News

We begin this morning, like all good middle manager corporate suck-ups (and Jerry McGuire) by asking government to “Show us the Money!”

So, presto, faster than you can say “I’d like the sausage and eggs, over easy, hash browns extra crispy, a side of ham, bagel with cream cheese instead of the toast, decaf coffee, side of ham, apple juice,  and a piece of pie for desert…make it ala mode with French Vanilla..I also have a peanut allergy and you did get that’s DECAF, right” here is what matters:

-0.8%

If your order takes a while, the detail level goes like this:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for January, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $439.8 billion, a decrease of 0.8 percent (±0.5%) from the previous month, but up 3.3 percent (±0.9%) above January 2014.

Total sales for the November 2014 through January 2015 period were up 3.8 percent (±0.7%) from the same period a year ago. The November to December 2014 percent change was unrevised from -0.9 percent (±0.3%).
Retail trade sales were down 1.0 percent (±0.5%) from December 2014, but up 2.4 percent (±0.7%) above last year. Food services and drinking places
were up 11.3 percent (±3.5%) from January 2014 and auto and other motor vehicle dealers were up 10.7 percent (±3.0%) from last year. Gasoline
stations were down 23.5 percent (±1.6%) from the previous year.

And yes, we now have two quarters of back to back declines in retail and a third would be what?  A recession.  Oh, wait, that would be quarters of GDP and we can lie our way around that by making up stuff, but sales don’t lie….which is why we need a large population of economists.

And what is keeping America alive?  Presently nothing.  But last year?  Auto sales.  Behold:

Save the Economy!  Buy something (even if it’s some useless shit you don’t need)!

Meantime, if your extensive breakfast order STILL hasn’t arrived, we could mention the market futures are up, so that means no crash until at least two months out.

With the Baltic Dry Index out there circling the 2009 lows, down another 13 this morning to the 540 level, so lower than 2009 – we know that a combination of longshore talks and delayed shipments may mean more than anything else  that the Fed is seeking any reason it can find to argue that we’re not stuck in deflation.  LOL, hep me, hep me, brother.

Still, gold and silver are chilling.  Say, did you catch this one?

Peace is Bad for the Economy

While retail can’t be blamed for everything that happens, any leftovers can be shoveled onto the rap sheet of Vlad Putin.

The problem, which USA Today doesn’t put in such direct terms in their story here today, is that there is Big Money…come on winners… is War.  And Vlad just agreed to a ceasefire, so that’s off for Q1.  Means another QE in EU is ITB (in the bag).

Of course, we still have ISIS but when Putin in talking ceasefire and the president of Syria was unflappable in his BBC interview earlier this week, how is  Boston Dynamics (a subsidiary of Google) ever going to sell a million robot dog army to the Marines without a hot war to ramp up for?

That, I suspect is why the Spot video has gone viral since we pointed this all out to subscribers in our Wednesday Peoplenomics report:  Peace is bad.  See Spot run.

When running, Spot wants RPGs and silenced human-killers to be made battle ready.  As luck would have it, we will either find a war, or make one, so stand by for a robo-battle yet to come.

Who’d have thought:  Google’s going to become a kick-ass (or dog) defense stock! 

So with self driving cars, internet search, social, dogs of war (pardon the pun) it’s going to be the one ETF of the future.  How come no one is saying this but me?  And where are the anti-monopolists?

We broke up a perfectly good phone monopoly years back, so why not break up a group that has such a strong hold on the future?  Where’s judge Harold Green who presided over the AT&T breakup case when we need him?  (Trivia answer: dead.  Great guy.  We used to grow people like that in this country.)

Where at the pols who should be keeping the future random?  Answer:  Getting campaign contribs hand over fist from where?  (those who own future…)

US Department of Resume Tweaks

Say, looks like NBC seriously considered firing Brian Williams for inflating his Iraq experience, according to reports like this one.

And now, the Washington Post is looking into the educational background of Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin and serious GOP 2016 hopeful.  I don’t recall the Post looking into the legal conduct of the Clintons prior to their running for offices or Beghazi, but my memory ain’t so good.  I’m getting old and cranky.

