View 479 August 13 - 19, 2007 (original) (raw)
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The Joys of Diversity
On our walk yesterday we spied a dead crow. I attempted to report it to the city health authorities. When I called the number, I got a long message in English from Mayor Villaraigosa, followed by the same message in Spanish, followed by a long wait listening to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Since I was on a cell phone with lousy reception I gave up. Roberta reported the dead bird when we got home and she could use a speaker phone. Incidentally, despite her efforts, the dead crow is still in our neighbor's driveway this morning.
Finding a dead crow is fairly unusual. The last time I saw a dead crow was some years ago, and there was a flock of 40 or so crows flying around above the body, and making a great fuss.
Actually, I have to correct that: about 5 years ago I found an injured young crow, that had probably fallen from a great height. I took it home, which took considerable nerve because more than a dozen crows attempted to stop me. They were quite aggressive in their attempt at defending the helpless youngster, and after I put the young crow in the bird cage I keep for fledglings -- we have raised about a dozen young birds, mostly linnets but also a mocking bird, a ring-neck dove, and a thrush -- after I put the young bird in a cage the others hung around to watch. Alas, the bird couldn't perch properly although it was old enough to do so, and it died.
My point being that in both cases there were many crows around, all concerned about the dead bird in one case and the dying fledgling in the other. Yesterday's crow lay on the parking strip alone. There aren't enough crows left in Studio City to form an honor guard for it.
A few years ago flocks of 30 or so were common, and in the evenings they would all fly to some common location, so that you'd see several hundred crows getting together to talk over the day's events before they dispersed at dusk. They didn't live in huge flocks, but they seem to have remembered that their ancestors once did.
No more. A dozen crows is a large flock now. They're most seen in pairs, or fours.
It's due to West Nile virus, which has become endemic in Los Angeles county, having come to the eastern United States in 1999. Precisely who brought it here is unknown, although in theory one is not supposed to be admitted to the US when carrying a virus infection. Some speculate that it came in via an infected bird. West Nile is carried by mosquitoes. It can be directly infectious as well. And, alas, it was spread by blood transfusions and organ transplants before hospitals began to screen for it in donors. Now Canada and England worry about Americans bringing in West Nile to their countries.
West Nile Virus is one consequence of diversity that might not have been prevented if we had kept the old Melting Pot concept of Americanization of all immigrants. On the other hand, one of the characteristics of American culture is cooperation with the public health authorities. It might have been caught and quarantined. It might not have been.
West Nile has been in the world a long time, and surely people infected with it have come to the US before in the past centuries. It's only recently that it got uncontrollably loose.
The United States was not built on the notion of diversity. It was build on the notion of e pluribus unum: from many we become one. You could study to become an American, and provided you did so, you would be accepted. There might be initiation rituals: "No Irish need apply"; but over time, as the Jewish police captain in Serpico says, "When I joined the force you had to have an uncircumcised shamrock between your legs to get promoted." Far from the objects of discrimination, Irish had become favored. The same happened with Italians. St. Patrick's Day Parades, Columbus Day Parades, Serbian Halls, recall those times when we celebrated our diverse origins -- but did so as part of Americana.
You could study to become an American, and over time we were becoming one. The Melting Pot worked. There was a long delay in allowing American Blacks to become part of that process, but even that was happening -- until we discovered diversity as a goal. Now the very idea of e pluribus unum is derided.
When I was a guest of Nokia in Finland a few years ago, I was introduced by the President to a Vice President: "He is a Swede who lives in Finland." It turns out that this man's family had lived in Finland for over a hundred years. At the time I thought that was odd. I suppose today it can happen here.
The United States was built on the notion of the Melting Pot: once you became an American, you were American first and your origin wasn't important. We didn't always live up to those ideals -- it took Truman and the Korean War to end segregation in the Armed Forces -- but it was the ideal. No more. We are not told to forget the Melting Pot and becoming American.
This morning the papers tell a story: in Thousand Oaks, one of the safest cities in America, a 7 year old boy named Molina was hacked to death by his mother's friend Calvin Sharp. The mother's name was Ruiz. The boy had apparently spent too much time playing video games.
Welcome to diversity.
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Hedge Funds and Black Swans
The hedge funds are crashing, and Wall Street is threatened. The story is all over the papers. It's a very old story of supposedly smart people using their "technical analysis" of the market to make predictions. When things go on as they predicted they become confident. They borrow money on their stock holdings to buy more stock. Pretty soon they are speculating on borrowed money. It's all borrowed money.
Huge sums are injected into the markets this way. It's all paper. The housing market gets huge shots of money. There's no place to put it, so people without incomes and without credit are loaned large sums. All this money goes into the housing market. The price of a house goes up, and up, and up -- my house, which I bought in 1968 for $30,000 ( a lot then; I was able to borrow 90% of that because I was a college professor with nearly perfect credit) is said to be worth more than a million dollars now. Since the market is going up, it doesn't matter if people without income buy houses on 100% interest only loans; they'll still "build equity" as the price (not value) of the house goes steadily up, and even if they default on the loan everyone will make money. They can sell out for a profit.
In 1929 people bought Insull stocks without knowing what the companies did: they knew the stocks would go up. The resulting crash was overture to the Great Depression. Too much money chasing too little of value. One of the "reforms" of that time was to limit the margins in the stock market. You couldn't play the market on borrowed money secured only by the "value" of your stocks. At least not more than 10% margins...
But the smartest people in the world, the hedge fund managers, found ways around that in recent years. The result was the housing bubble, and a new stock market bubble. We went through all this once before, with stocks valued at 100 times -- not earnings, because the company hadn't earned anything yet -- but 100 times expected earnings. I warned readers in 1998 that this couldn't be sustained for long. For a stock to be worth 100 times its earnings (let along expected earnings) would mean that it would take 100 years for the stock to earn enough to pay for itself. Thus the only way it could be worth that would be for it to go up: for earnings to go up by a factor of 10 every couple of years. But if you look at the potential market for the company's services, there was not a growth factor of 100 even if the company had no competition at all.
The result was the dot bust. We now have new bubbles, and the smartest people in the world, the hedge fund managers, are astonished that they have suddenly lost as much 30% and more of their capital value in a few weeks. Of course the capital "value" may not have been there in the first place.
And they never catch wise.
Note too that a great deal of our employment base is in the "service economy". That phrase covers a multitude of positions, many very low paid: but also a number of the glamour go-go positions, the lords of the earth as described in Tom Wolfe's novel. None of them produce anything that can be eaten, ridden, worn, or even watched for entertainment. Their entire "productivity" consists of moving numbers around and manipulating paper and electronic representations of numbers on paper. None of that has an intrinsic value: and when it stops going up, people want their money out of it, only there's nothing valuable in there to begin with, and a "market correction" is inevitable.
There was a time when "sound investment" meant creating consumable goods. Now you can travel on trains through block after block of closed factories and dead production facilities. We get our goods from overseas, and pay for them through debt.
And we never catch wise.
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Subject: Greeting Card Malware Warning -
Dr. Pournelle:
There's another "You've been sent a greeting card" spam mail making the rounds. It seems to be prolific. In some cases, it may get through spam filters.
The message includes a link to click on to get your card. Clicking on the link will result in an attempt to download a virus on your computer.
If your anti-virus is current, it should block the viral install attempt. But "Safe Computing Practices" are that you should be very wary about clicking on links in emails. And greeting cards emails are a common malware-distribution technique.
My recommendation is to just delete greeting cards messages.
Regards, Rick Hellewell
For what it's worth, I just delete all those as well, even though I am pretty sure some of them actually come from people who mean well. But they scare me.