Author: fastcaranalysis

Social credit system foreshadowed by job market problems.

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For years in the United States getting a good job was a matter of training to do a job that required a lot of training to do. Becoming a doctor of medicine took ten years of university and residency training. Becoming a scientist required several years of training. Getting a bachelor’s degree was the entry level requirement for a lot of good jobs and further university training was required for the best paid jobs, like engineering and pharmacy and teaching and nursing. Some jobs had their own entry level training and even if they didn’t pay well at first, you could eventually earn well after you were familiar with the job.

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That started to change with hostile takeovers that erupted in American businesses under financialization. The return on investment for an education was damaged when businesses were liquidated across the U.S. and well trained people became unemployed. That was pretty bad for a lot of otherwise employable people. The average time spent in a job went from a long time to less than four years, even in jobs that required five years of training.

The next blow to the American job market was AI screening and cancel culture and DEI and other ways of screening out job applicants instead of screening them in. When an algorithm rules out candidates who have no idea how to get past the algorithm, it becomes more and more true that getting a good education doesn’t lead to good employment anymore. Getting hands on training might not lead to long term employment either. That destroys the return of investment in training at American universities and also on-the-job.

Nowadays, the application process is contaminated, according to Kim Komando, with 40% fake job advertisements. In fact, a lot of people have no idea how to get a job these days. The job market is broken.

What I have been thinking is that the lack of legitimate job opportunities may be a gateway to aid the establishment of a social credit system. What if all you had to do to get a job in the context of a new social credit system is to get the appropriate ap on your phone for social credit credentialization? Wouldn’t that encourage you to bend the knee to a new social credit system?

As we see the American job market languishing through another year of having confusing mechanisms of application in an environment with little success in finding rewarding pay, rewarding benefits or even any position at all, it’s worth wondering what this is leading up to. Could it be a motivation to join social credit credentialing when it comes on the scene in the near future?

Neoliberals see Americans as their giant vending machine.

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Addiction is nothing to joke about and being addicted to an infinite flow of money isn’t a funny problem. I saw a Joe Rogan Show clip today where Elon Musk refused to reveal all that he knows about all the ways our neoliberal government has been using America as a giant vending machine. There have been so many ways to steal non-existent money and put Americans on the hook for it. The U.S. went to a fiat monetary system during the Nixon Administration. We continued to pile up debt and Congress avoided restraining spending with a real budget. Omnibus spending bills became commonplace and now inflation is the result.

Without a budget, there’s no accountability for spending. DOGE has been revealing all kinds of spending shenanigans but Mr. Musk said that if he undermined all the grift pathways, by revealing them and shutting them all down, someone would surely think it is time to end Mr. Musk’s life. He has become unnerved by the things that he now knows from the DOGE investigations. Or at least that’s what it looked like and sounded like in the podcast.

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Some of those government and NGO spenders must have thought that they would never stop spending other people’s money and ruining other people’s chances. They wanted to do it for as long as the country had a leg to stand on. So ordinary people who go bankrupt because of huge medical costs should just realize that they made mistakes in their life….not that government policies have increased the cost of healthcare. When a young person can’t buy a house or pay for an education, that young person should think that they made mistakes and they shouldn’t believe that the government’s use of the country’s treasury as a resource of infinite spending and debt has ultimately been disastrous for them.

There are many other examples. Homelessness is a pretty serious penalty for ordinary people to face because the government followed disasterous outsourcing-of-labor policies encouraging corporations to move abroad. Neoliberals just wanted to couple economics (soft power) and politics (hard power) into an unbeatable one-two-punch motivator to get the world to shape itself into something that big bureaucrats wanted. And that something would bring new opportunties to the bureaucrats themselves. Just like an infinite vending machine should.

I wrote in my book, Political Catsup with Economy Fries, which I published in 2015, that putting politics and economics together the way the neoliberals are doing doesn’t create prosperity. It can game the system for insiders but it destroys markets by undermining market feedback mechanisms of profit and loss and brings corruption into politics. So here we are.

I am sorry, Mr. Musk, that the jockeys of infinite spending are mad at you. I think that you were right to delegate the DOGE work to a lot of other people. Perhaps you could start training and multiplying the number of helpers you have to stop the use of America as an infinite vending machine. America has never been able to infinitely sustain so much waste and abuse as we have seen these last twenty years.

A disturbance in the flow of money (out the back door).

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The Department of Government Efficiency has been having a busy week. According to a Trump spokesperson, DOGE has set up a website that provides transparency with regard to their findings. Elon Musk has been declaring that he’s interested in finding the truth in the way government departments handle money. He’s been finding inappropriate dispursements that aren’t labelled as to who they went to or even how much…a sign of fraud and abuse. And there are more monetary abuses than missing payment information which are being revealed much to the chagrin of those who were enjoying dipping into that money flow.

Because so much money misuse has been uncovered so quickly, I am cautiously optimistic. I hope that the DOGE is using it’s powers judiciously and appropriately. I am hoping that they are stopping people from stealing more money. I am hoping that those who have been stealing from the public’s coffers will be identified and prosecuted. Apparently many who may be guilty of such crimes have begun to panic. So far though, it appears that DOGE is mostly just trying to stop the outward flow of inappropriate payments to who knows who what and where and some other government departments will deal with prosecuting the people who have been stealing and dealing in these monies.

Whenever someone says that they are worried that DOGE is acting inappropriately, I just wonder if that person or group is guilty of taking some of that easy to get cash that has been bleeding the United States into poverty. Did that person have a cash connection? President Trump stated optimistically that some of the treasury accounting may have exagerrated the deficit and debt and therefore, the United States may be in better financial shape than any of us thought.

I heard at least one group attribute this statement to some other outcome than discovering cash resources previously unaccounted for. That someone would disparage found money made me doubt the impartiality of that opinion. Because a lot of people have been taking money inappropriately. Secret money, secret money connections, secret money destinations, bribes, influence. Balancing the books finally is something that makes me feel less helpless as I have long watched problems developing that are affecting us all and I feel a little happier about a potentially better tomorrow.

Go DOGE!

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100% Confidence.

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I buy books at Christmas. I have 12 of them from Christmas 2024. Some of them are classic fiction that is entertaining and some of them are new fiction. One of them is advice about how to have better health. Some of these books are filled with timeless truths.

Believe it or not there are timeless truths even today despite the narrative wars in our media that can be so confusing. I have finished the health book, finished 3 fiction books (reading the fiction aloud after dinner with my husband) and now I am wading into what seems to be books filled with timeless truths.

It’s nice to be reassured that timeless truths still exist. One of these books is Quadrivium: the Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music and Cosmology by Miranda Lundy, Daud Sutton, Anthony Ashton and Jason Martineau. It is four books inside one cover. It is already wonderful even though I’m only in the second book.

Imagine living in the past without media distractions and finding rhythm in number ratios inside the sounds in music, or being inspired by looking at the lovely faces of classical geometric forms. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Ventruvian Man, paired with Circling the Square from 1490, well after the Roman age where man was the measure of all things. You can still overcome all distractions and see the world that way now.

The other book that is filled with timeless truths is How to Solve it: A New Aspect of Mathematic Method, by G. Polya. Don’t let the word Mathematic scare you away from this gem. It is filled with common sense approaches to solving problems with unknown causes. This applies to mathematical questions but could equally apply to mechanical problems or really any problem where a solution is needed and is being sought out. Human beings are problem solvers. This book is about formal questions that you or I can ask to get to answers. Don’t give up, this book says, try a question to pry loose some part of the answer.

Of course, if you want to understand ideological change over U.S. history, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism, by me, Mel Scanlan Stahl. It will bring you to where you can understand how we got to our political here and now.

Victorian morays have no business in today’s politics.

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I keep hearing about attacks against Trump candidates for office. During the first Trump Administration, the Brett Kavanaugh accusations were motivated politically and a lot of accusations can be made for political reasons. While I think that a person’s morals are important, they are no longer relevant to appointments when baseless accusations are clearly being made to block people. Matt Gaetz just dropped out of the Attorney General candidacy because of accusations. These accusations arose after his candidacy threatened the Washington D.C. establishment. There were no criminal convictions to disqualify him. I think he shouldn’t have dropped out. And I think that entertaining the notion that baseless accusations should be heard is ridiculous. This isn’t the Victorian Era. And the reason that Washington D.C. needs to be changed is because of corruption regarding public service. That’s the kind of corruption that we need to focus on rather than accusations of private impropriety. Let’s stop allowing interested parties to play the game of virtue signalling, chasing down rumors and entertaining falacies for the purpose of blocking needed change.

Grab a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

How secure is your life if you can’t find a good surgeon or afford a good lawyer?

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If you were in a terrible car accident, would you be able to get the medical interventions to repair your body that you need in order to return to a normal life? Or if you had an unexplained medical problem, could you get the help you need in order to resolve it? Would you trust your doctor to order tests that would help you instead of just ordering as many billable tests as the doctor can to increase their profit? Would the Doctor give good advice if the need was for something simple? For example, if you had sinusitis would he order a CAT scan and surgery if rinsing your sinuses with saline would have been sufficient to repair the problem?

