AwakenWithJP
Published on Dec 19, 2017Bitcoin – Ultra Spiritual Life episode 86
In this video, I tell you all about Bitcoin, how it works, and why it’s guaranteed to be the best investment of your life.
January 31, 2018
Bitcoin – Ultra Spiritual Life episode 86
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“Bitcoin is, of course, a mania – a delusion of the sort that human societies are prone to”
Tim Worstall looks at some historical manias and explains how even the maddest of them can yield long-term economic benefits (to society as a whole, if not to individual maniacs):
The UK’s railway mania, the tulip bubble, the dot com boom and other collective economic madness – such as bitcoin – might lose people a lot of money, but they often lay down important foundations
Bitcoin is, of course, a mania – a delusion of the sort that human societies are prone to. This is fighting talk from someone who declared in 2011 that bitcoin was all over. Being wrong is not interesting – it is rare things which are interesting, not common ones – but the psychology and economics here are important.
The classic text on this topic is Charles McKay’s Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Human societies are prone to manias which seem to defy any sense or reasonableness. Certainly markets can be so overcome, although the witch burnings show that it’s not purely an economic phenomenon.
The South Sea Bubble, Tulip mania, railway shares, the dotcom boom and now bitcoin are all part of that same psychological failing of not recognising that prices can and will fall as well as rise. That is the classical interpretation of the McKay book and observation, but modern studies take a more nuanced view.
South Sea and the Mississippi Company bubble were simply speculative frenzies, but the tulip story – while appearing very similar – can be read another way.
It is still true, for example, that a few sheds near Schipol, just outside Amsterdam, are the centre of the world’s trade in cut flowers – the result of that historical episode where a single tulip bulb became worth more than a year’s wages.
We can, and some do, take tourist trips to see the fields of those very tulips today. Modern researchers point out that the tulip was near unknown in Europe, the first examples only just having arrived from Turkey.
The art of cross-pollinating tulips to gain desirable characteristics was only just becoming generally known, and Europe was reaching a stage of wealth where the purely ornamental was becoming valuable.
Yes, the speculation in prices was ludicrous – although the weird stuff was in futures and options markets, not the physical trade, and the absurd prices never actually happened – but the end result of the frenzy was still that the tulip and flower market became and is centred in The Netherlands.
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Tyler Cowen: The Economics of Choosing the Right Career
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 11 Oct 2016As many who entered the labor market following the Great Recession know all too well, graduating with a college degree does not mean you’ll easily fall into a good career. Four-year college graduates with entry-level jobs actually earned more in 2000 than they’re earning today and student loan debt burdens are higher than ever.
Does this mean you should skip college or drop-out? Not necessarily. Unemployment is still lower for those with undergraduate and higher degrees. However, understanding the economics behind the labor market will make finding a career a more manageable task.
The labor market in the United States has undergone many changes in the past few decades. Whereas we once had many manufacturing jobs that required little training or specialized skills, the labor market today demands more people who can work with computers and information technology.
Choosing a good career requires planning beyond getting a college education. You’ll want to carefully consider the career options available for your major, as well any specialized skills you’ll need to build outside of the classroom.
It’s also essential to understand how supply and demand affect your career options. How many people are also choosing that major vs. how many employers are looking for those skills? Is a particular career path susceptible to being replaced by a machine? What about outsourcing in the global labor market? What about laws and regulation – does it require an occupational license?
There’s a lot to think about! Choosing a career is a huge decision and understanding how supply and demand rule the labor market will help you better navigate your future.
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How the Vikings plundered Minnesota
By all accounts, the Minnesota Vikings’ new stadium in Minneapolis is a wonderful structure and fans have been very happy with the amenities provided. However, as Steven Malanga explains, the non-fan taxpayers in the city and the state have a right to feel plundered by the Vikings:
Fans of the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles will travel to the frigid northern city this week because the NFL granted a Super Bowl to Minnesota as a reward for stepping up with more than half a billion dollars in subsidies for the home-state Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium, which opened in 2016. For a city whose mayor recently described it as a “shining beacon of progressive light and accomplishment,” this is some feat, and a reminder that the NFL, whatever its troubles, maintains a firm hold on the taxpayer’s purse in many places.
Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, a New Jersey real estate developer, began pushing for a new stadium soon after purchasing the team in 2005. His supplications became more earnest after the roof of the Vikings’ old home, the Metrodome, collapsed in December 2010. Wilf originally proposed contributing just one quarter of the new stadium’s $1 billion cost, a spectacularly low-ball offer in an era when backlash against stadium subsidies for professional teams increasingly force owners to pony up a bigger share of construction costs. Wilf claimed that he couldn’t afford more, but he wouldn’t release the financial details of his real estate empire. A Minnesota state investigation, undertaken after a New Jersey judge ruled that the Wilf family had defrauded real estate partners in a local project and had to pay them $84.5 million, determined that the family could afford to pay up to $500 million for the stadium.
Even after Wilf upped his offer, the road to the stadium deal was paved with controversy. Minnesota financed a portion of its share of the costs by introducing a state-licensed electronic-gambling game to generate construction revenues, but the game proved a clunker with local residents; to fill the financing hole, Minnesota drew on revenues from its tobacco tax and increased corporate taxes. Then Wilf announced that he’d help finance his part of the deal by charging season ticketholders a seat license fee — prompting a threat from Minnesota governor Mark Dayton to pull government financing. Dayton soon changed his tune, explaining that sports financing has its own ineffable logic. “I’m not one to defend the economics of professional sports,” he said. “Any deal you make in that world doesn’t make sense from the way the rest of us look at it.”
Though it lent its balance sheet to the deal, the city of Minneapolis, according to critics — including one former city councilman — has been “hosed” by the Vikings. The city officially contributed $150 million to stadium construction, but these observers contend that that figure doesn’t include expensive infrastructure improvements that Minneapolis was forced to make. As part of the stadium package, Minneapolis also agreed to send $7.5 million a year in operating subsidies to the authority running the facility, which amounts to $225 million over the course of the deal. City taxpayers also apparently remain on the hook for any shortfalls in the revenues that back the bonds used to build the surrounding infrastructure. Residents understand little of this financing because, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune noted, the stadium deal “was as transparent as the Berlin wall.”
I’m a (very) long-term fan of the team, but that doesn’t mean I approve of the taxpayers being robbed blind so local fans of the team get to watch the game in a corporate welfare palace. Reason has posted several videos exposing the crony capitalist roots of stadium financing, including most recently this one. I first heard of “seat licenses” in 2014 and they sounded like a bad idea to me then. Back in 2012, when the public support was announced, I was not happy about it.
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Don’t mention Macbeth – Blackadder – BBC
BBCWorldwide
Published on 24 May 2010The palace entertains two distinguished and highly superstitious actors. Blackadder is careful not to mention the name of the Scottish play. Funny clip taken from the classic BBC comedy Blackadder.
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QotD: “Enhancing the user experience”
Once upon a time, computers weren’t all constantly connected to the intertubes. What we call “air-gapped” these days was the normal state of machines back in the desktop beige box days.
Back then, when you bought a program it came in a cardboard box on physical media. You would install it on your computer and it would work the same way from the day you installed it to the day you stopped using it. Nobody could rearrange the menus on WordPerfect or change the buttons in Secret Weapons of the Lufwaffe … Good times.
Nowadays, half the software you interact with doesn’t even reside on your PC. Further, there are whole departments at, say, Facebook or Blizzard or Google whose entire job is to “enhance the user experience”. If they’re not constantly dicking around, adding and removing features, changing what buttons do, moving things around … then they’re not doing their jobs.
We have incentivized instability.
Tamara Keel, “Tinkering for tinkering’s sake…”, View From The Porch, 2018-01-10.
