I spent Memorial Day weekend with extended family members in Santa Cruz, near where many of them live, but with none of them right there It was most pleasant, but explaining the nature of the place and the University of California branch there led me to think more deeply about the place. I am not aware of anybody else saying this before, but it struck me that Santa Cruz is a place where some decades ago Big Sur met Silicon Valley.
The place remains a very pleasant Northern California beach town, where tourists like to go and long have. It was fully crowded this past weekend, difficult to get to the Wharf and Boardwalk downtown and Natural Bridges State Park. All of this has little to do with these other matters. But sharp local observers note that there is an “old” and a “new” Santa Cruz. The old is symbolized by older wooden houses, some with funky sculptures in the yard and funny mailboxes. This all has a touch of Big Sur somewhat further south along the coast. One can run into Air Bnb landlords who are cameramen for the Dalai Lama and talk about how well they knew Timothy Leary and own 41 acres in Big Sur and so on. Yes, really.
The new Santa Cruz is symbolized by newer more expensive places, some with funky mailboxes, but they are not falling over. Many of these people earn often substantial their money over the Coast mountain range in Silicon Valley a half an hour away. Big Sur may have been there first, but Silicon Valley is fully there now, and the place is gentrifying fast,.
As it was, from the time that Silicon Valley first got itself going in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a parallel development in Santa Cruz that both fed off of that and in its own way fed into it, if not as much as Stanford University did. This was the founding in 1966 and subsequent early history of UC-Santa Cruz, sitting on top of a hill northwest of the center of town. From the beginning it combined an ideal of innovative and progressive education with a highly mathematical, scientific, and technical focus with much emphasis on computers, perfect for its proximity to the developing Silicon Valley. The former fed off the nearby Big Sur with such places as the Esalen Institute, which was always about serious intellectual and philosophical matters (and still is) as well as the more famous artistic and beat/hippie carryings on there. On the technical side a curious aid for UCSC upfront was the propitious proximity of the Mount Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, then second only to Mount Palomar in size, which helped attract top astronomers, who helped bring in the physicists and the mathematicians and computer scientists.
This curious confluence had a special period in the late 1970s and early1980s, one of those serendipitous agglomerations. Four physics grad students showed up who would had similar interests and would come to form the Santa Cruz Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Collective, also known as the Santa Cruz Chaos Cabal. First in the door was Robert Stetson Shaw in 1975, who would receive a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988. He was at the Institute for Advsanced Study in Princeton for awhile. In 1984 he published the book, The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System. According to James Gleick in his 1988 (pb in 2008) Chaos: Making a New Science, which has probably the longest discussion of this group available, Shaw was not just the first in the door at UCSC, but was the real intellectual star of the group. However, googling him pretty thoroughly shows him basically disappearing after about 1988, no publications, no places of work, although it appears he is still alive, with a younger brother, Chris, a prominent documentary filmmaker. I have never met him.
The rest of them came in around two years later. Two already knew each other from high school in New Mexico, with J. Doyne Farmer, probably the best known of them and the one who has done the most work in economics and finance, a prominent econophysicist and co-founder of the journal, Quantitative Finance. He is also the one I know the best and has by far the longest Wikipedia entry of the four, with many projects and activities under his belt. After UCSC he would do a post-doc at the Los Alamos nuclear lab before moving to the Santa Fe Institute, where he remains an external professor, although now mainly based at Oxford University in the math department where he runs the Complexity Economics Center associated with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). He has also been more involved in various business enterprises than the others.
His old school friend is Norman Packard, now at the Center for Complex Systems Research at the University of Illinois and also maintaining a connection with the Santa Fe Institute. Illinois has long had among the most powerful of supercomputer systems of any university in the US, and Packard has been a major developer of cellular automata and artificial life modeling as well as coining the term “edge of chaos.” He also spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and has worked a lot with Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica. He has been involved in some of the econophysics modeling of financial markets with Farmer, as well as some of his business enterprises. While I have not met him, I know much of his work well.
