Cab Thoughts 2/11/15

"In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm; in the real world, all rests on perseverance."- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Two groups of researchers in Asia have found fossils of early hominids that do not quite fit sapien, habilis or Neanderthal.

 

Obama, in his State of the Union address, called for the elimination of the tax break for education in 529 accounts. With all the trouble with education costs this decision might seem strange, especially when he reversed his position a few days later. And, as such, it may not seem important. But it really is.
First, some background. There is about one-third trillion dollars in tax exempt 529 accounts and the estimate for the next 20 years is 2 trillion dollars. There is one half trillion dollars in Roth IRAs and there will be much more with time. There are trillions of dollars in tax deferred/exempt accounts in insurance plans and every year--over the last 6 congresses--laws have been proposed to overturn those insurance exceptions.
So what does all this mean? Obama's decision aside--because he is certainly not a consistent or decisive thinker--the government is generally willing to make promises that seem to fit into a general philosophy but is equally willing to violate either the spirit or the specifics of those promises shamelessly. Secondly, these politicians are primarily interested in the money either personally or to forestall the problems their poor or self-centered decisions will inevitably cause. Third, no one can count on these people.

 

There are a lot of former physicists wandering around investment houses. One guy has a funny view: Stocks and bonds are matter. They are things. They are particles. They literally are physical objects. Credit and volatility are not matter. They are forces very similar to gravity. As credit is the willingness or ability to repay, it is a feeling, a sensation, a psychological construct. But it is not a thing. So the complex--almost mystical--behavior of economic forces on things he sees as, to some extent, immeasurable and unpredictable.



Saturn's moon Titan is a world with active weather -- including times when it rains a liquefied version of natural gas.   

 

An interesting assessment of terrorism, which is described as the policy of the weak. Damage to people, big damage, rarely has much effect. The example used is the Battle of the Somme, in 1916, early in the first war. On the first day of the battle 19,000 members of the British army were killed and another 40,000 wounded. By the time the battle ended in November, both sides together had suffered more than a million casualties, which included 300,000 dead. Yet this unimaginable carnage hardly changed the political balance of power in Europe. It took another two years and millions of additional casualties for something finally to snap. The flaw in terrorism is that it leaves the enemy largely intact and permits him to dictate most of the action.

Terrorism is an attack on a society's perceived safety. The impact--and success--of terrorism is entirely a function of the society's magnification of the event.

 

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/02/money-laundering.html

 

Ditzy David Duchovny, only six years before landing the role in X-Files, was a Ph.D. student studying literature at Yale University, planning to become a writer.

 

Angelina Jolie is more admired around the world than Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, according to a new survey.

 

The top drug dealer on the online black market website Silk Road was Connelis Ja Slomp, aka “SuperTrips”, a 23 year old man from the Netherlands who made over $3 Million from selling drugs on the website Silk Road. The man shipped 104 kilograms of MDMA, 566,000 ecstasy pills, four kilos of cocaine and other drugs through the mail to customers who bought his product on the website, according to court records.

An aside note: In New York State, out of all Molly capsules and powder seized in the state over 4 years, only 13 percent contained MDMA.

 

The Confederate submarine, the hand-cranked H.L. Hunley, sank the Union warship Housatonic in winter 1864 and then disappeared with all eight Confederate sailors inside. Its remains were discovered in 1995 in waters off South Carolina.

Ultracrepidarian: adjective: Giving opinions beyond one’s area of expertise. noun: One who gives opinions beyond one’s area of expertise. From Latin ultra (beyond) + crepidarius (shoemaker), from crepida (sandal). Earliest documented use: 1819.  This word comes with a story.

The story goes that in ancient Greece there was a renowned painter named Apelles who used to display his paintings and hide behind them to listen to the comments. Once a cobbler pointed out that the sole of the shoe was not painted correctly. Apelles fixed it and encouraged by this the cobbler began offering comments about other parts of the painting. At this point the painter cut him off with “Ne sutor ultra crepidam” meaning “Shoemaker, not above the sandal” or one should stick to one’s area of expertise.

Columbian authorities arrested 2,038 people in 2012 who were involved in various kidnapping and ransom incidents. 

 

Rigel, the star that is Orion’s western “foot”, is just 8 million years old.  The stars of Orion’s Belt are even younger. They formed about 5-6 million years ago, around the same time our ancestors Australopithecus were spreading across the African continent.

 

Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. Gallup's CEO says that has to be 50% with a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America's middle class. In a recent article he is critical of the government's unemployment numbers. If someone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job -- or if you've stopped looking over the past four weeks -- the Department of Labor doesn't count you as unemployed. If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 -- maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn -- you're not officially counted as unemployed. Those working part time but wanting full-time work--if you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find --the government doesn't count you as unemployed.



What is.....House Resolution No. 41?

 

Princeton University's first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather. Boston's John Murray Forbes's opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company.

 

Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist who helped developed the atomic bomb, was arrested in 1950 in Great Britain for passing top-secret information about the bomb to the Soviet Union. Fuchs' capture set off a chain of arrests. Harry Gold, whom Fuchs implicated as the middleman between himself and Soviet agents, was arrested in the United States. Gold thereupon informed on David Greenglass, one of Fuchs' co-workers on the Manhattan Project. After his apprehension, Greenglass implicated his sister-in-law and her husband, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. They were arrested in New York in July 1950, found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, and executed at Sing Sing Prison in June 1953.

 

Interesting. Diana Taurasi's Russian team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, is paying her more than her WNBA salary to take the WNBA season off. UMMC Ekaterinburg pays Taurasi $1.5 million, while her 2015 WNBA salary would've been right around the maximum of $109,500. She was last year's runner-up MVP.

 

The combination of oil and small business continue to influence the recent recovery. America’s oil & gas boom has added $300–$400 billion annually to the economy. Without this contribution, GDP growth would have been negative and the nation would have continued to be in recession. The typical U.S. firm in the oil & gas industry employs fewer than 15 people.

 

The Rule of St. Benedict:  Benedict (c. 480 AD to 543 or 547 AD) was a religious ascetic whose rules for ascetic living were highly representative of ascetic principles in other philosophies and religions. The early Middle Ages have been called "the Benedictine centuries." 

 

AAAaaaaaannnnnnnddddd....a graph: