I didn’t see any flooding from global warming, so I guess that’s no longer a problem. Glad to see Australia’s response to China’s claim to fishing grounds.
But will having the US stop using Carbon based energy change this projection. I guess I will have to ask Biden.
Actually, that is very interesting. Going to be a lot of earthquakes along the way.
Interesting. However it assumes the convective currents in the mantle driving the continental motion remain the same as today. Out of the 3 forms of energy transfer, radiation, conduction, and convection; convection is the most difficult to model. Those hydrodynamic equations tend to chaotic behavior.
That’s all well and good, but is the future sustainable, equitable, and just!?!
Don’t Trust Science!
Cool. You can still see Michigan.
According to the climate change fanatics, it’s too late to do anything to save the planet. After all, we had ….. what was it…… 5, 10 years to save the planet and I believe those 5 or 10 years have already “expired,” several times over IIRC.
Anyway, the earth has gone thru many periods of hot, cold, dry, wet…. repeat and rinse…….and each one of these climate regimes ended all by their lonesome’s and, poof, the climate changed into a totally different climate regime.
All without the aid of SUVs and coal fired power plants and the massive emissions of private jets traveling to and fro from those annual climate-change meetings.
CO2 levels on earth, in the past, have been anywhere from 2 to 5 times higher than today; some say even 10 times higher. Each one of these high CO2 periods came to a end and colder climate (if not an ice age) ensued.
And there is ample evidence that CO2 levels fall/rise AFTER the climate has warmed / cooled.
Manhattan used to be under 5000 FEET of ice !
the Empire State Building is less than 1500 feet in height.
The new World Trade Center , including the needle sitting atop its roof, is about 1800 feet tall.
The LIttle Ice Age, which ended in the early 1800s, was a several hundred year period of extreme cold in the N. Hemisphere. It was so cold that the Hudson River froze over a few times.
We are still “recovering” from the Little Ice Age.
By the way, the Little Ice Age was immediately preceded by the Medieval Warm Period; a several hundred year period of warm climate – warmer than today.
The Vikings didn’t settle Greenland because they wanted to live in igloos and stand over ice holes with spears waiting for a seal to stick its head thru the hole.
And the Vikings didn’t leave Greenland hundreds of years later because they got tired of living there.
ALL of the dramatic and extreme climate changes the earth has experienced have occurred well before humans had any affect on the climate, or well before humans even walked upon this earth.
Ask yourself what causes the annual change of seasons. If anything, it tells you that factors that have nothing at all to do with CO2 (an odorless, invisible gas; a plant/tree/crop/vegetation food ESSENTIAL to all life on earth) are what actually determine the climate.
There are a lot of assumptions going on here.
For one example: They were formed by glaciation relatively recently (in geologic terms). Do you really think the Great Lakes of North America will survive that long? Will there be another ice age in that time (or several) that form other, similar, lakes?
Totally fake, I have it on good authority that in 450 million years the land will spell out Let’s Go Brandon.
“We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming,” Harris told The Los Angeles Times in an interview. “We didn’t see Omicron coming. And that’s the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants.”
I guess the scientists in Oklahoma are smarter than those in DC. There is an epidemiology report published every week on the OK Covid site (https://oklahoma.gov/covid19.html). I reviewed the reports and the May 5 was the first to report variants, though they were identified by number & country. The table lists cases from 1/1. By the July 14th report, the countries were replaced with the Greek letters.
The CDC also has a pdf which lists variants of concern that were labeled as such on December 29, 2020.
Of course, we already knew about mutations, at least those of us who paid attention in science class.
I know I can’t be the first to notice this but if you’re looking for one unifying thread running through all of our problems it is this: A great many adults in the U.S. today are no longer “grown up” in serious ways. They are incapable of in-depth thinking, rational analysis, or contemplating anything other than what is directly in front of them at the moment.
When a child is caught doing something wrong, even when they are caught red-handed, it is pretty normal for that child to lie and deny even the most obvious reality. That’s because all the child can think about in that moment is “I don’t want to get into trouble.” In many respects, the essence of maturity is learning to think beyond the immediate moment, need, or desire.
