A good friend wrote this week about the company store and company housing at a coal mine in Montana. His ancestors were indebted for passage from Ireland in the 1890s and in several instances died of black lung disease within a decade or so of the journey. All of them save one were only ever paid in script (paper coupons issued by the company). Script was only good at the company store and for company housing in the company town. There was no exchange to American coins or bank notes.
Bernard makes the comparison to dollars in America since 1971 with no connexion to gold or silver. You can keep running on the treadmill but you can never get ahead. You can read his Substack at Radio Farside. Glitchy 'stack app doesn't want me to link to persons with @ today but maybe search won't glitch. lol
Anyway, it's a valid comparison. His one exceptional ancestor got a job at the owner's home with occasional silver coins in tips or payments. Eventually left town and bought a cottage somewhere in Gollyfornia. So it's a happy story!
Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell are evil. They hate humanity and enslave mankind with false promises and paper script. Their ambition is a patriarchal digital currency that prevents workers from having any fun and hastens their deaths. Every lamp post on Constitution Avenue (for the irony guys) should be decorated with bureau rats strangling in the entrails of central bankers, but many things which Americans should have done decades ago remain undone.
There is a reckoning. It's coming. God's will be done. Amen.
As an aside, the story is one of my grandfathers came over as an indentured servant to a farmer who paid his way and he worked extra jobs to pay the farmer off years early.
My Davidson clan forebears were forced off our land in the Highlands in what the filthy depraved mass murdering British still call the "clearances" as if we were some noxious weeds or undesirable trees on the land they stole from us in 1746. My lot were forcibly transported for life to the Virginia colony where we were expected to be worked to death. But God is merciful and there was a storm at sea and we made port in New York. For the convenience of the shipmaster and to avoid paying duty for the cargo or waiting for its owner to arrive and pay, he burned the indentures and had his men clear us from the hold. So we arrived penniless but free. I would sooner urinate on a British flag as listen to their nationalist socialist anthem. ymmv
Thanks for this great post "Thoughts on complex systems, failure cascades, and the international order" by N.S. Lyons. As a software engineer, I can appreciate the insights regarding complex & simple systems.
"... complex systems are vulnerable to failure cascades, in which the failure of even a single part can set off an unpredictable domino effect of further failures, which spread exponentially as more and more dependencies fail."
"In the best cases simpler systems are not only resilient but actively anti-fragile (they gain from and grow stronger amid disorder)... Simplicity itself can be a serious asset.”
"And empires fall the same way most complex systems do: by becoming too complex to bear their own weight."
If anybody is interested, this is the main difference b/w Bitcoin & Ethereum/"cryptos". Bitcoin is boringly simple. It's never been hacked since inception & its uptime is 99.95%. Ethereum is growing more & more complex & nobody understands everything anymore.
This passage from the book "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman about the months leading up to WW1 and during the first month of fighting. (h/t FFTT Tree Rings, Luke Gromen) illustrates the fallacy of assumptions in designing any complex tactic or system:
“In prescribing the tactics of assault, French Field Regulations had calculated that in a dash of 20 seconds the infantry line could cover 50 meters before the enemy infantry would have time to shoulder guns, take aim, and fire. All these ‘gymnastics so painfully practiced at manoeuvres’, as a French soldier said bitterly afterward, proved grim folly on the battlefield. With machine guns, the enemy needed only 8 seconds to fire, not 20.”
The Lyons article was excellent. The discussion on complexity was outstanding. My favorite quote was “unsurprisingly, disciplined men with guns were also the decisive factor in those few civilian communities that were able to fight off and survive the attack.” I think I will keep my guns and my 2005 F150.
"I know, and everyone out there knows, it's increasingly more difficult to keep pace with the debasement in the purchasing power of your paper money..." It’s not just purchasing power being debased at this time - add to that everything that we used to respect because we honoured and valued ‘standards’
Howe and the ‘run-away progressive managerial technocracy’. Yes they are not mutually exclusive - eventually people throw out the managerial technocrats (elites); those elites regroup and resume. The cycle continues. I’m beginning to think it’s the human condition. It could also be that Lucifer is king of this world and he’ll always have his followers.
Cheerful dread = birth of a terrible beauty. There is something morbidly fascinating about where we are all headed.
With respect to vehicle repairs in newer cars, my wife’s MB was in the dealership repair shop for almost 4-months for an electrical issue. They literally told her it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. God knows what it would have cost outside of warranty, but it ended up being a short circuit in a cooling fan. Four months because of a fan.
Half the country is living paycheck to paycheck and responding to sentiment surveys, the other half is out making DINKS videos. Politicians? They're trying to keep Trump from running and Biden from being outed, it would make a great SNL skit if it wasn't so sad...
