Celebrating May 17

May 17 1814, a bunch of guys declared Norway a sovereign state at a place called Eidsvold by signing a piece of paper with a set of rules that they had agreed upon among themselves. This day has been celebrated ever since as Norway's constitution day. The idea is that we are free because those guys were so brave as to make this declaration.

Even as a kid I had trouble understanding how exactly I was any freer under this constitution than I would have been under a Danish or Swedish constitution, and how is it that people in parliament are providing freedom for me? Another thing I disliked with the whole thing was that this holiday was not a holiday at all. Kids had to show up at school and take part in a parade to show everyone how happy we are to be free. But if I was free, why wasn't I free to skip school on this supposed holiday? It made no sense to me. Even back then, I was an anarchist at heart.

May 17 still gives me the shivers. Nationalists come out in force on that day. Their enthusiasm for Norway and every thing Norwegian borders on the manic, and God help you if you do anything to disturb the sanctity of that day. Whatever you do, don't cut in front of the children's parade. Cheer them on with "hip hip hurrah", and "long live the king". Only later are we having some fun, but no sour jokes about Norway, please. "Remember, Norway is the best country on the planet. The UN has declared it so on multiple occasions, so it must be true."

The fun and games after the children's parade were always entertaining, so I'm not against May 17 as such. But I very much dislike how it is, and always has been, hijacked by the most militant of nationalist enthusiasts. Why not tone the whole thing down, have some fun, and relax? That's how freedom should be celebrated, especially for people like me who aren't too fond of the state, and even less fond of state loving busy bodies.

My next Facebook post will for this reason be on May 17. I plan to post a picture of my son on our balcony, surrounded by flowers and dressed in a casual summer outfit. I may also post a picture from the lunch gathering I'm having with fellow expats here in Porto. We celebrate very much in the relaxed toned down way I prefer. Sunny and warm, as it usually is here in Porto in mid May, is again a reminder that Norway may be a nice place to live, but if you want to grow flowers on your balcony, or relax in the sun with friends, there are other places with better climate than Norway.

Oslo May 17 2010

By evelinagustafsson@live.se - Own work, Public Domain, Link

Finding Truth in Propaganda

My grandfather once told me to never believe anything written in newspaper or said on TV. Then I asked him why he read newspapers and watched the evening news, and he replied that he was merely keeping an eye on what people were talking about. His aim was not to believe what was said, but to know what was said and to make his own judgement based on that. Then he explained to me how to find truth in propaganda.

The key to finding out what's going on is to pay attention to the facts, and ignore the commentary remarks and opinions. Facts are things like people fighting in the streets, wars, stock markets, words said, etc. Opinion has to do with why people fight, who are the good guys, who are the bad guys and so on.

When we keep track of the facts, we soon find patterns that aren't specifically mentioned. We discover that Boris Johnson wasn't very ill with the plague. We discover that the vaccine can hurt our immune system, making us less able to fight new strains of the virus. We can even discover that Jupiter appears to be hollow!

The facts required to find out these things are often found in the articles themselves. The implications are left out on purpose, but the facts are there. The propaganda is rarely pure fantasy. It's generally true what's being said. But certain aspects are left out or under-communicated. We must do the reasoning ourselves, and we must sometimes connect dots between articles to get the full picture.

Sadly, most people pay more attention to opinions expressed in articles rather than the facts laid out in them. People confuse opinions with facts and end up doing stupid things as a consequence.

Guantanamo Bay detention camp

By Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy - (copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Camp_x-ray_detainees.jpg so that the image can be used on Wikinews.), Public Domain, Link

Reality, Conventions and the Market

My wife is fond of telling me that reality doesn't exist, and I always reply "... until it hits you in your face." We aren't really disagreeing on anything. The reality my wife is referring to is the idea of firm and unchanging absolutes. To the extent that such absolutes exist, they're specific to logic, maths and confined experiments. We don't live in a world in which all can be objectively know. The reality I'm referring to, on the other hand, is the continuous calculation in which we all take part, where reality unfolds with time. We can never fully know this reality because we're but a tiny part of it ourselves. However, that doesn't make it any less real. It merely makes it unknowable as a total. Bits of it can be known and understood in detail, but the totality of it is an ever-changing calculation.

