I always wondered about that inane grin

And on a more serious note...

-- Badtux the Picturesque Penguin

Why are so many engineers anarcho-capitalists?

I supposed I'm supposed to be talking about Herman Cain's sexual harassment problem right now, but c'mon. Everybody knows that white women throw themselves at black men 'cause they're curious to see whether black men's, err, instrument, is as big as reputed, and if the black man doesn't reciprocate then they file these bogus sexual harassment charges in retaliation, right? (Note: Sarcasm intended).

So anyhow, back to something more interesting to me. Anarcho-capitalism makes no rational sense if you know anything about human psychology and human history. Anarcho-capitalism is extremely inefficient -- for example, anarcho-capitalism requires that all roads be turned into toll roads, but collecting tolls is far more expensive than simply collecting taxes at the gas pump -- and does not deal with the freeloader problem of externalities. That is, if I pay a security company to catch the burglar who burglarized my house, and pay them to put this burglar in jail, I'm not the only person benefiting. Every other person that this burglar would have burglarized in the future is also benefiting. Unless they're paying part of the cost of catching and imprisoning him, they're free-loading off of me. Anarcho-capitalism has no solution to that free-loading problem, whereas democracy does -- in democracy, everybody who benefits pays (which is pretty much everybody to some extent, since a burglar in jail is no longer a threat to your own home and thus putting him in jail at least provides a mental benefit to you). I.e., *taxes* are the solution democracy has to the free-loader problem.

So, why do so many engineers, who are supposedly logical thinkers, fall prey to supporting anarcho-capitalism ("libertarianism")? In my opinion it's because they fall prey to the fact that the society that engineers live in, by and large, is a very circumscribed one filled only with like-minded people who behave in a way that ordinary people simply don't behave, and they then extrapolate from that to believe that society at large behaves that same way.

First things first. Engineers are a very special people. First of all, by and large engineering operates on anarchist principles. That is, engineering teams operate via consensus and engineers who are not capable of operating in that environment don't last, they leave or get fired. So engineers soon fall into the trap of believing that *everything* can operate via consensus that way. After all, if designing a huge software system can operate via consensus, why not society as a whole?

Secondly, there are very few Wallys out there -- Wally being the free-loading engineer from Dilbert. Engineers who don't enjoy their work don't last. They move into sales or marketing, or they move into management, or they end up in customer support somewhere, or they end up delivering pizzas or working as a "sandwich artist", but they don't stay in engineering. So the average engineer has very little experience with freeloaders in the workplace, the only society he really knows.

Finally, engineers generally are not... how should I put this? Engineers are typically not social creatures. They don't have many hobbies outside of the workplace, they don't socialize with non-engineers very often.

The end result is that engineers operate in a bubble, a bubble filled with like-minded people all of whom are devoted to creating good product, a bubble that has no freeloaders and where everybody is able to reach consensus on major issues and where everybody operates in good faith. And in this bubble anarcho-capitalism would work just fine, because there would be no freeloaders and everybody would agree on the final solution to the problems faced by the society and there would be nobody gaming the system for their own benefit at the expense of everybody else.

The problem is that real society -- the society outside the bubble -- just doesn't work like that. In real society, there are people who will never agree on anything. There are people who will game the system for their own benefit. There are violent people who will use violence to get their way. There are externalities that almost guarantee freeloaders unless you have taxes, which anarcho-capitalists declare is "slavery" and thus evil, thus meaning that society collapses under the weight of the freeloader problem. Anarcho-capitalism ("libertarianism") simply doesn't work when faced with actual reality, which is why there are no examples of anarcho-capitalism on the face of this planet right now (unless you count the warlordism of Somalia as anarcho-capitalism, which I don't). Anarcho-capitalism in the face of reality simply doesn't work. End of story.

Yet engineers insist upon believing that it does work, because it does, in the little bubble universe of their engineering departments... and so it goes, when people observe a small bit of human behavior then think that applies to all humans, everywhere, the end result is generally stupid. Like anarcho-capitalism.

-- Badtux the Democracy Penguin

Punk choral

The first 1:15 of this video is a Southern religious musical style called shape note singing, which is new to me despite the fact I'm decidedly from the Bible Belt. But then, our folks were Southern Baptists with their piano-based Broadman Hymnal or Catholic with the organ-based music typically associated with the Catholic Church, I never wandered over to the Church of Christ or one of the various "primitive" churches, it would have never occurred to me that there was an a capella religious music tradition out there that I was missing.

The remainder of the video is one of those "shape note" religious songs set to a punk rock musical backing, but it works much better than it sounds.

