Barak Obama Elected as President
Context?
Watch this video! and this
one!
AND
THIS! Catch this
one.
1. Over the next 18 months,
a return to stagflation.
Stagflation is an economic situation
in which
inflation and
economic stagnation occur simultaneously and remain
unchecked for a period of time. But first you have to get to
know this curve, called the collapse curve, most important
curve you’ll ever see in your life, get used to it, learn
how to recognize it and take advantage of it:
An interesting note from Mike Chambreau (a
mathematician) who worked with me at Hewlett Packard –
– he retired from HP just after Carly Fiorina became
CEO.
You have heard about various curves:
Gaussian/bell, exponential, power and fractal. There is
another curve which I will call the "Collapse Curve", which
has been around for thousands of years, and continues to
happen to each of us in our daily lives. So it is a good
idea to learn from this, as it will happen to you again.
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Look at the curve first, before reading any further.
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What do you think this represents?
1. Sardine population in Monterey Bay
2. Population of Mayan civilization
3. Number of farmers in New England
4. Bilirubin concentration in newborn baby
5. Systolic blood pressure in patient in emergency room
6. Hematocrit measure of mother during childbirth in
delivery room
7. Main engine Atlas/SAMOS reconnaissance satellite
motors on liftoff from Vandenburg AFB
8. Dollar value of recycled materials
9. Breathing rate of very old person
10. US Treasury T-Bill 3-month percentage rate
11. Solar panel power output in Mars rover
12. Altitude of single-engine plane when pilot has heart
attack
13. Value of your retirement/trust fund
14. Speed of sailboat when mainsail rips
15. Wachovia share value
16. Great scenes from the movie "Casablanca"
17. The life of Don Quixote
18. Kubler-Ross seven stages of grieving
19. Speed of sideswiped car on Highway 237
20. All of the above
The correct answer is #20. The plotted curve is #10
(SEP-DEC 2008).
Many of you have participated in several of these.
A. Everything going fine.
B. Sudden interruption, for whatever reason. Deep decline.
C. Frantic but well-meaning attempts to "fix" the
situation.
This usually results in linear "bang-bang" cycling in a
non-linear system, which of course is proven to be
ineffective (Pontryagin Maximum Principle).
D. Apparent success, getting back to 2/3rds of where we
started.
E. Slow decline.
What to do?
Know that this WILL happen often, so be prepared.
The future will NOT be like the past. There will
be substantial surprises, as what happened to the
Thanksgiving turkey.
(OK, some stuff keeps repeating…religious problems
in the Middle East, rioting in Africa, etc.)
Build your financial and mental flexibility.
Do your homework, so that when one of these cases happens,
you can take advantage of it ("When given a lemon, make
lemonade").
Have some sort of financial backup…not a credit card.
Stock up on supplies that will keep you and your family
going (don’t forget the can opener).
Avoid hospitals and lawyers.
Go sailing.
Close your eyes, breath deeply, play music, keep calm,
carry on.
Keep in touch with family and friends, who support you
through
tough times.
Be prepared for a total failure of high-tech
communications.
2.
Realization of Debt-Created Loss of Money Values
People older than 55 will finally
realize that there is no way out from under the debt in
any way that we are accustomed to using previously. They
will realize as many people in countries which have
undergone several inflation cycles, that the
government–in order to get out of trouble–decreases
the value of money through various mechanisms, which
makes their pensions worth far less. Several things are
likely to occur:
- emergence of unifying
efforts to begin to build the source of generation
warfare, where old interests are pitted against new
interests, where young interests are now juxtaposed
the interests of the growing old.
- Previously retired people in
good health will start returning to the workforce
for part time supplementation of their fixed
incomes.
- Laws will be enacted that
allow people on social security to earn large
amounts of money without endangering their social
security benefits.
3.
China Rises, India Falls
There are several reasons why India will not
become superpower, and China will.
-
China has a monolithic authoritarian
system which responds more efficiently to threats.
