Global Guerrillas

MEXICAN CARTEL LOGOS and BRANDING

Very corporate of them.

JOURNAL: The Education Bubble

Peter Thiel (Paypal and other ventures) has been making some waves for his position that higher education in the US is the next bubble.   In short, he's right.  Given what we now have available in terms of tools, it should be possible to get an Ivy league education for $20 a month.  

Instead we are getting a stagnant product that is so out of date that it doesn't deliver much social and economic value.  Even worse: it's undergoing hyper-inflationary price increases.

So, what should you do?  Thiel says you should refuse to participate and drop out.  Unfortunately, that's not a solution.  Just because something is vastly overpriced (like houses or stocks), it doesn't mean that it is worthless.  A degree is still valuable because it's valued in the workplace (even though it's not the golden ticket to employment anymore).  

The solution to this problem is to help create employment  opportunities (like what we are doing with our open venture start-up) that don't use a degree as a gating mechanism.  A solution that creates its own educational modules if needed (from scratch using modern tools and techniques). A solution that delivers something better than an Ivy league eduction and then backs it up with economic and social opportunities that exceed what you get in the global econonomic and social sprawl. 

Create the pull (the opportunity) and the rest will follow.

THE "JASMINE REVOLUTION"

China has been telling the world that their censorship system and state sponsored/protected copies of popular western Internet services (run by pliable Chinese "entrepreneurs") eliminated the risk of open source insurgency (like we saw in Egypt and Tunisia).  Actually, the fact that they are still delivering economic growth is the real reason (it's the only source of the government's legitimacy).  When that stops, all hell will break loose, censorship system or not.  

Regardless, it appears that the Chinese government is taking the threat of open source insurgency seriously (in particular, the speed at which a protest can form and grow).  Here's some observations from a trusted analyst in Asia.

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Dear John

I don’t know if you have been following events in China, but I think something quite interesting is happening and I would appreciate your take on it. In summary, several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This has been motivated, of course, by events in MENA, and the timing has been significant because it has coincided with two important political conferences in Beijing, but it appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.

The blogs and websites themselves are largely invisible to ordinary Chinese as the Great Firewall keeps them out, but they can be seen by the security agencies, who have been swift to react. The organizers, whoever and wherever they are, have repeatedly called on people to gather in a range of popular and public areas in the centre of major cities across China – shopping malls and university campuses – and go for a stroll every  Sunday afternoon to call for minor political change. These public areas are, at that time of day, normally filled with young people and out-of-town domestic tourists, all now potential ‘protesters’. Now, because of the number of competing and overlapping security agencies, there is a lot of pressure on the local commanders to make some arrests and to show some success, but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists. So some young tourists get beaten up and taken away, and some journalists get smacked around. This then acquires a predictable, and well understood, dynamic of its own. At the same time, the organisers have used a wide range of popular and politically ‘safe’ words to use as code words – the characters for ‘Two Conferences’ being one, which is also the political conference that occurred in Beijing at the same time. Last weekend it was the ‘Three Represents’, which was Jiang Zemin’s political thought legacy, and so on. These keywords get picked up by the censors, and all web and SMS traffic using them gets shut down or blocked – Jasmine itself is of course popular in Chinese culture and widely used in branding, but sites using ‘Jasmine’ in their copy, however innocuous, are blocked - with real-world social, political and economic consequences.

So you can see where this is going, and it shows no sign of stopping. The security forces are taking it seriously, the top leaders have come out in public to criticise the organisers for threatening social stability, and yet there is still no evidence of real-world substance to the protests, just China’s vast security apparatus chasing shadows on the streets and on the internet, and closing down large sections of China’s internet and SMS traffic. 

JOURNAL: Oil >$100 Crunch time ahead (again)?

The last time the price of oil topped $100 a barrel for an extended period, we ended up in a global financial meltdown.  Is this time any different?

Not much.  

All of the excessively financial leverage and fraudelent derivative wealth we had during the last melt down is still in place.  Total debt to GDP levels in the US are about the same (370% of GDP or so).  No reforms were made on Wall Street.  Nobody at fault for the fraud that led to the last melt down went to jail, so behaviors haven't changed. 

We're worse off than before.  Median incomes in the developed countries continue their steady decline.  Assets are depleted from the last meltdown.  Any hike in gas prices will hit the incomes of the average person like a sledge hammer (particularly when people already spend nearly 20% of pretax income on cars!).  

The list goes on and on.  So, what's your bet?

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This is classic Tainter (the excellent anthropoligist/historian).  He posited that complex societies only collapse when the costs of basic inputs increase at the same time the returns on investments in complex institutions/etc. turn negative. So, with oil going up again, we are seeing basic input costs rise.   It's also clear that our twin overheads Government and Global Finance are well past the point they delivered positive returns for additional complexity.  Worse, they are colluding, via cronyism, to prevent any meaningful changes.  

Good luck.