Trump, in accordance with his campaign promises to the rust belt and flyover country, has just slapped a tariff on steel and aluminum. If you look at the Nucor product catalog, you can see that the USA has ceded high end steel production to foreigners. Ceding high end steel production to foreigners is militarily unwise. Ceding the high end is also likely to have externalities. A network of skills unravels. …
Category: economics
The disastrous effects of females in power
Women cannot do men’s jobs, and the pretense that they can and are is doing immense damage to men’s work and the creation of value by men. Women in men’s positions subtract value. Women in powerful male positions subtract enormous amounts of value. Men at work get paid for creating value, and are forced to pay women for destroying the value that men create. The reason for female under representation …
Bitcoin and the May scale of monetary hardness
The current price of bitcoin is only justified if there is a significant probability of bitcoin taking over the world, and substantially replacing other assets that are less easily transferable and/or more subject to the caprice and violence of an increasingly disorderly, unpredictable, destructive, and anarchic state. If it does take over, will rise a hell of a lot further. For example, investing in real estate rental property is lucrative, …
A good time to invest in bitcoin
In 2013 I recommended investing in bitcoin. Quite recently I recommended not investing in bitcoin, because my cleaning lady who has no idea what to do when her computer freezes up, is investing in bitcoin. When the widows and orphans start buying stocks, it is time to sell. Lately I have heard tell of thought criminals opening bitcoin accounts, because they noticed “Nazis†getting their accounts blocked, and figured that …
Throne, Altar, and freehold
I have argued for Throne and Altar before: Throne because a stationary bandit is better than a mobile bandit; Altar because we have to shut down open entry into the state religion: Harvard needs an Archbishop and a Grand Inquisitor to stop America’s officially unofficial state religion from holiness spiraling out of control into ever greater holiness. But throne and altar has been tried, and has failed. How did it …
How to do cryptocurrency right
Proof of work tends to be inherently slow, has inherently high transaction costs, and the miner’s interests are not identical with those holding currency as a store of value and those using currency as a medium of exchange. Proof of stake is nontrival to get right. It is a form of the infamously difficult to understand (and infamously difficult to program correctly) Paxos protocol. The Paxos protocol has the great …
A bad time to invest in Bitcoin
Back in 2013 I urged people to invest in Bitcoin. Yesterday someone asked my cleaning lady to invest in Bitcoin. Now if someone had asked her to accept payment in Bitcoin, or send payment in Bitcoin, then this would be compelling evidence that one should invest in Bitcoin. But when cleaning ladies are asked to invest in Bitcoin, not a good investment. When Bitcoin began, everyone was a miner, and …
Cryptocurrency
Our financial system is corrupt and oppressive. Cryptocurrencies represent an opportunity to route around that system, and make lots of money doing so. Cryptocurrency is real, and presents the opportunity to make enormous amounts of money. Also, cryptocurrency scams are real, and present the opportunity to lose enormous amounts of money. Like the dot-com bubble in the 90s, you can add the concept of blockchain to just about anything and …
Holiness and corporate performance.
Notoriously, corporations that are Social Justice converged behave in ways that are not only evil, but self destructive, leading to loss of shareholder value. It is difficult to objectively assess social justice convergence, but we can expect it to have a pretty good correlation with the company’s business model – a green energy company is going to be full of social justice warriors, and receive lots of investment from fund …
No enemies to the right
No enemies to the left has been working great for the left, and no enemies to the right has been working great for us. If you declare someone to your right your enemy, you wind up dancing to a tune called by leftists. Supreme Dark Lord Vox Day recently criticized Spencer and the Nazis as fake right – criticized them not for being too far right, but for being too …