This is actually economics and management, and it’s something you maybe haven’t thought about.  But it’s bothering me this morning, so…..

Back when the length of U S Senate and House terms were being set, it look a long time to get a letter from, say, the West Coast back to the halls of power in Washington.

According to an Amazon forum, it took Pony Express:

Fastest, 7 days plus, average around 10 days summer, 12-16 winter

Now, let me apply some of our renown Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) skills and look at the problem in the time domain.

Let’s remember that 7-days was for just one way.  In order for there to be two-way communications, it would be 14-days plus a day for typing or writing because back then there were secretaries and such.  Some places were closer/faster, so let’s aggregate turn-around and travel time at 14-days.

A 2-year congressional term is 730 days.  So this means, the number of sequential back and forth communications that could be fired off would be (rounding off) 52.

Obviously, for a senate position (6-years) there would be three times as many, or 156 such exchanges. 

At the end of these exchanges, if a voter still hadn’t gotten something ironed out, there would be an election.  Throw the buggers out.

Fast forward to the present.

And email (even on a slow day on the net) takes 2-minutes to send.  Even with a big-ass attachment. 

Once it arrives, composing a reply could take an hour…but since it might have come in during a lunch break, and there could be a weekend, let’s generously say 3-days for turn around.  And then another 2-seconds in transit.

Given that the transaction speed is what makes government responsive, not the calendar (lol) then the length of a modern Congressional seat should be 3-days times 52 transactions, or 156-days.

And, by inspection, we see that Senate seats should be held for 468 days (1.28 years) which we could round off to one year and three months and buy senators a copy of Dragon so they can work as hard and fast as the rest of us.

And this relates to economics how, exactly?

Well, it brings down the stupid election spending and – because of higher turnover – there just might be less incumbent suck power and lower corporate bidding, which could put us all back in the game when comes to decisions like global taxes, fracking…well, we all have a list, right?

Any other Economic angles?

Yes.

The whole world almost melted down completely  in 1974 when Bank Herstatt welched on a debt.

That led the financial world to adopt something called continuous settlement – and that’s a fine concept to be roll over into government.

Lookie here: When Elaine goes shopping in town, I know when she will be home and when I need to go out and schlep in the groceries.  I can tell by when her debit card is dinged by watching the bank in real-time.

If banks can instantly ding my account, why can’t we get government online, elected along this continuous settlement model and get responsive? 

Don’t mean to get off our usual path of honest reporting of crooked finance, the continuous printing of money, or the pending monetary collapse of Europe.  But this is actionable except for one thing:  The Old Paradigmers can not change it themselves.

If the Congressional Record allowed and reported constituent comments, Facebook would be in trouble.

Meantime, stories of government waste continue to pile up because of unresponsive government.  The Washington Post reports three-quarters of a billion dollars a year is being spent on government employees who are on paid leave.

Life’s getting too short for this old man to run for office against one of these $100-million marvels that pretend to “represent us” unless we can squish down term length to something more reasonable and in keeping with modern business practice.  (The only thing longer than a senate term, though, is still software support hold times….)

Instead of running for office, I may have to settle for a high-paying government job, that I could be immediately be laid off from on administrative leave.  I recommend you apply for one immediately, too.

More after this…

Verizon Earnings

Kicking it:

Wireless

• Added 1.5 million net retail connections; retail postpaid churn of 1.00 percent; 106.2 million total retail connections; 100.1 million total retail postpaid connections.
• 4.8 percent year-over-year increase in service revenues; 4.6 percent year-over-year increase in retail service revenues; 31.9 percent operating income margin; 49.5 percent segment EBITDA margin on service revenues (non-GAAP).

Dow futures are up 45 when  we looked and some additional gains in the metals.  Crude is still hanging about $83.

Meantime, the National Association of Realtors is out with existing home sales…down a bit…

They also report in part “…unsold inventory is 4.5 percent higher than a year ago, when there were 2.21 million existing homes available for sale.”

One of these days that REO held by the banks will come out…

Tales of Two Three Oscars

Odd how these news rhymes work out:

Oscar Pistorius gets five years in jail.

