Alternet has the article Priceless! Jon Stewart Ridicules the Richest of the Rich for Pretending to be Concerned About Economic Inequality.

Last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart skewered the hypocrisy of a bunch of white rich men getting together to worry about economic inequality — as they enjoyed the luxury of the salons of the Swiss Alps.

Well, if you’re going to put it that way, I suppose there is a little irony if not hypocrisy in the goings on at Davos. Do we really expect the wealthy to go to a McDonalds in Hoboken to discuss this topic?

c|net has the article Facebook pokes holes in Princeton research with parody. The article had a link to the Facebook article  in question, Debunking Princeton.

This trend suggests that Princeton will have only half its current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all, agreeing with the previous graph of scholarly scholarliness. Based on our robust scientific analysis, future generations will only be able to imagine this now-rubble institution that once walked this earth.

Facebook even gives you a chance to peer review the article.  For similar scholarly studies see the previous blog post by RichardH Diversion–Highway Fatalities and Lemons.

One of the comments on the Facebook article shows that the rate of murder declines with declining use of Internet Explorer.

Naked Capitalism has the article How Bitcoin Plays Into the Hands of Central Bankers and Will Facilitate the Use of Negative Interest Rates.  This is an interesting view wehn compared to my previous post about Why Bitcoin Matters .  The thought that central banks could use the same techniques as Bitcoin had occurred to me. You can read the article to see why this makes sense.

Oh, and why would Bitcoin, um, central bank digital currency make it viable to implement negative interest rates? Kaminska tells us:

…the greater the negative interest rate, the greater the incentive to hold alternative coins. The greater the incentive to hold alternative coins ,the greater the incentive to produce them. The greater the incentive to produce them, the greater the chances of oversupply and collapse. The more sizeable the collapse, the more desirable the managed official e-money system ultimately becomes in comparison.

Either way, the key point with official e-money is that the hoarding incentives which would be generated by a negative interest rate policy can in this way be directed to private asset markets (which are not state guaranteed, and thus not safe for investors) rather than to state-guaranteed banknotes, which are guaranteed and preferable to anything negative yielding or risky (in a way that undermines the stimulative effects of negative interest rate policy).

So all these tales by Silicon Valley promoters (and remember, Marc Andressen mentioned all the money chasing Bitcoin-related ventures) of how liberating and democratic Bitcoin will be are almost certain to prove to be precisely the reverse. Hang onto your real world wallet.

I read and reread the excerpt above.  For the life of me, I cannot make any sense of what this says about negative interest rates. I don’t get the hoarding.  I don’t get the oversupply and collapse.  I don’t get why this is good or even bad for the central banks, nor why this facilitates their implementing negative interest rates.  Other than that, I fully understand 🙁

Market Watch has the article How to retire early — 35 years early.

For many Americans, the idea of an early retirement is pure fantasy — many surveys suggest that a good portion of us are convinced we’ll never be able to retire at all. But what if retirement saving isn’t quite as insurmountable an obstacle as you think?

I am not going to give away the secret in the article.  You’ll have to read it yourself.  However, here is a hint.  Follow this prescription to drive the wealthy 1% nuts and tank the economy at the same time.

The New York Times has the article Why Bitcoin Matters by Marc Andreessen.  It is hard to pick just one of the reasons to quote here from all the reasons that Andreessen makes clear in his article.  Here is one that I thought might get your interest.

In addition, merchants are highly attracted to Bitcoin because it eliminates the risk of credit card fraud. This is the form of fraud that motivates so many criminals to put so much work into stealing personal customer information and credit card numbers.

You have to read the article for many more reasons why Bitcoin matters.  One that particularly interests me because I have talked about it on this blog a number of times is:

A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. Micropayments have never been feasible, despite 20 years of attempts, because it is not cost effective to run small payments (think $1 and below, down to pennies or fractions of a penny) through the existing credit/debit and banking systems. The fee structure of those systems makes that nonviable.

My first discussion of micropayments was in my proposal in the post Monetizing Internet Content.  I then tried another post to get alternative news media to consider micropayments instead of begging for subscriptions in Alternative News, Please Stop Your Pathetic Begging.

Bitcoin can be a major component in my proposed solution for monetizing internet content.  The “Publisher’s Clearing House”, “Google”, “Amazon”, or “PayPal” type of company could create a business using Bitcoin internally to offer the service to small operations trying to monetize their internet content.  With Bitcoin, a small startup could make a business providing this service before the big guys even figure it out.  For all I know Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm may already be funding such a startup, since he already mentions this use in his article.

For all you people who are having trouble getting your mind around fiat money, Bitcoin ought to boggle your mind.  Marc Andreessen’s article make take a little of the boggle out.

Other previous posts that have touched on Bitcoin are The Behavioral Economics of Bitcoin and The One Crucial Detail That Could Sink Legal Pot in Colorado.

This Andreessen article may dispel a myth that might have come to mind in the legal pot article.  That is that Bitcoin makes these transactions anonymous and untraceable.  In that one way, it makes Bitcoin unlike a $20 bill.  Oh by the way, the traceability also does not make it like a credit card transaction either.

Thanks to Cedric Flower for posting a link to this article on his Facebook page.

