 |
| |
| As 2013 emerges from the
ingredients mixed together in 2012 and before, 2014
brings a tipping point in money and mankind. |
|
View
| Rear View Mirror through the New York Times
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|
Noise Increases; Signals
Harder to Find
Overall, noise in all systems is accelerating.
It’s going to be more and more important to be able to
detect signals in larger, more dense, and at higher levels
of frequency than ever before. Something like
Antifragility–benefiting from disorder–which is
different than Resilience is going to be more and more
important as discontinuous change emerges.
| "The point we will be making here is that
logically, neither trial and error nor "chance"
and serendipity can be behind the gains in
technology and empirical science attributed to
them. By definition chance cannot lead to long
term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial
and error cannot be unconditionally
effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings
to collapse, and knowledge to regress." – Nassem
Taleb in
understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility
|
Transduction of Energy:
From Fossil Fuels to Experience, Knowledge and Wisdom?
Breakthroughs are going to be the wildcard and they will
happen at an accelerating rate, and exponential rate which
is currently the rate at which scale is translating fossil
fuel energy into knowledgeability.
| “ . . . the idea of the future being different
from the present is so repugnant to our
conventional modes of thought and behavior that
we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting
on it in practice.” – John Maynard Keynes, 1937 |
Bio-Tech Revolution:
Article
Phytochemicals, as you may know, are chemical compounds
that occur naturally in plants. Nutraceuticals are plant-
or animal-derived products. Both, however, are meant to
provide health benefits.
| Natural gas and oil will
create a new industrial boom in the US as foreign
firms move operations to the US to insure secure
and cheap sources for their energy needs. Europe
will lose over 5 million jobs to the US due to
energy costs. Foreign firms will move to take
advantage of the refusal of american firms to
adjust to the strategic advantages of the US
infrastructure." – Roaring Teens |
Changing Food Consumption Habits:
Food,
Inc | The Skinny
on Obesity
"THE collapsing economy is affecting the how, what and where of
consumer food purchasing trends. For most Americans, the ideal meal is fast, cheap, and
tasty. Food, Inc. examines the costs of putting
value and convenience over nutrition and environmental
impact."
|
Retailers will reintroduce manufacturing in
the USA, especially clothing firms looking to
tighten the fashion cycle by sourcing close to
their operations and taking advantage of the
capacity of the US Transportation system to
deliver finished goods to coastal shipping
facilities, reintroducing the strategic advantage
of being able to deliver goods to all major global
markets from the USA within two weeks." – Roaring
Teens |
Off-Peopling Accelerates:
Blog |
Robots-will-take-our-jobs? |
Hyper-Human Warning
"Off-Peopling" means the way
automation makes people jobless. Unlike outsourcing, where
jobs are moved from high – wage earners to low – wage
earners, jobs in an off-peopling scenario are moved from
people to machines. Traditionally, work involving physical
hazard, boredom and laborious jobs are the ones to be
off-peopled. Robots, for example, don’t get bored and
don’t even complain and can be easily programmed, and can
work non-stop if necessary. This is applicable not just
for unskilled manpower or blue-collar jobs but even
affecting the skilled workforce.
| Figuring out how to manage and apply all
of the information is an enormous challenge, a
challenge made even more complex by biochemical
individuality: the fact that each of us is unique.
In both preventive medicine and traditional
"curative" medicine, what works well for most
people may have adverse effects on any given
individual. Hopefully, the new science of human
genomics will help us to sort this out, and this
process of individualized medicine is beginning
already. – Life Extension |
Big Data:
Good Article
"Data have swept into every industry and business function
and are now an important factor of production, alongside
labor and capital…Leaders in every sector will have to
grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few
data-oriented managers."
| Progress in medicine is expanding so
rapidly that the doubling time for medical
knowledge is now about four years (although there
no means of really measuring a moving target like
expanding knowledge with any degree of accuracy).
That means that during the next four years, we
will learn as much about medicine as was
discovered from the beginning of human existence
until now. |
Life Extension, Genomincs and Individualized
Medicine:
Life
Extension Manual |
Audio
In 2014, the realization that life extension is not a
myth, but a practical process that will be available as a
part of a process of individual biochemical design.
