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The Age Warfare Era Has Officially Begun

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Economics has always assumed that Capital (K) and Labor (L) are complementary factors of production (Y). Look how pretty and sophisticated this economic abstraction looks Meaning, roughly, that you can't produce something with K if you don't have a bunch of people (L) pulling K's levers and buttons. Alas. As is the case with many things economists have cooked up in their simplistic, impossibly abstract assumptions, this is not even close to reality. K and L are fundamentally different. L is human; K isn't. K might be owned by a human (the Capitalist), but K does not function the same way as L does. K doesn't go to restaurants. K doesn't buy gifts for its family on Christmas. Any income K receives, it recycles it back into itself, compounding its power; into reinvestment, and away from restaurant dinners and Christmas shopping for the family because, well, K doesn't have a family. There used to be a time in the past when K and L formed a succe

Eunuchs vs. Civil Servants

You and I, inhabitants of the Americas, should all speak Chinese (or a derivative of it) instead of a European language. We don't, of course, because it was the Europeans who "discovered" ( for the second time ) this continent in 1492 and sparked a rat race among European States to stake a territory in the "virgin" lands of the "New World". China had all in its favor to beat the Europeans in the early 15th century. They led the world then in technological innovation: cast iron was  first invented  in China; the compass  was invented there ; gun powder was  first concocted there . Not to mention printing; the umbrella, porcelain, the wheelbarrow, hot air balloons, and even seismographs to measure earthquakes. How can you be that advanced and not attempt to conquer other lands to extract their resources? Well, they did. And succeeded.  Decades before  Columbus "discovered" La Hispaniola, the Chinese had reached as far as East Africa. Befo

The Search for a New Order

The search for a new social and economic world order continues in the middle of all this madness. At least in my head. Growth and its power-law dynamics brought us to a place where the losers can't hold it together any longer. Rage engulfs  the developed world. Irrationality  reigns supreme . Capitalism (coupled with rule of law and property rights ) had provided the avenue to exercise our self-determination. The principle that material success is entirely (or at least mostly) dependent on our effort had proven a quasi-religious mantra for many. And it was alluring. More than that: self-vindicating . The idea that I'm the architect of my destiny and that nothing can hold me back can be an inebriating, hypnotizing force that arms us with untold amounts of discipline and resolve to over-perform. Forget for now about the fact that that over-performance can be easier to achieve in the fast lane   of that avenue. Or that a government has to build the actual avenue   for said a

Grow, (just not that much)

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Face it. We're all still playing catch up to the reality that this election laid bare. Our collective recency bias  kept us blind, thinking that what held true in the recent past (a corrupt, skewed political system serving a ring of cronies) would simply keep happening going forward. Never mind that the world's interconnectedness had made things inherently unstable . Or that it had already fed revolutions all over the middle east. That was them -- it seemed we thought . We're different.  Turns out, we're not. Now that the fire has reached home, we're scrambling for solid ground amidst this tectonic plate rearrangement. The Liberal World Order is under siege -- fascists are at the gates !-- and Fukuyama had it all wrong . The sense of loss and drifting is palpable. It's clear --by now-- why we missed it. But is it really clear why we got here ? Interconnectedness may have been the spark, and our yearn for belonging  may have exacerbated it, but the rea