Money

North Korea, Crime and Cryptocurrencies

On August 8, 2008, Bitcoin (a cryptocurrency) emerged. Cryptocurrencies are a form of money that can be used in online exchanges. Some would say it was inevitable, in that more and more business is done online, and there needed to be some kind of currency for online transactions other than the currencies of the various nations that issued currencies. A little history is in order. The Eurocurrency was created to have a common currency for nineteen countries of Europe, so that they would have one currency no matter what country you were in. Banking would be easier, and transactions would be easier, without having to switch from one currency to another while traveling in Europe, or exchanges from one nation to another. England decided not to join the European Union, so England still used the pound for transactions. Nineteen countries took the Euro as their currency. Banking and transactions became much easier.

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The Conurbation of Cerebral Citizens

A White House study in 2021 found that 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2 percent of their income in taxes, while the average American paid 13 percent of their wages in taxes. Keep that in mind as you read the following.

Dryden Brown, a man of  twenty-nine, has a new plan that will “save Western civilization” as we know it. He is on a mission to create a “network state” called Praxis, a city that “has yet to exist.” Praxis will be a “special economic zone” that will “accelerate technological progress” in the areas such AI (Artificial Intelligence for those unfamiliar with it) biotech and energy. Praxis has raised about half a billion dollars from the likes of Sam Altman, Shervin Pishevar, as well as (those notorious billionaire brothers) Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The city already has an online community of 89,000 prospective citizens. You didn’t get invited? Well, you’re not cerebral enough, and don’t have the social connections necessary in this “neo-Gilded Age.”

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Effective Altruism: A Pioneering Philosophical Position or Greed, Gratification and Garbles

Now that Sam Bankman-Fried can cause no further damage for at least the next two decades, or, if you wish, one score plus five, it might be interesting to evaluate his philosophical position. Bankman-Fried had adopted the philosophy of Effective altruism, to be referred to as EA as we carry on. Please do not feel bad if you have never heard of Effective altruism, as it seems to be a mantra of the nouveau riche, and if you were to be a member of the nouveau riche, your advisors would have probably already told you of it. Effective altruism has been embraced by the “early adopters” such as Bankman-Fried and other high-tech billionaires who philosophically love new ideas, especially when said ideas make them wealthy, although I would wager they haven’t read Descartes or Nietzsche. After all, if you are among the nouveau riche, a new philosophical position is probably warranted, as the older philosophical positions no longer fit in our Digital Age.

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College, Commissars, and Conspiracy

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Conspiracy theorists wake up, it is all here. While watching Bill Maher a few days ago, he showed some statistics about colleges, one being that tenured professors have fallen drastically, and that the administrative personnel have greatly expanded. In the 1970s, 70% of professors were tenured, whereas while now, 70% are untenured.  Adding to the lack of experienced professors, we have the unbelievable inflation that has made higher-education costs astronomical.  Academic fees have expanded far beyond almost any other aspect of the U.S. economy, with the exception of health care.  

Forbes magazine, in 2017, noticed the changes: “Put another way, administrative spending comprised just 26% of total educational spending by American colleges in 1980-1981, while instructional spending comprised 41%. Three decades later, the two categories were almost even: administrative spending made up 24% of schools’ total expenditures, while instructional spending made up 29%.” Not only that, but in the present day the probability of your college instructor being a full-time tenured professor is quite low; you are more likely to have a part-time untenured graduate student who is paid a fraction of what a full professor is paid (and they aren’t getting health insurance.) 

The price of a college education has soared. From Intelligent.com: “According to the National Center for Education Statistics, for the 1970-71 academic year, the average in-state tuition and fees for one year at a public non-profit university was $394. By the 2020-21 academic year, that amount jumped to $10,560, an increase of 2,580%.

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Insider Trading for the Public Good

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*Who would think that Members of Congress have one unique skill: picking great stocks?  According to an academic paper, “Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives” in the Business and Politics journal,  states: “We find strong evidence that Members of the House have some type of nonpublic information which they use for personal gain.”   Yes, Members of Congress do receive quite a lot of non-public information as a regular part of their job.  Trading on non-public information is a crime, but it is generally a difficult one to prove.