-
India has a consensus system that
amalgamates varied numbers of constituents which by the
very virtue of time and complexity, fragment and
differentiate. India will not be able to pull together
under the strain of it’s poor people, huge burden of
poor education and siphoning off of resources by those
who can.
4. Happiness,
and compassion is
reconsidered as Religion returns to main street
This is a theme continued from my 2007
forecast because it is so leveraging to the throws of
mankind. People will take refuge in religion and the idea
that complexity will be managed by the mystical, mysterious
and spirits will fuel the return the religion by large
numbers of people.
-
Religion will re-aggregate the lost
sheep. People will return to religion to belong in
tougher, more uncertain times. If the current crisis
(fall of 2008) is as severe as it appears to be, it will
wipe out the standard of living of most of the middle
class as we know it, returning the middle class back to
the fifties–and a different approach to life.
-
However, there is some evidence to
indicate that striving for greater incomes continues to
drive increased happiness, so the idea that happiness is
directly related to something other than your income,
may be a fallacy. Perhaps religion will replace income
as the determinant of one’s happiness vector?
Gross National Happiness
(GNH) is an attempt to define
quality of life in more holistic and
psychological terms than
Gross National Product.
The term was coined by
Bhutan‘s King
Jigme Singye Wangchuck in
1972 in response to criticism that his economy
was growing poorly. It signaled his commitment to
building an economy that would serve Bhutan’s unique
culture based on
Buddhist spiritual values. Like many moral
goals, it is somewhat easier to state than to
define. Nonetheless, it serves as a unifying vision
for the Five Year planning process and all the
derived planning documents that guide the economic
and development plans of the country.
While conventional development
models stress economic growth as the ultimate
objective, the concept of GNH claims to be based on
the premise that true development of human society
takes place when material and
spiritual development occur side by side to
complement and reinforce each other. The four
pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and
sustainable socio-economic development, preservation
and promotion of cultural values, conservation of
the natural environment, and establishment of good
governance.
Posts that contain
Happiness Index per day for the last 30 days.
|
MAY 29, 2009 |
The Happiest Salary |
|
According to this year’s Harris Poll Happiness
Index,
39% of Americans who earn
between $50,000 and $74,999 a year say they are
happy, making them the happiest of all income
groups. If you take out that middle-income group,
money does improve the probability of happiness.
More people who earn over $75,000 say they are happy
than do those who make less than $50,000. |
|
Source: The Harris Poll |
5. Forget the
dollar
Dollar hits new lows.
6. U.S. slowly
melts down…
I didn’t want to put this one, and they say
if you say something, then it won’t happen, so don’t let me
be the one that stops the party. My fear is that we will
become irrelevant…the day that happens in the world
economy, the U.S. as we know it is in trouble. I have doubts
this will occur in the next 18 months, but if your planning
horizon is not about 5-15 years, this thing will eat your
lunch in the end…therefore put it on your radar now–what
would it be like if the U.S. were a second-tier country
because of it’s debt load–and how would that affect you and
your days beyond your planning horizon?
7. Smart people
will become sovereign.
I left this forecast from 2007 because I
believe it is happening at a faster rate than we can
actually see. If you are not thinking about sovereignty,
then I suggest you consider doing so, and the affects this
will have on you and your business.
How else are you going to offset the nature
of asymmetry in the world and how it affects your standard
of living?
Now here is the big idea:
Most likely banking as we know it is a
commodity business where efficiency reins but due to
cost/benefit ratios and risk, the most difficult way to
grow…in fact, what I see coming, as a part of the long
tail–fractionalization, are people-NGOs coming up with ways
to invest people’s money that is far more rewarding and far
less risky than FDIC, which will at some point in the future
become a moot point, as we will no longer have the debt
production strategies we are using today….
