An Insurance Claim: A Fable

A man pulls up in his car behind a woman at a stop sign in a parking lot. The woman sees a parking spot slightly behind her, puts the car in reverse and backs into him. The two exchange insurance information but later her description on her insurance claim states that he drove into her as she was stopped.
When the man complains to his insurance agent she says, "Don't worry about it. This happens all the time; the next time it might be my client who lies. It will all even out in the end."

Moral: Businesses see truth as just another variable in their equations, often too expensive to pursue. So truth becomes a commodity --with a price.

Cab Thoughts 11/6/13

Einstein had come up with the light-quantum hypothesis in 1905. But nobody accepted it until 1923. “Not a soul. Einstein was completely alone in his belief in the existence of light as particles—for 18 years. That must have been very lonely.”--Douglas Hofsdadter

 

The London Review of Books says that physicians and nurses are using pseudonyms from Shakespeare while working at Guantanamo Bay's prison in an effort to "avoid being held liable for any mistreatment of the detainees." Dr. Iago. Nurse Macbeth.

 

Tesla Model S weighs as much as a Hummer H3. (You need a lot of batteries to push a lot of batteries.) Tesla outsells BMW, Mercedes and Lexus In America's wealthiest ZIP Codes.

Golden Oldie: 

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/02/wind-factories.html

 

Zadie Smith, on Britain's "lack of a service culture," writes, "[N]o one should be asked to pretend that the intimate satisfaction of her existence is servicing you, the 'guest,' with a shrimp sandwich wrapped in plastic. If the choice is between the antic all-singing, all-dancing employees in New York's Astor Place Pret-A-Manger and the stony-faced contempt of just about everybody behind a food counter in London (including all the Prets), I wholeheartedly opt for the latter. We are subject to enough delusions in this life without adding to them the belief that the girl with the name tag is secretly in love with us."

 

The Defense Department will buy 92,000 electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, by 2020. That number is equal to the total number that will be sold in 2013.

 

A merchant ship named “Mary Celeste” with ten people aboard set sail from New York City bound for Genoa, Italy in November, 1872. About a month later a British brig spotted the “Mary Celeste” adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, about 400 miles east of the Azores. A search party investigated and found no one on board. Whatever happened, the crew was never seen again.

 

Who was....Edward Teller?

 

There has been an interesting interrelationship between research and the military. Artificial intelligence, coined by John McCarthy in the mid 1950s, provides a good example. The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was a chief underwriter of artificial intelligence research. But in 1969 Congress passed the Mansfield Amendment, requiring that Defense support only projects with “a direct and apparent relationship to a specific military function or operation.” In 1972, ARPA became DARPA, the D for “Defense,” to reflect its emphasis on projects with a military benefit. Favored projects included “command and control” systems, like a computerized in-flight assistant for combat pilots, and programs that would automatically spot roads, bridges, tanks, and silos in aerial photographs. This was very different from the idea of understanding human thought as artificial intelligence had originally started. There are some limits to highly focused research.

 

Geckos can race up a polished glass wall at a meter per second and support their entire body weight from a wall with only a single toe. This was first observed by Aristotle and recently has been attributed to Van der Waal forces, weak molecular forces, from the tiny hairs on the gecko's foot.

 

Now, after NSA, Libya, Iran and Syria and the reemergence of Russia as a power broker in the Middle East, who would you prefer as President of the U.S. if you were Merkel or another of the European leaders, Obama or Bush?

 

Bill Gross from PIMCO, now that he is rich and safe, has reassessed his life and decided that the rest of us are not contributing enough. He writes in his recent letter that the share of GDP we’ve had to pay in wages has dropped from 47% to 43% during the past decade, allowing pre-tax profits to jump from 10% to 14% of GDP. We should pay more. Companies, using cheap credit, have been buying back their shares, over 1 trillion dollars worth since 2008. Has, he asks, our prosperity been based on money printing, credit expansion and cost cutting, instead of honest-to-goodness investment in the real economy? Well, yes, Bill, it has.

And here is the reason (from his own chart):

Growth comes from investment. Investments come from savings. So.........

Gross' letter contains new buzzphrases like "male dominated workforce" and "you did not build that, ...you rode that." He is also, newly, concerned with the dreaded "disparity of income" as if the U.S. can be compared to Zimbabwe and cites the "Gini coefficient" intended to represent the income distribution of a nation's residents. (It was developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper "Variability and Mutability.") Stay tuned. More revolutionary talk from the first tee to come.

 

In the late 90s Ford concluded that battery powered electric drive could not make economic sense if the empty vehicle weight was more than 70% of its loaded weight. The only EVs that even come close to meeting that standard are Kandi and electric two-wheelers.