Traditional one-size-fits-all medicine is rapidly
becoming obsolete, and it will soon come to be generally
regarded as dangerous…the 21st century promises to be the
century of biology and medicine.
| "If we can recognize that change and
uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the
future and the transformation we are undergoing
with the understanding that we do not know enough
to be pessimistic." – Hazel Henderson,
futurist and evolutionary economist. |
Non-Traditional Investment
Due to disruptions in the normal business cycle,
typical investment will not find many takers, so
alternative forms of investing will become the norm, or
what will be entrepreneurial-driven investment, rather
than traditional long-term buy and hold types of
investment. Instead investments in cost-cutting systems, big data and
efficiency creating systems, are likely to become the new
production.
| In the nine short years since Mark
Zuckerberg launched Facebook, social media has
evolved from dorm room toy to boardroom tool. Last
year, 73% of Fortune 500 companies were active on
Twitter, while more than 80% of executives
believed social media engagement led to increased
sales. So what does 2013 hold for social media in
the workplace? It looks like many of the big (and
sometimes overhyped) promises that have surrounded
social media – better insight into customer
behavior, improved office productivity with
internal networks and, of course, significant,
measurable ROI – will finally begin to bear
fruit." – Forbes |
Social Media Will Change Work: |
Mckinsey.com |
Forbes – December 11, 2012
A recent report from McKinsey showed that a
majority of the estimated $1.3 trillion in untapped value
from social technologies lies in “improved communications
and collaboration within and across enterprises.” In other
words, social media is poised to become an office
productivity tool, much the same way that email did in the
late 1990s.
| "The dramatic and accelerating evolution
of technology is, however, quickly turning the
prospects of investing in a historically great
business into something more akin to sleeping on
top of a ticking time bomb. You don’t know when
it’s going to go off, but sooner or later, it
will. Owners of these businesses are
underestimating the probability that the move
toward commercial-free, commercial-skipping, and
commercial-light alternatives will cause cash flow
to plummet instead of grow." – Gary Brode |
Collapse of Newspapers, Music…NOW–> TV
|
another-pillar-of-mass-media-collapses |
wsj.com
| "Eight in 10 American investors have an
emergency fund they can use in case they are
suddenly without income, according to a Wells
Fargo-Gallup Investor survey. But about half of
those with a fund say it will last six months or
less. The survey is conducted quarterly with
Americans who have $10,000 or more of investable
assets. Roughly 40% of American adults meet this
definition." – Gallup |
Beware Absence of Buffers:
gallup poll | follow the returns…
One difficult lesson of the financial crisis is that
when property values are plunging and jobs are
disappearing, credit tends to dry up. That is, credit
lines make a lousy source of emergency funds since they
tend to disappear when most needed. Given that
unemployment in the U.S. remains above 8% and
underemployment is at about twice that level, and many
more Americans are worried about losing their jobs, it is
not surprising that investors who can do so are building
real emergency funds — cash or cash equivalents — just
in case the economy suddenly worsens.
| "In one sense, a stronger and more
liquid investor balance sheet is good for the
economy. Stronger balance sheets make consumers
more credit-worthy over time and provide a
substantial financial base for the overall
economy. On the other hand, building emergency
funds means less investor spending in the
immediate term — something that is not good for
consumer spending overall or for short-term
economic growth. Regardless, the good news is that
when investors do feel confident enough to start
spending more aggressively — perhaps after the
election and after the fiscal cliff issues are
resolved — there is the potential for rapid
economic growth." |
Decreasing Aggregate Demand:
Consumer Index
|
Post Keynes
Forecasting demand is a difficult thing, however it is
clear that aggregate demand is decreasing and that
negative demand still poses the greatest danger to the
now, near, and far futures. In a growth-driven system,
demand is a primary driver of price, supply, profitability
and more important cash flow. Negative demand means
negative cash flow in almost all cases, meaning that
cost-cutting is in the cards in many forms. The new
healthcare law, as an example, will precipitate further cost-cutting
through limiting hours, pushing the burden for healthcare
into direct and indirect taxation–again moving private
costs and debts to the public in the process.
| Bloomberg reported last Friday, "average
incomes for individuals ages 25-34 have fallen 8%,
double the adult population’s total drop, since
the recession began in December 2007. Their
unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1
percentage point above the national figure."