This is the band Cordelia's Dad in their mid 1990's configuration. The bald dude is Tim Eriksen, a music historian better known as the music consultant for the movie Cold Mountain. The skinny kid on the right is actually a girl, that's a very young and slender Cath Oss (now known as Cath Tyler who makes music with her English-born husband Phil Tyler and not being so young and slender anymore, sigh, but she still has some pipes on her). The guy with glasses behind the drums is Peter Irvine. I have no idea what albums the two songs in this live video were on, if you're interested in further exploring this interesting fusion of musical traditions you'll need to do that detective work yourself. I just found this particular video oddly compelling for reasons probably not of any interest to you.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Alright already

Halloween costume of the year.

Me, I'm going trick-or-treating as the invisible bond vigilante. Since nobody can see me, that way I won't take any candy away from children, despite what Very Serious People insist.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Ghost

Indie band The National with "Anyone's Ghost", off their 2010 album High Violet.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The law is for the little people...

not for the cops of the NYPD.

Just following orders? Dude. The NYPD's union is fucking'a righteous. If cops were being ordered to do illegal shit that the cops didn't want to do, you better believe that the union would file grievances out the yinyang. Which they didn't. Why? 'Cause fixing tickets was just fine with the rank and file of the NYPD. Duh.

But let's not forget, the law is for us little people, not for the jackboots. Rule of law? In what country? You mean in Soviet America? Puh-LEEZE....

-- Badtux the Sovok Penguin

Trippy dance

This is a San Francisco group called Silver Swans, with a song called "Let Me Know". Their first album is supposed to be coming out in December. Sort of danceable dream pop (?)....

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Herman Cain's new campaign commercial

Beware the big potato moths... BIG potato moths.

Heh.

-- Badtux the Amused Penguin

When did justice become a dirty word?

That's my question. Whenever you talk about economic justice, the Republican lizard people sneer about winners and losers in capitalism -- despite the fact that the so-called "winners" they defend actually got their money by cheating. Whenever you talk about how the workers that create the actual wealth for companies are getting peanuts and the executives who produce nothing but bullshit and hot air are stealing all the wealth for themselves, they whine about class warfare. When you talk about the fact that millionaires pay a lower percentage of their income as taxes than teachers do, the lizard people stick their hands over their ears and whine "I can't hear you, na na na!". When you talk about how a small set of wealthy Wall Street banks stole the retirements of millions of Americans by selling bogus liar loans that they *knew* were going to go bad as "AAA investment-grade securities" then got the taxpayers to bail them out, thereby reaping any profits from risky business but putting the costs when risks went bad onto the taxpayers, they literally change the subject and start whining about how America just hates the rich. When you talk about the fact that a small set of absurdly wealthy plutocrats control more wealth than the other 299 million Americans -- COMBINED, they call you an anti-capitalist Communist.

And the sad thing is that when you start talking about economic justice, they *still* call you a Communist, even if you're absurdly capitalist like Nick Kristoff or myself. For the record, you cannot have capitalism in the absence of economic justice, because eventually it decays to crony capitalism (a.k.a. "fascism") and oligarchy -- the dictatorship of the many by the few who control all wealth, who literally have power of life or death over individuals.

So what would economic justice look like?

1. Bank of America gets free money from the Federal Reserve and is told they can repay it, well, whenever they feel like it. I want my free money.
2. When I don't pay my bills, my credit rating goes down and it costs me more to borrow money. When Bank of America doesn't pay their bills, they whine to the government for a bailout and get government-guaranteed loans, and their credit rating goes *UP*. I want that deal too.
3. When I do something stupid like buy a house I can't afford, I lose my house and all the money I invested in it. When Bank of America does something stupid like loan me money to buy a house I can't afford, they whine about "personal responsibility" -- for me, not for them, because they got a bailout from the Federal Reserve via "trash for cash" (i.e., sold the worthless non-performing loan *AT FACE VALUE* to the Fed for cash).
4. Warren Buffet released his tax information, we learned that with taxable income of $39 million, he paid $6.9 million in taxes last year, a tax rate of about 17.4%. Me, I'm paying 15.3% in payroll taxes alone (if you count the employer part), plus roughly 20% of my gross income as income taxes (after deductions), meaning that I'm paying around 35% of my gross income as Federal taxes (and that's not even beginning to count state and local income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes). I want Warren Buffet's deal -- or better yet, let's trade, let's let the millionaires have my 35% effective income tax rate and the teachers have Warren Buffet's 17% effective income tax rate.
5. HP CEO Leo Apotheker destroyed millions of dollars of stockholder value yet got paid $25 million for being fired on top of his $1.5 million salary and huge signing bonus and relocation bonus. Meanwhile, hundreds of HP employees are being laid off through no fault of their own, and getting $0. Economic justice is when the Leo Apothekers get the exact same separation pay as the hundreds of low-level people who got laid off due to Apotheker's incompetence.

