If Ye Ask Me, We're All Doomed

That was the famous quote by The Scotsman in "Dad's Army".
Just have a read of this article by Ross Gittins in the SMH:

"The four most disproportionately influential industries in Australia, they say, are superannuation, banking, mining and gambling."

Note that in my view, these are all useless to the common citizen:  I for one still strongly suspect that my super money will magically disappear before I get to collect whatever pittance is left after the administration fees because they are are playing with my super money on the giant casino called "The stock market". 
Then there is the news that the Super percentage is to be increased, which will place additional pressures on employers and drive more small operators out of business, but who cares, right?

I don't even need to say anything about the banks.

Mining giants are working hard to get rid of employees by bringing in computer operated machinery,  but then they never employed that many people anyway: they have those huge machines for good reason - employees are costly and troublesome, don't you know?

Gambling? An "industry"? Not in my definition: I thought an industry produced something useful for it's customers.  It needs a new definition, something like "parasitic business that slowly kills the host".

So in short, none of these operations does anything much for the good of the nation or (perish the thought) the citizens (or "consumers" as they are now called), but they have a disproportionate influence on government . . . . . .

Oh, that's right, that's called "corruption". 

World's Greatest Patent Troll?

Read here about Jerome Lemelson, a man who spent his whole life suing for patents, not only that though: he figured out how to scam the patent system so that he could sue for patents he didn't actually have by posting an application years before that was deliberately vague so that when the technology developed he could "amend" his existing patent and sue those who actually developed the invention.
This guy never invented anything: all he ever did was suck from corporations and businesses using the power of lawyers.
Amazing stuff, I would call it legal crime.
 It just makes me wonder what other dodgy operations are going on like this today.
Thanks to Fortune Magazine for the article.

Bring on the Robot Lawyers

"Scientology defectors queue up to claim back multimillions of 'misused' donations"

 Note that the "defectors" have some serious complaints, but not about church policy as such but rather about what has been done with moneys they donated for specific purposes that it seems did not get  there.   Don't believe a word of any church that was invented by a failed science fiction writer folks.  My own "Church Of Nothing" could also come into that category but then I don't want you to believe anything at all, so it is truly exempt. It also does not ever ask for any money from anyone. :) 

I cannot safely criticise one "religion" without criticising all of them for similar reasons: In my view they should all be paying tax on their income at the very least.  

I really wish they had to prove the validity of their preposterous claims in a court of law in order to get permission to operate, but sadly that is never going to happen. It might make great entertainment though . . . . . 

A lot of ventures that begin with good intentions seem to be hijacked by power hungry ratbags who then adjust the rules so they can get rich off the efforts and donations of "followers".

Bring on the Robot Lawyers I say. A machine that has no emotions cannot be emotionally manipulated and with ruthless  rationality, the mountains of bullshit that cloud he minds of people today could perhaps be reduced to foothills of foolishness in less than a century.

The Liars And Robbers Exposed

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

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Neo-liberals' economic policy just a get-rich-quicker fraud

Date

January 21, 2013

Category

Opinion

George Monbiot

How they must bleed for us. Last year, the world's 100 richest people became $241 billion richer. They are now worth $1.9 trillion.
This is not the result of chance. The rise in the fortunes of the super-rich is the direct result of policies. Here are a few: the reduction of tax rates and tax enforcement; governments' refusal to recoup a decent share of revenues from minerals and land; the privatisation of public assets and the creation of a toll-booth economy; wage liberalisation and the destruction of collective bargaining.
The policies that made the global monarchs so rich are the policies squeezing everyone else. This is not what the theory predicted. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples - in a thousand business schools, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and just about every modern government - have argued that the less governments tax the rich, defend workers and redistribute wealth, the more prosperous everyone will be. Any attempt to reduce inequality would damage the efficiency of the market, impeding the rising tide that lifts all boats. The apostles have conducted a 30-year global experiment, and the results are in. Total failure.
Before I go on, I should point out that I don't believe perpetual economic growth is either sustainable or desirable. But if growth is your aim - an aim to which every government claims to subscribe - you couldn't make a bigger mess of it than by releasing the super-rich from the constraints of democracy.

