He's one of the worst presidents we've ever had. I can't believe people still support him.
There is no widespread white supremacy happening either. The elephant in the room no one is allowed to talk about is that it's not white people with a disproportionate rate of murder and violent crimes.
Instead of improving education, job training and promoting healthy two-parent families, it's easier for Biden to pass the buck and blame the decay of society on white supremacy. It's disgusting and causing major resentment between the races. White people are NOT the ones attacking Asian people in large numbers either. I'm so sick of the lies.
They say "white supremacy" and "whiteness" etc. etc. etc. because they cannot say "we hate the culture of the Western Enlightenment which gave more dignity and freedom to the individual, and allowed the flourishing of art and scientific and philosophical discourse more than any other culture anywhere."
Actually., Islam came close once. The Islamic Middle East underwent a renaissance until about 1500 CE, then something changed. Education in critical thinking was replaced by madrasas with rote memorization of Koranic verses. 1492 CE wasn't just Columbus; it also is the year the Castilian monarchy completed the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. The Islamization of Europe was stopped in Macedonia and Bulgaria.
Yes, all fundamentalism means the death of free thought.
I was fortunate to have had a glimpse of Pakistan, the vibrance of the culture of the Punjab and the freedom to observe as one chose before the extremists destroyed everything. A real sorrow to me.
I only visited Pakistan once, and the influence of the British was overwhelming. Using the British approach to bureaucracy meant that nothing could ever be found, and if found, would be useless. Approval processes for even the most minor transaction were lengthy and involved an incredible amount of repetition and make-work. I spent one night in Karachi and that was more than enough.
The hotel was beautiful from the outside; indoors there was at least one guard per hallway carrying a fully-automatic weapon. I could not identify anything on the menu. I chose to sleep fully dressed on top of the covers. At midnight something happened to the phone system and all outside calls were routed first through my room. Worst weekend of my life, at least as of 1993.
In 1983, I think, I spent Eid with the family of our office electrician. We went from Peshawar to his mother-in-law's compound (he and his wife were first cousins) in a mud village outside Lahore. Some of the very old men who'd lived under the British came to meet me, and they said how much they missed the Raj times when everything worked and the roads were beautifully maintained etc. etc. I was quite shocked.
We'd gotten to the village while Ramazan hadn't yet concluded, and we all went to one of those fairs that used to be so common in the Punjab, and I think I was the only one fasting. Now you'd have your face kicked in for doing anything like that in public during fasting times.
A couple of years later, in Peshawar, I met some of my then-husband's friends from the University. Some of them were guys from rough villages in the Frontier, first generation to get any sort of education, and we'd sit and discuss poetry and all that sort of crap, and we could do that because, of course, the British had built that university and the boys' college that fed into it, and a language that had achieved global reach, and these guys who already spoke at least four other tongues each had a love and appreciation for this foreign world of literature and ideas that I'd never seen anywhere at home.
So very sad. The things done in the name of religion are too often horrid. I've wavered between being an Islamic Anglican and a Deist. Deist is the flavor of the month.
"White supremacy" is the useful inflammatory statement. Biden, the lifelong mediocrity-award politician, liked all those guys he served with whose names are now anathema. His only interest was being in the power boys' club. At this moment in time, he likes to yell slogans because that's the extent of his oratory skills.
The far left is the usual gang of overgrown student radicals whose only purpose is ostentatious protestation.
Everyone else throughout the political spectrum is either too cowed to act or to incompetent to act effectively.
For the rest, though--as usual, you're the master.
Great article Bill and it is clear we are on the same page. My whole thesis is based on the concept of our economy being an energy system with emergent properties which will of themselves simplify the outcome as EROEI has now turned negative.
As a systems engineer I have spent my life engaged with such systems and learned from six-sigma production engineers as we cooperated to solve MRP and ERP implementations.
In my shady past I was involved in ERP implementations to include system selection. In one case it was Oracle against my recommendation, in another E2, basically a Job Shop system. It was deceptively powerful. I'd been in the midst of SAP, Baan and a few others. At one point I had to scream at a fellow who was asking someone if he wanted to see all purchase requests from below him (he was middle management) without explaining the implications of his choice. He didn't understand why I was upset.
The vast majority of purchases are for inconsequential items. Does it make a difference if Jane buys the 99 cent veeblefetzer, an indirect item, or if she buys the 97 cent one? The plant can't run without them. But there are a lot of purchases. It was going to take weeks to get approval for little shit, no way around anyone in the chain, and if Bob went on vacation, why it could be three weeks before anybody noticed he had a ton of veeblefetzer purchase requests in his in-box. This was a prescription for disaster, and the chap had no clue what was wrong.
In another case I stopped a client cold when he wanted to sign a contract to use a photo-based imaging system to show furniture. It was many times more expensive than a good configurator, and if you changed the dimensions of the piece you had to have a new photo. This was another recipe for disaster, paying much more for something that would slow down the system.
