Category Archives: Economy

The Truth shall make you Whole

Posted on by
Reply

Is it right, either spiritually, politically or culturally, for one person (Musk, Zuckerberg et al) to own a conduit to the truth? Is this a new form of dictatorship? Do we already live in an oligarchical state? Where is our ‘democratically’ elected government?

Is it right for one person (Rupert Murdoch) to own: (He owns everything until the reader reaches two dashes)

News Corp. holdings including three national newspapers in the U.K.; almost 150 publications in Australia; the New York Post and Community Newspaper Group in the United States; The Wall Street Journal and related publications in the U.S., Europe and Asia; Dow Jones information services;

HarperCollins book publishers. The list includes:

Daily Telegraph; Dow Jones; Harper Collins Publishers; Herald Sun; Inside Out; New York Post; News International; NT News; Post-Courier; Sunday Herald Sun; Sunday Mail; Sunday Times; The Advertiser; The Australian; The Courier-Mail; The Daily; The Mercury; The Sunday Mail; The Sunday Telegraph; The Sun; The Sunday Times; The Times; Times Literary Supplement; The Wall Street Journal; The Wall Street Journal Digital Network; Weekly Times; Zondervan.

Broadcasting

Businesses include the FOX Broadcasting Company; the 27 stations in the Fox Television Stations group and various television operations throughout the world. Cable properties produce and license programming for cable and satellite platforms in the U.S and Asia, including the FOX News Channel and FOX Business Network, FX and STAR. News Corporation wholly owns Italy’s most popular pay-TV company, SKY Italia. The company also has significant holdings in British Sky Broadcasting, Germany’s Sky Deutschland; Asia’s TATA SKY and FOXTEL in Australia and New Zealand.

The list includes:

FOX Broadcasting Company; FOX Sports; FOX Sports Australia; FOX Television Stations; MyNetworkTV; Big Ten Network; FOX Business Network; FOX Movie Channel; FOX News Channel; FOX College Sports; FOX Sports Enterprises; FOX Deportes; FOX Sports Net; FOX Soccer Channel; Fuel TV; FX; Nat Geo Wild; National Geographic Channel United States; National Geographic Channel Worldwide; Speed; STAR; Stats, Inc.; BSkyB; FOXTEL; Sky Deutschland; SKY Italia.

Movie and television production and distribution

Move production and distribution through Fox Filmed Entertainment and Twentieth Century Fox Film. Television production includes 20th Century Fox Television and other TV studios.

The list includes:

20th Century Fox; 20th Century Fox Espanol; 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment; 20th Century Fox International; 20th Century Fox Television; Fox Searchlight Pictures; Fox Studios Australia; Fox Studios LA; Fox Television Studios; Blue Sky Studios; Shine Group.

Other assets

“Next generation” media properties including Hulu, an online video joint venture with NBC Universal and Disney; and News Outdoor, an outdoor advertising company.

The list includes:

American Idol.com; AskMen; careerone.com.au; CARSguide.com.au; Fox.com; FoxSports.com; FoxSports.com.au; hulu.com; IGN Entertainment; Milkround; National Rugby League; NDS; News.com.au; News Digital Media; News Outdoor; Scout; Spring Widgets; truelocal.com.au; WhatIfSport.

– –

The list goes on with media monopolies like Disney or Belo, another corporation that takes in $1.4 billion a year and owns or operates eight print outlets, 20 TV stations, and ten cable news channels.

Ownership of information is not benign. In mariner’s home broadcast area, one station is owned by a conservative organization called Sinclair Broadcast Group, a media company that also owns or operates 294 television stations across the United States. Each local news broadcast is required to insert a conservative commentary as though it were part of the news.

Specifically, mariner isn’t trying to be critical. Recently he has been focusing on the issue of truth and how it has become rudderless; no one knows what truth is. This is dangerous at the species level because each of us, individually and generally, must know what our stable, normal habitat looks like. Interpreting cause and effect is managed primarily by the subconscious brain. Should we flee? Fight? Ignore? Interpret? Impossible without the truth – what is real?