The final of the four students is James Crutchfield, who would go to the physics department at UC-Berkeley after finishing at UCSC. In the late 1990s he moved to the UC-Davis physics department where he established and leads the Center for Complex Modeling, and he also maintains a relationship with the Santa Fe Institute. I have met him. Although officially a physicist, much of his most influential work has involved modeling complex evolutionary dynamics as well as questions of computational complexity. I have probably drawn on his work more than that of these other three in my own work, a big fan of it I am.
Before they became the Santa Cruz Dynamical Systems Collective, they were Eudomaenic Enterprises. They set out to, and succeeded, in developing a system to beat roulette wheels in Las Vegas. This involved carrying portable computers and a mechanism to measure subtle vibrations of the tables. However, despite a couple of successful trips in which they beat the House by 20% on average, they could not make serious money due to casino security people catching on to them. Some of this would feed into the main company that Farmer founded, with Packard in tow, the Prediction Company, that did financial market investing. He sold it in 1999 to the Swiss bank UBS. He has formed or been involved in several other companies since. I have long found it interesting that while people often say to economists, “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?” this dictum is taken seriously by the more serious econophysicists, including Didier Sornette and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, who have also done very well with their own trading companies.
They had two professors who abetted their efforts and helped them get through UCSC to their PhDs, although at the time the physics department at UCSC really did not know how to handle them or fully appreciated what they were up to. The main person who got them through their dissertations was Michael J. Burke, who had been a student of Richard Feynman’s at Cal Tech and had some interest in nonlinear dynamics. He died in 1996.
However their main intellectual mentor was a math professor, Ralph Abraham, now 82 years old and emeritus at UCSC, one of the giants of the field of nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, and complex systems, still active. He coined the terms “chaotic hysteresis” and “chaostrophe,” among numerous other ideas, with his work influencing mine more than any of these others. He was very into visualizing through computer simulations multi-dimensional strange attractors, and some of those he discovered/invented have ended up on tie-dye t-shirts. He looks like Jerry Garcia, and more than any of these others he is the one with the most serious Big Sur and counterculture connections, with these being encouraged by his even hipper brother, Fred, who wrote Chaos Theory in Psychology and runs the Blueberry Brain Institute in Vermont. I know and deeply respect both of these brilliant and innovative intellectuals. In any case, it may be that with his array of interests and discoveries and influence, Ralph Abraham may be the central figure in this weird but creative confluence of Big Sur and Silicon Valley that came to fruition in the late 1970s in Santa Cruz.
Barkley Rosser
Mostly no one in New England understands the Banana slug on my t-shirts from UCSC (my daughter attended UCSC a few years ago and presently lives there). I must admit I had not looked into its history (the University…the banana slug is easier). Thanks.
If you think Santa Cruz has changed, you should take a look at Half-Moon Bay.
Picky Picky Picky!!!
Lick not Keck!!!
Mt. Hamilton!!!
DD,
Thanks, You are right. And I left out the “Nonlinear” in the title, now added on Econospeak version. Will correct on the observatory.
Done here too
MMMMMMM? Nonlinear? Back in the day I did linear dynamic analysis of missiles and spacecraft. Nonlinear is a bitch.
You did not mention, though I suspect you know, The Eudaemonic Pie and The Predictors, both by Thomas Bass. They’re engaging narratives about Eudaemonic Enterprises and the Prediction Company, respectively. The blackjack effort can also be read as a cautionary tale about the challenges of turning solid mathematical theory into working physical hardware – as anyone who has ever attempted it can attest, it’s harder than it looks.
Welcome to Angry Bear. First comments always go to moderation to weed out spammers and advertising.
In July of last year Didier Sornette, director of ETH Zurich at the Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO), released an outlook on Global Bubble Status on July 1st, that indicates:
“Based on the large and growing list of positions in its Contrarian Short portfolio—which includes the FANG stocks—it would appear that FCO’s supercomputer is setting up for some sort of market crash or correction in the months ahead.”
