Multiples

Now

Then

So, Russell comments on my post from the fifteenth.

45% of the 1.6 million Afghanistan/Iraq veterans are claiming compensation for injuries, versus 21% of Gulf War vets. They are also claiming far more injuries (10+) than earlier vets - although that may be an effort to make a lot of "minor" injuries add up to enough to count as disability.

I get thinking.  The bare stats that Russell cites seems to be a critique of the current crop of discharged vets, a subtle slam that they are trying to "milk" the system to a greater degree than the vets of the past.

OK, this is the longest time period that troops have ever been deployed.  The nature of the Army is different, no longer a draftee army doing a single tour and then back to the world, but a volunteer army doing multiple deployments under a single enlistment.

So more folks are asking for disabilities?  Yes, I would imagine that it is true and fair.

Every time you go to see the elephant, you start from zero and go into another, discrete probability space where you can get fucked up.  Each discrete tour adds to the overall possibility you will get fucked up.  Training fucks you up.  The military uses people like a person with a cold uses kleenex.

So, we have been abusing the hell out of these kids and then are surprised when they come back damaged.  I remember one of the reasons we stayed in that shithole Iraq as long as we did is the oh-so-moral "you break it, you buy it" rule.

So why is that not the case with veterans?

Dave's on a Downer

I really like Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire.  He does write a mean criticism of modern civilization,  but as is the tendency of most folks who dabble in the realm of truth, he does tend to get a little gloomy when he presents the hard numbers (but, who doesn't)

World population milestones (USCB estimates)

Population (in billions)	1		2		3		4		5		6		7		8		9
Year	1804		1927		1960		1974		1987		1999		2012		2027		2046
Years elapsed between milestones	––		123		33		14		13		12		13		15		19

Now, even with my empathy meter for Dave's depression set on high, I still can't quite get to the point where "humanity is fucked".  Because, truth be told, the astronomic numbers for growth of population and CO2 just doesn't seem to be an issue to me because I doubt that they will ever be achieved.

You have to consider the issues in tandem, along with resource depletion, and loss of arable land/fertility.  The greater bulk of humanity is not going to be offered an opportunity to replace itself in the near future.  This simple fact is due to we will soon be approaching hard limits to the ability to feed new population.  The green revolution is petering out and the ability to conjure food out of petroleum will be limited along with the supply of petroleum.   The warming of planet earth due to the waste products of the now-getting-limited petroleum will start to whittle away at the arable land, further decreasing the carrying capacity of the planet.

When the scenario outlined in the previous paragraph (I am referring to this as the "that's going to leave a mark" scenario) starts getting traction, there will be a continuing set of adjustments to population.  Malnutrition will have infant and child mortality skyrocketing.  Malnutrition will also start limiting the birth rate in countries where the birth rate is out of control.   Wars will begin to get access to resources (read here: food), diseases like attacking weakened prey.  The population will decrease.  It will suck.

Population by continent

Continent name	Density (inhabitants/km2)	Population (2011)	Most populous country	Most populous city
Asia	86.7	4,140,336,501	China (1,341,403,687)	Tokyo (35,676,000)
Africa	32.7	994,527,534	Nigeria (152,217,341)	Cairo (19,439,541)
Europe	70	738,523,843	Russia (143,300,000; approx. 110 million in Europe)	Moscow (14,837,510)
North America	22.9	528,720,588	United States (313,485,438)	Mexico City/Metro Area(8,851,080 / 21,163,226)
South America	21.4	385,742,554	Brazil (190,732,694)	São Paulo (19,672,582)
Australia/Oceania	4.25	36,102,071	Australia (22,612,355)	Sydney (4,575,532)
Antarctica	0.0003 (varies)	4,490 (non-permanent, varies)[18]	N/A[note 1]	McMurdo Station (955)[19]

The truth of the matter here is that Professor Ehrlich has always been right.  Population biology will hold to human populations as well as rabbit populations.  Technology won't make a silk purse out of the sow's ear.

