Category: Philosophy

Unscientific and Sloppy

I want to state upfront that I know nothing about pandemics and epidemics. However, I am good at looking at statistics and spotting fallacies.
Take for instance this chart that shows the exponential rise in number of cases which has the whole USA in a worry.

When looking at something like this we should ask a few questions.
First, how many people are being tested?
Second, in which manner is the test being administered?
The exponential rise in COVID-19 cases corresponds to an exponential rise in the amount of people being tested. Understand? The more people you test per 100K the more cases you will find. Makes sense?
The second question is even more important. Where and how is this test being administrated?
Imagine you wanted to get an accurate picture of who was going to win the presidency in 2020. Would you go a RNC conference and do a random sample of the people at the conference? Do you think this would give you the best representation for understanding the voters as a whole?
Or would you do a random sample of the general public and get a margin of sampling error for the given full sample and calculate a confidence level? The amount of sloppy thinking on this by so called experts is astounding.
Robert Zurbin is an aerospace engineer. Read the below carefully. Read it twice. He nails it.

In the face of the current coronavirus pandemic, authorities are taking measures that are having massive negative economic impacts. Some say that these measures are wildly unwarranted. Others, that they are disastrously insufficient. Who is right?
Nobody knows. No one can know what the right course of action is, because the available data to provide a basis for these enormously consequential decisions is woefully inadequate. The most important statistics we need to know to develop a strategy to deal with the situation are the size of the pandemic and its lethality. Current data provides no basis for accurate estimation of these vital metrics.
For example, as of the morning of March 30, Johns Hopkins reports that 143,532 Americans have tested positive for COVID-19, with 2,572 deaths. If taken at face value, this would suggest that the infection rate among Americans is 0.044 percent, with a 1.8 percent death rate among those infected.
But we know that such a conclusion would be inaccurate, because millions of people feeling symptoms are being turned away by testers, and there must be millions more, with and without symptoms, who are choosing not to volunteer for testing. So, without doubt, the size of the infected population is being underreported, perhaps grossly so.
The shortage of testing has led to a situation where only VIPs can be sure of getting tested if they suspect illness. Thus we hear about Tom Hanks, Prince Charles, and Boris Johnson testing positive, but how can any such assemblage provide a statistical base? Well, there is the U.S. Congress, where four House members and one U.S. senator have tested positive for COVID-19, for an infection rate of 1 percent and a death rate of zero. But Congress, while arguably politically representative of America at large, is hardly an optimal sample for medical polling purposes. Plausible arguments can readily be made why congressmen should have either higher (they attend lots of meetings) or lower (they don’t take mass transit) infection rates than the general population.
To get the right answer, we need to random-test the public. We don’t need to test all 327 million citizens — although, when feasible, that would be very desirable for the purpose of identifying immune individuals and putting them back to work. For the purpose of getting a rough estimate of the size of the infected population, we need to random-test only about 1,000 people nationwide. That is the approximate size of most election polls, and, provided that reasonable care is taken to ensure that the sample is representative of the electorate, such polls can generally predict the outcome within plus or minus 3 percent. It’s true that occasionally a 45 percent–polling underdog can pull off an upset victory, but never a 20 percenter, let alone a 1 percenter.  Limited polls might not always predict the winner, but they inevitably show who is in the competitive range. For purposes of quantifying the epidemic, that would be an enormously valuable correction to our current state of ignorance.
It is also probable that deaths by coronavirus are being underreported, or overreported, given opportunistic infectious diseases, notably pneumonia. There is reason to suspect this is the case for Germany, which reports 560 deaths in 63,929 cases (compared with 2,612 deaths in 40,751 cases in France), and certainly Russia, which claims nine deaths in 1,836 cases. So all deaths from disease should be tested to see if coronavirus played a role. But clearly, the great unknown that needs to be measured is the prevalence of COVID-19 among the population that is outside the medical system altogether.
Let’s say that the poll tests show that the general infection rate is, in fact, the same 1 percent as seen so far with Congress. That would mean that instead of there being 120,000 infected Americans, there are over 3 million. It would also imply a much lower lethality rate than 1.8 percent, although care must be exercised in drawing conclusions in this regard, since the deaths occurring today need to be compared against not today’s infected population but what its size was in the recent past, as there is a time lag between infections, illness, and death. Once that average time lag is assessed, the true lethality rate can be computed. This is very important, because if the lethality rate really were 1 percent, then, lacking alternatives, it could make sense to allow risky treatments that kill 0.1 percent of patients, whereas this would not hold true if lethality were only 0.01 percent.
If we can increase the nationwide random-testing rate to 5,000 per day (about twelve daily in each congressional district), then once the time lag is assessed, repeated poll testing of the population would provide predictive information about what to expect in the near future, giving advance intelligence to our defenders about how hard the enemy virus will hit us and when and where such blows will strike.
We need that intelligence if we are going to win this war. Random poll testing of the general public should begin without delay.