Well, there was no crash. He was YEARS early in predicting the ’08 crash, too early to be reliable for shorting stocks. I can tell you we WILL crash – but I can’t begin to tell you when.
The most reliable indicator I’ve seen is the trade weighted US dollar index; when that goes down, gold is headed up. Right now it’s strong. Notice how it fell during the 00’s when gold was strong, then spiked in 09 when gold was weak, then fell again as gold was super strong in 11, then got strong as gold has been weak for 7 years.
The thing about gold is you make your most money in the last few months of the boom. Gold spiked up hard in August of 11, but when the traders came back from the Hamptons after Labor Day that year, that was it for gold.I plan never making that mistake again, staying at the party too long.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TWEXB
This is way off topic and reads like an advertisement. It will be deleted.
Dan,
It is somewhat off topic, although connected to econophysics. Does not look like an ad, mostly a dump on Sornette, who has gotten lots of publicity. He did call one Chinese crash pretty precisely, but has missed on some others.
The gold bug stuff in the post is simply silly.
Bob,
Yes, good sources. I could have mentioned them, although I gave the bottom line, I think. But then, there is quite a bit more I could have mentioned, including banana slugs, :-).
Barkley:
You missed the other 6 comments he has up. Like having CoRev on steroids.
ok..the one of predicting every recession over the last 30 years got to me.
Apparently so.
BTW, regarding Sornette, I know that one point he and Bouchaud were in the same company together, but have since pulled apart. I think Bouchaud may have done better with his than Sornette has with his, although the latter has gotten more publicity. For awhile Bouchaud was coediting Quantitative Finance with J. Doyne Farmer.
You mentioned Didier Sornette. “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?” this dictum is taken seriously by the more serious econophysicists, including Didier Sornette and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, who have also done very well with their own trading companies.”
I was challenging the idea that Sornette has been successful in predicting crashes. I followed him in the early 2000’s, year after year he was wrong (well, WAY early).
As for edge of chaos theory, I thought that was mostly applied to biology; it would be interesting if he actually commented on how it applied to economics, which is what I thought this blog was about.
You guys are getting strangely annoyed at any comments that challenge anything you say. If you want to kick me out, go ahead, but it says more about you than about me. How about just ignoring comments you don’t like?
Dale,
I am not privy to the actual performances of the trading companies run by Sornette and Bouchaud. My own relation with Sornette is complicated, and I am not going to get into the details here, but you are right that sometimes he has been right and sometimes he has been wrong. As an intellectual matter I note that Sornette has tended to favor econophysics strategies derived from geophysics, earthquake prediction, whereas Bouchaus has along with Farmer been tied more to the more standard econophysics approaches based on statistical mechanics.
Yes, edge of chaos is tied more to biological models. If you had carefully read my post you would see that I clearly linked Norman Packard to cellular automata and artificial life models, so biololgy. Your comment on this shows you do not read carefully.
I am not annoyed. We are not a collective, and I am not responsible for any comments by others on this site.
BTW, if you want to have any respect from me, stay away from spouting gold bug garbage. if you do that, I shall view you as beneath contempt.
Barkley,
I do not know you, so why would I seek your “respect”? You’ve been very provocative in your remarks to me, when I’ve merely been adding to the conversation and have not attacked you.
Dale:
No, Barkley is polite. I am provocative. You are not under any attack.
Dale,
You do not know who I am? I am easily found with pages and pages well beyond what they list if you google me, some of it inaccurate. I had not googled myself for awhile, since you challenged me on questioning my existence, but in fact whoever runs all this has changed my ID. A few months ago I was an economist born in Ithaca, Greece. Now I am a mathematician born in Ithaca, New York.
