Cab Thoughts 8/3/13

Every debt is ultimately paid, if not by the debtor, then eventually by the creditor.

~Jim Grant

 

 

 

While the addition of iodine to salt originally was intended to eliminate goiters caused by iodine deficiencies, a new study suggests it had an unexpected consequence: Americans gained up to 15 IQ points after iodized salt became mandatory in 1924. (This was also the period of wide spread ownership of the Model T but the Model T was not mentioned in the IQ improvement.) This "study "appeared in The National Bureau of Economic Research, an American private nonprofit research organization and the largest economics research organization in the United States. I hope this study was federally funded.

 

Natural gas-fired generation is down 13.4% in the first 5 months of 2013, compared to the same period in 2012 and coal generation is up 11%. 

 

The manager of an Illinois restaurant, 26-year-old Alexander Pera, is accused of stealing the IDs of 50 employees and customers in order to finance 15 trips to Disney World and two Disney cruises, all within a five-month period.

 

Jonathan Tepper and John Mauldin have a paper coming out that includes a savaging of economist, their forecasts and their confidence. Here are three smidgens: 1. In November of 2008, as stock markets crashed around the world, the Queen of England visited the London School of Economics to open the New Academic Building. While she was there, she listened in on academic lectures. The Queen, who studiously avoids controversy and almost never lets people know what she's actually thinking, finally asked a simple question about the financial crisis: "How come nobody could foresee it?" No one could answer her. 2. The complete minutes of the Fed's October 2007 meeting were released. Keep in mind that the recession started two months later, in December. The word recession does not appear once in the entire transcript. 3. The month the recession started, Dr. David Stockton, the Federal Reserve chief economist, presented his views to Chairman Bernanke and the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on December 11, 2007. "Overall, our forecast could admittedly be read as still painting a pretty benign picture: Despite all the financial turmoil, the economy avoids recession and, even with steeply higher prices for food and energy and a lower exchange value of the dollar, we achieve some modest edging-off of inflation."

 

“The EPR (Enhanced Performance Round)replaces the lead slug with a copper slug,” said Lt. Col. Phil Clark, product manager for small caliber ammunition in the Program Executive Officer Ammunition. “This makes the projectile environmentally-friendly..." (from the Daily Caller, on the Army's effort to make a more "green" bullet. Could these people possibly be crazier.)

 

Who was....Dimitri Mendeleev?

Higher taxation today allocates pain to wage earners now. Borrowing is a tax on future wage earners. Increasing the money supply undermines the value of debt, essentially allowing the government to renegotiate its borrowing terms without legislation or supervision.

 

Virginia Johnson has died. In the 1970's she, with her collaborator and then husband, William Masters, did basic research into sexuality and became quite well known. There techniques of investigation were always suspect--they used patients with prostitutes and evaluated sex in a lab--but, in our functional world, they did learn some things.  Of course they also had their mistakes including views that homosexual conversion therapy had a high success rate and AIDS could be contracted from toilet seats. But their real significance was in breaking moral and ethical boundaries to generate data.

hagiarchy:
(HAG-ee-ar-kee, HAY-jee-) noun: A government by holy persons. Also a place thus governed.
From Greek hagi- (holy) + -archy (rule). Earliest documented use: 1826.


If the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) had not fallen from October 2009, when unemployment hit its Great Recession peak of 10 percent, unemployment would today still be around 10 percent. Moreover, if the LFPR were held constant from its highest pre-recession level of 66.40 percent in January 2007 (when unemployment was 4.6 percent), the unemployment rate would be nearly 12 percent today.

 

Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with microbes that he examined every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass.

For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households who were living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. (Number, not percent.)

 

Golden Oldies:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/12/unasked-question-from-iraq.html

 

 

While 88% of all humans are right handed, 65% of those with autism are left handed.

 

Amy Johnson was an English aviator (1903-1941). One of the first women to gain a pilot's licence, Johnson won fame when she flew solo from Britain to Australia in 1930. Her dangerous flight took 17 days. Later she flew solo to India and Japan and became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic East to West. She volunteered to fly for The Women's Auxiliary Air Force in WW2, but her plane was shot down over the River Thames and she was killed.

 

In the late 19^th century, the French mathematical economist Léon Walras aspired to invent a physics of social behaviour that would be comparable to Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, but aimed at an economic model with evolutionary qualities. The model was complicated, assumption-heavy and purported to reach a point of unregulated equilibrium in an economic system. The problem is, of course, that these theories include elements that have not yet been discovered. Many nations include in their economies financial investments in industries whose purpose is destroying their neighbors. How does that fit into the universal stable economic system? Significant problems exist when trying to adapt evolution to other disciplines including the fact that only results matter in evolution, the dreaded competition is involved and usually exploiting a niche is ruthless.

About half of the jobs created during the first half of 2013, and a large majority of the jobs created in Q2 2013, have been part-time jobs that offer employees as little as one hour of work per week, and up to 35 hours of work.

 

China gets just 5% of its total energy from natural gas. The USA is the world's number 1 gas producer and gets 26% of its total energy from gas. Yet, China already has 1.5 million vehicles operating on natural gas, while the US has only 250,000.

 

A 12-member team has discovered a bacterium that can use arsenic to live in place of phosphorus. There are six elements associated with life in addition to phosphorus,  carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur.

 

AAAAAAaaaaaaannnnnnndddddd.......a graph: