The life expectancy of cancel-culture

 Cancel culture is progressive historical revisionism and brave new world order use-truth packed into one neat deconstructionist, hyper-modernist package easy to sell in the corporate market place so it will run its course.

Creative destruction applies not just in economics, it works with culture too continuing to gnaw away at its own foundations. Sometimes popular cultural products/ideas last 20 years before anti-ideas appear to mock the previous popular one although the life-cycle may decrease with the w.w.w.

What vast public debt means today?

 Several quality economists have said that the public debt is not too important anymore. That is a ponderous concept plainly. If money or debt is so elastic for the government then it might be a good idea to periodically lubricate the economic well being of the poor and down trodden yearning to be rich that live in this nation with a trillion or two now and then.

There is a marginal reserve rate that means a bank needs to have about 10% on deposit of the amount it loans out. Banks don’t need to loan out actual cash; in fact the amount of cash in circulation is very small percent of the dollars in circulation electronically. So if the Federal Reserve gives a zero or near zero interest loan of a few hundred billion dollars to the rich, the rich banks can mint 9 times that amount in real dollars electronically that are repaid with real dollars. In effect the Federal Reserve is continuously giving free money to the rich- north of 16 trillion dollars so far with quantitative easing and there is more than that that has been lent. Giving the poor a few crumbs of what goes to the rich is quite reasonable. Especially since the money goes to Americans who directly invest the money in the economy rather than sending it to some foreign nation (the rich are the ones sending direct investment in foreign nations like China).

It should be mentioned that the last dozen years of Republican presidential leadership experienced some of the greatest deficit spending in world history- they are not people with invariably good economic ideas for the public rather than for-themselves and in fact reinvented permanent Keynesian deficit spending for pump priming as a Lafferian supply-side way of life. Former VP Dick Cheney apparently believed that the private sector should plunder the public sector and Republicans have tended toward occasionally selling those $9000 gold-plated wrenches to the U.S. government. The poor seldom benefit from that high-level brand of piracy.

Economics shouldn’t require a degree in economics to well understand, yet it does. I have only read a few books on the topic and would like a better more simplified foundation for global sustainable economics that disambiguate topics like the meaning of public debt.

Physics advances since Einstein are remarkable

 Sure; even Einstein’s cosmological constant that he set aside turned out to be apparently true with the expansion rate of the Universe. There may be not cosmological energy expanding things so much as space itself expanding, or some oddity related to the Higgs field that is itself a great discovery in physics.

One likes all of the discoveries in particle physics especially, and the insight that particles that are massless acquire energy when slowing down through the Higgs field as a third dimension is added to them.

Cosmology watchers have a wealth of discoveries since Einstein to consider, and the insights of relativity- general and special, are fundamental tools of philosophical thought as timeless as the spinning bucket thought experiment or the ideas of motion and volume of the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus.

If time is an apparent phenomenon of the subluminal quanta of the Higgs, is the field itself atemporal, and how does that compare to an atemporal singularity at T=0? Ideas concerning quantum entanglement and ‘spooky action at a distance’, all possible worldlines and quantum jitters as analogues of infinite variable positions have been produced to provide new ways of regarding the field phenomena that is the Universe of appearance-for others.

On the question 'should inheritance be abolished'

 Inherited wealth should be taxed, as should capital generally, when the amount reaches a level that is harmful to society. Capital grows faster than wages so wealth concentrates and inherited wealth concentrates without new effort by those with the inheritance.

That being said, inheritance is a good thing for the poor and middle classes that should have zero inheritance tax. Inherited intellectual capital and culture shouldn’t be easily dissipated as the inertia of intelligence, technology and capitol can be hard to achieve from the ground-up in a single generation. The imbalance in wealth distribution between the 1% and the 99% can be reduced by taxing the rich and not taxing the poor.

Concentrated wealth brings an effective end to democracy, free enterprise and ingenuity by the majority and control of the economy and politics to the tiniest minority. People need to disambiguate the relationships of democracy to wealth and power to consider if opinions of the majority can Trump the will to control the social order and kind of infrastructure and political economy a society has.

Piketty’s book ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ has an informative chapter on inherited wealth. Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Piketty, Thomas, Goldhammer, Arthur: 9780674979857: Amazon.com: Books

There is a related question concerning the contemporary practice of giving an inheritance to children before death that avoids the issue of inheritance and taxes. The rich have a zillion ways to avoid inheritance taxes.

Answering the 'what if' of Alaska independence

 If the United States wanted to get rid of Alaska and Alaska was therefore forced to be an independent nation it would need to rely on the United States or some other nation to supply military defense for it. Alaska of course does have a lot of natural resources to sell, yet I am skeptical about its prospects for defending against Chinese, Russian or Canadian invasions relying just on the national guard.

