Latest business and finance news & analysis
REMINDER: Banks are closed today, markets are open. Futures are near neutral and we expect a slow day.
This may sound like a trivial sort of thing to be talking about, but the problem is – trust me on this – far from trivial.
We all know robots are coming. They will be here any minute to about 20-years from now for most everything humans do. Already there are sex machines and sex robots so it stands to reason that most other human functions will be replaced, too.
It has not been particularly difficult to figure that the economy doesn’t have much of anywhere to go.
The market fell 200 points for a while yesterday, although it wasn’t that bad by the close. So for that reason, if nothing else, we expect to see a further dump in today’s action.
From a longwave perspective, this is till a Tuesday morning in 1928 and the Fed is still caught between a rock and a hard place. Consequently, a one year view of the bond market (10-year note) is less than encouraging.
I suppose one could look at the first two blips in the bond chart and argue that we are going to the 2.6% area on the 10-year. But I sense some resistance around 2.441% and honestly, that would be a dandy place for things to turn back down again.
You know, a lot of information is contained in how market’s move – its just people would rather ask their friends instead of learning to make reasonable projections on their own.
Laziness will cost you. Just remember, the financial markets are not there to may you rich. That’s one of the big lies. They are really there to make the rich richer and the poor…well, that’d be you.
No: Absolutely not. Because this gets to the heart of price deflation which I have been going on about (*almost) endlessly.
Import and export prices are hot off a press release – key point is in yellow:
“U.S. import prices declined 0.5 percent in October, after falling 0.6 percent the previous month, the U.S.
At last! There are some benefits to getting old.
Not that 66.8 is old…but it’s not in the ‘spring chicken range’ either.
Still, when it comes to travel, a lifetime of mistakes and paying full-price for travel eventually pays off. You get old, you get discounts. Having made every travel mistake in the book, getting things right eventually becomes automatic.
This morning, I thought we could run through some of the “head work” that goes into a decent cross-country trip.
Planning for the trip usually begins a month ahead of time – as soon as the date of the trip becomes firm and (to put it in military terms) the “mission becomes clear.”
In this case, the “mission” is my youngest daughter’s wedding in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand a week from yesterday.
This is really the only “fixed point” in the trip. Everything else is gravy. Which means we can then “run numbers” to see if we a) fly commercial, b) fly our own plane, or c) drive it in the old Lexumobile.
This is where we “Blue Sky” the trip. It’s when we wonder “Since we will be in Las Vegas, what ELSE might we knock off on this trip?”
There are lots of options: I’d like to pick up a Teppan-style Benihana-like meal in Amarillo, so that goes on the list.
There are a couple of casinos I would like to do a little gambling at. One is Twin Arrows up east of Flagstaff, AZ and on the return trip, there is one south of Albuquerque, NM where we haven’t stayed, either.
As you may know from past columns, we both like casinos when traveling. The reason? Well, not to offend Hilton, or any of the other Big Chains, they just don’t hold a visual candle to the activity in a moderately-sized casino/hotel. For one, there’s a choice of food. A good quiet upscale place, a buffet joint, and a burger bar…so a wide range of choices there. Plus usually a good watering hole can be found. Probably because it helps people forget the laws of statistics which argue there shouldn’t even BE such places as Casinos. Then let’s not forget that people talk to other people in casinos – around the bars, around the machines, at the blackjack table, and so on.
Remember, I probably “get off the ranch” fewer than a two dozen times a year.
Dow futures down. Oil is Up….the Deflation Wobble-Boogie is on again. It should be a song, really.
To accompany the dance (as in “song and…”) from the Fed on this whole business of whether to raise rates – and when – are a host of conflicted economic indicators. 10-year note creeping up, gold going down last week. Copper sliding…ocean shipping sliding…all which employment goes up? Vapes and ViseGrips for all hands!
The problem is, this week is unlikely (at least today) to see much clarification of matters.
Honestly, no one – including the Fed knows what to do – and as a result, a “lost in the wilderness” way of thinking has set in. But we are far from “lost” around here. We know that so far – since 2009 – the stock market has been doing a Jim Dandy replay of the lead-in to the last Depression.
