umbrarchist

Were you aware of Mack Reynolds and just didn't know about the North Africa Trilogy? Black Man's Burden was published in 1961 when Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Then 50 years later in 2011 NATO helps overthrow Gaddafi while a Black man is in the White House. What did Obama think was going on. Was the 10 years after Gaddafi better for Libya than the 10 years before? 382 vus

Of course this is verboten because it was written by a White guy. http://sfgospel.typepad.com/sf_gospel/2008/08/mack-reynolds-on-africa-islam-utopia-and-progress.html Black Man's Burden by Mack Reynolds https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/32390 Border, Breed nor Birth by Mack Reynolds https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/30639

That's my point. There are dozens. What do you expect 10 year olds to do? How many are designed to sell books?

Vague advice is not very useful. 6 comes closest. No comment about science and technology. Sounds like a Liberal Arts perspective. I don't know about any books my parents read. My mother called my books "Something Crazy". I read Souls of Black Folks in high school because I encountered so much mention of it. After I finished it I thought "Why do I keep hearing about this antiquated drivel?" It is from 1903. Before the Ford Model-T in 1908. Before WWI 1914 to 1918. I never heard of Hubert Henry Harrison until his book turned up in Project Gutenberg that I check a couple of times per month. There should be a Starter List.

I just watched the entire video again. I do not so much think in terms of valuable as I do in terms of INTERESTING. I presume that people can think for ThemSelves and make Their Own value judgements. His analysis of Hispanic voting was interesting and was his talk about a Constitutional Crisis coming up. I watched a video of Trump having trouble walking to his garbage truck. ChatGPT says that a 78 year old man has a 22% chance of dying in the next 4 years. We are currently enjoying the Trump Clown Cabinet Charade. So what is your problem with the video. Or did you watch it?

I have now found 3 different threads using his name. It might be a phony. It is more difficult to do a historical search than expected. I still haven't seen him post about any specific book on the thread that I am sure is his. 127vus

A nice thing about Trump being elected is that it dramatically and irrefutably demonstrates how stupid a lot of White people are. Now we have to try to survive the bullshit. .

Well I have never seen economics presented with that kind of emphasis on Demand Side Depreciation either. It is kind of original. .

So, no responses in a week. Was it too long and boring? Did I put y'all to sleep? .

Yeah Read! Read, read, read! Read what? And WHY? Levar Burton turned up on BlueSky yesterday. One of his posts said, "Fucking Read" He didn't name a single book. The first link is a review of the first two books of The North Africa Trilogy. Those two books have been free in Project Gutenberg for more than a decade. The next two links are to the e-books in PG. The third book did not come out until the 1970s and may not even be in the public domain yet. http://sfgospel.typepad.com/sf_gospel/2008/08/mack-reynolds-on-africa-islam-utopia-and-progress.html Black Man's Burden (1961) by Mack Reynolds https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/32390 Border, Breed nor Birth (1963) by Mack Reynolds https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/30639 The thing about science fiction is that it is future oriented. Too much reading is focused on the past. But I think the lesson of the past is who had technology versus who didn't and the people without the technology lost. So what does that say about the future? A curious thing is that 1961 is when Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. 50 years later, 2011, is when Gaddafi was overthrown and killed. CIA involvement in the first and NATO involvement in the second. But Obama was in the White House in 2011 and Hillary Caesar crowing "We came. We saw. He Died!" <maniacal laugh> So the North Africa Trilogy has an interesting retro-future backdrop. . 95vus

Mass vs OK war Round 2 Oklahoma has almost 7 times as much area but Massachusetts has almost 2 times the population. Massachusetts can't win because the Oklahomans have too much space to hide in. .

I hear that people have been abandoning TwiX in droves since the Triumph of Trump. (X aka Twitter) Steven King announced leaving with his 17,000,000 followers. I was banned years ago. I signed up for something called Blue Sky. .

