So if I were to stab you in the heart, would that make me qualified to sew that bitch right back up and charge you 18 thousand dollars?

Of course not, SO WHY THE FUCK is it critical to have Big Pharma and Big Insurance at THE FUCKING TABLE for health care reform to be successful?

For the love of God America, do you even hear the nonsense they speak at you?

Well I have to go, I am applying for one of the new stimulus jobs on a Government Euthanasia Panel. Gonna kill me some retards and ole' ladies.

I have been busy.

Really,

I have had a lot to do. I own two businesses and frequently get overwhelmed. Most of my problems are trivial or fixable with a bit or a burst of work. Alas, sometimes it just overwhelms me. I just hide. Not with my head under a blanket mind you..what i really do is go and involve myself with something so complicated that it takes me weeks or longer to get my footing.

People overload my public wifi? I spend two months reading about captiveportals , open node legal issues.

Buisness down this quarter? Go crazy reading alllllllllll about the economy.

Humm, I think it would be a good thing to learn computer programming? How about I spend a year reading about every computer language. Spend a hundred dollars on almost 20 used text books. Build eight PCs from junk. Test 5 different Linux distributions.

About two years ago my friend Matt suggested we make a CNC machine. I straight out told him that you can't make CNC machines you can only buy them. Boy.Was. I. Wrong.

Two years later I have built a half a dozen machines and learned about a hundredth of what I want to know about them.

Perhps it sounds like I am tooting my own horn and I admit that I am a bit, but I want you to get to know me. It is important that you know that to do these things I often negelect other import things. I am often unshaven, sleep deprived, thoughtless, smelly and far too slow to respond to sometimes important issues.

Yes I have let the power/phone/internet get shut off. Many many times. Most people who know me know that my sense of time is vague. Without a deadline my word is worthless.

Bringing me back to my main point. My deadline like most of my friends is the month. Every month we have to pay the bills, sniff the air, think about the weather, our jobs, our relationships and our future.

I really think that is what being an adult really is. Dealing with a deadline. Catch or find the food before the pain in your belly is too much. Feed the baby and the fire. On time or your future dies and you get eaten by the sabretooth tiger who's eyes you can see refelected in the firelight.

Do you get it yet? We get a trial by fire every single month and our elected representitives get 4 to 6 years between each foray into the trial we get every month.

By that metric our lives are are 48 times harder than theirs are. It is a bit spurrious, but seriously how many of us would turn down a job you almost could not lose for 4 years? Especially one that could lead to decades of lucrative follow on work that usually does not require much effort.

What I am asking is simply this. Could our government please talk to us like we are adults?

We all know that you have a cushy, albiet stressful job. We all know that most of you are opportunists rather than idealists.

So do us a favor and speak to us like we are adults. Drop the spin and the cultural camoflage and just tell us what the fuck is really going on.

I know this is an impossible request for those who have had nothing but contempt for the intelligence and motivations of the American public put in their heads since birth.

However it is necessary and it is necessary now. The alternative is your gradual fade from power.

That may seem a long reach but consider this. There is an entire generation that is willing to discard everything you hold dear for something that does not have a price. I call it an equitable world.

They do not even know what the consequences of their desires are, but they all insist on one thing. That thing is the truth.

They are all willing to bear the truth. No matter how heavy it is. It is an amazing thing that so many citizen are willing to carry that load and not pass the buck on to a figurehead.

That sucks for you. You are a figurehead.
Whether you work for shadowy corporate demons or a religeous ideology.

You are just a vessel. If that's ok with you then cool, but look out, because this generation is sick of it.

Treat us like adults or face you own extinction.

Let's Clear the Air.

To be blunt, anyone who says that "Government has no place in the economy...", is either a fool or getting rich on Government's place in the economy.

They are getting farm subsidies, military contracts, road contracts or school and public building contracts.

They are paying lobbyists to pass laws that protect their interests against the best interests of the rest of the country. They take government money all day long and laugh all the way to the Cayman Islands....or Switzerland.

If you believe the government has no place in the economy, prove it.

Stop taking the money.

