RT has the Keiser Report episode Give us this day, our daily billions (E1461)

Max and Stacy discuss the crybabies on Wall Street begging for billions and living in constant fear while the rest of the economy continues to live and thrive in the real world without non-stop free money.

Max just hates the USA dollar because it is backed by nothing, but he loves crypto-currency because it is backed by —— real nothing. I have yet to understand why crypto-currency nothing is better than USA dollar nothing. Built into the mathematics of bit-coin is a limit on how much can be produced. This all came into being from someone’s imagination. I suppose that when we run out of new bit-coin nobody will be able to imagine what comes next. If you know the history of computers it might be byte-coin which is 8 times as powerful as bit-coin. Maybe it will be quantum-coin.

As a devotee of Modern Money Theory (MMT), it sometimes bothers me how much ignoring of reality can come from the people who claim to be just explaining reality.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has the article Gilts and Bonds. In their Facebook intro to this article, they write the following:

The only place that net financial assets or financial wealth can come from is the government. The currency-issuing government, via its own central bank, uses its taxing and spending powers to create and destroy (spend and tax) net financial assets into and out of the non-government sector.

My response to that comment is

How about the trillions and trillions of dollars of notional money that disappeared when the real estate derivative market crashed? Notional money may not be real, but it has a giant impact on the economy.

Investopedia has an article Notional Value that explains this concept of notional value.

YouTube has the video Stephanie Kelton: The Public Purse.

As part of the lecture series between UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and the British Library, Stephanie Kelton speaks on why a government budget should not be looked at in the same way as a household budget

Stephanie Kelton always does such a good job of explaining this. Elect Bernie Sanders, and you may find Stephanie Kelton explaining more of the way the world really works than she has managed so far.

I have now seen the whole video, and it is even better than I had hoped for. She got a range of questions and she gave answers on topics that I had not heard her speak about before. She talked about the job guarantee verses universal basic income. She talked about the need to change the political reality from the bottom up. A whole range of good stuff.

Democracy Now! has the discussion One Million Take to Streets of Chile in the “Largest Mobilization Since the End of Dictatorship”

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera has announced a major cabinet shuffle after more than one million people flooded the streets Friday in massive peaceful demonstrations over inequality, high cost of living and privatization. The protest drew more than 5% of Chile’s population and followed days of widespread civil unrest that sparked a violent police and military crackdown across the country. At least 18 people have been killed and hundreds more have been shot and wounded since protests erupted Oct. 19. The protests in Chile began in response to a subway fare hike and have grown into a mass uprising against the government. We speak with Professor Macarena Gómez-Barris, founder and director of the Global South Center and chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute, and Alondra Carrillo Vidal, a spokesperson for Chile’s largest feminist advocacy group, Coordinadora Feminista 8M

The second part of the discussion is in the article A Fight Against Neoliberalism: Over A Million Chileans Protest Amid Violent Crackdown.

What is going on in Chile is an example of what can happen in the bottom up revolution that Bernie Sanders talks about. These changes won’t be instigated from the top down in Chile nor in the USA. However, 5% of the population can move a country. In the USA that would be more than 17 Million people. We have a long way to go from the 1 million donors that Bernie already has.

I have posted episodes of the Keiser Report before. Usually I can give you an estimate of what fraction is bs and what fraction is real. With this one, I have no idea. It could all be real or it could all be bs. As the experts in investing are wont to say “Do tour own due diligence” in checking this episode out.

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss the ‘not-com’ bubble (as dubbed by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic). As VCs lose their shirts on their money-burning unicorns, it is the retail investor showing much more sobriety and refusing to get swept up by the ‘acute fever’ in private markets. In the second half, Max continues his conversation with Dmitry Orlov of Club Orlov about his views on the protests erupting around the world and his thoughts on central banks engineering negative interest rates and what it means for the future of the global economy.

I post this on my blog so that when I lose all my invested money I can tell myself that I told myself this would happen. I am sure I will feel much better.

Ars Technica has the article Here’s what the people who claimed Google’s quantum supremacy have to say about it. I have been reading various headlnes about this, but here is the first article I have actually read.

Google’s argument for quantum supremacy focused on the claim that a simulation of its processor’s behavior would take 10,000 years on a state-of-the-art supercomputer. But IBM noted that Google’s argument was based in part on memory starvation, and supercomputers have hard disks that can hold temporary data during the computations. If that disk space is factored in, IBM argues, the calculation could take as little as 2.5 days. At a couple of minutes, the quantum processor beats that handily, but there’s still the chance that algorithm optimizations will cut the margin considerably.

I choose this excerpt, not to denigrate Google’s achievement, but to put some perspective on it for people not versed in computers.

In my day, the hot topic was massively parallel computers. My group at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) did some work in the field, so I came to understand the limitations of new technology that is in search of a problem that it can solve. I even remember when lasers were called “a solution in search of a problem”. The problems that they can solve do eventually get found, but it takes a while.

Gabriel Bischoff and I have a patent for some software that took advantage of parallel computers (that were not massively parallel) Method and apparatus for circuit simulation using parallel processors including memory arrangements and matrix decomposition synchronization. This patent is an extension of circuit simulation techniques to take advantage of parallel processing computers. Digital Equipment Corporation’s version of SPICE was the vehicle upon which these techniques were demonstrated. What we found is that as we applied novel techniques to solve the problem on a parallel computer, we realized that some of those techniques could be used on non-parallel computers to speed up the computation.

The USA billionaires have shifted wealth and income from the workers to themselves. They did this by lending us money so that we have to pay them interest just to use the money that the government created for our use. This is getting to be such a big burden that our working people cannot continue to support the billionaires and compete on the world job market at competitive wages.

If the USA is going to continue to be competitive on the world stage, we must tell the billionaires that we can no longer support them in the lifestyle that they have become accustomed to. It is about time that they started to work for a living by contributing something productive to our economy.

Foundation For Economic Education has the article The StingRay Is Exactly Why the 4th Amendment Was Written.

Police have the power to collect your location along with the numbers of your incoming and outgoing calls and intercept the content of call and text communication. They can do all of this without you ever knowing about it.

I was horrified to read this article. I wanted to do an independnt check of the veracity of this story. Rather than use the links in the aricle, I did my own Google search.

YouTube has the video How StingRay cellphone surveillance devices work from The Washigton Post.

The ACLU has the article Stingray Tracking Devices: Who’s Got Them?.

WikiPedia has this article Stingray phone tracker.

I am now convinced that this is a real threat.

YouTube has the video Max Blumenthal on why Hillary Clinton smeared Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein.

Hillary Clinton has smeared Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein as Russian assets, and almost no Democratic politicians are pushing back. Max Blumenthal says that Clinton’s comments reflect a continued effort by Democratic neo-liberals to deflect responsibility for their loss to Trump in 2016; marginalize voices like Gabbard and Stein’s who challenge their pro-war, corporatist agenda; and preview their potential future attacks on Bernie Sanders.

The real test of Bernie Sanders’ courage will come in the presence or absence of his defense of Tulsi Gabbard. If he continues his mouthing of the Russiagate propaganda, he will be brought down by his own timidity in foreign affairs.

The Intercept has the article Sanders: I Wouldn’t Make Obama’s Mistake of Shutting Down Grassroots Pressure on Washington.

The debate over the fate of Obama for America, Obama’s campaign arm, goes back to 2008, when Obama adjudicated an internal dispute within his operation by mothballing the organization and folding it under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee, which itself was forbidden from pressuring Democrats to push Obama’s agenda. Some in his orbit argued that Obama’s insider approach to the presidency needed to be complemented by robust outside pressure from grassroots organizers. But Obama believed that he and his team, led by Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, would be able to work more effectively with moderates and Republicans if grassroots activists weren’t pressuring them from the outside. That turned out not to be the case.

The above quotation is what motivates me to post this own my blog. I have had people deny that Obama did any such thing as mentioned in this quotation. The next time someone denies this when I bring it up, I will have this post to put before them.

Also, that’s “our” Richard Neal they talk about in the article. In my years with the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee, they were so afraid of offending Richard Neal that they wouldn’t even entertain the thought of giving a challenger a platform to speak. I hope this comes back to haunt them.

Life in Sturbridge is just too cushy for some people to realize that there are people who are hurting very badly from years of neoliberal policies of the Democratic Party.

In 2015, I tried to tell them that there were people in this country who despised Hillary Clinton. They thought I was nuts. They probably still believe that Hillary lost because of Russia.