HWFO May 2021 Housekeeping
Memetic density, hyperinflation, UBI, MMT, and an article index
I’m eight days late pushing this article out because we are in a hyperinflation event. I wanted to write an entire article about it, but I haven’t had time because of the hyperinflation event, so the best I could put together is a meme, really.
We can use this meme to talk first about memetic information density in social media, and then about hyperinflation, so let’s bang both of those out and then post the article index at the bottom.
The Expanding Brain Meme (above) is a subtle and powerful meme format, because of it’s underlying presumptions. It first posits a hierarchy of thought from dumb to smart. Dumb people think X, smarter people think Y, even smarter people think Z, etc. It also attempts to coalesce multiple levels of online argumentation into an image frame, condensing what would be perhaps an hour of typing back and forth in an online argument into a thought that’s processed in a matter of seconds. As with all memes, the point is to convey an entire argument as quickly as possible, and as with all memes there’s no guarantee the argument is going to be right, since memes have no references, back up data, or similar. So let’s take a moment to at least explain the argument regarding hyperinflation.
The US response to Covid-19, at it’s root, was a gigantic experiment in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Universal Basic Income. (UBI) We printed 25% of the entire money supply last year, and pushed some of it out to corporations as we tend to do, but this time we also sent a bunch of it straight to people stuck in their homes hiding from germs. The arguments against MMT and UBI over the last few years were always of the following form:
But people will choose not to work if they get a basic income for free.
Then businesses will just have to raise their wages to attract workers.
But in order to do that they will have to raise their prices for everything in order to get enough money to pay the wages, and if the prices of everything go up, then the net effect of the UBI is reduced.
Price inflation isn’t so bad if everyone has more money to spend and the net purchase power of the country stays the same. We’ll just have to ease into UBI and also rearrange other things like the progressive tax system so we don’t flood the markets with cash at one time, and then the net effects of inflation won’t be so bad.
That may or may not work, but how would we know? We can’t use our country as a giant MMT/UBI experiment.
And then in 2020 we used the country as a giant MMT/UBI experiment.
The Ron Paul fan club did us no favors regarding this hyperinflation discussion over the last decades, because they kept claiming it was going to happen when it didn’t happen. They were the chicken littles of inflation, it never occurred, and the only conclusions anyone could draw from the last perhaps four decades of United States economics was that either (A) they were full of shit the whole time, or (B) those super smart people at the Fed with all their little economic knobs behind the curtain have been able to twiddle the correct knobs to avoid it. I admit to being a Ron Paul fan club guy at certain points in my life, but I also admit that every time the hyperinflation discussion came up I looked out my window to see if I could see it. I couldn’t see it. So everyone should always be skeptical of hyperinflation talk.
Shit looks very different out my window right now.
I’m an engineering consultant related to land development. I’m doing my best to double my fees and people still keep paying me. Building material prices are also doubling. Everyone I know is working past midnight every week night and can’t find people to hire, and we land ourselves in Box One of the Expanding Brain Meme above. “People don’t want to work.”
So we move to Box Two and then Box Three, which is that everyone has to raise their wages, prices, fees, and such, not only to find people to work, but as a way to manage their own workloads which have grown unmanageable. This is universal across my industry. Things are probably 20% to 30% hotter today than they were in 2007 in the run up to the land development crash that precipitated the Great Recession. It’s why I haven’t had time to write.
And then I come back to the Ron Paul Chicken Littles, and I ask myself what a hyperinflation event would look like out my window if it were happening. Very simply, everyone doubling their rates and fees as frantically as possible after the Fed increased the total money supply of the country by 25% in a single year is exactly what the early incline of hyperinflation would look like.
This is not a policy argument. This is a prepper discussion. Hyperinflation may not happen, but if it does happen, there is zero we can do about it. The evil geniuses turning knobs at the Fed have no knobs left to turn. Even if the chance of hyperinflation is down around 20%, you should still prepare for hyperinflation now, in whichever way you think you can. I prepared last October, when I bought a new home with a fixed rate mortgage and sold my old home, raking the equity and sticking it in the market. Why did I do that? Because the only people who are insulated from hyperinflation are those whos assets and incomes scale with the inflation. The people who are truly screwed are the ones on fixed incomes. The poor, those on welfare, those on Social Security, and those pulling a wage in an industry that’s not as elastic as the money supply. So I put my bank on a fixed income (my monthly mortgage payment) and I hoped to take the portion of my wealth that was my prior home equity and tie it to a more inflationary index. If you’re a gambler, you could perhaps refi your own home and pull the same trick.