But, in my patented "that's going to leave a mark" scenario, the population of good old planet earth will take a tumble.  My guess is that in around 2200 CE the earth will be looking at an principally agrarian human population of around 750 million souls.  All of whom will refer to the period of time from 1900 to 2025 as "Those Fucking Idiots".

But among those 750 million souls will be philosophers, whores, farmers, carpenters, singers, thieves, politicians, religious fanatics, doubting Thomas's. and clowns.

No, the human race will be just fine, hell, we may even learn something from this.

What do they do?

Courtesy of the Demotivators

So, over at the Zerohedge site when I came across this little gem.   It was a cross post Submitted by Jim Quinn from The Burning Platform.

A true rant about the lazy bastards who suck off of social security and how the system is already broke. Well, I will certainly agree that the money is gone.  CongressCritters stole it a long time ago to pay for their pet projects.

Hmmm.  So what is trying to be said here?

This is the quote which really intrigued me.

Just because the scumbags on Wall Street and in the rest of corporate America commit fraud on a massive scale does not mean we should look the other way when lowlifes in our community do the same thing on a smaller scale. 

Wow.

Everyone is trying to pay no attention whatsoever to the fact that the world has changed a lot lately.  A person who goes on SSDI is now a "lowlife".  Now, even if the person is capable of working, just what job is available to them?  I haven't seen a huge increase in the job creation numbers lately.  Truth be told, job creation doesn't even appear to keeping up with population growth.

So what we are developing is a class of non-working poor who still wish to eat and have a warm place to shit.   The jobs that they once held are gone to China and the inexorable push of robotics and computerization.  In other words, in the words of Bruce:

"Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back

to your hometown"

So, what I am wondering is what do we do?  SSDI is being used in a manner it was not being designed for:  the long term support of effectively unemployable persons.  Some folks squeak about this, but the truth be told, the folks that are applying are usually without any other options.

Being older, under-educated, slow, and unemployable in a compressive collapse is a pretty shitty place to be.  The folks that I know who are going this route are any number of combinations of the above.

Over and over again, I keep asking what do we do with folks who don't have the intelligence or tools to compete in a job market that is being shrink to fits the needs of shareholders?   Hell, the government even allows companies to deduct the cost of buying the robots being used to kick people out the door.  You don't have to look far to find a story about the jobs that used to be.

What do we do?

Hiding the facts behind graphs

The Daily Kos is one of my everyday reads.  Not because I agree with their views, but because they best represent the current thoughts of the liberal hoi polloi.  They do have the occasional well thought out articles  which force me to modify and burnish my world view.  But for the most part, they have the same role and one-sided world view that the right-wing sites do, it is just a mirror image.

So, when this graph came up on their site as a means of convincing me that we should immediately start hiring more government employees, I got a big giggle when the following chart came to the surface as a piece of evidence for more cops and government employees.

OK, so following the 1981 recession, the public sector employment went up to 103% of the starting point.  The next point that the cherry picked is the 1991 recession when it went up to 103% of the starting point of that recession.  The 2001 recession was brutal with the poor guvmint workers in that they only gained up to 101% of their recession starting point.

So lets do some basic math.  

100 x 1.03 x 1.03 x 1.01 = 1.07.  

That means that recessions usually cause the number of government employees to go up.  The last three recessions have netted a nice little 7% increase in total government employment in the period 1981 to 2007.

The folks over at the KOS are whining because since 2007, the guvmint employess (or as I call the The Daily Kos' "Base") has actually gone down 2%.  So, back to math.  

100 x 1.03 x 1.03 x 1.01 x 0.98 =1.05

So even the the rapacious and draconian cuts in government employment since 2007 (2%!!!!!) leaves us with a 5% increase in total government employment in the ten or so years of the thirty-two tear period that this graph digests.  

So what does the whole picture look like?

So, what I see is in 1981, the number of government employees was around 15 million, in 2008 it was around 22.5 million.  The implication from the Daily Kos article is that they only grew around 7%, when in fact, they grew around 50%.  

