The right to die

LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.  Pss.39:4

Without a doubt, the largest economic issue no one wants to talk about is end-of-life medical care and its incredible expense.  The reason is obvious—talking about death truly frightens most people.  Yet death is as much a part of the natural order as oxygen and no matter what one believes about death, it IS a part of the real economy.  And the certain fact is that the less realistic a person or society is about death, the more it will cost.  Until at the end we have funerals, the last big chance to blow a large wad on conspicuous waste.  And this phenomenon is not new—witness the pyramids and Taj Mahal.

While bronze statues and orate crypts may have passed from favor, we have replaced it with an even more grotesque form of waste—the million dollar death.  Avoiding this outcome is very difficult for a wide assortment of reasons but the biggest one is the relatives saying "Of course, we want everything medically possible done for Grandma Millie" without having a clue what is included under the heading of "everything."  The result is a medical system that spends roughly half of the overall total on the last 90 days of folks' lives.  Not only is all this unnecessarily heroic medicine hideously expensive, much of it is so painful and gruesome it resembles torture.

Some of this makes a little sense in USA where the scheme of for-profit medicine produces professionals who will keep prescribing and billing until the last known patient asset has been spent.  But apparently, they have nearly the same set of problems in Japan—a country with widespread respect for the elderly and national health care.  So it boils down to a simple dilemma—people fear death and will do a lot of crazy things to keep it at bay.  And so far, the best known cure for the fear of death is religious practice.

And so we have it—another example where economics and religious practice intersect.  As for me, after working in operating rooms and critical care units, burying both of my parents and watching most of my friends bury theirs, having attended dozens of funerals and singing in many, I have long ago come to the conclusion that I want nothing to do with the medical-industrial complex's million dollar deaths.  There is nothing about life that is so sweet that it makes worth a slow agonizing death surrounded by the insanity of a CCU.

Let banks go bankrupt

The president of tiny Iceland is at Davos as a honored guest because that country's response to the banking crises of 2007-8 was easily the most successful by any objective measure.  The key, according to Grimsson was to ask his critics, "Why do they consider the banks to be the holy churches of the modern economy?  Why aren't banks like airlines and telecommunication companies?"

Good questions.  The obvious advantage this man has over his contemporaries is that he refuses to believe that bankers are magicians.

Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson tells Al Jazeera's Stephen Cole that Europe should let banks that are ran "irresponsibly" go bankrupt. Speaking at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Grimsson also held his country as a model of economic recovery after its near-collapse four years ago. "We didn't follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies. And the end result four years later is that Iceland is enjoying progress and recovery."

Guess who actually sat in an LFA?

Me!

I was not expecting to play such a goof-off today so naturally, I did not come equipped with my good camera.  This was shot with an elderly smart-phone in difficult lighting.



I have seen dozens of pictures and followed the development of the LFA for some years so I wasn't surprised by anything.  But seeing something in the flesh is still an eye-opener.

1) It's pretty small.  This is a car that tries to have everything a high-end passenger car has but is still supposed to be ultra light.  I am two standard deviations larger than the statistically average North American male.  Because of weight considerations, my guess is that someone my size is the maximum-sized driver the LFA was designed to accommodate.  I other words I just barely fit and there wasn't any wiggle room.

2) There is no wasted space anywhere.  I can only imagine how hard it is to do something simple like changing spark plugs.  It has a V-10 and only four cylinders are actually in front of the firewall.

3) Look at the size of these brakes!!  Those are 20" wheels!  Because Toyota is the world's largest car maker and hence a big fat legal target, they must treat all design decisions very seriously.  In this case, they could not just size the brakes for the rich twit who decides to find the top end once or twice after he bought his übertoy, they must size them as if the car was going to be routinely driven to the designed top speed of 325 km / hr.  The cooling system looked big enough to handle top speeds all day long.  Etc.  It was a stunning object lesson in just how woefully under-engineered most sports cars have been over the years.



And here are the links to some of my more serious writing about the LFA and those Veblenic virtues of Workmanship and Idle Curiosity.  But even though the LFA was an extremely serious and expensive engineering demonstration, at fundamental level, this car makes serious people just giggle.  Example: One of the more unfair criticisms that Lexus has had to deal with over the years is that it's ultra-quiet and graceful cars don't "stir the soul."  So in the LFA, the shriek of a V-10 hitting a 9000 rpm redline (750 explosions per second) is captured and piped into the cabin for the driver's aurel entertainment.  Any kid who ever clipped baseball cards into the spokes of his bicycle to make it sound more like a motorcycle understands this impulse immediately.