At this moment, mariner recognizes control patterns similar to gerrymandering. Not that specific government jurisdictions are controlled but more a control of information across viewing areas which may include several districts or regions. Think FOX or MSNBC; think Texas truth versus California truth – which one is true either politically or capitalistically or especially empirically?

In the old days before broadcast technology (dare we include the telephone), truth was local. Truth was hands on. Truth was based on existential reality. When the ownership of news was local, the broadcaster couldn’t range far from existential reality. These last bastions of local truth are being bought by venture capitalists, stripped of capability and turned into advertisement brochures. Today, truth has no foundation, no existential reality. The definition of truth is ‘manipulated broadcasting’. No wonder populism prevails; government, science and existential experience are irrelevant and not to be trusted.

Each day mariner dislikes uncontrolled capitalism more.

Ancient Mariner

A new definition for Musk Ox

Posted on by
Reply

Yes, the subject is Elon Musk. The article below from Axios is an important read. His ascendancy and power remind mariner of the Edwardian Age in England when money and wealth controlled government, society and the economy. Today, Musk also will control truth.

https://www.axios.com/elon-musk-power-influence-twitter-tesla-spacex-neuralink-boring-company-951463dd-774c-458c-8232-3a575c6d2ec7.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosfinishline&stream=top

“What Musk and others portray as a battle over ‘free speech’ is a proxy fight over who is entitled to attention,” says Renée DiResta, of the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Musk is the most obvious of a class of oligarchs that is growing wealthier without taxes, without national commitment and with the ability to buy out any government policy of their disliking.

The government of the last century no longer works for the common citizen. Will there be a destructive collapse sometime in the near future? Is democracy doomed as the world’s resources shrink and wealth rises in power? Does the US want to be a Putin Russia run by a dozen oligarchs?

Ancient Mariner

 

Did you know?

Posted on by
Reply

Not only can one make ghost guns, one can make ghost kidneys.

Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and San Diego may not be sustainable by the end of the 21st century because of water shortages.

Independent local election campaigns no longer exist. The concept of local campaign-local-citizen-related funding no longer exists. Local citizen funding as an indicator of local citizen interest is a victim to giant PACs who can fund regional broadcasters, who can saturate local markets even if a local election committee wanted to spend money; PACs can dominate social media. The republican reelection campaign PAC alone is spending $141 million on district races. Three cheers for totalitarianism!

Elon Musk tweets are the new Trump tweets: Have you noticed cable news shows increased programming around Musk tweets?

Oklahoma’s four abortion clinics have been overrun with demand from out-of-state patients. When a team of academic researchers posed as pregnant people and called the Oklahoma clinics at the beginning of March, all four told the callers they couldn’t schedule them for an appointment.

Used car prices are a staggering 35% higher than last March. Many consumer products will never retreat back to pre-Covid days.

Syria is gearing up its military to join Russia against Ukraine.

Guru speculates that as many as three different regional wars may erupt similar to the Ukraine-Russian war because of regional, longstanding issues:

The Middle East War. See the map for possible players. Some players like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran are seeking more power through unification but common human struggle exists throughout the region. The West counterparts may involve Europe, Greece, Israel, India and the United States.

 

 

The Southeast Asia War. See the map for possible players. This is a China-centric war that includes a current sore spot, Tibet, where a current conflict is China’s genocidal policy against Uyghur Buddhists. Beyond Tibet are a number of nations that depend on independent trade that China would like to own – Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia. The West counterparts may include India, the United States, the Philippines, Taiwan and perhaps if China acts out in a certain manner, the third regional war for economic control of the Pacific Rim will join in. Other nations would join in like Australia, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Canada and perhaps Columbia and Mexico. In the expanded regional war for the Pacific, Russia and North Korea would step in as China’s allies.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marching Forward

Posted on by
Reply

֎ As if there weren’t enough disruption to what reality is, the age of cryptocurrency is coming to our governments. Cities and states, as well as other nations, already are at the stage of experimenting with blockchain data storage. Let’s hope it at least eliminates standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. In the recent past mariner has been refused his purchase with cash, requiring a credit card – now what, anyone have change for a bitcoin?