Big difference there.  The take home lesson of this little morality play is that when you see someone cherry pick from a time frame and then start presenting little games like percentage lost/gain, you can be utterly assured that they are trying to hide the real data.

Savings and Loans

In a way, part of me wants to get pissed off now that the FedGuv is replacing the bonds in the government retirement accounts with IOU's from the treasury.  If you don't already know about this, it is part of the “extraordinary measures” of the Washington charade.

Treasury is reducing the amount of debt held by a federal employees retirement fund, known as the G-fund.  What they don't say is the reduction is made by replacing the short term government bonds kept there by a hand-printed IOU from Timmy Geithner.

At first, when this last happened during the previous installment of the Washington debt-crisis-follies,  they looted the G-fund and replaced it when the check came in.  So I sat down and though about it for a while.  I drank a glass of wine and watched the sun go down and came to the not-very-earth-shattering conclusion that they are just changing the form of the IOU.

Bonds are IOU's.  Nothing more nothing less.  When the clowns in the House of Representatives go to grandstanding about not paying the bills (read here, raising the debt limit) all they are doing is making themselves look like asses.  If Timmy and Barry want to give them more rope by replacing on IOU in an account with another IOU, what the hell is the problem.

I figure that my retirement fund has no better than a 50/50 chance of getting to the promised land anyway.  At least this way I can derive some comedy points by watching the clowns shoot themselves in the foot.

Is it just me

Or could it be that this scene in the finest film ever made is an excellent metaphor for the "Fiscal Cliff" negotiations now beginning in Washington DC.

Now, the trouble that I am having is distinguishing who is playing who.  Simplicity in metaphor would be Obama playing the sheriff and the congruscritters playing the town.  But, truth be told, the Washington rolls may well be reversed.  Who is holding who hostage?  Is Cleavon little actually using Boehner as a role model?  Time will tell the cast in this Opera Buffa.

It is a great scene.  Washington DC's ham-handed cover of it may leave a lot to be desired

Critical Point Point

Inflection Point Courtesy Wikipedia

In calculus, a critical point of a function of a real variable is any value in the domain where either the function is not differentiable or its derivative is 0.  The value of the function at a critical point is a critical value of the function. These definitions admit generalizations to functions of several variables, differentiable maps between Rm and Rn, and differentiable maps between differentiable manifolds.

 From Wikipedia

The Critical Point

It is what we are all trying to see.  It is the holy grail of the blogosphere.

For some reason, all of here in the odd little subculture of Doomerland we are obsessed with the idea of nailing down the Year, Date, Hour, and Minute of the process.  But I am thinking that this is a bit of an affectation on our part.  A way to show that, by God, we have been right all along.

But in truth, the point which we are so desperately looking for is not nearly as important as the shape of the curve.

Except in the simplest cases, one cannot expect observation alone to reveal the effect of the use of an aspect of economics. One cannot assume, just because one can observe economics being used in an economic process, that the process is thereby altered significantly. It might be that the use of economics is epiphenomenal—an empty gloss on a process that would have had essentially the same outcomes without it,

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera

Evolving as a goal

So, there was an article in Der Spiegel recently with an interview by Dennis Meadows, one the authors of  "The Limits to Growth".  Now, those of you who have the poor time management skills needed to make the  effort to regularly read this blog will be fully aware of my abiding respect for this work.  That being said, this isn't a work about how my opinion has changed, but rather, a set of observations on the way that the author and the blogosphere view the world.

The interviewer posits the standard set of questions to Dr. Meadows.  They are all well pitched softballs about the usual suspects:  Human ingenuity, the unexpected advent of a "imagine the profits that would accrue to the inventor of a new, clean and limitless source of energy." scenario.   They are all just ways or trying to make the interviewee look like a gloomy Gus, which in this age of mandatory "power of positive thinking" is the same as painting him a nut.

But there is one quote that stood out in my mind.

