When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)
The retail electricity price has grown by about 40 percent over the past decade; however, after adjusting for inflation, the real annual price in 2012 was at about the same level as in 1998 and almost 30 percent lower than the real price in 1984.
I met a man who is a metaphor for our times. He went to radiology tech school, graduated and could not find a job. So he opened a pawn shop. This week he is opening his fifth pawn shop. He is making a fortune.
Options have always been a problem for homo sapiens; the more options, the more problems. Freedom to choose is hamstrung by too much to chose from. So the paralysis of decision, be it writer's block or procrastination, is improved by first winnowing down the options (or so it is theorized.) Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words; his editor bet him he couldn't write a book with only 50 different words. So Dr. Seuss won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children's books of all time.
Who was....Edgardo Mortara?
Decoy effect: Psychologist Daniel Ariely suggests the following scenario: Someone is given a choice between two vacations -- a week in either Paris and Rome at the same price with free breakfast each day -- where they are equally likely to choose either one. Then a third choice is added -- Rome at the same price without the free breakfast. With that third choice, that same person will become much more likely to select the option of Rome with the free breakfast. That is because relativity helps us make decisions in life --"it's the same price plus I get free breakfast so it must be a good deal." This is known as the "decoy effect," and people from psychologists to marketers see it everywhere -- from buying a house to selecting someone to date. It is belief in this characteristic that causes some restaurants to include a highly expensive entree on the menu even though few will order it, simply because it results in more patrons ordering the second most expensive entree on the menu. Summary: The wingman should always be like you but slightly inferior.
According to hotel sources in Rome reported in the American press, James Gandolfini's last meal included four shots of rum, two pina coladas, two beers, two orders of fried king prawns and a “large portion” of foie gras.
aleatory \EY-lee-uh-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee, AL-ee-\, adjective: of or pertaining to accidental causes; of luck or chance; unpredictable: an aleatory element.
--from the Latin word meaning "the dice" or "chance" alea, aleatory first surfaced in English in the late seventeenth century.
Der Spiegel described the president's recent Berlin stop as a visit by "the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented" under the headline "Obama's Soft Totalitarianism".
After decades of moderate decline, intercity bus service went up from 5.1 percent growth in 2009 to 7.5 percent in 2012. During the same period, Amtrak says its ridership increased 49 percent. Meanwhile, government data shows airline boardings down significantly, growing only .6 percent, down from 5.1 percent in 2009, and the average number of miles driven per capita has fallen 6 percent since 2004. American Bus Association spokesman Dan Ronan said feedback from riders is that they're picking buses for their WifI and plugins, in particular, discount bus lines, which, according to the Chaddick Institute, saw a 30.6 surge in operations 2011-2012.
The St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds—all of the NL Central—now hold the top three records in the majors. Since the American and National leagues split into sections in 1969, three teams from the same division have never finished a season with the top three records in Major League Baseball.
Sixty percent of the jobs lost in the last recession were middle-income, while 59 percent of the new positions during the past two years of recovery were in low-wage industries that continue to expand such as retail, food services, cleaning and health-care support. By 2020, 48 percent of jobs will be in those service sectors.
EU sources reported Germany has put forward a new proposal to weaken EU draft rules on vehicle emission limits for carbon dioxide as it struggles to persuade other nations to help it protect its car industry. CO2 principles apparently have a price.
Golden Oldie:
The FBI had a file on Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes that called him a "communist writer" and refers to a "long history of subversive connections." The dossier, which starts in the 1960s and spans decades, also reveals that the FBI had informants track his movements while in the U.S., and details the agency's attempts to delay and deny his visa applications.
Over the years our ideas of dreams have undergone constant and sometimes dramatic revision. Dreams were thought of as out of time and could be prescient. Some felt them messages from the gods. Freud moved them inside us and made them symbolic, obscure scripts of our hopes and aspirations. Now dreams meet data. A psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland named Calvin Hall spent more than thirty years gathering dream reports from everyone who would share them. By the time he died in 1985, Hall had synopses of more than fifty thousand dreams from people of all age groups and nationalities. From this large database, he created a coding system that essentially treated each dream like it was a short story. Regrettably, he concluded they were quite predictable. And mundane.
An argument is emerging touting the benefits of raising the minimum wage (also highlighting the threat of growing inequality in earnings.) Economists David Card and Alan Krueger (the current chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers) have research showing that, contrary to conventional economic orthodoxy, increases in the minimum wage increase employment. The crux of the argument is that a decline in earnings result in decrease in demand. Raising minimum wages would presumably improve that trend.
Descartes felt that "wonder" was the basic human emotion. Adam Smith wrote that wonder arises ‘when something quite new and singular is presented… [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance’. Smith associated this quality of experience with a distinctive bodily feeling — ‘that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart’. This, in his "History of Astronomy" essay.
Science fiction author and screenwriter Richard Matheson died Sunday at age 87. He was the author of I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man as well as a number of Twilight Zone episodes.
AAAAnnnnnndddddd......a graph:
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