At any rate, where this all leads is to the Federal Election Commission trying to slime-ball through Internet controls (on the assumption people can’t figure out which side various media are on, so lets license are mandate reporting…) and after that?

Here’s the way if works:  Citizens United can buy elections.  Internet sites aren’t going to be allowed to, looks like.  Why?  The money goes to site operators, not the political mafia chieftains and their collections teams.  Morality ain’t in trouble – died long ago.  Obstacles to keep little guys with honest opinions and a hundred bucks to start a website is what this is about.

Well, I can see Fearless Leader taking up the cause and demanding a US Department of Resumes.  Oh, except that might lead to a closer look at people like Al Sharpton.  Damn upstart sites like Smoking gun, huh?

Sure, we can’t close the borders, but hey, we can expand the compunist agenda in other ways, can’t we? Faux participation – that’s the democracy for US.

Give me enough money and I can buy any policy you want. Two or three years for really controversial stuff.

Global Health Surveillance

Say, here’s another goody to consider…this from our Winnipeg news analyst:

Dear Mr. Ure,

One is reassured knowing that the WHO utilized a “dedicated internet search engine” for assistance with the ebola outbreak.

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Well, here we are, just a few days from what will be – for many – a three day weekend.

So nothing better than a little humor to set the mood, from reader D:

“Gotta love those grand-kids ..

I was eating breakfast with my  10-year-old Granddaughter and I asked her,

What day is Monday?”

Without skipping a beat she said, “It’s Presidents Day!”  ..

She’s smart, so I    asked her “What does Presidents Day mean?”  ..

I was waiting for something about Washington, Lincoln, Obama, Bush or Clinton, etc.

She replied,    “Presidents Day is when the President steps out of  the White House, And if he sees his shadow, we have another year of Bull Shit.”

You know, it hurts when hot coffee spurts out your nose.  “

(rim shot)

So who gets the day off and on?

The Federal Office of Management and Budget has the federal list over here – click on the backwards tabs up topside.

As for banks, the Chicago Fed has a list of banking holidays, over here.  Most of them make sense, except for Columbus Day which will fall on October 12th this year.  I mean, it’s not like Columbus discovered time deposits, nor (as the case builds) did he discover America.  Scandinavians and Chinese had documented the area’s existence ahead of his voyage. Which didn’t include the first installation of an ATM, either.

That didn’t happen until 1961 according to Wikipedia:

In the US patent record, Luther George Simjian has been credited with developing a “prior art device”.^[5] Specifically his 132nd patent (US3079603) was first filed on 30 June 1960 (and granted 26 February 1963). The roll-out of this machine, called Bankograph, was delayed by a couple of years, due in part to Simjian’s Reflectone Electronics Inc.

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Sure, we can get to the details about deflation and how the market is going two do in a moment.

But before we go there, check out the story out of the UK on how old people’s profiles are being put online so that care givers can make bids on how much they will charge the UK government to take care of them!  Another step toward Soylent Green.

Maybe I am just overly sensitive to the perversions of government and computing because I’m been focusing so much research time lately on what I call “compunism” – which is what happens when computers take over from what used to be thinking humans.

Once upon a time in the world, being a senior was a sort of badge of honor.  You got to be old by making the right choices.  And there was either  loving family to live with at the end of the work life, a small two bedroom home on a few acres for gardening…you know, the kind of death with dignity of storybook lore.

No more.  Now, in crass computer-driven Life, we see oldsters being auctioned off as revenue sources where we’re pretty sure they will save some money for government, but not without some great personal sacrifice –  starting with their pride and dignity – in the Unemployed Kingdom.

Lest we gloat, it will be here soon enough.

Uber/Google

Not like Compunism is well-understood, though.  The fact that capitalism, communism, and almost any other “ism” you can name is being superseded by computer-driven variants (hence my word “Compunism”) even some of the best and brightest don’t fully understand the collision.

Take the NY Times story about Google – which put $250-million into Uber – the taxi replacement that’s head-on with Lyft.

Both Uber and Google grok future well…it’s just that in the end, we have to wonder if Uber will see its human resource be reduced to computational transport with the Google autonomous car program?

