Saturday, October 4, 2014

Cab Thought 10/4/14

"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. "Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil."  - From an essay by Frédéric Bastiat in 1850, "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen"

Thomas Eric Duncan appeared at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital on September 26th, complaining of fever and abdominal pain. He had just come from West Africa. He was sent home where he incubated with his Ebola for two more days before returning to the hospital. One can only wonder if our vigilant health care system is cut from the same cloth as our vigilant Secret Service system. Put another way, are we on our own out here?

Columbia, in 1992, led the world in intentional homicides (93 per 100,000 people). The mayor of the town of Cali, a physician, looked at the problem as an epidemic and investigated it as an infection. He found nearly two-thirds of the homicides took place on weekends, usually after payday. More than half of the cases involved alcohol or happened at bars.
 
Truck driver is the number-one occupation for men in the U.S..

By measuring trace radioactive carbon in the wine, most bottles can be dated to within a year or two of the vintage.

ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl questioned President Obama’s comments during a CBS 60 Minutes interview explaining that the intelligence community had “underestimated” the strength of ISIS in Syria. “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said.
Karl then cited Former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn who warned that ISIL “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.”
Oh, well.
Wait. Weren't the intel reports the reason we originally invaded Iraq in the first place?
Oh, well.
 
 More than a hundred and ninety million children under the age of five suffer from vitamin-A deficiency. Every year, as many as half a million will go blind.

According to TheDrinksBusiness.com, the world's smallest vineyard is located in Les Amis de Farinet in Switzerland’s Valais region, and consists of just three vines. Who owns it? The Dalai Lama!

What was.....Lake Peigneur disaster?

Will automation increase unemployment? Historically the answer is "no." And one should always be cautious when one hears "This time it is different." One theory is that the concentration of automated workplace cannot survive without a buyer of the automated produced products so that the expansion of automation is inherently self-limited. Another is that the megalith of automation will result in increased, small individualism with an emphasis on uniquely human jobs and projects.
One question worth remembering: Who will be better off, the culture that resists automation or the one that adapts?

A guy named Sir Young, who was convicted of rape in Texas, was ordered to serve 250 hours of community service at a rape crisis center. Read that again, if you must.

Helpmate: from helpmeet. The existence of the synonyms helpmeet and helpmate is the result of an error compounded. God's promise to Adam in Genesis 2:18, as rendered in the King James version of the Bible (1611), was to give him "an help [helper] meet [fit or suitable] for him." The poet John Dryden's 1673 use of the phrase "help-meet for man," with a hyphen between help and meet, was one step on the way toward the establishment of the phrase "help meet" as an independent word. Another was the use of "help meet" without "for man" to mean a suitable helper, usually a spouse, as Eve had been to Adam. Despite such usages, helpmeet was not usually thought of as a word in its own right until the 19th century. Nonetheless, the phrase "help meet" probably played a role in the creation of helpmate, from help and mate, first recorded in 1715. (from the on-line dictionary)
 
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism. So said Karl Marx. A little Koran-like, don't you think?

Russia’s state-run OAO Rosneft
said a well drilled in the Kara Sea region of the Arctic Ocean with Exxon struck oil, showing the region has the potential to become one of the world’s most important crude-producing areas. I hate it when the good guys help the bad guys.

What ever happened to Penn State and the Clery Act?

Apparently there will be some debate over the legacy of Eric Holder at Justice. This goes to show how wonderfully diverse our community thinking has become. People looking at Holder's tenure can actually come to different conclusions. 
As a deputy attorney general in 1999, he recommended pardons for 14 Puerto Rican terrorists. A year later, he did the same for fugitive financier Marc Rich. Marc Rich! He then, as AG, created the Fast and Furious program that provided weapons for drug cartels for some still unexplained reason, ignored the IRS abuse and political targeting, developed a program for dealing with illegal immigrants that can only be called a non-program, became the first AG in the history of the nation to be held in criminal contempt of Congress and somehow, aided and abetted by the President of the United States, turned race into the prime focus of the country's legal system. The debate should not be over the quality of his leadership but rather whether or not the disasters he created were criminal or just stupid.
 
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-fox-applies-for-henhouse-job-and-he.html

Mike Tomlin was interviewed by Fox News lady Laura Okmin and he said this in response to her question as to whether or not he was a "player's coach:"  "It means something about my age or my race." Later on, "It's somewhat insulting." Probably wants to be AG.
 
Airstrikes against ISIS militants are a "psychological operation," not a military one, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an interview . I hate it when the crazies sound sensible.

A controversial immigration program in the U.S. called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, allows temporary relief from deportation. Since the Obama administration created the program in 2012, more than 580,000 unauthorized immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors have qualified for DACA and been given work permits that last for at least two years. Mexican consulates around the U.S. have been paying fees for some DACA applicants through a little-known program for Mexican citizens with financial need.
There is a decades-long migration trend that led to 9 percent of people born in Mexico now live in the United States.
 
The 700-year-old tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, is in a Turkish enclave in northern Syria  guarded by several dozen Turkish soldiers and perched on a manicured lawn under a Turkish flag on the banks of the Euphrates. The tomb was made Turkish territory under a treaty signed with France in 1921, when France ruled Syria. Islamic State and other Islamist groups, whose strict Salafi interpretation of Islam deems the veneration of tombs to be idolatrous, have destroyed several tombs and mosques in Syria. Ankara regards it as sovereign territory and has repeatedly made clear that it will defend the mausoleum if it is attacked. So Turkey's position with the homicidal maniacs might hinge on their ancient tomb, their disregard for the dead apparently being more important than their disregard for the living.
 
AAAAAaaaaaaannnnnndddd.....a graph:
Chart of the Day

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