If someone sued you in a frivolous lawsuit, could you find and afford a good enough lawyer to win your case? When you hire someone to work on your house can you do anything if they take your money and run without doing any of the work? What if the work is grossly below standard…could you get your money back from the first guy and still hire the better worker after that?

How much of what you have tried to achieve in life can be protected in a nation that isn’t practicing rule of law governance? NONE. All the good hard work you did in the past just might be for nothing. How can you protect yourself when you do anything now or in the future? You can’t. The reason that I make this point is because Joe Biden is trying to issue a Pardon for his son Hunter Biden retroactive to cover any crimes he may have committed over the last several years. If he can do this, how much rule of law operates here in the U.S.? What can any of us do if there isn’t really legal oversight or legal consequences for certain groups, like politicians, bankers, healthcare experts?

You can keep on going. You can keep on trying. And you will. But there aren’t any guarantees or even realistic assurances when investors can monkey around with real estate prices and double triple or quadruple the prices or the government can regulate cars out of existence or beyond your price range, or taxes keep going up, or groceries cost twice or three times as much, or AI systems boot you right out of any hiring pool of applicants for employment that you are qualified for without explaining their unknown reasons (and 40% of job ads online are fake, but no consequences to advertiser for lying to applicants). Etc etc etc.

Lets hope that things get better.

Our ability to make them better through our work and careful money savings or investment has been harmed by frauds of many kinds and by monopolies. Does making good choices still bring success? Can diligent efforts by ordinary people to do the right thing still work towards bringing them success in a system without virtuous markets or a system without moral politics?

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Neoliberalism overvalues some and undervalues other human traits.

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Overvalued traits and undervalued ones:

Single examples of human genius are over-valued without appreciating the normal sequence in a human lifespan where a person is born, matures, raises kids, gets old and then dies. Geniuses are supposed to be brilliant and figure out how to solve flashy problems but this puts a lot of pressure on them to be superhuman. A normal human lifespan isn’t appreciated or valued or supported with a system that has stable employment or without wishing by and large for an infinite lifespan instead of a finite one. Raising children doesn’t seem to be valued at all.

The perfect product is valued but it has to have superlative qualities and be mass marketed whereas products made independently by hand are undervalued even though humans have been making things for their own use for thousands of years. Mass production undervalues individual know-how and creativity. And remember that humans are part of mass production in most cases by running machines or overseeing processes. The human element is still playing a role.

Human agency is undervalued in the neoliberal workplace where people are seen as similar, even interchangeable, and expected to do whatever they are told to do without reasoning about what that is or what its consequences might be. This is in contrast to old mantras in medicine like “do no harm,” or Peter Drucker’s assertion that people have values and that they should carefully match their personal values to what they are doing at work; if the value sets don’t match, he thought, they should leave. J.S. Mill thought that with small men, no great things are possible.

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The power of organizations and what they can accomplish is overvalued for instance in government bureaucracies, while the power of individuals living life and making independent decisions is undervalued even though this is a freer arena where more options remain open all the time, giving society more flexibility. One of the problems with bureaucracy is its resistance to necessary change. Influencers have become tools of organizations without being held to standards of truth-telling. Truth is undervalued when peddling influence.

Secresy and subterfuge is overvalued and above board dealing is undervalued. Take for example voting in America. The ability for groups to cheat in elections has been more highly valued than the fidelity of our voting systems. That’s really a shame.

Censorship has been overvalued and freedom of speech, or freedom of expression, has been undervalued, especially recently since the Covid caper. Censorship is all about aggression to tell people what to do, what to think and to limit their choices while eliminating accountability for the wrong choices being made by organizations.

War has been overvalued under neoliberalism and peace has been undervalued. If state and corporate actors profit from warmaking, those people collecting money from war want more war all the time. This is tragic and a disaster for everyone.

Reality is undervalued under neoliberalism and fantasy has been elevated to new heights. But reality matters. Green energy including solar and wind is undermined by real limits of copper and steel, for example. Pretending that any idea can work if enough people believe in it is foolish. The real world always influences what is possible.

Partnerships between the most powerful players in government and industry are overvalued and individual lives are undervalued. Government picking economic winners and losers is overvalued while damage to individuals by externalizing costs to them is underappreciated. The risk of fascism leading to mass death is underappreciated. Yesterday, I read that inflation is likely to kill more people than the covid caper. What do you think about that? Do you see an end to inflation any time soon?