The Madness of Crowds

We are living through a mania. It is worse than the bitcoin mania. People that I follow and respect have succumbed to the Covid-19 madness.
Any data from China should be looked at with suspicion. South Korea is much more reliable source of nation-level data than China or Italy. We see that cases in South Korea have leveled off, which 99% are designated as “mild”.
The New England Journal of Medicine on February 28th had the most sober comment:

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggest that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968)…”

The fools in the media which extrapolate outlandish total mortalities will prove to be inaccurate. When the source of some of these outlandish claims made by media talking heads is traced back to the origin, what you find is a complete misrepresentation of the data.

Supply chain disruptions is already on the road to recover as China and other Asian manufacturing exporters go back to work.
Demand disruptions are just getting started. Corporate lawyers and insurers know the wrong move could lead to a lawsuit and cost the company millions. So to play it safe and cancel all events.

And Now Oil
Last Friday a split emerged between Saudi and Russia. Saudi slashed oil prices and demanded an increase in production. This lead to a 25% drop Sunday night in the price of oil. This was painful to watch since I am long oil. There are a few things to note about this.
First, both Russia and Saudi want higher oil prices. They just disagree on the best path forward. Second, if this truly is a feud between the two, Saudi will win. It cost them $15 a barrel to extract oil from the ground. Russia will wind up folding at some point. Saudi wants to negotiate. They need higher oil prices for the welfare state.

Central Bankers
After offering an expanded $1.5 trillion in repos, the New York Fed desk has announced Friday it is accelerating a planned $33 billion in treasury bond purchases. Since January, 15 central banks have cut rates. Monetary stimulus is coming from all directions. Boston Fed president Eric Rosengren is generally known as a hawk. He commented recently that in a crisis the Fed should be permitted to buy stocks. If you have not figured it out yet, let me be the first to tell you. Central bankers are going to print money. That is their answer to everything. Pandemic? Print. Earthquake? Print. Racism? Print. Global warming? Print. They will print until the bond market disciplines them.

What Should Be Done
I am long natural gas and oil still. Both are down big. The correction I “felt” coming has arrived. Covid-19 was the market looking for a reason to correct. But there was a lot of euphoria in stocks going into the new year. Far to many people became confident stocks could not go down. Far to many people were calling me asking me about stocks and what to buy. This is about the time a correction comes. This is why I stress the importance of taking profits. If you do not sell at a profit, you sell at a lose.
A lot of psychological and technical damage has been done. I have not deployed any cash reserves just yet. You need to see the market stabilize for a few days. The crucial point is this: There is nothing to indicate that an 08′ type financial crises is coming. Yes the airlines, cruise liners, restaurant industries will suffer. They will experience layoff’s.  Unemployment will rise for these industries. But money supply growth and credit conditions remain intact. 30% corrections are hard. Especially when they occur in a few trading days. This is why you must always have cash reserves. Whether this turns into a deceleration or just another economic scare remains to be seen. I believe it is the latter.

Free Markets Solve Problems

Credit reports do not rely on goverment force. If you do not pay your bills it goes on your credit report. No one comes to haul you off to jail. Landlords, employers, merchants and banks will just not want to do business with individuals that have bad credit. This is the free market rewarding good behavior.

How Careful You must Be

Richard Feynman was one of my favorite physicist. He was very suspicious of social sciences. He suspected, correctly, that a lot of these so called experts have not done the required work to know the subject well. From the book, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!“:

…there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.

Dear Clueless Professor

Matthew Desmond is a professor in the department of sociology at Princeton University. He has a lot in common with his contemporaries at other ivy league schools. Namely, they all can not think straight. This does not stop parents from pounding on the door to let their children into these cesspools of intellectual thought.
The New York Times is running an article by Professor Desmond about the brutality of American Capitalism. His very first paragraph shows he does not understand economics 101.

Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

Prices are a result of supply and demand. Buyer and seller meeting in the market. This is depicted in the supply and demand curves of every economic text book written in the last 100 years.  Desmond and Shkreli are both focused on the seller. The other half of the equation is the buyer. As things get more expensive people buy less of it. If the seller sets prices, why stop at $750 a pill? Why not $7,500 a pill? I own a 10 year old beat up car. I can post it online for an asking price of $1,000,000 dollars. No one would buy it. That is because I, the seller, do not set prices. The price is where the buyer and seller meet. He makes the same mistake again in the following passage:

…wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions…

The first part is a bad restatement of the iron law of wages. It was popularized by Karl Marx. He actually stole it from Ferdinand Lassalle who called it the brazen law of wages. But since Marx hated Lassalle so much, he changed brazen to iron. It has been debunked so many times and is so obviously false by general observations in the real world, that it is scary someone actually still believes it. The idea that wages in the long run get depressed until the point of a subsistence level, flies in the face of everything that is observed. If it was true, than we would all be making minimum wage right now. The fact is a small percentage of workers make minimum wage and most people do not make it for very long. They become more productive and acquire more skills. This allows them to command a higher wage. Desmond believes employers set the price of labor. However, the other side of the equation are the employees. He can not see this.
He continues:

In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.).

First, his statement that the richest 1 percent owning 40 percent of the country’s wealth implies that he believes the economy is a fixed pie of wealth. Jeff Bezos getting rich does not stop me from getting rich nor does it make me poorer. In fact, Amazon lets me buy cheaper products. It has enriched me, the consumer. For more on the fixed pie fallacy see here.
Second, I actually followed the link “live in poverty”, which takes me to the OECD website. Here is how the OECD determines the poverty rate.

The poverty rate is the ratio of the number of people (in a given age group) whose income falls below the poverty line; taken as half the median household income of the total population. It is also available by broad age group: child poverty (0-17 years old), working-age poverty and elderly poverty (66 year-olds or more). However, two countries with the same poverty rates may differ in terms of the relative income-level of the poor.

I am going to show you the absurdity of this definition by giving two examples. One is society A and the other is society B. Assume the dollar amounts have been normalized.
Society A
In society A, there exist 1,000 people. The median household income is $5,000. Half of $5,000 is $2,500. Let us say that 100 people make $2,500. This gives a ratio of 100/1000= 0.1. This 0.1 is what the OECD considers the poverty rate for society A.
Society B
In society B, there exist 1,000 people. The median household income is $500,000. Half of $500,000 is $250,000. Let us say that 100 people make $250,000. This gives a ratio of 100/1000= 0.1. This 0.1 is what the OECD considers the poverty rate for society B.

Both society A and B have the same poverty rate. Which one is better off? In fairness to the OECD, they actually cover themselves with that last statement in their definition. Professor Desmond is either incredibly stupid for using this statistic or is being intellectually dishonest.

The article is filled with sophism after sophism. It is almost impossible to read.

What Not to Do When Advertising

Third quarter earnings are being release. Procter and Gamble reported Tuesday that it wrote down the value of its Gillette brand by $8 billion dollars. Before showing the ad that played a part in this write down, I want to define the word advertising (via Wikipedia):

Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Sponsors of advertising are typically businesses wishing to promote their products or services.

The point of advertising is to sell more products. It is not to virtue signal to people who do not use your products. It is not to alienate your customers with ideological driven dribble. With this background you are ready to see ‘what not to do’ when advertising.

First, children do not shave. Why the ad talks about children bullying is beyond me.
Second, young teens that begin to shave have only one thing on their mind. This was true from the beginning of mankind. It will be true when the sun burns out. With small exceptions, men are biologicly hard wired to desire beautiful women.  This reality transcends race, ideology, culture, geography, economic class, etc.
The video has 31 million views. It has twice as many dislikes than likes. The comments section is about 90% negative. It is being called the “8 billion dollar write down”. Gillette posted this advertisement at a time when it is facing new and fierce competition from startup subscription clubs like Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s.
I do not own shares of Procter and Gamble. If I did, I would sell immediately. Management cares more about virtue signaling than the share holders. As far as I know, not a signal person has been fired over this blunder.
As a side note, the ad implies wolf whistling is bad behavior. Wolf whistling is a lighthearted way for a man to get a women’s attention. It almost never works. Men who do it are out of ideas.