All of which, I suppose, is why economic justice has to be a dirty word. Because fairness for ordinary Americans would hardly be fair to the lizard people who, like, deserve to own everything, right? Right?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Gold lining

Rilo Kiley, "Silver Lining", off of their final album, 2007's Under the Blacklight. Jenny Lewis is cute as a button and while she's not "on" for this particular performance, when she's in good form she's got a set of pipes on her too... not bad for someone best known before her music career for being a child star in bad movies.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Unemployed DFH's

Everybody knows that all those Occupy Wall Street thingies are just a buncha unemployed slackers with nothing to do. Like this one dude who was at the protests a couple of nights ago, who's clearly just a loser who needs to get a job. I mean, c'mon. You don't call a probably six figure salary as a network engineer at a startup a JOB, do you?! And nevermind Scott Olsen's previous job, as a U.S. Marine who received 7 medals over two tours of duty in Iraq and received a promotion to Lance Corporal over that time. Clearly he's just a lazy slacker who needs to get a real job... maybe one where he gets to wear another nifty uniform and says "will there be fries with that order sir?" all day long.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Non-event of last night

Various folks outside various SFPD police stations were watching to see the SFPD gather. Approximately 400 cops ended up crammed into six buses and a collection of patrol cars and motorcycles and left the Portello Hill station a little before midnight. And... and...

Nothing.

Perhaps the fact that several of the mayoral candidates including the one most likely to win the election were down at the street party that Occupy SF had become had something to do with that -- arresting your future boss is probably bad juju. Or maybe the cops never had any intention of moving in unless things got out of hand, and since the atmosphere from the live cams was more one of a big street party than anything ominous, they shrugged and just kept on driving. Or maybe it really WAS just a training exercise as SFPD is claiming today. I'm sure that there's some news stations disappointed that they didn't get yet more spectacular footage of protesters being gassed, beaten, and critically injured like former Marine Scott Olsen (who apparently is guilty of destroying police property by stopping a tear gas grenade with his head, funny that he survived two tours of Iraq just fine but the Oakland PD puts him into the ICU), but any sane person should be glad that, for once, sanity reigned.

-- Badtux the No-news-was-good-news Penguin

Drugged spy

From Kaki King's spy album Junior, this is "Falling Day".

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Thank you, Obama

President Obama today announced a plan to help young people who can't meet the payments on their student loans due to the shitty economy we have right now. Obama's plan lets these young people refinance their loans into a single loan at current interest rates.

Thank you, Obama. Now our young people, rather than having FIVE loans they have no hope in hell of paying back, will only have ONE loan they have no hope in hell of paying back. Hip hip hoooray!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Quote of the day

A former police officer says, regarding the Oakland police riot yesterday evening and the video of the Oakland PD taking out former Marine Scott Olsen because, apparently, it's okay only to fight for our freedoms, not to use them:

Seeing those cops standing around while someone is injured, laying in the streets, really pisses me off. That is not how a professional police officer reacts, that is how a gang reacts. The Oakland PD is just another California gang.

-- Badtux the Can't-say-it-better Penguin

The saddest song in the world

A dying man sings the saddest song in the world.

Townes van Zandt, "Marie", live in 1993, shortly before the end.

BTW, this song isn't fiction, it is true every day. The cause of death on the death certificate is always "natural causes". As if starvation and dying due to exposure when supermarkets throw away tons of food every day and millions of houses stand empty is somehow "natural".

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

So if this isn't capitalism, what is?

Lately I've been pointing out that what we have in America today is not capitalism but, rather, neo-feudalism, with corporate owners in the place of the lords of the manor of old and the majority of Americans as serfs dependent upon their overlords for their every need. There are trappings of capitalism, sure. There are still markets, there are still a few small businesses bravely struggling along as chain stores and big box stores take over everything thanks to regulatory capture and monopolization of capital markets, there are still a few people who manage to create new and innovative businesses that make it. But by and large, this is feudalism, not capitalism.

Capitalism, fundamentally, is not markets. Markets can exist in the absence of capitalism, indeed, even in the absence of money, though money tends to be invented relatively rapidly because barter is such an inefficient way of handling trade. Rather, capitalism is, fundamentally, a method of time travel.