As you can see here, we should have at least a year to run before the crap really begins to hit the fan so we still have time to prepare. Our airplane is going on the market,. and I expect it will sell by April or May of next year. That’s because there is a finite number of people who are ready to spend $25,000 on an airplane. Not everyone is capable to learning to operate in three-dimensions and frankly, there are a lot of two-dimensional people who really should stay on the ground.
No doubt, there are people around with brightly colored projections and those whose tea leaf-reading skills are not as reliable as our sanguine looking at real data for 15-years. But that doesn’t make getting up on Monday any more enjoyable. It’s a grind and I hate it, too.
Except for the odd missile test (tell me was one of ours please), it doesn’t shape up as much of a week.
On the economic front,. we have some bond auctions today – which is good because the fixed income people have to go to work, too.
Tomorrow there is import price data. But, like the bond auction unless you’re a player, this is a terrible bore.
Things will not improve Wednesday, either. Because it is a pseudo-Holiday. Here’s an area where the pretenders in Washington could actually do something: Since Wednesday is Veterans Day, could we all just take the day off and pay respects to Veterans.
The way things work out now is pretty simple – and I suppose it tells us more about the holiday than we would care to admit. Here’s my short list:
1. Private industry is almost universally being forced to work Wednesday. Lose someone in the family? In war? Just, or otherwise? Well, tough shit for you. Come in and work for the factory owners.
2. If you are a stockbroker, sure,.
This morning’s column will take “some nerve” to read – because it is about precisely that – how our nerves operate.
The conventional wisdom is that all “thinking” happens in the head. Logically, this must be so because that’s where the nominal central processor for the body is located.
However, there are some simple sensory tricks that call this notion into question.
Think about your consciousness for a moment – that point of being within the body.
Now pick up any of our weapons of precision thinking. A hammer will do.
Give your thumb a fair – but not injuring whack!
As you do this, there are two ways of experiencing the event.
One is to remain brain-centered. In this case, your point of view is fixed (and quite painful, I would add) and your “out there in the body somewhere” pain is perceived.
The second and more problematic notion is that your consciousness is – for however brief a time – actually existing somewhere other than inside head, behind eyes.
This is the most important question in science right now: On the one hand, our “being-ness” is in a fixed location. Somewhere behind the eyes.
On the other hand, if our consciousness can flit around up and down nerves in the body – to extreme points of pain – such that we assemble reality there, instead of behind the eyes…well, that is a different kettle of fish completely.
The first instance argues that moving consciousness from its normal “seat” will be a brain-centered task. The second case, however, argues that it is merely an engineering problem to build the appropriate interface to the neural network.
And, if that trick can be done, then we are off to the stars because the main problem consciousness has is that as a semi-electrochemical function, which most seem to agree it is, the possibility of extending “its network” becomes a possibility.
Since I sacked out early Sunday night, and I’m going through a “brain on fire” moment, I thought I’d mention this as a fine thinking point to solve this week.
Obviously, if the second case is true (consciousness floats around inside of a traditional body) then it follows that at the moment of death we are able to “break-out” from the confines of the “container” (body) in which we live. This would put some hard science behind some reported human experiences; namely the soul being able to slip the confines of the body at the moment of death.
Whether the last-moment’s overdose of DMT is wholly a coping mechanism – and a drug-induced illusion of ego – is a matter being hotly debated.
On top of cabinets in operating rooms, there are cards and plaques with numbers, letters, and symbols that are not known to staff. Many of the people reporting near death experiences report seeing these scientific test markers accurately. And this, in turn, argues that there is something of a chemical jailer in place.
And it may be that our brains actual produce this “chemical jailer” stuff as a part of their regular function.
For a moment, think about those web-like Dream-Catchers that you can find at New Age and Indian curio shops, particularly in the West.
Odd as it may seem at first, is there a possibility that the role of humans is to act as a kind of “soul-catcher” whose function in the greater scheme of things is to act as a kind of incubator for the soul? Many religions would have it so. Many hand out concubines while others give away whole planets in the after-life.
