Inflation VI

 

Lucky

I’d rather be lucky than good,
Tough than pretty,
Rockin' in the country than rolling in the city.
Spend my life rolling them dice,
Instead living like everybody says I should.
I’d rather be lucky, rather be lucky than good.

But what about governments?

Inflation is suggested to have two components: 1) currency inflation and 2) buyer-seller inflation. Currency inflation seems to be long term and is controlled by the central bank which manages the currency of c county ( in the case of the US, its Federal Reserve Bank). Buyer-seller inflation includes a range of factors, such as: changes in preferences; changes in the cost of production; changes in buyers disposable income; natural or man-made disasters, etc. Only some of these factors are controllable by the government. Some costs of production by sellers may be governed by the interest rate charged by the central bank. Some costs of purchasing/borrowing by buyers may be governed by the interest rate charged by the central bank. However other factors are beyond the control of any government and include changes in the cost of production related to changes in the costs of raw materials, changes in the cost of production due to natural or man-made disasters,  changes in consumer preference, or technological changes affecting either the producer/seller or the consumer/ buyer.

It is reasonable  to expect the government to control currency inflation. It is reasonable  to expect the government to control the cost of borrowing by sellers or buyers. It is NOT reasonable to expect the government to control the weather, any natural or man-made disaster, or  changes in preference or  technology.

The impact of currency inflation can be dramatic. Weimar Germany in the 1930s, Hungary in the 1940s, or Venezuela in the 2020s are vivid examples of what happens when the government produces currency without regard to the actual usage of that currency. In the United States, since the early 1900s, the long-term currency impacts appear to be stable except during economic crashes, when the US currency was on the gold standard, e.g. was a commodity currency; the 1930s when the US currency was no longer on the gold standard, e.g. was a fiat currency; 1944 when the US currency convertible into gold was made the international trading currency; and 1971 when the US currency was no longer convertible into gold in international trading.

When the currency effects are removed, it appears to show only buyer‑seller inflation which seems to be short-term in its effects. As noted, the government has limited ability to impact buyer‑seller inflation.  To expect otherwise is to expect a government to be not only correct but lucky. Anticipating truly random events such as international wars, supply chain disruptions, pandemics, hurricanes, droughts, etc.,  is a hope that those events are predictable when typically they are not. “I‘d rather be lucky than good” may work for sporting events, but it is not an acceptable national policy. Our national government should be good, not lucky.

Experts

 

I Am The Walrus

 

Expert, texpert choking smokers

Don't you think the joker laughs at you (Ho ho ho, hee hee hee, hah hah hah)
See how they smile like pigs in a sty

See how they snide

I'm crying

What is an expert?

Expert witness have been very much in the news  in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial. Having been an expert witness myself a few times, it worked out well once and worked out, IMHO, poorly four other times. Given that I have a pathological aversion to judging or being judged, it was probably inevitable that I had bad experiences. I find it cathartic to blog about my experiences.

A trial is supposed to be about determining the truth. An expert witness is supposed to elaborate on the truth. But how does one become an expert? And if there are experts on each side, and one side is not telling the truth, how do you tell if an expert is telling the truth?

I naively felt that each expert should speak the truth and the court would decide what is the truth. As I said that was naïve. The court does not have expertise on many matters. It instead looks at the credentials of those who are being presented as experts. That was my first experience. The case concerned the use of a computer program, which I had written. The first expert, who I believed had misused my program, testified. When I was on the stand, I was not asked about my program. I was asked if I was a registered Professional Engineer or if I had any other credentials. I did not, and I was dismissed from the stand before I had a chance to discuss my program. I took immediate steps to get a license as a PE. I was eligible to get a license, I just had naively thought the truth was more important than any credentials.

The second court case, (actually a city council meeting)  is where I was prepared to testify when the client came out stating that the matter had been already settled and no testimony was necessary. In this case the truth took a back seat to a back-room deal.

The fifth time as an expert witness ( the fourth time was the one that went well), ironically where the opposing expert was the very one from my first court case a decade earlier. In reviewing his report, I pointed out to my client’s legal team that a fundamental math error had been made. On cross examination of that expert, my client’s lawyer asked him about this. Because of this error the judge struck his testimony and his report from the trial record,  and I did not testify because there was no longer anything to refute. I did get the feeling of Karma in seeing his report and testimony dismissed, but the truth again took a back seat to credentials.

