Fundamental change

Bryan over at Why Now reminds us that today is the 107th anniversary of the 1st manned flight at Kitty Hawk.

My grandmother was born when the nearest city, 50 miles away, was an all-day trip on muddy roads via horse and wagon, lighting was kerosene lamps, heat and cooking was wood stoves, the bathroom was an outhouse, the running water was what you pulled out of the well with a bucket and a rope, the refrigerator was a large ceramic jug dropped into the well at the end of a rope, dinner was whatever you had harvested, and sausage was what you made in your own smokehouse from slaughtering one of your own pigs. Medical treatments for most diseases read as, “send home with palliative treatment to die” and graveyards were full of tiny little graves that read “Baby Smith” or “Baby Page” or “Baby Taylor”, where starvation was an ever-present threat only one bad harvest away. She went peacefully in her sleep with the Internet, space travel, big-screen TV’s, and modern medicine, where childhood mortality from disease was rare and starvation in America almost unheard of.

I think of what kind of progress children born in the 70′s will see in their time, and I feel sad. They were already born with man having reached the moon, and nothing done in outer space since then has matched that peak. Cars and aircraft are more fuel-efficient, quieter, faster, and more powerful, but those are marginal improvements on already-existing inventions. The Internet, which hit its stride in their mid-20′s, certainly was an innovation, but it’s pretty much the only real innovation of the past forty years (by real innovation, I mean one that changes how people live — by that standard, big-screen tv’s aren’t real innovation, since they’re merely an improvement upon an already-existing technology that doesn’t fundamentally change how people live). And given that things seem to be pretty much winding down, I doubt we’ll see any other real improvement… it’s all downhill from here, bay-bee.

We live in sad times. Our grandparents could exult in the march of progress, even if their own life was hard at times they could be confident that progress would help make their lives easier and more productive over time and that their own children would have an even easier and more productive life, assuming that nobody blew up the planet with nukes. But our own children… it looks like things are going the other way for them.

- Badtux the Reverse Progress Penguin

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The Obamapublican Plan

Preznit Hopey Changey is shocked, shocked I say, that his base hates his giveaway to the rich. Looking at the graph above (courtesy of DKos), I have NO idea why he would be so shocked....

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The new ownership society

So, asks a puzzled person, isn't the massive wealth redistribution that has happened over the past thirty years bad for the wealthy too? After all, the companies they own need customers for their goods, and if nobody has any money other than the wealthy, then there's less goods sold, and the wealthy get less money.

Ah, but... see, the thing is, money isn't wealth. Wealth is GOODS AND SERVICES. Money is just a handy intermediary to use to transfer goods and services around. What is wealth is what you *buy* with money -- things like, say, dachas on the Black Sea, McMansions on the ring road, that sort of thing.

During times of inflation, people took on debt or purchased assets at inflated costs. During times of deflation, people can not pay their debts in the now-suddenly-scarcer currency, and have everything taken from them by the ownership class. From 1937 to 2008, thanks to years of Keynesian economics, the supply of currency rose every year. Note that monetary inflation is the same thing as debt deflation -- your debts become worth less in real terms every year during times of inflation. People made major life decisions such as purchasing a home based upon the notion that prices would always rise -- a notion which 70 years of Keynesian economics applied to the money supply reinforced, because nobody under the age of 70 had any experience with monetary deflation (that is, shrinkage of the money supply -- NOT AT ALL the same as price and wage deflation, which lags monetary deflation for reasons I've previously discussed here). These people made a decision which seemed reasonable given their life's experience... and then had the stool of their entire life's experience kicked out from under them as they hung in the air and money suddenly became much scarcer.

So what's the end game? The new ownership society is where the wealthy own *everything* because the money supply has crashed so far that nobody can pay their debts -- and the owner class buys up the defaulted assets for pennies on the dollar. At that point, the ownership class really doesn't care if the money supply collapses all the way and they can't sell anything for money. Because they will own you. Think Latin America's oligarchs. They own everything, so their minions have no place to go and must labor in their fields and workshops to produce the hand-made goods and services they want. Their every need is taken care of by their serfs, who beg for crumbs of bread in exchange for being allowed the privilege of placing a bathrobe upon their master's back upon their master exiting his bath. What few things they need that their serfs cannot make in their master's workshop are bought by exporting agricultural goods, natural resources, and hand-made items from those workshops to more civilized nations and getting the technological goods they want back in return. Do these people care that they can't sell anything to their serfs? No. And neither will our ownership class, once they own everything -- including us.

-- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin

Holy cr*p!

The tallest tower I ever climbed when I was in the electrician biz was about 30 feet tall -- a mere tad of a tower, *only* three stories tall. There was a light on top of it that wasn't working, and it was my job to fix it. Even that teeny tower scared me shitless and was one reason I decided to go to college and get my Computer Science degree.

These guys, however, climb thousand-foot towers *daily*. Talk about some dudes who clang when they walk. And whatever they're being paid, you can guarantee that it ain't enough. Not in a world where rich fuckup can pull in millions of dollars for being CEO's who run companies into the ground based solely upon being winners of the lucky sperm club. I probably make more money than these guys, and all I do is sit in a cubicle slinging bytes around, where the most dangerous part of the job is combatting middle-age penguin rotundity...

-- Badtux the Impressed Penguin