Your view of our economy is good because it's holistic.
As you wrote about complex systems, I wandered into https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/diesel-underpins-global-economy-eroei?s=r where I saw an interesting bit about why things are coming apart. "But all bubbles pop, and public agencies are incapable of reducing their budgets, staff and complexity, because one politically influential constituency or another favors every program. So there's no way to trim anything without igniting a political firestorm as whatever sacred-cow program that gets trimmed arouses the constituency committed to preserving that sacred-cow." Read on: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/05/what-happens-when-complexity-unravels.html" That kind of thing was the observation of Cyril Northcote Parkinson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Northcote_Parkinson). Parkinson's law of 2000 always struck me as true - all organizations over 2000 expand at a given rate regardless of useful function.
"The Ratchet Effect is: costs and complexity only increase, they never decrease because organizations are optimized to expand, not shrink, and so there are no institutionalized pathways to reducing complexity and costs. Everybody clamors for a larger budget and another assistant. Nobody clamors for a radically reduced budget and staff. This raises a question few seem to ask: what happens when complexity unravels?"
I could only wish for a clearer view of our future. When money is worth nothing (zero interest rates) then asset bubbles are certain. But eventually, like the real estate market in 2007, prices can't go up forever - we run out of bigger fools. We didn't deal with 2008 well at all and that remains with us. We are now seeing complexity unravel and a bunch of foundational assumptions seem to be failing.
Perhaps (as we have examined in the past) what happens when service on the debt requires hard, uncomfortable political choices is arriving faster than we expected. We have had distractions of Covid and a war to intervene with the inevitable. Given the effort to discredit our system over the last 30-40 years, can we find our way to a better future? Much uncertainty ahead.
Of course the lockdowns were tragic economic errors. They destroyed working systems perhaps as the Chinese intended. That a few places recovered well wasn't promoted mainly because of politics is sad. All that said the efforts of the government to intervene in those complex systems like all central planning has failed. We are likely to enter recession and a bunch of politicians will be replaced but the core regulators will remain. If we can find a leader who understands the adverse effects of excessive regulation we might recover in several years.
It's rather amazing how much we have damaged in such a short period.
We had a leader who understood that, and impeached him twice. I never thought Trump was suited for office due to temperament. I still think so but he was much better than the replacement
He's one of the worst presidents we've ever had. I can't believe people still support him.
There is no widespread white supremacy happening either. The elephant in the room no one is allowed to talk about is that it's not white people with a disproportionate rate of murder and violent crimes.
Instead of improving education, job training and promoting healthy two-parent families, it's easier for Biden to pass the buck and blame the decay of society on white supremacy. It's disgusting and causing major resentment between the races. White people are NOT the ones attacking Asian people in large numbers either. I'm so sick of the lies.
They say "white supremacy" and "whiteness" etc. etc. etc. because they cannot say "we hate the culture of the Western Enlightenment which gave more dignity and freedom to the individual, and allowed the flourishing of art and scientific and philosophical discourse more than any other culture anywhere."
Actually., Islam came close once. The Islamic Middle East underwent a renaissance until about 1500 CE, then something changed. Education in critical thinking was replaced by madrasas with rote memorization of Koranic verses. 1492 CE wasn't just Columbus; it also is the year the Castilian monarchy completed the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. The Islamization of Europe was stopped in Macedonia and Bulgaria.
Yes, all fundamentalism means the death of free thought.
I was fortunate to have had a glimpse of Pakistan, the vibrance of the culture of the Punjab and the freedom to observe as one chose before the extremists destroyed everything. A real sorrow to me.
I only visited Pakistan once, and the influence of the British was overwhelming. Using the British approach to bureaucracy meant that nothing could ever be found, and if found, would be useless. Approval processes for even the most minor transaction were lengthy and involved an incredible amount of repetition and make-work. I spent one night in Karachi and that was more than enough.
The hotel was beautiful from the outside; indoors there was at least one guard per hallway carrying a fully-automatic weapon. I could not identify anything on the menu. I chose to sleep fully dressed on top of the covers. At midnight something happened to the phone system and all outside calls were routed first through my room. Worst weekend of my life, at least as of 1993.
You were a decade too late.
In 1983, I think, I spent Eid with the family of our office electrician. We went from Peshawar to his mother-in-law's compound (he and his wife were first cousins) in a mud village outside Lahore. Some of the very old men who'd lived under the British came to meet me, and they said how much they missed the Raj times when everything worked and the roads were beautifully maintained etc. etc. I was quite shocked.
We'd gotten to the village while Ramazan hadn't yet concluded, and we all went to one of those fairs that used to be so common in the Punjab, and I think I was the only one fasting. Now you'd have your face kicked in for doing anything like that in public during fasting times.
