The Importance Of Where And What
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Paul Gauguin Tahitian scene 1892 This is another piece I received today from Bruce Wilds, a US Midwest business owner I earlier f
[See the full post at: The Importance Of Where And What]Mail I sent just now to the author, Bruce Wilds:
Bruce, by sending your piece to Zerohedge as well,
who only knew about the one 2 months ago because I published it
and BTW Tyler and I have had a great relationship for many years,
You make it impossible for me to publish more pieces of yours
Original content is a major issue.
Ilargi
The Automatic Earth
The issue is complex and not to fret on not spending line on every small issue, or of blaming the victim, but
1) if the banks don’t have absolutely certain access to completely free money they would have be prudent and prioritize and limit credit. Therefore credit would be cut off early and safely. This is a fundamental way in which the present system is intentionally broken, and nations have been grasped and drowned by it many times.
2) as part of 1, Financialization, they have spent 40-60 years specifically arranging tax, tariff, trade, and worker laws to drive U.S. production overseas on the basis of saving the a) worker, b) environment c) safety d) regulation. Therefore no choice is possible to buy American or local, because it is de facto illegal and to do so would bankrupt you shortly. Many Americans or American businesses have tried since 1980 and failed. So you cannot be a “responsible American” either with savings (0% interest paid) or with purchases (0% products are all U.S.).
Nor can any one person reverse large wheels set in motion, much less the average working Joe, though they are held underwater and accused of drowning. The best we can do is read the times and position accordingly. However, that is working against one’s self: even should you make the 25-fold rise in Dow stocks and donate to anti-financial causes, you are still enriching the financiers then paying to attack them — zero sum at best. Meanwhile the other side can make the 25x and lose no donations but rather donate to enhance the unfair, anti-worker, anti-American effect.
And so they have.
Back in the 80s when merger mania began and outsourcing, downsizing, etc. became household words, I watched americans buy foreign products and move iondustries overseas and thought: We vote with our dollars.
“Financialization, they have spent 40-60 years specifically arranging tax, tariff, trade, and worker laws to drive U.S. production overseas on the basis of saving the a) worker, b) environment c) safety d) regulation. Therefore no choice is possible to buy American or local, because it is de facto illegal and to do so would bankrupt you shortly. Many Americans or American businesses have tried since 1980 and failed.”
This is true as far as it goes. Too often, a crisis produced by a previous generation’s greed is addressed, is “solved”, by avoiding the problem. So we shipped nasty industries overseas to pollute their country, not ours. Safety regulations are expensive because too much of modern industry is ridiculously toxic or dangerous unless carefully controlled. etc. etc. Rather than pay the true cost of the many goods we consume, we passed those costs onto others… not without incurring an ultimately unaffordable cost to ourselves. How do we pay ourselves to consume resources that others produce? Hmmm….
All of this to make sure consumption didn’t decline, because the only way the creeps allegedly in charge have power is in taking a bite of most consumption, whether on the production end or sales end. If USA had found the political will to solve its crises at home without resort to foreign escape, globalization, colonialism, what have you, it would have driven us into a democratic socialism based on acknowledgement of our limited resources.
We would have had to work together to solve our problems, not try and get as rich as we can (the American dream). We can’t do that when we’re bound together in massive populations of many millions. We especially don’t do that when we have so much available fossil fuel/hydroelectric energy that we can afford to fuck each other over and over because hey, there’s plenty more and tomorrow’s another day, may the best man win, and remember, Things Are Always Getting Better (despite recurrent setbacks and a gas gauge moving toward effective zero: there’s gas in the tank, but it takes so much energy to run the fuel pump the engine can’t turn over).
There was nothing wrong with trying to protect the environment, the worker, and forming a basic regulatory structure by which these things could be mediated and executed. But doing so EFFECTIVELY would have required us to tighten our belts, at least for awhile, and while we the people sometimes will voluntarily submit to that, we usually won’t, and elites just about never will.
A basic unwillingness to be self-reliant is a self-explanatory basis for unqualified failure in life. A basic unwillingness to be self-reliant has been the basic definition of any expanding empire, as we have been until contraction recently set in. Thieves are not self-reliant any more than ticks are self-reliant. THere has to be something to steal for a thief to thieve. There has to be an available host body for a tick to feed. While ALL acquisition is a form of theft, especially any acquisition involving killing a living thing to eat it, but also any resource extraction, since nearly always there’s some other animal that called that resource home or local larder until one dug that well or tunneled that mine or plowed that field or cut down that timber, there is a) acquisition with intent to build and increase life prospects and comfort while minimizing positive entropy(increasing disorder), and b) there is acquisition like that of the locust: eat all you can, breed all you can, and don’t do anything to increase negative entropy(reducing disorder).
