Stoop Juice

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The Fastest Way To Build The Wall In 2019 The fastest way to build the wall and promote my bleak outlook for 2019 is to seek-out factual information that confirms my biases. I’d encourage people to read Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle to illustrate the news media’s birth through mercantilism and yellow journalism. This early playbook of blatant lies and omissions are being reenacted today by Donald Trump and his administration’s muckraking, while the 50 articles I’ve written on LinkedIn to encourage self reliance and mobilization go mostly unread.  Could this be the reason why so many well intentioned individuals who oppose the Trump administration opt for the road of least resistance?

Media

Before the printing press was invented, word of mouth was the primary source of news. Returning merchants, sailors and travelers brought news back to the mainland, and this was then picked up by peddlers and traveling merchants and spread from town to town. This transmission of news was highly unreliable, and died out with the invention of the printing press. By 1400, businessmen in Italian and German cities were compiling hand written chronicles of important news events, and circulating them to their business connections. The idea of using a printing press for this material first appeared in Germany around 1600. Magazines flourished after Napoleon left in 1815. Most were based in Paris and most emphasized literature, poetry and stories. They served religious, cultural and political communities. In times of political crisis they expressed and helped shape the views of their readership and thereby were major elements in the changing political culture. Theodore Roosevelt coined the term "muckraker" during a speech in 1906. He compared investigative reporters to the narrow-minded figure in John Bunyan's 17th-century religious fable, "The Pilgrim's Progress": the "man that could look no way but downwards, with a muckrake in his hand.” To others during the Progressive Era the term muckraker characterized reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt. They typically had large audiences in some popular magazines. Yellow journalism or press presents little or no legitimate well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.

Mercantilism

Mercantilism is the economic theory that holds that the prosperity of a nation depends upon its supply of capital, and that the global trade is unchangeable. Capital is held by the state, is increased through balance of trade. Overall, they encourage exports and discourage imports, with the use of tariffs.

The 99%

Most people have an intuitive model of cooperative behavior that stems from two linked fears, one of being taken advantage of and another of under producing for lack of opportunities. Creating a way, a path, for us to work with citizens and government in a format that eliminates the ingrained fears by understanding both supply and demand is the primary goal. On the demand side, the commons situation encourages a race to the bottom by overuse—what economists call a congested–public-good problem. On the supply side, the commons rewards free-rider behavior—removing or diminishing incentives for individual actors to invest in developing more output.The tragedy of the commons predicts only three possible outcomes. One is the sea of mud. Another is for some actor with coercive power to enforce an allocation policy on behalf of the village (the socialist/communist solution). The third is for the commons to break up as village members, fence-off bits they can defend and manage sustainably.

Building The Wall

2018 witnessed 3 government shutdowns.  Currently, the President Of The United States forced the government to shutdown insisting we build a wall on the Mexico - US boarder. The support for the wall is another example of the tragedy of the commons whereas the demand for undocumented workers in certain industries in the U.S. creates incentive for others to cross the boarder which has led to the increase in illegal residents in the United States. On the supply side, many Americans don’t know what to study in college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. The number of these useless individual increases, not through chance but by definition diminishing incentives for this group to invest in developing additional skills in higher demand or outperforming undocumented workers in low skill work. Put another way, the fastest way Americans can build the wall is by outperforming undocumented workers in low skill industries. This will discourage others looking for work from crossing the Mexican border. Past Democratic or Republican administration’s inability to address this is partly to blame for the immigration mess we have today.

The way things are

In the real world, we are not all equal and Donald Trump is the President of The United States. Access to most opportunities are subsidized by access to wealth. This is followed by how much of the sciences, engineering, technology, management and skills of labor an individual possesses coinciding with an individual's ability to learn, understand and articulate effectively these areas of study. The fourth and final step is to make the application and utilize our aptitude and abilities on things within our power. It’s also very common for people to change the narrative they tell themselves regarding economic philosophies based upon experiences, education and self interest during their lifetime. Unfortunately, there is a serious shortage of super beings in America.

The way things should be

Instead of mimicking Donald Trump’s non-virtuous approach, we should seek to make open-source cooperation sustainable similar to what happens with software programs. Part of the answer certainly lies in the fact that using software does not decrease its value. Indeed, widespread use of open-source software tends to increase its value, as users fold in their own fixes and features (code patches). In this inverse commons, the grass grows taller when it's grazed upon.That this public good cannot be degraded by overuse takes care of half of the congested–public-goods problem. It doesn't explain why open source doesn't suffer from under provision. Why don't people who know the open-source community exists universally exhibit free-rider behavior, waiting for others to do the work they need, or (if they do the work themselves) not bothering to contribute the work back into the commons?Part of the answer lies in the fact that people don't merely need solutions, they need solutions on time. It's seldom possible to predict when someone else will finish a given piece of needed work. If the payoff from fixing a bug or adding a feature is sufficient to any potential contributor, that person will dive in and do it (at which point the fact that everyone else is a free rider becomes irrelevant).Another part of the answer lies in the fact that the putative market value of small patches to a common source base is hard to capture. Being reactive by only sitting on the patch gains nothing. Indeed, it incurs a future cost—the effort involved in re-merging the patch into the source base in each new release. So the payoff from this choice is actually negative. Suppose I wrote an article that encourages people to think and the readers find it easily accessible , and suppose many readers realize my article has a monetary value; how do I collect from all those people? We all can win if we see money for what it really is, a social construct that promotes exchange through trust. To put it more positively, by writing this article I gain from the reader’s input and potential input from different groups. I also gain because others will improve on my work in the future.

The road of least resistance 

We should enable Americans to form habitual ways to meet certain needs or solve day-to-day problems instead of reading distracting tweets from the President. Tell yourself, “greatness is the perception that virtue is enough”. Unfortunately, the common person often lacks virtue, instead we avoid looking within ourselves to make self-improvements to increase our value in the free market. The weakest rebuttal to what I propose is that no market is absolutely free; a frail objection since all things exists in the margins. I advocate for capitalism by arguing the economic pendulum should swing more in the direction of the free market in order to promote a better quality of life for the masses. Ideally, we could balance our lives, with clearly defined goals and a realistic understanding of outcome. Put another way, individuals must know and understand the probability and effectiveness of their actions in order to reach their goals. I think we need to be both constructively skeptical and virtuous while helping those in need. Since gauging need is subjective, it opens up the door for misinterpretation and disagreement regarding distribution. How do we qualify, quantify and communicate an individual’s need? Who’s the agent of interpretation? These are 5 beliefs of the current administration I disagree with that should be avoided:

1. Citizens and government want different things.

2. Technique counts more than intent.

3. Solutions have inherent value (one size fits all)

4. Donald Trump ignores Methodology 

5. World - class advocacy precedes world - class Inquiry (talking before listening) or a misinformed will to power approach.