Cab Thoughts 5/10/14

I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.--deTocqueville


Mother's Day was founded by a childless woman, Anna Jarvis, for mourning women to remember fallen soldiers and work for peace. It was a sentimental notion and went viral when approved as a national day of recognition by President Wilson in 1917. Jarvis fought the commercialization of it.

Home ownership rate is at 19 year lows, while median asking rents just reached a new all time high.

Walid Phares is an American citizen of Lebanese descent, an academic and scholar with a number of books and publications. He says that Middle Eastern petrodollars have been very active in influencing American foreign policy, as have many other foreign interests. Isn't that treason?

There is a one year wait to get into the Marines.

Nemesis: n: An opponent or enemy that is very difficult to defeat, often recurring. From Nemesis, a goddess who, originally, distributed fortune as deserved. As time went by she became more justice oriented and became the god who took revenge against those who showed arrogance (hubris) before the gods.

While the City of New York is regulating soda sizes, Beijing's Public Security Bureau has been setting standards for dogs suitable as house pets. The maximum height has been decided upon and 41 breeds have been banned. Interestingly, the esteemed and now ignored Cultural Revolution leaders banned all dogs as "bourgeois affectations."

Yasiel Puig was late for the Dodger opener with the Giants.

Minimum wage: A bipartisan Congressional Budget office predicts that 16.5 million workers would benefit from the President’s proposal to raise the minimum wage and lift 900,000 out of poverty from the 45 million projected to be in it in 2016. Earnings of low-paid workers would rise $31 billion. Since low-income people tend to spend most of their paychecks, higher consumer outlays would result. But the CBO also predicts that the proposed rise in minimum wages would eliminate 500,000 jobs and because of their income losses, the overall effect on wages would be an increase of only $2 billion, not $31 billion.

This Sterling thing is a mess. As bad as Sterling is, holding people legally responsible for what they say in their homes is worse. Should children report their parents? What is the point here, keeping people quiet? Homogenizing opinions? Or is it how people think that is important. Do we need to make the bell-curve a straight, thin vertical line. Finally a good use for waterboarding. We will find the miscreants then.

When did strip joints become gentleman's clubs?

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/03/bowdlerism-reconsidered.html

Roughly one-third or 20,000 of purportedly hazardous bridges are located in six rural states: Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota. These states account for only 5.9% of the nation’s population but have a total of 118,000 bridges, one bridge for every 160 citizens—men, women and children included. “The Most Traveled Structurally Deficient Bridges, 2013″ is a list made by Department of Transportation. Of the 100 most heavily traveled bridges in the US by rank order, and which are in need of serious repair, 80% of them are in California. Of the 30 billion dollars earmarked by Reagan to rebuild the infrastructure, only 30% went to road and bridge construction.

Who is...Tenzing Norgay?

Four-year high school graduation rates hit 80 percent, capping a decade of significant improvement and suggesting that US schools can hit even more ambitious goals by 2020.

From an article on the possibility of freight trains running on electricity by Noel T. Braymer: Liquefying Natural Gas requires refrigerating it by hundreds of degrees below zero. This is not cheap and requires a great deal of energy to do. Also new facilities will needed to fuel trains with Liquid Natural Gas and a reliable way to carry it on trains will be needed. The plan is to build “tenders” to carry the Liquid Natural Gas for the locomotives on a freight trains. A recent news story run by Reuters reports that after a year of experimenting with running trucks with Liquid Natural Gas; the Canadian Trucking Company Bison Transport found the savings less and the problems more than expected."

More than six hundred modern first editions, all inscribed to Nick Basbanes, are being offered en bloc by Lux Mentis Booksellers in Portland, Maine. The price is available upon request.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute reports some remarkable figures on the percentage of older members of the workforce, 55 and older. The percentage of such workers has gone from 29.4% in 1993 to 40.3%b in 2013. For those ages 55–64, the upward trend was driven almost exclusively by the increased labor-force participation of women, whereas the male participation rate was flat to declining. However, among those ages 65 or older, the rate increased for both males and females over that period. This upward trend in labor-force participation by older workers is likely related to workers’ current need for continued access to employment-based health insurance and for more years of earnings to accumulate savings in defined contribution (401(k)-type) plans and/or to pay down debt. Those are astonishing numbers.

AAAAAaaaaannnnnndddddd......a picture of Spica, Mars and the eclipsed moon: