Economics

Writing those sort of headlines makes me feel like I need to to take a shower. Yet, sometimes the truth is dirty, and the truth is that Rupert Murdock "gets it".

Fox has annouced that that they will use their network of sites to offer downloads of their televised content. [see news story]

Now, admittedly, this pay-per-view model sucks the private parts of goats. Who wouldn't pay 1.99 for an episdoe of 24? Well, let's see....

Everyone.

However, these things evolve slowly, like the law. Sooner or later FOX will realize that there is far more money to be made from offering vidoes for free, and using whatever methods are possible to force consumers to watch 40 second ads for pringles, or the airforce. 

Globalism is yesterday's tomorrow. The future is about living locally on a much smaller scale. Pepsi Cola and Exxon-Mobil are exactly the kind of gigantic enterprises that are going to wither and die over the next decade. China is not tomorrow's geopolitical colossus, it's a geopolitical super train wreck waiting to collide with the reality of its environmental devastation, population overshoot, and energy starvation. Americans will be lucky if they can do each other's laundry ten years from now, let alone sell massive amounts of soda pop to people twelve thousand miles away.

-Jim Cunstler

Jim Kunstler, author of Clusterfuck Nation, is the author of today's quote of the day.

Google HQ was a glass office park pod tucked into an inscrutable tangle of off-ramps, berms, manzanita clumps, and curb-cuts. But inside, it was all tricked out like a kindergarten. They had pool tables, and inflatable yoga balls, and $6000 electronic vibrating massage lounge chairs, and snack stations deployed at twenty-five step intervals, with lucite bins filled with chocolate raisins and granola. The employees dressed like children. There were two motifs: "skateboard rat" and "10th grade nerd." I suppose quite a few of them were millionaires. Many of the work cubicles were literally modular children's playhouses. I gave my spiel about the global oil problem and the unlikelihood that "alternative energy" would even fractionally replace it, and quite a few of the Googlers became incensed. "Yo, Dude, you're so, like, wrong! We've got, like, technology!"

Yeah, well, they weren't interested in making a distinction between energy and technology (or, more precisely where Google is concerned, a massive web-based advertising scheme -- because it is finally clear that all this talk about "connectivity" just leads to more commercial shilling, shucking, jiving, and generally fucking with your headspace in the interstices of whatever purposeful activity one may be struggling to enact on the internet).

By George OrwellFrom: Down and Out in Paris and London, Chapter 3

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it—you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there are your meals—meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day’s food. All day you arc telling lies, and expensive lies.

One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called himself a compositor. He was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark either of an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite certain in which class to put him. Madame F. did not like the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance. The Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the

The typical criticism of deficit spending is as follows: Deficits let current generations off the hook for paying the bills. Thus, consumption rises while rate of savings and investment declines. This leads to there being less capital per worker, and therefore lower growth in productivity. Since capital is scarce, the rate of return rises, which leads to a rise in interest rates. These high interest rates attract foreign investors which, by definition, cause our trade deficit to widen. However, there has been almost no correlation between the budget deficit and the interest rate, productivity growth rate, or the savings and investment rate. Some economists, such as Robert Barro of Harvard see this as absolute proof that deficits don't matter. To them, the typical criticism of deficit spending is nothing more than a scary story to tell in the dark. If only it were just a "story". Like economists Robert Eisner and Michael Boskin (chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers under George H. W. Bush), I believe that correlation between the deficit and other economic variables is so low because the deficit has been defined incorrectly. The official debt is only a measure of our government's liabilities; it completely ignores our assets. In layman's terms, its akin to calling the owner of a $1 million property a debtor, by mere account of his large mortgage. There are fierce arguments amongst academia and government officials on how to measure our debt. Those are beyond the scope of this post, but we can conclude: The deficit is not a well-defined economic concept The real problems with deficit spending are not measured by our current federal deficit figure. Most notably, we should be worrying about transfers of wealth between generations (or maybe just me, since I'm 22).