Ni Hao Y'All

I've been remarking for a couple of years that the flow of jobs will reverse and poor areas in the US will start to see work moving from China. What I had in mind was returning US companies. But there seems to be an unexpected bonus. The Chinese are coming.

I should have seen it from the first. If it's cheaper for a US company to build something in the US, it's going to be just as advantageous for China's private businesses to do the same. So why not expand abroad and reduce their political risk while improving their profitability?

Fixing the data loss loophole

The US Congress could, with a pretty small outlay of money, set up a web portal with an API that would allow all executive branches to report data losses within a few days of when they happened. And then we should require that they report within 5 days. We could call it Lois' law. 

Most recently this would have had the effect of chopping two years off the timeline of the IRS scandal and perhaps made it a live issue for the 2012 campaign. Big data analytics might also be deployed on this database to find "data loss hot spots" and better direct where to deploy investigative efforts. The bonus, a lot of hard drives are over $100 dollars so just destroying one is a crime sporting a ten year prison term. You have a lot of leverage at that point to play 'make a deal' in order to get at the underlying politically motivated crimes. 

Bitcoin as US currency warfare

Still noodling around with bitcoin and learning more about the phenomenon. One of the puzzlers that a number of people are scratching their head about is the cautious support that bitcoin seems to be getting in the US. Why would an inherently deflationary currency attract support from a government that seems so strongly committed to inflating its currency into a creeping devaluation. 

The answer came in an hour long talk with Andreas Antonopoulos that was up on youtube. He forthrightly predicted that bitcoin was eroding all currencies but that the dollar would be the last to fall. In the 'devil take the hindmost' currency world we inhabit, that makes bitcoin an ally of the Fed for now. 

Things do seem to be playing out that way as China subsequently made moves against bitcoin even as it also made moves to work with Russia to supplant the dollar. 

How big is bitcoin? Saturday June 21, 2014

For this post all values are rounded.

As of today bitcoin has created
12,922,000 coins in circulation

At time of writing 1 bitcoin was $594 USD

This puts the total value of the coins at $7.7 billion USD and is roughly equivalent to what the federal reserve calls M0. For USD M0 is $3.9 trillion at present.

If Bitcoin were an economy, it would be the 149th largest in the world slightly larger than Montenegro and slightly smaller than Mauritania.

Ethereum - Bitcoin on steroids

Bitcoin was only the beginning

Ethereum is bitcoin style disruption (blockchain technology) that is generic across anything writable in software. That's huge.

Etherum is not ripe. It's not something you want to devote a lot of resources to but it is something you want to keep your eyes on to monitor because any successful etherum software can disrupt any field of endeavor as bitcoin is disrupting banking. Look to hear about ethereum in a mainstream news outlet near you in mid 2015.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is not what you think it is.  This is the sort of thing that comes out when you listen to Bitcoin insiders who actually build the software that makes Bitcoin a thing.

Everyone in this room understands that Bitcoin is not a currency. It is a value transfer network with a decentralized consensus mechanism. 

Translating from techno-geek to poli-geek, Bitcoin makes voluntary polities. In plain english it allows people to congregate into one or more novel, voluntary associations, entering and exiting them at will.

The point of doing that is to establish convenient states of "we" as in we dollar spenders, we mastercard holders, and even we believers in this or that social habit or norm. This is incredibly valuable. It allows participants to exchange value within an enhanced trust set of rules. In the real world, this is a more granular edition of what european countries faced when they looked at joining the euro zone. A number of countries for whom joining was economically a bad idea did it anyway because they saw advantage in adopting a shared identity. Greek euro bonds suddenly sold at nearly the same low interest rates as German euro bonds. The market priced nation state bonds by the identity, and the repayment risk, of the most trustworthy of the big euro economies for years. It took the admission of a massive violation of trust and the rules of the euro (Greece's accounting fraud scandal) before national bond pricing was restored.

In this view, nation-states create a massive bundle of shared values, and a number of them are expressed through the currency. Bitcoin as software allows anyone to express shared values, sometimes economic, sometimes as expressions of solidarity. The politics of which shared values will be expressed is independent of the software. It pretty much can be anything.

Tea Party Comprehensive Immigration Reform

I'm an immigrant, but not much of one. We left Romania, legally, in 1971 through the grace of God and Richard Nixon. Essentially I was part of the communist slave trade because we were in bondage and, arriving in the US, we became free.

My aunt argued against it. Why she argued against it and why she was wrong provides the core of a Tea Party immigration policy that is in the United States' interest, comprehensive, and humane.

There are people who fall in love from afar. My father is like that with the USA. My family's tale of immigration starts with my grandmother running from an intolerable personal situation and my grandfather following her. My two aunts were born in the US. My family returned to Romania in a case of pretty bad timing, just in time for the bottom to drop out as the Great Depression started soon after. My father grew up on stories of America and what it was like there and when my aunts became adults, they eventually got their US passports and left.

The soft costs of immigration to the immigrant and family ripple across a generation or two. There is a loss of social context, a feeling of not entirely belonging. You're the outsider, the stranger. Both cultures are home but neither culture entirely fits. Unless you are like my grandmother and desperate or like my father and in love, these soft costs dominate the equation and people just don't move very often.

Essentially my father was an american long before he set foot on US soil. He loves this country, became naturalized, learned english, had a long career as a civil engineer, and did his best to make America a better place. He's the sort of immigrant that contributed far more than he took and is a significant chunk of the conservative movement. He's also a minority of immigrants crossing the border today. Such love affairs have always been a minority but they are an important minority to recognize and embrace because they falsify the narrative of the Tea Party's enemies that it is cruel and unfeeling and only interested in simplistic solutions that have no soul.

The desperate, on the other hand, are dangerous. Desperate people can swamp a boat, collapse a bridge, trample people to death. Talk to anybody who does work in crowd control and they'll tell you desperate people in large numbers can be scary dangerous. The crowd control professionals have all sorts of multi-layer strategies to prevent, reduce, channel, and contain the consequences of crowds gone wrong (desperation is shorthand for a number of emotions, the common point being that they shut down rational thought and good sense).