Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

@WWTH:

[I]f anything happens to cause a significant loss of jobs,

Like, say, the impending meltdown of the retail sector?

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/1737089

there will be a swift domino effect as most Americans will not have the savings to stay economically active during a period of unemployment.

Maybe I’m biased because of my loathing for Trump and the Republicans but I’ve just got that same feeling I had in the mid 2000’s where everyone was all “yay let’s spend!” and I was looking around at all the new housing developments going up and seeing the lofty real estate prices and thinking “this is not going to end well.”

You’re not the only one who saw the “dot-bomb” coming. I did too. All kinds of hugely-valued tech companies with no profits showing on their balance sheets. Something had to give. And I sensed the meltdown in ’08 in advance too — not that it would start in real estate, but that the market as a whole was in trouble. That giant spike in gas prices was one clue. No way that was sustainable. A jump in energy costs slumps everything else.

Now I’m getting that spidey-sense tingling again, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a big one. I pay more attention to real estate now, after ’08, and yes it’s unsustainable. Rents and purchase prices are out of control and out of reach for most workers. Who do they expect will buy all this new construction, or rent at these prices? An incestuous group of rich absentee-owner speculators? If they’re the only ones buying then it’s a bubble by definition. Prices that are massively inflated compared to a) costs and b) use-value implode as surely as things fall in a gravity field.

Retail is teetering on a precipice. Real estate is teetering. The stock market is massively over-inflated. I’m not sure exactly what the flashpoint will be but the economy is a tinderbox. Maybe the Fed flirting with raising interest rates, or actually doing so, will be the lit match that sets it off. Or maybe a major retailer going Chapter 11. Or it could start in the real estate sector again. All those people staying with parents rather than getting starter homes or even renting … a demand slump will eventually cause real estate prices to slip, and as soon as they slip even a little, the “investors” (speculators) will begin to bail, and that will make the bottom drop out.

But wherever it starts it will spread to all of the above and more. People who lose a bundle in real estate will sell off stocks to regain liquidity. People who lose a bundle on the stock market will sell that fancy unoccupied second house to regain liquidity. People who lose their jobs and have no savings will stop buying — so once the retail sector starts to collapse that collapse will accelerate, and goods and services companies’ stocks will be affected. A stock market slump will in turn tip some of the distressed retailers over the edge. And so forth.

I don’t think we’re looking at another 5% or even 10% “correction”. More like 20% or even 30%. It won’t just be the current bubbliness. There’s a bunch of “market correction” that’s been deferred since 2008 and the TARP bailouts. Losses never regained and papered over with bandages.

It’s Great Depression II that we can look forward to.

Which in a way is kind of interesting. The first one occurred both a) when the rich had pretty much wrested complete control over policy and made a plutocracy (the first Gilded Age) and b) there was a skyrocketing of per-capita productivity from oil-fuelled mechanization — cars, elevators, factory machines, and so forth. The same factors are present again: we have a second Gilded Age of plutocracy and there’s been a skyrocketing of per-capita productivity, this time from computers and automation.

The previous Depression was ultimately followed by a prosperous age with rising standards of living for even the working class, as the gains from productivity were finally redistributed more fairly. Perhaps that will happen again. But the really troubling thing is that pesky intervening World War, which concluded with the use of nuclear weapons in anger. If that happens again, it will likely start with those…

@Steampunked:

To ‘incentivise’ Them to get jobs.

Doesn’t work when the jobs aren’t there. Perhaps they need to think more about incentivizing the employer class to create jobs. Which giving them free money and tax breaks doesn’t do, of course. The only thing that incentivizes them to create jobs is if they expect to profit by doing so. The only reason they’d profit by doing so is if they expect to profit by raising output, thus needing to hire more workers. If they can profit easier by doing something else (stock buybacks, raising monopoly prices, getting tax cuts and handouts from the government) they still won’t. So stock buybacks must be outlawed again, monopolies broken up, and the gravy train of tax cuts and supply-side handouts to the employer class halted.

The other thing needed is demand stimulus. People who have no money because of decades of stagnant wages don’t spend unnecessarily, keeping aggregate demand low and discincentivizing increasing output.

So:
1. End stock buybacks. Make them illegal again.
2. Stop the supply-side handouts to the rich.
3. Give antitrust teeth again.
4. Give the money saved on item 2 partly to fund the enforcement of 3, but also to the people as a whole — the poorer the better, as their marginal propensity to spend is highest.

Then you will see jobs roar back into the economy, and offering better wages and benefits too. Perhaps even ones you can live on! And that will incentivize people to get jobs. 🙂

And now apparently Russian jets are buzzing American ones at crash-riskingly-close ranges, and/or vice-versa.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-navy-releases-video-russian-jet-intercept/

Did I mention geopolitics increasingly seems to be a tinderbox to me too?

