Cab Thoughts 3/19/14

“As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don’t teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors’ fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice.” --Matthew Vadum

In 2013, the value of the average American 401K was $101,000, up 16% from 2012.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has a new 67 page paper that evaluated the problems of the world. One would think it would be longer. Fortunately they have found a common thread that is a factor in most problems: The newly discovered inequality problem. (Fairness is not mentioned.) Regrettably for Americans, the inequality is rather slanted. Americans have more of everything and the IMF wants them to give their wealth--not to the poor, oh, no!--but to the IMF.

Of the people making minimum wage, 2/3rds will be making more than minimum wage in 12 months.

Henry Paulson says that during the 2008 crisis, the Russians approached the Chinese about selling all their U.S. mortgage bonds to accelerate the damage being experienced by the American economy. The Chinese were appropriately horrified and refused. This would be a kind of economic warfare. Is it much different from economic sanctions?

I really liked "True Detective," especially the two leads. I was OK with the ending; I was just happy the story line did not degenerate into some cliche religious bashing. Unlike many, the lack of resolution of the group crime did not bother me nor did the out-of-body character development. As time has gone by, however, I am less content.

Some think the "Between the Ferns" discussion with Obama was an interview and not an ad.

Chicago has a 19 billion(!) dollar municipal pension debt with a one billion dollar balloon payment due soon. Their teachers pension debt is separate.

In 2010, 15% of people who went to their physician for a headache got a CT scan or an MRI. From 2007 to 2010, people visited the doctor 51 million times for headache-related problems, according to a national database of outpatient visits. And 12 percent of the time, the doctors sent their patients for a brain scan. That's about 1 Billion dollars a year to investigate one of the commonest complaints patients have but one that has a very low significant cause rate. Anyone who is uncertain about how medical costs will be managed need go no further than this: Someone other than the physician will make the decision to investigate or not.

Who is...tonton macoute?

We are straining our water resources. The world has progressed in water management in stages: aqueducts transport to treatment of existing water sources to reverse osmosis of waste water (cheaper than desalinization.) But Perth, Australia has a desalinization plant that is powered by wind and solar that provides 50% of the city's drinking water.

Ford has been turned around by a new president from Boeing--without federal help. He has a list of five rules that must be followed at all business meetings. He took them from a list of rules on the blackboard of his second grade daughter's classroom.

58.5 Billion dollars will be spent this year by Americans on pets.

Good news! There is a guy selling investment advice based on biblical writings. Vonnegut had a character who did that based on letters of Genesis being DOW stock symbols.

"Human": "Pertaining to man." It was first used in the 12th century in English. Samuel Johnson is listed by the OED as the earliest usage of the word "being" in relation to "human beings." From M.Fr. humain "of or belonging to man," from L. humanus, probably related to homo (gen. hominis) "man," and to humus "earth," on notion of "earthly beings," as opposed to the gods. Interestingly the Heb. "adam" is "man," from "adamah," "ground").

Some research recently has shown that it is more advantageous to put money into politicians than into R&D.

In an article on memorization, CNN writer Elizabeth Landau writes: "When I was a teenager I saw a website suggesting pi could be a song, with one as middle C, two as D, three as E, etc. This helped me get up to 178 digits in college, winning me a T-shirt."

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/07/violence-and-immitative-magic.html

Ryan Sandberg left baseball in 1994. He wrote this in his book 20 years ago: “I was caught between two generations, the one I came up with, which still cared about the game, and the one I left behind, which hardly cared at all. In the ‘90s, I saw too many guys having fun after losses because they got a few hits or did something good for themselves. That didn’t appeal to me at all. There’s a lack of respect today for the game and for each other.”

The dowdy Irish Dowd has a negative article on Obama but makes a good point: "...governing through executive order isn’t a sign of strength. It’s a sign of weakness."

AAAAaaaannnnndddddd.....a picture from WWII: (guess)