 

AAAAaaaaaaaannnnnddddddd.......a mock-up of China's announced and published nuclear blast radius in the U.S. from their nuclear submarine fleet:

Jupiter; Eclipses on Other Worlds

This is Jupiter, surrounded by gas clouds. On the surface of the clouds are three dark spots, shadows of the three Jupiter moons seen as small white spots to the left (Io, the closest, Europa the second sitting about 7 o'clock from Io, and Callisto, the small smudge-spot far to the left). Callisto's shadow is the elongated one at the southern pole. On Jupiter, these would all look like eclipses.

 

Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephens. She was an unfortunate, haunted genius, and one of the great Modernist writers. Her best novel might be "To the Lighthouse," an elegant story of a household overrun with children managed by a beautiful, warm mother and a distant, preoccupied philosophical father. It is set in a summer home over a generation. Essential to the book is a search for meaning and the means of that search spread out over time and disrupted by the madness of World War One.

This is Virginia at 20.


This is her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), born in India and later a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also a nurse and wrote a book about the profession.



This is the father:

Sunday Sermon 11/3/13

The philosopher Bruno Latour raises a concern about the Enlightenment: We have debunked everything to the point that we can not justify any source that points to action. He is particularly concerned about global warming. The effect of the debunking mentality of the last centuries, originally aimed at religion, superstition and tradition,has seeped into science--which then cast suspicion on itself with the uncertainty principle--so that now the science of global warming is not believed.
Has the entire Enlightenment been a self-inflicted wound? Are all our thinking and advances worthless?

Today's gospel shows Christ reaching out to Zacheas, a short man who has climbed a tree to get a look at Christ. Christ is soliciting a little man balancing himself in a tree. It is an absurd picture, but perhaps we are pretty silly.

Cab Thoughts 11/2/13

"I'm not sure I'm ready to have fun yet."--child on sideline of tennis camp


The phrase “jack-o’-lantern” is of British origin. In the 17^th century, it referred to a night watchman, a man who literally carried a lantern

Russia converted the Trans-Siberian from fuel to electric with wires along the track. The Trans-Siberian Railway covers 9,288 kilometers between Moscow and the Pacific port of Vladivostok, or 5,771 miles. If it were twenty-one miles longer, it would be exactly twice as long as Interstate 80 from New Jersey to California. The trains run almost constantly, mostly fuel.

For the U.S. to ship food for food aid, 50 percent of the food must be shipped on U.S. vessels by law.

They had a microphone on the plate umpire the sixth game of the series. When Ortiz came to bat the fine St. Louis catcher,Yadier Molina, turned to the umpire and said, "This guy is amazing. He cn hit everything." The umpire said, "Yeah, he's fun to watch."

post·hu·mous: adj. Occurring or continuing after one's death: a posthumous award; Published after the writer's death: a posthumous book; Born after the death of the father: a posthumous child.
ety: The word posthumous is associated with death, both in meaning and in form. It goes back to the Latin word postumus, meaning "last born, born after the death of one's father, born after the making of a will," and "last, final." Postumus was largely used with respect to events occurring after death but not exclusively so, since the word was simply one of the superlative forms of the adverb post, "subsequently, afterward." Because of its use in connection with death, however, later Latin writers decided that the last part of the word must have to do with humus, "earth," or "to bury," and began spelling the word posthumus. This form of the Latin word was borrowed into English, being first recorded in a work composed before 1464. Perhaps the most telling use of the word appears in the poet Robert Southey's comment on the rewards of an author: "It was well we should be contented with posthumous fame, but impossible to be so with posthumous bread and cheese." (Amer. Her. Dic.)

Achilles tendinopathy and tendon rupture is considered an overuse syndrome from excessive loading of the tendon during vigorous training activity. Exposure to corticosteroids, both systemic and with local application, has been reported to be a common antecedent of Achilles tendon rupture and is thought to increase risk of rupture through tendon atrophy and weakening.

The HHS is getting a lot of press with all the ACA difficulties. But we forget what kind of people and organizations we are dealing with. In 2009 the HHS nominee resigned because of tax problems. But there was more. In just two years, he made 5.2 million dollars, $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer. Nor is he a registered lobbyist. Why was a law firm paying him money? Influence peddling? No one remembers Tom Daschle any more. But his resignation certainly cleaned the HHS up.

In 1975, there was a single craft brewery in the United States; today there are more than 2,000.

 

Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book "that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself—as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful attraction of this black hole of nothingness." (Bruno Latour) He is a French philosopher. Thierry Meyssan, in 911: The Big Lie, writes that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. He's French too.

