Illusions, the end of history and perception!

Vsauce once again gives us an amazing video with thought provoking ideas and theories. Enjoy!

Mexican Hot Chocolate!

Another great video from TasteMade

Silver Slumps To $19 As Precious Metal Smackdown Continues

From Zerohedge:



The overnight session was relatively quiet as precious metals trod water while equity markets tumbled. However, as the US equity cash session looms, silver and gold are coming under renewed selling pressure (and the USD bid) in a seeming effort to provide some rotational bid to stocks into the open (just like yesterday). This is the lowest for Gold ($1218) and Silver ($19.01) since July.

The Asia close, Europe open and US open appear opportune times to dump all your precious metals...

Bitcoin vs. Gold: The Future of Money - Peter Schiff Debates Stefan Molyneux

Interesting and fun debate between Peter Schiff of EuroPac and Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio. Enjoy and remain objective!

Information Liberated: Jeffrey Tucker on How Digital Media Subverts Government Power

From Reason.tv.

The Biggest Threat to Minimum Wage Workers Everywhere

From Zerohedge: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-12/biggest-threat-minimum-wage-restaurant-workers-everywhere

Over the past year, unionized restaurant workers across numerous fast-food chains but mostly at McDonalds, expressed their dissatisfaction with compensation levels by striking at increasingly more frequent intervals - a sentiment that has been facilitated by the president himself and his ever more frequent appeals for a raise in the minimum wage. Unfortunately, as we have pointed out previously, in the context of corporations that have given up on growing the top line (as virtually all free cash goes into stock buybacks and dividends and none into growth capex), and in pursuit of a rising bottom line, employee wages are the one variable cost that corporations will touch last of all. But what's worse, these same unionized employees have zero negotiating leverage.

Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the recent strategy of smoothie retailer Jamba Juice, which in order to battle a 4% drop in Q3 same store sales has decided to radically transform its entire retailing strategy by getting rid of labor, cheap, part-time or otherwise, altogether. Presenting the biggest threat to minimum-wage restaurant workers everywhere: the JambaGo self-serve machine that just made the vast majority of Jamba's employees obsolete. Coming soon to a fast-food retailer near you.

Why did Jamba just make its retail sales force obsolete? Part of the problem is heightened competition: McDonald’s has entered the smoothie market, and others like Dairy Queen and Panera spent the summer promoting their rival drinks. Which means even less top-line growth potential. It also means that in order to push more of the top line straight to earnings, and bypass variable costs, a problem that will be faced by increasingly more corporations, Jamba's corner office had no choice but to unleash JambaGo.

Bloomberg reports:

The smoothie chain is hoping to see improvement from something it calls “JambaGo,” a self-serve machine that can be installed in cafeterias, schools, and convenience stores. Jamba Juice makes money by selling the prepackaged, pre-blended smoothie ingredients to JambaGo vendors, like a soda maker selling syrup to the owner of a soda fountain. The advantages: Jamba doesn’t need to build a store and the labor costs are much lower compared with hiring staff to concoct made-to-order drinks.

The company expects this model to help expand its brand more quickly and cheaply. Last quarter, however, revenue from the JambaGo program amounted to just about $400,000. But having recently landed a deal with Target (TGT) to put JambaGo machines in 1,000 Target Cafés, the company will soon have installed more than 1,800 machines (up from only 404 at the start of 2013). By contrast, there are currently about 850 Jamba Juice stores.

Based on a goal of $2,000 in annual revenue per JambaGo, the rough math for 1,800 machines is $3.6 million—a decent boost for a company that took in $228.8 million in revenue last year. Another 1,000 are planned for 2014, which would bring in another $2 million in annual revenue.

Here's what happens next: Jamba will do what every other company does to demonstrate that its radical strategy is successful - fudge the numbers and beat EPS for several quarters. This will happen even if JambaGo is ultimately yet another loss leader. However, its peers will watch closely and soon decide to roll out their own version of just this: a self-contained dispenser of a la carte prepared fast-food food, either liquid or solid, and in the process let go tens of thousands of their own minimum-wage employees, also known to shareholders as "costs."

What happens after that should be clear to everyone: more unemployment, lower wages for the remaining employees, worse worker morale, but even higher profits to holders of capital. And so on. Because in a world in which technology makes the unqualified worker utterely irrelevant, this is what is known as "progress."

