Reverie

Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in Beggar's Opera

My graphs don't fit.


Beginning in the 1660s, many British productions allowed Romeo and Juliet to live on, or had Juliet wake up for a simultaneous death-duet with Romeo; until about 1730, some companies played to all tastes, offering the 'tragic death' and the 'happily-ever-after' versions on alternating nights.

The average cost to make “Game of Thrones” per episode is $6 to $8 million.

It will cost $60 to $80 million to make a whole season of Game of Thrones.

Interesting origin but I can't fix the font either:

Cocksure: PRONUNCIATION: (KOK-shoor, kok-SHOOR)  MEANING: adjective: Arrogantly or presumptuously overconfident. ETYMOLOGY: From cock (a euphemism for god) + sure, from Old French seur, from Latin securus (secure). Earliest documented use: 1520.

Cowen on the incoherent anthem silliness: "Nor do we play the anthem before movies, as is mandatory in India. Furthermore, “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn’t sanctioned by Congress as our national anthem until 1931. Earlier in the history of baseball, the anthem was played during the seventh-inning stretch. It was only during World War II that the anthem was played regularly at the beginning of each game, rather than for special games alone, such as the World Series."

Starting in 2018, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board—the source of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for state and local governments—will force officials to record healthcare liabilities on their balance sheets. These are the liabilities that governments are committed to, retirees and the like. Pew Charitable Trusts estimates the national shortfall will add up to $645 billion.

That’s on top of the estimated $1.1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities they already had. 

Another shortfall is in retirement savings. As people are living longer, they will require more money, longer. A report this summer from the International Longevity Centre suggested that younger workers in the UK need to save 18% of their annual earnings in order to have an “adequate” retirement income – which it defines as less than today’s retirees enjoy. But these realities are tough, even for the clear eyed Swiss.

Earlier this month, Swiss voters rejected a pension reform plan that would have strengthened the system by raising women’s retirement age from 64 to 65 and raising taxes and required worker contributions. From what I can see, these were fairly minor changes, but the plan still went down in flames as 52.7% of voters said no. A study shows that the United Kingdom has a $4 trillion retirement savings shortfall, which is projected to rise 4% a year and reach $33 trillion by 2050. This in a country whose total GDP is $3 trillion. That means the shortfall is already bigger than the entire economy.

In the Country of Ire, 80% of the Irish who have pensions don’t think they will have sufficient income in retirement, and 47% don’t even have pensions.

France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Spain are all pay-as-you-go countries (PAYG). That means they have nothing saved in the public coffers for future pension obligations, and the money has to come out of the general budget each year.

Europe’s population of pensioners, already the largest in the world, continues to grow. Looking at Europeans 65 or older who aren’t working, there are 42 for every 100 workers, and this will rise to 65 per 100 by 2060, the European Union’s data agency says. By comparison, the U.S. has 24 nonworking people 65 or over per 100 workers, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which doesn’t have a projection for 2060. (WSJ)

As Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine calculates, current global average income per capita is about $10,000. If the world grows at 3 percent per year over the next 80 years or so, global average income per capita will rise to $97,000. According to Nordhaus and Moffatt’s estimations, therefore, an increase in global temperature by 3°C would reduce global average income per capita by $2,000 to $95,000. A 6°C increase in global temperature would reduce global average income per capita by $8,000 to $89,000.

“We have a predicament,” Bailey concludes. “How much are we willing to spend in order to make those living in 2100, who will likely be at least nine times richer than us today, $2,000 better off?”

One of my basic beliefs in the world has been changed. I always thought that Darwin really chose the non-Lamarkian path and denied the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But he did not. There were many elements in evolution he could not understand--actually that he thought natural selection was too limited to explain. He used the development of habits--rather than the Lamarkian inheritance--that he felt became instinctive before allowing anatomic change. Abstract reasoning and intelligence were his two stumbling blocks.

Interestingly, he felt women were not able to reason as well as men but inherited the tendency from their fathers and through use and habit this became more native to them.

Such politically incorrect thinking probably invalidates all of his work so don't tell anyone.

In 1941, the Boston Red Sox’s Ted Williams played a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics on the last day of the regular season. He went 6 for 8 to boost his batting average to .406 and become the first player since Bill Terry in 1930 to hit .400. It has never been done since.

We are a long way off from putting beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword, but that is the logical destination of the path we are on, because we have lost faith in the utility of upholding the right to be wrong.--Goldberg

Poor families in 2005 were more likely to own things like a clothes dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, or air conditioner than the average household was in 1971. 

In 1970 the Hispanic population in the U.S. was 5%. Now it is 17%.

Lawrence, Kansas has a witch-themed store opening to serve its growing pagan population.

North Korean-connected businesses in China must shut down to comply with new United Nations sanctions meant to stymie Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear-weapons programs, China’s government said. (wsj)

The University of Washington released a study on the impact of Seattle's raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. The study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that the costs to low-wage Seattle workers have been three times larger than the benefits. Using a richer trove of data and more sophisticated statistical methods than have been available for other studies of minimum wages, the report concluded that Seattle's still-advancing increase has cost more than 5,000 jobs, and that workers whose wages were increased to comply with the new minimum lost an average of $125 a month as employers reduced their hours. Although total employment in the restaurant industry, which hires a substantial portion of minimum wage workers, did not decline, employers replaced less skilled, low productivity workers with others able to produce higher-value work products. As one of the study's authors said, "Basically, what we're doing is we're removing the bottom rung of the ladder."

The Los Angeles Times (9/26, Karlamangla) reports that “for the second year in a row,” US diagnoses of “chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis reached a record high.” The article says “more than 2 million cases” of the three sexually transmitted diseases were reported in 2016, according to data released by the CDC on Tuesday. The Times adds that the rise in women with syphilis has caused a corresponding increase in congenital syphilis among newborns, which has nearly doubled to 632 cases since 2012.

Alabama Republicans voted decisively to nominate Roy Moore, a former state Supreme Court judge, for a U.S. Senate seat, delivering a rebuke to President Trump and the GOP establishment that supported his rival.

This from the WSJ. This may be less of a rebuke of Trump than an indication that the anti-politician movement may be out of control, indeed may be incompatible with leadership.

Dark matter has no charge, no weak and strong forces, and no nuclear forces--but it has gravitational force. 27% of the universe is dark matter. So, does a huge mass without influence other than gravity cause the structure of the universe?

In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide control of occupied Poland roughly along the Bug River–the Germans taking everything west, the Soviets taking everything east.
It was a follow-up to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. 
Governments of power seeking their natural level.

Fifty-three percent of Americans support single payer health care, according to a June 2017 poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. But,  BUT....according to the same Kaiser poll, 62% would oppose single-payer if it gave the government too much power over health care. Sixty percent would reject it if it increased taxes.
So, how do the people in favor of single payer expect this would work?

Sanders estimated that the single-payer plan he proposed during his presidential campaign would cost $1.4 trillion a year. To cover that cost, the plan included a 2.2% income tax and a 6.2% tax on employers, i.e. products.

The liberal Urban Institute's analysis of Sanders' campaign plan found that federal expenditures would surge $32 trillion over its first 10 years. Total U.S. health spending from all payers, public and private, was $3.2 trillion in 2015, the most recent year for which there are data. So Sander's single-payer plan would double what our entire nation spends on health care each year to the federal budget.

AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd......a picture/metaphor of the American debt crisis:

Photo: DWS via Flickr