Wait wait, I hear you say. Time travel? Yes. Time travel. In pre-capitalist economies, businesses adapt to consumer needs very slowly. If Acme Widgets is selling Wurtzingers and the tastes of the general public changes towards demanding Furblacknitzes, Acme Widgets in a pre-capitalist economy must slowly accumulate the income to buy the equipment and hire the people necessary to produce Furblacknitzes. So pre-capitalist economies respond very slowly to changes in consumer tastes or desires. But in a capitalist economy, the money supply of the entire nation resides in banks as deposits (i.e., as loans to banks that banks then pool and loan out to businesses and individuals), and Acme Widgets gets a loan from the bank then pays that loan back at some future time using the money earned from selling Furblacknitzes. In short, Acme Widgets has TIME TRAVELED -- they slowly accumulated the money needed to tool up for Furblacknitzes *today* to satisfy the demand for Furblacknitzes *today*, but they did this in the future and the money traveled back in time to when they needed it!

Note that this requires a functioning financial system -- banks that provide loans to deserving businesses that need money for expansion, financial markets that sell bonds and partial ownership in businesses to similarly provide money for expansion, and so forth. And that's what we're lacking today. Banks aren't performing their job of risk aggregation -- that is, pooling the excess income of the nation and splitting it between millions of borrowers so that any one borrower failing does not cause a loss of any one depositor's entire funds. They lent out money to borrowers who they *knew* could not afford to repay the loans, and now aren't loaning out money at all. And capital markets have turned into just a giant ponzi scheme where stockholders and bondholders compete to scam each other into buying each other's overpriced stocks and bonds. If you are a small business wanting to respond to changing consumer needs today, you literally can't get money. Which is impossible in a capitalist economy, but we don't have a capitalist economy, because a capitalist economy requires there to be access to capital -- and unless you're one of the Fortune 500, that just isn't true in America today, at least not at any interest rate short of ursory.

-- Badtux the Capitalist Penguin

Dreams of revenge

Sara Lov, "A Thousand Bees", off her 2009 album Seasoned Eyes were Beaming.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Occupy Wall Street in one picture

60% of Americans own less than 5% of America. I.e., they're flat broke, lacking the fundamental capital to do anything at all to improve their economic position.

Meanwhile, 5% of Americans own 59.4% of America. The top 5%, and especially the top 1%, have set up an anti-capitalist system where they are the rulers, and the bottom 60% are their serfs. This isn't capitalism. This is neo-feudalism. This is a return to the economic system of the Dark Ages, where the lords of the manor owned everything and you depended upon them for your very existence.

This is not sustainable in a democracy. It isn't. OWS is just a canary in the coal mine here. The amount of pressure building down below is enormous and when it blows... nothing good will happen, guaranteed. Nothing good. Which is why it is in the interests of the top 5% to restore capitalism to the global economy and make sure that the bottom 60% have access to the capital needed to make something of themselves, whether that be via education, access to grants and loans for small business incubation, whatever. Otherwise... uhm. I'm in that top 20% that owns 83.4% of everything, and I tell you, I *like* my neck and would prefer to have it continue keeping my head attached to my body. I am astounded that the top 1% think that the laws of physics don't apply anymore, that they can let pressure build up below and nothing bad is going to happen. Because that's insane. That's literally insane. And self-destructive, in the end, because the oligarchs are going to end up getting their cold-blooded lizard hearts ripped out and thrown onto the streets if this keeps on like it is, but our lizard overlords appear to be DUMB as well as greedy...

-- Badtux the Capitalist Penguin

Capitalism and the myth of job creators

So a small business owner says to me, "I took over a failing furniture store chain with 100 employees, and made it thrive again, saving 100 jobs." At which point, I say "Uhm, no."

See, here's the deal. Capitalism is all about matching supply and demand and when properly functioning, the fate of any specific business is of no relevance. If this guy's furniture chain had failed because of mismanagement and stocking furniture that people didn't like, some other furniture company would have arisen or expanded to provide the furniture that customers wanted. The 100 people would have gone to work for that other furniture company, because furniture doesn't sell and distribute itself, yo -- people would need to be hired to do it.

In short, capitalism, where it exists, basically insures that the furniture sector will have pretty much a constant number of employees because the number of people buying furniture in a given year is pretty much constant. In other words, it's the customers who created those jobs, and unless the number of customers somehow takes a dive -- like, say, in a depression -- the fate of any specific furniture company is irrelevant. A company fails, there is still demand for furniture, and in capitalism some other company will adapt or arise to fulfill that demand and will hire the people laid off by the failed company. In short, all that one company failing does, in a capitalist economy, is shift people around to some other company where they can best fulfill consumer demand. It's just a game of musical chairs in the end -- in a capitalist economy.

Of course, what we have here in America today isn't a capitalist economy, it's what's called "crony capitalism", where a small set of very wealthy businesses use various tactics such as regulatory capture and monopolistic practices to make sure they don't have to compete in a free market. But I'll discuss that in a further discourse on, "What is capitalism, and why don't we have it in America?"

-- Badtux the Capitalist Penguin