Meadows: The problem that faces our societies is that we have developed industries and policies that were appropriate at a certain moment, but now start to reduce human welfare, like for example the oil and car industry. Their political and financial power is so great and they can prevent change. It is my expectation that they will succeed. This means that we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change.

 Now, I can see nothing wrong with this statement.  Homo Sapiens has always evolved in exactly the fashion described.  It is the way of the world, it is no big deal.  We have to reduce the population of the world by quite a significant amount.  What is happening now is that we are trying to definehttp://theautomaticearth.com/Earth/quote-of-the-year-and-the-next.html the method to be used in the cull.  Our problems lie in the arenas of energy use, resource depletion, and overpopulation.  We tend to fixate on a secondary characteristic of financial crisis, but in truth, that is merely an epiphenomenon secondary to the big three.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when Raúl Meijer over at the Automatic Earth took a look at the same article.  He did steal my end piece by getting there first and anticipating my conclusions, and then he had the gall to write them down in a more polished and erudite manner than I possibly could.

We evolve the way Stephen Jay Gould described evolution: through punctuated equilibrium. That is, we pass through bottlenecks, forced upon us by the circumstances of nature, only in the case of the present global issues we are nature itself. And there's nothing we can do about it. If we don't manage to understand this dynamic, and very soon, those bottlenecks will become awfully narrow passages, with room for ever fewer of us to pass through. 

As individuals we need to drastically reduce our dependence on the runaway big systems, banking, the grid, transport etc., that we ourselves built like so many sorcerers apprentices, because as societies we can't fix the runaway problems with those systems, and they are certain to drag us down with them if we let them.

 So here is the nub of the matter.  We are going to be going through a evolutionary bottleneck in the not-too-distant future.  Perhaps I will live to participate, perhaps not.   But if you spend some time reading the works of Darwin and Wallace it seems to me that if Homo Sapiens is going to survive or evolve, it is going to be necessary to adapt quickly and in groups.  That being said, it becomes apparent to me that surrounding oneself with the accouterments of the society that is already failing (read here:  Band-aids, Beans, and Bullets) would not give one any adaptational or evolutionary advantage.

The standard preppers fare is a way to defend a lifestyle that is being killed by reality.  A defensive position will always be overrun.  Especially when the opponent is something as implacable as natural selection.  What is needed is not a physical redoubt, but a mental attitude capable of adapting to change.

Finally:  I found this graph and it made me giggle.  I thought that I would share with you.  A hearty call out to the Sub-Dude

The Robots, a bit of a ramble

The above clip is about Apples manufacturing process.  It is the thing that started off this ramble.   Don't blame me, blame Apple computer.

Notice how few people you see in the clip.  When you read the information available to us flesh and blood, you will be struck by the small number of people who will be employed by the making of these little marvels.

So, on a personal note, as I sit every day in my FedGuv cubicle, doing work for eight hours, I feel at the end of the day that I have done my bit and was part of the process of getting the mission completed.

That will be going away soon.  The new computer system that will be coming on line will make four of the six people who prepare the paperwork every day extraneous.  This is at a single VA.

No going back on this decision, nor am I certain that going back would be the right thing.  But the truth of the matter is, that decisions like this are removing jobs for people in this country.  When you add the moving of manufacture to foreign countries,  the increasingly disposable nature and inability to repair things, you are looking at an continuing loss of jobs here in the USA.

The jobs that most of us hold are really not all that important; they can, as in my personal instance, be easily replaced by a not-all-that-sophisticated computer program sold by General Electric or Oracle.  But the issue that is becoming increasingly important to the country and to millions of folks caught in the same middle class trap that I inhabit is simple.

What will I do to survive when this is gone?  The dogma espoused by the free-market types is that I will get up on my shanks mares and go out and find a new job with the new businesses constantly being pushed out of the ground by the saintly forces of "creative destruction" and the "invisible hand".

But, increasingly, businesses are coming to the conclusion that a simple purchase of capital equipment to replace the workers that used to do the jobs is vastly preferable to dealing with the vagaries of the workers.

