practical purposes, infinitely productive. Really. As an example, once you've written a book it is possible to "print" it to a PDF file. That PDF can be copied infinitely without further effort. There is no publisher, no distribution house, no need for central access, no measurable cost. Anyone having the book can make more of it. Divorced of the physical medium the product -- a book -- can be universally accessible. The traditional concepts of supply and demand would tell you that it's worthless. Yet we have evolved the concept of "intellectual property" to hold on to that monetary value. Intellectual property is a concept designed to apply the concept of monetary value to concepts in general. The world has become a very foreign place to 18th century thinkers.

In the world of the 18th century, you made your livelihood by making things. You either owned the means of production (i.e. the factories or shops) or you provided the labor to those who did. And since it was very difficult and expensive to set up shop, then the vast majority of people had no choice but to provide labor. That is, most people had no choice other than to get a job. And, since the world was a much smaller place, once you got a job, you held on to it for life, as jobs didn't grow on trees.

We've all seen graphs like this one...

Figure 1

...as well as other graphs that show even larger gaps of "inequality" by comparing "apples to meat pies"... corporate profits vs. worker take-home salaries, for example. While automation and outsourcing makes many such graphs meaningless, this particular graph does show that the "income gap" has been increasing.

Now take a look at the gross domestic product for the US since data automation was invented and applied:

Figure 2

I hold that we have fewer domestic production-line workers, and that this accounts in large part for the inequality. It is possible for corporate workers to share in that increased profitability through profit-sharing and stock investments, but these aren't exercised by nearly as many people as could.

Competition from foreign labor (such as that which killed our local textile mills) also means that we don't need as many domestic factory workers as we used to. By "need" I mean that our workers aren't cost-competitive. For one thing, looking at these graphs with an envious eye, you naturally want a bigger piece of the pie... a higher wage. Meanwhile, a Chinese worker is just happy to get paid.  If you're the one buying the labor, you're going to buy what makes economic sense to you, just as when buying eggs at the grocery store, most people will look for the bargain rather than fulfilling some perceived or imposed social obligation to local farmers. So the Chinese laborers get the work, as devastating as may it be to the company in the long run. In the end, we are the ones giving preference to the low cost goods at Wal-mart. We cannot seriously point the finger at corporations for giving us exactly what we demanded.

Take another look at Figure 1. All those trend lines are apples-to-apples, and in real dollars, everyone's income has increased. The occupiers argue that the poor get poorer, which is patently untrue. So they argue that the lower percentage hasn't increased enough... it's an argument based on pure envy. They want a slice of the pie, even when they don't own the pie at all. Neither have they contributed to the increased profit through labor provided by automation and outsourcing. Nevertheless, the graph provides an incentive and justification for the envious non-owners to tax part of the pie away from the owners, when they could just has readily have invested in ownership themselves through common stock. They decry bailouts for others, yet demand them for themselves. I'm singularly unimpressed.

What people have not realized is that there is a "New World Order", and it is not something that is planned, it is something that is organic and is already here. The reason we are no longer on a gold standard is not because fat cats have horded wealth. It's because wealth has grown exponentially with automation, outsourcing, and our new ability to be infinitely productive. These have reduced the domestic requirement for semi-skilled labor.

The problem is that the people on the streets are holding to 18th century thoughts about economy in the 21st century. Remember, in the 18th century you had to get a job. Today, anyone with an eBay account can become a shopkeeper. Anyone with a skill can market it. Anyone with an idea can exploit it. There is no physical standard requiring that we get our wealth from an outside source. This is not a zero-sum game. If you haven't noticed it, every trend line in Figure 1 has gone up. This is not a case where one segment grows at the expense of another. Not only does the pie grow, but you can make your own pie.  The moment that people stop looking for jobs and start looking for work, then they have grown the economy, and there is literally no limit to how far or fast it can grow when everybody is contributing. But I cannot stress this enough... it is not necessary for you to eat crumbs from anybody else's table. It is not necessary for you to envy someone for what he has when you have the opportunity to make your own destiny. The answer to the people who are standing in the streets is to stop standing in the fucking streets and do something productive. Not all of them have to become entrepreneurs; but it doesn't take many to provide employment for the rest.