While title to things non-owned is a questionable racket, it doesn’t move us from the central part of this morning’s ponder: Is there a non-drug way to build a physical extension of nerve tissue to get “out?”
I’m not sure how that would work…somehow in this life, I skipped the part where I study neurology and become an expert in this sort of thing.
However, it seems (intuitively) like there ought to be a way to “wire in” to neurons that are other than what we’re born with – and if that can be mastered, then we come up to exactly the point where immortality on this plane becomes possible.
Not that it would be easy. But huge progress looms in the Man-Machine-Interface area of research and development.
Let’s say that we could invent this new stuff that would “wire in” to a sufficiently large nerve in the body. And then, we would be able to break out, at least to some limited degree.
I’m sure you’re aware of all the work being done in “mental coupling” – which is exactly in this realm. On the input side, there are rudimentary “helmets” that use electrical impulses to couple to the brain.
One example of this was written up in 2013 when MIT’s work on artificial retinas was discussed in some depth here.
That was purely on the input side of the problem. Frankly, what amounts to perhaps a 60-pixel optical field may not seem like much, but it really is an incredible start.
On the output side of the problem, there is a ton of product on the verge of coming to market. Hongkiat has a list of “8 mind-blowing breakthroughs” over here.
The likely leader on the output side of things is a company called EMOTIV and their website is over here.
The key products to look at – in terms of where we go from simple Apps – will be thought-controlled computer commands. It looks like their Insight product is moving in that direction quickly.
Even more impressive is the fact that there are already Android apps coming out for the EMOTIV Insight like this one that promises:
FEATURES:
• Connect with an Insight headset via Bluetooth(r) SMART.
• Train 13 mental commands: Push, Pull, Move Left, Move Right, Lift, Drop, Rotate Left, Rotate Right, Rotate Clockwise, Rotate Counter Clockwise, Rotate Forward, Rotate Reverse and Disappear.
• Compatible with Android 4.4 and above.
It won’t be too long before the coping catches up and someone will come out with a thought-directed browsing system.
And after that?
Well, don’t look now, but if I was running DARPA, I would already be researching how to apply the Emotive Insight to flying of an aircraft. After all, coordinated light is not as difficult as the 13-commends which are already in the Android program. Flying an airplane by “thought control” comes purely a “mind-mapping” exercise.
To fly an airplane, you have three rudder inputs: left/right/none. Ailerons (roll) are the same thing – right, left, center. And then you’ve got three positions for elevator – up, down, and neutral.
Of course, each of these has to be proportional (and did I mention simultaneous?) but it’s not that hard.
Come to think of it, it has already been done in the Clint Eastwood move “Firefox” which came out back in 1982:
A joint Anglo-American plot is devised to steal a highly advanced Soviet fighter aircraft (MiG-31, NATO code name “Firefox”) which is capable of Mach 6, is invisible to radar, and carries weapons controlled by thought. Former United States Air Force Major Mitchell Gant (Eastwood), a Vietnam veteran and former POW, infiltrates the Soviet Union, aided by his ability to speak Russian (due to his having had a Russian mother) and a network of Jewish dissidents and sympathizers, three of whom are key scientists working on the fighter itself. His goal is to steal the Firefox and fly it back to friendly territory for analysis.
A number of products in this same arena are starting to pop onto Amazon. One such product is called Muse: The Brain Sensing Headband – Black and it will set you back $300 bucks. It promises some insight into the state of your brain (in terms of relaxed, level of cognitive function, whether you’re all worked up, hyper, brain-on-fire and that sort of thing. In which case, it will be very useful as a biofeedback machine.
At an even lower price-point is the NeuroSky MindWave Headset which runs $80 – but can be found with mobile options and software for (what else?) more money. This may be the first real “brain connector I buy because of its product description:
The MindWave headset takes decades of laboratory EEG technology research and puts it in your hands.
This morning is a fine example of a New Depression Journal and Look Ahead: You see humans are -whether they realize it, or not – in a perilous gulch at the moment. The results of decisions made now – and in coming years – may determine how humans fare in future relations with machines.