852vus

The Idiot Quotient tests just measure a certain kind of smart. Fixing a broken piece of electronic equipment may correlate with the tests but it still requires knowing electronics. How well it correlates with figuring out that Trump is an Egotistical Moron may require more testing. Black Americans are still stuck with the reality of technology getting more and more complicated and reading performance going down. 20 years ago I offered to pay some nieces and nephews to read some books I selected. They refused. My mother called my science fiction books "Something Crazy!" I ignored her. .

Oversimplification! There are Smart White people, Dumb White people and Brainy White people. I attended an engineering school where you did not get in unless your SAT was in the top 5%. I am not in the all White people are alike rut. I am not say that intelligent White people cannot be racist either. But it has a different style. The "acting White" phrase had not come into Vogue when I was in high school. I was sarcastically called "A scholar and a gentleman". Getting straight A's in math was easy. Was I supposed to apologize for that? .

An electrical engineering drop out Black person who worked as the service manager for a Hi-Fi Retailer and watched White people buying expensive garbage to play status games with each other. The history of the last 550 has been a record of what people with technology can do to people without technology and the people without could not do anything about it. In my rarely humble opinion Black Americans spend too much energy concentrating on the stupid White people and not enough on the technology and economics manipulated by the smart and brainy White people.

I thought Trump was obviously an Egotistical Moronic Asshole in 2016. He spent 4 years as president proving me right, then another 4 years as ex-president putting a cherry on top. More Americans would rather have a White male moronic asshole as president than a non-White female. I admit that I did not pay a lot of attention to Kamala since I knew that I was voting against the asshole come hell or high water. .

President-elect Donald Trump stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world by nominating Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as his defense secretary, tapping someone largely inexperienced and untested on the global stage to take over the world’s largest and most powerful military. If Putin cannot beat a comedian in more than two years he will be terrified by a Fox News host. ROFLMBAO .

