Published on 12 Sep 2017
The math behind the National Debt is so complex that Reason TV decided to lean on “Cosmos” to explain it.
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We are about to begin a journey beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity. Join me, as we explore: Our Amazing DebtWe are all made of star stuff. And in America, we are all born more than $61 thousand in debt.
The collective debt we owe as a country now stands at $20 trillion, a level of debt unfathomable to our contemptible caveman ancestors.
How can we comprehend the sheer magnitude of the national debt? With our starship of imagination.
This is the USS Dumbitdownforme and it cost $12 billion to construct: all financed through debt. We didn’t have the money to build it and we didn’t want to raise taxes to pay for it, but we really wanted it. So, like a fiscal wormhole, we’ve used debt to puncture the reality of financial constraints, connecting what we want now to even more money we promise to pay later.
$20 Trillion is not just a lot of money, it’s all the money, and then some.
If we could round up all the US currency in existence–every dollar bill, every quarter, every penny–we’d still need another $18 trillion. All the gold that has ever been mined couldn’t even cover half of our debt.
Yet our story doesn’t end here.
Like our ever-expanding universe our debt is constantly growing larger. This year we will pay more than $250 billion on interest payments. Not the debt, just the fee for borrowing money.
Much as cosmic expansion will inevitably lead to the heat death of our own universe, the debt, too, is unsustainable. As nature seeks balance, so to will our creditors.
Will the government gut spending? Defund entitlements? Devalue our currency?
One day, perhaps in our lifetime, we will discover the answers and reach the limit of our amazing debt. But for now we can only behold this awesome force that binds all Americans, bewitching us with the fascinating possibility, that maybe, just maybe, we’re all f***ed.
Written and produced by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton. Edited by Austin Bragg.
September 13, 2017
Our Amazing Debt (Cosmos Parody)
Tesla’s experiment in price discrimination
Alex Tabarrok links to a story about Tesla using an over-the-air software update to help Tesla owners in hurricane-threatened areas get more range from their lower-battery capacity cars … but he says this may eventually come back and bite the company:
Tesla knows that some of its customers are willing to pay more for a Tesla than others. But Tesla can’t just ask its customers their willingness to pay and price accordingly. High willing-to-pay customers would simply lie to get a lower price. Thus, Tesla must find some characteristic of buyers that is correlated with high willingness-to-pay and charge more to customers with that characteristic. Airlines, for example, price more for the same seat if you book at the last minute on the theory that last minute buyers are probably business-people with high willingness-to-pay as opposed to vacationers who have more options and a lower willingness-to-pay. Tesla uses a slightly different strategy; it offers two versions of the same good, the low and high mileage versions, and it prices the high-mileage version considerably higher on the theory that buyers willing to pay for more mileage are also more likely to be high willingness-to-pay buyers in general. Thus, the high-mileage group pay a higher price-to-cost margin than the low-mileage group. A familiar example is software companies that offer a discounted or “student” version of the product with fewer features. Since the software firm’s costs are mostly sunk R&D costs, the firm can make money selling a low-price version so long as doing so doesn’t cannibalize its high willingness-to-pay customers–and the firm can avoid cannibalization by carefully choosing to disable the features most valuable to high willingness-to-pay customers.
The kind gesture to Tesla owners in Florida is probably deeply appreciated right now, but…
Unfortunately, I fear that Tesla may have made a marketing faux-pas. When it turns off the extra mileage boost are Tesla customers going to say “thanks for temporarily making my car better!” Or are they going to complain, “why are you making MY car worse than it has to be?”
Human nature being what it is, the smart money is betting on the “Thanks for the temporary upgrade, but what have you done for me lately?” attitude setting in quickly.
Adpocalypse Update – Out Of The Trenches Platform – Italy Trip I THE GREAT WAR
Published on 12 Sep 2017
Thank you to yukka.nl for the programming effort and support with the OOTT platform.
OOTT-Platform: https://outofthetrenches.thegreatwar.tv
September 18 – Meeting at Kobarid, Slovenia: http://bit.ly/Kobarid
September 19 – Meeting at Vittorio Veneto, Italy: http://bit.ly/VittorioVeneto
September 20 – Meeting at Lagazuoi: http://bit.ly/LagazuoiWW1
Merchandise (EU): https://shop.spreadshirt.net/thegreatwar/
Merchandise (US): https://shop.spreadshirt.com/thegreatwar/Flo has a few news to share with you concerning the YouTube “Adpocalypse” and more.