The Rise of Freedom and the Decline of the State

George Orewell’s classic book, 1984, is about an omniscient government, led by Big Brother, that employs thought police to stomp out any one that does not toe the party line. In the novel, the government controls the narrative. It rewrites history as it sees fit and changes the meaning of words as needed. The idea that the western world is in decline and we are headed to this dystopian future is a popular idea across the political spectrum. Particularly among the right wing. The exact opposite is happening. Everyday that passes, we are becoming more free. First, a little history is required about Matt Drudge.

Matt Drudge
I go to the Drudge Report everyday. Even people who hate Matt Drudge go to his website. Why? Because he sets the tone of the news cycle with his headlines and the stories he links too. The other day he linked to a speech he gave to the National Press Club on June 2, 1998. The speech he gave was prophetic. It is also an interesting story about how he started. His father thought Matt was stuck in a rut. So he flew to Hollywood and winded up buying him a computer. Two months later, Matt began posting news stories to the internet.

I moved on to scoops from the sound stages I had heard — Jerry Seinfeld asking for a million dollars an episode — to scoop after scoop of political things I had heard from some friends back here.
I collected a few e-mail addresses of interest. People had suggested I start a mailing list, so I collected the e-mails and set up a list called The Drudge Report. One reader turned into five, then turned into 100. And faster than you could say “I never had sex with that woman,” it was 1,000, 5,000, 100,000 people! The ensuing website practically launched itself!

He made the correct conclusion:

What’s going on here? Well, clearly there is a hunger for unedited information, absent corporate considerations. As the first guy who has made a name for himself on the Internet, I’ve been invited to more and more high-toned gatherings such as this, the last being a conference on Internet & Society and some word I couldn’t pronounce, up at Harvard a week ago. And I mention this not just to blow my own horn, but to make a point. Exalted minds — the panelists’ and the audience’s average IQ exceeds the Dow Jones — didn’t appear to have a clue what this Internet’s going to do; what we’re going to make of it, what we’re going to — what this is all going to turn into. But I have glimpses. And sometimes deep in the middle of the night I tell them to Bill Paley.

He than accurately states what the next 20 years would be:

We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be. The difference between the Internet, television and radio, magazines, newspapers is the two-way communication. The Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek like me as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal. And you would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.

Drudge became famous when he broke the Monica Lewinsky story. MSM was sitting on the story trying to keep it quite.

It certainly changed on the night of January 17th, when Newsweek spiked, at the 11th hour, a well-researched, responsibly documented piece about the President of the United States and an obscure White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. After checking with multiple sources, I ran a story about the killing of the story. According to the Los Angeles Times, people familiar with the matter said Clinton was informed Saturday night or Sunday morning The Drudge Report had posted that Lewinsky was about to erupt. For four days I had the story exclusively, and I took a lot of heat. Everyone was afraid of it until the water broke…over at The Washington Post that Wednesday, and then everyone jumped on it.

We get the usual haters and cry babies:

Now they love it too much, and I’m still taking the heat. “He’s one man out of control,” a caller warned on talk radio in Los Angeles. “There is such a built-in level of irresponsibility in everything he does,” cried First Amendment protector Floyd Abrams in a page one Wall Street Journal piece. “The notion of a Matt Drudge cyber gossip sitting next to William Safire on Meet the Press would have been unthinkable,” smacked Watergate’s Carl Bernstein in an op-ed.

The oligarchs of the media were visibly upset by this moment. They realized this was the beginning of the end for them. In their minds, stories must be carefully vetted before public consumption. Drudge than makes his most important statement of the speech:

The Internet is going to save the news business. I — I envision a — a future where there’ll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason. It’s freedom of — freedom of participation, absolutely realized.

This is exactly what happened. Anyone can pull out there phone and start recording. Any government bureaucrat that dares cross the line will wind up on YouTube. He closes with this:

I was walking the streets of Washington — the streets I grew up in — last night. Found myself in front of the Washington Post building again, looking up, this time not longingly. This time I laughed.
Let the future begin.

I go to CNN and other MSM sites once in a while. I find them amusing. Just like Drudge laughed back in 1998, I also laugh at MSM sites. Just low level conversation. The words “political hack” come to mind. They are all predicable. CNN is running a headline story now called “Dollar stores are everywhere. That’s a problem for poor Americans.” Imagine that! A store that sells cheap goods to lower class people! The outrage! The injustice!
The rest of the headlines are about Trump and how he is a this-ist and that-ist. Predicable. Boring. Below are the main points why freedom is the future.