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Last year's annual report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development should have been an obituary for the neo-liberal model developed by Hayek and Friedman and their disciples. It shows unequivocally that their policies have created the opposite outcomes to those they predicted. As neo-liberal policies (cutting taxes for the rich, privatising state assets, deregulating labour, reducing social security) began to bite from the 1980s onwards, growth rates started to fall and unemployment to rise.
The remarkable growth in the rich nations during the '50s, '60s and '70s was made possible by the destruction of the wealth and power of the elite, as a result of the 1930s Depression and World War II. Their embarrassment gave the other 99 per cent an unprecedented chance to demand redistribution, state spending and social security, all of which stimulated demand.
Neo-liberalism was an attempt to turn back these reforms. Lavishly funded by millionaires, its advocates were amazingly successful - politically. Economically they flopped.
Throughout the OECD countries taxation has become more regressive: the rich pay less, the poor pay more. The result, the neo-liberals claimed, would be that economic efficiency and investment would rise, enriching everyone. The opposite occurred. As taxes on the rich and on business diminished, the spending power of both the state and poorer people fell - and demand contracted. The result was that investment rates declined, in step with companies' expectations of growth.
The neo-liberals also insisted that unrestrained inequality in incomes and flexible wages would reduce unemployment. But throughout the rich world both inequality and unemployment have soared. The recent jump in unemployment in most developed countries - worse than in any previous recession of the past three decades - was preceded by the lowest level of wages as a share of gross domestic product since World War II. Bang goes the theory. It failed for the same obvious reason: low wages suppress demand, which suppresses employment.
As wages stagnated, people supplemented their income with debt. Rising debt fed the deregulated banks, with consequences of which we are all aware. The greater inequality becomes, the UN report finds, the less stable the economy and the lower its rates of growth. The policies with which neo-liberal governments seek to reduce their deficits and stimulate their economies are counterproductive.
''Relearning some old lessons about fairness and participation,'' the UN says, ''is the only way to eventually overcome the crisis and pursue a path of sustainable economic development.''
As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the US, it strikes me that the entire structure of neo-liberal thought is a fraud. The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with power.
Guardian News & Media
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Every so often an article comes along that just says everything better than I can say it, and this is one of those.  What I want see now is what (if anything) is going to be done about it . . . . . . 
 

Egyptian Science

My seven year old niece introduced me to Horrible Histories, which is so good (being both truthful and entertaining) I had trouble choosing which one to show . . . .  and then I found this one.
Some day not too far in the future, our scientists will probably be regarded with the same respect this gent gets. Enjoy.

Degeneration

Form Paul Sheehan at The Sydney Morning Herald:

We cannot slow down and it is at our peril

"The future is accelerating. It is racing towards us faster than ever in our collective lives. How can that be known, you must ask, given that the future hasn't happened yet. It hasn't happened but a long-term pattern of accelerating life-cycles of societies is established.
''This is a deep trend of history,'' writes a futurologist, Michael Lee, in a new book, Knowing Our Future. ''It would be foolish to believe this [deep trend] can be easily reversed … Civilisations have life cycles, too, and their durations are shrinking over time.
''The lifespan of socio-political empires averaged 2000 years for a period of four millennia, but then more than halved with the next 1000 years of history. This sharp decrease in the lifespan of civilisations accelerated yet again in the following 500 years of history, dropping to a little over one-tenth of their average duration in ancient times.''
Lee's study of this deep trend was in part based on the work of Robert Samet, a civil engineer and futurologist who traced the duration of societies over history. In Long-Range Futures Research (2008), he described a striking shrinkage in the longevity of empires and cultures: ''The earliest civilisations between 3500 BC and AD 500 last for an average of 2000 years … In the period from AD 500-1500, the average duration was 500 to 1000 years … since AD 1500 … the average duration has been 200 to 500 years.''