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From Harrison Fischberg:

It is important to note the hypocrisy and more accurately, the fundamental misunderstanding in regards to economics, of the common person. Generally speaking, individuals prefer to have the best quality product, at the lowest quality price. One would be hard pressed to find an individual who would buy the exact same product at a 10 fold price increase, when the option to buy it 10 fold cheaper is available. When shopping, people search for the best deal and this is not only "proven" a priori but can be seen empirically through Cyber Monday, Black Friday and sales in general. However, the issue comes forth when people want to pay the lowest possible prices for goods, but then find it morally repugnant for a person to work below a certain wage. What they are missing however is that, A) wages are prices and B) the action of the consumer is what drives the fundamental structure. If people were happy paying 30 dollars for a meal at Burger King, then those who work for BK most certainly could receive a higher wage. However, this simply isn't the case since there are other options to BK and the competition for best product, at the best price, will force BK to lower its prices as well as the wage they pay out. When the consumer realizes that it is they who form and orient the market, will things sort out. But until then, the call for government intervention will not fix a thing, leading companies to move towards automated machines. This is what the consumer is actually calling for. They just don't realize it.

The Truth about Bitcoin

With another surge in price and media speculation, it would be worth your while to take a look at this objective and honest analysis of Bitcoin, presented by philosopher Stefan Molyneux.

Your Name!

More Vsauce!

Is Saving Money Bad For The Economy?

Great post from ZeroHedge on frugality and the value of thrift. Enjoy!


Submitted by Gregory Bresinger via the Ludwig von Mises Institute,

Our grandparents believed in the value of thrift, but many of their grandchildren don’t.

That’s because cultural and economic values have changed dramatically over the last generations as political and media elites have convinced many Americans that saving is passé. So today, under the influence of Keynesian economists who champion government spending and high levels of consumption, thrift has been devalued.

“The growth in wealth, so far from being dependent on the abstinence [savings] of the rich, as is commonly supposed, is more likely to be impeded by it,” according to John Maynard Keynes’sThe General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

“The more virtuous we are, the more determinedly thrifty, the more obstinately orthodox in our national and personal finance, the more incomes will have to fall,” he writes. “Saving,” Keynes wrote in his Treatise on Money, “is the act of the individual consumer and consists in the negative act of refraining from spending the whole of his current income on consumption.”

But saving, pace Keynes, isn’t “negative.” It is deferred consumption. “The great producing countries are the great consuming countries,” writes Benjamin Anderson in Economics and the Public Welfare. More importantly, high rates of savings will lead to higher productivity, which would benefit our children and grandchildren, classical and Austrian economists have explained.

“We are the lucky heirs of our fathers and forefathers whose saving has accumulated the capital goods with the aid of which we are working today,” wrote Ludwig von Mises inHuman Action. Saving, ultimately, is consumption, writes Detley S. Schlichter in Paper Money Collapse. “By setting aside some resources for meeting financial consumption needs, we invest them.”

Nevertheless, Keynesian ideas dominate the Obama administration and mass media. Most politicians, including Republicans who often pretend to be friends of thrift and self-improvement, are tacit or overt Keynesians. That’s because politicians, whether they have studied Keynes or not, generally love the idea of cheap money. Most delight in spending taxpayer dollars. They believe this is the way elections are won.

This Keynesian dominance has led to dramatic economic and cultural changes. These changes have been going on in America for over a half century. For instance, the United States has gone from a nation with one of the highest rates of savings during the 20s to having one of the lowest rates among major industrial nations today.

Yet penalizing thrift, the lifeblood of job creation and better tools that make current workers more efficient, has hurt the nation’s ability to grow and employ millions of young people looking for jobs. That’s because Keynesianism, according to its modern interpreters, amounts to a celebration of consumption. It is a belief that government spending combined with low savings rates lead to permanent booms.

It is the government’s role, Keynes’s followers believe, to keep the boom going through spending. So it is consumption, not supply, that makes a successful economy, they say.

Mainstream media rehashes the message that the consumer, not the producer, is the biggest part of the economy. Politicians agree.

As the economy started to slow down in 2006, President Bush urged Americans to “go shopping more.” Newsweek, in a headline story several years ago, told Americans to “Stop Saving Now.”

This anti-saving philosophy is more than just bad macro-economics. It is the doctrine that has come to take over economic thinking, now dominated in the popular media by Keynesian economists such as Paul Krugman. In his latest book, End This Depression Now, he explains why growth rates are low. The administration hasn’t been sufficiently Keynesian enough. Obama’s stimulus, he complains, was on a “wholly inadequate scale.”

Keynesians of all stripes have constantly urged Americans, especially the government, to spend. The effect of this change has been more than numbers. It also changed how many Americans see the path to self-improvement. Joe Sixpack, the average American who once believed that through thrift, hard work and discipline he could save his way to a better life for his family, is the victim. Keynesian economists and mainstream media commentators often depict savers as selfish people.