Oscar de la Renta checks out at age 82.

And rounding up the Oscar cluster is speculation about which films might be hot for the 2015 Oscars.

The Dirty West/Ukraine Oil Re$serve$

Was using cluster bombs in Donetsk says a human rights group. 

Not true says the who yah gonna believe.

Aw…hell….didn’t they get the memo about the Dneiper-Donets petroleum basin? Have a State Dept. cookie and read:

The Dnieper-Donets basin is almost entirely in Ukraine, and it is the principal producer of hydrocarbons in that country. A small southeastern part of the basin is in Russia. The basin is bounded by the Voronezh high of the Russian craton to the northeast and by the Ukrainian shield to the southwest. The basin is principally a Late Devonian rift that is overlain by a Carboniferous to Early Permian postrift sag. The Devonian rift structure extends northwestward into the Pripyat basin of Belarus; the two basins are separated by the Bragin-Loev uplift, which is a Devonian volcanic center. Southeastward, the Dnieper-Donets basin has a gradational boundary with the Donbas foldbelt, which is a structurally inverted and deformed part of the basin.

See map page 6 here.

“You mean Ukraine was / is all about oil and gas?”

D’oh.  Of course it ain’t over…it’s never over.  Just like the Leviathan gas find off Gaza…double d’oh dough…

Everything is a business model, remember?

Too Much Sizzle

And not enough steak when comes to news content says a new Harris Poll out this morning:

When provided with several types of news stories and asked which are under-, over-, or appropriately covered, three-fourths of U.S.

Read More

For us,the future on Monday mornings like this, comes down to “bounded Ziggy.”

“So what’s a Ziggy,” you obediently marvel, barley able to move after the weekend.

Have you forgotten?  The old TV series Quantum Leap which had a plot about jumping around in time…

Quantum Leap is an American television series that was broadcast on NBC from March 26, 1989 to May 5, 1993, for a total of five seasons. The series was created by Donald P. Bellisario, and starred Scott Bakula as Dr.

Read More

Pardon the unusual update:

President Obama has selected a political figure – not a medical expert or epidemiologist – to become the nation’s “Ebola Czar.”

Ron Klain, who was chief of staff to two vice presidents (Gore & Biden) and worked on the Al Gore recount project in 2000, has been named to the position.

Wikipedia’s entry on Klain sums him up this way:

He is an influential Democratic Party insider. Earlier in his career, he was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Byron White during the Court’s 1987 and 1988 Terms and worked on Capitol Hill, where he was Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination. He was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the HBO film Recount depicting the tumult of the 2000 presidential election.

Read More

One of our sources called last night to tip us off that a cruise ship would be docking in Galveston on the 19th and that on that cruise ship was a lab worker who had worked with the samples from Ebola Patient Zero up in Dallas.

Now that two healthcare workers in the hospital had come down with symptoms, my source told me, there was consideration being given to sending a helicopter out to bring the exposed lab worker back for closer medical scrutiny.

“Our problem, “ said the source who is a government official, “Is that we don’t want to be the ones responsible for letting 2,000 people who have been exposed off the ship in Galveston Sunday morning.”

As a result, look for high-stake government discussions today and into the weekend on how to best deal with the ship.

While we didn’t put this up as a headline last night (pending second sourcing) that came overnight when ABC and the NY Times reported on the case.  The Time’s “Health Worker Who May Have Had Contact With Ebola Is on a Cruise Ship.” provides a few additional details.

So does this early morning press release from the State Department:

As part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s detailed contact trace investigation conducted in response to the first Ebola case in Dallas, it was discovered that an employee of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had departed the United States via a commercial cruise ship on October 12 from Galveston, Texas. The employee did not have direct contact with the since deceased Ebola patient, but may have had contact with clinical specimens collected from him. The individual was out of the country before being notified of CDC’s updated requirements for active monitoring. At the time the hospital employee left the country, CDC was requiring only self-monitoring.