You literally have equal opportunity right now. Many of you don't know it because you've been flatly lied to by Socialists who would keep you mired in an 18th century mindset. But be aware: equal opportunity is not equal results. It never will be if it's to be truly fair. It is up to each of you as an individual to make the most of your own life, and you're never going to get anywhere by losing focus on your life and your opportunities to shout "hey, that's not fair!" at someone else's good fortune.

--==//==--

Hopefully this will be my final post on the subject, as I'm quite tired of the Occupiers. Everything they've done... every position they've taken... has been fueled by envy and ignorance. I have very little patience for either. Look at their slogan: "We are the 99%." It's bullshit. Hell, if they were the 99% I'd be with them. I'm neither rich nor powerful. These are the small percentage of the 99% who'd rather sit on their asses and live for free on the largess of others. These are the would-be kept pets, the whining, ignorant sock puppets for the 1% of would-be socialist organizers, and I have no interest whatsoever in being one of them.

More Junk Science on TV

Why do I do this to myself? 

At the beginning of the month I started watching a "documentary" miniseries on Hulu called "The Pyramid Code". IMMEDIATELY my B.S. meter started pegging and I became so frustrated at the depth of balderdash that I stopped watching, and posted something close to the following on Google+:

I'm not talking about the usual "aliens did it" retardation...alien visitation crackpots are easily dismissed... those are more entertaining than frustrating.

My major beef lies with totally false claims that advanced technology is required to build the things and that advanced mathematics (beyond algebra) are required to arrive at the dimensions... that their construction necessitated the use of exotic 'power sources' that we don't understand today. It's not remotely true. You can construct a pyramid of those exact dimensions (pi and all) using integer math and bronze age tools. And it appears that "elbow grease" and "puttin' your back into it" have suddenly become exotic power sources (I can't say I'm surprised on that one).

The "it's not possible" claims are maddening. All this does is allow the author to advertise two things: 1. "Even though I have a Ph.D, I'm too frakkin' stupid to think of simple solutions to practical math problems", and 2. "I'm so bloody spoiled that I cannot conceive of an age where people were willing to labor."

BTW, here's something I wrote on the subject a few years back: http://blog.cratchit.org/2007/06/how-to-build-pyramid.html

Well, having rested for a good 20 days, I decided to try another stab at watching it today. I should have known better. 

Dr. Carmen Boulter has the kind of Ph.D. that renders all scholarship suspect and the most outlandish of folk tales credible... in other words, the practically worthless kind. Whether it be giant quartz "crystals" (Dr. Boulter hasn't bothered to pay attention to anyone who can tell her the difference between a crystal and a rock) that act as giant vibrational warm-fuzzy transmitters, or nuggets of esoteric physics like, "sunlight on water... that is energy," Dr. Boulter hasn't met a scientific theory she wouldn't like to replace with a hearty helping of woo.

One thing that's particularly distracting is her love affair with the phrase "Band of Peace", which she apparently uses to refer to the fertile Nile river valley. Do a little experiment for yourself. Using Google, try searching for the phrase "Band of Peace", excluding the name of her program. Here's the search term, and a link for you. I'm excluding only the verbatim phrase "The Pyramid Code"

"Band of Peace" -"The Pyramid Code"

See anything about Egypt or the Nile in what's left? Right. What these results tell me is that she promoting the hell out of a phrase she dug out of her butt. In fairness, she might have dug it out of somebody else's butt... maybe Hakim's. Either way, the constant repetitions give the viewer the distinct impression that if this program does nothing whatsoever but make this moniker stick, then Boulter will have won her own little private Nobel Prize. It's totally in keeping with her trend of replacing any hard science she may find with shit she made up.