[Be careful what the increase in housing
prices actually means!] |
Retirement Scramble:
State of Retirement
|
SafeSecureRetirement.pdf
2014 signals an inflection point, where an acceleration of
retirement will begin to occur and people have not put
enough away for their retirement. Retirement Ages will be
extended by Social Security, while businesses will work in
the reverse, choosing to move older people out because of
lack of skills, and off-peopling.
| "Privately-run, individually-directed
voluntary accounts supported by tax deductions do
not work. Expensive to maintain, these are subject
to financial risks and leakages, and provide
meager incentives to save at a huge loss to the
taxpayer. In the end, 401(k) plans make it
difficult for America’s working and middle-class
families to save enough for a safe and secure
retirement." – A Safe and Secure Retirement for
All Americans |
March of Islam: |
Sharia
Islam influences continue to make their way into more and
more governments at higher and higher levels, validating
that progressivity is not going to be the only solution to
complexity.
CAIRO (Reuters) – Egyptian voters
overwhelmingly approved a constitution drafted
by President Mohamed Mursi’s allies, results
announced on Tuesday showed, proving that
liberals, leftists and Christians have been
powerless to halt the march of Islamists in
power. Final elections commission figures
showed the constitution adopted with 63.8
percent of the vote in the referendum held
over two days this month, giving Mursi’s
Islamists their third straight electoral
victory since veteran autocrat Hosni Mubarak
was toppled in a 2011 revolution. …
|
@2030:
Bloomberg
Analysis
|
Global Trends 2030
|
World Transition
New technologies, dwindling resources and explosive
population growth in the next 18 years will alter the
global balance of power and trigger radical economic and
political changes at a speed unprecedented in modern
history, says a new report by the U.S. intelligence
community. The 140-page report recently released by the
National Intelligence Council lays out dangers and
opportunities for nations, economies, investors, political
systems and leaders due to four “megatrends” that
government intelligence analysts say are transforming the
world.
Those major trends are the end of U.S.
global dominance, the rising power of
individuals against states, a rising
middle class whose demands challenge governments,
and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy
shortages.
Good news from Germany: A ‘global transformation of
values has already begun’. It’s proving tough to leverage
changing attitudes into sustainable behaviour — but a
transition to a more sustainable society ‘would be
welcomed by a significant part of world society’.
In a 400-page report called World
in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability,
the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WGBU), the
heavyweight scientific body that advises the German
Federal Government on ‘Earth System Megatrends’, reviewed
a wide-range of values surveys. A significant majority of
the German population, it found, views growth and
capitalism with scepticism and ‘does not believe in the
resilience of market-driven economic systems’.
This post-materialist thinking is not limited to the
well?-off and educated. In South Korea, Mexico, Brazil,
India, and China, the report also found, a significant
majority supports ambitious climate protection measures,
and ‘would welcome a new economic system’ to achieve that.
A key barrier to change is that value systems are
often ‘abstract concepts perceived as an hypothetical area
of life’. Other obstacles include a lack of long-term
orientation in policy; loss aversion; path dependencies;
distorted fiscal incentives; the ‘lock-in effect’ of
existing systems; plus laws and institutional inertia.
Seeking inspiration, the report examines how great
transformations happened in the past: the abolition of
slavery; the green revolution in agriculture; the spread
of the internet.
A key conclusion here is that ‘individual actors and
change agents play a far larger role as drivers of
transformation’ than they’ve been given credit for in the
past.
| “Just
found (Dec 09) CIA cooling report: "The
western world’s leadlng climatologists have
confirmed reports of a detrimental global climatic
change [cooling]. The stability of most nations is
based upon a dependable source of food, but this
stability will not be possible under the new
cllmatic era. A forecast by the University of
Wisconsin projects that the Earth’s climate is
returning to that of the neo?boreal era
(1600-1850) – an era of drought, famine, and
political unrest in the western world." (1974)” |
Climate Change: Cool/Warm? |
Cool |
EPA
(Disappointing:( |
Actions To Take
|
Carbon Cycle
Warming, Cooling, Myth or Magic, it’s won’t make a
difference, we won’t make it anyway, hehe!
|
"In a contrarian view of the economy, not
only is there no real danger at the core of
the american enterprise, it is about to embark
on a growth curve that has not been seen since
the days of JP Morgan pulling money from
around the globe to grow US GDP over 8 percent
per year, 100 years ago." –
Roaring Teens |
Roaring Teens! |
OMG |
Outlook 2013? |
World3
Natural gas and oil will create a new industrial boom in the US as foreign
firms move operations to the US to insure secure and
cheap sources for their energy needs.