In order to beat Donald Trump, our elites weaponized COVID. They fear-mongered, fomented hysteria, and reduced the vast and complex challenge of dealing with a pandemic to “It’s Trump’s fault.” It worked, but now they need to teach Pavlov’s dogs NOT to slobber when they hear the COVID bell and that’s turning out to be awfully difficult.
We could very easily have schools in high-population Blue States shut down and go to remote learning AGAIN this winter, which will complete the disaster of losing an entire generation of children. Millions of kids are never going to fully recover from this and that’s going to affect our society for the next 60+ years.
Mike
Truly staggering amount of pro and college athletes testing positive the last few days. These people are close to 100% vaccinated and of course young and supremely healthy but what percentage of people would test positive right now if everyone was tested?
Sports and colleges are the best window into what is going on right now because they are almost totally vaxxed and yet are tested an insane amount.
Pangaea reforms and all the interior of the super continent becomes one big Outback with rain only at the coastal areas just like what was happening until the end of the Triassic as per that video a couple days ago?
MBunge,
Amen. If it wasn’t for Christmas break coming up schools in blue states would be closed right now and I predict they will be after new year’s.
This will be the third school year in a row disrupted. 2nd graders have never had a normal school year.
Evil.
The early indications are that Omicron is mild, yet the fear mongers mainly talk about “ cases”….totally frustrating!
Maybe this will be a generation of free thinkers. Kids are learning that government delivers poor solutions and they need to think for themselves. Boomers learned that government solves problems – it’s how we got to the moon. And that led to a generation of expanding government.
Looks like the UK is going to lockdown after Christmas (that makes sense) for 2 weeks which of course will be extended and extended and extended.
Boris is basically in a coalition with Labour on lockdowns now as over a 100 Tory MPs revolted on his latest authoritarian measures.
Brits who have any interest in freedom are pretty much screwed at this point. They don’t have a Florida to escape to.
“Truly staggering amount of pro and college athletes testing positive the last few days. These people are close to 100% vaccinated and of course young and supremely healthy but what percentage of people would test positive right now if everyone was tested?”
This morning I looked at the CDC page that Nonapod linked to a few days ago which lists variant percentages. Unfortunately they haven’t updated since the 11th. which still listed 3%. And worse, if you look carefully, that 3% is based on a projection model.
Data this morning for new cases was not out of line with numbers from the past two weeks…. ie no explosion of cases as the press is reporting, but maybe that shows up next week.
Try this thought experiment: suppose it’s 1955 and there’s no genetic testing etc. News reports an outbreak of a flu bug with mild symptoms in South Africa, and seems to be spreading. Does the world go into a panic??
physicsguy,
Interesting thread from this U. of Johannesburg data analyst on how things are going in Gauteng province the ‘hot zone’ for the Dread Variant Omicron.
Looks like Australia will become part of China. Continental drift is driven by geopolitics?
Meanwhile, Antonio “Il Duce” Fauci has “canceled the holiday for his family. ‘For the first time in more than 30 years,’ he said, ‘I’m not spending the Christmas holidays with my daughters. He claimed everyone doesn’t have to cancel get-togethers, as long as they “ask and maybe require that people show evidence that they are vaccinated.”
Maybe Fauci’s daughters are relieved that Dr. Grinch isn’t visiting them this year.
The other interesting thing we are seeing in sports is numerous people are testing positive for the second and third times.
Part of that is the fact that this scam has been going on for almost two years now plus the cycle thresholds on the PCR tests are still to this day all over the map (an under the radar massive scandal) so who knows if they actually have had it all these times.
Again, sports and colleges are a great window into this because they are almost 100% vaccinated (and increasingly boostered) and tested constantly so anybody that says testing and vaccinations are a way out is flat out lying they are only a way to extend this forever.
Revolver has a new deep dive on how the FIB stage managed the January 6th riot to create an Insurrection” — the Reichstag fire excuse Hitler needed to grab totalitarian control of a once democratic republic — that CommieCrats needed to assert totalitarian means commensurate with their Post-Constitutional authoritarian goals. The Deep State is no narrow cabal, as we’ve all learned since the Great Biden Cheat dangerously made a senile quasi-octogenarian “President.”
Like the first Revolver report, it’s very long and graphics heavy, so much so that my device cannot load it all. Their tease is “Damning New Details.”