Alaska would need to become a nuclear power and develop a fleet of nuclear armed Kamikaze drones submarines and aircraft to assure mutual destruction to its attackers. That would be costly and in violation of a few treaties that it hasn’t signed yet though other nations have.

Alaskans could stay alive until they died eating fish and buffalo or caribou. Man does not live by bread alone though, and Alaska would need some kind of immigration policy to attract more quality people economically speaking to live there and the harm to the environment would be substantial with the increased population that presently is fewer than 800,000 people.

People can live in very poor circumstances and so could Alaskans although they might fare pretty well for-themselves. When Alaska participates in a trade fair with an advanced nation like China, it has art, carvings of ivory, snowshoes, oil barrels and smoked fish etc. while China has super-computers, super-tankers, jet aircraft and so forth and a million manufactures. Exporting logs used to be a prime Alaska business and then they upgraded to manufacturing log homes to sell to the Japanese and others who like those for some reason.

In a peaceful environment Alaska could get on fine, while in a war environment it just would not have the trillions invested to defeat an enemy that is well founded. Tourists could arrive by the millions annually to spend cash looking at lem sheds and huts in remote rural locations and Hollywood could make brave movies there with harrowing adventures of people fighting and climbing on the last glaciers in North America.

Inflation of dollars vs bitcoin

 If a high rate of inflation occurred with wages and prices skyrocketing it might be easier for people to pay off mortgages and student loans. For sure inflation would not be good to people on fixed incomes. Contracts written at a particular pre-inflation price could be paid off with inflated dollars. Since the Fed hates inflation as apparently do the rich, because perhaps, capital usually increases faster than wages except during periods of inflation (I believe), it’s unlikely to happen.

It is interesting to compare bitcoin inflation or value with that of a dollar. Inflated bitcoin value is regarded as good, while that of the dollar is bad.

Ecologically sustainable, relevant infrastructure and libertarianism

Governments have always been around to keep social order. In theory they can accomplish things that individuals and private collectives can’t afford or don’t have an interest in. Plato said that the commons is neglected by the polis and is the worst kept area in comparison to private interests. Private interests though have their own interests in mind and not those of the public. A libertarian society, if such could actually exist except in a frontier setting with corruption being the rule rather than the exception and a Frank Reed like character needed to free the town of its Soapy Smiths, would likely be a rathole.

In a libertarian society infrastructure would grow incidentally without regard to public interest. If the technological tool kit required for building infrastructure is simple and if the demands on society are simple the infrastructure may self-regulate. Consider a primitive society with people hunting seals on the ice with spears- they require no public spending because the society is simple and services are provided by nature. Compare that to England in the industrial revolution when people were getting cholera of drinking water from the Thames river- the remedy required public mediation to treat all that sewage effluence.

The nation today has people going off in a zillion directions chasing after tangential political ideas that will not allow the national or global economy to continue to exist very far down the road with more than 12 billion people on Earth by the end of the century. Excellent new ideas need to appear that can coordinate planetary redevelopment toward a new direction of ecological economic synthesis and libertarian won’t do that. Neither will communism or socialism- each have problems in repressing free enterprise where new structures need arise from invention.

Americans in the private sector are quite concerned with getting their special economic interest gored when new and massive government-directed changes take places that would allow an infrastructure of sustainable support for 12 billion people. Governments don’t have a surfeit of inventive people able to originate and explain great redevelopment ideas obviously. Jacques Cousteau and James Lovelock each expressed the idea that humanity has fewer than 200 years left before collapse and I tend to agree with that prospect. On basic political facts and forms they are confused and splintered chasing after things that won’t work very far into the future.

Public and private interests each can mismanage infrastructure and keep existing forms long beyond their historical time for utility. In the present global environment that is akin to packing gunpowder for storage in a warehouse on the waterfront as occurred in Lebanon last year.

Effects of US consumerism 1920s unto today

 The United States was more of a producer rather than a consumer society in the 1920s. People continued to put up their own preserves with home grown food wherever possible. There were no fast food joints and few chain stores. Much of the nation wasn’t electrified, television didn’t exist and in brief the nation was very, very different than today.

The U.S.A. was still on the gold standard and the federal government did usually run deficits except during war. During the 1920s President Harding and Coolidge reduced public debt to about five billion dollars. History of the United States public debt - Wikipedia

Wall Street’s eventual crash was caused by ‘irrational exuberance’ and to great of expansion and investment. Churchill as the British Chancellor of the Exchequer persuaded the U.S. government to be tight with bailing out Wall Street and the lack of financial stimulus helped a run on banks The rise of Nazi problems would also cause increased military spending in the 1930s and further cycles of debt, conflict, military industrial complex spirals and tax increases. History tends to repeat itself in several ways at least in regard to fiscal, tax and public spending policies.

