Acquiring Ferraris vs Acquiring Adaptive Rate (making good time while lost?)

commentary by Roger Erickson

One Ferrari does not a recovery make - Bill Mitchell

Ferrari's vs Adaptive Rate. That also generalizes to static value vs dynamic value. It's telling that we've been trying to discuss this for AT LEAST 2300 years - along with the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance. Yet still we have too few even paying attention. Everyone could learn to swim if we could get 'em to go into the water - especially at an early age. Figuratively, however, that's less likely in Nebraska, the Sahara, Death Valley, etc, etc.

Humans are more cooperative than any other species, but only when they share a context, and are allowed to cooperate freely. Much of our difficulty stems from lack of interaction, and the resulting lack of shared context exposure. No amount of isolated knowledge will overcome failed distribution or overcome the greater population penetration rate of competing ideas which are propagating faster.

It doesn't matter what unique group options diverse individuals in a social species can each see - only what they can get the moment-of-gravity of their group to see and coordinate responses to.

Which means? Paying attention to recursion fundamentals - i.e., ALL the distributed operations, not just the one's you've become expert in - e.g., swimming? If you want the Titannic to be a bit more agile, don't bother leaning over the rail and shouting? Go down in the guts and recruit people to help retune some out of sight fundamentals? You won't BE a success since no one will notice. But you will DO something that matters to the people, groups and species you care about.

Good thing we have at least some people stubbornly making the right choices about BE or DO choices.

The Strange World of Patent Propaganda and Virtual FraudUse Patents

commentary by Roger Erickson

DailyKos has just received feedback from one of the authors of the original Platinum Coin legislation, publicized years ago by Ellen Brown in a book.  A key passage from DK is worth repeating.

* In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years. The Secretary’s authority is derived from an Act of Congress (in fact, a GOP Congress) under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8). What is unusual in this case is that the law gives the Secretary discretion regarding all specifications of the coin, including denominations.

* The accounting treatment of the coin is identical to the treatment of all other coins. The Mint strikes the coin, ships it to the Fed, books $1 trillion, and transfers $1 trillion to the treasury’s general fund where it is available to finance government operations just like with proceeds of bond sales or additional tax revenues. The same applies for a quarter dollar.

* Once the debt limit is raised, the Fed ships the coin back to the Mint, the accounting treatment is reversed, and the coin is melted. The coin would never be “issued” or circulated and bonds would not be needed to back the coin.

Philip N. Diehl, 35th Director, United States Mint

***

Of course, this just echoes what students of currency operations have long said, from Warren Mosler back to John Law. Even the Greeks and Sumerians either created Nomisma, or simply kept bills of credit to track flexible and unpredictably intersecting transaction chains. Given reality, social liquidity is always a function of distributed wit and group-intelligence.

Now we have yet another demonstration that social liquidity is simply group investment in teamwork, i.e., social credit. So, if we can mint and melt purely symbolic coins at will, why not just damn the purely symbolic T-bonds instead?

Why not indeed! It's only because the semantics of coinage & bondage run through the bank lobby, which claims to have a Virtual FraudUse patent, held off the books, of course. What is a virtual FraudUse patent? It's what clever frauds perrennially use to separate foolish populations from their real resources and dynamic options. VFUs usually involve some form of propaganda used to impose and maintain the virtual patent. The usual intent of a VFU patent is to wall off group access to dynamic assets which groups would otherwise utilize, as indirect paths around the limits imposed by personal hoarding of static assets.

Astute readers will instantly recognize that social evolution is the progressive transition from local hoarding of static assets to distributed hoarding of dynamic assets.  Gold bugs, by definition, do not grasp the dynamics of growing organization, nor the concept of "return-on-coordination."  Citizens of a democracy, however, always balance a "Be or Do" choice.  Be personally "wealthy" by sequestering static resources from your neighbors, or do something for  your country by increasing net dynamic assets.  How do YOU define patriotism?  How far your country reaches is a distributed function of how far YOUR vision for it reaches.