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January 30, 2018
British Special Forces – Bulgarian-Ottoman Relations – Caporetto I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 29 Jan 2018Ask your questions here: http://outofthetrenches.thegreatwar.tv
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Fitness tracker heat map shows dangerous activity near wrecked WW2 ammunition ship
The SS Richard Montgomery was a WW2 Liberty ship that ran aground near Sheerness in August 1944 carrying a cargo of bombs and other explosives. Part of the cargo was removed before the ship broke up and sank just offshore. There’s still quite a lot of TNT onboard the wreck, and it’s recently come to light that someone has been visiting the wreck, thanks to fitness tracker data:
The SS John S. Mosby, a Liberty ship similar to the SS Richard Montgomery
Photo from the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, via Wikimedia.
The information came to light after social media users realised that the latest version of Strava’s heat map, which shows the aggregated routes of all of its users, could be used to figure out where Western military bases in the Middle East are. Fitness-conscious soldiers, running around the bases’ perimeters, built up visible traces on the heat map over time.
However, of much more concern is the revelation that people have been poking around the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery, a Second World War cargo ship that was carrying thousands of tonnes of explosive munitions from America to the UK. The ship grounded in the Thames Estuary, in England, in August 1944, barely two miles north of Sheerness.
Extract from Admiralty chart of Sheerness (Crown copyright):
The multicoloured box is the location of the SS Richard Montgomery wreckAlthough wartime salvage parties managed to scavenge a large amount of ordnance from the grounded Liberty ship, her hull split in two and sank, taking around 1,400 tonnes of explosives down with her, before the job could be completed. Officials decided to leave the wreck in place.
According to a 1995 survey report [PDF] on the wreck: “The bombs thought to be on board are of two types. The bulk are standard, un-fused TNT bombs. In addition, some 800 fused cluster bombs are believed to remain. These bombs were loaded with TNT. They could be transported fused because the design included a propeller mechanism at the front which only screwed the fuse into position as the bombs fell from an aircraft. All the bombs could therefore be handled – with care – when the accident occurred.”
[…]
The 1995 report noted that TNT “does not react with water and will not explode if it is damp”, before adding that the brass-cased cluster bombs’ lead-based fuses “will combine with brass to produce a highly unstable copper compound which could explode with the slightest disturbance”. Although the compound “if formed, will wash away in a few weeks”, it was not made clear in the report how often the compound forms and creates the dangerous hair-trigger condition. Experts believe that the best way of keeping the wreck safe is not to disturb it, which led to a 500-metre exclusion zone being imposed around it.
I thought the ship’s name sounded familiar … I posted a video about the dangers of this wreck back in 2013. Last month, I posted a video about the Liberty ship program.
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DicKtionary – A is for Air Force – Curtis LeMay
TimeGhost
Published on 17 Jan 2018A is for Air Force, you know that of course
And we turn to the states to look at the dates
When the man in command, that some couldn’t stand
Is our hero today, General Curtis LeMay.Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Like TimeGhost on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimeGhostHistory/
Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Based on a concept by Astrid Deinhard and Indy Neidell
Produced by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Camera and Edit by: Spartacus Olsson
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“Libertarian brutalists” … yet another name for the alt-right
At Catallaxy Files, Jeffrey Tucker identifies two very different kinds of libertarian:
Why should we favor human liberty over a social order ruled by power? In providing the answer, I would suggest that libertarians can generally be divided into two camps: humanitarians and brutalists.
The humanitarians are drawn to reasons such as the following. Liberty allows peaceful human cooperation. It inspires the creative service of others. It keeps violence at bay. It allows for capital formation and prosperity. It protects human rights of all against invasion. It allows human associations of all sorts to flourish on their own terms. It socializes people with rewards toward getting along rather than tearing each other apart, and leads to a world in which people are valued as ends in themselves rather than fodder in the central plan.
We know all of this from history and experience. These are all great reasons to love liberty.