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Signs of an accelerating pattern of vulnerability and decline in our own western model of society are offered by the world's most famous economic historian, Professor Niall Ferguson. This year he used the Reith Lectures to chart the elements of decay in the Western civilisation. He gave his lecture series the gloomy and arresting title, The Great Degeneration, just released as a book.
He argues that advanced Western societies are developing sclerosis, manifest in the envelopment of life in bureaucratic and legal red tape. The most advanced economies are also becoming increasingly mendicant societies, evidenced by the unsustainable growth of social welfare spending in the European Union, the United States and, in a longer-term trend, Australia.
Among the telling low-lights offered by The Great Degeneration:

•   The advanced nations which have created public and private debt larger than their gross domestic products confront a narrow range of options. They must raise the rate of growth above the rate of interest. If they cannot, they must default on a large proportion of public debt. Or wipe out debts via currency depreciation and inflation.

•   The real rate of structural unemployment is concealed by the mendicant state. In the three years from June 2009 to June 2012, the world's largest economy, the US, created 2.4 million jobs but 3.3 million Americans were awarded disabled worker benefits. ''Unemployment is being concealed - and rendered permanent - in ways all too familiar to Europeans.''

•   The financial crisis in 2007 had its origins in over-complex regulations not just misguided deregulation.

• ''All political systems are likely to succumb to sclerosis, mainly because of rent-seeking activities by organised interest groups.''

• The rule of law is increasingly being superseded and displaced by the rule of lawyers.

If this lecture series could be summed up in a single sentence it is this: when a majority of people vote for a living rather than work for a living, democracy, freedom and living standards are all in a lock-step of decline.
Ferguson is also a noted critic of casino capitalism but even his concerns about the emerging dominance of the vast financial derivatives market pale when compared with the details provided in another book published this year, Dark Pools, by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Scott Patterson.
The accelerating cycles of capitalism's creative disruption have reached a new velocity with the basic form known as stock trading. Sixty years ago, the average stock trade involved buying and holding a stock for four years. By 2000, that average holding period had shrunk to eight months. By 2008, it was two months. By 2011, it was 22 seconds. It would be even less now.
Patterson describes the global financial market as ''a worldwide matrix of dazzlingly complex algorithms, interlinked computer hubs the size of football fields, and high-octane trading robots guided by the latest advances in artificial intelligence''.
''With electronic trading, a placeless, faceless, post-modern cyber-market in which computers communicated at warp speed, that physical sense of the market's flow had vanished … Regular investors, of course, had little idea about the massive transfer of wealth that was taking place.''
The transfer of wealth upwards over the past quarter-century is well documented as a byproduct of global capitalism.
Then there is climate change, an encompassing process of accelerating change and disruption. The ideology of manic economic growth, driven by the false wisdom that technology can conquer problems caused by technology, is clearly having a global impact on the environment caused by the reality that 7 billion people now live on the planet and the average person is consuming far more than ever before in history. That this must significantly affect not just the environment but the global climate invokes the most basic and self-evident commonsense.
The world's scientific community has presented a compelling case that the acceleration of global consumption is in turn accelerating the much deeper natural pattern of climate change.
If you feel like life around you is speeding up, especially the cycle of invention to obsolescence, it's not you, it's everyone and everything."
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There are some very interesting things in this opinion article, which is why I post it here complete.
I don't agree with everything here but there are some observations that really are spot-on, for example this one:
" when a majority of people vote for a living rather than work for a living, democracy, freedom and living standards are all in a lock-step of decline."
This is something that  amazes me: people who think they deserve a free ride, who want to do nothing and sit at a desk and collect bags of money for it. This is a moral failure. Society is built on trade and exchange: the trading of services (your labour) for credit exchangeable for goods and other services.

What has happenned? I suspect the main reason for the failure here is that we see others who appear to have done nothing for their wealth and thus people say to themselves "why should I be working if they have more than me yet they don't work at all as hard as me?" . . . . . except it is all a lie.
Money for nothing is worth nothing.

Bye Gerry

Gerry Anderson, creator of Supermarionation TV shows Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and others, has died at 83.
Thunderbirds had a big impact on me as a youngster: not only were there groovy zooming ships and gadgets, they did it all to SAVE people,  and yet there was still room for explosions, monsters and secret agents.

The only thing that came close since was Team America: World Police which you could say went further  - and it was inspired by Thunderbirds.