A MarketPlace of Ideas

My favorite fruit is Halle Berries.

Original Arty exerpt below in bold

    Anti Capitalist product, do not use!                  Buy this instead !!

But Scotts sees similarities between the two plant-food makers. So, the Goliath of plant products sued late last month, accusing TerraCycle of copying its look and falsely claiming that its organic products are better than synthetic ones like Miracle-Gro.

In order to make my point in regarding this article I want to first make it clear I am not a believer in Man Made Global Warming  ( MMGW ).  I have extreme skepticism about anything that comes out of the green lobby money machine.  Terracycle appears to be a company that plays some of the same schemes and themes of the green movement.   

That being said, for Scotts Miracle Gro to bring a lawsuit over usage of similar colors or advertising claims is a mickey mouse-(tm) things to do.  ( Will Walt-Disney sue me for that reference?!!! ) 

1- similar colors - ok so like I invented the particular shade of green, so both companies owe me royalties!  If color schemes can be claimed in a proprietary fashion we’re ALL going to owe the gays a truckload of money!!!

2- advertising claims?!!!  - If we sue every time an advertiser makes unsubstantiated claims we are ALL going to be in the poor house.

In the case of the claims by TerraCycle: My experience with fertilizer teas is that if you allow a healthy bacteria growth in the tea that for some reason the plants are markedly more vigorous.  Of course this is in Arizona soils which are definitely more steril than midwestern soils.  However I can say in at least the Arizona situation that Terracycles product is likely to be much more effective a product if its not pasteurized.  ( I assume not since its not for human consumption! ….although I wish the Scotts Miracle-Gro CEO James Hagedorn  would grab a bottle of TerraCycles Worm Poo Tea and chug it post haste.  His herd of lawyers should follow suit !

I won’t be buying any more Scotts products until and only if Scotts reimburses TerraCycle for all costs they have incurred due to Scotts Miracle Gro’s suit against them.

I am an ultra-capitalist as you reading this should be.  It is the most efficient ecological protection mechanism that has ever been created.  You may not understand this now but you will someday.  This principle will be hammered again and again as we proceed into the future by forces more powerful than any one person or group.

The free trade policies / open economy is proving to be a valid concept. Now while our economy is rather weak the other nations of the world are stimulating our economy with the dollars they took in during earlier years.  Thus the USA and its free trade policies have created another pole in the world economy.  ROW is now stimulating the USA economy.

World leaders can not control the weather or the tide.  The really wise leaders USE the tide to do what they want done if they can.  If they can not then they simply fail.  There are powerful forces of world freedom on the loose.  These tidal forces were encouraged by Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s.  A symtom of this has been the stock market going up during most of the time since then. 

For quite some time people including me have worried about the significant trade deficit run with the Asian powerhouse industrial economies.  The worry has been about collapse and economic ruin due to debt overhang caused by massive borrowing by the USA.

It appears events are playing out a different way than one might have thought years ago.  Currently we are experiencing slow economic growth as of April 2007.  However the DOW index has reached the record level of 13,000.  This is very evidently due to R.O.W. ( rest of world ).  The DOW companies that are experiencing upticks are the ones with exposure to ROW.   The domestic economy is not so sizzling and thus no ROW and your stock will have no go.  So it can be argued that the rest of the world is now stimulating the US economy.  Where in the past the USA has been the locomotive of the world economy the roles are reversed now.  How did this come about ? 

For quite some time the other growing nations of the world such as Brazil and China have not played fair on the trade issue.  Thus they have accumulated US Dollars because their governments have made it so difficult to spend the money.  Only an inexperienced novice thinks they USA is not the fairest nation in the trade arena.   I have direct experience with import / export from / to Brazil.  You can ship anything legal you want from Brazil to the USA.  Lord help you if you want to go the other direction.  Taxes are extremely high.  

For example:  Brazilians receive a fraction of the wages that people in the USA make.  Thus Brazilians could benefit from low cost used computers right ?   Sorry R-O-N-G wrong.  It is forebidden to import used computer equipment to Brazil.  This is ostensibly to try to grow a domestic computer industry.  But who in their right mind believes Brazil is going to compete with Taiwan in computer motherboards ????  Only a foolish liberal or a lying politician.  Thus a person making 1/4 the USA national average has to buy computer equipment at prices 2X what they are here in the USA!!! The hill is 4 * 2 = 8 times steeper than in the USA !!!!

Other National economies have been rather closed off.   We are the facilitator.  Brazil as an example.  Ask yourself can people in China buy something on ebay and receive it without problems the same way I can from China ?  China as a group is un confident enough to use domestic consumption as the driver of its economy.  It seems to need the USA for this “directive demand” to show its economy which way to go.  This is probably a mathematically provable point.  Their own demand is not as educated as the USA’s consuming public.

The Chinese and others are in possession of large piles of US Dollar cash.  It was inevitable that as we shoveled US Dollars willy nilly into the mouths of the Chinese that they would finally start puking the dollars back at us.  I say puking because they obviously have been VERY reluctant to just play fair and use the currency as efficiently as possible buying from us where it made the most sense.  They have done everything they could to avoid buying from us in an attempt to grow their own economies first.  It is understandable from a practical political point of view.  ( which of course is very high on the impracticality scale if an engineer evaluates it ! )

The currency must rebalance in some fashion at some point.  At some point if you are to do anything else than invest in real estate which has now gone soft in the USA, you must do something with the money other than stick it under your mattress.  After all greenbacks in and of themselves can only warm your house if burnt or clean your bum if you use them as T.P. ( one square only per Cheryl Crow please!) unless you use them to buy something.  Its just paper for god sake!  Thus we are seeing a dynamic equilibrium coming into balance finally.  The dollar is weakening and our large corporations are finally selling to ROW to the extent that its driving their stock price up.

