Info Bots.

I read a few years ago that one of Putin’s main advisors was a performance artist who specialised in confusion. He would do one thing then the opposite so you wouldn’t know what he’d do next. Evidence suggests Putin initially took this on board as part of his policy making. More recently it looks like he’s taken it a stage further. With the advent of multiple social media platforms confusion could be sewn directly in the minds of the west.  Bots' are automated software that send out social media messages that spawn extreme conflicting opinions. Initially false accounts place extreme opinions about for example stray dogs. Some say stray dogs are vermin to be exterminated and others that they should be homed, loved and cherished. Once seeded real people accounts favouring either extreme view are re-tweeted many times over and swamp the conversation. For the undecided it appears people are taking these two extreme views about stray dogs. They ask themselves, ‘Where do I stand?’ and choose the one that appeals to them most and join one or other of the extremes. This strategy empties the middle ground in favour of the two opposing views. The Face Book algorithm that gives you ‘what you might like’ only reinforces each side’s views. The resulting conflict gridlocks any rational progress and the factions for and against Trump and Brexit become a 50/50 split between stubborn bigots. Recent elections and interviews with supporters on both sides prove the point. So whether you’re for or against stray dogs it’s the Bots and their handlers that have won. 

17 Shot Dead.

The news said the guy was full of remorse. Why? It might seem a strange question but he wasn’t crazy, he’d just decided to do it. So how can a cognitive decision be so far from its real world consequences? In the decision process he wanted to retaliate for being expelled, for the students thinking he was a jerk, not liking him, probably like at home. Society was happy for him to buy a gun; the guy in the shop was nice to him. And no one really dies in shoot-em-ups and TV shows. They’re just acting and the blood’s CGI. Social media’s full of anger and wild conspiracies, lies and truth all mixed into a soup of confusion. He was a decent human being that didn’t deserve all this shit. So he decided. It would be a duck shoot, bam, bam, bam like Call of Duty or The Wire. Even if he got shot he’d just go back to his last saved game or use the remote. Sure in the moment he enjoyed it, all these scenarios coming together to free him from his anger. But people died, the blood was real, the cries and tears were all real. Reality impinged hard on this maze of constructs killing them like bullets. So he felt remorse. Of course he did it but his constructs are all still in the air, in the US environment, for isolated young men like him to breath in; deadly noxious fumes that can continue to cause real people to be shot dead. 

Gone in Ten Seconds.

Last night I was tasked to watch Man U v Tottenham for Mothermouse but missed the first twenty minutes. The last seventy, in fact the last eighty-nine and fifty seconds of Tottenham- glorious and Man U- pathetic would have been inexplicable without those first few seconds. Imagine a boxer vainly attempting to reassemble his brain cells after an uppercut in the first round. The fear, the confusion was palpable, the exotic spice of supremacy intoxicating: Tottenham never better, Man U, hopefully, never worse. Tottenham’s ten-second goal somehow created an instant localised zeitgeist that Jones’s glorious own goal merely confirmed. This, as with most things recently, reminded me of Brexit, the whole country v Europe, stunned by something unexpected that happened so soon after kick-off all parties never really recovered from it. May/Lukaku, lolloping round aimlessly as Kane/Barnier confidently escaped every tackle. We’re playing a shit game because neither Leave nor Remain thought we’d even be playing this fixture. Sure we’re passing and running about but somehow unsure where the goal is. And somehow like Man U we’re banking on an American Glazer special relationship buyout and hoping we can afford Thierry Henry’s transfer fee to be our new manager. So as we forgo the Premiership for League 1 remember this unholy alliance between the League of (rich white) Gentlemen and redundant Yorkshire miners may have scored from the kick off but there’s still eighty nine minutes and fifty seconds yet to play. A couple of goals and late pen should do it. 

Money Flow

It’s common place to assume a company’s main responsibility for its profitability is to its shareholders. To this end it aims to use the cheapest labour, the most economic means of production and maximise its sales. Its shareholders responding to market forces would otherwise, by accepting a lower share price, reduce the companies worth. It’s like if people don’t like you your bank balance will go down. The diagram arrows show the relative responsibilities to and from a company and in effect show the influence the parties have over each other. As the vast majority of workers work for companies these influences dominate our economy. It’s clear the wider society and the company’s labour force have far less economic influence than the Directors and shareholders. As economic influence directs money flow it’s obvious the flow is from right to left. Shareholders demand profit “or else” and directors become grossly overpaid. This ‘money pump’ is also leaving society and the labour force increasingly impoverished. Health, education, the police, defence and infrastructure are all under funded and mean employment practices abound. In the past unions plus labour laws and higher and more unavoidable taxation restricted these flows but with avoidable taxation and little union pressure they’re escalating as never before. This is gush up not trickle down economics. But what will be the result? With a failure to invest in health, education etc the work force will become poorly educated, unhealthy, stressed and demoralised, an army marching on an empty stomach. Companies, the hub of our economics, will become stranded. A neglected workforce, a diminishing home market and, as profits fall, deserted by shareholders. It’s not some moral duty that companies pay taxes and provide fair conditions of employment it’s enlightened self-interest. It’s also enlightened self-interest that governments preside over a vibrant economy and an equally vibrant society. 

Selling it from Under You.

