Paradocracy

Taxpayers may blush when they learn that their $8 billion-per-year Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is hardly satisfying its purported mission of protecting the nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce .   According to a June 2015 report by the Huffington Post, the TSA has failed 95 percent of airport security tests conducted by Homeland Security. Corroborating this story, ABC News reported that undercover investigators revealed security failures at dozens of the nation's busiest airports, successfully smuggling mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials.   Oddly yet unsurprisingly, the Transportation Security Administration conveniently dismisses rules — such as the removal of shoes, belts, and jackets, the separation of laptops from luggage, and the use of bins — when these shortcuts suit their whims. One may then wonder how many of these perceived rules have spawned f

One common characteristic among those who compose emotional appeals in economics, who often cite the divide between the rich and the poor , the haves and the have-nots , is a macro-focus upon the wealth of the so-called financial elites —think about the fast-paced, commerce-driven montages of New York City —and a micro-focus upon the drudgery of individuals who live in that which is popularly accepted as poverty .  However, a micro-focus upon those who have “made it” would unequivocally invoke relatable, emotional responses from the audience, and a more sophisticated calculation of those “have-nots” would reveal that some individuals among them are wealthier than others, in ways beyond mere monetary terms, while some simply prefer the known comforts over the unknowns which are attainable only through risk: this may entail only marginal risk, but a measure of risk nonetheless.  This documentary, entitled Living on One Dollar , claims that these families are living on one dollar ea

The gender pay gap, on the whole, may after all be the consequence of the specific pressures applied to males in their unique respective roles as the anticipated providers of their respective households, an incentive buttressed by the market for courting women.  Meanwhile, women are rewarded for distinctly different traits which are not necessarily inclusive of their respective capacities to generate income for the household. The general market outcome -- that is, those discernible averages based on gender -- may spawn from the ubiquity of academically-repugnant, yet pragmatically-desirable preferences mutually expressed, desired, perpetuated and encouraged by men and women in their social conventions.

The appearance of a repetitive history — or, as Mark Twain might describe it, a rhyming refrain — may strike witnesses this way only because this is the exclusive manner in which they may individually integrate or relate the new material to already-fastened ideas of the world.  Much as it is difficult to read script not printed upon a page or to accurately interpret intentions, witnesses to history may only perceive and translate information through the lenses of prior experience and the limits of language  —  of course far removed from relevant time and circumstances in space  —  which expediently allow them to usefully yet incompletely comprehend, report and personally respond to these events.  Due to the ubiquity of such likeminded, nearly diluted and simplified conceptualizations of the world, we will often thus encounter individuals of similar, incomplete yet thematic dispositions regarding worldly affairs. Our respective incapacities to relate or digest alternative scenarios,

The brilliance of the current political structure is found in its constructive conning of lower-income individuals into paying for the salaries and benefits of persons who claim to possess the acumen and authoritative leverage to administer such positive change as to avail them overnight of their lot in life, all while perniciously extinguishing those opportunities by systematically monopolizing the funds which might otherwise be available to incentivize their creation. This is all part of the soft despotism which has palatably replaced the more blatant and physical form of slavery which is indelibly etched into the minds and texts of nearly every student of history. Let it be known that this form of slavery, more conspicuous and systematic, will surely become the next subject of great scrutiny in the annals of future texts covering this history. The counter-cycle theory of exchange proposes that the systemic means by which purchasing power, here defined as the relative

Are People Nice or Are They Playing The Game? Most perceived occasions of niceness or sympathy are rooted in a game strategy by which the participant is aiming to protect, preserve, or advance his proprietary holdings, social reputation or conscience, or his status in law, while observers only recognize the outcomes of his mental calculus without any insight into the underlying mechanical intentions. Why Do We Care What People Think? Why is it that individuals are so conditioned to seek approval, agreement, and any other offshoot of social acclaim? This predisposes calculated individuals to calculus-altering values whose unit-based relevance is surely more precisely classified upon a scale of merit, but which mystically renders itself valuable merely because the recognized source casually shares visible countenances and characteristics with counterparts who claim far greater wisdom and possess far more intimate detail in their subject matter expertise. The Fallacy of C

