Feb

12

I solicit DailySpec members to write one interpretation of the phrase "ever changing cycles". Let's see what gets compiled.

My favorite one line description of what ever changing cycles are reflected most in is that the correlations of no contracts remain the same, they keep changing and often in gradual non erratic "tendency". (No please don't kill me, I didn't use the equally vague word 'trend', but only said tendency).

I also request, our generous host, the chairman of the list, and the one who coined the phrase ever changing cycles, helps elicit as many responses as he can and then shares with us his own notion of the mystical ever changing cycles.

Gibbons Burke writes: 

Two words: random walk. 

anonymous writes: 

Are the cycles ever changing?

I'm not certain, I think the cycles are always there but they get accentuated from one time to another. It is what causes them that is the great mystery which has caused me to pound my head into the wall many times late at night. That helps, occasionally I get a glimpse of something going on that is causing this.

However no clarity yet on that point.

Paul Marino writes: 

Mr. Mac, the most practical thing that you ever did in your life would be to shut yourself up for three months and read twelve hours a day at the annals of crime. Everything comes in circles – even Professor Moriarty. Jonathan Wild was the hidden force of the London criminals, to whom he sold his brains and his organization on a fifteen per cent commission. The old wheelturns, and the same spoke comes up. It's all been done before and will be again.

- Sherlock Holmes

The Valley of Fear, Arthur Conan Doyle

I see ever changing cycles inside the big cycles, demographics, interest rate regimes, etc.

The President of the Old Speculator's Club writes: 

The inability of law enforcement to police the streets effectively provided Wild with the perfect conditions in which to build his new business. Victims of theft generally had little chance of getting back what was stolen from them, let alone catching the thief. Through Wild's new service, however, owners of lost or stolen property could apply to him for help in recovering their possessions for a fee that fell below what it would cost them to replace the objects. His business proved to be extremely popular.

Wild benefited from this policy by collecting a fee every time he was able to prosecute a criminal. His office, then, essentially served as the de facto "Scotland Yard" of the day. Jonathan Wild, the man supposedly responsible for clearing the streets of criminals, was in point of fact the head of a vast criminal empire and a well-oiled criminal machine. Wild's Lost Property Office was actually a clearinghouse for stolen goods that members of his own organized gang had themselves acquired. The thieves he apprehended, supposedly for the good of the community, were fall guys; they either belonged to rival gangs, or were members of his own gang who had tried to double-cross him, quit his business, or ceased to be more valuable than the 40-pound reward given by the government for capturing and convicting a criminal.

This new [Transportation] Act gave judges the option of removing felons from the streets and jails without having to take away their lives in the process. As a side benefit, the Act seemed to offer help with the American colonies' desperate need for cheap labor. Settlers in America faced the problem of securing labor at a cheap enough price for them to grow their businesses, mainly because anyone who had sufficient means to make the trip overseas from Great Britain to start a new business in America had no intention of working for anyone else…convict transportation killed two birds with one stone: It rid the Isles of unwanted criminals and provided cheap labor for the American colonies.

A provision in the draft of his Transportation Act aimed specifically at curtailing Wild's organized criminal activities. This provision made it a crime for anyone to take a reward for returning stolen goods to their owner without at the same time capturing and giving evidence against the thief. Failure to turn in the criminal could subject the person taking the reward to the same punishment as the thief, assuming the latter was ever caught. This provision was so clearly aimed at Wild that the Transportation Act also became known as "The Jonathan Wild Act."

Since the Transportation Act made it a crime to collect a reward for returning stolen goods without turning in the perpetrator as well, Wild shielded himself by using transported convicts to return stolen goods and collect the reward from their owners. Returned convicts not only provided Wild with protection from the provision in the Transportation Act aimed directly at him, but if they ever tried to betray him, he could easily turn them in for a large reward, and they would receive an automatic death sentence.

From Bound with an Iron Chain (The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America) by Anthony Vaver


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1 Comment so far

  1. ED on February 12, 2016 4:28 pm

    Incentives change when the price structure changes, which leads to different actions and outcomes. People who don’t adapt or better yet anticipate these changes will be behind the form. The behind the form guy is looking for a fixed ticket so he is guaranteed to lose.

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