Therefore, without editorial, let me tease this monster with a summary post, up only in the 8 or 6 hours since the thread went live. I hope this synthetic reduction is veridical:
Stephen Triesch
20 minutes ago
Here’s my summary:
1. Despite numerous advance warnings of potential trouble, security was remarkably – suspiciously – light for such a massive crowd. (The original breach of the outer security fence was so easy because that area of the perimeter – on the direct route from the rally site – was only protected by five police officers. The FBI sends twice that many agents to arrest an unarmed old man like Roger Stone.)
2. A handful of men with a military demeanor seemed to be the ringleaders of the breach, yet none have been charged despite ample video evidence of their actions. The ringleaders seemed to have little interest in the actual rally and speeches, but were busy arranging the breach of the Capitol well before the rally and speeches had even ended.
3. The purpose of these unindicted men seems to have been twofold: (1) to encourage (and assist, in some cases) unstable members of the crowd (e.g., “Antler Man”) in engaging in unlawful acts such as fighting with police and breaching the Capitol; and (2) to herd as many ordinary, non-violent Trump supporters as possible into the Capitol and its immediate vicinity. This was facilitated by removal of the barriers and the warning signs prior to the arrival of the crowd, who – by entering a restricted area without realizing it – unwittingly broke the law.
4. The purpose of herding in as many Trump supporters as possible was to reinforce the impression of a huge, violent mob (an “insurrection”) threating our nation’s very existence, whereas the reality is that the number of people who actually engaged in violence and other overt crimes was probably limited to one or two hundred (if that) out of a crowd of 200,000 or more. But the sight of the large crowds in and around the Capitol was essential for the “insurrection” narrative that was immediately put in place.
4. For “conspiracy theorists,” the question of “Who benefits?” is always paramount, and is believed to provide a clue as to who actually orchestrated a particular event. In the case of January 6th, it is clear that the only people who have benefitted are the enemies of Trump and the populist movement that he helped trigger.
Continental drift and climate change. No doubt that the positions of land masses affect climate. But continental drift takes millions of years. Climate alarmists worry about the next decade. Or at least they say they do.
However, think about this. Every day on Earth there is someplace that records 70 degrees below zero or colder and someplace else that records 100 degrees above zero or warmer. And people live in those places. And have for centuries. How do they do it? Adaptation. They developed strategies for coping with those extreme temperatures. And coping has become easier since the introduction of fossil fuels. Not only has adapting been made easier by using fossil fuels, but it has improved their standard of living as well.
A simple statement of fact: Abandoning fossil fuels will result in much lower living standard for all who go that route. Whatever climate change occurs, we are much better off adapting to it as humans always have. And fossil fueled energy will make it much easier to adapt while maintaining our standard of living.
Griffin, that SA twitter thread is fascinating. The real tell will be in another week to see if the predictions bear out.
Your point about pro sports teams and colleges is quite valid I think to the efficacy, or lack of, the vax for the omicron. Just Darwin at work…mutate to render the vaxed host vulnerable so can still reproduce.
I just hope DeSantis can shield us here in Florida for the massive overreach that we can all see coming from Washington…. they are drooling to go after everyone.
This Graham Medley clown is one of the chief modellers for the UK gov’t.
He openly admits they only model for the worst case scenarios because that is all they are asked to do.
‘For the first time in more than 30 years,’ he said, ‘I’m not spending the Christmas holidays with my daughters.
1. His wife can’t travel; or
2. They didn’t invite him.
Boomers learned that government solves problems – it’s how we got to the moon. And that led to a generation of expanding government.
The ratio of government purchases of goods and services to domestic product in this country increased in a stepwise fashion from 1933 to 1974, then hit a plateau. Obama’s attempt to add another step failed. If we’re talking about people born during the years running from 1938 to 1957, they were all still in their young adult years when this plateau was reached, and the very youngest were minors. The median age of people in institutional leadership in 1974 would have been around 55, born in 1919. If it’s generations that interest you, the people who presided over the reconstruction of political economy after 1931 were drawn from the “Lost Generation”, the “Greatest Generation”, and the older among the “Silent Generation”. The people countenancing it in the voting booth were a mix of every generation too young to produce Civil War veterans.