Decisions are not weighed or executed upon a fixed grid of values; rather, they are honed on an ever-focused set of comparable, relative and recognizable Boolean-style bases generated from the operable, recollected, near-replicable sets of perceptible data presented by ever-developing episodes: whether to strike the F key instead of the D key; whether to check one’s Facebook news feed, to respond to an e-mail, to drift into the kitchen for a quick snack, to hydrate, to go for a run, or to stay the course.  The reader can easily follow the train of thought which has heretofore directed the ever-comparable sets of inductively-relatable options. The controller of this vast grid is always oblivious to a near-infinite array of alternatives which might, under a variety of other circumstances, appear viable and relevant to his position.  For example, Miguel Cabrera is far less likely to consider the value of the shotgun offense while he approaches the plate at Comerica Park, while game-ti

The United States dollar has undergone quite the distortion: let's say you attend a play at the local theatre. You check your coat and receive in return an IOU stub which grants you a claim on your coat upon your departure from the theatre. Government has essentially convinced the audience that the coats are no longer of relevance here; that rather the IOUs are the most important aspect of the transaction. In fact, they become so convicted that they distribute more of these IOU claims to convince the ever-broader audience that they too are coat owners. Of course, upon leaving the theatre you recognize that you are still coatless and the weather has become no more tolerant since the government masquerade began. Remember, the United States dollar is not beneficial in and of itself, but rather in the capacity by which it enables more extensive reach in quantity and quality of goods and services to grant people the greatest pleasure, leisure, and time. The mere expansion of the quantit

Think gender discrimination (or sexism) is nearing extinction? No way! The mainstream feminist movement will never allow its Sisyphus-size rock to roll off the cliff!  Despite gender’s potentially-indefinite scale of relevance, given the not-so-controversial and even desirable positions assumed by their billions of specific representatives on either side, the controversy generator seems prepared to weather the virtuous storm of those compelling forces whose incidental consequences have long advanced more gender-blind, merit-based dynamics in the general marketplace. These phenomena are evident at both the macro and micro level, across esteemed roles in public and corporate office, shared household duties, and academic and athletic achievement. Of course, there exists plenty of idiosyncratic disparities between specific households, cultures, and interpersonal relationships, whereby gender often serves little more than incidence to complement the slight of hand of the statistician w

Poaching, definitionally distinct from hunting only by the artificial and abstract regulatory provisions of in-vogue parliamentary or congressional councils, strikes a largely-moral chord with its sponsors while piquing a less-prominent ecological interest in others. A cursory investigation into the history of poaching reveals a very sentimental or monopolistic refrain, whereby general assembly routinely ruled in favor of immediate public commercial or fiscal interest or its delusional counterpart of overtly-romanticized political expedience, a human anthology well-documented throughout the Oyster Wars, the Bering Sea Anti-Poaching Operations, the countless modern episodes of counterintuitive, destructive " ivory-crushing " protests, and the contemporary occasions of fines and imprisonment stemming from relatively modest, and might one dare describe it as "human" or "animalistic," demonstrations of innate survival strategy.  The major distinctions across

The Wikipedia Game is a competition encouraging participants to navigate the online encyclopedia through available URL links to discover a predetermined page. The game inherently demonstrates one of the critical facets of efficient markets, from which often spawn a series of additional frictional events: the information problem.  The information problem is a consequence of scarcity, which takes many forms and faces each person across every episode of human behavior, however momentous or trivial, inclusive of a near-infinite and ever-developing set of unique circumstances. We can therefore never properly assume that there ever exists a very bare minimum of knowledge possessed by any set or persons when confronted with a challenge.  A common folly among persons today is the intense and popular invocation of “common sense” as an embodiment of some Holy standard to be worshipped and embodied by all. Of course, there exist no such empirical or historical parameters to support the expect