The employee has been self-monitoring, including daily temperature checks, since October 6, and has not had a fever or demonstrated any symptoms of illness. It has been 19 days since the passenger may have processed the since deceased patient’s fluid samples. The cruise line has actively supported CDC’s efforts to speak with the individual, whom the cruise ship’s medical doctor has monitored and confirmed was in good health. Following this examination, the hospital employee and traveling partner have voluntarily remained isolated in a cabin. We are working with the cruise line to safely bring them back to the United States out of an abundance of caution

There are only three cruise ships due to dock in Galveston on the 19th and the Washington Post mentions Carnival by name in its headline.  USA Today names the Carnival Magic.

So, as of this morning, there are three main aspects of Ebola to be watching as we head into the weekend:

1.  Will local government officials move to prevent the cruise ship from unloading on schedule come Sunday morning?  As our unnamed government source told me last night “I don’t want to be the [redacted] that turns 2,000 people loose, if they have been exposed…”

Yes, a tough call indeed, although I think it would be totally cool for Carnival to simply lay on double provisions for the Magic and turn the cruise into a 21-day event and let the people onboard log some additional R&R.

2.  The next problem to consider is whether the widely promoted 21-day window is enough.  There’s a report out this week on the Natural News site – which often has good healthcare content – that the incubation period (in a small percentage of cases, admittedly) may be as long as 41-days.

Medical sources tell us the highest period of communicability is when the host has reached high levels of the virus and is actively “shedding” but if the  onset can be so long, we may have other cases still incubating out of the Dallas incident.

3.  Last, but not least, keep an eye on economic impacts and lawsuits on this.

For example, does Frontier airlines have any recourse to CDC if they gave the Dallas nurse the OK to fly because she was subcritical?  A good lawyer ought to be able to build a 7 or 8-figure argument that CDC actions may have damaged their prospects.  Or, might other airline groups be eying a drop in forward revenue and be looking to legal departments?

It would be predictable.

And similarly, what will happen to the poor lab tech?  Will we – in coming months as this case shakes out – see lawsuits coming out of the woodwork for lost revenue?

Our back of the envelope math figures about a 60% chance of two more cases coming to light between now and Tuesday morning.  But in the meantime, the condition of the lab tech who went on a cruise will be important to watch, as will government response at the local level down in Galveston.

Organizationally, on the federal side, CDC is an Agency under the Director of Health and Human Services.  As Wikipedia notes “The President of the United States appoints the director of the CDC and the appointment does not require Senate confirmation.

Read More

Yet another round of emails has landed like  V-2 rockets on London in my inbox.  One mentions what a douche I am for failing to embrace global warming.  That happens periodically, I suppose.  But with reason…

The Warmist email reminded me that US News is covering the rise of natural gas use and proclaiming that it won’t change the warming profile.

Those more prone to “chill” (so to speak), like the gang up at the Chronicle Project, sent along a snip about how sea ice in the Antarctic has just set another record high.

Asymmetry bothers me – a lot.  Polarity makes manipulation of public consensus just too damned easy.  Yet we see it in headlines every day.

Let’s focus on warming hype once again:  What seems to be going on is the northern hemisphere has more “hot air” going around than the southern hemisphere.  Real heavy ice down under and very little topside (Arctic).  Ignore the fact it’s summer, if you can, also.

I have a couple of theories about ice thicknesses; some serious, others less so.

Among the “less so” is the number of politicians, hysterical TV Networks, and so forth resident above the equator.  With the exception of New Zealand and Australian television, plus southern Africa, there’s not as much global hot air coming off the southern hemisphere. 

Privately, I wonder if Rupert Murdoch’s focus on America helped cool the Antarctic?

In truth, the southern hemisphere may generate less heat in 3-days than comes out of Washington in a single day.

More seriously,  A search of  the LA Times archives reveals that drought in California is nothing new and that what passes as climate change rhetoric today obscures focus from the historical record and, further, the fluky weather of the 1860’s is why California doesn’t have a major cattle industry today.  Blame a drought of 150-years ago..

As a 1991 article in the LA Times headlined “The Great Drought : Fickle Weather in 1860s Led to Breakdown of Cattle Industry.”

Around the office here, when we’re not buried in work, we try to keep in mind that macro-variations in solar output and absorption of different particles, seems to have a semi-regular pattern to it.