And now, if you’re new to the list, here’s what we do around here.
Mission
Handwaving Freakoutery (HWFO) began as a Medium publication in 2018 primarily geared toward mathematical analysis of gun violence in the USA, examining media narratives, disproving many popular ones, and offering alternatives. As we went down this journey together, we discovered that media falsehoods are driven largely not by shadowy actors attempting to manipulate the narrative, but by market forces requiring the media to adopt false narratives for profit, both inside and outside the gun space. We later began to understand that the media behavior is connected to the evolution of culture, so we developed a framework for speaking of cultures themselves, and examined how the internet is increasing the rate of cultural evolution, how the media is connected to this rate increase, how the divergent cultures themselves are fueling the culture war, and how all of this indicative of various doomsdays.
HWFO pivoted to Substack in 2021 because Substack is way cooler for various reasons. One of the things Substack is worse at, however, is having multiple tabs where I can index articles for prior reading, grouping them by topic. So we’ll do that here, and we’ll update this post once per month as I continue to migrate Medium material over to Substack, supplementing with new articles as I go.
Subscription
This publication is and will always remain free to read, and any money earned through Substack subscriptions or Patreon will be dutifully spent on the author’s alcohol fund. But to give something back to the readers, anyone who does contribute to said alcohol fund will gain access to a private Slack server to discuss HWFO topics with other HWFO readers (and me) outside the public eye. Around 80 people are yammering away in there right now, and some of the article topics are born from these discussions. I’ll post an updated access link in a few days, as subscriber only content.
Index by Topic
General
HWFO in Other Media – an index of podcast appearances, “TV” appearances, and publications outside of the Medium, Substack, and Open Source Defense umbrellas.
So Long Medium – where we talk about the pivot from Medium to Substack.
Beautiful Death - thoughts on the passing of my father.
She Did Not Go Gently - thoughts on the passing of my wife. (this was published on Quillette)
Things Jordan Peterson’s Rehab Taught Me - a comparison between how Jordan Peterson handled his wife’s cancer and how I handled mine, and the curious connections between them.
Guns
The Gun Solution - where we fix the entire gun problem in every way that it can be fixed.
Everybody’s Lying about the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide – where we tear apart the “more guns = more deaths” monkey business with mathematics.
The Left is Making the Wrong Case on Gun Deaths – where we dive deep on the real problem with gun deaths, male suicide, and how we might fix that.
Geographic Evidence that Gun Deaths are Cultural – where we use GIS systems to show that almost everywhere where gun homicides are high, gun suicides are low, and visa versa, so “it’s the guns” is a very poor explanation of what’s going on.
The Gun Homicide Epidemic Isn’t – where we look at historical US homicide rates and show that we do not have an epidemic of gun homicides, we have an epidemic of media freakoutery about gun homicides.
The Magic Gun Evaporation Fairy – a dive into the literal impossibility of gun buybacks or gun confiscation.
Gun Buybacks Don’t Work if you Believe in Math – where we calculate how many guns you’d have to buy back to avert a homicide, and extrapolate the general case.
Real Talk about School Shootings – where we peel apart the school shooting numbers and explain how they’re a terrible thing around which to craft policy.
Doctors are Wrong about Firearm Effectiveness in Mass Shootings – where we explain that magically replacing all rifles with pistols would probably increase the body count of these things, so any focus on rifles in mass shooting policy is a red herring.
The “Sabika Sheikh Firearms Licensing and Registration Act” Fails Third Grade Math – where we perform some low effort mathematical dunking on a house rep, but raise the larger issue that the gun control crowd simply has no comprehension of how widespread gun ownership is.
Culture / Culture War
Playbook to Fight Woke School Board Takeovers - I was asked this question too many times in too short a time span, so I laid out the architecture of how to win a school board fight against a woke insurgency in article format so I wouldn’t have to keep typing it. Good luck, I moved instead.
A Detailed Look at Woke Update Mechanics - where we use the Dolezal Affair and the cancellation of Richard Dawkins to explain the most unique, intriguing, and dangerous element of the Woke program.