A good friend wrote this week about the company store and company housing at a coal mine in Montana. His ancestors were indebted for passage from Ireland in the 1890s and in several instances died of black lung disease within a decade or so of the journey. All of them save one were only ever paid in script (paper coupons issued by the company). Script was only good at the company store and for company housing in the company town. There was no exchange to American coins or bank notes.
Bernard makes the comparison to dollars in America since 1971 with no connexion to gold or silver. You can keep running on the treadmill but you can never get ahead. You can read his Substack at Radio Farside. Glitchy 'stack app doesn't want me to link to persons with @ today but maybe search won't glitch. lol
Anyway, it's a valid comparison. His one exceptional ancestor got a job at the owner's home with occasional silver coins in tips or payments. Eventually left town and bought a cottage somewhere in Gollyfornia. So it's a happy story!
Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell are evil. They hate humanity and enslave mankind with false promises and paper script. Their ambition is a patriarchal digital currency that prevents workers from having any fun and hastens their deaths. Every lamp post on Constitution Avenue (for the irony guys) should be decorated with bureau rats strangling in the entrails of central bankers, but many things which Americans should have done decades ago remain undone.
There is a reckoning. It's coming. God's will be done. Amen.
As an aside, the story is one of my grandfathers came over as an indentured servant to a farmer who paid his way and he worked extra jobs to pay the farmer off years early.
My Davidson clan forebears were forced off our land in the Highlands in what the filthy depraved mass murdering British still call the "clearances" as if we were some noxious weeds or undesirable trees on the land they stole from us in 1746. My lot were forcibly transported for life to the Virginia colony where we were expected to be worked to death. But God is merciful and there was a storm at sea and we made port in New York. For the convenience of the shipmaster and to avoid paying duty for the cargo or waiting for its owner to arrive and pay, he burned the indentures and had his men clear us from the hold. So we arrived penniless but free. I would sooner urinate on a British flag as listen to their nationalist socialist anthem. ymmv
Thanks for this great post "Thoughts on complex systems, failure cascades, and the international order" by N.S. Lyons. As a software engineer, I can appreciate the insights regarding complex & simple systems.
"... complex systems are vulnerable to failure cascades, in which the failure of even a single part can set off an unpredictable domino effect of further failures, which spread exponentially as more and more dependencies fail."
"In the best cases simpler systems are not only resilient but actively anti-fragile (they gain from and grow stronger amid disorder)... Simplicity itself can be a serious asset.”
"And empires fall the same way most complex systems do: by becoming too complex to bear their own weight."
If anybody is interested, this is the main difference b/w Bitcoin & Ethereum/"cryptos". Bitcoin is boringly simple. It's never been hacked since inception & its uptime is 99.95%. Ethereum is growing more & more complex & nobody understands everything anymore.
This passage from the book "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman about the months leading up to WW1 and during the first month of fighting. (h/t FFTT Tree Rings, Luke Gromen) illustrates the fallacy of assumptions in designing any complex tactic or system:
“In prescribing the tactics of assault, French Field Regulations had calculated that in a dash of 20 seconds the infantry line could cover 50 meters before the enemy infantry would have time to shoulder guns, take aim, and fire. All these ‘gymnastics so painfully practiced at manoeuvres’, as a French soldier said bitterly afterward, proved grim folly on the battlefield. With machine guns, the enemy needed only 8 seconds to fire, not 20.”
As the saying goes, 'everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth'
The Lyons quote is brilliant.
Yeah, a great writer I just came across the other day.
The Lyons article was excellent. The discussion on complexity was outstanding. My favorite quote was “unsurprisingly, disciplined men with guns were also the decisive factor in those few civilian communities that were able to fight off and survive the attack.” I think I will keep my guns and my 2005 F150.
"I know, and everyone out there knows, it's increasingly more difficult to keep pace with the debasement in the purchasing power of your paper money..." It’s not just purchasing power being debased at this time - add to that everything that we used to respect because we honoured and valued ‘standards’
Howe and the ‘run-away progressive managerial technocracy’. Yes they are not mutually exclusive - eventually people throw out the managerial technocrats (elites); those elites regroup and resume. The cycle continues. I’m beginning to think it’s the human condition. It could also be that Lucifer is king of this world and he’ll always have his followers.
Cheerful dread = birth of a terrible beauty. There is something morbidly fascinating about where we are all headed.
With respect to vehicle repairs in newer cars, my wife’s MB was in the dealership repair shop for almost 4-months for an electrical issue. They literally told her it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. God knows what it would have cost outside of warranty, but it ended up being a short circuit in a cooling fan. Four months because of a fan.
Half the country is living paycheck to paycheck and responding to sentiment surveys, the other half is out making DINKS videos. Politicians? They're trying to keep Trump from running and Biden from being outed, it would make a great SNL skit if it wasn't so sad...
CREDENCE!!! Sorry, I digress.
I still listen to them regularly.
Taylor Swift is person of the year: nuff said.
CREDENCE!!! I digress.