Unlike the La Nina/El Nino oscillation, science has been quite slow figuring out that there is likely a “Northern Hemisphere Drought Oscillator” as well.

The 1860  drought came along (to round things off) about 75 years before the midpoint of the 1935 Dirty Thirties in the US Midwest.

Tack on another4 75-years to the last of the Dust Bowl years (1940) and now we’re looking at when?  Answer: 2015 if you haven’t beaned-up, yet.

I’m going to go out on a limb here for the Global Warming people: I’m going to predict (with a 10% margin of error) that when California finally returns to normal rainfall, we will be able to add 70-75 years to whatever that end date is and predict the Midwest will be getting its ass kicked 75-years hence with another Dust Bowl event.

While it’s true, by the way, that planting trees and cover crops top soil retained topsoil, it’s also true that a lot of the ending of the Dust Bowl had to do with the calendar and this Hemispheric Drought Oscillator.

The study of economics teaches us a lot about looking for the hidden variables behind many things.  In fact, I’ve just ordered a bunch of textbooks to do some research into the emerging science called behavioral economics.

What the intersection of psychology and economics is teaching us is that subtle changes to set conditions that happen off on the margins, may exert a disproportionate influence on outcomes.

While I’m pretty sure California will continue singing “How dry I am” for a couple of more years, the longer  and more holistic view suggests that weather patterns (like drought epicenters) may express in different locations over time. And oscillate at a frequency of 75-years.

I’ve studied Nicolai Kondratieff’s work extensively (the godfather of long wave economics) and you can see distinct solar patterns in his commodity price research dating back to to the 1200’s.

Not to claim Clement Juglar was a charlatan, but we note that his 7-11 year fixed investment cycle dovetails neatly with the observed 11-year solar cycle, as well.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately (off in spiritual studies) about the “operation of the Universe” under Law.  And when I say law, I mean the common framework that all things obey whether they want to, or not.  We can bend law (like gravity) but when we do so inadvisedly, it is at our own peril.

The same thing applies to socioeconomics, weather, and the general environment we share.

Droughts and climate change may very well turn out to be nothing more than localized expressions of systemic regional variation over time. They sure look that way.

So much so that in the next few years, I expect we will continue to enjoy the fruits of lower solar output which – in turn –  should moderate what’s being sold as “climate change..”

Like law in spiritual matters, when a macro cycle law arising in complex system dynamic equilibrium comes into view, it’s tempting to monetize it.  

Happens in religions, happens in science.  Which is why, when we spy a discernable change in something like the weather, politicians run off to monetize it.  Hence the press for a global climate tax by the New World Order/PowersThatBe types.  Everyone wants to own their own mandatory collection plate.

The difference between tithing and taxing is minute.

History is a damned inconvenience, too.  It fuels renegade thinkers.. 

The astute observer will note the California Drought of the mid 1860’s ended without government intervention.  When the cycle turned, the rains came back.

In likewise fashion, when the last of the Dry Years passed (at last) in 1940, the Dust Bowl settled down on its own. 

Sichuan Province in China is instructive, as well.  We have three pretty good data points we  can enumerate, drawn  from Wikipedia here:

1. 1928-30 Northwest China resulting in over 3 million deaths by famine.

2. 1936 and 1941 Sichuan Province China resulting in 5 million and 2.5 million deaths respectively.

3, In 2006, Sichuan Province China experienced its worst drought in modern times with nearly 8 million people and over 7 million cattle facing water shortages.

We can infer from the end of the 1928-1930 event a drought cycle of 76-years.

Thus we would expect from 1936 we should see drought arise in China from 1012 and lasting through at least 2016.  It ought to be greening up in California  about then, also.

Sure enough (although you no doubt miss things like this because of “news overload” and hysterical events like Ebola behinds headlines like “Drought worsens China’s long term water problems.” 

It also explains why the Chinese are working like crazy on cloud-seeding technology – in order to light off some rainfall.

As with the study of religion, polarity on issues like Climate Change is not very useful for the Great Middle.  If there is a central  (monotheistic) core to the Universe, the study of cumulative law is quite instructive.