The series makes copious use of Abd'El Hakim Awyan, though it didn't do him many favors. Hakim was a doctor in his own right, yet was credited "Indigenous Wisdom Keeper". Not so great for his credibility, but a damn cool title, nonetheless. I'm so going to have that put on a business card. Hakim brings just the right amount of down-home folklore, but is clearly out of his depth when discussing anything to do with physics. The "sunlight on water" quote above is his.

Hakim makes much of the fact that the Khemetic language had no word for "death" and thus the ancient Egyptians could not have been obsessed with death, despite all the pyramids, mummies, tombs, temples, mustabas, etc. Of course, he says that just before he relates the word for death ("they called it 'Westing', as in 'going to the West'). To be sure, the same "no word for death" claim can and has been said of the Teutonic languages; and English-speaking Christians have a score of words for death, and still believe in resurrection. Also, the origins of words often have only a vague connection to contemporary usage; for instance, a person may collect a "salary", though it's been 2,000 years since Roman soldiers were actually paid in salt. So it was unclear to me what this is supposed to prove. Then came my answer.

"The Egyptians obviously had a very different world view from ours today. They believed in the afterlife and the soul's immortality."

Suddenly I understood why Boulter and co. were having so much difficulty with the subject, and it made me very sad. I then sat through the rest of the episode watching their "scientists" treat with utmost credibility the notion that the ancient Egyptians had a physical means of attaining what the archaeologists themselves reject in their everyday lives. These beliefs are common in today's culture. I thoroughly understand being an atheist. I don't understand in the slightest being so blind to the world around you that you don't see the parallels in what you're studying and the millions of people for whom a central portion of this worldview has persisted to the present day. How was it possible for them to be so perplexed? 

That question carries forward just in general. I watched the section on reading hieroglyphs with a sincere desire to shout at the screen, "would you stop acting stupid and just present the information?!" Look, if you've got 4,000 hieroglyphs and only 26 letters, it's not a news flash to say that there's not a 1 to 1 correspondence between glyphs and letters. With that number of glyphs, it's pretty safe to assume that we're not talking about a syllabary either. Rather, you're going to have a concept per glyph, as in Chinese. None of this was news even before the Rosetta Stone was discovered. So why does Boulter pretend that this is a revolutionary new understanding of hieroglyphs?

Perhaps she's led astray by Laird Scranton, a computer programmer and amateur anthropologist who, starting from an observation by others that the Dogon people of Africa believed the star Sirius had a companion star, leaped to the conclusion that all of Dogon cosmology is scientifically brilliant, and that their rock paintings of water and eggs and grain should be interpreted as describing quantum mechanics as opposed to, say, a recipe for cake. He estimates the science of their ancients to be at least 50 years in advance of our own... which has enabled them to build mud huts and paint rocks. I weep for our children of 50 years hence. The forward of Scranton's book, Sacred Symbols of the Dogon, lays out his qualifications... hey, he's a software designer! Computers have symbols! Hieroglyphics are symbols! Therefore he's an expert. You can't argue with that kind of logic.

Don't get the idea that there's absolutely nothing of value in this series. There are bits of real scientific information embedded in the video, particularly when Dr. Boulter is not on-screen. I actually feel sorry for the legitimate scientists who share the screen here and there. And I suppose there's some entertainment value in cataloging the myriad forms of woo that appear here. Sadly, the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor that I can't recommend the show to anyone as an introduction to the subject of Egyptology. Get familiar with the subject first, then come back and see what you can pick out.

---

As a reference, here's how you present this sort of information:

And here's part 2:

Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, Thomas Brophy does things strictly according to the scientific method. He has a hypothesis, calls it a hypothesis (knowing the difference between that and a theory), and does the math. Most importantly, he knows that science ain't horseshoes... close isn't good enough. So when his hypothesis is close, but not exact, he discards it and looks for a better one. Nice.