The purported asset in blockchain is that no one ‘owns’ the data or can secretly manipulate values – which is a common practice in dictatorships. Let’s hope blockchain storage can alleviate the fears of the republican states that want to outlaw open elections.

֎ The untold story today is the desperate condition of the low income financial class. More than 11.4 million renters are behind on rent, according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Over 300,000 black female single parent families have been evicted; white female single parent families aren’t far behind.

Add to this a new press for charity food centers and low income housing opportunities (which don’t exist). Our own law abiding citizens are no better off than the homeless children in immigration facilities (another sin on US society). Sadly, mariner sees no sympathy from our disabled governments. The reader and mariner must make every effort to ease the undeserved pain in these unfortunate families.

֎ [Inflation Footnote] In an effort to turn a depressing, terrible national situation into something with personal value, mariner has made a game, if that’s the appropriate word, of trying to alter his financial overhead by the going rate of inflation. For example:

Mariner drinks a lot of coffee. He isn’t a connoisseur, he’s after the caffeine. Typically mariner will finish a pot plus some each day. Each morning he pours out a cup or two of yesterday’s coffee and makes a fresh pot. Recently, his online supplier advised him that each pound of coffee will cost $2.50 more because of a notably bad growing year for coffee in South America and because of inflation.

To modify his behavior to account for the increased cost, mariner preserves yesterday’s leftover coffee and drinks it before he makes a fresh pot. He feels successful in his adjustment which, when calculated, amounts to an increase of 8 percent in coffee cup availability, thus offsetting the increased cost – at least when compared to inflation.

This is a con on himself to allow him to feel successful in combating inflation but to tell the truth, it does not block the depression that comes from the terrible state of millions of desperate citizens. The governments aren’t up to the job – this is a citizen’s responsibility. Don’t storm the Capital; storm the charitable sources to help even in one’s own neighborhood. Find a residence for a family that doesn’t have one; send a check to any number of charitable organizations.

Ancient Mariner

Inflation 2022

Posted on by
Reply

It is no surprise that lower income families, retirees on fixed income and debt-laden families are suffering under inflation much more harshly than those with higher income. An individual bringing home minimum wage will have to pay proportionately more for necessary commodities and food than a higher income individual.

For example, a person may bring home, after deductions, about $250/week. Because of a shortage in low income housing, as much as 50 percent of the individual’s income will be for rent. The remaining $125/week must purchase all other consumables, children’s expenses and fossil fuel needs.

If inflation rises by 7 percent as it has in just 4 months, the individual doesn’t have $125/week; they have $116/week. Mariner’s grocery shopping jumped by 15 percent. If the individual had shopped at mariner’s supermarket, their net value would be reduced by more than 7 percent.

Of course inflation affects everyone. Inflation inflicts tragedy on the poor but even ‘middle class’ families need to adjust spending patterns to minimize the higher cost of family living. What follows are suggested modifications for offsetting the loss of spending power:

  • Have two dinners each week that are meatless. Fruit salads, meatless vegetable pasta, bean soup are much less expensive without meat and, in fact, better for you.
  • Move away from pre-packaged, ready-to-eat foods. Does the reader remember how to use flour, rice and eggs?
  • How many channels on the smart TV are paid for? Cut back by half. Spend more time with your family – that’s free.
  • Many families have a weekend night out. How about switching to a night out every other week or not at all?
  • Adjust the furnace thermostat down by three degrees and wear a sweater – raise it for air conditioning.
  • Analyze auto trips per week. Find a way to stretch those trips to 10 days. A good game for this category would be to shop less frequently but limit the amount to what the old schedule would have purchased in a shorter time.
  • Alcohol consumption along with snacks is relatively expensive. Cut back by half or more; perhaps this is a good time to start a serious diet.

These ideas are offered to help the reader develop a mindset that lessens the impact of inflation. Mariner is positive that there are many more ideas the reader can conger.

Ancient Mariner

It is time for change . . .

Posted on by
Reply

. . . Let’s hope the change will be productive. Mariner, especially with the input of Amos, knows he complains a lot. In this post, however, mariner simply is sharing evidence about why the nation is in dangerous disarray. Mariner will share with the reader his personal experiences which show the extent of fragmentation this nation suffers.