Thursday, September 9, 2010
Japan's moon shot

Saturday, October 6, 2012
Building the LFA

Monday, December 17, 2012
Peak Auto

Tuesday, January 25, 2011
USA economic competitiveness

Climate change news gets worse

Jan 25 is the statistically coldest day of the year here in Minnesota.  We natives have rarely been disappointed by this date's notoriety.  I have seen many of them where the temps have hit -25°F (-32°C).  Such cold WILL get your attention.  Yet as I write, it is 16°F (-9°C) and as our drought grinds on, there is almost no snow on the ground.  So we don't need a lot of data to be convinced that climate change is real.  I like to say that here in Minnesota, the evidence for climate change is so overwhelming that deniers only come in two flavors—morons and drooling morons.

Frontline investigates banksterism

Yes, I know I have covered the subject of crooks on Wall Street.  In truth, I find much of what happened unethical and cosmically stupid even when it isn't technically illegal.  But this effort by PBS' Frontline to cover the scandal that NONE of the big banksters went to jail is especially rigorous and well worth watching.

Building perfection

For anyone who ever says building something perfect is impossible, this clip of what Lexus went through just to build a toy designed to prove a point should give some indication of just how much perfection is possible. The levels of perfection shown here can be employed to build something more interesting than another trinket for some rich clown who probably has no idea how perfect something can be.

The sustainable society will only be built with the most elegant technologies.  Here is one example of what humans can do with the necessary resources.

The bill to "fix" climate change gets more realistic

As the World Economic Forum gets under way, another study surfaces that show another educated guess at how much doing something meaningful about climate change will actually cost.  As someone who has been say this is at least a $100 Trillion project since the early 1990s, I always welcome anyone who thinks along these lines and hope that they have more success than I in getting governments and other institutions to spend the money.  This from Businessweek.

BoJ caves!

Tha austerity ghouls took it on the chin today.  In one of the more encouraging developments, the Bank of Japan actually honored a request by a democratically elected official.  As NOTHING so makes a mockery of democracy as central bank "independence" (arrogance? totalitarianism?) this is very good news indeed.

Note of at the end of this first article, some German toady warns of the dangers posed by government "disturbing abuses" in the affairs of the central banks.

Wall street profits from hunger

Ripping off the world's poor for fun and profit.  And yet there are  those who actually say that those of us who use the word bankster are the ones with bad manners.  You cannot make this up!

Windpower still on a roll

As a son of the prairie, I love it whenever I see wind turbines turning against the horizon.  But wind power is not being chosen for its superior aesthetics but because in many ways, it is the most reliable way to generate electricity that doesn't involve boiling water.  Even the Japanese are getting in on the act and Japan is not noted for its wide open spaces.

The "Golden Era" of investment banking comes to an end

The term "Investment Banking" covers a wide assortment of sins—most of them extremely dangerous to the real economy.  And because these folks made off with SO much loot, their victims number in the billions.  There are many of us who wish that the whole rotten lot would just disappear because the tiny amount of actual good these people can accomplish could just as easily be done with depositor-owned banks run by people pulling down ordinary salaries.

So now the investment banking business is imploding—mostly because the overwhelming majority of their new rackets have been revealed to be money-losers. Turns out investment bankers are too expensive even for the banking business.  And so these plunderers of the universe are losing their jobs and quickly discovering there are no alternatives that can support their lavish lifestyles.

So some are taking the advice from the rest of us who have been encourging them to leap from high places.  Now it may be a bit tacky to cheer on the suicides of these banksters, but they simply must go.  We cannot afford their piracy.  But mostly, the social order can no longer tolerate the sheer bullshit they must spew simply to justify their pathetic existences.

Saturday toons 19 JAN 13

Electrical grid news from Germany

I am not a patient person.  I have been accused of having extraordinary patience because I built complicated things as a child.  "Oh, you must really be patient," folks would say when I showed them the flying model airplanes or radio (or whatever) I had built.  Actually, the key to building complicated things is persistence.  Patience has almost nothing to do with it—it simply cannot because I have nearly none.  Of all the things that trigger my impatience, the #1 is watching people make the same mistake over and over.  And I really become impatient with people who keep making the same mistakes because of some irrelevant belief set.