Who needs a driver when you have a processor?

And, in the meantime, we stand by projections made some months back that precisely this kind of unexpected displacement will drive structural unemployment past 30% before 2025 and that leaves The Big Policy Question No One Wants To Ask (TBPQNOWTA):

“Who will pay for all this crap?”

The answer – which I’ve been explaining for years – is simple:

Machines must be taxed.

Not on their unit output, but on how many humans they replace.  Otherwise, in a 100% automated world, there’s no way to pay the social costs and the world falls apart.

Which is it likely to do, anyway…

Angela’s War Flight

The German Chancellor(ette) is in Washington this morning where she’s going to tell the Golfer in Chief that it’s time to bring back Cold War Rhetoric…saying that Vlad Putin has his eyes on the rest of Eastern Europe.

Not that that she’d be wrong, except, let me think here…

Wasn’t it whatshername over at State who was passing out cookies to Maiden a little over a year ago in order to stir up the shit in the EUkraine so that the Merkelites could find another fool to rope into the Ponzi Scheme that is the EU?

So what now? 

Well, Merkel has a plan it seems to bump up defense spending to help the German economy recover because the word DEFLATION is showing up all over hell and gone.

China to surpass EU and North America by 2017 in the industrial robot race.

And while one Google headline said  A tidal wave of global capital is looking for safety, Merkel would be pleased to see some of that go to Germany.

And why not?  War has always been a growth industry.

But don’t mind me…I’m just pointing to a possible housing bubble collapse in New Zealand as still move evidence that global deflation isn’t just a story in the news flow:  It is the story.

Unless…

You want to see how the Swiss HSBC folks are being screwed to the media wall for helping all those tax cheats for all those years.

Life Under Compunism:  Data-Shopping Climate

Not to drive the point underlying most news too deeply today, but here’s another data shopping story about how the “crisis” in global warming is just data-shopping at its finest.

Put PhD. after your name, walk in with stacks of “data”…who’s going to review the model which is so complex the authors don’t even know how it works?

Still, if the compunists at the top of the computerized social order need a global tax, let’s call it a crisis and all pony up.

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Getting a fair bit of very good feedback on our latest projections as to how the world works that I laid out in Peoplenomics this weekend.  We’ll be doing more on the topic, too: 

Compunism – as I’ve called the phenomena – is what you get when you take a bunch of other “isms” and role them into  a new field of (inadvertent) human behavior.

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine an “anything goes” world where every human event we engage in has suddenly been tainted by the stench of too much computer use, data, dependence, and that most terrible of all facets of Compunism:  Data shopping.

Now, open your eyes.  We’re there!

Everyone is data-shopping and as everyone tries to hedge everything, a huge data-driven feudalism descends upon us.  Un-noticed and almost indescribable to the brainwashed.

OK, to be sure, the government’s Total Information Awareness Program, some of which is no doubt being built into the mix at the Provo computer surveillance fortress / surveillance computing center, will be done right…

Notwithstanding, though, I for one would donate $5 bucks to put a big sign next to the freeway up there that simply reads “Samaritan.”  People who watch Person of Interest will get it.  Television lets more slip than it might…or, it’s feeding The Resistance.

The humans who don’t get it, are those effing idiots who buy and send unfiltered commercial email/spam to innocents like me.,,.

I was on the receiving end of yet another round of  “Get this super-comfort Bra…” this morning.  And, worse, I was instructed to “Buy this special Valentine’s Day package for Your Man.”

WTF?  Ain’t no ‘phobe, dude, but can we at least do a gender sort on such lists?  Half that list cost was useless.  No man I know would tell his wife what bra to buy… you kidding me?  Talk about low IQ marketers….

Is this where the gender confusion in the world is coming from?  Are too many people being subliminally (and not so subliminally) sold wrong-gender goods by computers that they have become like the legendary crack monkeys at all overdose on blow when there’s so much it? 

How are later apes supposed to act when the computer is ubiquitous and is even now showing up on people’s arms in place of their wristwatches?

There have been some good comments on Compunism from the Peoplenomics side of our thinking and a few references in this site’s discussion pages.