Europe will
lose over 5 million jobs to the US due to energy
costs. Foreign firms will move to take advantage of
the refusal of american firms to adjust to the
strategic advantages of the US infrastructure.
Retailers will reintroduce
manufacturing in the USA, especially clothing firms
looking to tighten the fashion cycle by sourcing close
to their operations and taking advantage of the
capacity of the US Transportation system to deliver
finished goods to coastal oshipping facilities,
reintroducing the strategic advantage of being able to
deliver goods to all major global markets from the USA
within two weeks.
Regionally, stock markets will come
back to life and expose smaller enterprises to a high
risk angel investors type market which will invigorate
growth funding in the USA.
Finally, Florida will become the
start up capital of the world as retired parties bring
their Human Capital to the table and become the
creative springboard for exponential growth as the
average working age of the retired on their third wind
expand well into the mid 80’s.
| "In total, chemical-related
companies have announced $45 billion in
projects over the next several years (most of
which will be in Texas and Louisiana). Warren
Buffett’s Union Tank Car – which leases
railcars – is currently operating at full
capacity. And railcar manufacturer and lessor
American Railcar Industries, controlled by
billionaire investor Carl Icahn, has a backlog
through 2014. Trinity Industries, the biggest
railcar producer, is converting wind-tower
factories to meet the growing demand for
railcars." – Stansberry Research |
What is 200 times
stronger than steel?
And now you know the rest of the story…hehe
The antidote?
Antifragility? |
Read a
Review &
Prologue
"Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes
fire.
Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want
to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the
fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this
author’s non-meek attitude to randomness and
uncertainty. We just don’t want to just survive
uncertainty, just about make it.
We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition –like
a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics —have the
last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even
dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and
the inexplicable.
How?"
Join Mike Jay, for a program of Resilience @F-L-O-W:
"Designing Antifragility!" in 2013
Click here
to register
Hi,
Grabbed the (context) piece below from Stansberry
Research Digest,
as it sums up a lot of the meta-models of energy as a
game changer…
look, it’s only a matter of time, before we
figure out a way to put back into the earth, what we
are taking out, with similar gaseous properties and
viscosity, that is my bet…
if the government wanted to create a market to get
this done faster, instead of taxing people, they would
create a new industry that pays for putting CO2 back
where natural gas is coming out of and waste products
deep within the earth to sequester them where we are
extracting fossil fuel. I’m not saying it would be
easy or simple, but think about it, what if someone
could get paid, with the same funny money they are
giving banks to lend out, to do something
productive…?
It’s just an idea, but there is a sea change occurring
as a result of energy dynamics…
Manufacturing will rebound in the USA, Energy will
continue to evolve the way we are investing in energy
and the real economy and jobs are going to be the
result–what’s more–jobs that people can do….
SOON, we will add Robotic-Aided Output to our
definitions of work, where a person and a robot will
do some form of larger, more complex work, where the
human and the robot will work together to "aid’ each
other in the process of using our current human
resources, while we convert fossil fuel energy into
innovation and new work.
It’s just a matter of time…a short time, where we
see all these effects, and I believe we ride the next
wave up as a result!
ROARING TEENS, are you ready?
I predict China will have a new manufacturing
competitor, and it will be ROO–robot-aided output, an
entirely new field of work, as it is now in infancy,
as ALL of us are robot-aided, we just have dumb
robots, soon, we will introduce robotic agents and
mechanisms that can shoulder some of the
serial-computing we lack as parallel-processing
humans. China can’t do what we can do with robots,
they have created a HUGE SOCIAL Nightmare, soon to
play in a theatre near them…they MUST have
low-paying jobs, and can’t OFF-People their society as
we can and will, and are doing now…and with energy
shifting everything, we now have enough CHEAP power to
push out the demand-curve and create new production
(and consumption) paving a way for the "jetson"
lifestyle which will typify the epitome
@BS…consumers–>u ain’t seen nuttin’ yet!
CHINA will become more important for it’s ability to
affect rare earths, which a robotic society needs,
than it will it’s ability to make cheap toasters,
SOON!