But they are not the only reasons that people support liberty. There is a segment of the population of self-described libertarians — described here as brutalists — who find all the above rather boring, broad, and excessively humanitarian. To them, what’s impressive about liberty is that it allows people to assert their individual preferences, to form homogeneous tribes, to work out their biases in action, to ostracize people based on “politically incorrect” standards, to hate to their heart’s content so long as no violence is used as a means, to shout down people based on their demographics or political opinions, to be openly racist and sexist, to exclude and isolate and be generally malcontented with modernity, and to reject civil standards of values and etiquette in favor of antisocial norms.
These two impulses are radically different. The first values the social peace that emerges from freedom, while the second values the freedom to reject cooperation in favor of gut-level prejudice. The first wants to reduce the role of power and privilege in the world, while the second wants the freedom to assert power and privilege within the strict confines of private property rights and the freedom to disassociate.
To be sure, liberty does allow both the humanitarian and the brutalist perspective, as implausible as that might seem. Liberty is large and expansive and asserts no particular social end as the one and only way. Within the framework of liberty, there is the freedom to love and to hate. At the same time, they constitute very different ways of looking at the world — one liberal in the classical sense and one illiberal in every sense — and it is good to consider that before you, as a libertarian, find yourself allied with people who are missing the main point of the liberal idea.
In my experience, most of the people who espouse these “brutalist” notions are not people who have ever identified as libertarians.
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The Three Teachings – Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism l HISTORY OF CHINA
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 1 Aug 2015The Three Teachings Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism have been a backbone of Chinese society and culture since the bronze age. The Three teachings are still intertwined strongly with today’s China. There are different interpretations to China’s chore faiths. Over time, different dynasties favoured different faiths, if only to define themselves against their predecessor. Ultimately though, its all about the philosophy of combining spirituality with every day life. All about the Three Teachings now on IT’S HISTORY.
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QotD: Worstall’s Law of Organizations
I would, and do, argue that this is, in fact, the inevitable fate of all and any organizations, so much so that we might call it Worstall’s Law of Organizations, perhaps a minor corollary to Parkinson’s Laws. All and any organizations will in the end be run by those who stay awake in committee. A brief survey of the world around us will show that this is a simple and obvious truth.
Tim Worstall, “‘Any Organization Will, In the End, Be Run By Those Who Stay Awake in Committee'”, Ideas in Action, 2005-06-23.
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January 29, 2018
A new collection of H.L. Mencken’s “The Free Lance” columns
In Reason, Bill Kauffman reviews S.T. Joshi’s new selection from H.L. Mencken’s Baltimore Evening Sun essays:
The longtime Baltimore Evening Sun columnist, American Mercury editor, and rumbustiously splenetic critic, who graced this orb from 1880 to 1956, would not be published in any major newspaper today. The reasons he foresaw over a century ago, when he decried the “cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing” whose purpose was the extirpation, the annihilation, of anything resembling a robust exchange of ideas. Two beliefs puffed up the righteous censor, according to Mencken: first, “that any man who dissents from the prevailing platitudes is a hireling of the devil,” and second, “that he should be silenced and destroyed forthwith. Down with free speech; up with the uplift!”
Plus ça change and all that.
S.T. Joshi, who has chosen his primary scholarly interests — Mencken, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ambrose Bierce — with a fine eye for readability over reputation, has assembled a selection of Mencken’s Evening Sun “Free Lance” columns of 1911–1915 into a book called A Saturnalia of Bunk and contributed an informative introduction to it.
Henry Louis Mencken churned out six of these 1,200-word meringues every week, a vertiginous pace that makes Joyce Carol Oates look like Harper Lee.
Logorrheic bloggers aside, does anyone really have that much to say about the controversies of the day? Mencken once nicked Bierce for reprinting his early work, which was “filled with epigrams against frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old and puerile newspaper controversies.” Is A Saturnalia of Bunk similarly irrelevant?