It’s worth studying white America’s treatment of Native Americans. Through massacres and countless broken treaties it has reduced them from a viable widespread people with a rich heritage to an impoverished depressed rump rife with drugs and alcohol. It has gone on to treat its own lower reaches to the same fate, and all in the name of commercial viability. This morning my Face Book page is a long list of petitions against closures of social amenities, road schemes requiring heritage demolition, crisis in the NHS etc all in the name of commercial pressures and the need to monetise our social assets. Interspersed with these are items on mental health, pollution and plastic waste. The world corporate via the government is creating a similarly depressed, pointless and neglect-able rump that appears to be bringing its own misfortunes on itself. It is not, it’s being thrown out of society and left to fester because it can’t monetise its position. Councils, education, NHS, police, libraries and social amenities are under funded and ordered to monetise or be sold off. Socially it’s the equivalent of selling your essentials, bed, cooker, even food for a little cash in hand, and cash without sleep or food is of little use. Spend it and you have nothing, only the seller has even more. Thus it’s vital the government governs the actions and values of society to maintain its vitality, to not give fruitless handouts or allow its assets to be stripped by powerful corporations but to maintain its viability, integrity, environment and well-being. A government that does not maintain this fabric of society is in gross dereliction of its duty and my Face Book page gives ample evidence of this being the case. 

Heart Story.

The speaker continued. “So we continued looking for these brain like cells around the heart and stomach of other animals. Gorillas have more than quadruple that of humans, dogs triple and even cows have double that of humans. It appears human development has not only increased our ‘head’ brain it has decreased these other areas of brain like activity. What might that suggest? From centuries human societies have referred to ‘heart felt’ and ‘gut feeling’: We say them without thinking. But people often experience visceral emotion in their chest, existential hunger in their belly. We don’t consider them evidence of brain activity yet we readily accept a headache is evidence of mental stress. Surely if you feel it in your chest it must be happening there, not in the heart itself but in its surrounding brain. I say ‘brain like’ because we don’t experience these responses as the usual cognitive activity connected to our outward senses; they appear just an indescribable sensation.” The audience took the speaker’s pause to re-comfort themselves. “The quite recent revelation that we do have outposts of brain activity in these regions has thus far been a novelty, an unexpected quirk of evolution, possibly located to help the organs function. But what if those colloquial sayings are accurate? What if they are the seats of our experiencing of love and primal hunger?” The speaker paused again before closing the circle of his argument. “If so our findings suggest animals have retained a greater capacity to experience and evaluate these essentials of life where human evolution has consistently bread out that capacity in favour of our conscious head brain.” He looked around his audience. Most were proving his point, evaluating it no lower than their necks, finding it interesting, novel, worthy or not of consideration. “Can you imagine that gorillas experience life four times as intensely as you, that as you play with your dog he loves you three times more than you love him? That you’re simply no longer equipped to love him that much? Of course you have no way of knowing. Our most recent research has returned to the study of humans. Our non-invasive scanning techniques have shown a strong correlation between heart-brain volume and how people are perceived by others, self-perception having proved too unreliable. People experienced as empathic, loving with a rich joyful life are in the higher percentile where egotistical, uncaring types with a self-serving lifestyle are in the lower. I leave you to ponder the consequences of following this particular evolutionary path.”

The House Price Class of ‘75.

From 1952 to 1970 (18 yrs) UK house prices approximately doubled. That’s a year on year rise of 4%, slightly below inflation. In 1975 and ’79 there were two short periods of high inflation, 27% and 22%. In the thirty odd years since then inflation has dropped back to around 5%.

%		x7	x49 yrs	x42 yrs	x18 yrs
1.03		1.23	4.26	3.46	1.70
1.04		1.32	6.83	5.19	2.03
1.05		1.41	10.92	7.76	2.41
1.06		1.50	17.38	11.56	2.85
1.07		1.61	27.53	17.14	3.38
1.08		1.71	43.43	25.34	4.00
1.09		1.83	68.22	37.32	4.72

Compound interest is a strange beast. Little apparently insignificant percentage rises can accumulate to large multiples over time. In the table above over 49 years (‘70 – 2016) a yearly interest of 5% gives a multiple of 10.92 where a yearly interest of say 8% gives a multiple of 43.43. Anyone who’s had a mortgage will know one’s sensitivity to interest rates. Now banks don’t like high inflation, it devalues what they’ve got, so the late 70’s was a scary time for them. From the 50’s and before houses were bought and sold along with inflation. Like everything else they went up year by year like the rising cost of a new vacuum cleaner but something happened around 1980, something that wasn’t in peoples consciousness before, the thought of a house being an investment. House prices rose in line with the short periods of high inflation and ‘appeared’ to appreciate in value. It’s highly likely the banks stimulated or even invented this notion of your house as an investment because they must make the bulk of their profits from domestic mortgages and ‘owning an appreciating asset’ would make a great stimulus to their business. People would be willing to pay a greater percentage of their disposable income to move up the housing ladder. And so it was house price escalation took off. From ’72 to 2006 domestic house prices increased 18 fold from £10k to £180k. It got to the point people were earning more in bed than going to work. But every householder was proud of their home’s increase in value even though it only meant they were paying more and more to the banks in interest for the exact same mound of bricks and mortar. Where inflation was 5% house prices rose by around 8% per annum.

yrs		1972-2016	1952-70
house price multiple		18	2
house rise % pa		7.50%	4.00%

If they’d maintained those pre 70’s increases that 2016 £180k house would only cost around £40k. (In 2007 US banks would lend a domestic cat $100k if they could offload the consequences in a triple A junk bond) So in a way the 2008 crisis began in the 70’s and remains today in homelessness and the affordable homes crisis. And we’ve only got our own gullibility to blame.