Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Cab Thoughts 5/22/13

The key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.'--Peter Lynch


Amazon's U.K. unit racked up sales of $6.5 billion last year, but only paid $3.7 million in corporate taxes (which is nearly as much as it received in government grants). Why does Amazon.co.uk pay so little? Reuters says it's because "all sales to British customers are routed through a Luxembourg affiliate, Amazon EU Sarl."

Camouflage: From a combination of the Italian word camuffare (to disguise) and the French word camouflet (puff of smoke), describing a common practice among thieves: staging an attractive woman who would blow smoke in the face of an intended target, which was both sexually suggestive at the time and distracting enough that the thief could snag the victim's wallet.

Last week, the mother of a seventh-grader in Northville, Mich., filed a complaint seeking to keep an unexpurgated version of Anne Frank's Diary off of middle school shelves because she felt a passage describing the female genitalia was "pornographic." But a review committee has decided to keep the book in the curriculum. Glen Ellyn School District 41, an Illinois school district, has banned the young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower from its library and classrooms after parents complained about its discussions of sex and drug use.

Freedom of the press has emerged as the crucial individual freedom because it seems the press is the only source of information the administration has.

The American Heart Association officially announced that people who owned pets, particularly dogs, appeared to have a reduced risk of heart disease and had better survival rates than those without pets.

"An authority I respect has put it this way: China's model of growth is to spend 100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP. Environmental degradation, moral collapse, the polarization of rich and poor, pervasive corruption -- all these things are constantly exacerbating the contradictions in Chinese society. More and more we hear of mass protests in which hundreds or even thousands of people will burst into a government compound, smashing up cars and setting fire to buildings....life in the Mao era was impoverished and restrictive, there was no widespread, cruel competition to survive, just empty class struggle, for actually there were no classes to speak of in those days and so struggle mostly took the form of sloganeering and not much else. People then were on an equal level, all alike in their frugal lifestyles; as long as you didn't stick your neck out, you could get through life quite uneventfully....In China today there have emerged real classes and real class conflict."--Yu Hua, China in Ten Words


Now this is reassuring. FirstEnergy: A lemonade pitcher containing two goldfish swimming in radioactive water was found in a steam tunnel at its Perry nuclear plant. Just two months ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report highlighting security vulnerabilities of the tunnels at FirstEnergy's Perry plant. Or this. An elderly nun and two peace activists, armed with flashlights and a bolt cutter, approached the fence at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and cut their way through the fence, fully expecting to be arrested on the spot. Instead, they walked nearly a mile, cutting through four fences in all, breaching what was supposed to be the most tightly secured uranium processing and storage facility in the country.

Sell in May and go away: If you had invested $10,000 in the Dow in 1950 and only kept the money in stocks from November through April, you would have had $684,073 as of the end of 2011. If you reversed the strategy and invested for the May-October period, you would have lost $1,024 over the same 61-year period. The positive return is a compound ROI of 7.17%. The negative is -22%.

The psychic business is a $2 billion industry in the U.S..

Who was....... Mehmet Ali Agca?

Latin script -- the everyday alphabet of today's Western world -- evolved from Greek letters, which  themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew. British archaeologist Flinder Petrie--and more importantly his wife--found a written language in the western Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim they dated from 1400 B.C.. Egyptologist Alan Gardiner realized that the Petries had actually stumbled across the origin of the alphabet, or something very close to it. Authorities believe that the proto-Semitic inscriptions the Petries first found at Serabit derived from Egyptian hieratic or hieroglyphic writing, perhaps to communicate with non-literate miners. ("Hieratic" means "priestly" as the writing was limited to use by priests.)

Golden Oldie:

A worker is about 10 times more likely to die on the job in North Dakota than in New Hampshire. North Dakota's workplace fatality rate is more than 3 times greater than the national average.

The Justice Department says Apple took the lead in an ebook price-fixing ring with five major publishing houses, according to a court filing Tuesday. The houses — Penguin, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette — have all agreed to settle, but Apple is scheduled to go to trial June 3.

Hiring disabled people to pose as family members can get your kids to the front of the line at Disney. The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.

"He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to ... cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."--House Judiciary Committee's Articles of Impeachment, July 29, 1074. Using the IRS for political purposes is not an embarrassment. Nor is it incompetent. It is a serious crime. The integrity of these agencies is a crucial distinction between us and the multiple creepy despotic governments that come, stay for a long time and reshuffle themselves.

Amazon debuted a virtual currency called "Amazon Coins" on Monday. The coins can be used to buy apps in Amazon's Appstore and on Kindle Fire. A dollar will get you 100 of the new coins, though the Internet retailer will discount coins bought in bulk.

A poll by the University of Michigan and Mullenberg College finds an amazing 68% support "strongly" or "somewhat" a moratorium on gas drilling in Pennsylvania. Just 25% is strongly opposed to a moratorium.

The number of new biotechnology and medical device companies receiving start-up financing has now fallen to the lowest levels in 18 years, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. is the highest-earning athlete in American sports for the second straight year. The boxer is projected to make $90 million in 2013 according to Sports Illustrated's annual list released Wednesday. Miami Heat star LeBron James is a distant second at $56.5 million.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is being compared to the unburied Polyneices from Sophocles' Antigone. Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker writes: "In the end, what entitles [Polyneices] to burial has nothing to do with what side he was on — and it's worth emphasizing the play is not at all shy about enumerating the horrors the dead man intended to perpetrate on the city, his own city, the pillage, the burning, the killing, the enslavement of the survivors — but the fact that he was a human being, anthropos." This seems to me to be an agonized answer to a question no one has asked.

Good news. The unindicted Sandlers of Golden West infamy have opened a new shop, Pro Publica. This is a non profit, NON PROFiT, organization that purports to do independent investigative journalism "in the public interest." This is a real advance because anything in the public interest would break new ground for anyone associated with Golden West. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time investigative reporters and the resulting stories are given away to news 'partners' for publication or broadcast. In some cases, reporters from both ProPublica and the news partners work together on a story. ProPublica was originally funded through the astounding financial success of the heartless and abusive Golden West Financial Corporation, where Marion and Herb Sandler were co-CEOs and co-ringleaders. ProPublica still receives half of its money from Golden West plunder.

Graphite is a form of pure carbon that is one of the softest solids known, and one of the best lubricants because the six carbon atoms that link to form a ring can slide easily over adjacent rings. Yet, if the atomic structure is changed, there is another crystalline form of pure carbon, diamond, that is one of the hardest solids known.

AAAANNNNNdddddddd.....a graph:
Chart of the Day

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