While this is not purely economic, and thus within our normal scope in Peoplenomics, the matter is sure to become both economic as well as social in less than 10-years time.
The decisions we make now are important. As you will see in the materials to be presented using our hypothetical Directorate 153 paradigm, a continuity of government agency may even today be working the “leading edge” of the issues.
For Gun Rights advocates, there is a key question: The currently framed interpretation of the Constitution permits us to “keep and bear arms.”
Traditional interpretation has so far generally limited the definition to fired projectiles. Yet, as you will see this morning, there are a wide range of non-traditional weapons which are both common and which could be tasked as anti-robotic measures. In the face of this reality, will Liberty be able to outrun the megalomaniacs who would command hoards of robots?
This will be a reasonably short and to the point column this morning. The reason?
Not much is more important than the jobs report.
The spin on this is government’s use of the term “essentially unchanged.” That is idiotic language for a nation of sheep. Something is either unchanged, or it is not. Plain and simple. Maybe better, maybe worse, a bit or a lot. But “essentially unchanged” is m”essentially BS” to anyone capable of precision thought.
So here that is, hot off the press (release)
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 271,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 5.0 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services, health care, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and construction.
Strong enough to knock out the power. Long-lasting enough that Zeus-the-Cat was let in the house to hide out from the weather for a while…thunder & lightning…Over the course of a couple of hours sitting out on the screen porch, the temp dropped from a muggy 85 down to a more-reasonable 75. Low 60s this morning.
We can’t help but notice the NY Times is out with a lead on the disclosure (at last!) of the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade deal.
After all the hype and BS about how this was really going to fix America’s trade mess, seems the best they could come up with was getting Vietnam to help their worker conditions which won’t to jack-squat for the people of, oh, Detroit for example.
Here’s a little morsel: The TPP gives even more power to the World Trade Organization by recognizing its power in the exceptions section:
Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to prevent a Party from taking action, including maintaining or increasing a customs duty, that is authorised by the Dispute Settlement Body of the WTO or is taken as a result of a decision by a dispute settlement panel under a free trade agreement to which the Party taking action and the Party against which the action is taken are party.
One we get through the happy-talk and the corporatist fat-cat pitch, a bunch of us who can read the whole document here will likely conclude that it is another selling-out of America. We The People, I don’t believe, ever agreed consciously to give away our national sovereignty to a foreign-dominated trade group that has no interest in ensuring the quality of life in America.
Wrong! Of course we did: Another District of Corruption hoodwink.
Here’s the thing: When a country gives up the power to impose tariffs in order to regulate its internal economy (and raise money from tariffs on lower-priced imports) you’re no longer running your own country.
This bending over for the WTO is unacceptable and corporatist traders is in defiance of Liberty. We are either a free-standing country or we are an occupied country with a corporate puppet-government. We ought to tax anything coming in we feel like. And, if a corporation is domiciled offshore for tax convenience sake (think Apple, et all) then they should pay a higher tax on their goods coming in than a company which keeps its account in America.
Which, of course, we are. Or used to be…
This trade deal is just a layer of chocolate frosting on a bullshit cake. Just so’s you won’t notice.
Fact is: If corporations weren’t going to cut a fat hog on it, it would never have been rammed through congrease so fast.
TPP won’t balance the national debt – though it could if we didn’t have WTO and external games being played with the tariffs imposed on you name it: Cars, computers, washers, dryers…whatever.
Worse? The dispute settlement section lists this an an exception:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) levels the playing field for American workers and American businesses, leading to more Made-in-America exports and more higher-paying American jobs here at home.
Reader Doug – a Peoplenomics subscriber for a long time – apparently didn’t read o9ne of our recent reports closely enough.
Reason? He apparently may have missed this from the Peoplenomics October 28 report:
Time to Buy Bitcoins
Right about here, I was going to launch into a long discussion about how the U.S. is Babylon from biblical accounts – and the Tower of Babel is what we are building with an information society.
But we will save that for the second part of this report because the main thing I want to point out is this chart: Think of it as a surprise ending to our report this morning.
