Pollyanna on LSD - part the third

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

Well... as asserted in the past, this is just a tautology, rather some deep insight into the macroeconomic sphere. OTOH, in 1951, The United States of Alabama was closer to being a self-sustaining closed economy than it is today. Whatever. From a macro point of view, it's all just arithmetic. So long as The Rest of Us have most of the moolah and buy up the output, then the equation balances. We experience neither runaway inflation with output limited nor depression when demand collapses due to The Rest of Us not having most of the moolah.

And, as usual, it does matter what that output is and who might buy it up. When we used to make shirts and shoes and other stuff that the proletariat needed, the equation balancing implied that The Rest of Us were doing OK. But... how does the equation work when output is skewed ever more to financial services relevant only to the 1% and 5%? Not so much balance.

One might recall that, until FDR, Uncle Sugar did nothing to cushion the destruction of jobs and aggregate demand when some creative destruction ruled the economy. Check out, once again, the graph of recessions and depressions throughout the 19^th century. Not a pretty sight. But... back then, even with some mechanization of production, it was still times when the mass of the proletariat was husbanded to produce the Good Stuff for the 1% of the times. Humans as disposable parts. My Grand Pappy well remembered that very effective job retraining he got from the Department of Labor when the horseless carriage killed his job making buggy whips in 1901. Those were so much better days.

So, now we face the specter of AI going primal nuculur on labor. Makes the 19^th century experience look benign. And, of course, the bankers to the !% pooh pooh all the angst of the proletariat. Of course they do. Here's among the latest. From the mind and pen of the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, no less. He must be smart. He's so rich.

Will A.I. disrupt the labor market? Absolutely. This transition, like other significant moments in our history, will entail new challenges, especially as A.I. separates labor from productivity in magnitudes we haven't seen before.

That's a no shit Sherlock tautology, as well. But recall the Great Migration. The movement of the proletariat from the rural South to the assembly lines of the North. What made that successful, for some definition of successful? Simply that Southern farmers were smart enough and able enough to do the repetitive tasks of the assembly line.

Let's see what Solomon has to say

But the United States has a long track record of creating new jobs in response to disruption, from the electrification of the 1900s to the digital revolution of the 1990s; I don't see any reason to think this dynamic will stop now.

Much of that "digital revolution" was merely converting from manual to automation of the same tasks! A bit of retraining in how to use word processing and spreadsheets was about as hard as it got. Not a requirement to drop steno work and learn medicinal chemistry. Get real.

But when you look at jobs or sectors less relevant to automation, the picture changes. Our economists estimate that the growing demand for data centers has created more than 200,000 construction jobs since 2022.

Once again, with feeling - construction is not an ongoing job type. Not unless we want to keep building data centers for the next 50 years at the current pace. Dwell on that for a second or two. We'll need nuculur fusion electric plants to run 'em.

Let me get this strait - the educated, smart Blue People will be shitcanned in favor of Dumb as a Sack of Hair MAGAnauts? Yikes.

Now, this one is gobsmacking

In 1900, global life expectancy at birth was 32 years old; today, it's over 70.

So... mass unemployment is the reason for this increase in lifetimes? Really??? How about drugs, vaccines, and public health mandates. Or, in other words, smart Blue people figuring the tough stuff out.

Now... Pollyanna on steroids

[T]he health care industry now employs more than 18 million workers. The U.S. economy is still the most innovative, dynamic and entrepreneurial in the world.

And most of those are engaged in either high eductation demands or menial bed pan changing. The K-shaped economy, also on steroids.

Have a nice day.

By The Numbers - part the one hundreth

Have you ever wondered how the Strait of Hormuz fits in the territorial waters figure? I sure have, and finally looked it up. There are more claimed than you can count, but the minimalist one is our olde friend the 12 mile limit. Turns out that Iran and Oman control the narrowest passage area, 21 miles, with their mutual 12 mile limits. So, those who claim that the Strait is "international waters" are just lying. That such had historically been the case... well fuck you Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte). I love it.

In 1959, Iran altered the legal status of the strait by expanding its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) and declaring it would recognize only transit by innocent passage through the newly expanded area. In 1972, Oman also expanded its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) by decree.[21] Thus, by 1972, the Strait of Hormuz was completely "closed" by the combined territorial waters of Iran and Oman. In 1971, Iran took over the Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands west of Hormuz against Arab wishes, thereby extending control of the navigation channels.

That's a great catch that Catch-22.

Pyrrhic Loser - part the fourth

Thomas Massie, first among others, might well be Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) Rubicon. Like the allusions?

It will boil down to: what will the 45% of GOP-ers who protested Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) dick sucking choice? Will they join with Dems and Independents come the General Election? Will the voters for the other 'losers' to Batshit J. Fucking Moron's^©Tillerson dick sucking picks join with the Independents and Dems in the General?

And, given the really nasty gerrymandering in play, mayhaps the Dems should pivot to flipping the Senate? Why? Simply because all those Blue City Dems still way outnumber the knuckledragging morons in the sticks that Bone Spur Samurai^© must have. He is, after all, a 49% minority dictator. And, by some measure, no where near that much support. His core zealots appear to be around 20% of the GOP: a slim minority of a minority party.

Man Made God in Man's Image

There are many reports dealing with Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) fixation on his White-Supremacy-Evangelical-Protestant morons connected to America 250. Here's one from the usual suspect.

Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, said in a recent interview that language describing America as a Christian nation "can be destructive," especially when it's used to center culture around the exclusion of certain groups.

Some 80 years ago, Catholics were routinely excluded in American public life, he said.

"They wouldn't say, this is a Christian nation, they'd say, it is a Protestant nation," he said.

And, for the record, this is the relevant bit of the 1^st

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

We ain't just Puritans.

Roger Williams was kicked out of Massachusetts even before there was a USofA.

Initially a Puritan minister, his beliefs evolved and he questioned the authority of the Puritan church in enforcing religious conformity. He was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he established Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he termed "liberty of conscience" making Rhode Island the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding charter.

Jews attempting to escape Nazis were barred from coming to America, fur instance.

And so on.

Ya cain't have all them dirty Irish and German and Italian folk "poisoning the blood of our country" during the 19^th century, and even the earliest part of the 20^th. As Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) says it.

"No Irish need apply." A history. It wasn't just the jingoists of the 19^th century

The 1924 National Origins Quota Act (known as the Johnson-Reed Act) establishes that quotas will be calculated based on 2 percent of each nationality's proportion of the foreign-born US population in 1890, as indicated in the 1890 census. The use of the 1890 census to set the quotas is criticized as discriminating against southern and eastern Europeans, who arrived in the United States in greater numbers during the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. Students, nationals of Western Hemisphere countries, members of certain professions, and the wives and minor children of US citizens are exempted from the quotas.

The Dark Ages were impelled by religious zealotry. It's gonna be a rough ride. Tom Lehrer gets it on the nose, yet again.

Stupid is as Stupid Does - part the seventh

Well... yet another example of Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson proving him quite right.

While Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson keeps filling the coffers of the fossil fuel companies (Shell, and one suspects the rest, reported huge windfall profits), most every other country is developing electrified transport systems. How much of petro in the USofA is devoted to transport, you might ask? Well, it's 70% and a good part of that is tied up in the Persian Gulf, thanks to Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson.

At a time when oil and gas supply is faltering, the cost of wind and solar energy keeps declining. And, when paired with battery systems for storage, renewables can often provide steady electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, even when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow.

Of course, it's not all bunnies and roses. To signficantly transition to wee little electrons moving stuff, there needs to be infrastructure that can run on wee little electrons. Most of the rest of the world kept, and expanded, their rail systems post-WWII, while the USofA went all in on cars and trucks. It may be that battery powered cars and trucks can exploit those wee little electrons rather than directly with trams and trains. We'll see. One hopes.

Gaslight

Since AI, as currently implemented, isn't very secure by nature; hallucinations and fake data and so on, it would be a Good Idea to vet such systems. Today's report has it that Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) intends to "vet" AI models. After Anthropic announced that its still (for some definition of 'still') hidden from public view Mythos model can break virtually all of computerdom, Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) and his merry band of psycopaths clearly began to see visions of Absolute Power Over Everything.

Mythos is so powerful at identifying security vulnerabilities in software that it could lead to a cybersecurity "reckoning," said Anthropic, which declined to release the model to the public.

Do you really, really believe that Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) our Grifter In Chief would ever, in a million years, let anyone stop him and his merry band of psycopaths from using it to subjugate The Rest of Us??? MTG, evil apostate that she is, would likely be on the New Shortlist of Those to be Deleted.

The administration is also evaluating whether new A.I. models could yield cyber-capabilities that could be useful to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, they said.

So, there it is: the evil bit said out loud.

By The Numbers - part the ninety ninth

Farmers have been getting the Cadillac treatment pretty much forever. Even though non-urban population is down to 20% in this here The United States of Alabama. One of the ways is money and data support from Uncle Sugar. The Farm Bill has been mentioned here at least a few times. This recent report describes, mostly, farmers reliance on USDA data collection and reporting to run their farms. Quite a boon. But, according to the report, the last corn crop total acreage report was off by, it is believed, 5%.

Of course, the Batshit J. Moron and his merry band of acolytes don't assess that the miss report is due to the draconian slashing of employment at USDA; of course not

The Agriculture Department lost 23,000 employees in 2025, as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency slashed jobs across the federal government. The National Agricultural Statistics Service, which produces crop reports, was one of the hardest-hit divisions; it lost 34 percent of its staff, going to about 500 employees from around 800.

The guy in charge puts the blame on lowering survey response rates

For years, the department has struggled with fewer farmers returning its surveys, one of the key data sources for crop production reports. The response rate for recent surveys was around 40 percent, according to the department, down from around 60 percent a decade ago.

What's funny about such an excuse? When you watch (or read) your fave news source, you'll get survey results on Batshit J. Moron's approval rate for various actions or his overall approval/disapprovel and the like or Americans view of abortion or immigration and the like. If you look at the fine print at the end of the report you'll see two numbers (approx. values) the sample size, generally around 2,500 (sometimes smaller), and the margin of error of the percent(s), generally around 3.4%. For 349,000,000 Americans. Now, the number of voters is about 174,000,000 in 2024.

Now, the whole point of the crop reports is to support gaming the market by commodities traders and farmers. One wants the lowest price, the other the highest. But

Farmers have a deep and direct relationship with the federal government, which sustains much of their business. Farmers participate in crop insurance and conservation programs, apply for grants and receive disaster assistance and ad hoc payments. The Agriculture Department projects that government payments will account for 29 percent of farm income this year.

Welfare kings. The tail is wagging the dog.