When I googled you I got that someone with your name founded a company in 1990 bought out in 2005. If that was you, I hope got a good deal. Otherwise, you are a big fat zero, with others with your name dominating you after about 15 hits on google. Sorry. You want to google me? It goes on and on and on, and, well, they shut it down before you can get it all.
No, your only “attack” on me was to erroneously lump me with others here who have criticized you, with whom I do not necessarily agree.
As for you, looks like compared to me, you are a big loud nothing, sorry to be so blunt, but your remarks have become increasingly stupid, so, in your face with the hard reality. You are nothing intellectually in cyberspace, no matter how many posts you make. Obviously your post-2005 efforts have been a flop. I do hope you are not completely broke.
I didn’t say “I didn’t know who you WERE”, I said I don’t KNOW you. Why would I seek the respect of someone I don’t even know? Apparently you think random people come on AB seeking to gain your approbation.
I can understand your lack of understanding of the subtle differences in English phrasing is likely hereditary. For example, I see this entry about your father:
“Later citations of Davidson’s paper, such as made by American mathematical economist Barkley Rosser, erroneously state that Davidson mentions the “entropy law” (and/or entropy) as underpinning economics; which, however, is not the case, as Davidson does not use the word entropy, nor does he allude to it, but rather only seems to discuss the law of mass action, the law of chemical equilibrium, and Le Chatelier’s principle (although he doesn’t mention this term either) in the general sense. ”
Oops, like father like son, constantly imagining reading something else.
You don’t have to worry about me hanging around “Angry Bear Blog” anymore; it’s clear that it’s populated exclusively by liberal professors who spend all their time in the coddled, low-pressure world of academe rather than the real world, and are triggered by mention of other professors whose theories differ from theirs.
I see that at the end of the day you’re most in love with falling in lockstep with LOOKING like a professor, complete with corduroy sportcoat, black turtleneck, and that little homage to Lenin growing under your nose. Although hey, I’m not knocking it – your getup likely worked very well in charming your Soviet bride, but let’s face it, Marina would have probably married Danny DeVito to get out of Moscow, and likely planned to “fall in love” with you as soon as she realized you were an American.
What I fail to understand is how people like you, who has actually married someone who is a firsthand witness to the follies of holding up “income equality” in the USSR, is nevertheless still convinced that it is some ideal to strive for. Perhaps you would recognize your motivations more if you read the book ENVY: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck, which demonstrates that all economies are deeply affected by this entirely unproductive emotion.
The tragedy is when professors and politicians are enlisted to seize the assets of the wealthy through the mechanisms of the state in order to ameliorate the wounded pride of those less able to accumulate resources.
You showed your hand when you lashed out at me for even mentioning gold, but let’s face it, you’re a university professor – even if you completely agreed with the gold standard, you could never say so, as your fellow “free-thinking” liberal colleagues would rat you out faster than a Soviet Pioneer testifying against his father at a show trial. All of you convinced yourselves that the modern world has “outgrown” gold somehow, even though if you were all born 125 years ago you would have said that there was no reason to replace the gold standard. You’re a product of your times, and of course the main reason you despise the gold standard is to defend a fiat system to appropriate the assets of the wealthy for income redistribution.
I wonder if you wonder what life would have been like had you had the courage to have a career in the real world and try to deal with time pressures of corporate life, rather than trading off your father’s name. Well, it’s too late now – this fall you will stand in front of another class of students at Zane Showker, your eyes meeting with theirs in mutual loathing. Tedium, indeed.
Farewell, Angry Bear Blog!
Down below in answer to you on healthcare; “It is a community, there is community rating, and you can not go it alone even if you can afford it.”
The tragedy here is your envy, your envy of those who enjoy the benefits of being in a community. You will go so far as to sabotage it by whatever means possible. I already pointed to one example. You talked about being on Cobra. Cobra is there by law passed in the community to make sure people, who could afford it, had a means to gain insurance even if it was expensive. You did not create it, the community did and you benefited from a community decision.
