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You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful. -Marie Curie, scientist, Nobel laureate


Astonishing Pens game last night. Tremendous comeback. They are fast. And they adapt. They changed their lines and their game in the end of the second period.
27 degrees.

Shadyside is in the WSJ.

Whether it is the press pushing the Russia collusion conspiracy with reports of the Steele’s dossier, Carter Page’s supposed spying-inducing behavior, George Papadopoulos’ purported inside knowledge of the WikiLeaks hack, the Trump Tower meeting, or stories that Trump’s team softened the Republican National Convention’s platform on Russia, these stories all have the same formula. The stories began with innuendo wrapped in unrelated facts, leaks from unnamed sources seemingly verified elements of the tale, and a complicit media then wove the strands into a growing Russia collusion narrative. This is beginning to look a lot like professional propaganda techniques. If you say a lie often enough...

Google Svetlana Lakhova.

The number of California retirees collecting a public pension of $100,000 or more hit an all-time high of 79,235 last year, up 85 percent since 2013.

African Swine Fever is killing millions upon millions of pigs all over the world, and this threatens to create a crippling global shortage of protein as we head into 2020.  This epidemic began in China last year, and it is now also running wild in North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines.  But this crisis is certainly not limited to Asia.  According to the Washington Post, so far in 2019 there have also been outbreaks “in Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine.” 

Reuters reports a new study by researchers at Oregon Health and Science University and Portland State University School of Public Health reveals that “only about one in 10 discharged hospital patients given access to their electronic medical records go online to take a look.” Study authors wrote, “This suggests that there is significant room for improvement in engaging patients with their information electronically.” So their knowledge about their records is given to be valuable?

More people died in the 1918 flu pandemic than were killed in the first world war and the second world war combined.

On November 8, 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) became the first person to observe X-rays. Rontgen’s discovery occurred accidentally in his Wurzburg, Germany, lab, where he was testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass when he noticed a glow coming from a nearby chemically coated screen. He dubbed the rays that caused this glow X-rays because of their unknown nature.


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A newsletter recently noted the Economic Policy Institute reported last week that over the course of the past four decades the average “corporate executive” saw his/her total “pay” rise 1,000% and that is almost 100 Xs that of the average worker. Precisely, the total pay including salaries, benefits and stock options for CEOs rose 1,007.5% from 1978 to 2018 while that of the average worker rose 12%!

Worse… or perhaps merely more statistically shocking… in comparative terms, CEOs now make, on average, 278 times the average worker’s income; that compares to 20 times that in 1965 and to 58 times that in 1989.

The columnist predicted revolution.

This appeared in response, from Perry:

"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average compensation for the “Chief Executives of Companies and Executives” was only $236,000 in 2018. The EPI study you cited reports only the compensation of “CEOs at the top 350 U.S. firms.” That’s a pretty distorted and biased sample (350 CEOs), considering that there are about 6 million firms in the US and the top 350 CEOs therefore represent less than 1/100th of 1% of all firms. Breaking it down by employee size, there are more than 19,000 firms with more than 500 employees representing about 50% of all workers. The BLS reports the average salary of $236,000 for about 17,000 CEOs, so it’s possible that the average salary of $236,000 corresponds closely with the US firms employing 500 or more workers.

Further, about 50% of US workers are employed by businesses with less than 500 employees and 17% of US workers are employed by firms with less than 20 employees! Therefore, comparing the compensation of only 350 of the highest-paid CEOs working for the largest US firms to the average compensation of  more than 120 million “typical” workers (EPI reports that the “typical workers” it compares to CEOs represent 80% of payroll employment of 150 million), most of whom don’t even work for one of the 350 CEOs is statistical chicanery and legerdemain! Also, if we ignore the top 350 CEOs running the largest US firms as outliers, I’m sure nobody is too outraged that the average CEO of a typical firm in the US doesn’t earn that much more than the average dentist ($174,000).

The 350 highest-paid CEOs in the EPI sample earned $17.1 million on average in 2018, or about $6 billion combined. If you could confiscate that entire $6 billion in CEO compensation and redistribute all of it to the 120 million “rank and file” or “typical” workers that EPI says are underpaid due to excessive CEO pay, that would amount to $50 per year in annual pay (before taxes) for each worker, or about $1 per week or $0.025 (2.5 cents) per hour! Big Deal!"