First, accept the fact that mariner is an old geezer with many of the typical maladies that come with old age. One malady among others is a lung issue. When mariner was young he suffered lung damage while working in an industrial factory. The resulting years since have been normal with no effects but in recent years the lungs are suffering a gradual decline.

Each year when mariner gets his general physical, three different pulmonologists have offered him a prescription that ‘may’ slow the decline. It is important to know that this prescription costs $10,000 each month. The firm that sells this prescription has arranged for some off-shoot firm to pay $8,000 in his behalf.

To each pulmonologist mariner said, “I will die before I accept that prescription.” This is the point of truth about the condition of our society: The CEO of the pharmaceutical firm that sells this drug each year makes $2.4 million in base salary. If mariner pays him 10 thousand/month, he will let mariner live longer.

This is the result of forty years of unbridled capitalism in the United States. This is the underlying cause of Trumpism and direct attacks on the principles of the Constitution. Working classes statistically make less today than they did forty years ago (Minimum wage in 1980 was $5/hour; that equates today to $19.50/hour). Mariner can throw many charts and comparisons at the reader that show a rapidly growing poverty class – coupled with a rapidly growing billionaire class. In past posts, he has demonstrated the social stratification between post-college life and labor class life – including the deliberate, premeditated elimination of unions.

On the society front, mariner has complained continuously about abuse by big data technology; he will not belabor the issue except to say that the right to live an individual life centered on the existential experience of that life is under great threat by a capitalistically driven technology.

Human life has lost its priority to a handful of dollars.

The pandemic is a dreadful way to force to the surface deep, embedded values that are fracturing this nation.

Ancient Mariner

It is about the times

Posted on by
Reply

Mariner’s wife has a desktop Zen calendar. Most of the time mariner struggles to grasp the point of the quote but today it couldn’t be clearer or more apropos to these times:

“The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness.”

We must find our dignity within ourselves – in the world today the reader won’t find it anywhere else. There is no news outlet broadcasting good times. Even marginal advances in humanism and technology are fraught with negatives and controversy. There is the Putin war, the totalitarian legislatures, the republican autocracy, the uncontrolled metaverse, the age of misinformation, global warming, pandemics, housing shortages, inflation, skyrocketing medical expense, China, North Korea, societal disintegration, the age of mass murders, the destructive influence of venture capital, uncontrolled private equity, growing plutocracy, Christian-based Trumpism, abusive tax structures that protect the wealthy, ignorance about the disappearing biosphere, disrespecting the very immigrants who will bolster the national population and its GDP.

Okay, mariner will stop. Oddly, it seemed almost like good news when the news outlets broadcast the passing of Madeline Albright; it wasn’t, of course, but it seemed better because it carried no angst. Bless her; she helped run a more civil nation in a different time.

Within ourselves we must find stability, sameness, a reason we exist. We must use behaviors that show responsibility for others, by doing what we can to help victims of our age.

We must separate our emotions from our thinking. Pure, educated thinking is in short supply today. We must act with vision and wisdom.

As the Zen quote implies, we must search for a world with meaning.

Ancient Mariner

 

Jobs

Posted on by
Reply

A company called RoboBurger is out with a machine that will make you a burger with custom toppings in six minutes for $6.99, Jennifer A. Kingson reports in What’s Next.

In the food courts of the future, you could avoid human interaction by ordering from a hamburger vending machine, a pizza vending machine and, of course, cupcake vending machines.

The first RoboBurger machine was just installed in the Newport Centre Mall in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Besides mariner’s lamentations about the future regarding the loss of human contact and abuse to the social herding instinct referenced in the last post, he wonders what will happen to all the low income fast food workers as these boxes spread. The employees don’t have any assets to speak of – where is the next underpaid job market?

Artificial intelligence expert and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee predicted that 40 percent of the world’s jobs will be replaced by robots in the next 15 to 25 years. That means two out of every five working class people will be out of work at a time when there are no other jobs to be had.