The great tragedy of the debates between individualism and collectivism is that we allowed the extreme nutjobs to control the debate.  In places like USA, we are told that collective action like governments building infrastructure or organizing medicine is the first step on the road to serfdom (Hayek).  The Marxist states actually validated this crazy paranoia by collectivizing millions of economic decisions that actually are best left to the individual.  In truth, this was a fight over nothing more than the best way to screw things up.  In a well-run society, collective needs (like a reliable supply of energy) should be collectively addressed while individual needs (like who can best run the neighborhood eatery) should be left to individuals.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoliberalism triumphed world-wide.  These extremists taught that everything—even such obvious organs of collective action such as municipal water supplies—had to be privatized.  And in large part they were.  Now Germany, which has privatized electrical distribution, discovers it REALLY needs a new grid.  And a member of Merkel's right-wing government is suggesting that this grid upgrade will best happen if it is nationalized.

What this means is that someone has come to their senses and admitted that when it comes to real-world problems, pragmatism offers far better solutions than ideology.  We can only hope that neoliberalism soon disappears into the same historical hole that Communism fell into in 1989.  Because problems like climate change are FAR too serious to allow ideological nutjobs to control the arguments.

Of course, just because some German politician has made a public move back to the center does not mean the mechanisms of neoliberalism are dead.  And so we see that the Japanese company Mitsubishi wants to invest in this partially nationalized electrical grid.

Corruption is killing us

The most depressing aspect of yet another bankster getting an important job in the government is the knowledge that whatever else happens, nothing important or useful will get done about the big problems like climate change.  Here Charles Ferguson, the documentarian who gave us Inside Job, takes a look at the thoroughly execrable Jack Lew.  Apparently, Lew is the sort of mediocrity who has taken all the intellectual horsepower the good lord gave him and put it to work figuring out how to serve the ultra-rich (and hopefully keep them out of jail when their continuing crimes are exposed.)  He absolutely DOES NOT CARE how the real economy is performing.  In fact he cannot imagine such a thing even exists outside of providing for his consumer needs.

Yup, we can predict that the Treasury under Lew will not figure out how to find the $trillions necessary to finance any meaningful solutions to climate change.  In fact, if you told him financing solutions to real problems was his new job, you would get that perfect example of a-dog-watching-a-ceiling-fan look.  He sees his job as making happy the big boys over at Goldman Sachs or wherever.  BIG difference.  And maybe some more of this foolishness wouldn't be so serious except for the fact that the time is running out to solve the big problems like climate change.  These minor-league suck-ups are dangerous because they get in the way of getting the necessary done.

Corn belt drought projections with great chart

This, folks, is not good news.  Most of our food is grown outdoors in unprotected conditions.  If those outdoors change, we are in for a world of hurt.

America, Prepare For A Century Of Drought

That $48.7 billion November trade deficit

The other day I got an email from a guy who claimed to be a regular reader.  He seemed to think I had missed some of the advantages of running huge trade deficits.  It was cute, in an odd sort of way, because he writes as if he had thought this up himself.  Sorry, these arguments have been around since at least the 1970s and I have been swatting them out of the park for decades.

First his arguments that trade deficits don't matter.

but, consider this: the goods we import are a permanent loss of resources to the exporters and a net benefit to us of those resources (it improves our standards of living)

our loss is the dollars we create from nothing (fiat money with no intrinsic value that can't be depleted)

upside:

• those exporter nations love our $
• if we had imposed reparations on post war Japan demanding trillions of $ of Sonys, Panasonics, Toyotas, etc in return for scrip, they'd have screamed - but they did (and do) it willingly!
• the US $ has become the global reserve currency - prized
• what other nation is willing to run unending trade deficits in order to displace us in that regard?
• why would we be willing to deplete our real resources to gain someone else's currency?
• all nations cannot become net exporters: assets = liabilities just a contrary thought that took me a while to digest!

Essentially this line of "reasoning" is flawed for two reasons.