What is and has happened with healthcare in the community over the last year is the destruction of its tenets. The ACA has some pretty basic tenets as pointed out in the three-legged stool example. Take away one leg and the stool will topple over. Charles Gaba who lives nearby me has it correct. Back to my ACA example . . . from before day one, the politics of one group has been to obstruct a president who in black and was elected by the community. The vow was to make him a one term president.
The ACA was passed under his administration. It became law in spite of the resistnce of so many in Congress to a black president and everything he did. The ACA does have some flaws in it such as mot controlling pharma costs. The issue with the Risk Corridor program (which also appears in Republicans Part D program) occurred because of the need to pass it and the failure of Congress to properly appropriate seed money properly. Only Congress can appropriate; but even then, Upton and Kingston took it one step further by inserting Section 227 into the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2015. It blocked the administration from transferring funds. All in the name of Envy, Envy of a black president sitting in a tradtional white man’s chair as the president, Envy by people like yourself who do not feel they should have to contribute portions of thir income to pay for the healthcare or the healthcare insurance of others who can not afford it, or are a higher risk, or who lose their job, etc.
After all Mr. Lone Wolf . . . you did it all by yourself. If you collapse on the sidewalk, do you wish me to help you up and get you medical care? You have a great premise going until you need the community to help you regardless of your skin color, ethnicity, age, etc. In the end and just like Ayn Rand did, you will sell out and your Libertarian Envy philosophy will lie in a heep next to you. You could not have done it by yourself without the help of the community around you. Your personal achievement and luck came at the expense of the community who was their to support you.
Your Libertarian poo only goes so far before it gets stale.
PS:
No prof here. I am too vulgar to be one although I will lecture and teach on Supply chain and its principals at one of the universities I attended. I am one of those manufacturing people who can walk into a plant, look at the layout, and come up with ideas on how to improve the physical throughput. I also do the planning side of it also.
It’s tenets, not tenents.
“ll in the name of Envy, Envy of a black president sitting in a tradtional white man’s chair as the president, Envy by people like yourself…”
You think anyone who doesn’t vote for a mixed race president is a racist? Really? I bet I’ve done more for minorities than you have. I’ve rented low income houses to blacks and Hispanics in one of the poorest cities in the country for over ten years. I’ve given hundreds to a black neighbor just to help her get her house painted. You vote for Obama and pat yourself on the back for ‘doing something for blacks’.
See, the answer is not having the government SEIZE money from us, padding their pensions, and then whatever’s left over giving to the poor, but for us to VOLUNTARILY get involved with helping the less fortunate. So it is about the community, except the community is not Washington DC.
Tell me how communism has worked out in Cuba. No, why don’t you listen to this Cuban, Humberto Fontova, tell you what it was like in 1961:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdKJ-jHU2UE
1. I served in Cuba with 8th Marines. Word has it, Cuba has better healthcare with a lower infant mortality rate than the US even with the embargo.
2. Looked to see where I said anything about voting, nope I did not.
3. I’ll betcha you “think” you did more than a fair share for minorities. I lived with them, went to school with them, and served with them.
It is about community Mr. Holmgren the shining city on the hill Reagan described as compared to the other city Cuomo talks about where life is not what Reagan describes and the fortunate people look away from. The answer is you think you did this all by yourself and you did not. The janitor in the school helped make you what you are today, the old man in the cart pulled by a horse in the alleys of Chicago where I lived contributed to the community, and every human around us gave something in the community to help you and I on our way. You are fortunate to live in a society where all have contributed in the community to provide the means and helped make you what you what you are today.
Your volunteering is not enough.
Dale,
Wow, nobody has ever come close to nailing me so effectively as you have, Dale, such an achievement. Looking like Lenin? Well, about 40 years ago some people told me I looked like Trotsky, so with my subsequent hair loss, clearly Lenin is it now.
As for my marriage, amazing how you figured out that Danny De Vito was my most serious rival for her hand. I mean he is witty and had a lot more gold bars under his mattress than I did. Of course if she had gone with him, she would not have coauthored the world’s most respected comparative economics textbook. But she would still have had more gold bars under the mattress than she has now, and that is certainly more important than anything else.
As it is, Dale, I am glad to learn you came out of that 2005 sale of your business with so many gold bars under your mattress that you can be terrified of all the envious 99% coming to try and take them away from wealthy you. It is good that you have grateful black and Hispanic tenants who do not loathe you for one second as they hand over rent to you and never think of you being a slumlord. Your gold bars will be safe.
BTW, Dale, the quote you provide about Davidson is simply wrong. nO p. 721 of his 1919 paper, Julius Davidson refers to “the second law of thermodynamics” as the key law underlying his entire analysis. The second law of thermodynamics is the law of entropy.
Ooooooops!
Run75441 It is about community,I don’t dispute that, and yes I have done enough. You “lived with minorities”. Well, aren’t you special. I bet you even shook their hand once or twice.
Barkley,
Your resentment of the “rich” is telling, but I may as well reveal I am not the Dale Holmgren who had a business in Minnesota. I live in California, and my income currently is less than $50,000 a year, and I don’t have a pension waiting for me when I turn 65. I’m disabled. And yes, the houses in the neighborhood I grew up in Illinois are now slums – but not my 3 little bungalows, they are all renovated. The kids growing up in those homes will not be ashamed to invite their friends over. I suppose the socialist in you expects me to rent these little homes out for free rather than be “a slumlord”. I know these people don’t resent me for charging them rent, because they were all eager when they signed the lease. Sure they struggle – these are starter homes, and they are starting out in life. But they won’t always be young and poor.
See, all your resentment is over the fact that you thought I was rich and lived in a big home and had nothing to do with black people. Yet you work for a university that has virtually no blacks on campus as either students or faculty. Now, I couldn’t care one way or another about that, but it’s interesting that YOU care so much, when your own life is so free of African-Americans. Funny how the left thinks.
https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/james-madison-university/student-life/diversity/
Well Dale:
Don’t pat yourself on the back too much; I almost put you in spam. I do not care if you are disabled like Barkley does. Every time I walk into the VA hospital, I am amongst the physically disabled. I walk and look physically fit except for a blood disorder which will eventually kill me. The resentment is over you being a fraud not only with your Libertarian views; but, with your lies. I did not like you in the beginning and I do not like you now or what you are saying is even true.
And I live in a county which is 97% white with less than 1% Black. It is fun to irritate the lily white populace with the promise of a growing and migrating Black and minority population. And no you have not done enough. We will never have done enough for what has happened to them. So put on your MAGA hat and go stir up trouble elsewhere.
Well, Dale, this is certainly turning into a long farewell. And Dan Crawford had just privately told me we had seen the last of you. Oh well.
OK, I am sorry you are disabled, but the rest of this is just hilarious. One minute you are coming on as a wealthy guy resenting all the rotten no good poor people after your wealth who are “unable to accumulate resources.” Of course income and wealth are not identical, and it may be that while having an income less than $50,000, despite getting rent from three “bungalows” (not slum housing !!!), you are still actually wealthy, with a whole lot of gold bars under your mattress. But offhand it seems you are not quite in the position you appeared to be as the apparent former owner of a business to lecture an academic on not dealing with the pressures of corporate life. Or maybe it is that you know all about those pressures because you were there and did that and were a total flop at it, so can assume others would be too.
As it is, I have no problem or guilt about supporting government redistribution policies both through the tax system and the income transfer system, some of which actually hurt me personally (my income is higher than yours apparently). Don’t tell me you won’t take Social Security or Medicare whenever it is that they become available to you. Obviously details of these programs can be debated, and they have been and are on this site, even if you like none of what has been said. But these discussions have involved actual disagreements. We are not all on exactly the same page as each other, even if you would prefer to engage in silly ideological ranting while lumping us all together (“the left”). Pretty vacuous, Dale.