The Daily Kos has the article What Happens when Poor People get Cash? An Empirical Study.  The bottom line is:

So applying money to the problem of native poverty DOES work as far as native children are concerned.

There is much detail in the article about what exactly happened and why that is important to read beyond the conclusion quoted above.

I find the segment below a little silly and distracting.

about half the casino profits went to infrastructure and social services, including free addiction counseling and improved health care. Ann Bullock, a doctor and medical consultant to the Cherokee tribal government, argues that these factors together — which she calls the exercising of “collective efficacy” — also may have contributed to the improved outcomes. She describes a “sea change” in the collective mood when the tribe began to fund its own projects. A group that was historically disenfranchised began making decisions about its own fate.

Professors Costello and Akee continue to think that cash made the difference,

Why can’t it be just as good that trying two solutions to a problem has better results than one solution? It may be of academic (and some practical) benefit to know which change had the most impact. For the lives of the people involved it would have been an immoral exercise to try to find out if the people could have done nearly as well with less help.

The Real News Network has the interview Ownership of WaPo by CIA Contractor Puts U.S. Journalism in Dangerous Terrain.

The mythology is that that doesn’t matter, because who owns a newspaper doesn’t affect the atmosphere or policies or reporting that come out of the newsroom. But in the real world, this is a new structural relationship that, unlike in the past, is not only built on personal relations or ideological connections or some stray business affinities; this is a direct conflict of interest, where the owner of what some believe is the most powerful political media outlet in the country is not only gaining more wealth from a big contract with the CIA, but is also eager to gain even more business from the CIA, because Amazon has said, hey, the $600 million from the agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, is just a start. We look forward to, Amazon says, in its words, “a successful relationship with the CIA.”

So this is, I think, at the crossroads of a contradiction between an ostensibly free press and a corporate-digital-governmental tacit alliance that is about using digital power to keep some data secret and to extend the surveillance state, to gather data and to use it, among other things, in the service of ongoing warfare across much of the planet.

The video references an article on Truth Out Why the Washington Post’s New Ties to the CIA Are So Ominous.

Should we be afraid, very afraid? Or should we just think “So what else is new?”

Occasional reader WayneP sent me links to two articles related to the same reports on income inequality.

The Los Angeles Times has the article Income inequality is not a concern of Wall Street’s money addicts.

The richest 1% of Earth’s citizens own 46% of global wealth. That news comes to us from the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Even more dramatic is this statistic: The planet’s 85 wealthiest people have wealth equal to that held by the poorest half of all humans.

Restated with all the zeros on display, that is a ratio of 85 to 3,500,000,000.

The second one is The Sun Daily article World’s rich threaten democracy says Oxfam in pre-Davos report.

The World Economic Forum, which organises the Davos talkfest, warned last week that the growing gulf between the rich and the poor represents the biggest global risk in 2014.

Income inequality is not a concern of Wall Street’s money addicts

I address one of the ways to tackle this problem in my previous post Adapting Society To The Age Of Robots .

New Economic Perspectives has the William Black article Deflation: The Failed Macroeconomic Paradigm Plumbs New Depths of Self-Parody.

As crazed and destructive as the quacksterians are, the “wait for it” deflationauts bring a degree of nuttiness to the economic ER that causes one to be stunned and horrified.  For the deflationaut economists to figure out (finally!) that deflation is deadly they have to understand something about inadequate demand.  The WSJ article shows that their rationale for warning (but not acting!) against “the threat of deflation” is based on the effect of deflation on demand.

“[D]eflation can be difficult to escape because households and firms postpone purchases in the hope that goods and services will be cheaper in the future, thereby further weakening demand and pushing prices down.”

Note that this passage implicitly admits that “weak demand” “push[es] prices down.” Inadequate demand, therefore, is what causes deflation.

Don’t you wish William Black wouldn’t mince words, but would tell you what he really thinks about the quacksterians? 🙂

It is amazing how people can claim that Keynesian economics is complete bullshit while using Keynesian economic principles to explain what is going on in the economy. Makes one wonder how their minds work, if they work at all.

Forbes Magazine has the article 7 Crippling Parenting Behaviors That Keep Children From Growing Into Leaders by Kathy Caprino.

While I spend my professional time now as a career success coach, writer, and leadership trainer, I was a marriage and family therapist in my past, and worked for several years with couples, families, and children. Through that experience, I witnessed a very wide array of both functional and dysfunctional parenting behaviors. As a parent myself, I’ve learned that all the wisdom and love in the world doesn’t necessarily protect you from parenting in ways that hold your children back from thriving, gaining independence and becoming the leaders they have the potential to be.

Are these the 7 things that I did to my daughter, and now I can try to do just as badly with my grand-daughter?  Well, at least I know that my daughter survived and so will my grand-daughter.  Maybe my daughter and son-in-law are correcting for all the wrong things I did.

I am surprised a Forbes magazine article didn’t suggest you teach your kids that if you can provide for all their material wants, other kids should expect that their parents  can do the same for them.  If their parents can’t, then it is their fault for their selection of parents.  They shouldn’t expect to be able to take from the kids that had better parent selection skills.