Hiring managers don’t want to hire older workers. Yet it is hard to get a return on investment for expensive training when the average time a person can work in a job is so short now. On balance, youth is undervalued and old age is undervalued. Older people aren’t valued for their knowledge or wisdom. It takes a full lifespan to see how wrong even careful choices can go. It takes a lifetime to alter what we believed when we were young when we see more of life and learn about life. But youth is also undervalued in terms of being socially nurtured towards successful outcomes. Financialization has undermined the success of young and old alike. Valuing humans has gone awry in the neoliberal era. Young people are often told to expect robots to take on their role in the workplace. Young people in school are being told that AI is smarter than people, even though that isn’t true. We have algorithms but not intelligent computers. Human intelligence matters as much as ever now, but it is undervalued in the neoliberal age.

We all live in the neoliberal era right now. What do you see as undervalued and overvalued? How can we improve our society? How can we invest in processes and value human life in a way that can help society to grow and improve?

Hoping for better outcomes and forecasts.

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What a mess the economy has become and is. I was right to be worried about what the fake election result in 2020 would lead to. Now with an end to the Biden Administration, it’s the perfect time to hope for better. Are there any easy fixes?

According to Trump’s transition team, we can improve American health by revealing and reducing ties between scientific research and big pharma and RFKJr. will see to that. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to make government more efficient by cutting where they can cut out unneccessary government jobs and roles. President Trump himself cut more than 1000 regulations during his first term and according to him, businesses across America thanked him for that, so I’m guessing he will do more of that. President Trump will be deporting a lot of criminal immigrants with criminal records from their home countries and perhaps many other migrants. Our economy’s wages will not be reduced for the long-term as much with fewer illegal immigrants. Dr. Oz says that our current healthcare system is unsustainable and I wonder if Dr. Oz (despite his ties to Oprah Winfrey who supported the would-be Harris administration) would be willing to pitch in to help RFKJr. do even more to make healthcare less about sick care and more about health. Tulsi Gabbard got my support years ago as soon as she suggested Congress could cut the number of pages allowed in legislation to ten maximum. She’s going to be in charge of reordering the Intelligence community which has been doing so many stupid things. Trump’s whole cabinet is forming early with plans to reduce corruption in the military, in healthcare, in our bureaucracy.

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Not to worry (unneccessarily?), but I’m not seeing the level of social unrest that was promised by the media post-election 2024. There were a lot of predictions that no-matter-who-won, blood would flow. Instead there seems to be a new optimism. Of course, with the way people get information now, it could be that something out of sight still threatens us all. I hope that whatever may still lurk and mutter deprecations in the darkness will retreat to the farthest dark corners and lurk there without causing anymore trouble. There’s trouble enough with the economy and too much debt-debt-debt. How can we possibly clear it all away after so many expensive profligacies?

Don’t worry right now. We still have a short wait. In the meantime, there’s still leaves to rake, gutters to clean, snow soon to shovel, turkeys to bake, trees to trim, packages to wrap, gifts to mail or make or buy. Whatever happens, there’s still ordinary life to call us forward to make efforts on behalf of those we love and care about. The new administration starts in January if there is no more drama during the innauguration.

The American nation started with tariffs that were meant to protect infant industry from established European industries. Now, President Trump wants to initiate a new tariff policy. This is against one of the main principles of globalization. If he does tax imports, and inflation continues, everything will get a lot more expensive, I think for a period of time as Americans set up manufacturing here. Right now, almost everything that you buy comes from far away. Changing that will alter almost every offering on the market, from food to clothing to furniture, to craft supplies, to print art to almost everything. Making production more local again or at least more U.S. based will be an expensive transition. Stopping economic interventionism, where the government picks economic winners and losers, is harder but Trump’s cabinet appointments are getting started on that by attacking corruption in Washington D.C. which has been costly to Americans. With reduced corruption, less economic interventionism which has favored fascism, and more local economic industry and manufacturing at home, America might have a chance to prosper. Eventually, Americans will have more jobs, and the economy will start humming again.

I’m still worried about the monetary system. There’s talk about changing to digital currencies, which would not have better discipline than fiat currencies (which have been suffering under overprinting and deficit spending). Deficit spending is an important contributer to our inflation. Other financial innovators want to fractionalize ownership. They see this as a way to multiply asset trading markets sort of like tranches of mortgages allowed partial mortgage trading that migrated into housing markets and derivative bets and caused the CDO mortgage backed security crash in 2008. Banks have been secret movers and shakers that seldom are examined for the harms they are causing. Bankers were the first American exception to prosecution for their law-breaking during the 2008 Great Recession. That’s when we lost rule of law in America. Will President Trump do anything about too-big-to-fail banks? Will he be able to reduce banking shenanigans that undermine private ownership? Will Americans ever have fairer banking that pays interest for savings accounts? Will there ever be a ceiling on credit card interest charges? Will American life ever make sense again with a long term plan for prosperity?