Oh, and while JMU has fewer African Americans than most Virginia unis, the number is not zero, and, no, I am not going to list colleagues and friends who fit the category. But then, this is not the first blunder you have made in writing about me. Something about the law of entropy, I think, you expert on econophysics, you.
Run,
Well, if “we” can never do enough for blacks, why single ME out, or conservatives in general? I was merely defending myself against the suggestion I do nothing at all. As for my “lies”, I haven’t lied at all; I merely waited before correcting Barkley, who googled me and thought I was rich because he mistook me for another man who had the same name.
As for you liking me, what you really don’t like are my views, which are that the world would be much better off if govt limited itself to protecting us from violence from others. I don’t like your views, either, but I’m sure if I met you in person and didn’t know your views I would think you’re an alright fellow.
Barkley,
As for you, you constantly suggest I believe things I don’t. I do not feel resentment for poor people. I do think we need to provide food and shelter for those unable to – which we did voluntarily well before Social Security. have faith in my fellow man to do just those sorts of things – voluntarily. Even voluntary college scholarship funds are laudable, based on merit, not mere desire to attend college.
I never said the college had zero blacks, I said “virtually no blacks”. Why correct that by saying there are a few?
As for Social Security Insurance, would you pay premiums on an insurance policy and then refuse to collect it? I was given no choice when the premiums were extracted from my pay, I’ll be damned if I’ll feel guilty about collecting on it. But purely as a theory, I think Social Security is just one of a long list of things that has harmed this country.
I was a corporate tax director, and my long career made my shake my head at the ridiculous burdens placed on corporations in the tax field. The frequent and long winded changes they constantly make surely kept me employed, but, as with most things government does, we would have been a lot better off as a country without their tinkering.
No need to feel sorry for me being disabled, it’s just by way of explaining why I’m not still working, which I would love to be able to do. Nothing worse than still wanting to contribute to a working world but having chronic pain prevent you from being able to even sit.
Farewell, buddy.
Dale,
It was most definitely not true that in the past voluntarism succeeded in keeping people from being either undernourished or homeless. Where on earth did a tough-minded former corporate tax director as you claim to be get such a silly idea? Or maybe you are really just a naïve wuss except when going around making false accusations about people.
Dale,
I should probably leave well enough alone at this point, and I am certainly going to show myself to be impolite, but I have been thinking about what you have said, and some of it does not make much sense, this involving your personal stuff.
You say you cannot work at your job because you cannot sit. But it has become quite a fad for people in office jobs to work standing up with these elevated desks with their computers on them. It seems your stated reason for being unemployed seems to lack any reasonable basis.
This makes me wonder why you are really unemployed. Given your apparent admiration for Trump, perhaps you engaged in activities that he does while at work, such as lying, stealing, sexually harassing, or being just plain incompetent. While his supporters so far seem to see no problems with this sort of conduct, of course an employer concerned with making money will not tolerate such conduct. Perhaps you are innocent of all that, but, frankly your stated explanation for why you re unemployed does not hold water.
Anyway, if you really do have a chronic pain, I hope you are able to have it go away.
“his supporters so far seem to see no problems with this sort of conduct”
His supporters have the attitude of Abraham Lincoln when informed of General US Grant’s misbehavior: “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
(And wins, I might add).
Grant’s only flaw was excessive drinking. Trump has a much longer list, including several deserving of impeachment, starting with being the first president to clearly (and repeatedly) violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, with his doing so underming several serious international negotiations in ways that are likely to lead to the US not “winning,” even if Trump and his family personally win financially.
Grant’s administration has long been accused of being one of the most corrupt in US history, but nobody ever accused Grant himself of that, it was all people he appointed. In this administration it is lots of people Trump has appointed, with them simply imitating him, whom they cannot begin to match for his total corruption.