Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Cab Thoughts 10/29/14

"To get profit without risk, experience without danger, and reward without work, is as impossible as it is to live without being born." - A. P. Gouthev
 


“The Death of Klinghoffer” is being performed by the New York Metropolitan Opera amid public protests. Protests in the street. It is a 1991 work by the American composer John Adams and depicts the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and the murder of a Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, by Palestinian terrorists. Mr. Klinghoffer's daughters wrote that the opera “presents false moral equivalencies without context and offers no real insight into the historical reality and the senseless murder of an American Jew…it rationalizes, romanticizes, and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father.”
The aegis of Art.
 
A running back from the Dallas Cowboys, Joseph Randle, was caught shoplifting underwear and a cologne. A Los Angeles-based brand called MeUndies has just hired Joseph Randle as their spokesman. You can see how something like this might confuse the average person. But Monica Lewinski has just launched her career as an "anti-bully advocate."
 
Tom Hanks has written a short story called "Alan Bean Plus Four," out now in The New Yorker.
 
Hurricanes and typhoons are formed by a rotating mass of air that centers around an area of low pressure, bringing high speed winds, heavy rain and thunder storms. The difference in the name depends upon where they are formed. Hurricanes generally form in the north Atlantic ocean or in the north east Pacific Ocean, with the Caribbean sea being worst effected. Typhoons develop in the north western part of the Pacific Ocean, affecting south east Asia, the South China Sea and Japan most.  They are both types tropical cyclone, which form over large bodies of relatively warm water in the tropics. 
 
Who is....Paul Verlaine?
 
The chief executive of French oil major Total, Christophe de Margerie, was killed when his private jet collided with a snow plough as it was taking off from Moscow's Vnukovo airport. Russia's Investigative Committee said the driver of the snow plough had been drunk. Now in any other country this would be a horrifying tragedy and an indictment of the culture. In Putin's Russia, however,....
 
Singularity: N: The quality of being strange or odd; peculiarity. Originally a mathematical term for a point at which an equation has no solution. In physics, it was proven that a large-enough collapsing star would eventually become a black hole, so dense that its own gravity would cause a singularity in the fabric of space-time, a point where many standard physics equations suddenly have no solution. Beyond the “event horizon” of the black hole, the models no longer work.
 
Mimas is one of Saturn's smallest moons. It is mostly made of ice and it has a wobble in its orbit which leads astronomers to guess that inside might be a liquid water interior ocean. 
 
Regulations have a price. Some have estimated regulations in the U.S. to be about 10% of GDP. Some states require a "nail technician" to have a license that requires a 750-hour training program to learn something that every teenage girl knows how to do by the time she is 13 or 14?  750 hours of training that you have to pay for in order to be able to do a manicure for which you get paid 20 or 30 dollars? This has also led to the creation of little educational companies that will provide the approved education. And they will arrange the loan.
 
The percentage of workers over 75 that are still active in the workforce has doubled in the past 20 years.
 
Ah, to be young and in love in France! In 1873 Paul Verlaine shot his lover Arthur Rimbaud in both a Brussels hotel and the wrist. This is from the police report: "In morality and talent, this Raimbaud [sic], aged between 15 and 16, was and is a monster. He can construct poems like no one else, but his works are completely incomprehensible and repulsive....Verlaine had abandoned his wife with unparalleled glee; yet she is said to be very likeable and well-mannered. . . ."
It became a productive year for both of them. While in prison, Verlaine completed and published "Songs Without Words," an unpopular collection which was seen as revolutionary within a decade. Rimbaud published "A Season in Hell", his only book. Soon afterwards, he gave up on Europe and literature for the quieter life of gun-running in Africa. By the mid-1880s the French Decadents were hailing him as their "Messiah," and by the middle of the 20th century he was "the poet of revolt, and the greatest of them all" according to Albert Camus. 
This from his "Season": "Priests, professors and doctors, you are mistaken in delivering me into the hands of the law. I have never been one of you; I have never been a Christian; I belong to the race that sang on the scaffold; I do not understand your laws; I have no moral sense; I am a brute; you are making a mistake..."
 
Fisher Equation of Exchange: Reduced to its most simple form, it comes out as P=MV, where P is the nominal gross domestic product (not inflation-adjusted here), M is the money supply, and V is the velocity of money.  If the central bank prints too much money, inflation will ensue. But, if the velocity of money is slowing, the supply of money can rise without an increase in inflation. And that is precisely what has been happening. In fact, the velocity of money has been slowing since 1997 and recently it has been plummeting.
 
Golden oldie:
 
In days gone by, it was common for some ports to have isolated areas, usually islands, to hold ill or suspected ill immigrants. These places of quarantine were called “Lazarettos” or “Lazerets,” after Lazarus, the beggar from the Scriptures. The islands often doubled as leper colonies and sometimes penal colonies.  They would isolate and quarantine those who were sick—or thought to be sick—until they recovered, or until they died. Built in A.D. 1423 on an island in the Venetian Lagoon, Lazzaretto Vecchio, was the first lazaretto constructed to quarantine people and care for them during the years of the plague epidemics. From 1832 to 1848, thousands of Irish immigrants landed on Grosse Island in the St. Lawrence River. Over 5,000 Irish were buried on Grosse Island which makes it the largest Irish Potato Famine cemetery outside Ireland. 
 
Bob Dietrick, from Polaris Partners, quoted in Forbes:" “As this unemployment chart shows, President Obama’s job creation kept unemployment from peaking at as high a level as President Reagan, and promoted people into the workforce faster than President Reagan.
“President Obama has achieved a 6.1% unemployment rate in his sixth year, fully one year faster than President Reagan did.  At this point in his presidency, President Reagan was still struggling with 7.1% unemployment, and he did not reach into the mid-low 6% range for another full year.  So, despite today’s number, the Obama administration has still done considerably better at job creating and reducing unemployment than did the Reagan administration.
We forecast unemployment will fall to around 5.4% by summer, 2015.  A rate President Reagan was unable to achieve during his two terms.”
 
AAAaaaaannnnnndddddd.....a graph of the percent of 55 year olds and over who are in the workforce:
labor force participation rate 55+

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