The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. -Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004)
For years, the populations of high-tax states have been shrinking while low-tax states have been gaining residents.
In his 2017 book, The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich, Stanford University sociologist Cristobal Young questioned whether wealthy people are really so mobile.
Only about 2.5% of millionaires moved to new states each year, and not all went to lower-tax states.
Who is moving? Mostly young people, particularly recent college graduates. They are four times as likely as millionaires to move in any given year, and taxes aren’t the reason. They follow job and educational opportunities.
At the very least, a trade war would, like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, worsen a recession. At worst, it could fuel a depression. (from Lemeiux)
Aluminum makes up only 0.01% of the GDP but contributes to auto costs which make up 4.0%. This can get tricky.
The U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 caused a great need for wheat, and farms began to push their fields to the limit, plowing under more and more grassland with the newly invented tractor. The plowing continued after the war, when the introduction of even more powerful gasoline tractors sped up the process. During the 1920s, wheat production increased by 300 percent, causing a glut in the market by 1931. In 1934, a massive storm sent millions of tons of topsoil flying from across the parched Great Plains region of the United States as far east as New York, Boston and Atlanta.
Who is...Garry Kasparov?
Mentioning R. J. Rummel on the Internet is akin to mentioning The Camp of the Saints; you are sure to draw some crazies, pro and con. Rummel was a social scientist from Hawaii who began to estimate the number of non-combatant deaths caused by active or indirect state-sponsored action. The numbers are staggering. Of course, most states are not keeping public records of the citizens they kill so there are some estimates that are necessary. But they are very sobering. His total is well over 200 million. Million!
Enrolling patients in studies is the pivotal part of any study. Most studies are happy if they get 0.75 patients per site per month.
The last recession ended nine years ago (in June 2009), which means that the current expansion will have lasted 10 years next month. That long an expansion only happened once before, from March 1991 to March 2001, across the 33 recessions identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1857.
"The upshot is that economics has played virtually no role in all the major political movements of the past half-century, including civil rights, feminism, anticolonialism, the rights of sexual minorities, gun rights, antiabortion politics, and "family values" debates. It has been completely unprepared for Trumpism and other varieties of populism, having failed to predict those developments just as it failed to predict the financial crisis of 2008. And, until very recently, it has shrugged at one of the most politically charged and morally troubling issues of our time -- the rise in inequality."--This is from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2018. I did not realize that economic was supposed to be so interactive; I thought it to be much more observational, neutral and analytic rather than goal oriented.
In 1997 Garry Kasparov, the chess champion widely regarded as the greatest who has ever lived, lost in a tournament to IBM's Big Blue. The Russian master conceded defeat after 19 moves in the sixth game of the tournament, losing the match 2.5 to 3.5. It was the first defeat of a reigning world champion by a machine in tournament play.
Big Blue, which can analyze 200 million chess moves a second, had met Kasparov once before, but the human had been able to hold his own against the computer. Before their second meeting, Kasparov had never lost a professional chess match.
Pedestrian injuries from cars are up 11%.
More than one in four immigrants that ICE arrested last year had no criminal convictions at all, and of the rest, their convictions were mostly victimless crimes—largely traffic infractions, immigration offenses, and drug offenses. Almost 90 percent were for nonviolent crimes. Somehow the question of illegal entry into the U.S. has been drowned out by the argument that, once here, illegals are not too dangerous.
The purpose of production is to enable consumption. Production is a means, not an end. Protectionists usually have the mindset of those who would hire people for make-work programs, the idea that having a job is inherently of value, even if nothing of value is produced.
Fascinating that the Carnegie library theft was discovered in an audit; the absence of almost priceless books like the Newton was unnoticed.
Golden oldie:
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
One wonders about legacies and what they mean. Virtually every native passer-by in Rome can give some explanation of the art of the town. Among the Germans it's the composers, not the philosophers.
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Congress paved the way for a resumption of public-health research into gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of several measures in a broad spending bill to address the Parkland, Fla., shooting. There have been a lot of these studies but apparently they are committed to searching until they get the results they want.
Our interest in the survivors of crimes having insight into prevention of those crimes is curious. Where else to we advocate this? Do patients have an insight into disease or therapy? Auto accident victims an insight to traffic laws? These types of testimonials are common in political rallies and, in that cavalcade of the idiotic, they are usually the most fatuous.
In an effort to raise funds to pay off debts and defend the vast new American territories won from the French in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the British government passed the Stamp Act in 1765. The legislation levied a direct tax on all materials printed for commercial and legal use in the colonies, from newspapers and pamphlets to playing cards and dice. While eventually repealed, this tax--along with the Sugar Act (1764), which levied new duties on imports of textiles, wines, coffee and sugar, the Currency Act (1764), which caused a major decline in the value of the paper money used by colonists, and the Quartering Act (1765), which required colonists to provide food and lodging to British troops--all stimulated and nurtured a growing American nationalism as well as radical elements like The Sons of Liberty.
Charen on the Schneiderman blow-up: 'Why are feminists more despairing about these revelations concerning liberal men than conservative women are about equally ugly stories concerning conservative men?
The answer, I'd suggest, is that liberals tend to believe that one's politics and one's morality are the same thing. If you hold the correct views about abortion, the minimum wage, women's equality, gay marriage and guns, it means not just that you agree with me but that you are a good person. A man who champions the #MeToo movement would never hurt a woman, right?"
Job insecurity: The Bureau of Labor Statistics states on average for the years 2007 through 2017, the number of Americans who were either laid-off or discharged from their jobs was 1.7 million monthly. Monthly!
Bain thinks automation will eliminate up to 25% of US jobs by 2030, with the lower-wage tiers getting hit the hardest and soonest. Bain argues something curious: The drive to automation is not financial, it is driven by the declining availability of workers.
They foresee up to 40 million permanent job losses in the US, even accounting for higher demand.
In 2007, a dollar in debt generated 37 cents in GDP growth. In 2017, a dollar in debt created only 31 cents in GDP. A saved dollar historically multiplied 16X.
“It is with great sadness that Ol Pejeta Conservancy and the Dvůr Králové Zoo announce that Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhino, age 45, died at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya on March 19th, 2018,” the conservancy said in a statement.
The future of the species now rests with the two surviving females, Sudan’s daughter Najin and her daughter Fatu, who also live at the conservancy in Kenya. The Czech zoo is the only one that has successfully bred northern white rhinos, who once roamed freely in swaths of central Africa, but have been decimated by poachers who hunt them for their horns. The zoo has used artificial techniques of reproduction in the past, although no pregnancy has yet occurred.
“Examinations of the two females showed that neither is currently capable of natural reproduction,” said Jan Stejskal, coordinator of the zoo’s program for saving the northern rhino, according to the conservancy’s website.
The only hope for the preservation of this subspecies now lies in developing in vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques using eggs from the two remaining females, stored northern white rhino semen from males and surrogate southern white rhino females, said Richard Vigne, Ol Pejeta’s chief executive.
(The site where I found this was flooded with comments about the politics of "white", "rhino" and conservation.)
While Saudi Arabia is the world’s 14th largest economy and has a population of over 32 million people—foreign investors essentially have 0% of their portfolios allocated to the country.
AAAaaaannnnnnddddddd....a list of citizens (noncombatants) killed by governments, according to Rummel. He calls this phenomenon "Democide.":
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