Even the average person with his savings account, living in a Brooklyn tenement (I’m speaking of bus driver Ralph Kramden from the iconic television series The Honeymooners) must pay taxes on his measly $75 savings account. This anti-savings mentality has amazed some from nations where savings are viewed positively.

A former U.S. Commerce Secretary was asked by his Japanese counterpart in the 1970s in Pete Peterson’s book Facing Up, “please explain putting the highest taxes on what you call unearned income. We have always assumed that income from savings was the most earned of all. It is hard work to save, don’t you think?”

Tens of millions of baby boomers aren’t doing the hard work. They have little or no savings. How will Keynes and his scions’ misguided policies provide a decent standard of living for them?

America’s personal savings rate declined some 56 percent over the past 50 years from 1963-2012, according to the 2013 Economic Report of the President. The personal savings rate averaged just 3.8 percent in the decade between 2003 and 2012. That’s a big drop compared to the 1963-1972 period when it was 8.7 percent.

However, it’s worse than that. Since the end of last year, the personal savings rate has declined some more, dipping to 2.5 percent in March and April, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Even President Obama’s economic report, in documenting that savings rates are low, concedes that the recovery that began some four years ago is weak. The recovery, according to the president’s report, trails previous ones.

“From 1960 to 2007, the U.S. economy had seven recessions, and the annual rate of growth of real GDP during the 12 quarters following these recessions was 4.2 percent,” the presidential report said. “In contrast, during the 12 quarters following the trough in the second quarter of 2009, the average annual rate of growth of real GDP was 2.2 percent. After three years of recovery, the cumulative growth of real GDP was 6.3 percentage points lower than the average value for the earlier post-1960 recessions.”

Meanwhile, savers are penalized for their thrift. The Fed’s policies mean they receive almost nothing in interest.

Remarkably, President Obama, in the same report, in a move Keynes would have likely applauded, proposes to put a cap on qualified retirement plan balances. Apparently, the president agrees saving is “a negative act.”

These anti-saving policies should change, some say. A better tax code, one that promotes and doesn’t tax savings to death, will “mean more innovation, job creation and higher wages,” U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp noted when I interviewed him for an article in the New York Post.

“When workers see paychecks start to rise again,” Camp adds, “they will be better able to make decisions that best serve the financial needs of their family — including building up their savings.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean Camp and others will now reject Keynes. Plenty of Republicans— consciously or unconsciously — have shown themselves to be philosophical followers of Keynes. And Camp, working on an overhaul of the tax code, might consider a logical measure: Why not drop all taxes on a savings and investment as a way to reverse decades of destructive economic policy?

That could be the most important decision for a generation of young people without work because doesn’t generate enough capital. It could also be critical for their parents who approach a retirement with a falling standard of living.

Despite the Keynesian sentiments of much of our political and media elites, we owe it to our grandparents to re-learn the lessons of thrift.

What Color is A Mirror?

Another awesome video by Vsauce

Who owns the Moon and Property Rights

As usual, Vsauce brings us another awesome video about who owns the moon, interesting facts about ownership in space and the absurdity that lies at the heart of the UN and governments around the world, dictating intergalactic law... Maybe these folks should focus on getting planet Earth in shape before worrying about who can own what outside of our pale blue dot.

Alan Moore on the current state of being a celebrity

Time to get Bored

Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

                                                                      You Live Here

Drop Culture

A great clip by Tragedy and Hope, with message taken from Terence McKenna speech. Enjoy and be.

I Loved It... I Loved it All

Essay by Edward Abbey "I Loved it...I Loved it All" from Ned Judge on Vimeo.

A fantastic short film that shows the Arches National Park through the eyes of Ed Abbey, a thoughtful and curious man, all with a beautiful life lesson tied in. Enjoy it.
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An eight minute film essay that I co-produced and directed with Ed Abbey in 1985. At the time I was working for a network magazine show. The executive producer took me to lunch one day. He told me that he was having trouble with his son who was 18. The son thought his dad was a corporate whore. He had told his father if he had any balls at all he’d put Ed Abbey on his show. That’s why the EP was talking to me. Would I see if it was possible? I had an acquaintance who knew Ed and he passed the request along. Ed responded that he’d give it a try. He signed the contract and wrote a script. We met in Moab and went out to Arches National Park to shoot some practice sessions with a home video camera. We would review them at the motel in the evening. After a day or two, Ed was feeling pretty comfortable on camera so we scheduled the shoot. We were all happy with the way it went. But then we ran head-on into network reality. Roger Mudd, the show’s host, was extremely negative about putting an “eco-terrorist” on the show. The executive producer caved (his son was right about him apparently). So this Abbey essay was put on the shelf and never aired. Abbey died 3 years later in March 1989.