We have amazing skills that could let us enjoy life far more efficiently, less wastefully, if we could be patient and respectful of each other and our shared environment on a finite planet. Since we’re not a closed system but instead are supplied with fresh new energy every second by our friend the sun, we could create a roughly steady-state civilization. But we prefer being locusts, I guess.
For some time, we’ve been spending our resources faster than we can replace them. We’re going physically broke. It doesn’t matter who has the jobs now (jobs are stupid anyway, wage slave hamster cages). No matter where you look in the world, even ye olde Russia, it’s locusts locusts locusts all the way down.
We’re victims of our own extravagant success.
locust-swarms-are-driven-by-salt-and-cannibalism
History, btw, tells us that until about 100 years ago, salt was as important a resource as wood and slaves, although water has always ruled the resource list.
But for awhile there, if you had enough money and the right skin and could ignore the constant screaming in the distance, life in late-stage Atlantis was wayyy cooolllllllllll……………..
Make it in America
It will bring back the oil shortage
It will bring back the pollutions
It will destroy our societies
It will feed the pork, graft,Bosco: I see your lemniscate and raise you “The Hardest Mandelbrot Zoom Ever In 2014,10^198 : New record – 350 000 000 iterations”. It’s an oldie but a bestie.
Y’all have seen it, I’m sure, but it’s a lovely revisit.
New computer and still can’t do links, but goggle the quote and take a nine minute acid trip. It’s my absolute favorite Mandelbrot zoom because the aim is so good.
If you have never seen it you’re in for a treat.
Just wasting time on this very sweet summer night.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)
The following are examples of orders of magnitude for different lengths.
(see article to compare size of virus to …)First up, props to Ilargi for publishing this.
One of my constant concerns/themes, has been the extent to which politicians have refused to consider the predictable consequences of their Covid mandates in terms of impact to business and communities. I’ve linked previously to the ministerial advice in NZ, which notable didn’t address any of this.In NZ, there is quite low population density and relatively high costs in freight and especially rent. Consequently, NZ small businesses typically have gross margins of 30 – 50% when selling goods. Goods are expensive here, but people’s supplier relationships means the businesses are often (marginally) viable. Obviously, Aliexpress et al are eating into some of that over time, but the freight component is still significant, and not the NZ government is collecting GST on offshore purchases, a balance has returned.
As a previous small business owner, I’ve experienced that;
a) customers are loyal as long as the effort of finding another supplier is larger than the marginal cost of buying locally (which Covid-related shutdowns will have impacted significantly)
b) profits are tight enough such that maintaining a war-chest of cash to cover 3 months+ of non-operation is just impossible
What conventional economic theory of supply and demand misses is that ongoing sustainability of any business is not based on the “free market” sale price of a specific item. Sustainable business is much more comparable to an electron orbit model, where a complete orbit at any level is highly stable, whereas, an incomplete shell is inherently unstable. Hence most businesses can sustainably operate at one level, or a significantly bigger or smaller level, but not in the ambiguous regions in between.
Many small businesses who have previously established a stable “shell” are now disrupted – wither because they have incurred significant debt which they must carry, or because their operating model and customer base has been decimated.
A large percentage of those businesses will never survive the next few months. Crucially – there are the businesses owned and run by people willing to take personal risk (in a way most corporate droids are completely unable to). For those who do survive – why would they remain operating a risky business, when the opportunity to sell out to a corporate entity will almost certainly arise?
Our politicians and government advisers share none of this risk (their plush salaries will continue). We are witnessing the execution of a huge number of businesses by government fiat. And the longer we go on, the more dubious the evidence for what has happened.
Personally, I believe the West (and particularly the US) has reached it’s “soviet moment”. The future is untenable.
What I most fervently hope for is that the nuclear capacity of the US is somehow contained and protected. In retrospect, it seems a miracle that the disintegration of the USSR did not lead to terrorist possession of single nuclear weapon.Looking at BLM, Covid response, CHOP, Trump, Biden etc, it seems almost impossible to believe a similar thing could occur in the US.DNC Head Howard Dean had a simple solution: We tariff nations on the basis of how similar their environmental and worker laws are compared to ours. In that way, we all go up, and we have a true level playing field. To his credit it took a few months, not minutes to kick him out of the party after saying this. Doesn’t make it not true, though.
