George Rebane
My heart goes out to our cartoonist Bob Crabb in his kerfuffle with a (fellow?) progressive lady who has accused him of dissing the transgender community with one of his offerings. (more here) I know Bob, and he would be the last on the planet (if not Nevada County) to ever knowingly hurt the feelings of a class of people who are indelibly part and parcel of the same social orientation as is he. He has now walked into the expanding “minefield” of progressive thought and talk policing, a prominent aspect of revolutionary political correctness that has become so virulent in limiting free speech that it has predictably started eating its own. Self-consuming politically correct speech became wholesale in the USSR of the 1920s and 30s, and served as inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984, and, of course, today also for our own resurgent Left. After such verbal assault, I hope that Bob doesn’t pull in the horns too far on his wit and wisdom.
Take a look at the kinesiology and kinetics of robots as being developed by companies like Boston Dynamics (here). In these pre-Singularity years this is only one aspect of how human abilities are being matched and superseded by advancing technology. Such advancement explains the divergence between the price of labor and productivity that still continues to puzzle some and enrage others. In the US economy, labor and productivity tracked each other almost perfectly until the early 1970s. At that point productivity maintained its growth trend, but the price of labor almost leveled off and has been increasing at a very modest rate since then. The 1970 date is significant in that it coincides with the milestone of the introduction of commercially successful minicomputers into our economy – e.g. Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-8. (I immediately bought one for my R&D company, and quickly upgraded it for a PDP-11 when that became available.) With such computing power available to ‘everyone’, US industry was off to the races, and the increases in productivity were now due mostly to invested capital instead of labor. Ever since then, labor in the aggregate has strained in the competition to provide value in the workplace. From my perch, this divergence was easy to predict and has been preached here for years under the larger category of systemic unemployment (see also John Henry, the Steel-Drivin’ Man).
Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer has always come across to me and mine as our local good-hearted and well-intentioned walking monument to intellectual innocence. In his 2feb19 column ‘Will House shirk duty to initiate impeachment?’ he attempts to make another case for ‘indict first, find evidence later’, which is now the established mode of progressive jurisprudence practiced in government, entertainment, and by the leftwing commentariat.
Millennials against capitalism. Author Malcolm Harris in Vox – ‘Why Millennials are burned out. Capitalism’ – is the latest to write about the millennial generation and their travails in adjusting to earth. My basketball coach back in Indiana told his charges about how performance and risk fly in tight formation. His wisdom was corroborated by years at university and later in business where I confirmed that the greatest achievement, and most certainly every human advancement, is always brought about at the ‘edge of the envelope’ where stability is marginal and risk is highest. This ‘law’ cuts across ALL endeavors, be they in engineering, finance, sports, or the arts. Most of those who paid attention came to know this through schooling in the academy and/or of the hard knocks variety. However, it is clear that this is another wisdom of the ages that is absent from today’s snowflake curricula. Harris, himself a Millennial, explains why Marxism appeals to this generation, and how they see capitalism exploiting labor, just as Herr Karl said it would.
[5feb19 update] “This is the flip side. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich. The rich leave, and now what do you do?” Andrew Cuomo. I love it when every once in a while a progressive experiences a smiphany (a smidgen of epiphany) about the way real humans behave. We recall that the Left has always maintained that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior, and the Laffer Curve, well, it’s just worth a laugh. Now with NY’s very high tax rates combined with Trump’s tax cuts, the state’s rich have been doing the Sayonara Samba to greener pastures, leaving the state’s coffers $2.3B in the red. The Empire State progressives are asking each other ‘Whoulda thought?!’ But my bet is that even with his t!t in a wringer, Cuomo has learned nothing that will stick with him for more than a week. And, of course, the remainder of the nation’s Left will pay it no mind – the mantra ‘To increase govt revenues, just raise taxes’ is alive and well. (more here)
[7feb19 update] We’ve all heard that gold is ‘an ancient relic’ from government elites whose job is to convince to value fiat money über alles. Governments themselves, of course, know better and value gold as the mother’s milk that really nourishes and upholds the function of dollars to drachmas to serve as mediums of exchange, units of account, and stores of value. This truth was again underlined with Russia’s announcement that recent confirmation of vast amounts of gold under Siberia will make its currency bulletproof against sanctions imposed by the west. And they are right, it will because everyone really wants to know that those little pieces of paper and computer bits are really backed by something that everyone agrees has value, no matter how ancient. (more here)
The Olympus of hubris. Former President Obama has continued to take credit for today’s booming economy, you know, the one that took off a bit after President Trump had a go at it (more here). But on second thought ol’ Barry may have something there. It took some mighty dedicated mismanagement to keep America’s stellar economy hobbled to less than 2% growth for all those years. Obama did indeed keep our economic pressure cooker plugged up until someone, anyone, would come along who did not want to fundamentally transform America. So maybe he can take some credit for finally getting out of the way, and letting good times return again. (Of course, the Dems have their Plan B – aka the Green New Deal – ready to go to really sink the country.)
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