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Automation’s Animus Against the Affluent

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*It has come to pass, that AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robotics (the word robot comes from the Russian language, meaning work) are moving ahead as fast as they can be built. AI and robotics are inseparable, presenting a one-two punch to anyone who gets in its way, or, in the way of the people who are creating it.

AI, robotics, the internet and the global economy, a synergistic economy-changing juggernaut, have made things very good for some and quite painful for others. As the unions in the U.S. declined, the wages of the non-union employees fell, as when there were unions they lifted all wages as workers tried to get a job at the union shop and the non-union employers had to compete with employers paying union wages. Why couldn’t the unions embrace the internet? Why couldn’t the unions organize around programmers and coders?

Unions couldn’t get the attention of programmers, systems analysts, and the like, because the demand was so high that wages skyrocketed, and there weren’t many companies abusing programmers for every long, because they would just be poached by another organization where the grass was greener; their gourmet  lunch could be ordered and prepared in-house and they made, median salary, $175,000 per year at Google or $240,000 at Facebook. (Those numbers might be dated, as supplied by The Wall Street Journal some time ago.)

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Glassdoor Reviews – Miscreant Managers Mangling the Message

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*We all know that internet is teeming with liars. Conspiracy theorists and quasi-governmental “officials” claiming all kinds of things that never happened, and denying things that actually happened, in order to create doubt or encourage beliefs that will help them advance their atrocious agendas. As long as the liars stay within certain parameters, their impact is minimized and their fraudulence doesn’t affect many people. But then, not to affect many people would not serve the motives of the lying internet scoundrels. Keep Reading

General Motors – Change for the Sake of Change

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*How to succeed in business in the twenty-first century: Outsource as much as you can, to the point that the CEO makes over four-thousand times what the poor schlub doing the grunt work is paid. Ask the government for bailouts, and then make sure you have an excuse for not paying back all that you were loaned, by compensating the government with stock you know will never be worth the amount you borrowed. Concentrate your efforts to specific models or types of products as the future, even when you’ve suffered huge losses by betting on that model’s marketability, and your firm’s limited ability to make new models profitable (let alone work) before. Put all of your bets on unproven models, unproven technology and areas where your firm has limited experience and expertise, especially when your firm’s past experience with innovation is sketchy at best, and when your business has a track record of abandoning innovative thinkers. The American car culture is passing on. Read on to see why.

“That men do not learn much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”- Aldous Huxley Keep Reading

The Cracks in the Cogency of Corporate Culture

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*“Describe the culture here” is a question I like to ask in interviews. Like it or not, most of the places you work will have a culture. I was told once that I should try to fit into the culture where I worked, and my unstated response was that if nepotism and pilfering were the corporate culture, I would just as soon go elsewhere. Looking back upon it, I think that I was supposed to give credit to the solutions I devised to the group. The only problem with that scenario from my perspective was that when it came to the application of any solution, I was the one who would be working overtime, or coming in on my day off. It was strongly in my interest to solve the problems before they arose, if simply to keep from spending my life working overtime addressing problems created by other managers. Keep Reading

The Trifling Take of Truckers

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Trucker Shortage

*The economy of 2018 is booming, according to any indicator you would choose to pick. One of the indicators of a booming economy is the volume of items sold. Most household or business items sold need to get to the household or business of destination, whether transported by the buyer, the seller or a third party. Every time the economy picks up, people buy more things.

While today’s economy has a lot of intangible products such as streaming or downloaded products, there are still a lot of material products being purchased. Material products, be they commodities or finished goods, have to be moved, and the vast majority of times, the material products are moved by a truck. The trucking companies have lots and lots of potential customers, all wanting the company to transport something for them. Every time this economic condition happens, the trucking companies cry out that they cannot get enough drivers.

There’s a national driver shortage, and has been one for a long time. As someone who has extensive experience in the trucking industry, I can safely tell you, there is no driver shortage. Sorry, the driver shortage is another urban legend, conspiracy theory, fake news, whatever description you wish to use to describe something that doesn’t really exist.  Keep Reading

Imparting Inclinations Involving Indentured Servitude

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Alqattan

*You’ve probably not heard of Sondos Al Qattan.  Neither had I, until recently. Sondos Al Qattan is a Kuwaiti beauty blogger, if you hadn’t already guessed. I realize that in the world of political correctness, using the title Miss, Mrs. or something else might be presumptuous of me, so I will just use the name. You can assign a gender as you wish, or, not even use a gender. Let’s not assign genders here, as that is politically incorrect and presumptuous.