Likewise, when we stop damning one side, or the other, to the bowels of hell for their perspective on climate, and step back far enough to see the whole cloth of the complex system, there may be some unifying principles (73-78 year drought cycles for one) that can help humans navigate into the future with much less effort and way lower taxes.

But where would be the job growth in that?

DreamScapes

Several thoughts from readers on my odd dream I described in yesterday’s column:  Mary-Anne of Omaha, for example:

Hi, George. Very interesting dream. Your comment about doorways into other worlds reminded me that the author CS Lewis explored this idea in his Narnia books.

In “The Magician’s Nephew” there is a “wood between the worlds” — an in-between place — from which you can get to any number of worlds/universes simply by jumping into a pool.

If you have the proper equipment (a ring in this case), the pool will turn into a chute and you find yourself deposited onto another planet.

Read More

Turns out that the second nurse to come down with Ebola did indeed contact CDC before flying and was below a threshold set by the agencies.

While some of my colleagues have criticized me for being so hard on CDC from the outset with headlines like “CDC Dallas Screw-Up?” back before the MSM really ramped up,  a quarter century of news judgment is showing its value.  Unfortunately, our projects in September that we’d pass one million cases in January will also likely be right, as well.

And that could be very bad for politics and the economy.

Already we have seen stories about how the Obama administration – which has delayed the revelation of its “Executive Reconquista” program until after elections – now seems equally bent on burying the seriousness of Ebola until after elections as well.

Already, though, two countries, St.Lucia and Colombia, have announced travel bans from West Africa.

The Centers for Disease Confusion, meantime, is continuing to react to the spiraling situation, spending too much time on politics and not enough on action.  Adding close healthcare workers to no-fly lists seems like a no-brainer.  But to the Washington Cartel, it’s just another one of the obvious steps that is being fumbled.

Unfortunately, however, the problem is not limited to the United States.  We are hearing reports that our “Grow food of die” mantra is coming ever-closer to fruition as we spread before you the story of how the UN is becoming concerned that Ebola could fuel a world-wide food shortage.

It would be nice if such events were to follow sequentially and logically, but the odds continue to grow that they will not.

Economics – particularly the long wave variety we follow around here – has long demonstrated that what fips a decent recession into a full-on Depression is a drought and falling food supplies.

It’s what fueled – in part – the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

And here are the first two points of this morning’s report:

1.  Food supplies could be much sketchier than anyone realizers when Ebola and other pandemic diseases begin to munch of supplies at the same time markets are failing.  You understand, I hope, that financial markets are where (in commodity markets) food producers of the convenient goods in the grocery store, lock in their supplies and prices. 

We’re already seeing the large dislocations propagate in the commodity markets as Oil is down to the $80 range, and if things continue much longer (a year or two) that might mean prices down into the $40 range.  For now, the Saudis are still looking like they might come out winners (along with the US) in an effort to drop prices.

The sand in the Vaseline, though, is that oil prices coming down 20% quickly means that other prices will be deflating as well, and once established, the vicious cycle is harder to break than the virtuous cycle.

And, as the markets resume their downward spiral at the open this morning (looking for another 100+_ point downer in the Dow) we see that spiraling deflation may end up killing more people than Ebola.

2.  Given the unexpected way complex systems can operate when a single variable gets outside the normally bounded range, we can see markets crashing right around on schedule – November 10 is the hot date to watch. 55-days after the market high. Investors might be called psychotic-logical in repeating past patterns; they do so with considerable regularity.

So we can “line ‘em up” this morning as a sequence of disease disaster, leading to governmental disasters, leading to pandemic disaster, leading to food disaster.  We ought to see financial disaster as a plug-in right after the governmental disaster app begins to run.

Now that official government news agencies are spreading the word about how the odds of a major outbreak are still very, very low, we recall for you once again what you should be doing when government says “Don’t worry.”

You ought to be scared shitless.

Future futures market is set to open the Dow down 200.  Remember who said “1,740” on the S&P?   Robin Landry…and people scoffed.