Occupy Wall Street: Some Answers to Criticisms

A very good friend of mine is Russ Rogers, 1/2 of the awesome and clever band "Godz Poodlz", and eponymous star of "Rusty's Rocking Jamboree". Russ is one of my favorite people in the world. Russ and I are proof positive that two people do not have to agree politically to get along. We're in very different places as far as our economics go.

Russ not only read through the last four or so lengthy blog posts, but took the time to respond to me on Facebook with some detailed commentary of his own. I was going to talk about something else in this space, but decided to stop and answer a few of Russ' criticisms first.

I've asked Russ to post up his thoughts to the comments section here so I can link to them. He hasn't done it as of this writing, but I'm going to go ahead and respond to them anyway. Since they were pretty lengthy, I'm not going to post the entirety of each complaint. Instead, I'll post enough of it to get the flavor of the writing and also post "the gist" of it as I read it. I'm pretty sure that doing it that way will get Russ to attach his comments directly to these posts.

Oh, and one last thing... if anything I say here can be interpreted as snarky OR humorous, I was going for humor. I'm not kidding when I say Russ is one of my favorite people.

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Since the Seventies, productivity is UP by 80%! It's not just that STUFF like computers and cell phones are better and do more, WORKERS are better too! ...

(The gist: workers are responsible for these productivity increases, and therefore deserve raises that they're not getting, so trickle-down economics doesn't work. I discussed the trickle-down effect in my last post, so I won't do it in detail here.)

That is just wrong. Actually, it's not that workers are better, too. It's that processes are better. I do know a thing or two about that, because it's my business to put processes in place that make workers more productive.

Some examples: I recently implemented a system whereby warranty claims, which used to be written and submitted on paper, are now filled in on a smartphone app. The result? Paper claims used to be paid in 6 to 8 weeks. Electronic claims are paid in 3 days. Are the workers any better at what they do? No, they're not. They're the same workers, doing the same work, the only difference being that they fill in the forms on a smartphone instead of paper. They used to make scores of mistakes and would still be doing it if the new system didn't prevent it. But you'll happily give them credit for the process improvement that was thrust upon them. I've done scores of these kinds of systems over the years. Sales Force Automation, loan analysis, truck load tracking, inventory management, paperless medical storage, etc., all of which are measured in increased productivity. Hell, my very first IT job was when I wrote a system for the USAF that reduced 2 weeks of manual circuit outage ticket analysis down to one pressed button and twenty minutes of printing. A fully-roboticized assembly line doesn't mean the guy pushing the "start" button is five times the worker he used to be.

Let's make this very clear; "the workers" didn't get 80% more efficient at anything.

Automation can make certain processes 2000% more efficient. I've hit that mark, or close to it, a few times. Be that as it may, companies are more profitable, and some of that profit should go to Labor. It does, but as I discussed last time, when outsourcing is involved, it's not our labor. And it's competition from foreign labor that depresses what our workers can earn here. Of course, we're going to re-visit this topic when we talk about hiring, below.

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How are the incomes of the wealthiest of the wealthy doing? How is the top 0.1% doing? Their earnings are up 240% since the 70s! The percentage of income that the top 1% earns (their share of the total PIE) has gone from just under 10% in the Seventies to almost 25% of the TOTAL Income now. The top 1% now earn more than the bottom 50% of wage earners (whose share of the pie is around 15% and shrinking). The top 0.1% have gone from taking a 2.5% share of total earnings (in 1975) to 10.4% (in 2008)).

(The gist: the pie has gotten bigger over the last 35 years. The Economy has grown. But not everyone has shared equally in those rewards.)

There isn't one pie. This isn't a closed ecosystem or an electrical circuit where every electron that flows out eventually winds up back at the battery... it isn't a zero sum game.

