2 - 59 Calling on Humanity's Brain

Blog 2 59   Calling on Humanity’s Brain

Hello, Victor, How are you doing?

Oh, hello Harold.  Well, actually, not so bad. My figures are not all in yet , but it looks as if I broke the two hundred mil mark for the first time last year.

Oh, very impressive. You must have a very good brain.

Well, yes I guess so.

Where did you get it?

What do you mean, where did I get it?

Your brain. Did you buy it? 

No! What are you talking about, Harold?

Did you do anything special  to get your brain?

No.., I’ve always just had it. It came in the package, you might say.

“Came in the package”?  So, it was actually a free gift. And you’ve used it to make two hundred mil last year?  Good return on investment, I’ld say.

Okay, Harold, what are you talking about?

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot lately… Thinking that if the 1% of the world’s people with the best brains - that’s about eighty million top-notch brains - thought of themselves as the brain of humanity, rather than as just super-bright individuals, what could they accomplish? If even half of them thought of themselves as the brain of humanity and they set about to do what a brain does - keep the rest of the body fit and happy - wouldn’t they leave the world - which they inevitably will do - wouldn’t they leave the world a much better place?

Harold, you’re losing your perspective.

Hmmmnn. No, Victor, I think I may be finding it

Hatched in New Zealand.   Feb. 2018

Blog 58 Defining Democracy: a Down-Under Definition

 Blog 58 Defining Democracy: a Down-Under Definition.

In these  blogs I have bored you more than once with academic, polysyllabic, etymological  derivations and explications of such terms as democracy, oligarchy,  aristocracy,  

                            yatayatayata… Apologies for previous failings. 

We have just returned from a two-month visit to a real democracy, and had some conversations with real New Zealanders, especially Adam  (real name, which he has given permission to use - Greg Adams) a practising democrat and a clear-thinking man of parts.

It seems to have been a much-needed break for us and demonstrates that even an old fogg can get a new idea or two.

So this blog, item one, how to define democracy, and the next blog, item two, the brain of humanity, were hatched, like penguin chicks, in New Zealand.

Item One

In a world where almost all governments call themselves democratic, maybe this is a useful test: ignore the claim and examine the outcomes.

First step: make a list. Ask what would the people, if they really were calling the shots, want? Then check the reality. How does Nation X actually stack up against  that list. 

Here’s my short list. Yours may be quite different, but just as effective as a democracy litmus test:

1.  Public health care. 

Where the typical citizen doesn’t have to worry about the costs. Just like the rich citizen. And I don’t think it would be too hard to find enough doctors who would want to care for the ”less than rich”, because… well, just because they would think it is a good thing to do. I certainly know some.

2. Free Public education,.

No overwhelming fees and long-lasting student debt burden.  But this one is not just a wish. It’s essential for the creation and survival of democracy.  To stay in charge, the citizenry must have the tools to be effective critics, to  be able to unmask the propaganda and explode PR BS from government or corporate or other special interests. Free, and good, education (as good as any private school education, for example) is vital to provide those tools.

3. A graduated taxation system.  This is what thelawofmoney blog is all about. Without public control of the money supply, the law of money - money goes where money is - will, suck the wealth out of any economy and bank it at the top.

(Even if all the currently-existing dodges to conceal hidden hoards were closed, the law of money would still operate.)

So what is a graduated taxation system? 

What is it not? Well it is not what has been called a “fair taxation”, system, where a rate of tax - say 15% - is levied on all incomes equally. If that sounds fair to you, you haven’t had enough of #2 - a good public education. 

Simply, in a graduated tax system, higher income/wealth taxpayers pay at higher rate (percentage) than lower income/wealth taxpayers. 

Here’s a graduated income tax system - not a practical proposal, for illustration only.  It shows sample annual incomes from $20,000 to $2 billion.

INCOME      TAX       TAX PAID       REMAINING

                        RATE   INCOME

$2,000.000,000 90% $1,800,000,000 $200,000,000

   $600,000,000 80%   $480,000,000 $120,000,000

   $100,000,000 70%     $70,000,000   $30,000,000

     $50,000,000 60%     $30.000,000  $20,000,000

—————————————————————————————-

—————————————————————————————

    $500,000 30% $150,000 $350,000

    $100,000 20%               $20,000         $80,000

$50,000 10%                 $5,000         $45,000

$20,000 5%                  $1,000         $19,000

There are better grounds for arguing  this as a fair taxation system than there are for the 15% flat tax. 