Part of this ever-changing reality are the conventions of social interaction. Language is one such convention. Words have meaning that we can relate to. That's how communication is possible. Yet no single person invented language. It evolved organically into what it is today, and it continues to evolve. New words are invented. Old ones are forgotten, and many words change their meaning over time, sometimes by accident, and sometimes as a deliberate effort to subvert the meaning of words.

Street slang is spontaneous, while comities dedicated to the management of dictionaries are structured. The two are often at odds with each other, as was seen with the Blue Anon joke that was scrubbed from the Urban Dictionary because it was the wrong kind of funny.

Money is another important convention. This too evolves partly through spontaneous market action and partially through comity. The Dollar is the world reserve currency for this combination of factors. It has also evolved to become something different than it was. A dollar used to be a measure of gold. Now, it's an abstraction, limited in number by various factors, all determined by a hierarchy of bank comities, with the Federal Reserve at the top.

The evolution of money from something tangible to an abstraction has inspired the creation of alternative abstractions, namely crypto-currencies. While the origin of this idea is uncertain, we know that a large number of such currencies have evolved spontaneously over the past decade. Every one of these promise to be an asset and a potential future money. However, there is as of yet no convention. None of these currencies have been adopted as money, and there are good reasons to believe that this will never happen.

Conventions are not something that anyone can decide on. Not even a government comity can do this. At most, comities can control and direct an established convention. But the final decision is made in the market. If there is no spontaneous adoption of a proposed convention. The convention fails, and something more in tune with the wishes of market participants takes its place.

The idea that one or more crypto-currency will replace the dollar at some point is based on the false belief that "we" can define money to be whatever "we" want it to be. This sounds true. But who exactly are "we"? If this means that Paul and Peter can sit down and write a contract based on DOGE coin, then the answer is yes. Paul and Peter can use DOGE coin as money in their private contract. However, that doesn't mean that anyone outside this circle will start doing this as well. Paul and Peter using DOGE coin as money doesn't make DOGE coin money in the wider world. To become money in the real sense of the word, DOGE coin must become the convention of choice, and that's not going to happen.

It's disingenuous to claim that money is whatever "we" decide it to be. When this claim is made deliberately and publically by someone with a vested interest in the scheme, it goes beyond disingenuous and becomes fraud. When the claim is made by others its merely ignorant and silly.

Similarly, we can privately decide to be something that we're not. However, no amount of force will make our decision true. I can claim to be a young black lesbian woman trapped in the body of a 57 year old white guy, and I can force others to go along with this, provided I live in a jurisdiction where this is law. But a law made by a comity is not the same as truth. Those who think that truth can be created through law got things backwards. Law is the product of truth, and since truth isn't whatever "we" decide it to be, law isn't either. Nor is money. All of these things are decided by convention, and convention comes about in the great continuous calculation that is reality. If we ignore this fact, reality will come back, and it will hit us in our faces. Justly so, because Karma is as much a part of reality as are language, money, law and gender.

Creation of Adam

By Michelangelo - See below., Public Domain, Link

A Paint Job

My wife's apartment has a south facing wall with large windows that let in a lot of light and that allows us to see all our plants out on our balcony from inside. It's a great arrangement, except that it makes the apartment difficult to keep warm in the middle of winter. But winters are short in Portugal, so it's a problem we can live with.

Another problem is that the wood frames need to be painted every so many ears. This, we've been neglecting for too long. More than ten years have gone by without us doing anything, and the other day I discovered a whole nest of little insects living under a bit of cracked paint. When I pealed the paint away, the little black creatures, no bigger than fruit flies, came crawling out. I was for a moment afraid that these were termites of some kind, but the wood was untouched. No damage was done, but the message was clear. I better get these window frames scraped and painted before something serious happens.