First of all, in my last post I talked about the value of ideas. Those that have the valuable ideas are going to make more regardless of the real effort that goes into monetizing them. It's going to be a bigger percentage, too, because until it's shared, and sometimes even afterward, they own 100% of the idea. That's not really a huge concern because, although there's a delay, that money eventually does go back into general circulation. Moguls become philanthropists, and when they die then inheritance taxes bleed off that capital. Financial dynasties do not last forever. They do last long enough to be tremendous incentive for innovation and growth, and that's incredibly good for society.

Now, if things are working the way they're supposed to, then money flows from one company to another and eventually back around again, through salaries to the workers who buy the usual stuff, and from the top 1% from executives who make luxury purchases from other companies with workers of their own who are buying bread and clothing with that money. Remember that the guy who buys a corporate jet just paid a bunch of aircraft builders who are just as much "Labor" as the guys in the plastics plant a mile from my house. At a very high level, it you might think it would tend to resemble a zero-sum game over time. Some capital would flow constantly; some would accumulate to be released back into the economy over time.

Except for three things: the creation of ideas, bringing new wealth in; competition from foreign labor, taking wealth out; and automation, reducing jobs.

We don't have enough competitive Labor to produce all of the products we consume. The companies are American; the products are American; the labor is Chinese (or Malaysian, or what-have-you). So the money that should have flowed back into our labor pool didn't, and our workers are competing with those overseas workers that aren't receiving the bulk of that money. And there's the cause of the discrepancy. We have people who could do the jobs, but they can't compete on price against people who will work all day for a pittance doing tasks that Americans just won't do.

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Corporate profits are at RECORD levels, but that is NOT reflected in corporate hiring? Why? Because there isn't demand. Why? Because Economic times are hard and people are pulling back on spending. So what incentives do Corporations have to raise wages or hire more people if they are already making historic profits? Why should CEOs make changes to a system that is already rewarding them more than handsomely for laying off workers.

This expresses two diametrically opposed thoughts and a big misconception:
1. Profits are way up.
2. Demand is way down.
 
If actually weren't any demand, then profits could not be up. No one would buy the product, and without sales, there could be no product. It is true, however, that most people are pulling back on spending. I know I am. But hold on to that thought; it makes sense if you're talking about the demand for labor.

Corporate hiring is not directly proportional to demand for their products. Who told you that it should be? Most likely, he's going by historical trends while ignoring modern realities. I told you we would re-visit automation, and here we are... because that's the new variable.

You've already noticed that productivity has noticeably increased. Since Labor is expensive here, productivity has to increase for a company to remain competitive. Automation increases productivity, though often at the cost of the net number of jobs. Frankly, I'd rather keep five Americans working than export 25 jobs overseas, and I can help a company do that by devising better tools and processes for them. But when productivity increases, you expect profits to rise and hiring to not rise. It is the natural result of automation. There is no reason to be surprised by this. It's math.

Now, when I automate, the general goal I have in mind is to make the drudgework do itself to free the worker up for more productive tasks. For instance, I designed a business rules engine for a subsidiary of AIG that processes thousands of loan applications in the time a human underwriter does one. The output is basically, "approved", "disapproved", or "refer it to a human". The idea was to apply the "no brainer" business rules where appropriate, and refer to a human underwriter only those loans that required a judgement call. Without removing a single underwriter's job, they became more productive. Electronic claims means you're talking to your customers, not doing paperwork.

Unfortunately, not all automation just frees you up for more important work. A lot of it simply eliminates human jobs. A lot of jobs are nothing but drudgework, though they may be considered skilled positions. Auto manufacturing is a classic example. Skilled welders and painters on assembly lines have been mostly replaced by robots. As we continue to move into the future this will continue to happen. In every case, the next guy to be replaced by a machine is likely to be someone who you thought couldn't be replaced.