The final time I was an expert witness, I had what I thought was a professional  disagreement with the opposing expert. I was first on the stand and the opposing expert was second. During her cross examination not only was what I thought was an inconsistency pointed out, but her ethics and motives in making her assumptions were questioned. I was so shaken I wrote to the “opposing” expert to apologize.

Experts are not there to present the truth. Their reputations and credentials will be judged to determine whether they are telling the truth. Their motives, which are IMHO irrelevant to the truth, i.e. the facts, will be questioned. It is just as the humorist Carl Sandburg put it” “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you., argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” A plague on both your houses.

 

Birthday

 Won't You Be My Neighbor

Won't you please, won't you please?

Please, won't you be my neighbor?

Thank you Mister Rogers

Yesterday was my birthday.  It was also the 143rd day of the year.  Mr. Rogers used to say that 143 was code for I love you, because the number of letters in each word in that phase was 1-4-3.  I only learned that yesterday.  143 to you to too, Mr. Rogers and to all of you..

Differences are Normal

 

I’m The Only One

But I'm the only one
Who'll walk across the fire for you
And I'm the only one
Who'll drown in my desire for you
It's only fear that makes you run
The demons that you're hiding from
When all your promises are gone
I'm the only one

You may be the only one, but no man is an island.

Arguably much of today's turmoil is caused by a misunderstanding of the relationship between the individual, the group, and the absolute. While I am not a certified statistician, statistics does offer some insights to help enlighten this issue.

Man is a sexual, social animal. The Group that is Man requires new Individuals to replenish the Group when an Individual dies. Man as Individual and Man as a Group seeks a relationship with an Absolute. If something is an Absolute, e.g. God, then it has no error. Statistics says that the Standard Error is the square root of the Variance divided by the square root of the sample size. An Individual has a sample size of 1. Thus an Individual can not have zero error unless his Variance is also zero. A group can approach zero error with a nonzero Variance, if the sample size, the size of the group, is increased. A uniform normal distribution is considered to be one where the Variance is 1. Thus a normal group can have virtually no error if the size of the group is large enough. Its error can not ever be equal to zero, but its error can approach zero.

The problem is that individuals try to approach the absolute. They can only appear to do that if their variance is zero. However that is not true of a group. To be normal, the variance should be one. If the variance is one and the sample group size is 100,000 then the Standard Error is only .001 which is almost zero. The problem is that a nonzero Variance requires that every value is NOT equal, even if those values are part of the same distribution, group.

In addition to not being normal, (a  statistical term not an ethical term), if a variance is zero on one issue, then it is unlikely to be zero for every issue. While Evangelical Christians and Catholics may agree on Abortion, they tend to disagree on the infallibility of the Pope. So how can an individual approach the absolute and still be a member of a group whose variance is not one. Einstein elaborated  on an answer to this in his General Theory of Relativity. It is possible to have an absolute i.e. the speed of light, and your relationship to that absolute depends on your frame of reference. Your weight, length, time all vary based on your speed in your frame of reference relative to the absolute that is the speed of light.

Humorists have long tried to tell us that reducing error in approaching the absolute does not mean that only one frame of reference is correct. In Gulliver’s Travel Jonathon Swift describes a silly difference, over whether you should break the eggs at the Big End or the Little End that led to deaths, war, and rebellion. Mark Twain said that “Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.

An individual man can approach the absolute, but a group of men can also approach that same absolute from a different frame of reference. A group should not expect its variance to ever be zero. In fact if it is normal, then it should have a variance of one.

Thus an individual should not expect a healthy group to have a variance of zero. The fact that individuals require different sexes to reproduce does not mean that an individual can not contribute to a group if that individual does not reproduce. Your sexual preference does govern your ability to reproduce, but your ability to reproduce is not the only way in which you can contribute to a group. A variance of one is normal. The willingness and ability to reproduce should be part of that variance.

Justice II

 

If I Had a Hammer

I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between
My brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

Justice Thomas apparently  doesn’t know it is the Hammer of Justice.

Do we need any more proof that Justice Clarence ”Long Dong Silver” Thomas is the most dangerous man in the United States of America? Admittedly Justice Samuel “ Strip Search Sammy” Alito is giving him a run for the money, but Justice Thomas wins by a nose. The purpose of any trial is to establish the Truth. If the Truth is that there is evidence of innocence, then that is the Truth. In trials for capital crimes, there should be more care that the Truth has been discovered given that execution is not reversible. If the Truth is later found that an executed individual was innocent, there is no opportunity for a Mulligan on that wrongful execution.

Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case of Shinn v. Ramirez. In that opinion he stated that the court ”may not conduct an evidentiary hearing or otherwise consider evidence beyond the state-court record based on the ineffective assistance of state postconviction counsel.”  The court was NOT being asked to rule on evidence. SCOTUS was only asked if the defendant received his constitutionally required representation to discover the Truth, which may not have been part of the state-court record. Justice Thomas is apparently uninterested in the Truth, as he has shown in previous dissents, majority opinions, etc. The Supreme Court does not exist to protect the State, as Justice Thomas seems to suggest. It exist to protect the constitutional rights of individuals from excesses of the State.

The Supreme Court has become political because Justices such as Justice Thomas have made it political. He has  no respect for the Truth, only respect for the State. The call is coming from inside the building. Danger. Warning. Justice Thomas is NOT interested in wielding the Hammer of Justice.

Corporations

 

People

A feeling deep in your soul
Says you were half now you're whole
No more hunger and thirst
But first be a person who needs people
People who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world

Are Corporations people?

The SCOTUS, in Citizens United v. FEC opined that corporations are people and thus have the right of free speech.  I do not agree with SCOTUS in that case.  Corporations are NOT people.  The Constitution says that the people are enumerated in the decennial census. That census does not list corporations.  Yes, corporations are groups of people, and people have free speech.  But corporations are legally a special group of people.  If a group is liable for an action, then every member of that group is liable. If you are driving the car in a bank robbery and one of your gang kills a bystander during the robbery, then you are guilty of murder even if you never held the murder weapon.  However if the corporation  is sued for a wrong doing, your assets as a owner of that corporation are protected.   Only those assets that you have legally transferred to the corporation ( i.e. the corporation’s assets) are subject to liability.

The question is thus whether you can transfer the right of speech to a corporation.  If you can not transfer it, then a corporation, even though it is a group that includes you, can not own it.  Freedom of speech is an absolute.  Like life and liberty, it either exists or does not exist.  It can not be subdivided.  You can not give your life to a corporation. (You can give your life FOR a corporation, but it is still your life. You can not give your life TO a corporation.)  You can not give your liberty to a corporation.  You can not give your freedom of  speech to a corporation.  A corporation can not exercise what it does not have.  It thus has no freedom of speech, even though its shareholders have freedom of speech.

You dissolve a corporation, you do not execute a corporation.  You penalize/fine a corporation, you do not jail a corporation. There are no corporations on death row in Texas.  This is because while shareholders of corporations are people, society has decided in law that corporations are NOT people. Corporations can NOT both have special protections and absolute rights. You can not have your cake and eat it too!

Republicans VI

 

Back in Time

So take me away, I don't mind
But you'd better promise me, I'll be back in time
Gotta get back in time

Get back, get back
(Get back Marty!)

Marty McFly was right. I don’t think we are ready for this.

Single-ballot plurality-rule elections structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party such as that of the United States, according to Duverger’s Law. Throughout most of US history, there have been two parties.

The constitution did NOT envision the formation of political parties,  But from the beginning there were effectively two parties: the Federalists and the Democrat-Republicans. This led to the crisis after the election of 1800, when the Vice President, who was supposed to be the second-place finisher in the vote for President and the President and his intended Vice President, were both from the same party (Democrat-Republican) and thus received the same number of electoral votes. This ultimately led to the 12^th Amendment.

After the election of Andrew Jackson,  disaffected conservative Democrat-Republicans joined with  conservative Federalists to form the Whigs. This was the conservative party from 1830 to 1852. The problem is that while there were two political parties, there were more than two pollical beliefs:  Conservative Pro-Slavery; Conservative Anti-Slavery; Liberal Anti-Slavery and Liberal Pro-Slavery. The current Republican Party was formed not as a conservative party but as an anti‑slavery party. It included not only conservatives who believed in Government but also Know Nothings who did not believe in the expansion of slavery and Whigs who did not believe in government regulation.

While the Republican party was more conservative than the Democratic Party, it has had its own divisions. Grover Cleveland was elected president because of the divisions between the corrupt nominee James Blaine supported by the Republican Stalwarts and the anti-corruption Mugwumps. The split between the traditional Republicans backing William Howard Taft and the Progressive Republicans backing Teddy Roosevelt led to the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

The corruption of James Blaine and the segregation of Andrew Jackson has been combined in today's Donald Trump. Conservative, non-segregationist Republicans may split and form a new party as in 1830 or may serve to usher in only a Democrat Party rule. While examining history can be instructive, the future has yet to be written.