This is not about gambling. Well, not in the way you might be thinking.
Gambler’s Ruin: The original meaning is that a gambler who raises his bet to a fixed fraction of bankroll when he wins, but does not reduce it when he loses, will eventually go broke, even if he has a positive expected value on each bet. Another common meaning is that a gambler with finite wealth, playing a fair game will eventually go broke against an opponent with infinite wealth.
I’ve been trying really hard to keep things civilized in my social media discourse of late. Occasionally on Twitter I’ll retweet Talib Kweli or Shaun King because these guys are speaking truth to white establishment power in the face of all kinds of racially charged nonsense. I recently engaged in political repartee on Facebook, which was a terrible mistake (because it sucked up time I didn’t really have). However, it got me really digging into a few statistical and philosophical items surrounding the 2016 elections.
It started out looking like this (all verbatim, errors included):
RANDOM FRIEND OF FRIEND (RFOF): I’m voting for Trump because he can grow the economy and rebuild the military better than any choice we’ve got.
ME: Current unemployment rate:
4.7% – it was 7.8% when President Obama took the oath in Jan. 2009.
2016 spending by the federal government (in $):
Dept of Defense – $585 Billion
Dept of Education: $215 Billion
The military is doing just fine.
Here at home, however, Johnny and Jenny still have trouble with math, reading, and finding our enemy’s destroyed country on a map. And if they manage to graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree, Johnny and Jenny will average $26,000 in student loan debt. Double that (or more) if they stick around for a master’s degree. If they’re lucky enough after graduating to also find the job they’ve aspired to through their education, maybe they’ll have that debt paid off in 5-10 years.
So I will courteously ask that you pump the brakes on the military/economy rhetoric for a second and consider that perhaps the issue isn’t that we are all actually poor and actually defenseless; perhaps we just need to learn how to do things more consciously and efficiently.
Sources:
http://www.defense.gov/News/Special-Reports/FY16-Budget
Click to access budget-factsheet.pdf
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
https://trends.collegeboard.org/student-aid/figures-tables/cumulative-debt-undergraduate-graduate-studies-time
http://time.com/money/3829776/heres-what-the-average-grad-makes-right-out-of-college/
RFOF: And the Russians weren’t impinging upon Europe, made the fake “shift” to Asia which antagonized China, all his “government” firms are bankrupt” and of course, his admin is the “most transparent” with a full-blown Kilary cover-up, but where’d they come up with that number? Our GDP remains to hover around <2% and we need to be at 4-5% to face our current threats (per every L/R Scholar) which means 5M more jobs….where’s that? Where is it?
RFOF: And I notice you quote Ash (who I’ve worked around my entire post-Army career and respect as a nuclear counter proliferation expert) and he also says we’re going to convert bullets to reconstructed penises into vaginas, give me a break. The obama has something on him, or he’d never be that dumb.
ME: You’re exactly right that we need 5M more jobs to get where we “need” to be, but it is an unattainable number. The trajectory of our current economy – and the form of our current economy, for that matter – is unsustainable.
Automation and the second industrial revolution have ensured that we must begin to think differently about what “work” looks like, how our economy operates, and what kind of role people actually have in building and maintaining it. People have to LEARN how to have real skills again – reading, writing, arithmetic, history, basic philosophy & civics, basic chemistry, biology, physics, botany, agricultural science, architecture, carpentry, basic engineering, and – most importantly – cooking. All of these things begin in the schools and continue at home.
The consumer economy of the last 60 years has always been a gambler’s ruin, waiting for the day we reached bottom and had no chips to cash in.
Bernie and Trump are both right when they say a revolution/change is coming, but their respective shifts look very different, both in process and result.
Credit, stock markets, and modern finance will all have to be reconsidered. At the rate we are going, I believe the real currency in 20 years will be fresh water, arable land, seeds, and livestock. All of this is academic if we don’t start thinking about how to live on an overpopulated planet with a shrinking habitable footprint.