Can it be done?
Well, hell yes. It’s not that hard.
All you need is a little common sense and the ability to step back from the crowd a bit and see into the economic future.
Whilst normally we sharpen half our wit on matters economic, I’m compelled this morning by a couple of recent news reports to raise a discussion about whether America – the one we grew up with – has already been flushed by a negligent and a mostly incompetent Congress.
A bit of background here: We are not the only “nominally free” country to go down this road. In England, discloses Wikipedia, there was much discussion of “Elective Dictatorship” in the mid 1970’s:
An “elective dictatorship” (also called executive dominance in political science) is a phrase popularised by the former Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom, Lord Hailsham, in a Richard Dimbleby Lecture at the BBC in 1976.[1] The phrase is found a century earlier, in describing Giuseppe Garibaldi‘s doctrines,[2] and was used by Hailsham (then known as Quintin Hogg) in lectures in 1968 and 1969.[3] It describes the state in which Parliament is dominated by the government of the day. It refers to the fact that the legislative programme of Parliament is determined by the government, and government bills virtually always pass the House of Commons because of the nature of the majoritarian first-past-the-post electoral system, which almost always produces strong government, in combination with the imposition of party discipline on the governing party’s majority, which almost always ensures loyalty. In the absence of a codified constitution, this tendency toward executive dominance is compounded by the Parliament Acts and Salisbury Convention which circumscribe the House of Lords and their ability to block government initiatives.
Fast-forward to present-day America or whatever your more honest name for it might be nowadays (I like ‘Merica).
We see that there is no longer a genuine party sitting in opposition in Washington. John Boehner sold out (trade deal) and I expect no less from Paul Ryan (border issue).
When I have referred many times to the Obama Wing of the GOP I was not kidding.
First, I am not a big fan of woo-woo. But I have also done enough research into the future, means of predicting, and how predictions come to pass, that I also don’t scoff at people’s ability to plug in to bits about the future, either. There is something to it – I’d stake my life on it.
Once you’ve experienced knowledge at a distance whether he measuring stick is space or time, it changes your outlook on life. The daily becomes trivial.
Take for example this Phoenix quake swarm story.
Elaine and I were kicking it around after breakfast Monday when she said “Play that video report” that was popping up off ABC-15 in Phoenix.
Thinking nothing about it, I rolled the video and saw reporter Katie Connors doing what reporters would call a “stand-up” near the epicenter of the quake when she said near the end of her report…
“We are live at Rock Springs Café, everyone knows this place, they are famous for their pies…we are waiting for the doors to open to go inside…”
Instantly, I froze the video..
Pies…pies… reporter….earthquake report. A huge alarm bell was going off in my head…
OMG!!! I KNOW THIS PART!!! Seen it before!
A quick search of our archives of past articles quickly turned up this January 13, 2015 column where what was the topic? Earthquakes.
If you reread the story over here, a long-dead colleague of mine from the rock & roll news period had shown up in a vivid/epic dream I had the morning of January 13th.
That dream seemed to foretell of a massive April 9+ earthquake – which obviously didn’t happen in 2015. But here was the totally strange part as I described my colleague appearing in this incredibly vivid January dream:
“He passed away something like 20 years back and haven’t thought about him in years, so it was odd in this dream that a personality of the news business was present (unseen, soft of off-stage doing the discussion) and that was notable, I think.
As to the earthquake part, there are actually two. One (and they are possibly a pairs) are in the 5.3 and 5.6 category and they connect with “Thursday” or “Friday” and after this, people who are involved will be going back to the city (this happens east of San Francisco).
One of the returning news crews will be stopping (on the way back to the city) to have something that’s like an apple fritter or apple scone – as a place somewhere in the area that is famous for those.
There were other oddities about the story too: Lot’s of dog references, a kind of map of a state or national park area (it was shown as a kind of green glass layer under the area.
All of which sounds like a pretty ho-hum news item. There was some snow on the hills, and a ski area up a ways, and after peaking at the ski area, there’s a small hydro project somewhere on the eastern slopes.