Month: January 2012

Posted on

the dereliction chart

We’re lying to ourselves about what we’re putting into our country.

Pilfering our pockets is popular. Real investment is not.

Standard thinking is that since the early 1980s capital spending has been booming and despite cyclical swings real business fixed investment has moved up to record levels…

Yes, that statement is baloney. We’ve abandoned real investment.

IT has accounted for virtually all the growth in real investment since 1980…

The IT share of total capital spending has been steadily increasing and now accounts for 45%.

Virtually all investment in capital goods and productive plant is flat or fallen to ~1%.

Sloppy. Sloppy. Sloppy. Shame. Shame. Shame.

Posted on

their nuclear underworld

The Atlantic:

…solid pieces of evidence that Japan’s nuclear industry is a black hole of criminal malfeasance, incompetence, and corruption.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the monolithic corporation that controls all electric power in Greater Tokyo, and runs the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant that experienced a triple meltdown following the March 11 earthquake, is on the brink of nationalization according to Japanese government sources.

The official reason is that the firm may not be able to handle the massive compensation payments it owes to victims of the meltdown without going bankrupt. Unofficially, the firm has such long-standing ties to anti-social forces, including the yakuza—that some members of the Diet, Japan’s national legislature, feel the firm is beyond salvation and needs to be taken over and cleaned up.

…in other words, “When a man is has to survive doing something, it’s the nuclear industry; for a woman, it’s the sex industry.”

Posted on

the REAL entitlements

The underling mechanism for inequality growth need not include deliberate actions by wealthy individuals.

Wealth is generated based upon the work of accumulated capital rather than labor. Wealthy investors are making bets with peers that have similar levels of wealth. Since neither side is actually creating wealth from raw goods, on average there are equal numbers of winners and losers.

Gary Rondeau:

There are good arguments that too much inequality is detrimental to social well-being. Without deliberate mechanisms to redistribute wealth downward, inequality will grow without bounds out of statistical necessity.

Managing inequality means introducing mechanisms that redistribute wealth more equitably which are at least as strong as the statistical effects which naturally concentrate wealth.

This is where greed comes in !

In practice, those that have attained wealth, even if by the throw of the dice, feel entitled to their fortune and resist any attempt at leveling the playing field.

Whether it is luck or skill that is involved in negotiating one’s bets, winners consistently attribute their success to skill, and with that comes a sense of entitlement to their winnings.