Obituary - part the second

Well, once again: That Didn't Take Long.

Ayatollah Don^© has managed to stir up Our Allies to the point that they're actively seeking to visit the USofA with (almost) financial ruin. Dumping a bunch of Treasuries, in and of itself wouldn't kill the USofA in a nano-second, but takes the Rest of The World one step closer to stripping the US Buck of Reserve Currency status. And that, as explained in Episode 1, puts USofA Debt into Zimbabwe Land. That's not good eats. Bretton Woods gave the USofA the luxury of paying its foreign debts by printing its own currency. No other country could/can do that. Think about that for an hour or two.

So far, European officials have signaled Greenland's sovereignty is a red line that's not up for compromise, while the Trump administration isn't budging either on its stance.

But the U.S. has a key vulnerability the EU can exploit, according to George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank.

"Europe owns Greenland, it also owns a lot of Treasuries," he wrote in a note on Sunday.

Holding those bonds helps balance America's massive external deficits, and Europe is the world's biggest lender to the U.S.

And, I'll bet, you thought that was China? Guess not.

The European hoard is said to be 12.6 Trillion Dollars worth. At least until it isn't.

According to the US Treasury, Japan is the largest single country holder, at $1,202,600,000,000 nominal last November. China is third with $682,600,000,000.

How difficult would it be to dump the US Buck as reserve currency and choose the Euro or Renminbi? General view is: will take more than Ayatollah Don^©'s infantile behavior. Me? I'm not so sure. He's clearly on a crusade to make America 19^th century again. Back when we were a third world country: a few Marie Antoinettes and the rest cake eaters. Only shitkickers would vote for such an idiot. And Batshit J. Moron means to intimidate all those Blue City Voters to stay home on Election Day. We'll see.

Don't believe Mammy Yokum? Go look at a county level vote map from 2020. See all those Blue Dots? That's what's had Batshit J. Moron going batshit since forever. Only stupid shitkickers want him. Discrete state/precinct maps, like this (haven't found a USofA one yet, but at least one dataset exists for the adventurous) show what Batshit J. Moron is up to in yet more detail.

He could just about end American Dominance just because he's so stupid. It ain't how many nukes ya got, it's whether you control international finance. But he's a failed (6 times that we know about) real estate knucklehead, and nothing more. It's a sure bet that he thinks Bretton Woods is a fine merlot. Only tyros drink merlot.

Kill All The Workers

There's that famous line from Shakespeare

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers

Capitalists follow a more inclusive motto

The only thing we do, is kill all the workers

So, may be that's the Achilles Heel of AI, as currently implemented. That's the conclusion, if you read between the lines.

Signaling the scale of capital that he believes he needs, OpenAI has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on data centers and related infrastructure.

The thing is: few if any of the pundits have grasped the import of even AI, as currently implemented. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, capital has made money only by replacing labor. It has no intrinsic value. So, the $64,000 question - is there $1.4 trillion of labor up for redundancy? If you suck $1.4 trillion (plus profit on that expenditure) of buying power out of an economy, what are you left with? It would appear that AI, as currently implemented, proves at long last that the Luddites were right. After all, capitalists are in the labor rendundacy business. And, on the whole, they have no clue that the arithmetic has to add up if the economy/society is to survive.

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

And just to add a bit of snark: Führer Trump is using the Fed renovation project to kneecap Powell. Part of that renovation is the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building.

Pollyana on LSD - part the third

Well, friend Tom Friedman has jumped the shark. Again. This recent essay is so ahistoric as not to be believed. After all, this is an educated almost geezer who should have his facts in hand. Apparantly not.

It evinces the sin of omission.

Because after talking to people in the U.S. oil industry, it is clear to me that if Trump wants to see U.S. companies invest billions of new dollars to repair Venezuela's oil infrastructure, the first thing they will tell him is that they need a return to the rule of law in Venezuela.

Like hell, that's what they want. They always want a benevolent (to them) dictator who'll keep wages at subsistence and the coveted resource at nada. Rule of law? Ha Ha. Only if the dictator and bidnezzmen get to make the law.

So, it seems, he's never heard of the original Banana Republic?

In 1911, Zemurray conspired with Manuel Bonilla, an ex-president of Honduras (1904-1907), and American mercenary Lee Christmas, to overthrow the civil government of Honduras and install a military government friendly to foreign businesses.

The mercenary army of the Cuyamel Fruit Company, led by Christmas, effected a coup d'état against President Miguel R. Dávila (1907-1911) and installed Bonilla (1912-1913). The United States ignored the deposition of the elected government of Honduras by a private army, justified by the U.S. State Department's misrepresenting Dávila as too politically liberal and a poor businessman whose management had indebted Honduras to Great Britain. This was a geopolitically unacceptable circumstance in light of the Monroe Doctrine.

United Fruit, et al, were happy.

Or the CIA's destruction of Mosaddegh in Iran? It was all about the oil, of course. So we got the Shah, a compliant dictator. The oil companies were happy.

On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état orchestrated by the United States (CIA) and the United Kingdom (MI6). A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands. It was instigated by the United States (under the name TP-AJAX Project[8] or Operation Ajax) and the United Kingdom (under the name Operation Boot).

Fact is, bidnezzmen always would rather a compliant dictator, who keeps labor at subsistence wage and free access to the desired resource.

Dumb and Dumber - part the third

Was watching ESPN, waiting for Tony and Wilbon, and an advert that I thought I'd seen earlier in the week, happened again.

OK. So the theme of the advert is: we see an auto assembly line coming at us, and the robots (no humans on the line, just a couple looking on) are smashing the windshields and other bits and pieces.

Cut to the advert, for Indeed, and it's calling for COBOL coders to fix the problem!!!!!!!!! C'mon man!!!!!! How possibly dumb could Indeed be????????? At least java, more likely C++, may be Rust, Fortran in a pickle. Since it's robots, could well be some robot assembler. COBOL??? No way on God's green earth.

So, OK, that was off the top of my head. Much of these musings come to be that way. So, to be fair, I looked to the Great Google, and found this site.

C/C++
Python
Java
C#
MATLAB
Hardware Description Languages (HDLs)
Lisp
Pascal

I wouldn't think Python would be a candidate for such real time work, but who's to know? As expected, no COBOL to be found. The world has not ended.

Obituary

It is just possible, though not welcome, that Führer Trump and his brown shirts will turn the USofA not great again, but a second or third rate country.

Understanding how that could happen depends on knowing how it is that the USofA became the biggest gorilla on Mother Earth. And, no, it isn't because of some assumed superior racial/ethnic identity.

It's because the USofA was the only developed country that exited WWII nearly entirely unscathed. These essays have mentioned Bretton Woods some times in the past.

The new economic system required an accepted vehicle for investment, trade, and payments. Unlike national economies, however, the international economy lacks a central government that can issue currency and manage its use. In the past this problem had been solved through the gold standard, but the architects of Bretton Woods did not consider this option feasible for the postwar political economy. Instead, they set up a system of fixed exchange rates managed by a series of newly created international institutions using the U.S. dollar (which was a gold standard currency for central banks) as a reserve currency.

If you read the whole page, you'll find that Bretton Woods agreement wasn't cast in stone, and changes have happened over the years. What remains the same, so far, is the Uncle Sam's Buck is still the international reserve currency. Trust me on this: that status is the ultimate global power. Nucular bombs aren't. Reserve currency is.

In 1973, OPEC decided it had had enough, and threw a bomb into the clubhouse. Still, Uncle Sam's Buck survived.

So: you'll know that the USofA is Just Another Country when the rest of the countries no longer recognize Uncle Sam's Buck as the international reserve currency. We'll be just like Zimbabwe.

There still must be some commonly accepted currency, after Uncle Sam's Buck leaves the stage. Might be the Euro, might be the Renminbi. In any case, it won't be Uncle Sam's Buck. With Führer Trump's and Miller's increasing bellicose actions, it won't take long for the Rest of the World to say Adios, Amigo to Uncle Sam. Go fuck yourself Sam.

The US Buck dies. RIP.

Sui Generis

Today's (dead trees) NYT has a clash betwixt Bruni and Stephens. As usual, the MAGAnaut lacks the insight to name the simple fact: countries/economies which run on extraction of natural resources are always Fascist. And not even countries, even right wingnut parts of countries.

And, of course, Stephens lays the condition in Venezuela to 'socialism', when the fact is Maduro was/is just another right wingnut tin pot dictator. Just like Führer Trump. Or Führer Trump's idol, Putin.

Walk back the BoM of any product, and there you will find some number of natural resources plucked from the belly of Mother Earth. The issue becomes a problem when most, if not all, of the state's GDP is that extraction. It then becomes a much more tractable problem for the dictator to control a single sector of the economy, and, as often as not, in a relatively small part of the state. Texas is the perfect example.

I expect that Führer Trump is planning to garrison the oil fields down there, and let the rest of the country go to Hell.

Of course, an economy highly, if not wholly, based on pulling stuff out of the belly of Mother Earth will die when the stuff runs out. And, of course, when the 'owners' of the extracted resource feel the heat as new technology makes the resource less profitable. Führer Trump has it in for any non-fossil fuel source of electricity. I wonder why? Could it be he intends, like any good dictator, to siphon off much of the oil revenue to TRO? It has at least 500 entities now. What's a couple more hidden in that deep state?

Windfall

For those campers licking their chops over the promise, implicit though it may be, that snagging all that Venezuelan oil for our own selves will appear as much lower prices at your local gas pump? Guess again.

There is a precedent in natural gas. The fossil fuel industry just ships it overseas for yet more moolah.

The new administration's plans to unleash American gas without restrictions would significantly hurt the economy here at home and expose U.S. residents to the volatility of the global gas market, the study shows. Natural gas prices could skyrocket by more than 30%. The average American household could see its energy bill rise by over $100 by 2050.

Of course, that study was done and released under Sleepy Joe (who hates the fossil fuel cabal, of course). Did they get the facts wrong? I doubt it. But Führer Trump will find some mindless RFK-nicks to claim that both LNG export and trans-shipping Venezuelan crude elsewhere (Russia? China?) Makes America Great Again. And the shitkickers who are his base will eat it up.