We have a lot of unemployed... the figure is bouncing between 9% and 10%, and no amount of hope has changed that. The solution to this is not to look for increased hiring from established businesses; nor is it to get the old jobs back from overseas. The solution is new business, competitive business, run by people who understand the value of local labor and have incentive to hire. And, it means for the laborer that he has to be willing to do something new. You cannot just sit there and pine for the good old days. This kind of change was predicted more than 50 years ago. When people say, "Small business entrepeneurs will be doing most of the hiring. Do not trample on the people who are trying to create jobs," you need to bloody well listen to them because that is 100% accurate in every respect.

For those corporations that use large amounts of human labor... CEOs should make the changes because they can recognize the pain of the horrible mistake they've made from outsourced Labor. There's a great story by Steve Denning in Forbes magazine called "Why Amazon Can't Make a Kindle in the USA". Click through and read it. If that doesn't chill you to the bone, it should. Management should forego short-term maximization of profits in favor of long-term strategy and stability. And Management and Labor should be doing everything they can to work together to make local labor competitive, because without it we're really, really hosed.

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The Tax Laws on investments were designed to encourage REAL investment. But those laws are being GAMED by corporate CEOs and people in the Investment Industry. They take large portions of their compensation (their pay) in Stock and Stock Options, versus a standard salary... 

(The gist: All CEOs are greedy, greedy, greedy, gaming the system, doing everything they can to exploit every loophole, and they -- all of them, to the last man -- are dirty rotten thieving bastards.)

Let's start off by correcting a misconception... this is "real investment". Any time a company makes an expenditure that they expect will return value to them in excess of that expenditure, we're talking about "real investment". And here the Board is making an investment in what they think is going to be sound management.

CEOs don't "take" anything. A board of directors hires them. The compensation is negotiated. They're offered stock and stock options in lieu of cash because that way the Board doesn't have to cough up cash, and as an incentive to perform. Illegal practices should be prosecuted, but taking stock options is neither illegal, immoral, nor "gaming the system". Stock options are worthless unless the company actually performs well. The stock options are there as incentive to do a decent job because you don't get paid at all unless you do. And yes, you get paid very well if the stock performs. So does everyone and anyone who's invested in the company. But let's be clear, offering stock options costs nothing in immediate cash dollars, and the returns for success always exceed the payoff.

(BTW, a stock option isn't a gift of stock. Rather, it's exactly what the name implies. Typically, you're given the option to buy stock in the company at some later date at today's prices. You can exercise that option or not. If the company does well, and the price at the future date is higher than when you were issued the option, you can turn around and sell the stock at a profit. But it doesn't mean you were handed free money.)

This form of compensation becomes high-profile when a company is really on the skids and can't immediately afford to pay someone to fix the problem. I mentioned my previous post the examples of Lee Iacocca and Steve Jobs. It's also used as compensation for start-up companies in lieu of salaries that they can't yet afford to pay because they haven't overcome their start-up costs to become profitable.

I'll say it again: CEOs are employees. They can be fired and forced out, whether they be Carly Fiorina or Steve Jobs. The payouts for some of these folks is outrageous. Here are five examples at moneycentral.msn.com. But not all severance packages are outrageous. Not all CEOs are crooks and not all Board members are cronies. And sometimes the "golden parachute" is not something that you can do much about. In some cases, the "compensation" comes in the form of stock options that were granted at his hiring in lieu of salary (as we've mentioned), and which don't vest until years after the CEO leaves, and then only if his successor manages to do a better job.

Here's how that happens: Mr. Incompetent is hired as CEO and offered stock options instead of a mega-salary. He takes the offer, then does a terrible job, pisses off the Board, and they fire him. He didn't intend to do a poor job, and they didn't intend to hire an incompetent, but what's done is done. So now he's out, but he's already got the stock options. So it looks like he's walking away millions of dollars richer, which might become truth, but the only way to punish the guy through his stock options is for the company to do poorly, which punishes all of the shareholders. They're not going to shoot themselves, so they fix the mess, the stock price goes up and Mr. Incompetent is richer. So why not eliminate the "golden parachute" this way: why not say you only get the stock option if you perform, and if we have to fire you, then you don't get it at all? Because that would be exactly the same as back-dating the stock option.