Remember, his long term call is still for a Dow under 1,000.  But just not today.  We still are on track to really crash in November around the 10th.  Think of today as additional foreplay.

More after this…

A Word from the Future

Watch for a prominent death in Saudi Arabia comes out of our www.nostracodeus.com software.    Interesting thing to watch for, especially because of all the oil price intrigue of late.  Will it be linked?  Of course, not.  At least publicly.  But it shows up as one interpretation of data.  Just so’s you know ahead of time.

New Electrics and Oh Duhs

It has been years ago that the prediction was made of “new electrics” and since the term could be applied to almost anything with a power source., we have to discount it as a “prediction fill” in the here & now because new breakthroughs in electrical this and that’s come on a regular basis.

But after the disclaimer, isn’t this interesting?  Lockheed Skunkworks is close on something called a Compact Fusion Reactor, or CFR… A reader inside the striped-tail joint tells us…

George,

I recall from your column some time back you talking about the rise of ‘New Electrics’ coming along about this timeframe.  Not to toot my own company’s horn…but…‘TOOT’.  Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works is engaged in a project to build Compact Fusion Reactors (CFRs).  Here is a snip from an article on LM’s website:

“[Thomas] McGuire’s team is taking a much smaller approach to their fusion reactor concept.

Read More

There is a fine line between democracy and “mob rule.”  And honestly, I can’t tell you where that line is.

What I can reassure you – with some solid backup – is that the US has since 2000 sunk from being in the top three of economically “free” countries in the world to 2012’s number 12 world-wide.

That’s not my opinion, but rather a report from the prestigious Cato Institute.

Coming to such conclusions is not done lightly or quickly, either.  It takes a little more than a year and a half to collect the data and for the report,

If you get some time, you might want to read the report in its entirety.

But, since we both know everyone’s too busy in today’s hurried-up world, let me share with you the part of the report I found most interesting.

From the Executive Summary:

Chapter 1: Economic Freedom of the World
The authors of the report, James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall, provide an overview of the report and discuss why economic freedom is important. They also review the decline of economic freedom in the United States.

Since I picture myself a pretty good unconventional economic thinker, I was anxious to get to this part of the report.  Because reports like this are designed to stimulate thinking and broaden public awareness, I don’t think Cato or the study authors would mind me sharing their findings discussed in Chapter 1:

“What accounts for the US decline? While US ratings and rankings have
fallen in all five areas of the EFW index, the reductions have been largest in the Legal System and Protection of Property Rights (Area 2), Freedom to Trade Internationally (Area 4), and Regulation (Area 5). The plunge in Area 2 has been huge. In 2000, the 9.23 rating of the United States was the 9th highest in the world.

But by 2012, the area rating had plummeted to 6.99, placing it 36th worldwide.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise reason for the decline in Area 2, the increased use of eminent domain to transfer property to powerful political interests, the ramifications of the wars on terrorism and drugs, and the violation of the property rights of bondholders in the auto-bailout case have weakened the tradition of strong adherence to the rule of law in United States.

We believe these factors have contributed to the sharp decline in the rating for the legal-system area.

Expanded use of regulation has also been an important contributing factor
to the declining ratings of the United States. During the past decade, non-tariff trade barriers, restrictions on foreign investment, and business regulation have all grown extensively. The expanded use of regulation in the United States has resulted in sharp rating reductions for components such as independence of the judiciary, impartiality of the courts, and regulatory favoritism.

To a large degree, the United States has experienced a significant move away from rule of law and toward a highly regulated, politicized, and heavily policed state.

The decline in the summary rating between 2000 and 2012 on the 10-point
scale of the index may not sound like much, but scholarly work on this topic indicates that a one-point decline in the EFW rating is associated with a reduction in the long-term growth of GDP of between 1.0 and 1.5 percentage points annually (Gwartney, Holcombe, and Lawson, 2006).

This implies that, unless policies undermining economic freedom are reversed, the future annual growth of the US economy will be only about half its historic average of 3%.”

As long as we’re kicking around the Cato Institute site, you might also be interested in their finding that some of what’s called healthcare law in the us may not be constitutional.

Read More