Blog 57 A News Commentary for the Day (March 14, 2018) Seventeen Minutes

Blog 57  A News Special of the Day (March 14.2018.) 

This blog has for the most part avoided the top news topic of the last two years - the classroom behavior of the nation’s most prominent schoolboy. But, without naming him, permit me to make a few observations on his response to the problem of the shooting deaths in our schools. Now I’m not referring to the little though long-standing problem in ghetto schools, but to the big problem of discontented shooters randomly ravaging schools with automatic weapons. 

Following the mantra of some NRA members and other respectable citizens, that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” or the equally preposterous proposition that “There would be less crime if every citizen was armed”, permit me, on the grounds that every proposal has a right to be heard, to comment on an even more radically ridiculous proposal - that teachers in American schools should be armed with guns.

Talking points:

1. In the intimacy of a school it would be impossible to conceal which teachers were packing. “My Bobby [third grade] saw Mr. Sawyer’s gun poking out of his pocket.”

Since many of the shooters are disgruntled students of the schools they shoot up, they, too, would know who the gun-toters were. So the shooter-to-be would open the door of that classroom first to start his spree by taking down the armed teacher. Sometimes he would succeed.

2. Now you know how parents often have an overactive interest in their children’s educational welfare. Such parents would demand that their child not be placed in a packing teacher’s class. After all, they would claim, it is more dangerous there. The point is, that it would increase the administrative burden of assigning students to classes. You might ask for parents to volunteer their children for those particular classes, but what if a principal couldn’t get enough volunteers? Just a minor administrative problem. Hire a few more teachers. No, the budget-conscious administrative voices would block that.

2 A good alternative proposal then has recently emerged: equip all the pupils with guns. Then… then, the ultimate solution,  there would be no crime, nobody would be killed (according to the “guns don’t kill people” principle.) 

3 Well,I don’t know. That argument would make the shooter-to-be an honest citizen merely exercising his Second Amendment rights. Trust me. In America today, anything is possible.  Even in Supreme Court decisions.  Remember the Citizens United decision that money must be allowed to buy elections. Blog #14

4  Attaining competence with firearms under either regime - armed teachers, or armed students. 

Now, open disclosure  here. Your blogster has not handled a firearm for many years, but was once upon a time an instructor teaching cadets how to clean, load and fire a military rifle. He even fired a Bren machine gun. It was a weighty weapon with a pair of legs on the barrel. You plopped it down on the ground on its legs and laid your own body on the ground behind it. If you just squeezed the trigger you could empty a magazine in seconds. So we were taught to say “Sunovabitch, Sunovabitch. Sunovabitch” as we squeezed the trigger  three times. That fired off only three or four rounds with each squeeze. 

But, I digress. Maybe just as well, even though there are several more points to be made regarding “unintended consequences” and “collateral damage” if the armed schools followed the long-held American tradition of “Shoot first, and ask questions later.” 

But, enough is enough on this subject..

Next posting, back to the law of money and a new approach to recognizing a real democracy, thanks to Adam, the man..

Blog 56 Adam and the Penguins

Blog 56

Okay, okay… When the file on little blog-ideas just crying to be published reaches a thousand words… 


Your blogster has just returned from travels abroad which hatched some interesting insights. He has also just finished reading an important “intellectual” book., Part of this blog’s purpose from the beginning has been to translate hard-to-read books and other treatises into the language of ordinary human beings.  There has been some feedback that (despite the deficiencies of the cartoons) sometimes we have been successful. So, instead of retiring from the blogdom of money, let’s take another shot or two at it.

Let me start with a man I met, a remarkable man. (I’d like to think there are many more like him in his native NewZealand.) 
Call him Adam. He was a farmer’s son, brought up with a farmer’s perspective on work. Now, he lives in a city, has a hostel business, a property repair business that tackles everything from plumbing to laying artificial turf, and a sideline as a home-builder. His one slight fault perhaps is that he is a little too hard on people who have, shall we say? a weaker work ethic.

But, lest you see him as a work addict - far from it - he has time for people just because they are people - here’s a snapshot>

He asked if I would like to drive out on an errand with him . First, however, he stopped to pick up an item at a corner store - a brush, actually. We arrived at the store three minutes before it opened. While I sat in the pick-up; he engaged in three minutes of actual pick-up - of trash on the curb around two sides of the store. He didn’t know the, probably young, people who had thrown their empty coffee cups and junk out of a car window the night before. It wasn’t his trash. But he picked it up, put it in plastic bag and gave it to the clerk who opened the store to him.