Happily, no. Although Mencken’s fusillades against, say, blue laws have grown fusty, his rousing conclusions — “the militant moralist tries to steal liberty and self-respect, and the man who has lost both is a man who has lost everything that separates a civilized freeman from a convict in a chain-gang” — have lost none of their punch.
These columns, composed while their author was on the shy side of middle age, afford, says Joshi, “a nearly complete view of Mencken’s political, religious, social, and cultural philosophy as it had evolved up to this point” — and this philosophy would largely remain constant for the rest of his rooted life. (Mencken, a dyed-in-the-wool third-generation Baltimorean, a sardonic citizen of his place, made his home in the house in which he grew up.)
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Cheng I Sao – Pirate Queen – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 27 Jan 2018She was the most ferocious pirate China had ever known. She was a powerful fleet commander, a sharp businesswoman, and a consummate strategist. She was Cheng I Sao, leader of the Pirate Confederation, and she lived her life on her terms.
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“… those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike [Jordan Peterson] more than the honest progressives I know”
Zachary Slayback tries to discover why so many intellectuals dislike Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson:
I’ve spent the last few years thinking about how to upend higher education and have worked with some leading entrepreneurs and thinkers in this space. Continually, we come back to the question of liberal arts education and its value (remember, I studied philosophy!). Some people are too quick to dismiss liberal arts education as useless and not worth the time. Instead, they insist on purely vocational education. Yet many of the most successful and happiest individuals I know are widely read (rarely because of their college courses), can discuss ideas from Aristotle to Jung to Jacobs with you, and love the idea of entertaining big ideas.
I visited Peterson’s lectures and found them to be nuanced, intricate, and to jump well between clinical experience, psychological research (most of which was well-validated, hard to do in psychology), and Jungian myth interpretation. When he released his Bible lecture series, I found myself, for the first time since I was a child, intimately listening about the ideas that go into religion and how these ideas surface elsewhere in the culture. More than a decade of skepticism towards religious texts due to their shallow readings and uses for the Joel Osteens of the world melted away.
His lectures rarely touch on politics in any capacity. When it gets brought up, he’s quick to note that he does not oppose calling trans individuals by their pronouns but that he opposes having his language dictated by a central political committee. This seems commonsensical to me. Part of what made the American and Canadian traditions so egalitarian is their rejection of forced speech and titles.
And for those who listen to Peterson, he bridges any kind of ideological gap (in fact, those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike him more than the honest progressives I know). Peterson’s worldview is a classical liberal rejection of collectivism (an ideology that killed more than 50 million people in the 20th century alone) while simultaneously not falling into an atomized view of the individual relative to his culture.
Just last week, I met with an acquaintance in San Francisco, the Mecca of American political correctness, who described herself as a “liberal democrat type,” who had listened to and met Peterson at a company event. She admitted that she couldn’t read into his politics and found his talk compelling about the nature of the world, men in it today, and why people like Peterson must appeal to so many people outside the San Francisco and Washington DC bubbles. She was explicit in saying that she was neither a libertarian nor a conservative and still Peterson motivated her to introspect, read into Jungian archetypes, and better understand the culture that shapes the world.
She’s not alone. I regularly speak to friends and acquaintances from across the political spectrum who find value in Peterson’s talks. These are people years out of college (or who never went) who now pick up classics like Dostoyevsky, Jung, Neumann, and even the Bible with a critical intellectual lens. Peterson regularly talks about and shares letters from fans who admit that his moralistic talks inspired them to pull themselves together and “sort themselves out” by figuring out what they want from life and pursuing that. r/JordanPeterson (yes, he has his own subreddit) is filled to the brim with stories of people saying how Peterson helped them get control of their lives and navigate the world.
I’ve bought but not yet read Peterson’s recent book, 12 Rules for Life. It’s not the sort of thing I usually read, so I’m not quite sure what to expect (Indigo says it’ll be delivered tomorrow).
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