 

Deaths related to alcohol in several studies in England shows a rise in young women's mortality. For those born in the 1950s, it was a rate of eight per 100,000; for those born in the 1960s - 14 per 100,000, while for those born in the 1970s it rose to 20 per 100,000. However for men, comparable figures showed a recent decrease. A new survey in the United Kingdom has found that almost two-thirds of young women admit to drinking so much that they woke up the next morning with virtually no memory of events of the night before.
Interestingly, the rise in alcohol consumption among young women, especially in the United Kingdom, is prompting the alcohol industry to come up with new ways to attract female drinkers worldwide with new marketing approaches that will "create new drinking occasions and new opportunities."

The Wilmot Proviso was proposed by Congressman David Wilmot, first term Democrat from Pennsylvania, as a rider to the appropriations bill proposed by Polk to facilitate negotiations with Mexico to annex Texas to the U.S.. It provided that no new territories could be slave. It always passed the House and failed the Senate.

Sir Walter Raleigh has always been a bright but diffuse point in English history. Explorer, soldier, courtier, writer he fell in and out of favor with Queen Elizabeth and then James I. He eventually was tried by James for his connection to a Spanish plot to invade England. His trial was a spectacle and he was convicted but pardoned. Recent evidence points to him being guilty as hell. Documents which had previously been imperfectly catalogued at the Bodleian Library were discovered during random checking of papers held there. These included Raleigh's own deposition and his main accuser's--his close friend Henry Brooke-- statement to the tribunal, and provide strong evidence that Raleigh denounced King James and spoke in favor of a Spanish invasion. He went so far as to advise on the best invasion location (he recommended Milford Haven). He also requested a Spanish pension of £1,500 a year in return for his spying. He was eventually executed in a great irony. Some men under his command sacked a Spanish fort and the English killed him to make the Spanish happy.

The Buffett family is publishing a book on how to feed the new 2 billion people in the world in the next 40 years called "40 Chances." Some conclusions are Africa needs better seeds, fighting the drug trade can influence food insecurity, and more fertilizer isn't always the solution to maximizing farmers' yields. Their farms use GMOs, "genetically modified organisms," an organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques to improve crop production.

AAAAAAAaaaaaaannnnnnddddd....a graph of PowerBall odds:

Match Prize Odds

+ Grand Prize 1 in 175,223,510.00 $1,000,000 1 in 5,153,632.65 + $10,000 1 in 648,975.96 $100 1 in 19,087.53 + $100 1 in 12,244.83 $7 1 in 360.14 + $7 1 in 706.43 + $4 1 in 110.81 $4 1 in 55.41 The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 31.85. The odds presented here are based on a $2 play (rounded to two decimal places).

Income Inequality and Social Instability

There is a new book out called "Average is Over" written by Tyler Cowen. It explores a theme quite commonly heard nowadays, income inequality and potential social instability. (The social instability is always hinted at, written in a whisper, as if the tipping point is so close the mere mention of it will precipitate chaos.) Cowen generally agrees that there is a division of income in the U.S. that he believes will continue but he is much more confident in its outcome. His thesis is that the computer, Internet and increasing freedoms will make education and advancement much more democratic with a rise in quality and production. A “hyper-meritocracy” is developing. With computer advances, chess has become a common analogy now and he uses it too. Before online chess, an Armenian player would have had to move to Moscow to compete at the highest levels. Now, Armenia is a “perennial competitor” for international chess honors. The advance of machine intelligence will cause a surge in income inequality, but will also level the playing field for opportunity. In a recent interview with NPR Cowen predicted that “for a lot of people upward mobility will be a lot easier.” Competence, not social status, will decide.

As to the instability that doomsayers predict will result, Cowen calls these theories of the revolutionary consequences of income inequality “some of the least thought-out and least well-supported arguments with wide currency.” His argument is that there are stronger bonds in society than economic similarities. In a 2011 article for The American Interest, Cowen wrote, “By broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.” (This is reminiscent of de Tocqueville who always thought there was an esprit in the nation based on liberty.)

More, wealth has risen dramatically. The Dallas Federal Reserve Bank published a report showing that the increase in income disparity is overwhelmed by the rise in the standard of living. In 1919 it took the average American eighty minutes of work in order to buy a dozen eggs. Today it takes him five minutes. That diffuse wealth is a very soothing--and perhaps sedating--element in society.

So income inequality might rise but so will opportunity. The real question is this: How does a society like ours judge social equality? Is income equality the best way? Or does the equality of opportunity and the collateral increase in wealth offer so much more?

Another question: If there is a complacency that develops in the "have-nots," what about the risk it will develop in the "haves," in the producers the "have-nots" need?