Great Depression II… shiiiiiittttt

in a world with thousands of nuclear weapons, no clean water, economies whose people are totally dependent on electricity and electronics…

and we USians living with 275 million firearms, 300 million gallons of potable alcohol, a 3-day supply of food and less than a day’s medical care….

like we were taught in the grade school air raid drills, “put your head between your legs and kiss your ass ‘goodbye’ ”

ETA: @ Brony;

you said “Hello, LUCA”, and I thought Luca Cavilli-Svorza…. Though not too far off the trail!!

The LUCA thing is fascinating. I myself think it may be more closely related to the ribosome than to any larger thing (bacterium). The ribosome is the smallest unit of present life that is (nearly) a self-replicator. It can make all of its own proteins given the right RNAs, and those proteins can obviously include RNA polymerase. A small system consisting of a ribosome, a small RNA chromosome, and the RNA-duplicating molecule some RNA viruses (but not retroviruses) use, could replicate in the right environment … and a cell is the way such a combination could “put on a spacesuit” containing that environment and wander beyond it.

If there was an earlier stage still it was presumably a self-duplicating “ribozyme” RNA. Protein probably came next in that case, producing the above. Then DNA, as a way to long-term store useful RNAs — an archival format — and cell membranes, in that order or the other.

Besides ribosomes, especially those in bacteria and archaea, the other likely place to find clues to such things is in those RNA viruses that do not use or produce DNA at any point.

P.S. You guys might want to tune in tonight’s SVU. It’s got a right wing speaker being protested who then gets assaulted.

Unfortunately, so far it looks like it might be siding with the alt-reich or else taking a “both sides” cop-out…

It’s a quarter over now but there’s a west coast broadcast three hours later, which most cable subscribers can probably get (not to mention the half or so of you who are out west). I don’t know how non-North-Americans can get it, but it’s probably going to hit the (it rhymes with Twit Warrant) sites within a few hours, for those willing to resort to that route or with no alternative from local TV companies where they are.

I’m currently listening to pop songs being borked by doggos to drown out POTUS.

Oh shit.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-it-will-be-hard-to-unify-country-without-a-major-event

Makes me worry what kind of “major event” he and/or his handlers (either Repuglicon or Russian) have planned …

Woke up later than I’d intended.

Fired up the stream for the end of the State of the Union speech.

Heard idiots chanting USA USA.

Turned it off. I’m going back to bed. Fuck that noise.

did Cheetolini do that “sponsored by” telethon scroller with names of people who gave him money?

Apparently, yes, on his campaign website’s stream. (Haven’t confirmed it myself, but saw it mentioned).

In non-Trump news: Just how anti LGBTQ do you have to be for Jamaica to ban you from entering?!

@Brony:

If I’m reading the time table right and the patterns are legit the relic in the ribosome could predate the late heavy bombardment. Did it live in a membrane?

Outer space, more likely. There’s been some mutational-clock research suggesting that the LUCA may have lived as much as 9 billion years ago — no Earth at all for the first half of that. But what I think is really telling, is that the first evidence of liquid water in the geological record is followed promptly by the first evidence of life, both at about 4GYa. Life showed up instantly once there was liquid water in sufficient abundance. That suggests it was already all around us, falling out of the sky, and the moment surface conditions allowed it to establish a toehold, it did.

Show me a world whose geological record shows it had liquid water for an eon or two before life showed up, and I’ll show you the true ancestral homeworld, where all the zillions of wrong combinations got tried before something that could self-replicate cropped up, and there was nothing already out there to drop in, colonize the place, and eat all the interesting molecules before that could happen.

So aside from the last day of summer session teaching today, I’ve been distracting myself with older Shaun videos on YouTube (again, it’s a looooong train ride home).
Today I watched Shaun’s response to Stefan M.’s rant on The Force Awakens… you know, I hadn’t seen much of S.M. actually speaking. My god is he whiny! That sneering, glaring posture! That bellow of “this is warnography!!!!” at the end, complete with laser-eyed glare ?
He managed to work the white feather cliche into it, and likened the original Death Star to both toxic masculinity, and the Female Hypergamous Welfare State, at the same time.
It was wondrous to behold.
He’s also terrible at watching movies – almost as bad as Cinema Sins. He says that Finn is perpetually horny, for example ?

In other news, I am very disappointed that there’s heavy cloud cover tonight, so we can’t really see anything of the Super Amazing Blue Blood Eclipse Moon of Awesomeness.

@ Surplus

But what I think is really telling, is that the first evidence of liquid water in the geological record is followed promptly by the first evidence of life, both at about 4GYa. Life showed up instantly once there was liquid water in sufficient abundance. That suggests it was already all around us, falling out of the sky, and the moment surface conditions allowed it to establish a toehold, it did.

Sounds like panspermia. I know Fred Hoyle has been discredited recently, and some shade thrown towards that idea as a result, but there are a LOT of organic molecules in interstellar space, assuming they survive the solar radiation on the way, it’s possible some could make it to Earth (and Titan, and Triton, and…)

@ Brony

The RNA paper link doesn’t work for me

ribosome

This one should

Fred Hoyle

“Deep space isn’t that far away. It’s only a half hour drive; if your car could go straight up.”