I could rest my case on that episode. But that evening he invited us out to see if we could catch a sight, just as the darkness was setting in, of a local feature - mother penguins swimming in to nests concealed among the rocks of the breakwater, to feed their chicks. As the darkness fell, there were 50-or so other curious folk spread out along a stretch of road that lay about 2 or 3 metres above the water level. Adam and a fellow volunteer, in yellow jackets, explained to watchers that they must be quiet, shine no lights, and definitely not go down on the rocks near the nests, or the penguin moms would swim out to sea again. The two volunteers also kept a nightly count of sightings for the biologists who study penguins. One deceased penguin chick was discovered later. It's in Adam's freezer waitting for the biologists. Beginning to like Adam?

Now for the personal point. In our conversations over four or five days with him, I came to a bright new idea related to the basic interest of this blog.  Oh yes, even I still have things to learn! So tune in for at least one more blog.  

55 On Respect for Customers - Banks vs. Credit Unions.

Blog 55  Customer Respect

A complaint has reached us that your friendly old blogster is prejudiced against corporations and especially against banking corporations. 

Yes, but don’t take that personally if you are employed by a bank. Remember that a corporation is not a human being - even though it has a lot of the legal privileges of a human being. A corp is still just a helpless creature which must hire nice human beings, like you, to tend to its needs. Of course,, unlike you, it is legally exempt from being put in jail. (Its owners. too, though human beings like you, in most countries cannot be jailed for anything their corp does either.)  

Hmmmnnn. Perhaps that could be changed, but only for the controlling shareholders, I would recommend.

But this blog wants to report two little human scenes which may, or may not, be relevant to this topic. 

Story 1.  Kitchen table. Wife calls her husband. “Can you explain to me what this means?”  

(I came in after they both had spent “hours” with pencil, paper,  and calculator trying to figure it out.  What they were puzzling about was this section of a quarterly report on a pension fund held by their friendly old bank.) 

                          This Period    This Year    Since Account Opening*

I Opening value     20.897.68    21,394.34               0.00  

I

I   You added                  0.00             0.00       35,568.13

I    

I    You withdrew        364.78      1,094,32       24,632.04

I

I Amount Invested =-364.78  =-1,094.32       23,632.04

I———————————————————————————                                  I Change in Value          100.33         331.21         9,697.14

I

I Closing Value       20,633.23   20,633.23       20,633.23

I ________________________________________

* This chart shows the changes in the market value of your account, and also reflects all cash and securities added, withdrawn and transferred into or out of your account for the specified time period.

I pass it on for more accomplished bookkeepers. To them it will be patently clear what, for example, the symbol “=-“ means. We think we finally got that one, but it didn’t clarify anything else. 

So, just skip this story and get on to:

Story 2 This is a personal experience.

I was doing some business in a credit union branch. There was a lady, well-dressed and smiling, who singled out members coming away from the tellers and asked for their response to the recently revised monthly statement format.

When she asked, me I said, “Well, it seems to me that the Credit Union is getting more like a bank.”

She seemed a little taken aback by that. Pressed, I explained that bank statements are designed for the employees to understand. I might have added “not for the customers”. I explained that the “pre-improvement” version of the Credit Union statement identified each of my several accounts with a number and an account name (Savings Checking, Guaranteed Interest, etc) The new one just had seven-digit numbers for each. Easy for the employees to learn..

Skip ahead about three months on this story, when a  further redesign of the statements came out. It included the name of each account!

Now, I ask you, would you ever get that response from your own friendly old bank IF you were ever actually ASKED to comment on a re-design?  The new statements, of course, would be accompanied with multiple assurances that the new design was “easier,” “clearer,” “more convenient for our customers." ("So there. We, of course, know better than you what’s easy, clear and convenient for you.")

New Series Blog 2-54 Man vs Corp

Blog 2-54  Man vs Corp 



"The plundering classes don't care where their money comes from, so long as it keeps coming - in larger armored cars.
Prof. Lucius D. Landseer.

The directors' first thought when corporate earnings sag is, "How can we reduce wage costs?"
B. J. Chopinhandra  (corporate director)

So "every CEO's dream: a fully automated corporation with no human employees (well, except himself)." (Herself?)
Cogs Blog, Series 2-54 

From an Optimist, or a Pessimist?

Optimistic or Pessimistic Idea?

We were taken by part of a recent TV interview. Haven't been able to identify the interviewee. But here's his idea.

The world is getting to be a better place, "because for the first time inn human history, more people are dying from the effects of obesity than are dying of starvation."



Still on furlough, but couldn't resist that one. It bears thinking on.