I will get straight to what Sondos Al Qattan said in social media regarding new laws passed to help the Filipino housekeepers in Kuwait: “The new laws that have been passed [in Kuwait] are like a pathetic film. For her [domestic worker] to take a day off every week, that’s four days a month. Those are the days that she’ll be out. And we don’t know what she’ll be doing on those days, with her passport on her,” she said in a video in July, adding, “”

Pretty strong stuff. A day off a week, and the ability for the worker to hold in their possession their passport was just too much for Sondos Al Qattan, who had to speak out. Keep Reading

Theoretical Education in a Practical World

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Library - Theoretical Education

*From the New York Times, May 26, 2018: “Last year the University of Wisconsin at Superior announced that it was suspending nine majors, including sociology and political science, and warned that there might be additional cuts. The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point recently proposed dropping 13 majors, including philosophy and English, to make room for programs with “clear career pathways.”

It’s about time.

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Facebook’s Fickle Finger of Fate

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*Some years ago, there was a comedy show that had as a part of its weekly bits, the “Flying fickle Finger of Fate” award, which went to people in the news who accomplished “dubious achievements.” From The Wall Street Journal, Friday July 27, 2018: “Facebook shares fell 19% to $176.26, erasing about $119.1 billion in market value, after the Menlo Park Calif., company warned late Wednesday about slowing growth. Facebook’s loss in market value Thursday is larger than 457 of the 500 companies in the S&P 500. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg alone lost almost $16 billion in the value of his stock holdings.”

But Mark Zuckerberg is a genius.

Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg poses a question during the CEO Summit.

Perhaps Zuckerberg will have to skip the Wadyu steak Friday night, and just have the regular filet mignon. Keep Reading

My Wall Street, My Financial Future

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*Last week I read an article in a prominent financial magazine written by an unnamed professional financial advisor. Unsurprisingly, he simply spouted off reasons why everyone should work with a financial advisor and even recommended readers invest with someone who will operate in a “fiduciary capacity” (AKA have ultimate control over your money).He did make some solid points, namely about the importance of finding someone independent  and trustworthy with an investment style you’re comfortable with. These characteristics are crucial to your peace of mind— your future is everything, and you need someone with your goals in mind managing your money.

The author made finding your dream advisor seem as easy as asking a friend or someone you respect for a recommendation. I hate to break it to you, but he or she doesn’t exist— unless you consider yourself an option. Who knows your needs, risk-tolerance, and plans for the future better than you?

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Could Legal Marijuana Bring You More Money This Year?

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Marijuana

Despite this not necessarily being a stock-related tip, I feel as though I don’t do readers justice if I can’t provide an outside-of-the-box way to make money via passive income through reading my articles. Therefore, I want to dig deeper into the mechanics of how business operates in the medical Marijuana realm.

It is speculated that politicians in over a dozen states are now growing jealous of the Cannabis boom happening across the legalized areas of America. While those pouty politicians spill their guts to their therapists, let us examine a truly underdog story which has nearly been a century long in the making.

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Government Shutdown – Minimal Impact for most Americans

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Government Closed

* Op-Ed

 

Everyone calm down.

WASHINGTON — From an economic perspective, the shutdown of 2013 led to a GDP decrease of 0.25%.  It’s true that hundreds of thousands of federal employees received no pay, or late pay as a result of the previous shutdown, that inconvenience merely impacted their discretionary spending.  While contracted employees may not be impacted, the ability of the government to enter into new contracts, the execution of existing contracts may be impacted, and could lead to increased costs for follow-on research and development type efforts.

Tourism related industries are affected by the shutdown, as national parks closed, museums gift shops sat empty, and there were additional costs labeled as “lost productivity.”

But for the most part, a short shutdown would have minimal impact for most Americans, at least in the immediate term.

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