A couple of years later, in Peshawar, I met some of my then-husband's friends from the University. Some of them were guys from rough villages in the Frontier, first generation to get any sort of education, and we'd sit and discuss poetry and all that sort of crap, and we could do that because, of course, the British had built that university and the boys' college that fed into it, and a language that had achieved global reach, and these guys who already spoke at least four other tongues each had a love and appreciation for this foreign world of literature and ideas that I'd never seen anywhere at home.
A unique moment in time and I saw it die.
So very sad. The things done in the name of religion are too often horrid. I've wavered between being an Islamic Anglican and a Deist. Deist is the flavor of the month.
New husband, I should clarify. I married there.
I disagree wherever you say "Biden believes..."
"White supremacy" is the useful inflammatory statement. Biden, the lifelong mediocrity-award politician, liked all those guys he served with whose names are now anathema. His only interest was being in the power boys' club. At this moment in time, he likes to yell slogans because that's the extent of his oratory skills.
The far left is the usual gang of overgrown student radicals whose only purpose is ostentatious protestation.
Everyone else throughout the political spectrum is either too cowed to act or to incompetent to act effectively.
For the rest, though--as usual, you're the master.
Biden doesn’t believe anything except the perks of power. As I said, you should be writing my posts
No, you're doing just fine. Comments just for counterpoint, not main content.
(I'm crawling my way through a time-and-place memoir effort and each word is agony. That's why I like fiction. Accuracy not required.)
Great article Bill and it is clear we are on the same page. My whole thesis is based on the concept of our economy being an energy system with emergent properties which will of themselves simplify the outcome as EROEI has now turned negative.
As a systems engineer I have spent my life engaged with such systems and learned from six-sigma production engineers as we cooperated to solve MRP and ERP implementations.
In my shady past I was involved in ERP implementations to include system selection. In one case it was Oracle against my recommendation, in another E2, basically a Job Shop system. It was deceptively powerful. I'd been in the midst of SAP, Baan and a few others. At one point I had to scream at a fellow who was asking someone if he wanted to see all purchase requests from below him (he was middle management) without explaining the implications of his choice. He didn't understand why I was upset.
The vast majority of purchases are for inconsequential items. Does it make a difference if Jane buys the 99 cent veeblefetzer, an indirect item, or if she buys the 97 cent one? The plant can't run without them. But there are a lot of purchases. It was going to take weeks to get approval for little shit, no way around anyone in the chain, and if Bob went on vacation, why it could be three weeks before anybody noticed he had a ton of veeblefetzer purchase requests in his in-box. This was a prescription for disaster, and the chap had no clue what was wrong.
In another case I stopped a client cold when he wanted to sign a contract to use a photo-based imaging system to show furniture. It was many times more expensive than a good configurator, and if you changed the dimensions of the piece you had to have a new photo. This was another recipe for disaster, paying much more for something that would slow down the system.
Your view of our economy is good because it's holistic.
As you wrote about complex systems, I wandered into https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/diesel-underpins-global-economy-eroei?s=r where I saw an interesting bit about why things are coming apart. "But all bubbles pop, and public agencies are incapable of reducing their budgets, staff and complexity, because one politically influential constituency or another favors every program. So there's no way to trim anything without igniting a political firestorm as whatever sacred-cow program that gets trimmed arouses the constituency committed to preserving that sacred-cow." Read on: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/05/what-happens-when-complexity-unravels.html" That kind of thing was the observation of Cyril Northcote Parkinson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Northcote_Parkinson). Parkinson's law of 2000 always struck me as true - all organizations over 2000 expand at a given rate regardless of useful function.
"The Ratchet Effect is: costs and complexity only increase, they never decrease because organizations are optimized to expand, not shrink, and so there are no institutionalized pathways to reducing complexity and costs. Everybody clamors for a larger budget and another assistant. Nobody clamors for a radically reduced budget and staff. This raises a question few seem to ask: what happens when complexity unravels?"
I could only wish for a clearer view of our future. When money is worth nothing (zero interest rates) then asset bubbles are certain. But eventually, like the real estate market in 2007, prices can't go up forever - we run out of bigger fools. We didn't deal with 2008 well at all and that remains with us. We are now seeing complexity unravel and a bunch of foundational assumptions seem to be failing.
Perhaps (as we have examined in the past) what happens when service on the debt requires hard, uncomfortable political choices is arriving faster than we expected. We have had distractions of Covid and a war to intervene with the inevitable. Given the effort to discredit our system over the last 30-40 years, can we find our way to a better future? Much uncertainty ahead.
Of course the lockdowns were tragic economic errors. They destroyed working systems perhaps as the Chinese intended. That a few places recovered well wasn't promoted mainly because of politics is sad. All that said the efforts of the government to intervene in those complex systems like all central planning has failed. We are likely to enter recession and a bunch of politicians will be replaced but the core regulators will remain. If we can find a leader who understands the adverse effects of excessive regulation we might recover in several years.
It's rather amazing how much we have damaged in such a short period.
We had a leader who understood that, and impeached him twice. I never thought Trump was suited for office due to temperament. I still think so but he was much better than the replacement