So, to be fair, I put my foil hat on a little bit at the end. But… I’m comfortable with that because I believe it, even if it sounds a little fatalistic. I liked how he referred to US. Secretary of Defense Gen. Ashton Carter by his nickname – “Ash” – like they go way back to West Point or something. Maybe they do – what do I know? Remember: Random Friend of Friend.
But then things got really interesting from RFOF. He dropped this one on me:
It’s not unattainable. Next, big, manufacturing, middle class (my whole life so please don’t think I’m lecturing) move is aerospace/space (and I’m not talking about Gingrich’s dumba** “Mars Colony.” UAVs (UAS per the FAA) and returnable/reusable craft from space (Branson/Musk).
Too much for FB, but I’ll give you a dollar if you’ve heard Trump say that. Two of Killary.
It’s not even an innovation problem, it’s an export problem. So many tech regs…WE NEED LEADERSHIP, not potentates!!!!
In a Shyamalanian twist, RFOF and I are starting to agree. Despite his self-censorship, propensity for acronyms & random CAPS, and a complete lack of copy editing, I’m starting to find some common ground here. I appreciate this, and I let him know that we are finally approaching Promontory Summit.
ME: You’re right. You’re also agreeing with me by saying we need to shift away from consumer industrialism and toward durable goods. Durable goods requires raw materials, and that requires land stewardship. It also requires skills learned through education.
All of those things point to restructuring our military (smarter, more efficient – less standing army, more tactical & flexible), investing in national & state infrastructure, creating a smarter power grid that isn’t dependent on fossil fuels, improving transit systems, and believing in each other again – regardless of religion or country of origin. When we stop fearing The Other, we will start acting like neighbors again – the kind that share tools or borrow a cup of sugar or take cookies & a 6-pack of beer to the new folks across the street.
Then, wonder of wonders, it all ended cordially:
RFOF: I think, that’s a pretty cool post. I’m going to request a recess by Chairman D**** to gather my response (I didn’t use “retort” because that got “gay” after “Pulp Fiction”-no offense-not to you, don’t know you-in General). So I’ll yield my time to ROB K******** our next Congressman from Ohio, so vote for him!
Sigh. I said it ended cordially, not perfectly. Dude still managed to be both racist and homophobic in the same breath. (Seriously – when I heard Samuel L. Jackson say “well, allow me to retort!” I thought it was the coolest thing since air conditioning. Whatever, bro). Also, I don’t know this Rob fellow that’s running for Congress, so I’ve redacted his name. Our mutual friend has also been redacted (Chairman D****, above) as to save him a certain measure of embarrassment after I so thoroughly hijacked his Facebook post.
I still don’t think our economy as we know it is capable of adding 5 Million jobs. It seems more likely that 5 Million military and military-related & manufacturing jobs could shift into new manufacturing, construction and agricultural jobs. I think we need to start increasing the serious work that must be done in land management as it relates to food production. I think the credit & finance, healthcare, higher education, and insurance industries all need to be blown up and restructured in such a way that there is equity for even the lowest among us. Here’s why:
My biggest fear right now isn’t dying in America – it’s getting very sick in America and recovering so that my family & I have to face the costs.
My second biggest fear is figuring out how I will afford to send my kid to college without saddling her with crippling debt. I estimate (fairly, I think) that in 14 years, the annual cost for her to go to the same private university her mother & I went to will be somewhere around $75,000. One year, Seventy-Five Gs. That’s nonsense. Today, 13 years after I graduated, the tuition is in the high $50,000s, annually. I’m not confident that anyone could demonstrate a $30,000 difference between my educational experience and what I might get at a state school. Whose fault is that – mine? My parents for agreeing to send me there? Shall we blame my university, or perhaps, oh, Ohio State? What’s the point in even delegating blame here? There’s just one moral at the end of this – there’s gotta be a better way.
Let’s just hope we’ve still got a stack of chips in front of us when the last hand is laid down.
adam ate the city. 