Board of Directors need to do a better job negotiating compensation and severance packages, and keeping stock options short-term; and shareholders need to keep the Boards' feet to the fire by voting for reasonable limits. It's their money, and they are the ones who have both the right to be outraged and the power to do something about it.

Wanna REALLY occupy Wall Street? Buy some common stock.

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Our Economy was driven into the ditch 4 years ago, and it wasn't put there by welfare moms, it wasn't Social Safety Nets that put us there. We were put there by unscrupulous, under-regulated investment firms that were GAMING the SYSTEM. They over-leveraged themselves and expected that the Country would bail them out...

(The gist: CEOs are still greedy, greedy, bastards, gaming the system, doing everything they can to exploit every loophole. Oh, and trickle-down economics still doesn't work.)

Our economy was aimed at that ditch a long time before that. This economic situation only apparently began when the housing market collapsed in 2007. This caused mortgage-backed securities to fail, mortgage insurance, banks, etc.

So why did the housing market collapse? This article at WTFFinance.com actually explains it just about perfectly. From that point forward you can watch the dominoes collapse.

Lenders were forced by our government into accepting risk that they never would have accepted for themselves, regulation or no. As you have seen, the smooth operation of a lender's business depends on you successfully repaying your loans according to the terms. So they don't want to lend to people who can't afford it. It's the old Catch-22... those who can get credit don't really need it. But we wanted to have our cake and eat it too. We let the politics of envy and applied accusations of racism and social justice to force banks to offer loans to home buyers and businesses that could not repay them. We wanted to make home ownership a right instead of the fulfillment of an aspiration.

If you want to talk about the gaming of the system then by all means do not fail to discuss in full the gaming of the political system by shysters who could play the part of saviors who brought the American dream to their voters back home without any foresight or regard for how encouraging piss-poor investments could bankrupt our country in the very near future. These, incidentally, are the very same politicians who are still gaming the system by playing the part of the outraged everyman who "can't believe" the banks made the very same investments they were forced by these politicians to make! If you have two words of value to say about gaming the system, then let those words be "GET OUT!" to the politicians who set the stage for this mess with their ineptitude.

As for trickle-down... it does work and I showed you where it goes. Now, when huge quantities of money are siphoned off to another country, the effective solution is not to shout that the huge quantities of money don't exist. The solution is either to find ways to siphon it back into this country, or plug the leak that's sending it that-a-way in the first place.

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There is Class Warfare going on this country. And one group of people are winning. And the lower classes and middle class aren't just getting squeezed. We are getting juiced.

(The gist: I like clever slogans)

As an adult, I have been dirt-poor, making just $10,000 per year. Today, I am firmly in the working middle class. I am not and never have been uber-elite rich. Being one of the middle-class being "juiced", and fairly well educated, I nevertheless have a fairly good handle on how the system does work, how it should work, and what's not going to address the problems with which we're faced.

Sloganeering won't solve it. And blaming the affluent simply because they are affluent and therefore convenient scapegoats isn't a solution, either. Storming the castle and divvying up the loot won't make a single job. You should want people to want to be rich, and you should want them to have the opportunities to do that make them more innovative and productive, contribute new ideas to society, and put other people to work... and not just because they put in their 8 hours a day or stood in the right line to get their dollop of the public porridge. I can tell from your complaints that you want that too, although your "solutions" would make exactly the opposite happen.

