Posts

Material Analysis 2019

Historical Materialism was once all the rage. Freakonomics is historical materialism without Marx. I am giving an overview and then showing how Marx and basic questions about material conditions can enlighten. Review of Marx Wading through the invective and gossip of three or four volumes of Marx’s Capital to find the nuggets is tedious: dictatorship of the proletariat labor theory of value class struggle money isn’t capital failure of colonialism Centralization of production leads to unions. business cycle Competition drives down margins in investment and production. Profit requires disaster and  disruption. You’re welcome. Sorry if I missed any. These ideas have been absorbed into common use. Occasionally an economist makes a living inveighing against or rediscovering one. Bernanke’s bad asset class or Tom Peter’s excellence, for instance. Here is a list of some other market issues:    Winners change the rules.   Pa...

Historical Inevitability and United States History

Usually historical inevitability means the king is great, the empire will last forever and I want to keep my job. The counter story, Noah, Gilgamesh or Ur, is that when you live on a delta surrounded by mountains things may change, someone building a boat in the middle of a plain may not be ridiculous and you should be nice to the hill kids. The first to directly disagree with inevitability as permanence was Adam Smith. Smith liked explanations. Smith said empires inevitably fall because they are inefficient.   He attempted to convince England to abandon empire, particularly the American colonies. Wealth of Nations , Smith’s book, is not taught despite its central place in political and economic philosophy. I think the fall of civilizations is more basic. I was in Cahokia, Illinois at the Native American trash heaps. The museum said that this town only lasted about two or three hundred years and they didn’t know why. Two or three hundred years is a decent run. How long can pe...

Writer Club Introduction

-Melville, why do you use those goofy words? Cervantes, enough with the flowery language. Joyce, what are you doing? Shakespeare, you can’t just make up words, speak English. Twain, does historical context justify child abuse? When you come to writers club you will receive our raw first impression. We may not get it. One of our authors wrote a lovely piece about Spellman College. I felt I was there. She fell in with an agent who had a set demographic. Watching the metamorphosis of her piece was heart breaking.   Today, just as anyone can be President, everyone can publish. This is a problem. We can’t be your editor. We can be a test audience. We are fussy about grammar, syntax, spelling and quotation marks. We like consistent point of view, linear exposition, flow, simple language and show not tell. We often don’t agree. We are here as a service. If you don’t like a ground rule, change it for your review. I prefer someone read my piece. That allows me to observe the audie...

Ether Revisited

A deficiency of blogging is that subsequent posts supersede the originals. I use this blog as a Pensieve so I don’t modify posts. Instead I have adopted the convention of revisited in the title. The prosaic explanation of dark matter is that it is composed of Neutrinos. I am a fan of the prosaic. Whatever it is there has to be a lot of it. It has to have mass. I believe it has to propagate light. Does it have the sole property of propagation? Does it propagate in cooperation with other materials?   Does it only show this ability in vacuum? Since light bends in gravity I am unable to think of a distinction between inert photons, static neutrinos and current theories. Can we create, however faint, the laser affect within vacuum? If the ether material lases it should maximize at specific frequencies, identifying the particles. Christine suggested dissipated gravity waves as an explanation of the chatter.

Calling It for Ether

Ether has long been used for explaining the propagation of light. Aristotle discussed Ether. Given electromagnetic waves, the implication that light has to propagate through something seemed reasonable.   Ether went the way of phlogiston and caloric when Michelson and Morley split a light beam, then bounced the two perpendicular rays back to each other and found no difference in diffraction. If it can’t be measured then forget about it. The Dark Matter theory accounts for the difference between observed mass and the behavior of galaxies by positing an entity that exists in a vacuum yet has mass. Dark Matter seems a misnomer as it allows for the transmission of light. Exists in a vacuum, has mass and propagates light, sounds like Ether to me. Abandoning Ether leads to the wave particle duality and quantum theories.   Why is it that a child without any apparent ability of concentration or interest can intently spend their entire playground time pouring sand through a s...

Gas Operated

I recently attempted to drive clutch again. For those who can, it is perfectly easy to depress the clutch while pressing the gas. For the rest of us, it is difficult. Without automatic transmission the roads would be far safer, bicycles and public transportation far more popular and spouses more faithful.   Whether or not you do so, if you can’t drive stick you are not a competent human being and shouldn’t have a car. Guns today are different than they were. That is why all the quick draw McGraw’s and shootemup   Joes are out there. I don’t mind the people who have been raised with guns and understand the culture and behavior that requires. But those people are a very small group, and you probably won’t hear from them. All guns are artillery in the sense that their projectiles have a parabolic trajectory. In order to have any range bullets have to go up and come down. It is horrifying to see the Drill kids, called that because they are proud that they don’t know how ...

Taxes

Milton Friedman made his living arguing that the Federal Reserve caused the 1929 stock market crash and thus the Great Depression by jacking around discount rates.  Economic argument is difficult. We cannot even prove that the stock market crash caused the Great Depression. But his point that the Fed should be considerate, respectful and measured is well taken. As any driver can tell you, when you don’t know what you are doing, it is better to do it slowly. Fiscal policy should be deliberate as well.  When there is uncertainty it is difficult to plan or invest. The new tax law dumps everything into the chipper. People keep talking about individual effect or ethic. The real problem is that we have no idea what the cumulative impact will be. That is bad. What will be the systemic impact on America? This law assumes instability. It was passed in the belief that many issues will be addressed in subsequent legislation. What a wonderful fetcher, how can Congress not shake that ...