Wow.

The state of the job market can be shown easily (Hat Tip to John Williams over at ShadowStats)

Now, I am not saying that Williams has the complete right of matter, he is not the all-seeing Eye of Providence, but I would tend to trust his take on things over the politically-motivated pablum over at BLS.   So the idea of just up and finding a new job with an unemployment rate of >20% is not really in the cards.

This doesn't even consider the hard reality of my 60 years on the planet.   More than a third of unemployed older workers have been out of work for more than a year, and 55 percent (1.1 million) have been unempoyed for more than six months, up from 23 percent in 2007.  Older workers are great once you have them, but the truth is, they have a lot of problems that employers just don't want to deal with.

So, you are looking at options.  The options don't seem to be there.  Education is out, going to school at sixty to learn a new profession isn't a decent option, you will never earn enough to pay for the schooling itself.  That is just a straight dumb-ass move.

Moving to a new city where jobs are plentiful.  This mythical creature doesn't appear to exist.

So more and more, we are being cast loose in a society that really has no use for us.  The industrial base is being converted to a non-human format, and the wealth that once went to workers is now being distributed around the other wealthy.  The workers that remain are becoming increasingly susceptible to
the recursive processes described above.

I really can't see where this is going.  The flow of money to the already wealthy has to stop when the customer base that is systematically being destroyed by automation and outsourcing is finished.  When than happens, the pendulum will start swing the other way.  But who knows when that will occur.

Just so you guys know, I still haven't completely worked out my schedule for writing.  I need to sit down in the afternoon more and in the morning, less.

Right now I am working on a bit about robotics and automation.  But it is coming out slower than I anticipated.  As soon as it is ready I will trot it out.

I am wondering just how the games in Washington DC will conclude.  Currently it is the usual twaddle about "my friend on the other side of the aisle", and declarations about what the American People want (usually in parallel with the most recent large donation to their campaign fund.

The debt ceiling "crisis" is getting lubed up for use.  Timmy and Barry are out sacking the FedGuv Retirement plan for spare nickels.  It is amazing how people seem to forget that this is money (and I use that term in the loosest possible sense) that is going for bills that we have already run up.  So really we are talking about not paying the bills that we have already occurred (you know, like Illinois).

So, it is back to business as usual.  The folks in the front of the bus are trying like hell to prevent the power and perquisites that they hold from slipping away.  But they, like King Canute, cannot prevent the world from doing what it will.  The sand that is beneath their feet is being washed away by the tide.

Let's see how many more proclamations they can issue before the sand washes away from under thir feet.

Predictions?

Should I do any?  Is it a useful exercise or is it just a different way to gaze into my navel?

If any of you have any ideas on this give me a shout, otherwise, I may throw some out on Saturday when I have more time to chat and think (I'll also go and see the Hobbit).

As for the news for the past couple of days, I have never seen so much self-congratulation as group of people celebrate not really solving a totally unnecessary crisis that they created themselves.

Opening Windows

Getting close to winter here.  Been cold the past couple of days so the house gets closed up and the furnace goes on.  I am a true cheapskate, with the thermostat at 60 and sweaters on all the time.  Blankets stay in the living room and baking is done to prepare food and to heat the house.

Whenever I get the chance though, the windows go open and the stink of an old man and two teenage boys is flushed out.  Since it is sunny and around 37, the clear air outside is being exchanged for the aforementioned stink.

I am trying to start out the year writing and hope to continue throughout the year.  It does mellow me out and allows me to work through the issues and questions going through my brain.  I even notice a certain improvement in my disposition and better clarity in my thoughts when I write them down.  For some odd reason, writing what I am thinking down allows me to be less a reactionary dumbass and offers increased validity to my arguments.

Now that doesn't mean that what I post here is all that great, it just means that it is better than my thoughts and arguments without having it here.

Welcome to the New Year

First, a comment from the only country in the West with a security apparatus more intrusive than ours.

From The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

We will get fooled again (come to think of it, we have)