It’s not that computers are here….nothing new about that. 

But, as I explained on the Peoplenomics side (in greater detail), it wasn’t the car that changed the world…it’s the whole system of cars; gas stations, road signs, shopping malls, all a result of the production line and Ford.

What networked computers are doing goes so far beyond this as to be unthinkable – at least by the legacy ape series of wet processors.

The new silicon dry processor thinkers are just ahead and they mean to take our planet from us.

We’ve had a chance  to get high civilization right, but it’s like putting down a poor foundation.  Along come computers are we don’t gracefully deal with change.  We don’t learn from the mistakes of the Vedics, Aztecs, Egyptians. 

This is do-over number what?

Sure makes me want to get out of bed and go bust my balls for another week working…and I imagine you feel about the same…

Speaking of Data-Shopping

A tip of the hat to reader Mario who found this list of business starts, stops, and bankruptcies over at Statistical Brain which goes a long ways toward cutting through the government mumbo-jump (and bullshit) about how the economy is doing.

Of course, what doesn’t show up on there is the on and off book hiring related to government.  Still, the sad (but not MSM headline-making) fast seems to be that new business creation was 77% of 2006 levels in 2014.

Not exactly romping, stomping growth that we’ve all been hearing so much about, but then  again “None Dare Call It Deflation,” huh?

A Real-Life Story of How Compunism Works

Subscriber Michal, as you’ll figure out after reading this post, is in healthcare.  And, after I explained the concept of Compunism and how it works, he was generous enough to share his experiences:

George,
I read this weekend article and I got a headache. But then I realized the headache came about from me being bent over while the system F*cked my head into the headboard.

It reminds me that before I made the mistake of going all in with silver, I was making money on the Compunism of financial information. I would notice that the stock market algo’s would sell a stock when it should have been buying, until the next day when someone corrected the algo, and bought the stock. Algos are responsible for 97% of stock transactions. The algos were responding to computer generated articles from press releases. Many times, the resulting headline would be opposite to what the article said. The algo’s were reading the headlines and not the stories. So, I started to look for articles headlines where there was a contradiction in headline versus story, and would buy or sell according to the story. Ended up making 40% in 2011 and 12. Shows that what the computer generates is more believable than the facts.

As for my current lifetime in alternative care, I see the compunism in health care.

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Oh, oh.  I bet you’re thinking “There goes George on the Brian Williams story…” but you’d be wrong.

That’s just a distant “Who cares?”  CNN says he was there, but his chopper didn’t take an RPG but did catch ground fire.  The NY Times has a different take  Across town, the NY Daily News is now questioning his coverage of hurricane Katrina.

While the Williams story may be boundlessly entertaining (pitting the right and left over what media should, or shouldn’t do, say, act, etc) the story won’t impact where we go next as a country.

Lying is, I hate to break it to you, a well-established policy of government.  Which is my so many documents about historical events – like the Kennedy Assassination  – are still secret.  It’s also why FOI requests get turned down all the time and nowhere is this more apparent than in economics.  The public’s right to know seems government-impeded, and likely for good reason:  People would be pissed and angry if they had all the facts, more’n likely.

The lie changes from day to day.

The big lie du jour I refer to, of course, is what we’ve been telling you for years.  We report the government press release, word for word, but we discount it a bit.  Say 90%, or so.

And it’s not like I’m the Lone Ranger and you’re Tonto in this:  The  Gallup polling organization.reported something extremely interesting earlier this week:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Payroll to Population employment rate (P2P), as measured by Gallup, was 44.1% in January. This is statistically similar to the 44.3% measured in December, but it is the highest measurement of P2P for any January since Gallup began tracking the metric in 2010. January is typically one of the lowest months for P2P in any year.

They go into the other factors a bit, too, including the alternative measures of labor under-utilization and the CES Birth-Death Model which allows bureaucrats to just “make up” numbers as long as they came make statistical justifications for their estimates.

And, of course, what will make this morning’s report even more interesting (in terms of fudging things) is when someone in the MSM gets around to figuring out that it seems highly likely that the employment numbers include 5+ million illegals who have partaken of an illegal (as in not embodied in law passed by Congress) way to snatch up a US work permit.