It worked, but now they need to teach Pavlov’s dogs NOT to slobber when they hear the COVID bell and that’s turning out to be awfully difficult.
Pavlov’s dogs are members of the teachers’ unions, the administrators for which they work, and their counterparts in higher education. The first two sets have long been collecting pools for what my mother called ‘the world’s inadequate people’. The third exhibits a mix of inadequacy, deceit, and malice.
Art Deco: expansion of government is not calibrated by the ratio of government purchases of goods and services to domestic product.
This 250 million years into the future was cool – but I don’t believe the current trends will continue that long without more meteorite collisions that are big enough to change the current magma patterns under the plates.
My own untalked about guess, less than a theory, is that Pangea was formed due to a large meteorite, smaller but later than that which broke in and out to form the moon. Then Pangea broke because of other big hits – and this simulation won’t be accurate because of future big meteorite hits.
Instapundit linked to an article about potassium feldspar and how it affects cloud formation, plus its connection to extinction events. I far more fear another ice age over global warming.
The USA should promise to offer land to those on any island who lose 30% (50%? 10%?) of their land area to rising ocean levels. (And also build more nukes)
This morning I hit my first diet goal of 175# — down 31# since I started in early August. This weight was hard to imagine then. All my clothes, except a suit I bought in 2000, are now comfortable, even loose, fits.
My next goal is 164, which for my height puts me into the upper end of the “Normal” weight range. That doesn’t sound far-off, so I’m starting to think about the transition of my diet to whatever’s next.
I’ve been using Tim Ferriss’s Slow-Carb Diet. I eat protein, veggies and beans at each meal, but no “white foods” — sugar, flour, grains — plus no dairy or fruit (except tomato and avocado). The idea is to keep your blood sugar steady.
However, one day a week is Cheat Day and I can eat and drink whatever I want (though Tim recommends starting with a diet breakfast). I’ve chosen Sunday to cheat, so right now I’m sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and nibbling Ghirardelli chocolates.
It’s a pretty livable diet. I’ve been losing 1-3# per week.
Pangaea reforms and all the interior of the super continent becomes one big Outback
At least we’ll all be able to get a steak.
Re: Pangaea
I too noticed the video looked like the reformation of the supercontinent, Pangaea.
Which is a bit worrisome, albeit long-long-term. Pangaea is considered a factor in the Permian Extinction, the worst extinction event in Earth’s history:
_______________________________________
As the supercontinent formed, the ecologically diverse and productive coastal areas shrank. The shallow aquatic environments were eliminated and exposed formerly protected organisms of the rich continental shelves to increased environmental volatility.
Pangaea’s formation depleted marine life at near catastrophic rates. However, Pangaea’s effect on land extinctions is thought to have been smaller. In fact, the advance of the therapsids and increase in their diversity is attributed to the late Permian, when Pangaea’s global effect was thought to have peaked.
While Pangaea’s formation certainly initiated a long period of marine extinction, its impact on the “Great Dying” and the end of the Permian is uncertain.
That’s when the trilobite died off. As a kid I was sentimental about trilobites.
Art Deco: expansion of government is measured by the expansion of regulations – the financial burden falling on individuals and businesses.
Huxley, all that without any organized exercise program? And/or no periodic fasting?
(Pretty amazing, actually.)
Or measured by the headcount of government civil servants and agencies that must be supported by taxes and borrowing regardless of their output of regulations or dear colleague letters or lawsuits.
Anon. – exactly. Also let’s look at government spending as a percentage of GDP. In 1965 under 20% – approx 15%. In 2021, federal spending was equal to 30% of the total gross domestic product. Then there’s the additional spending at the state and local levels.
The NYT weighs in: “On this episode of “Sway,” Ms. Mazzucato tells Kara why the 1960s Apollo program proved that bold, empowered governments can solve our biggest problems; how that model might work to tackle challenges like climate change; and why the Covid crisis is the best time to put moon-shot thinking into action.”
The episode: Stop Whining About Big Government https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-mariana-mazzucato.amp.html
Anon. – exactly. Also let’s look at government spending as a percentage of GDP. In 1965 under 20% – approx 15%. In 2021, federal spending was equal to 30% of the total gross domestic product. Then there’s the additional spending at the state and local levels.
You’re comparing the spending puke of the last two years to abiding phenomena.