Eat an apple.

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It’s apple season. I’m harvesting apples today from my apple trees. I have red delicious and honeycrisp apples and it’s been cool enough that the sugars have concentrated. Seasonal timing is irrevocable and I should pull the apples off the tree so that they can be used before the hard freeze comes. Some apples have worms and I will cut them out of the cores and harvest the rest to preserve as apple butter or to make pies or to serve sliced apples as a side with meals. This is a delicious bounty from trees I planted years ago.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

It’s also election season. I see a lot of ad hominem attacks against either of the major candidates. I don’t care about that.

Some people posit a civil war is in the offing because the United States has become so polarized by algorithms on the internet. Those algorithms feed narrow information to internet readers that polarize their views more and more until everyone is mad at everyone else. But I don’t care about that except as something that is happening in the background.

Polarizing people keeps them from cooperating with each other and that’s too bad but it is a temporary problem. People are social. Eventually they will come together again. The power of algorithms isn’t infinite… or even definite.

I would like the vote to have greater fidelity. I want no more digital computer involvement in vote counting. No mail in ballots either. Vote in person on the day of the election. Why not make election day a holiday? And I want more cooperation to fix problems that we face as a nation. We still live in an economy that has scarcity. That means that we have to conserve resources and that when we spend money on one thing, we can’t also spend it on another.

Avoiding a legitimate accounting of government spending doesn’t lead to infinite money. It just leads to problems like those faced by the people who have been flooded out in Appalachia. They have not been getting all the help they need. Eventually, through the sacrifices of many other people, some of those Appalachian farmers are getting hay for their starving livestock and food and water for the people.

Good people try to help each other to have less suffering.

The days of insider access to government money by government people will eventually end. Financialization, interventionism, or if you prefer accelerationist policy will end. Because this is an economy where scarcity is eventually undeniable. The thieving people gaming the budget to keep a gravy train of money going to insiders will be stopped. They can’t keep gaming the system for themselves forever. Look at history. It will come to an end.

I hope it will end sooner so that good people can join together to fix what’s broken, return to rule of law governance and end corruption in our nation. Don’t we have important things to accomplish here? Planting an apple tree can provide years of fall harvests. We can learn to be a nation with a moral compass that points to a united America that strives for renewed prosperity that is widespread and lasting. Not through guile but through work.

Losing ground in America.

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Accelerationist policy is when the government picks economic winners and losers. It’s a policy based on the idea that the government should guide economic growth by sponsoring certain kinds of growth and blocking other kinds through either regulations and laws that stop growth or permit growth or by making loans unaffordable or unobtainable to certain groups while other groups can get affordable loans. It’s the idea that government knows best how to guide economic growth. It’s a bad policy that is failing America.

Ludwig von Mises abhorred accelerationist policy. Because it leads to problems like the ones that we see everywhere across the U.S. today.

Accelerationist policy was behind the Great Recession when insolvent banks that gambled on real estate were saved after the real estate market crashed. It’s behind the end of Glass Steagall laws that once protected people from being harmed by financial gambles. It was behind the Affordable Care Act that raised the cost of healthcare for all Americans while lowering care quality. Accelerationist policy is why algorithms that value real estate at such high prices are in widespread use so that over half of all Americans can’t afford a mortgage in a monopoly price fixing scheme. It is why so many students got loans for a university education of dubious quality and utility and also why students can’t discharge that debt by declaring bankruptcy when they can’t find work. It’s why the way that we measure unemployment has changed so that we don’t count longterm unemployed people who can’t get a job. It’s why cars cost too much after regulatory mayhem to make cars more carbon neutral or why cars have so many costly gadget add-ons like back-up cameras. It’s why insurance of all kinds costs more now. It was behind the Covid Caper.

Accelerationist policy laughs at death and mayhem. It’s the Bugaboo of modern times.

It’s how the Federal Reserve implemented ZIRP that has removed interest on savings. It’s why you can’t get interest on money by saving money….because the government wants you to be motivated to spend your money immediately. It’s why old people can’t make it once they stop working and also why the government needs old people to never stop working and also why algorithms now screen applicants to screen out elderly ones that can’t ever get a job now. And no one can find out why a perfectly qualified applicant is screened out by the AI software.

It’s why there aren’t winning options for so many of us.

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ADDENDUM: Interventionism or interventionist policy is the older term for government interference in the economy; Accelerationist policy is the rebranding of the old term by American government think tanks.