Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Cab Thoughts 6/10/15

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
~H. L. Mencken


In a quarter in which US GDP is set to decline, consumer credit, according to the latest update from the Federal Reserve, increased by just over $45 billion. But how is it possible that with such a massive expansion in household credit there was no actual benefit to the underlying economy? Simple: 98% of the credit lent out in the first quarter, or $44.3 billion, went to student and car loans.


"I don't think it’s too controversial to say that personally I believe that capitalism is generally the best economic system. However part of the problem today is that over the last 15-20 years, capitalism has been propped up every time it’s about to go through one of the cyclical creative destruction phases. Compounded up that's left us with a big mess to clear up across the globe and a lot of sub optimal resource allocation. That's not the fault of capitalism per se it's the fault of the authorities for not letting cycles naturally evolve. This has become increasingly more difficult as the imbalances build on top of each other.So across a lot of the Western World we're left with too much debt, too much inequality, low real wage growth, limited conventional tools to help the economy to de-lever, QE and ZIRP and a political backlash against the mainstream. Until we find a better solution voters are likely to have a bias to find alternatives whatever the economic literacy of these views."--Deutsche Bank's head of global fundamental credit strategy, Jim Reid
 
Polaris is the North Star, the star that coincides with the Earth's north celestial pole. But that has not always been the case nor will it be in the future. The Earth's axis rotates (precesses) just as a spinning top does. Precession is caused by the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon on the Earth. The period of precession is about 26,000 years. While the Pole Star in the northern hemisphere is now Polaris, in 3000 B.C. the north celestial pole coincided with Thuban, a star in the constellation of Draco. In 14,000 A.D. Vega, in Lyra, will be the northern pole star. So little is constant, even among the stars.
Hipparchus first estimated the precession of the Earth's axis around 130 B.C.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,/For loan oft loses both itself and friend,/And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” --Hamlet.
T
he Austrian school of economics was founded in 1871 with the publication of Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics.
von Böhm-Bawerk  was a member of the movement, refined by thinkers like von Misis and Hayek. In essences the thesis emphasized individual decision and private property as opposed to the popular historical analysis. "Debt is future consumption brought forward," von Böhm-Bawerk taught. All the debate over economics is turgid and benighted but the Austrian School have one thing going for it: The homicidal Marxists hated them.

Who is...Tax Donkeys?

"All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (Jimmy describes a pansy friend as 'a female Emily Bronte'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who does shall go unmourned.... I agree that Look Back in Anger is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it as roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of 20 and 30." This, amazingly, is from a review of  John Osborne's first play, Look Back in Anger, in 1956.
 
The Ganges River in India is one of the most polluted rivers in the world. The pollution includes sewage, trash, food, and animal remains. In some places the Ganges is septic, and corpses of semi-cremated adults or enshrouded babies drift down the river.
 
The theory seems to be that we are to trust less the judgment of those who put their own resources at stake when making business decisions, and trust more the judgment of academic or government ‘experts’ who, putting nothing of their own at stake in such ventures. This strange theory is considered in most polite circles today to be “progressive.”  In fact, acceptance of this strange theory is profoundly irrational.--Bordeaux
 
No more "Death to the Leisure Class!" A Chinese company and the Cuban government have signed a letter of intent to build a golf course and resort, official media said on Friday, with an apparent eye to the eventual lifting of U.S. travel restrictions. Cuba currently has one 18-hole-golf course.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-edge-of-science.html


Of the 144 million dollars donated to the Clinton Foundation in 1913, 10% went to charity. Most of the money paid out went to travel and lodging.


Philips introduced a 10-year A19 60W equivalent soft white LED bulb for $4.97 (without rebates). The Philips Everyday is a 8.5W, 800 lumen LED bulb with an estimated yearly energy cost of $1.02 (based on 3 hours/day, 11¢/kWh). $4.97 for a 60W A19 LED bulb is a pretty good deal (both the Philips Slimstyle and CREE A19 60W bulbs had been hovering around the $9 mark for a while now). But starting May 1, that price becomes twice as good. Home Depot will be selling 2-for-1 packs of the bulb for that same $4.97 price in May, June, and July, while supplies last. That is under just $2.50 per bulb, making the price per bulb equivalent to popular 2-packs of CFL and incandescent bulbs.

According to this figure that appears in this December 2013 report from the Pew Research Center, the percentage of minimum-wage workers who are 35 or older is about 29. These data from Pew are consistent with those found in Table 1 of this more recent report (April 2015) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  In this BLS report we learn that 48.2 percent of all workers who earn the minimum wage or less are under the age of 25 (and 21.4 percent of minimum-wage-or-less workers are still teenagers.) Only 2.5 percent of all workers age 25 or older earn the minimum wage or less


A Defense Department audit has found that a number of Pentagon employees used their government credit cards to gamble and pay for “adult entertainment” — findings that are expected to lead department officials to issue stern new warnings.--Politico. Stern warnings?


China’s military plans to produce nearly 42,000 land-based and sea-based unmanned weapons and sensor platforms as part of its continuing, large-scale military buildup, the Pentagon’s annual report on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) disclosed Friday.

A funny idea from Zero Hedge, "Tax Donkeys": The wealthiest 0.01% - 0.001% pay a disproportionately large share of taxes as a kind of fee for service for "the best government money can buy," not unlike what they pay for legal, financial, and tax advice, household staff, private security, and so on. While it's obvious the bottom 90% lose out in this system, the top 10% just below the Oligarch class are punished twice: they pay most of the income taxes, but aren't wealthy enough to buy political power. They are the Tax Donkeys that toil to pay for the corporate-state's social welfare programs that keep the bottom 40% passive and the imperial structure that secures the primacy of the Deep State and Oligarchy.
Pity the Tax Donkeys who pay for everyone below and further enrich the few above.


A woman employed as a State Department contractor was indicted in Houston on Wednesday for an alleged identity theft scheme using personal information she stole while working at a passport office.

On the Clinton "donations," State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke, told reporters that while it "regrets" that it did not get to review the new foreign government funding, it does not plan to look into the matter further, spokesman Jeff Rathke said on Thursday. "The State Department has not and does not intend to initiate a formal review or to make a retroactive judgment about items that were not submitted during Secretary Clinton's tenure," Rathke told reporters.


Burton Malkiel, professor of economics emeritus at Princeton University and author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street updates his book every few years. He said recently, “Every time I update a new edition, typically every four years, I get the same results: A low-cost index outperforms two-thirds or more of active managers over time. And the one-third that outperform are never the same from one period to the next.” Despite this, over 70% of U.S. assets invested in mutual and exchange traded funds are still in actively managed funds.
 
Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and was captured in a warehouse, and Oswald shot Kennedy in a warehouse and was captured in a theater.

Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, a bodyguard for Fidel Castro, has written a book, "The Double Life of Fidel Castro.” It contains some stuff that I suppose may or not be true. For example, no one knew until recently that he had a wife, Dalia, with whom he had five sons, all with “A” names: Alexis, Alex, Alejandro, Antonio and Angelito. Even Fidel’s own brother, Raúl, did not meet them until the children were adults. He has an island, a retreat, Cayo Piedra, that is quite elegant.

Dour (rhymes with "Tour") adj: Sullen; severe; gloomy; stubborn. ety: Probably from Latin durus (hard). Earliest documented use: 1425.
 
AAAAaaaaaannnnndddddd...a cartoon of the earth's precession:

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