Decentralization of Information
On February 19, 1942, FDR issued executive order 9066. Japanese, Italians and Germans living in the USA, citizens and non citizens, were relocated and incarcerated in concentration camps. Do you think such an event could take place in the USA again? I do not. By the time government officials got to the third house to drag people away, there would be a YouTube video exposing them. Can you imagine Drudge’s headline for this?
There are three things bureaucracies hate:
1- Being told what to do by other bureaucracies.
2- Funding cuts.
3- Bad publicity.
This would fall under point 3.
The gatekeepers of information have lost control of the narrative thanks to the internet. The doors have been blown off the hinges. You can start a website or podcast and write or talk about whatever you want. You do not need to go to a publisher or the FCC to get permission or be vetted. The Silicon valley giants have banned Alex Jones and others from their platforms. But trolls still post his show everyday on YouTube.

As I said before, internet censorship is not going to happen.
Government bureaucracies have been hand cuffed. A civil servant gets a job, does his 20 years and gets out. Bureaucrats are risk adverse. They do not want to risk their pension by winding up on a YouTube video that goes viral. The decentralization of information has been a death blow to states.

The Loss of Faith in Bureaucracies
Hegel praised bureaucracy as the “objective class”. He said they put the public good above its own. Max Weber said bureaucracies are the embodiment of “goal orientated rationality”. There is not a person left who believes this. In fact, just the opposite. Everyone hates going to the DMV. “Red tape” has a bad connotation. Even calling some one a bureaucrat is considered an insult. The welfare and warfare state are visible failures. People still clamor for both on some level. This contradiction exist in the minds of the voting public. What do you think is going to happen when the US government checks begin to bounce? What do you think is going to happen when the government demands more and more and they offer less and less? Complete loss of faith.

Conscription
Conscription has been brought to an end. Armed forces have become all voluntary. The Carter administration attempted to register young men as a preliminary toward possible conscription in a future emergency. It was met with resistance and abandoned. All future endeavors have failed.

Gun Laws
People who own guns for self protection on some level understand that police bureaucrats are not going to protect them. They are minutes away when seconds count. The ability to own guns was always symbolic. In a practical sense, owning guns has nothing to with resisting government oppression. It was always more of a deterrent. If the feds come to your house to take your guns and you resist, there are only two possibilities:
1- you are leaving in cuffs
2- you are leaving in a body bag.
The best thing to do is pull out your phone and start recording. Bad publicity!
Putting all that aside, gun laws everywhere are obsolete. They were made obsolete by 3D printers. Cody Wilson already fought this battle and won under the first and second amendment. People have the right to post gun designs for 3D printers online. The prints for gun designs have been copied everywhere and to millions of computer probably. As time goes on, 3D printers will get cheaper and cheaper. The reason people are not printing guns up in mass is because its cheaper and easier to buy guns legally and illegally at the moment.

The Idea of Decline In Western History
 Arthur Herman wrote the book, “The Idea of Decline in Western History.” He traces the idea of decline and what he calls “cultural pessimism.” This idea of decline predates the sixties counterculture by at least a hundred years.
The material life of people in the western world has improved dramatically. The amount of wars have been declining. Life expediency is up. Crime rates and murder rates have been on a steep decline over the past few decades. Amazingly, the public mood clashes sharply with this underlying reality. Especially from right wing people. We are not becoming less free. Orwell’s book 1984 will stay a fiction novel.

1984!

Charles Hugh Smith latest article is entitled, “Alexa, How Do We Subvert Big Tech’s Orwellian Internet-of-Things Surveillance?“. He believes the US is turning into George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia. He begins the article with the following:

Convenience is the sales pitch, but the real goal is control in service of maximizing profits and extending state power.

I am nervous already! He continues:

When every device in your life is connected to the Internet (the Internet of Things), your refrigerator will schedule an oil change for your car–or something like that–and it will be amazingly wunnerful. You’ll be able to lower the temperature of your home office while you’re stuck in a traffic jam, while your fridge orders another jar of pickles delivered to your door.
It’s all in service of convenience, the god all Americans are brainwashed to worship. Imagine the convenience of turning on the light while seated on your sofa! Mind-boggling convenience at your fingertips–and since you’re already clutching your smart phone 24/7, convenience is indeed at your fingertips.
It’s also about control, and as we lose control of everything that’s actually important in our lives, the illusion of agency/control is a compelling pitch…
The Internet of Things is indeed about control–not your control, but control over you— control of what’s marketed to you, and control of your behaviors via control of the incentives, distractions and micro-decisions that shape behavior.

This certainly sounds like I am in control. But no! It is all an illusion! You see marketing is a form of control! You didn’t know…
Reality Check: Marketing is all about satisfying the consumer. Getting information to the consumer to make better decisions and improve their lives. The algorithms “learn” what you like. This save you, the consumer, time. Time is valuable. I only want to see advertisements that might interest me. This might put me in contact with some device or piece of knowledge I never knew existed.
The internet has made the consumer more informed. The internet has made the consumer more ‘powerful’. Goods and services are all subject to a bad Yelp or Amazon review. Forty years ago this was not possible.
He continues:

The control enabled by the Internet of Things starts with persuasion and quickly slides into coercion. Since corporations and government agencies will have a complete map of your movements, purchases, consumption, communications, etc., then behavior flagged as “non-beneficial” will be flagged for “nudging nags”, while “unsanctioned” behavior will be directed to the proper authorities.
Say you’re visiting a fast-food outlet for the fourth time in a week. Your health insurance corporation has set three visits a week as a maximum, lest your poor lifestyle choices start costing them money for treatments, so you get a friendly “reminder” to lay off the fast food or make “healthier” choices off the fast food menu.
Failure to heed the “nudges” will result in higher premiums or cancelled coverage. Sorry, pal, it’s just business. Your “freedom” doesn’t extend to costing us money.

The author does not understand the nature of government bureaucracies. The NSA wants to end the mass phone data collection program. I quote , “The agency is reportedly of the view that this program, which gathers metadata on domestic text messages and phone calls, has become too burdensome to continue operating.”
The NSA collects massive amounts of data. Even if they have a sophisticated AI to analyze all this data, bureaucrats still needs to go through each flagged event. I don’t care how sophisticated this AI program is, there will still be a lot of noise.  The Boston Marathon bombing caught US government officials off guard. After the bombing congressman Peter King had this to say, “I received two top secret briefings last week on the current threat levels in the United States, and there was no evidence of this at all.”
When you are watching everyone, you are watching no one.
The same issue exist for corporations on a much smaller scale. You go to Burger King and order a #5. Is a #5 healthy or unhealthy?  Is a #5 the same in all store locations in the country? But lets say a health insurance company could collect all this data: where you eat, what you ordered and analyze it. Who would most likely buy health insurance from a company like this? People who eat healthy of course. If health insurance companies tracked all of this information they would have more knowledge. This would reduce their risk since they know what everyone is eating. I doubt anyone who ate Burger King five days a week would buy health insurance from a company like this. Why would they? They are more likely to get cheaper insurance from a company that is in the dark about the type of lifestyle they are living. It is the same with car insurance. Looking at data, car insurance companies know that younger drivers get in more accidents on average than older drivers. This is one reason car insurance is more expensive for younger drivers. But imagine car insurance companies had more information. Imagine they tracked your speed, driving habits, how often you are on the road, etc.
A new driver that did not drive often might see his car insurance price drop significantly after a few months. Where as a new driver that was always on the road during rush hour, might see his car insurance get more expensive. There will still exist a segment of the population that does not like the idea of a company tracking them in this way. Companies would still exist for these people.
He than follows his logic to its conclusion, namely, off the deep end:

Understand you’re being played and gamed 24/7; ignore all the marketing, pitches and propaganda. Make it a habit to ignore all marketing pitches, discounts, coupons, etc. Become an anti-consumer…

I do not recommend you ignore discounts. I also think it is a bad idea to throw away coupons if they actually save you money.
I would not hire Charles Hugh Smith to be my financial planner. Would you?

Inequality- The Non-problem

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos earned billions of dollars in their lifetime. By earning billions of dollars, they have made society more unequal on paper. But has this made the world better off or worse off? Everyone who buys a Microsoft computer, Apple Phone, etc. contributes to inequality. The biggest loud mouths proclaiming that inequality is a problem, own all of these devices and use all of these services. They are contributing to what they say is a big problem. Consumers vote with their wallets. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos made the world a better place.