There’s something remarkably impressive about the notional, theoretical compulsions which drive people to accept that other people’s money, the product of their labor, even a not-so-modest fraction of their own, ought to finance a near-infinite space of institutions, of near-infinite cost, which academically purport to advance select idealistic notions of the famed, mislabeled, and ill-defined public good while pragmatically and historically failing to ever sustainably achieve these ends, only to expend exorbitant sums of wealth in the pursuit of this great masquerade and other interests completely remote from those of the published and implied official mission. It is, of course, easy to accept the costs, as they are collectivized and distributed so as to appear negligible; thus, the costs are largely inapparent and invisible to the layman whose personal interests stretch only so far as his visible profile and reputation , his own pocketbook and his theoretical convictions and disposit

Bill Maher has recently taken a stab at supporting his favorable view of the Obama administration. He attempted this with an array of select data which might, on the surface, arouse optimism and garner applause, but upon further scrutiny would simply fail to hold. Watch the video here . I'll take this point by point. First, unemployment is a non-viable metric by which to measure the creation of wealth. Second, those figures which are today in vogue fail to capture the greater collage of employment strife facing today's laborers, including underemployment, discouraged workers, and part-time laborers. Third, the US dollar-denominated price of gas per gallon has declined by 28% while its gold-denominated price declined by a whopping 52%, indicating that the administration of Obama, Bernanke, and Yellen has corroborated a resistance to even further price declines, approximately a 24% margin. Fourth, the percentage of the insured fails to capture those costs incurred by perso

Statists in Detroit yet again rest their case on the balances of government revenues instead of recognizing that these privately-managed funds have constituted substantial growth, innovation, and renovation in the city of Detroit. This article comically and unwittingly refers to the issuance of tax credits in 2011 which enabled corporate earnings to remain with the persons who first designed the mechanisms which voluntarily, symbiotically spurred investment and development in the city. Since this very date, Dan Gilbert's Quicken Loans has doubled its volume in loans while increasing its staff by over 117%, all while the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn metropolis has experienced a per-capita GDP increase of 7%, one of the highest rates of increase across the entire nation. Admittedly, doses of quantitative easing, government-backed loans and purchases of mortgage-backed securities, and a zero-interest rate policy have combined to artificially buttress these volumes and revenues for Gilber

I am currently weighing the calculated values of an investment: the excess cost, approximately a premium of 88% over an Amazon alternative, of course excluding the relative unknown opportunity cost inherent within the expense of at least one hour of time spent otherwise, perhaps invaluably or frivolously, depending upon the lens of observation. The 88% immediate premium may indeed be justified by an enhanced experience, whether by that immediate satisfaction of time preference, a joyful commute or in-store adventure; however, those expectations would spawn from one's familiarity with the route, the type of store, the expectation of product availability and consistent quality, and the risk tolerance or appetite of the operators to retain and endure the remaining unseen or unforeseen probability of aberration: this is admittedly an ever-trivialized cost over the course of replicated exposure, yet the risks thereof remain relevant, practical signals to those market participants. I

Website Mic.com  recently released an article entitled Here's What's Happening 2 Years After This Restaurant Started Paying Workers $15 an Hour . The author of the article takes deliberate steps to create a hit piece which will generate controversy and attract views. He has effectively reduced to the absurd an example of individual, voluntary human action to suit his agenda for political reform. The author even unwittingly acknowledges the voluntary nature of this transaction, yet he will surely and conveniently ignore this facet of the narrative: "On the outskirts of Detroit, where the minimum wage is $8.15, one fast-food restaurant has been voluntarily  [emphasis added] paying its workers $15 an hour for two years, and business is thriving." In his article, the author recognizes that "The Detroit metropolitan area is still reeling from deindustrialization, with one of the worst unemployment rates in the country." He acknowledges that "slack in t