Seems simple enough to me:  If there aren’t enough people working in the US, you just open the border, hand out work permits to anyone who wants one, and then infer that they are all working because, gosh, why would they need a work permit if they weren’t working?

So in the bigger scheme of life, Brian Williams is likely only a scapegoat for bigger lies in play all around us.  Not the least of which is employment but which extends into other areas as well:  climate, globalism, how big government is (20+ million) and so forth.

So with that as foreplay, let’s go jump in that pool, again, shall we?

Noting, before we jump into the cesspool, that Williams is a distraction because there’s bigger fish.  Not the least of which is that the Federal Reserve notes of today buys just 4.18 CENTS compared to the purchasing power of the Dollar when the bankster coup took place in the fading hours of 1913.

The Grand-Whopper of them all is simple if you want to see it:  Money is not a storehouse of value (leastwise the paper stuff passed as money.).  It’s a tool of the cruel used to manage and rule.  And thems that makes the “money” makes the “rules.”

Expat Bruce, down in the mountains of Ecuador, where he’s waiting for the US to implode, sent me this sobering reminder:

“id you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it…

“There’s no way to rule innocent men.

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Flying story, user notes on Retrograde and the Big Vitamin Battle on the grill this morning…we’ll start with the fun stuff.

See that funny looking instrument off to the right, there?

That’s called an artificial horizon, attitude indicator, and a bunch of other things in aviation.

The idea is simple enough:  If you are flying an airplane, and the clouds come along with enough density to block out a view of the ground, you need to know where “Up” is.

Your eyes become useless, the inner ear begins lying to you, and what you think is your “sense of balance” turns out to genuinely suck.

Any second, vertigo will ensue if you don’t have one of these…and that will be that.  You’ll either pitch up the nose of the airplane, too far, stall, and come crashing down to the earth. 

The artificial horizon gyro platform (vacuum or electric-powered) keeps that from happening if you can read it and “keep coordinated” under instrument conditions.

Or, you’ll drop the nose down and think that you’re flying straight and level when, if you’d look at any number of instruments, you would be able to see instantly that your nose is down, you are increasing airspeed (the air speed indicator is rising), the altimeter is showing you beginning to burn off altitude, and your vertical speed indicator might be suggesting a speed of something line –1,500 feet per minute.

That’s why pilots (at least good ones), are always aware of their instruments.

“How does this relate to Retrograde?”  you’re wondering.

When you fly an airplane there’s a checklist you go through, so that when you (not IF) you ever goof up and go inadvertently into instrument conditions, you’ll be able to fly the airplane safely using the “instrument scan” technique.

On serious airplanes, the instruments are arrange in a standard T configuration with this goody top and center of the T.  Below is a directional gyro (a gyroscopic compass) and to the left is the air speed while to the right is the altimeter. 

So there I was, picking up the old Beechcrate from the Doctor’s office and we were socked in, Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) and not legal to fly instruments, I did a “high speed taxi” down the runway,  “accidentally” lifted off to about 10-feet of altitude, and then dropped back down into ground effect, floated along a few feet over the runway with 15-degrees of flaps in, until, almost a mile later, I was coming up on the north end of the runway, so I settled back down  onto the main gear, dropped the nose, raised the flaps and was slowed to way under flying speed before the desired turn-off.

I did the “high speed taxi” and “float in ground effect” because of something I figured out:  When an airplane comes out of maintenance is one of the highest likelihood of failures you’ll find.

By keeping the first post-maintenance flight as a “high speed taxi” (where, OK, you might lift off into ground-effect, slow flight) you can check everything and be safely within a few feet of ground which seems to me like a good thing.  When  possible, I do two of these, before going really flying after maintenance, since I’m a natural-born coward.

Back to the Retrograde part.  I noticed in the preflight that my main gyro (attitude indicator) was not erecting properly.  It was slightly wonky in the preflight. 

Since I was going on a “high speed taxi” it was no issue.  I know the airplane like a “second skin” and practicing aborted take-offs is a very good exercise. 

