Fred’s Cozy Little Nook

From article: Can the Auto Industry Retool itself to build rails?

1. Today is not anything like the economic system that existed during the last Great Depression. Completely different world. It is almost unhelpful to draw too many parallels between then and now.
2. Today’s economic system is much more global than it was back then.
3. Chaos Theory and Complex System Dynamics needs to be applied to the global picture we have today. For any number of reasons. And I have yet to hear any economist speaking of today’s world in such terms.
4. The principle of Self-Organized Criticality is definitely apropos here. The market organized itself to a critical state, where nearly any shout in the mountains from anyone would bring the whole thing down.
5. I have my own variation of this principle — let’s call it the Evolutionary Humpty-Dumpty Principle. A Complex Dynamical System (CDS), if of the right character, has a tendency to organize itself to a critical state such that your typical control points will simply fail to function. The Feds always attempt to control the market through interest rates and the supply of money; other major governments around the world employ similar controls, and others as well. The details, after a fashion, are not all that important so much as the fact that the market will “build up a tolerance” for such artificial control artifices. Hell, our own bodies do it with drugs constantly taken all the time. Why not the global market?
6. There are many aspects of this economic system that is predicated on the fallacy of “infinite resources, infinite growth”. Yet any 7-year-old can tell you that the system is NOT infinite. So what do we have? Many free-running Ponzi schemes, like Social Security and the Stock Market. Yes, boys and girls, those gaining money out of those systems do so at the expense of others.

When you wrap your mind around all of this — and more — you will begin to understand how truly frelled we really are. Where you should focus your view is not on what the “talking heads” babble to you every day, but on the flow of money and the structure of the system, noting where assumptions are made without basis. Noting the points where the lack of transparency exists. Noting all the zero-sum instruments in finance that is billed as something other than what it really is. Noting that when governments print money, the actual value of the overall picture has a tendency to stay constant. Printing money is a panic reaction to a situation that our leaders have no understanding of. Printing money will only buy a short-term advantage, with a much bigger drop later.

Look for the lie in anything you hear over the major media outlets with regards to the market. They are most likely not telling you the truth so much as they are trying to influence and manage your behavioral dynamics in hopes they can stitch Humpty back together again.

Take what I state here with a grain of salt if you wish. Or do your own research and come up with the same conclusions that I have. And doing the research will not be easy because many of the players in the financial world actually believe the lies they spout on a daily basis. You must reach behind them to see the circuit boards for yourself, and follow the actual layout, not what they tell you what it is.

And most of all, embrace complexity, because the world is far from simple!

It occurred to me this morning that Memes have the greatest successes for existence if they can do two things:

1. Program for their own retransmission (Thought Contagions, Lynchian Memetics)
2. Quell or Obliterate competing memes.

The two above are not new ideas to the field of memetics. However, what interest me is how memetic evolution can influence genetic evolution. That is to say, how can memes direct the biological evolution of their hosts? Those meme sets that can accomplish the above 2 and also improve on the biological reproductive rates of their hosts whilst at the same time leveraging parthenogeneic transmission, will be especially virulent over time and become solidly entrenched.

Such successful meme sets are usually referred to as “culture”.

A principle for memetic success I will put forward is that it also induces “clumping activity” in its hosts. Normally, we refer to this as “clans”, “city-states”, and “countries”. We also refer to this as “race”, “ethnic identity”, “feminism”, etc.

Indeed, any of the “isms” can be construed as a set of memes that strongly induce clumping behavior among its hosts.