The type of job that is in imminent danger is warehousing people filling orders for online sites like Amazon.  Also at great risk are taxi drivers, uber drivers, and other ride-share drivers. Autonomous self-driving cars will use AI technology to drive and apps to identify who needs to be picked up and dropped off. Payment will be made with a credit-card swipe.

UK’s Institute of the Motor Industry states, ‘As many as 97 percent of active auto mechanics aren’t qualified to work on electric cars and won’t get their hands dirty in the future – robots can handle it.’

Assembly line workers will disappear and, interestingly, so will air traffic controllers.

Close to mariner’s home, librarians will disappear as the tracking system becomes fully automated and virtually all reading will be online or in digitized form.

Remember Nadine? She will be the replacement for payroll clerks, human resource staff, customer service representatives, cashiers (don’t get mariner’s wife started), translators and even mortgage brokers.. . . And this is a small list. Mariner is dumbfounded by what the world will be like in 2050. Guru won’t even talk about it. Our best guess for insight may be a fortune teller, certainly not our government’s octogenarian legislators.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Moving Forward 

Posted on by
Reply

Like global warming and other slow but critical phenomena, one of the issues looming steadily larger is providing enough food to feed billions of humans. It has been stated by agronomists, realtors and anthropologists that there is no more open land to purchase for grand scale farming. Conflicting with this is the need to restore much of the biosphere that has been destroyed by human practices. In short, how can humans increase food supply in a world that shrinks for many reasons? In this month’s issue Science Magazine reports a breakthrough that may significantly improve crop value for grains:

“When farmers in ancient times harvested their crops, some saved the seeds produced by the best performing plants and sowed them the following year. Gradually, this selection led to better and better results, such as increasing the size and number of kernels of maize—traits that helped pave the path to modern corn.

Now, a team led by researchers in China has identified a single gene behind this crucial productivity boost in maize and linked it to early improvements in rice harvests as well.

In 2004, maize geneticist and breeder Li Jiangsheng of China Agricultural University (CAU) began to explore the genetics of teosinte, the puny wild ancestor of maize, which early farmers domesticated and bred to create edible corn. One big change: Whereas teosinte has just two rows of kernels, modern maize has more than a dozen. To understand what changed genetically, Li and colleagues spent years creating an experimental intermediate type of maize that has six rows.

By mapping genetic markers, Li and an even larger team identified a single gene that influences the number of rows of kernels in this lab-grown corn. They called the gene KRN2, for kernel row number.”

What is new that just one gene can be manipulated to increase rows of kernels. It is highly likely that all grasses, e.g., wheat, can be made to grow larger amounts of grain. Imagine the global increase in productivity if each ear of corn, each rice and wheat caryopse increased its yield by twenty percent! Good news!

 

The New Economics

Posted on by
Reply

Changing culture of world economics. What began in 2017 as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade/cultural liaison between eleven nations, has become the new standard for international trade in the future (street name: supply chains). Yesterday the New York Times wrote “There may well be a fracturing of the world into economic blocs, as countries and companies gravitate to ideological corners with distinct markets and pools of labor.”

The difference in the 21st century is the binding power of the Internet. A good example is the impact on Russia as the entire European Union, currently dependent on Russia for 80% of its oil and gas, has signed an agreement to depend on sources other than Russia. This could not be done so quickly without the tools of social media, the ‘Cloud’ and satellite integration.

Further, culture plays a larger role than it did in the last century: democracies are uniting around other democracies; similarly, autocracies are uniting as well (e.g., China’s Belt and Road Initiative). One of the unresolved issues in future economics is the impact of global warming – today more than half of all nations have failing economies that cannot carry the impact of climate change. Somewhere in the shadows the rich nations will have to make economic shifts in priorities, e.g., in current tax imbalances, discounted trade agreements and larger support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Guru suggests this conflagration of shifts will make three nations the owners of all meaningful supply chains: United States, China and India.

Referencing again the New York Times quote, their term ‘fracturing’ suggests many troubling but small nations may be at the center of high energy confrontation. For example, Cuba, Taiwan, Mexico, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, Myanmar, etc. Other medium-sized nations like Hungary, Greece and Brazil will use politics to gain favorable economic relationships between supply chains.

Ancient Mariner