By the time I was down at the far end of the field, the attitude gyro was (finally) erected, but on taxi (regular low speed type) back to our hangar, Jeremy the Mechanic looked into the vacuum pump and announced it healthy.

“Most likely, it’s because it’s so bloody cold out…but this is how gyros give notice that they are planning to go out.  They take too long to spin up in cold weather.”

Conditions were 33-degrees and the airplane was dead cold when this happened, but I concurred with his assessment: Not normal so it’s another squawk that will be addressed.

The mechanic was also impressed with how slow our VG equipped airplane will almost hover in ground effect.  He couldn’t believe how slow it was flying with the nose-high configuration.

Since we were talking about Retrograde the other day, I’m not sure how I’d score this one.

Was this the “going away present” for Mercury going out of Retrograde on the 11th? 

I haven’t figured out how to score this one:  One side of me figures that Mercury just screwed me out of $600-bucks because it will cost around $500 to rebuild the gyro platform and another $100, or so, for the in and out of the airplane…so that was bad in terms of the checkbook.

But, it might actually be “good” in the sense that whenever possible, I like to “trap errors” in tightly controlled conditions, when flying in ground-effect is:  Hitting the ground from 3-feet is a lot different than hitting from 3-thousand, and from ground effect, I can have the aircraft stopped and be out of it in 15-seconds, or so. 

So the bottom line to this was to wonder if Retrograde is really all that dangerous.  After all, if we have great safety habits, maybe Retrograde is just Nature’s way of telling us what we need to be saving money for, next. 

More Adventures in Retrograde…

All this Retrograde talk got reader Kate to wondering about how all this ties in with my recent comments on the “workings of time.,…”

“… the fact of quantum physics that all time exists”

Is this by the same physicists who found the Higgs Bosom and then….. didn’t? I have a hard time believing that we know much of anything (hard facts) about the universe. But we must keep looking…. I suppose. Also, why would Mercury retrograde affect you if all time exists?”

You know, this may see absolutely nuts, but let me roll one out here:

We all know that time-space is deformed by the mass of a planet or other large object, right?  And, since other planets go around influencing the subtle nature of our depression in time-space, is it possible that at a deep-down psychological level, we have time expectations than can be tricked, just like the inner ear can be tricked into losing track of where up is, that we were talking about in gyros?

And, if this is the case, could that really be what the “retrograde effect” is all about – a minute variation in space-time which is so small that we don’t notice it because it impacts the whole planet?

Isn’t it possible that we all have forward-directed expectations which could increase the number of people making missteps right when Mercury runs the wrong way?

Long-time Peoplenomics subscriber Kerry sure noticed the effect:

Mercury in retrograde huh ? I must be right in the window. Just got my water bill last Friday.

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We begin with coffee and context:

Here’s a little factoid you may not know, gleaned from the latest Experiment Aircraft Association magazine:

In July of 1929, Transcontinental Air Transport began to offer coast-to-coast air service.  It had ordered something like ten of the (then new) Ford Trimotor planes.

This was before precision GPS approaches, WAAS GPS, and even VORs.  These were daytime flyers because back then luxuries like runway approach lights (like VASI units) weren’t around, either.

“What could this possibly have to do with economics?” you’re wondering.

Ah…therein lies this morning’s thinking exercise, Grasshopper.

In order to see when we are at the “top” of a market, we really oughta see some new technology come online.  Like the TAT offering in July of that year, we would expect it to be a hybrid of current technologies.

But cool enough, that people would get the idea.  TAT was founded on the idea of flying coast to coast.  Since the airplanes couldn’t fly at night, people flew during the day, trained overnight, and then flew more the next day.

Our modern analog should become visible at some point – and if you have some dart throws (guesses) please feel free to send them along.

Oh, one other thing about TAT:  Their first airplane crash occurred exactly on the same day as the (up until then) all time market high around Dow 386 and change.  As Wikipedia tells is:

“On September 3, 1929 a westbound TAT flight crashed on Mt. Taylor in New Mexico, with loss of all aboard. The Associated Press said it was the first plane crash on a regular commercial land route.

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