Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in
Beggar's Opera
My graphs don't fit.
Beginning in the
1660s, many British productions allowed Romeo and Juliet to live on, or
had Juliet wake up for a simultaneous death-duet with Romeo; until about
1730, some companies played to all tastes,
offering the 'tragic death' and the 'happily-ever-after' versions on
alternating nights.
The average cost to make “Game of Thrones” per episode is $6 to $8 million.
It will cost $60 to $80 million to make a whole season of Game of Thrones.
Interesting origin but I can't fix the font either:
Cocksure: PRONUNCIATION: (KOK-shoor, kok-SHOOR) MEANING:
adjective: Arrogantly or presumptuously overconfident. ETYMOLOGY: From cock (a euphemism for god) + sure, from Old French seur, from
Latin securus (secure). Earliest documented use: 1520.
Cowen on the
incoherent anthem silliness: "Nor do we play the anthem before movies,
as is mandatory in India. Furthermore, “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn’t
sanctioned by Congress as our national anthem until
1931. Earlier in the history of baseball, the anthem was played during
the seventh-inning stretch. It was only during World War II that the
anthem was played regularly at the beginning of each game, rather than
for special games alone, such as the World Series."
Starting in 2018, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board—the source of
generally accepted accounting principles
(GAAP) for state and local governments—will force officials to record
healthcare liabilities
on their balance sheets. These are the liabilities that governments are
committed to, retirees and the like. Pew Charitable Trusts estimates
the national shortfall will add up to $645
billion.
That’s on top of the estimated $1.1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities they already had.
Another shortfall
is in retirement savings. As people are living longer, they will
require more money, longer. A report this summer from the International
Longevity Centre suggested that younger workers
in the UK need to save 18% of their annual earnings in order to have an
“adequate” retirement income – which it defines as less than today’s
retirees enjoy. But these realities are tough, even for the clear eyed
Swiss.
Earlier this
month, Swiss voters rejected a pension reform plan that would have
strengthened the system by raising women’s retirement age from 64 to 65
and raising taxes and required worker contributions.
From what I can see, these were fairly minor changes, but the plan
still went down in flames as 52.7% of voters said no. A
study shows
that the United Kingdom has a $4 trillion retirement savings shortfall,
which is projected to rise 4% a year and reach $33 trillion by 2050.
This in a country whose total GDP is $3 trillion.
That means the shortfall is already bigger than the entire economy.
In the Country of Ire,
80% of the Irish who have pensions don’t think they will have sufficient income in retirement, and 47% don’t even have pensions.
France,
Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Spain are all pay-as-you-go countries
(PAYG). That means they have nothing saved in the public coffers for
future pension obligations, and the money has to come
out of the general budget each year.
Europe’s
population of pensioners, already the largest in the world, continues
to grow. Looking at Europeans 65 or older who aren’t working, there are
42 for every 100 workers, and this
will rise to 65 per 100 by 2060, the European Union’s data agency says.
By comparison, the U.S. has 24 nonworking people 65 or over per 100
workers, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which doesn’t have a
projection for 2060. (WSJ)
As Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine
calculates, current global average income
per capita is about $10,000. If the world grows at 3 percent per year
over the next 80 years or so, global average income per capita will rise
to $97,000. According to Nordhaus and Moffatt’s estimations, therefore,
an increase in global temperature by 3°C
would reduce global average income per capita by $2,000 to $95,000. A
6°C increase in global temperature would reduce global average income
per capita by $8,000 to $89,000.
“We
have a predicament,” Bailey concludes. “How much are we willing to
spend in order to make those living in 2100, who will likely be at least
nine times richer than us today,
$2,000 better off?”
One of my basic
beliefs in the world has been changed. I always thought that Darwin
really chose the non-Lamarkian path and denied the inheritance of
acquired characteristics. But he did not. There were
many elements in evolution he could not understand--actually that he
thought natural selection was too limited to explain. He used the
development of habits--rather than the Lamarkian inheritance--that he
felt became instinctive before allowing anatomic change.
Abstract reasoning and intelligence were his two stumbling blocks.
Interestingly, he
felt women were not able to reason as well as men but inherited the
tendency from their fathers and through use and habit this became more
native to them.
