America 300

It's hard to think about the Tricentennial of the USA as we’re wobbling toward America 250 in two weeks. And since I was technically an adult (22) for the Bicentennial in 1976, some sort of miracle happening would be necessary for me to be around to see 2076. (and I’m fairly sure I called it the bison testicle anyway, instead of the real word).  

Somebody had this in their collection of memes in the last week. I don't know who gets credit.

Strangely, this post starts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise, where John Wilder started this Monday’s (6/15) post “America 350: Looking Backward from 2126” with a comment I left to him a couple of weeks earlier. My comment was essentially that we’re seeing more and more America 250 talk in the last month, and does he think that we’ll make it to America 300? Many billions have been spent trying to take our country down already, are they going to get the US to collapse?

His answer was “yes.” I tend to agree and honestly have to admit that part of it is I’m surprised we’ve made it to America 250. Now, John makes a detailed argument pointing out the contributing aspects, like forced importation of foreigners, forcing people to accept all manner of bad people in their societies, from rapists and child predators to all sorts of theft, fraud and criminal acts. Basically, many of the social ills we see in the honest news practically every day. 

Years ago, and it’s hard to find the transition point, I switched the blog over to writing mostly about space topics, which took over and expanded my old “Techy Tuesday” posts into Most Days being Techy Days. Some weeks are all space, but I also write on other technical topics like ham radio, the real environmental stories, some economics, and tend to stay away from politics and political talk.

One of the reasons I tend to agree with Wilder on this is we both lean toward being “real money guys”. That phrase tends to be used for people who think we should shut down the Federal Reserve and get rid of their “constant benign inflation” belief. I was going to say “policy” but it's more of a wild speculation. There’s really only one way to think it has anything to do with real life, and that’s that simply that one of the justifications of them targeting mild inflation is that if people honestly believe that prices on everything they want to buy will be higher the longer they wait, it encourages spending on the car, coat, furniture, house improvement, new car or whatever right now rather than saving up for it. That creates more activity for some businesses and tends to make positive headlines. Naturally, if you live on a credit card the card companies depend on the interest you’re paying for their livelihood so they want you to buy it now and pay them for it over the next few years.

In reality, I think "real money" guys are just a bit looser than those who advocate for gold-based currency. At least some that I've read (and my personal belief) is that gold really isn't all that different from the big stone rings (called rai) they use on Yap Island. The stones aren't something that can be created in infinite amounts like digits in a computer. They can't do a stone version of "just print more" like the Federal Reserve does with paper money or just create the number in a computer file. In fact, they can't create any more of those rings now. 

Wilder talks about something like this - limiting the supply of money - in what he calls BasedBux©. There will never be more than 100 million of those. 

In contrast to prices going up by inflation, there’s a little-talked about principle known as one of the “golden laws of manufacturing” that says if your company doubles the amount of things it produces, the price for each one tends to come down 25 to 30%. Part of that is “quantity discount” that reduces the price of parts the more they buy, and part of it is the increase in efficiency of everyone sitting and working on the same thing instead of interrupting their work all day to change what they’re working on, bringing built products out and bringing in newer ones to work on.  

The real issue for America is we need to find some animal we can rename the Trison (try-son). Purely so we can refer to the Trison testicle year.