Consumerism in the 1920s was not at all like it is today. The United States was still a primary producer at home and in industry. Manufacturers could put into business the inventions of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell etc. Farming was increased with new machine technology and became more productive and less labor intensive. Road and dam building projects occurred in several states to use the increasing automobile production and electrification to put Americans to work. The nation then was not so reliant on foreign production and financial services for jobs. It still built infrastructure and was not afraid to upgrade in response to existential challenges.

Today the U.S.A. should take at least some small steps to return toward a production value. That could include reducing patent costs and streamlining them by orders of magnitude so U.S. inventors who are poor can do more than give their ideas away on the Internet to whomever wants to use them, creating tax incentives for those out of work longest to be hired and assuring that all Americans can afford higher education through graduate school to maximize their potential etc.

Defining the origin of the Universe

There are lots of theories existing at any given time (in time). Often they are disproven. Sometimes they convey an image of authority to the people that advocate the most popular theory.

A Higgs field and an inflaton that arises about simultaneously splitting off from an unstable field at T=0 from a singularity is a popular theory. It is thought to have existed carefully balanced in a vacuum balanced between positive and negative energy. After the expansion of all that energy in the Higgs field and a win for matter over anti-matter the sub-luminal mass of the Universe continued along with gravity, stellar synthesis and biological evolution. People tend to accept those general parameters as a valid theory of the origin of everything in this Universe back to a singularity.

Then there are meta-theories that have the initial energy before expansion as pure spirit- in the mind of God as it were, with the expansion pre-determined in accordance with His will. Some people have tossed blind random chance into a meta-theory to explain the existence of life, and have postulated a profusion of Universes existing in a Multiverse along the lines of Everett’s every possible universe that could exist does exist principal. That is a good approach for a defining theory that allows for the Universe to be in several forms with several explanations for its existence depending upon where one starts or orients the beginning.

If mass and energy are at the most fundamental level secondary phenomena of mathematical or spiritual construction made by a thinking being, or alternatively is a Super-string theory supports the profusion of Universes, or if the Universes are something like a static field with mind switching between the appropriate Universe that corresponds to what the sentient, primary being thinks (a phenomenon of mind) in a deterministic field with free will determining the destination of the traveler through the moral or soteriological facts, or if one appeals to quantum simulation theory with the idea of origin coinciding with some sort of Schrodinger wave function collapse into self-awareness the definition of the origin of the Universe might appear equally valid to the sentient observer even tested with some measure of falsifiability.

Therefor a definition of the origin of the Universe these days tends to be a process. The genesis of being and nothingness has an in God we trust element to it for those of us that regard an omniscient being and Creator of every possible Universe at some stage of the way, and a logical point to purpose and utility- again a process.

Language itself is a process of associating words and objects, meanings and ideas with definitions and objects each changing in the temporal field of common human experience. God, alternatively, is constant forever and before any temporal field that he manifests.

On clever, creative people in government

 I would like clever creative people to be in government sometimes instead of just the private sector that tends to pay much better. My thoughts on defense against biological war potential differ quite a bit from those of the government apparently, judging from the lack of interest expressed in defending against the possibility. One would need to have politicians that actually would change things to invest much time in making suggestions for change.

Actually I write quite a bit and it is mostly wasted as far as applications go in specific area. One may give away ideas yet they will be transformed into sludge. I would not have applied the term incompetent to President Trump myself as a general criticism. He was mostly irrelevant outside his interests- that is he was satisfied in getting his own interests done and unresponsive to other challenges. It is not my idea that Democrats are very competent in meeting modern challenges to the U.S.A.- quite the contrary. I know expect nothing substantive from them yet would like to be disappointed. Republicans alternatively are just interested in business profits and mostly are exteriorities to the challenges facing the nation, people and environment over the next decade.

Biological war prospects have advanced quite a bit since 2003 when there was a publication by a Colonel reviewing revolutions in military affairs (R.M.A.) He mentioned the number of fully sequenced virus genos then (about 500). I checked on that number this morning and it is more than 10,000. There is a pandoras box of genetic recombinant engineering and subtle modifications for the tool kit of bioweapons that is not in any way addressed competently. Protecting the public as an excuse for not letting the public be aware of the R.M.A. that has made biowar and culling of the population of the nation and/or the planet a real possibility is lame.

Human life on the planet needs new ecospherically conservative and restorative infrastructure that would allow humanity to cut its vector from ancient economic infrastructure with sustainability for the maximum population at the highest standard of living. A healthy and thriving ecosphere is part of the quality of life that makes living enjoyable. Infrastructure firewalls defrapping bioweapons mass culls would need to be part of that new ecological economic infrastructure.

There is a clever mini-electric train that shows the simplicity of modern science and technology that can serve as a for-example to be upscaled and applied with innovation that could help in making mass transit and personal transit a better synthesis in a rewilded ecosystem that requires just a little imagination.