UmbrEcon101 Karl Marx used the word 'depreciation' 35 times in the first two volumes of Das Kapital. But Marx died in 1883. Many things which consumers buy today that depreciate did not exist when Marx was alive. Marx and Adam Smith never saw a planned obsolescence economy which amounts to a planned depreciation economy. In Marx's day the subject was called Political-Economy. The Depression shook the United States to the core and affected most of the world. The concept of GNP, Gross National Product, was developed in the late 1930s. What is meant by The Economy and how does one measure it? What is a Good Economy and what should be done to control it? After John Maynard Keynes paid President Roosevelt a visit some time in May or June of 1934, FDR dismissed him as "a mathematician rather than a political economist." In fact, in the Democratic Party Platform of 1936, FDR's party did not adopt Keynesian doctrine. When Roosevelt was finally convinced of the need for a deliberate fiscal stimulus in 1938, it was on the basis of empirical results derived by researchers in his own government who had no direct acquaintance with Keynes's recently published ideas. But it is the response of the economy to the deficit spending, that World War Two required, that is taken as proof of the validity Keynes' ideas up until the 1980s. The Worker/Consumers on the left provide Labor to the businesses on the right for which the businesses pay wages. Goods and Services are provided by businesses in the lower part of the loop for which consumers pay prices thereby completing the circular flow of green arrows, Money, all around the loop. Increasing the speed or quantity or both of that money through the loop is recognized as economic growth. Loops similar to this have been used to describe and explain GNP/GDP since the 1970s that I know of. It was in my Samuelson's Economics textbook that I used in college. It is missing details like taxes and corporate investments. It will not explain fluctuations in the stock market, for instance. But if there is a Gross, there should be a Net. The equation for the Net Domestic Product is: NDP = GDP - Depreciation I have never seen a graphic in any book explaining NDP. I had to create my own: When you read the textbooks on economics explaining NDP you will find that the Depreciation is for Capital Goods. Machinery owned by businesses, like Industrial Robots purchased by General Motors, 18-wheel trucks purchased by shipping companies. They get added to GDP when they are purchased and are then used to earn money for years which is the purpose of Capital Goods. This Depreciation can be filed with the Internal Revenue Service to reduce the taxes paid by a business. This makes it possible for economists to collect the data necessary to compute the Net Domestic Product. So my diagram has a red downward pointing arrow to represent that depreciation. Consequently depreciation actually means two different but related things, the Physical Wear and Tear which reduces a machine's long term usefulness, and the money that the government allows businesses to file in compensation for that reduced value as a cost of doing business. What if an accountant "forgets" to file the Depreciation for a shipping company one year. Does that keep the physical Depreciation from happening to the trucks? Absolutely Not! The Laws of Physics Do Not Care!!! They do not care about the Money! They do not care about the Economy! They do not care about the PEOPLE! When have you heard any economist talk about the NDP? It got half of a page in Samuelson's Economics textbook which was more than 600 pages if memory serves. Of course having an arrow on the right side of the graphic ruins the symmetry of the picture. What has been happening on the Left side of the picture since World War Two? The first home refrigerators began appearing in the United States in 1927. Through the 1930s having a refrigerator was a big deal. By the end of the 30s 45% of American households had refrigerators. It took until 1951 to reach 80%. Less than 1% of households had televisions in 1948. Refrigerators did not require broadcasting stations to make sense to buy. But by 1962 90% of American homes had televisions. Of course automobiles beat other devices historically. 60% of families had cars by 1929 in the United States. In fact the US had more cars than the rest of the world until the 1960s. But machines wear out and break down and must be repaired or replaced or done without regardless of who owns the machines. The Laws of Physics do Not CARE! So what happened to the depreciation on the Left side of the graphic? If depreciation is incorporated into the graphic on the Left what does that imply about the NDP Equation? There are now Two Depreciations. Depreciation of Capital Goods which though acknowledged to exist, is not mentioned to us peons by the glorious economics profession. And the Depreciation of Durable Consumer Goods which must exist and consumers experience but has not been part of the equation for decades. We have been living in a world run on defective algebra. Dcap == Depreciation of Capital Goods Dcon == Depreciation of Durable Consumer Goods NDP = GDP - Dcap (official economic delusion) NDP = GDP - (Dcap + Dcon) (reality) Since consumers make purchases to replace their worn out durable consumer goods they are added to the Gross Domestic Product. This is called Economic Growth though the consumer does not experience any growth since he is spending money just to stay in the same place. GDP ain't what they say it is. GDP == Grossly Distorted Propaganda There were 200,000,000 motor vehicles on the road in the United States in 1995. How many were Capital Goods like 18-wheel trucks doing long haul drives from Seattle to Chicago? How many were sedate sedans for Granny's Sunday go to Meetin'? The Laws of Physics do not care! Machines wear out with use. They even deteriorate if sitting and doing nothing which can be significant if left for too long. So what is the logic behind economists saying nothing about the Depreciation of Durable Consumer Goods over the half-a-century since the Moon landing? Consumers must work to compensate for that Depreciation. Is this just a high technology form of share cropping that is good for GDP? .

Capitalism began being phased out in the 1920s. Corporate Consumerism is the order of the day. PO will kill us all https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz68ILyuWtA

A Trump voter has to be a retard. 'nuff said! .

What is STEM without Physics? The way the ions create an electric field across the depletion zone is physics. The way the read write head in a hard disk drive works is the same physics as in a reel to reel tape recorder. Physics is a continuum schools create these Intellectual barriers that are supposed to exist in people's thinking. Where does atomic and electron physics stop and chemistry begin?

Supposedly the airwaves are owned by the government. Politicing over the air should be free. .

I was working for IBM in 1980. A 3033 mainframe, the Top of the Line cost $3,000,000 with 8 Megabytes of RAM. If you had come back in a time machine and told me about today's smartphones I would have called you a liar. To me we are Living Science Fiction. But our educators cannot figure out what to do with the stuff. Before COVID I was at a high school working on their Wi-Fi. This White woman was talking about The Great Zimbabwe with walls 9 Kilometers tall. I was hardly paying attention until I heard that. High school kids with Chromebooks and teachers who don't know a meter from a kilometer. 🤦