1) While superficially it may seem like it's a great deal that USA can create money with a few keystroke which we can then exchange for flat-screen TVs and Toyota Priuses, this "trick" covers a huge tragedy.  Just because electronic money seems less real than say, gold, it is not.  That electronic money spent in Japan or China is money not spent in Youngstown Ohio.  The people who earn that electronic money are more prosperous than those who do not.  The trade deficit affects lives in real and very meaningful ways.

2) There are huge cultural effects of manufacturing that are lost when we give up the practice in exchange for new and novel forms of laziness.  People who make things gain the wisdom of the tool makers and users.  People who do not tend to behave as would be expected of the partially evolved.  A country that forgets how to manufacture and settles for merely knowing how to shop has made a conscious decision to dumb down.  It is not at all surprising when a country that neglects to do the jobs associated with creating the very difficult soon is also a country that doesn't do too well in other intellectual pursuits either.

Those who claim that trade deficits don't matter (or are actually a good thing) are members in good standing of the Leisure Classes.  They don't get why folks take so much pride and feel so much satisfaction from creating stunningly beautiful and difficult things.  One of the reasons the Leisure Classes are so susceptible to untrammeled greed and other sins is that those who only shop can never feel the pleasures of the Instinct of Workmanship.  A builder can take his kids out to the job site on weekends to show them what he has accomplished in cooperation with his mates.  What exactly can an expert in force and fraud point to with pride?  Not much.  IMHO the inability to take pride in one's work is reason #1 why the Leisure Classes are a haven for sociopaths.

Japan's attack on economic orthodoxy

The politics of Shinzo Abe continue to fascinate.  It is actually quite amazing that Japan has been so conventionally orthodox when it comes to macroeconomic policy.  Japan hasn't deviated from conventional thinking all that often in the post WW II period but when she has—such as when MITI organized the rise of her automobile industry through central planning and cartels—she has been astonishing successful.  Given such a track record, Japan should be much more daring and even arrogant in her economic thinking.  Yet she has just spent over two decades allowing her economy to be hollowed out in the name of the global conventional wisdom.  Yeah, I don't get it either.  So along comes Abe who is quite the nationalist and one of the manifestations of that nationalism is that he is refusing to follow the economic norms.

Krugman, who is about as surprised at this move from orthodoxy as I, takes the story from here.  All I can say is, Go Japan!  The conventional wisdom is literally killing us so it is refreshing to see someone try something new.

The corn belt drought grinds on

As someone who hates to shovel snow, this extra-dry winter should make glad my heart.  Unfortunately, this winter's drought is threatening the global food supply.  The immediate problem is the winter wheat crop.  But as this thing grinds on, more and more farmers will be facing a real economic crunch.  So far, high commodity prices and crop insurance have kept most of the grain growers afloat.  But high grain prices are killers for the folks who feed livestock and crop insurance is not a bottomless well either.

About that trillion-dollar coin

In a move that shocks absolutely no one, the Obama White House has announced that it wants nothing to do with the Trillion-Dollar-Coin.  As monetary "solutions" go, the big Coin wasn't much of an idea by historical standards.  But for an administration that can't bring itself to prosecute some of the more egregious financial criminals in history, taking on the big actors of monetary policy was literally unthinkable.  I mean, look at the presidents who actually took on the money boys—Jackson, Lincoln, FDR.  Obama has MUCH more in common with W than those three.  To take on money power, one needs both courage and a deep intellectual understanding for why it should be done.  Obama has neither.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would just provide a link to my discussion of money from Elegant Technology.  I worked very hard to write that thing and I am pretty sure I cannot top it.  But this story deserves comment for one overwhelming reason—it has opened up the subject of monetary theory to the general public in a way that hasn't happened since World War II.  This awareness is critical.  Monetary power relies on no one questioning their game.  It's why William Greider called his magnum opus about the Federal Reserve Secrets of the Temple.  It's why the so-called Nobel economics prize is actually a creature of the Swedish Central Bank (Riksbank.)  It's why the Federal Reserve exercises monopoly control over the economics profession.  The folks who create the money want total control of the conversation over the creation of money.

That control has been lost.  And once someone begins to think about a $Trillion coin, cannot more imaginative ideas be far behind?

Let's Try These 10 Budget Fixes

Trying to find the original source of the graphic below, I found this really cool site: Connect the Dots for Democracy USA. There are a few dozen excellent graphics, arranged by topic, here.

Saturday toons 12 JAN 13