A visit to Creekside
Another of my favourite wineries in Niagara gets a great write-up from Rick VanSickle:
While the vast majority of Niagara wineries chart a predictable course of core varietals — Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc — the winemakers at Creekside have taken the rabbit hole less travelled and have found immense success doing it.
The steady team of head winemaker Rob Power […] and assistant winemaker Yvonne Irvine […] love the challenge of being different.
“There are guys that stick to Chardonnay and Pinot and there are guys that don’t,” says Power. “And we definitely don’t.”
Their portfolio is deep and varied and by their own admission is the antithesis of Pinot Noir/Chardonnay, mainstays in Niagara winemaking. Here it is Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah and wild things that are lost and found in the darkest corners of the cellar that get top billing.
Or, as Irvine says: “We make wines we want to drink ourselves.”
The lineup here is deep in Sauvignon Blanc in every incarnation you can imagine: Stripped down bare, oaked, blended and sparkled. Syrah also plays a starring role in equally varied styles right up to the flagship wine from the winery: The Broken Press Syrah with and without the inclusion of Viognier. And, of course, the big bruiser and one of the region’s most sought-after wines, made just five times in 18 years — the Lost Barrel Red, a zany concoction of highly concentrated remains of wine and “tailings” that’s collected, stashed in a barrel and forgotten for years and years in a dark corner of the cellar only to emerge as a wine very unlike anything else made in Niagara.
Creekside has always marched to the beat of a different drummer, even has ownership as changed. And what a beat it is.
I got a front row seat to the winery’s chaotic mass of wine that was laid out in the barrel cellar to taste with Power, Irvine and retail director Britnie Bazylewski — an endless array of whites, reds and big bruisers including one red that just may be the last one in Niagara released from the hot, hot, hot 2010 vintage (that aforementioned Lost Barrel).
The Thirty Years War
Published on 10 Nov 2014
The Thirty Years’ War was fought from 1618-1648 (Thirty Years!) in the Holy Roman Empire. It began as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Bohemia, but grew to involve Denmark, Sweden, and France. After the French began helping Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant king of Sweden, the lines became blurry and the war became more about the balance of power in Europe than about religion. The Peace of Westphalia paved the way for France to become the dominant power in Western Europe and for the permanent decline of the Holy Roman Empire as a political institution.
If you like this lecture, check out my other lectures for AP European History and Western Civilization!
QotD: The changed nature of “class”
For a while communists went around looking lost [after the collapse of the Soviet Union]. Umberto Ecco referred to them as “defrocked priests” who have lost their vision of paradise. And then … And then they decided we just hadn’t tried it hard enough or well enough.
But by the time they found this “new vision” (these doomsday cults never admit they were wrong, you know) they had given up on the idea of the proletariat conquering the bourgeoisie and rich, and had instead turned into sort of missionaries of victims and wounded people.
Instead of social class meaning what it meant to Marx, which was entirely economics based, it now meant “group vaguely aligned through some (usually natural) characteristic.” So we have the oppressed class of oh, gay people who come from all backgrounds and regions and who face differing levels of acceptance from family and society, but who are deemed to be all equally victimized, and as such to need equal intervention from the elites to make them whole. Then there are racial groups, so factionalized that at some point we’re all going to become a race of one.
The elites took to this new way of viewing society like ducks to water, partly because you don’t actually need to do anything to help anyone anywhere. Like Marx, who mistreated his illegitimate son from the woman who was somewhere between an indentured servant and a slave to his family, even as he preached social revolution and the triumph of the lower classes, they can simply preach acceptance and talk about how poor victims suffer without bothering to notice that their neighbor is unemployed and surviving on cat food. If you ask them about this particular instance, they’ll tell you that, well, come the revolution he will have a job and food… Meanwhile they’re working for the greater cause of bringing about the revolution.
And thus, more dreary than the “quality” that consisted of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, we have the taste makers hailing the new “quality” which consists of “fighting patriarchy” or “white hegemony” or whatever latest crazycakes lens is applied to society. Yep, the people with the power are accusing other people of keeping them down because they have a vagina or can tan or whatever. (And the proof of this is the Dolezals of the world who find great rewards in pretending to be victims.)
Sarah A. Hoyt, “The Quality of Writing”, According to Hoyt, 2015-10-11.