Thus I have to marvel at the long range effect reaganomics has had.  Here we are 20 years after Ronald Reagan left office and he’s still proving to be right in line with what world economic trends have turned out to be!   This forward thinking from a guy who was really quite old when first elected!  I have to chuckle because the democrats are the ones calling themselves progressive.

Many factions in the US political landscape want us to stop this marvelous process.  It would be stupid to do so.  We’re on track to a world that is more free, peaceful and open.  

In the end these countries are absorbing all the best methods the USA has empirically found that an economy works best.  There is no choice or opinion in this matter. It is a reality of physics and mathematics.  They can either adopt the effective measures or suffer.  Eventually the path of least energy/ path of most favorable output will be followed.  Thus the turn around in flow of dollars.   The dollar and American methods are becoming a de facto world standard for only one reason…..capitalism works best.    If a method is not the best it will die and by evolution be replaced by some other method.  For all these liberals who talk about believing in evolution its frightfully obvious they don’t understand the how the process of evolution works.   But then it should be no surprise these libs only know how to talk. They don’t impress me as people who actually understand how to make anything work.  Most engineers are conservatives of some variety. Its not a surprise either!

See a summary of Jeremy Grantham’s idea of a World Wide Bubble   When Jeremy Grantham describes a world wide bubble it sounds an awful lot like an economic expansion monetized by our old friend the green back.  We can be proud as a society to have acomplished what he describes.  The results are what comes of the best idea in an ecosystem of ideas.  If we want to remain the leaders, we need to keep the ideas coming and keep living by the ones we already have instituted.

There is a lady in England supposedly claiming to be sensitive to WIFI and cell phone RF signals.  While this is either a joke or a hoax with 100% certainty the sad thing is our society is getting collectively neurotic enough that there will be some true believers.

Firstly as an electrical engineer whose speciality was RF design I can tell you without a doubt that this lady is confabulating her symtoms one way or another.  Either by joke, hysteria or hoax this story is a fiction.

The problem is that this story is emblematic of our society.   A few years ago this story probably would not have found a market.  Now the collective consciousness is in such a place as this is saleable fodder for the information industry machine.  This is a measure of how neurotic people are collectively becoming.  

 Most of these people appear to be liberals to me.  When I hear their thought processes I can’t help but think of democrats here in the USA.  Irational self justifying arguments that in the end lead to nowhere or somewhere someone has to pay a large lump sum of money as a result of some litigation against an ill health effect.  The following is a snippet from the original arty:

To ensure a good night’s sleep, Sarah now takes the precaution of swathing herself in her special silver netting. She is concerned by the increasing spread of wireless networks. “I think it’s a terrible mistake,” she says. “Is Wi-Fi going to turn out to be the tobacco, asbestos or Thalidomide of the 21st century? It’s looking that way.

 ….. not only can she feel the radio waves but in addition can feel their frequency!  Hilarious.  You can’t help but laugh.  The ladies age was quoted as 51 in the original arty.  Of course she’s not considering menopause. That couldn’t be it! 

In the past the man in the tinfoil hat was recognized as being a lunatic. Now in an age when global warming is considered to be a real phenomena people are putting on their tinfoil hats and being taken seriously!   Coincidence? You be the judge.  Or is it that the same mass neurosis is driving both stories?!

 The problem with our nut jobs are that they are also little Napoleans and want a fictional problem called Man Made Global Warming MMGW to be addressed by shutting down all of industry in effect

In the end these aging boomers are afraid of dying and afraid of the change that technology is making in our societies. Technology is also making it possible to transmit these weak low/negative value ideas throughout the world.  Formerly weak ideas would have not even made it to an audience. 

I have to laugh to myself.  These people are really going to start screaming when they see what the future holds.  Ray Kurzweil is suggesting we will be augmenting our intelligence by a factor of 10,000 by 2040.  The pace of change by that time will be so dizzying that the fictions won’t have time to keep up.  These lunatics will swallow their tongues.

This is a list that I am starting so that I can tally all the scientists that believe that  MMGW is not happening.

Every since the airing on Channel 4 in England and on YouTube of the “GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE” I have noticed a decrease in the amount of people claiming the science of MMGW is settled and ALL the scientists agree.  The fact is the honest ones do not agree with the church of the robed MMGW priests.   

Note added 4-30-2007 : There appears to be an uptick in the amount of scientists quoting MMGW to be bankrupt theory reported in the print and online media.  I wonder if the cynical press is reading the tea leaves and getting out ahead of the MMGW hoax before its exposed by the USA media airing of THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE.

Tim Patterson Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario

I think the proof in the pudding, based on what (media and governments) are saying, (is) we’re about three quarters of the way (to disaster) with the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Patterson. “The world should be heating up like crazy by now, and it’s not. The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles.” Patterson explained CO2 is not a pollutant, but an essential plant food. Billions of taxpayers’ dollars are spent to control the emissions of this benign gas, in the mistaken belief that they can stop climate change, he said. “The only constant about climate is change,” said Patterson.