Such politically incorrect thinking probably invalidates all of his work so don't tell anyone.
In 1941,
the Boston Red Sox’s Ted Williams played a double-header against the
Philadelphia
Athletics on the last day of the regular season. He went 6 for 8 to
boost his batting average to .406 and become the first player since Bill
Terry in 1930 to hit .400. It has never been done since.
We are a long way
off from putting beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword, but
that is the logical destination of the path we are on, because we have
lost faith in the utility of upholding the
right to be wrong.--Goldberg
Poor families in 2005 were more likely to own things like a clothes
dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, or air conditioner than the average household was in 1971.
In 1970 the Hispanic population in the U.S. was 5%. Now it is 17%.
Lawrence, Kansas has a witch-themed store opening to serve its growing pagan population.
North
Korean-connected businesses in China must shut down to comply with new
United Nations sanctions meant to stymie Pyongyang’s missile and
nuclear-weapons programs, China’s government
said. (wsj)
The
University of Washington released a study on the impact of Seattle's
raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. The study, published as a working
paper by the National Bureau of Economic
Research, concluded that the costs to low-wage Seattle workers have
been three times larger than the benefits. Using a richer trove of data
and more sophisticated statistical methods than have been available for
other studies of minimum wages, the report concluded
that Seattle's still-advancing increase has cost more than 5,000 jobs,
and that workers whose wages were increased to comply with the new
minimum lost an average of $125 a month as employers reduced their
hours. Although total employment in the restaurant
industry, which hires a substantial portion of minimum wage workers,
did not decline, employers replaced less skilled, low productivity
workers with others able to produce higher-value work products. As one
of the study's authors said, "Basically, what we're
doing is we're removing the bottom rung of the ladder."
The Los Angeles
Times (9/26, Karlamangla) reports that “for the second year in a row,”
US diagnoses of “chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis reached a record
high.” The article says “more than 2 million cases”
of the three sexually transmitted diseases were reported in 2016,
according to data released by the CDC on Tuesday. The Times adds that
the rise in women with syphilis has caused a corresponding increase in
congenital syphilis among newborns, which has nearly
doubled to 632 cases since 2012.
Alabama Republicans
voted decisively to nominate Roy Moore, a former state Supreme Court
judge, for a U.S. Senate seat, delivering a rebuke to President Trump
and the GOP establishment that supported his rival.
This from the
WSJ. This may be less of a rebuke of Trump than an indication that the
anti-politician movement may be out of control, indeed may be
incompatible with leadership.
Dark
matter has no charge, no weak and strong forces, and no nuclear
forces--but it has gravitational force. 27% of the universe is dark
matter. So, does a huge mass without influence
other than gravity cause the structure of the universe?
In 1939,
Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide control of occupied
Poland roughly along the Bug River–the Germans taking everything west,
the Soviets taking everything east.
It was a follow-up to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
Governments of power seeking their natural level.
Fifty-three percent of Americans
support single payer health care, according to a June 2017 poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
But, BUT....according to the same Kaiser poll, 62% would oppose single-payer if it gave the government too
much power over health care. Sixty percent would reject it if it increased taxes.
So, how do the people in favor of single payer expect this would work?
Sanders
estimated that the single-payer plan he proposed during his
presidential campaign would cost $1.4 trillion a year. To cover that
cost, the plan included a 2.2% income tax
and a 6.2% tax on employers, i.e. products.
The
liberal Urban Institute's analysis of Sanders' campaign plan found that
federal expenditures would surge $32 trillion over its first 10 years.
Total
U.S. health spending from all payers, public and private, was $3.2
trillion in 2015, the most recent year for which there are data.
So Sander's
single-payer plan would double what our entire nation spends on health care each year to the federal budget.
AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd......a picture/metaphor of the American debt crisis:
Photo: DWS via Flickr
Note that this chart expresses the various items as percentages of
GDP, not dollars. So the relatively flat spending categories simply mean
they are forecasted to grow in line with the economy, or just a little
faster. But the space representing net interest
grows much faster than GDP does – fast enough to make total federal
spending add up to one-third of GDP by 2090.