Those NGOs I’m talking about will be
pseudo-financial systems created around planet-wide business
enterprises, whose risk is mitigated similarly to the old
hedge funds, but more prime in nature and not as leveraged
through ether-like derivatives…
I realize this might be too big a leap for
the short term, but the people who invent these things and
provide some form of reasonable risk management are going to
be the banks of the future in my view…
People are getting smarter, they see the
writing on the wall and when the promise of FDIC becomes
tossed on the rocks of the shore, just like pending social
security and all the variety of trust funds in the U.S. that
have nothing in them but government IOUs…people will start
looking for these pseudo business forms as a form of
preserving, or growing wealth.
I say this because it might trigger some
kind of ideas for those who have better KSEs than I in
finance, banking and investment.
8.
Asymmetry Reins
Asymmetry occurs when there are regions of
the world that because of a variety of causes grow, develop
and prosper at different rates than others. Most likely this
is due to the economic freedom
scale.
Contrary to egalitarian needs and views of
the "green" system, the needs to have things socially equal
are subverted by the more leveraging issue of economic
freedom. Therefore what happens, those who are governed by
assumptions of egalitarianism are actually contributing to a
natural asymmetry created in all probable cases, as
genetically guided.
In other words, in nature there is
asymmetry, and the asymmetry is in fact, at equilibrium, but
it is as Prigogine states in his nobel prize winning "Dissipative
System" argument.
When people at certain "values systems"
modify nature, they aggrevate asymmetry in my opinion, which
then distorts reality, you might say, the reality of nature.
As nature distorts, the factors of equilibrium, the
underlying law of egalitarian balance, is distorted, causing
the very thing that the egalitarian needs.
9.
The
Blue Planet
Let me ask you a question. What color do you
turn when you hold your breath too long?
Enough said…?
It
Climate Change Stupid
People in the know finally agree that it’s
not global warming produced by man, but climate change
produces by the nature of things. Once all this occurs, we
can stop worrying about CO2 and start trying to figure out
how to live with climate change, which we KNOW is occurring.
We’re spending so much time and sillyness
arguing over who caused global warming, in our incredible
arrogance, we are failing to evoke the resources necessary
to design our species around climate change.
http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap3-4/sap3-4-brochure.pdf
10.
Fractionalization and differentiation, not integration
What is occurring as the species becomes
technologable (new word<G>), to mate technology and
able–because the costs are going to accelerate downward
(one advantage to the coming depression), people are going
to be enabled to do more of what they want, instead of
choosing from what’s available.
In some ways, this is a saving grace of
modern times, yet it brings about entirely different
constituents in terms of what is possible for new being,
doing, having and becoming. Learn about the long tail
here.
11. Vegetarians
jailed for killing and eating plants!
Most Outrageous
Forecast: Plant’s Rights–Plants have feelings too!
ZURICH — For years, Swiss scientists have
blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples.
But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such
experiments may be to plants?
That’s a question they must now ask. Last
spring, this small Alpine nation began mandating that
geneticists conduct their research without trampling on a
plant’s dignity.
Beat Keller
"Unfortunately, we have to take it
seriously," Beat Keller, a molecular biologist at the
University of Zurich. "It’s one more constraint on doing
genetic research."
Dr. Keller recently sought government
permission to do a field trial of genetically modified wheat
that has been bred to resist a fungus. He first had to
debate the finer points of plant dignity with university
ethicists. Then, in a written application to the government,
he tried to explain why the planned trial wouldn’t "disturb
the vital functions or lifestyle" of the plants. He
eventually got the green light.
The rule, based on a constitutional
amendment, came into being after the Swiss Parliament asked
a panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and
theologians to establish the meaning of flora’s dignity.
…people of Ecuador last month voted for
a new constitution that is the first to recognize ecosystem
rights enforceable in a court of law. Thus, the nation’s
rivers, forests and air are no longer mere property, but
right-bearing entities with "the right to exist, persist
and…regenerate."
More
Best of Luck in 2009. If you haven’t heard
my 2009 Must Have, Must Do Audio, it will be available
January 5, 2009 here. Until then. |