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

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?

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.