Scraping and painting window frames is easy to do, but tedious work, especially for an amateur like me. A professional could do the job at least four times as fast as I can. However, I'd rather do it myself. It saves me the money, and with time to spare, I see no reason to employ somebody to do something I can do myself, even if they can do it faster than I can.

I don't know how much we would have to pay a professional to do this job, but I'm sure a professional would book it down as a full day's job, especially if I were to let him do all the associated cleaning and moving about of plants. If we further assume that the job would be done with all taxes and fees paid, we're talking a pretty big sum of money. My experience from Norway was that a skilled worker would cost me about five times my after tax take home pay as an engineer at a software company.

This means that if I spend five days scraping and painting our window frames, I'm saving money equal to my take home pay as a skilled software engineer. That's a nice little sum of money for sure. However, I expect this to take four days, so I'm saving even more relative to time spent, assuming I would have employed a painter legally. Had we made a private deal with no taxes paid, I could get the job done for half the original offer. That's how much taxes, fees and regulations cost. For every hour the painter spends on doing his work, half an hour is taken away from him by the state.

Conversely, my take home pay was less than half of what my employer paid me back in the days when I was still employed. My tax rate was more like 70%. Had it not been for the overhead of paying taxes, my take home pay would have been three times what it was. So if I had paid no taxes and the painter had paid no taxes, we would have had a situation where one day of his labour could have been paid by me for less than one day's work.

This illustrates the enormous cost of government. What should have been a deal in which I trade less than one full day of my labour for one full day of a painter's labour has been corrupted into me having to spend four days in order to get one day's work of painting done for myself. Imagine all the services we could have paid for with those three days confiscated by government.

When every five days of work translates into only one or two days of purchasing power, we cannot claim to be free. Yet, most people will still claim that government services are free, and that taxation is a great way to pay for all this free stuff, and there simply isn't any way to fix this stupidity. Nothing but frustration will come of any attempt to explain the above to people. It's a waste of time. Rather, we should note the potential hidden in tax evasion, and take advantage of this.

I found a way to reduce my taxes from more than 50% to almost nothing by rearranging my affairs, and I'm sure others can achieve similar result if they put their mind to it. With taxes relentlessly increasing, tax planning and tax evasion becomes key to survival.

Window frames in need of paint

The Problem With Great Riches and Great Fame

Bill and Melinda Gates are getting a divorce, and it appears that there's more going on than just a case of "growing apart". Melinda is said to be furious with Bill for something that happened eight years ago. Now, all of a sudden, Melinda finds the Gate-Epstein thing tasteless and a cause for a divorce. This is strange, to say the least. Clearly, something is going on below the surface.

People as rich as Bill and Melinda don't have to divorce if they tire of each other. They don't have to live in the same house. They don't have to see each other on a daily basis. They can agree to keep a distance from each other, and do their separate things. Divorce, like marriage, is a legal construct. Getting a divorce is a way to split off and protect a fortune in times of trouble, and that is the most likely reason for Melinda's sudden change of heart. There's trouble ahead for Bill, and Melinda is doing her best to distance herself from it, and save the family fortune in the process.

What exactly is going on below the surface is anybody's guess. There's no lack of skeletons in their respective closets. They've been involved in all sorts of shady businesses ranging from vaccines and vaccine passports to software and surveillance. A large number of people have been adversely affected by this, not least over the last 18 months, which makes the timing of their divorce all the more noteworthy. However, the most interesting side to this is not the details but the broad Faustian outline of the overall story. At some point, relatively early in their lives, they struck a deal with the devil.

The story is the same over and over again. It even features in the Bible. Great fame and great riches are offered in return for people's soul. Jesus was presented with this avenue. He would become the wealthiest man on the planet if he merely went along with a few changes to his doctrine. However, he rejected the offer, and in the end, he was nailed to a cross for his refusal to go along with the devil's plan. Other's are not so strong, and others still, are eager to sell their soul for any kind of benefit.