NOW, a work of caution, or the proverbial cold
shower…all we are doing is pushing our already
limited growth scenarios along the peak line–delaying
Seneca’s curve a little longer–so while we are going
to get a window, both individually and collectively,
what is on the other side is not going away, but
becoming sharper, and this curve is still this curve,
and until through some form, we leap the curve, we are
stuck with the ride, fyi.
How we understand this and what is going to
occur as we face this paradigmatic shift–one way or
the other–is going to be key in this decade of the
ROARING TEENS.
Most of you understood why I wanted Obama to
"cheerlead us through he malaise" we are/were facing
(asymmetrical, some will face each, I’m not sure
where most will be yet, time will tell soon)…but
think about this…
If you have what is basically a cheerleading, led by a
large cheerleading squad (media), then anything worth
cheering about, gets cheered about…it’s the nature
of the thing…so if the malaise (at least in the USA,
Europe is in big doodoo because they have no energy
miracle and THEY are going to hear that great "sucking
sound" as jobs fly out of there like no person’s
business)…if the malaise is gone, then what do the
cheerleaders have to cheer about?
Yep, they will cheer about anything, and make what is
happening into the ROARING TEENS!
Because that is what cheerleaders do–>cheer.
I don’t have a corollary of the mid-twenties
as my history is light to see if there were
cheerleading then as well, but surely what you see is
a fortuitous (for some) concurrence of events, the
democrats come out smelling like a rose…and the home
team will win, producing a set of dynamics where we’ll
see a third democratic term possibly by Michelle
Obama, no less…and certainly Biden, heaven
forbid…to keep the ROARING TEENS ROARING….
I have mixed emotions about all of this, and of course
we should as nothing has changed, only the fact that
we have delayed the inevitable with a lot of fanfare
and of course, space-time, that may/will help us as
technology is growing exponentially, so problems we
once had, we might not have…we can eliminate
them<–my favorite.
I can promise you this, the next few months are going
to be interesting–both politically, technologically
and economically…but with FAR more flair than we
were expecting just a year ago!
REPUBLICANS LOSE THE HOUSE IN 2014!
OBAMA elected in 2016?
Inflation becomes an issue, the USA Budget is
Balanced in 2016!
 One
industry is finding yet another use for cheap
natural gas…
According to the trade publication Oil & Gas
Journal, oil and gas producer Apache (with
the help of oil services firms Halliburton and
Schlumberger and equipment maker Caterpillar) is
working to convert its drilling equipment to run
on natural gas instead of diesel. And the cost
savings would be huge…
In 2012, the industry will have used more than 700
million gallons of diesel through the tools needed
to perform hydraulic fracturing. ("Fracking" is a
key technique in extracting oil and gas from shale
formations.) That’s $2.38 billion, using recent
average prices of $3.40 per gallon.
Converting these operations to natural gas would
reduce fuel costs by 70%, according to Apache
Executive Vice President of Technology Mike
Bahorich.
Consider
these numbers from Apache… One of its "frack jobs"
in the Granite Wash at the Stiles Ranch field in
Texas typically uses 36,290 gallons of diesel to
complete the job. Using an average price of $3.40
per gallon, the total fuel cost for one job would
be $123,386. At current natural gas prices, the
cost drops to $74,473. And Apache has up to 12
frack jobs running at one time.
"This is a real trend, and it’s happening
now. We’re witnessing a sea change in the industry
that will have a great impact not only on how much
less oil is imported but also will help keep our
air clean," Bahorich said. "By using field gas,
the U.S. would import 17 million fewer barrels of
oil each year to make the diesel to fuel these
fracs."
We
discussed how low natural gas prices are also
attracting manufacturing and chemical companies
back to the U.S. And the trend is only
strengthening.
The cost
savings are so significant, even Wal-Mart is
switching back to "Made in America." On Tuesday,
the country’s largest retailer told suppliers it
would add $50 billion of American-made products to
its shelves over the next 10 years.
In the last fiscal year, Wal-Mart spent $335
billion on buying and transporting products
globally… So the $5 billion a year is only 1.5%.
But other retailers will follow suit.
And the job creation that results in the U.S. will
only feed Wal-Mart’s customer base.
William Simon, Wal-Mart’s U.S. CEO, told the
audience at the National Retail Federation
convention in New York this week, "A few
manufacturers have even told Wal-Mart privately
that they have defined the ‘tipping point’ at
which manufacturing abroad will no longer make
sense for them.
|
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