Cab Thoughts

“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

Seattle city council unanimously voted in a $15 per hour minimum wage.

Skill shortages are cropping up everywhere. A Manpower survey of US firms found that 40% are having trouble filling jobs.

Physicist Tony Phillips notes this is the weakest solar maximum to have been observed in the space age, and it is shaking out to be the weakest one in the past 100 years. A "solar maximum" is the time in the sun's 11-year cycle when it is the most active.

A study by the International Monetary Fund concluded that the Fed's QE had pushed $470bn into emerging markets that would not otherwise have gone there. 

The governments have decided on loose monetary policy and this has driven their total debt levels to a record 175pc of GDP. It may be even worse. China has thrown all caution to the wind, pushing credit from $9 trillion to $25 trillion since Lehman. Its debt levels have reached 220pc by some estimates. Officials at both the IMF and the Bank of International Settlements privately doubt whether China can extricate itself smoothly from this.re. IMF officials say nobody knows how much of this hot money will come out again, or how fast. 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/09/sunday-sermon-peace.html


Jean-Claude Juncker has headed the powerful Eurogroup meetings of Eurozone finance ministers who were trying to solve the crises in the EU's single currency. He is famous in economic circles for the remark, "When it becomes serious, you have to lie."
He is President of the European Commission, the most powerful position in Europe. Amazingly, this position is not put to popular vote but rather is decided behind closed doors by political peers.
 

"The extraordinary thing is that Piketty’s analysis is based on a massive logical error. His thesis runs as follows: if R is the rate of return on invested capital and if G is the growth rate of the economy, since R>G, profits will grow faster than GDP, and the rich will get richer and the poor poorer. This is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) at its most egregious. Piketty confuses the return on invested capital, or ROIC, with the growth rate of corporate profits, a mistake so basic it is scarcely believable."--Charles Gave.
Gave's explanation for the popularity of this flawed thesis is our bettors' insatiable lust to do good with our money.

Since the 1970's Majuli islander Jadav Payeng from India has been planting trees in order to save his island. To date he has single-handedly planted a forest larger than Central Park NYC. 

Flo, from the Progressive commercials, has more than five million Facebook followers.The working draft of Bob Dylan's iconic song "Like a Rolling Stone" pulled in over $2 million at Sotheby's, a new world record  for a popular music manuscript.








Who was....Gavrilo Princip?

Mao Daqing from Vanke – China’s top developer – says total land value in Beijing has been bid up to such extremes that is on paper worth 61.6pc of America’s GDP. The figure was 63.3pc for Tokyo at the peak of the bubble in 1990.” China is the world’s second largest goods importer, buying the equivalent of more than $1.7 trillion in foreign goods each year (compared to US imports of roughly $2.3 trillion). A decline in China's purchasing would have dramatic world impact.

Shelta is an argot used in parts of the British Isles based in part on Irish.

The adult smoking rate has been cut by more than half – from 42.4 percent in 1965 to 18.1 percent in 2012. After climbing to 36.4 percent in 1997, the high school smoking rate has been cut by 57 percent, to 15.7 percent in 2013.

China has used more concrete in the last three years than the U.S. used in the last century.Hawaiian Electric gets 86% of energy from oil and coal.

From Nature: "an aged animal to young blood can counteract and reverse pre-existing effects of brain aging at the molecular, structural, functional and cognitive level. Genome-wide microarray analysis of heterochronic parabionts – in which circulatory systems of young and aged animals are connected – identified synaptic plasticity–related transcriptional changes in the hippocampus of aged mice."
Not just biochemical improvement but physical improvement. Dracula.

Tautology: noun. the needless repetition of an idea, especially in words without imposing additional force or clarity. as "widow woman." Logic: a compound propositional form all of whose instances are true, as "A or not A." Or an instance of such a form, as "This candidate will win or not win." 




AAAaaaaaaaannnnndddddd.....a chart:
(I have no idea how this happened)