The way this works is that someone ambitious and clever comes up with a new and novel way of doing things. This is registered higher up in the hierarchy, and an agent of this hierarchy is sent out to contact this person. The agent tells the person that his or her novel product or idea has great potential, and a deal is proposed in which the person in question is offered great riches and great fame if some control is handed over to the agent and the agent's masters. The agent will also let it slip that a refusal to go along with the proposal might result in difficulties. It is in essence an offer the person in question can't very well refuse.

This agency is what the Bible refers to as the beast. It's the state and its agent is a government bureaucrat. However, the offer is not quite as black and white as it may seem. There are ways around it, because the beast is a many headed monster, often at war with itself, and not loved by anyone, including its own agents. We don't end up nailed to a cross if we decline the offer politely and roll back our ambitions sufficiently to no longer be a threat to the beast. But the problem in this is that most of us would love to be rich and famous, and rolling back our ambitions is right out painful. Almost everyone contacted by the beast will go along with the offer.

Those who refuse and stubbornly continue their project unabated, get crushed. Only those willing to scale things down and perhaps do something entirely different get away from such an encounter with both their soul and their health intact.

Once a deal is struck, the process of moral decay starts in earnest. Little by little, the state takes control of the product or idea. The original idea gets solidified and corrupted into something colossal, and the inventor, still officially the owner, is rewarded handsomely with fame and riches. He or she is also introduced to the inner circles of the state. Its inner workings and logic is revealed to the newcomer. It's made clear that everything has to do with power and coercion. Further rewards are offered to those who go along with this. The outsider has the option of becoming an insider with authority to send out agents on his or her own terms. Laws and regulations will be custom made, all to the wishes of the newly inaugurated insider.

At this point, the corruption is almost total. However, there's always some remaining unease. There's an awareness of the evil that's being done. These people are not ignorant of their own corruption, and they will try to fix it in some way, either by appearing generous or by actually being generous. They will also let a bit of truth slip out on occasions. Elon Musk called crypto a speculative asset the other day, which is interesting because he's central in the latest pump of DOGE coin. On the one hand, he lures people into this scam, and on the other hand he's warning against it. His behaviour is that of a man in conflict with himself.

The problem with the Faustian deal is that it leads to this sort of inner conflicts. Those who take it become rich and famous, but how much are they able to enjoy it? They have huge mansions and immense wealth, but every closet they open has a pile of skeletons in them. How much fun is that? Can they even sleep at night?

The Faustian deal may be better than being crushed by the beast, but it's not better than the true alternative. Once we focus on legacy rather than fame and riches, we find a way around the beast, and we find that affluence and happiness is closer at hand than most people think.

Surveillance

By CC BY-SA 3.0, Hustvedt - Own workLink

Intellectual Property Rights

There's been some debate lately about intellectual property rights on vaccines. On the one hand, there's the WHO and Biden administration pushing to waiver this right for plague related vaccines. On the other other side, there are politicians standing firm on the side of corporations.

An important thing to keep in mind when it comes to IP rights, is that there's nothing natural about them. These rights have no root in libertarian doctrine. Rather, they are inventions of government, aimed to privilege corporations at the expense of the little guy.

This can be demonstrated with an example. Let's say someone in a workshop somewhere is making copies of a popular handbag. That person is not intruding on anyone in doing this. Selling these copies to people isn't intrusive either, as long as it's clear that the bags are copies rather than originals. To sell them as originals would be fraud, and hence a violation of libertarian doctrine. But as long as everyone is informed about the origin of the copies, nobody is victim. The only supposed victim is the producers of the originals. However, this supposed victim can only enforce their supposed rights through violence towards the little guy in the workshop. Doors will have to be broken, hand bags must be confiscated, and the little guy must be arrested, fined and put in jail.