However, it seems you’re against resource use, and therefore extraction, you are against life itself. There is no life without neg-entropy, drawing energy and inputs to yourself and pushing waste and entropy away. Since ticks, but also bugs, trees, giraffes, whales and plankton do this, they are similarly immoral and should be removed. I don’t think that fits. Rather we are animals who have the rights and requirements of all living things, and live as a part of an eternal whole.“You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace.”It is our denial of life and our animal nature that causes such trouble, not our embrace of it. That is why we are unthinking, and therefore victims of our success. If we weren’t denying, seeing nature as the “other”, we would think not “let’s save the earth” because the earth will be fine, but “let’s save ourselves” and our standard of life, the freedom and air and pleasure that makes life worth living. We can only do that by gardening earth as is the way of our species, and gardening it to increase all species as is also our way. Denying death, killing, eating, trading, sacrificing, cooperating, is how we’ve come to have nothing, not even the right to leave our lairs, see our children, and breathe free air anymore. It’s not only anti-human, it is anti-life, and no other species is death-desiring enough to do so.
As Husky says, you have an “end of Rome” or “Soviet” moment, where, if you do not align with natural law and protect property – negentropy – rights, “capital,” that is, “people” will bury their coins in a pot in the back yard, take no risks, and do no work for 70 or 1,000 years until things change and they give up their unnatural, anti-life ways.
I doubt they will, because they must learn their lesson. But the Black Market and corruption, and the violence and dangers therein, will be brisk. If you think the environment is bad under Capitalism, wait until you see it under Communism. viz, China.
I think Dr. D said it best. But I’d like to ad that Bruce doesn’t read TAE because recently there was a good article on the mechanism of how Wall Street moved the whole manufacturing base of America to China. We can’t solve a macroeconomic issue by microeconomic behavior modification.
This is delusional, my usual choice is not between American made or S.E. Asia made. It’s more like between China and Germany, still the second exporting powerhouse in the world behind China. All major brand of tools for instance are made in China no matter how American they sound. The biggest pork producer in the USA, Smithfield, is now Chinese owned for crying out loud. The best plier ever made is not Channellock but Knipex made in Germany and that’s the only one that I buy, at a premium. For most of the rest of my purchases I don’t have a choice whether I buy it locally or at Amazon, and that includes the pair of Crocs I got yesterday, made in Vietnam. Yes, I try to buy locally anyway because a fraction of that spreads around locally but in the big picture, the rustbelt is not coming back ever even if all the citizenry now turned “consumers” were to buy from the local Dollar store which BTW, last time I took a trip around the bowels of the Florida peninsula, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar and any other iteration of that vomite inducing franchise that only sells China made crap, pop soda and Cheez Doodles, dots the small town landscape end to end. No mom and pop stores, no local flavor, no independently owned stores, zip, zilch, nada.“Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that total savings deposits at US banks jumped sharply as the coronavirus outbreak surged in March and April.” Business Insider 14 May
I saw this a while back (somewhere else). andt it surprised me. The idea was that Americans were saving their checks. I recall Lagarde tsk-ing people for saving instead of spending, and current interests rates are punishing to savers, but apparently Americans will save, given a chance (and nowhere to go to spend it.)
Before leaving this thread, and moving to the next, I want to add one more thought to the wise comments.
I think that there has never existed so many people that has had such a good life.
I am one of those who can say, “We have lived in the best of times.”
“We stand on the shoulders of a multitude of previous life.”
It took the use of every piece of coal, every drop of oil, that was once alive, for us to enjoy such a good life.As for Bruce the article writer: NEVER trust a midwestern businessman. Get a contract and tell him about your fetish for Louisville Sluggers.
“In retrospect, it seems a miracle that the disintegration of the USSR did not lead to terrorist possession of single nuclear weapon.”
I hadn’t heard that EUromerica/Eurasia had retired their nukes. 😉
“However, it seems you’re against resource use, and therefore extraction, you are against life itself. There is no life without neg-entropy, drawing energy and inputs to yourself and pushing waste and entropy away.”
THat’s is among the more bullshit statements I’ve read from you, Doc, and I;ve read quite a few stunners already.
I just understand that just as a man has to accept his limitations, so does a civilization. I’ll bet even your love doll is made of straw.
Sorry. No respect. You’ve burnt yours.
Reading through the rest, yup. Straw men straw men straw men. None of them follow from what I’ve stated but twist off a corner and call it the whole, like the lbind men describing tghe elephant. Those straw men breed ticks, you know.
It gets wearisome.
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