Social Justice is a Crowdsourced Religion - where we explain the Woke engine to nonwokes and offer some ideas the wokes could use to fix what’s broken about it.
Game Theory on the Second Civil War - where we generally work towards a way to avoid violent conflict using math and stuff.
Real Talk About Meritocracy - where we break down the ways in which the USA is, and isn’t meritocratic, while also differentiating between “meritocratic” and “fair.”
Science Says Sam Harris is Alt-Right – where we take a deep dive into how all prior political axes are being collapsed into a purely woke/antiwoke band, buttressed by a deep explainer on wokeness itself.
The Two Confusing Definitions of Racism – where we explain how difficult conversations about racism are literally impossible to have, because different groups are defining the term differently.
Explaining the Social Justice “Woke Anti-Semitism” Paradox – where we unpack certain popular Woke narratives and show that they combine to produce anti-Semitic behavior. This same analysis could be used for Asians, and explains why they’re getting a raw deal in liberal zones in 2021.
Spot the True Believer – where we use Eric Hoffer’s “mass movement” framework to explain MAGA and Woke.
Modeling the Socioeconomic Future with Dungeons and Dragons – where we use the DND character building model to explain bell curves, Charles Murray, automation, and silicon valley’s obsession with UBI.
Conversations with Black Folks about Cops – where we examine the police brutality problem from the perspective of someone on the street, instead of someone in a Critical Race Theory academy.
Stop Calling it a “Coup” – where we show how the “capital insurrection” was nothing more than a continuation of 2020 behavior, and what that portends.
Deplatforming, Sargon, MAGA Hat Kids, and the Kulturkampf – where we compare our modern culture war to prior culture wars and discover this is new dog old tricks.
Rape Math – where we try to back-calculate what the numbers probably are for use in the “not all men” discussion.
Don’t Read This – where we make mid 2020 election prognostications that turned out to be pretty on point.
The Purge Will End in Violence – where we discuss the early 2021 tech purge and what it portends in the long game.
Media Criticism
Facebook is Shiri’s Scissor - A very deep dive into how human social media is analogous to artificial neural networks in computing, how someone evil might develop such a network in order to destabilize the world, and how we’ve basically already done that by accident.
The Social Media Catastrophe - where we explain how the media is trapped in a tragedy of the commons situation which forces them to drive smartphone users insane for clicks.
The Media Engine of Chaos – where we use HWFO gun article traffic numbers from Medium to explain the root cause of all these shitty gun articles in the media, and by extension, all the other shitty articles too.
I Just Made $100 off Some Dead Kids, and That’s the Problem – where we drill even deeper into the media incentives for mass shooting coverage, and how they literally increase the odds of more mass shootings, to make them even more money.
The Long Problem – where we use the Atlanta Spa Shooter as a case study about how flawed media incentives lead to incorrect narratives.
Covid
HWFO Covid-19 After Action Report - where we dunk on everyone because of how right we were.
Want a Vaccine? Elect a Nationalist - where we explain how “me first” nationalism beats globalist cooperation within the game theory of international relations, using Covid vaccination rates as our case study.
Does the USA have the Worst Covid-19 Response? Not at All – where we compare the USA to other similar countries and discover we’re sort of middle of the road in how we’ve handled it.
Covid-19 Stands to be Done by the Summer – where we use infection rates from prisons which achieved herd immunity the hard way to predict when we’ll be done with this stuff.
Open Source Defense
I also write for OSD about guns, and some of those are worth bookmarking as well.
Gun Policy Needs a “Decision Support System” – where we mathematically determine exactly how many homicide and suicide victims the modern gun control policies would actually avert, and use that model to determine a true gun control policy compromise that includes giving back the stuff that doesn’t work.
Letter to 2020’s New Gun Owners – where we do a point by point breakdown of the entire Biden gun control platform.
Collateral Damage, Race, and the Virginia Gun Control Bill – where we show how Virginia’s attempt at an assault weapons ban actually created the opposite effect, sanctuary counties, and how its implementation will be systemically racist by necessity.
Talk to Your Kids About Guns – where we add another rule to the four rules and discuss safe storage of firearms around children.
Generally speaking, if anyone likes anything I write about guns, you should go read all the rest of the material over on OSD as well. I’m definitely not the smartest guy in the room over there.