IP rights are in other words in direct opposition to property rights, and must therefore be tossed out as not belonging to libertarian doctrine. People making a living by inventing stuff and patenting them, or by writing books or making music must find other ways to protect their income than to resort to the violence of the state, and there are no lack of ways to do this. Performers can perform, and sell their recordings as originals, rather than copies. They can thus get the protection implicit in laws against fraud, and the support of fans and people looking for status. Industry can keep their production procedures secret. Authors can sell originals and orient themselves more towards performance. They can also look for sponsors.

The only entities that must rely on IP rights by necessity are large corporations, which makes it strangely amusing that corporate favourites such as the WHO and the Biden administration are backing a push to dismantle IP rights. It's as if the WHO and Biden don't understand their role in the world. They are sawing off the branch they are sitting on.

As for the liberty minded among us, we should keep out of the debate and let the big guys slog it out uninterrupted by us. As Napoleon once said: Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Smallpox vaccine

By Photo Credit: James Gathany Content Providers(s): CDC - This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library (PHIL), with identification number #2674. Note: Not all PHIL images are public domain; be sure to check copyright status and credit authors and content providers. Deutsch | English | македонски | slovenščina | +/−, Public Domain, Link

The Gold to Lumber Ratio

The price of lumber has gone up a lot lately. There's much talk about this in certain circles. Some see it as an omen of imminent hyperinflation. Others are less pessimistic, siting transitory supply chain disruptions as a possible cause. However, there's nothing stopping us from looking at a price chart ourselves to see if we can figure out what's going on.

As noted in my book on investing, long term charts should be denominated in gold, and not some fiat currency like the dollar. That's because fiat is flexible and constantly debased. The only reliable measure over long time spans is gold. Let us therefore take a look at the gold to lumber ratio.

This chart goes back to the mid 1970s, and should be read as follows:

• Peaks indicate gold strength relative to lumber
• Troughs indicate lumber strength relative to gold

Starting with recent history, we see gold strength going into year 2020, followed by a rapid reversal. This corresponds to the reversal in monetary policy by the FED that happened with the plague as an excuse. Massive amount of new dollars have been created in this time span, and it appears that lumber reacted more strongly to this deluge of dollars than did gold.

The beginning of the chart include the high inflation era of the 1970s. This started with lumber strength, but ended with gold strength relative to the dollar, and a corresponding strength relative to lumber. The money deluge back then had the same initial effect as what we've seen this past year. It remains to be seen if it also ends the same way.

What followed after 1980 was a long, orderly decline in the strength of gold relative to lumber, with a bottom in 1999, corresponding to the bottom for gold relative to the dollar.

Fair price for lumber looks to be in the 1.5 to 3.0 range, which means that lumber traded at fair price from 1982 to 1992, but traded above fair price from 1992 to 2005. There was more than a decade of easy profits in the lumber industry. But that changed quickly. After three years in the fair price range, lumber traded below fair price from 2008 to 2018.

From 2018 until today, there have been some wild price fluctuations that have brought us to the current high price for lumber at about 1.1.

The chart looks choppy at the tops and smooth at the bottoms, but this is because the chart is linear, rather than logarithmic. The tops are not more volatile than the bottoms, they merely look this way due to the way the data is presented. There's no information hidden in these details.

What we see is the cyclical nature of the lumber trade. Good years are followed by bad years. With a decade of bad years behind us, it's now reasonable to expect lumber to stay relatively expensive for up to a decade going forward. However, most of the potential for speculative profits are taken out at this point. All time high for lumber relative to gold was at 0.69 back in 1999, and lumber traded on average at about 1.0 during the golden years from 1992 to 2005. That's a mere 10% above current levels. Furthermore, there's the spectre of inflation, so gold, rather than lumber, is the better bet going forward.

2 by 4

By Swtpc6800 en:User:Swtpc6800 Michael Holley - Own work, Public Domain, Link