The Power of Conformity

The Elevator Experiment from Miguel Paulo Flores on Vimeo.
A group conformity experiment that relates to Solomon Asch's experiment.

While many of us (and the laughing audience too) believe that "I would never do such a thing!", the reality of conformity and standardization is obvious. With too wide a variation, productivity and efficiency become an issue and hampers growth (economically and socially). Because of this, we as a species have evolved within degree to conform for survival and "social" reasons. Conformity enables the human mind  to construct easy to understand concepts, from very complex and complicated realities. But with this comes the loss of spirit, the loss of individuality. So next time, when out shopping or with friends, think about this clip and ask yourself, "Are you turning around because everyone else is?"

Coffee, Capital and You!

"HERE IS YOUR CUP OF COFFEE"- Heart Coffee Roasters from shelby menzel on Vimeo.
filmed and edited by Shelby Menzel for Heart Roasters in Portland, OR.

An intriguing short film that shows fundamental aspects to the operation of the marketplace and consumer choice. A cup of coffee that one buys for 1,3 or even 5 dollars, is quite minuscule compared to what it would cost the individual per cup, if he were to do it himself. The clip shows how capital, the division of labor and market demand come together, without the need of a central planner, to provide a good desired by millions.

A short film about love, the male brain and boobies.

FLAGPOLE from Matt Kazman on Vimeo.
A serious short film.
About boners and salami nipples.

* FINALIST - 38th Student Academy Awards
* OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2011 Palm Springs International ShortFest
* OFFICIAL SELECTION - 37th Seattle International Film Festival [SIFF]
* OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2011 Austin Film Festival

written & directed by MATT KAZMAN
starring DAVID THOMPSON

Entrapenureship and Coffee

Tellason Stories: Meet Jeremy from Vertical Online on Vimeo.
In the second film for our Tellason series we're featuring Jeremy Tooker. Jeremy is a coffee craftsman and the owner of Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco. He is dedicated to sourcing the best seasonal single-farm-origin beans from around the world and coupling that with impeccable roasting. We also learned that he is a tireless entrepreneur who regularly works 60-80 hours a week in pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee.

Jeremy Tooker
http://fourbarrelcoffee.com/
http://themillsf.com

Director: Logan Kelsey
http://www.verticalonline.com

--
Stories by
http://www.tellason.com

I know Jeffery Tucker will certainly enjoy this! (http://lfb.org/)

Short story on love... and food.

Chicken or the Egg from KIMWU on Vimeo.
"Chicken or the Egg" is an offbeat romantic comedy about a pig who has an EGGdiction to eating eggs. But when he falls in love with the hottest chicken in town, he must choose what comes first... the Chicken or the Egg.


A student animated short film by Christine Kim and Elaine Wu from Ringling College of Art and Design.


Special thanks to our composer Laurent Courbier (http://www.laurentcourbier.com/fr) and our sound designer Mutante Media (http://mutantemedia.wordpress.com/)!

Enjoy!

The future will liberate

Peter Diamandis is an engineer, entrepreneur visionary and all around inspiring person. As the founder of the X-PRIZE Foundation and Singularity University, he stands at the forefront for the new wave of technological advancement coming our way. Check out the video above to catch a glimpse at our bright and abundant future.

Taco Bell and Doritos--- How to create jobs

http://www.complex.com/city-guide/2013/03/food-for-the-economy-the-doritos-locos-tacos-created-15000-jobs-in-2012

"Who would've thought that tacos would be responsible for economic growth? Not only are Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Tacos immensely popular, they also created some 15,000 new jobs last year. That's what happens when you push 375 million tacos, which is a little more than a million a day for a year."

Voluntary contracts, free association and the market once again show that with a little insight and a good marketing path, jobs can and will be created, without the need for "stimulus" and "redistribution of wealth".

Credit to Joe Satran

Can science answer moral questions?

Can science answer moral questions? Sam Harris says yes.

How to make a peanut butter and honey sandwich...in SPACE!

Awesome video showing how a PB&H sandwich is made in outer space. Just watching how things move about in outer space is awesome in and of itself.

Human Flight

4 minutes and 30 seconds...astonishing.

Fun Bubble column toy

A neat little toy shown by Tim of www.grand-illusions.com

Check out his Youtube channel Henders007 for more cool and interesting toys/gadgets. Always a pleasure to hear him talk as well.

New Highway Designs