I want all boats to rise. They don't have to rise at the same rate because we eventually get it back, and if things are done right there's a steady rise while we wait. So here are some things that I think we're not doing right:

• American companies should prefer American labor. When it comes to outsourcing IT for example (since that's my industry), I really dislike in principle the idea of off-shoring. I prefer what I call "boondocking", which is ... well, let's face it, it's basically hiring folks like me. People living in economically depressed areas where the cost of living is low are a fantastic deal compared to off-shoring. They offer a competitive labor costs, and have no time-zone disadvantages (which far outweigh the fictional and theoretical time-zone advantages pushed by sellers of off-shoring) and have greatly reduced shipping costs.

• American labor must be competitive to be prosperous. Look -- the unions chose an "us vs. them" business model, so they now have to live with the situation they chose: there are separate pies for them and for the businesses they rely on, so they have no choice but to be competitive or reap more of what they've sown. They've been sidelined in favor of off-shore competition. You might like unions, but I like being competitive, and when my approach makes companies come to me instead of you then you might want to try my approach. The need for gathering IT workers into exhorbitant-dollar neighborhoods to collaborate is long-since obsolete. With today's high-speed Internet, we're all as good as next door.

The same thing goes for manufacturing. BMW built a plant here, not in Detroit. Our folks get good wages and want to work. We want BMW, We want Boeing. We want Amazon, and many more like them... and we're going to get them.

You might read this and say, "It's not fair to ask us to take a step backwards!" Well, guess what? Labor already took that step... and more! So instead of a reasonable salary and a secure job, they get nothing but the claim of being "an unemployed worker". Meanwhile, somebody else is getting paid. Labor is a competitive market, and those who don't want to compete simply shouldn't be surprised when they lose business.

The unions' answer to this is to beg Congress to somehow mandate that people must hire them. That's S-T-U-P-I-D. Businesses simply won't do that. Where they have the choice they'll move to where there is non-union labor. Where there is no choice then they will just discard opportunities as being "not cost-effective". And where the opportunity would have been cost-effective if it weren't for organized labor, then it will not be pursued by an encumbered company, but by new start-ups, in unencumbered areas, started by executives who have quit to pursue the new opportunity. What they won't do is roll over and bleed money. Nevertheless, the unions have actually filed suit against companies that want to open new factories in these same United States, hiring Americans, because the Americans that were hired weren't "those" Americans.

I needed some trees pruned in my yard. I'm terrible with a chainsaw, and I know it, so I called a few landscapers. The guys who gave me quotes understood to a man that labor is a competitive market. The one I hired was the one who wanted and needed my business the most, and this was reflected in his quote. As the day progressed I liked what he was doing and asked him to do some more, so he made a bit more than he originally quoted... as much as I could reasonably afford. When he finished the day, he went home knowing that I would most likely call him back the next time I needed work done (and I'm inclined to call him soon). THAT man understands something about economics that has eluded union negotiators across this country. The proof? Empty factories.

• I don't mind a hefty estate tax. I did mind it, until I thought about it. Money flows to innovators as a reward for their innovation. We should have no expectation of it being otherwise. But an estate tax does ensure that the money thus collected re-enters the economy. Keep in mind that money thus collected represents only a portion of the value of the wealth already distributed by an entrepeneur.

Warren Buffett rightly points out, "I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing." But a guy like Buffett has his own plans for the distributing the money that has nothing to do with taxes. He'll be distributing 99% of it to charities on his death, much of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  

You really need to re-think the assumption that the money just goes to the top and stays there.

• I don't think you should need an awful lot of incentive to give to charity. I don't itemize charitable contributions. But to the extent that tax deductions encourage some people to make charitable donations, they're a net gain for Society. Charitable spending is far more efficient than government spending, whether it's a Shriners Hospital for Children, or helping the old lady next door with her heating bill. Charitable spending is frankly better than government spending; and any time you hear, "somebody should..." your first thought should be for what you can do, not what the government can do. Government-first thinking is just plain lazy. If everybody taught this to their children in word and deed, we wouldn't need a government dole.

•  I think commercial banking and investment banking should be separate.  As such, I'd be for re-instatement of key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. But that's boring as hell to talk about and this is already too long.