Stand by your principals and stop running your mouths.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the fools. Most of you seem to be civil servants.

That means the greedheads and the fools have us coming and going.

Post National Economies

Wow.

I need to think about this for a bit.

Currency and Script continued.

I have been rolling the ideas of currency and script around for the last few weeks. Without blinders on, it would seem that credit is a form of script. Script with terrible terms, but script nonetheless.

I kind of felt that bringing up Zimbabwe in the last post was a bit gratuitus, but on reflection it seems like there are a few ideas there to explore.

I did actually go and look on Ebay for A Zimbabwean trillion dollar note, and it's no surprise that you can absolutely buy them, for a mere 16.95. My hat is off to the trader who realized early that people would want them as curiosities.

Buy low and sell high right? It would seem to be one of the foundations of capitalism. I did get a chuckle out of that, but after some thought it occurred to me that our intrepid trader probably had to buy a bundle of Zimbabwe green backs. Well more than a bundle, most likely a bag full.

He bought in bulk and now he is selling them retail. Well I hope he did. I suppose a cousin could have mailed him a couple of them. I just assumed that he got them from the bank and that to get the bank to go to the effort of getting them he would have had to thrown down at least a few hundred dollars.

What if I threw down a few hundred dollars or however much it took to get 100,000 Zimbabwe individual notes and then gave them away to people who promised to accept them as local dollars?

Think about that.

How would it affect my local economy?

How it would affect Zimbabwe's economy?

Think about post-national economies.

The entire banking system once ran on a computer less sophisticated than whatever you are using to read this post.

Think about what would happen if a thousand US communities tried it.

Simultaneously.

Well,

"If the state can't save us, we need a licence to print our own money" Says George Monbiot

"A little secret that will make the world fall apart" Says Avery Pennarun.

Dave Winer, "The protoblogger." writes "I am not an economist"
(Note, he wrote his blog before I did, 11th vs. 13th but I just found it today while looking for my own blog. Guess I should bookmark mine so I can find it easier.)

Seems to me that my last post was on the money, so to speak.

If the local solution to a recession/ depression is local currency, that would indicate that the monetary system as it stands is a failure. Global liquidity is money going where businesses want it to go, not where it is needed by the citizens of the country that issued it.

We don't want to end up like Zimbabwe, because their currency is worthless.

They have too much currency, and we do not have enough.

I wonder if I can buy a Zimbabwean 100 Trillion Dollar bill on Ebay yet.

A Gaping Hole in your Failed Economic Theories

I have goods and services and you have goods and services.

I want what you have to offer and you want what I have to offer.

I am standing around with my thumb up my ass while you are standing around with your dick in your hand.

Let a conventional economist attempt to explain this and we would start crying in frustration and rage whilst tearing our hair out.

I will make this simple, because what you are hearing is wrong.

Those little green symbols we use to trade with are missing. Some people put them in Swiss Bank accounts. We call those people "The Problem".

Now there are not enough little green symbols here in America. We need more of them and we need to print them. Not borrow them, print them.

Convention wisdom fears inflation, but seriously take a look around and read the first three lines of this post again. Those little green symbols are never coming back and that's the real problem. The US is not a banana republic, we have many things to trade with each other that we can't because we have no longer have a domestic instrument of trade.

To recap, our economy is sitting on the side of the road like a 5 year old Pontiac because the primary tool that makes it function, currency, is in artificially short supply. This is the elephant in the room that no one with authority wants to talk about.

Available currency has been diminishing for a long time. This problem has been masked for at least ten years by the now exploding credit market. Credit has been making the problem worse. Credit is only a crutch to stopgap temporary currency shortages, not a sensible replacement for it, and it's even worse as a long term solution.

The solution is simple, I call it the "Give Me Five Thousand Dollars Plan".

Then give the approximately 250 Million people who paid taxes last year Five Thousand Dollars too.

The result is that 250 Million people go out and attempt to fix the economy in their own creative American way, without the problem types skimming 6.9 to 29.9 percent off the top and sending it to Switzerland.

There it is, a 1.25 trillion dollar stimulus right where is needs to go, into the hands of those that need it the most.