First Blog

 10/5/22. This very day the national debt hit $31 trillion, comparable to credit card debt as there is no equity involved. Many discount this as insignificant, but is it? The total income to the government is about $4 trillion annually. This means the government owes almost 8 times its income. Forget the $4T is almost totally encumbered, i.e. spent. Let's now measure this debt in comparison to your debt. Suppose you make free and clear $100,000 annually.  Suppose you owe in credit card debt 8 times this amount. Your debt would be $800,000. (Your house and car, as equity, don't figure in.) Most people would consider a revolving credit card debt of $10,000 as huge to the max.  Now you have a personal idea of how much the government owes.  It also tells us why the Fed doesn't want to increase interest rates to curb inflation. An increase of just 2% in the prime rate requires the government to pay more than $600 billion in additional interest - each freaking year! Translated th

On Marijuana. In Colorado, you can get a rocky mountain high. Sales for pot just hit a new high. Pot dealers give lessons on pot usage at their in-store “high” schools. The demand for legalized pot is at a record high. “High-er” education is now available in legalized-pot states. After a pot high trip, some come down-town. Is Colorado still the high-est state? Nowadays, the pot calls the kettle irrelevant. It is rumored soon drivers can will be able to shift to a new gear called high-drive. Did you hear about the kid who got high by weeding the backyard?  Some pot users want killing weed classified as a felony? AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) has created her very own class identity, the Inspired Idiots .   They’re noisy, but insensitive to facts, ready to believe the impossible, and enthusiastic contributors. Did you know snarkiness has its own signature?   After a while the apparent cleverness and contempt   of the satire becomes predictable and no long

Political stupidity is suffered by all parties.  It is disappointing the quality of political leaders has declined to such low levels.  We have many leaders pursuing ideology, or money, or power, or all.  At least they know what they want.  USA political plans and results. The vector forward.  A. Goals. Team A. Redistribution of wealth. Team B. Creation of new wealth. B. Action plans for Teams A & B. Spend more money than you take in by borrowing. C. Results for all. Redistribution of not much and collective bankruptcy. Yes, we will all go bankrupt together.   Unless… Our only hope is that the ultra-rich Chinese, Arab, and other foreign bankers, now owning about 30% of our debt, will not allow us to perish. Yes, we are becoming too big to fail . This could be.   Even today, economists are teaching this to our college students - precisely that the national debt will never NEED to be paid off and is thus not a worry.   Factoids: Current deb

How big is the national debt?  You know; it’s about USD 20 trillion.  And how big is that?  We could stack dollars upon one another to reach the moon and back – in fact, three round trips!!  Yeah! So what?   More tellingly, with the $20T bucks you could buy every single stock included in the S&P 500 - meaning you can own outright every company so listed.  For example, you would completely own the top fourteen, Apple Inc, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, Amazon.com, Berkshire Hathaway, General Electric, JPMorgan Chase, Facebook, Wells Fargo, AT&T, Nestlé, and hundreds more.   It is estimated that over all of human history 5,820,203,717 ounces of gold have been mined.  At the current price of about $1200/oz, this values today at $6,984,244,460,400, or about 1/3 of the total US debt.  Or you can win the (average) Powerball Jackpot about 322,000 times. That average is just over $62,000,000.  Or you could give every US citizen $57,000 c

  Big money . Want to get rich?   Invent a biodegradable ink .   With such chemistry, errant youths could have all the tattoos they desire, and not suffer their whole lives with visible proof of temporary insanity. Bigger money .  You see Facebook ,Twitter, Instagram, and the like as social apps .   It seems that modernity has an unlimited appetite for such apps.  These transcend the now ancient letter, morning coffee, and telephone conversation by miles, even light years.  Create a new such app.  Easy to say, difficult to do,but the rewards are extravagant.  Really big money . We know the national debt (in 2015) is about 19 trillion dollars.   A lot of money this is.   But what does it mean?   We are crossing scales or orders of magnitude, and this is difficult for almost all people.   Suppose I said that a lifetime is about two billion seconds. (Actually, 2.2 billion seconds.) This is a magnitude of such a value to make it incomprehensible by any measure.   But when I say

We are a nation of heaps.  We live in heaps.  We respond only to issues when they become heaps - and then rarely.  So, what’s a heap? The heap paradox comes from rather vague predicates.  You’ve often heard of a heap of sand or a heap of trouble.  What this means is roughly we cannot distinguish individuals (such as grains of sand from a pile) from the others.  In fact, it is more complicated.  The ancient interpretation of this paradox (also called the sorites paradox ) is to resolve the question as to when, by removal of individual grains of sand, it is no longer a heap?  In this note, we look at heaps from the reverse perspective.  For example, when we add grains of sand to a collection, when does the collection cease being a collection and becomes a heap?  Of course, this paradox has no real resolution, but the word “heap” does seem to apply to many issues of the day. The (reverse) heap paradox is a key social and political situation in the USA.  At

I don't understand how much $16 trillion ($16T*) of debt is.  So, to help myself, I break it down to terms I can understand. There are about 254,000,000 registered vehicles in this country (2009 data).  Big number this is.  But dividing number into $16T would give a valuation of about $69,000 for each of them.  This is somewhat higher than the average cost of automobiles on the road. Another way to put it is to say the US national debt could replace the entire US fleet of automobiles with, for example, brand new fully equipped Lexus ES460's.  Nice cars.  Make mine pearl white. The total of state budgets in 2010 was about $666B.  Dividing into $16T gives about 24.  This means the $16T national debt could completely cover all state budgets for about 24 years. The total annual foreign aide budget of the US is reckoned to be about $54B.  Dividing this into $16T gives about 296, meaning that the national debt of the US could cover all foreign aid for almost three centuries. Th