Art Deco: expansion of government is measured by the expansion of regulations – the financial burden falling on individuals and businesses.
You haven’t attempted to measure that and your example referred to a public spending program.
Huxley, all that without any organized exercise program? And/or no periodic fasting?
Barry Meislin:
I’m impressed myself. In the past when I dieted, I only lost 1-1.5# / week.
Tim Ferriss is big on the kettlebell, so I’ve been doing KB swings 2-3x/week. I’ve worked up to 300 x 45# swings interspersed throughout the day. But nothing too organized or time-consuming. Though the swing will get one’s heart pumping and stregthens the all-important core.
However, as Tim says, you can’t outwork your mouth, so the main focus is to reduce daily calories and emphasize slow-burning ones.
Fasting — I’ve taken to skipping breakfast after Cheat Day, but that’s it.
It’s an interesting diet. I recommend it. The main trick for me was to find beans I liked. Fortunately, there is a Mexican restaurant a half-block from my cafe which cooks great pinto beans for $3/lb.
Art Deco: then you missed my point and/or I wasn’t clear. My point was that the fact that the government was so spectacularly successful with the moon program changed the way people (boomers and those who came after them) saw the role of government. The view became exactly what Mazzucato states – far better than I did.
And it’s ironic – because at the very same time we (the US government, actually) were losing the war in Viet Nam.
If you scroll down in this article, there’s a very nice graph of government spending https://ourworldindata.org/government-spending. For the US big jumps for WW1, WW2, and then 1960+ onward and upward.
And of course this doesn’t include spending on regulatory compliance which began in earnest 1970+
For the record, the Bureau of Economic Analysis sorts public expenditure into four categories. You can assess the ratio of these expenditures to nominal gross domestic product for each year running from 1929 to 2019, 91 readings in all for each category.
1. Public consumption: median value, 0.157; range, 0.064 to 0.18; last, 0.14 No secular trend since 1946.
2. Interest payments: median value, 0.04; range, 0.0086 to 0.066; last, 0.042; no secular trend since 1970
3. Subsidies: median value, 0.0038; range, 0 to 0.0062; last, 0.0032; no secular trend since 1960.
4. Transfer payments: median value, 0.088; range: 0.0077 to 0.156; last, 0.148; secular trend since 1929.
This last metric is driven by demographics and by the price dynamics within the medical sector. Over 90% of the expenditure is accounted for by five programs enacted (respectively) in 1935, 1939, 1956, 1965, and 1965. There were no Boomers in Congress when they were enacted. Up until about 20 years ago, Medicaid was the only program among them from which it was common for the post-1937 birth cohorts to draw.
“ Over 90% of the expenditure is accounted for by five programs enacted (respectively) in 1935, 1939, 1956, 1965, and 1965”
SS – Let’s not forget the expansions: automatic COLAs, SSI, DI payments, eliminating restrictions on earnings.
Medicare – the add ons over the years are too numerous to mention: https://www.medicareresources.org/basic-medicare-information/brief-history-of-medicare/
Eva Marie:
Do a search for my Vietnam posts to see in what sense we were losing the war. It may not be quite as you think. See in particular this, this, this, and this.
I want to add 2 things:
1. It fell to the boomers+ to pay for SS. Privatization of SS never became popular because of the belief that the federal government would be the better manager.
2. This got me thinking – if we had lost the space race as well as the Viet Nam war, what a disaster that would have been. Neo, I will read your links. But in the end it was a loss.
Eva Marie:
Saying “in the end it was a loss” is very different from “we lost the war.” As I said, read the links.
Neo, I read the links. Well that was sad.
You did lose the war. It sucks. But you did.
There’s lots of Cope-ium imbibed about thrashing the NVA in every pitched battle and decimating the VC during Tet… And it’s all correct. But War by Other Means (to flip it on it’s head) and All That…
If you can be defeated by your myriad enemies foreign and domestic doing an end run through your effed up domestic politics every. single. time. since Vietnam, then that’s all she wrote. Game over. Tactical victories don’t mean Jack @#$% if you don’t win the wars *and* achieve your desired strategic and political outcomes. Of course it would help if you actually had *coherent* and sane achievable dittos and a collective ruling establishment memory longer than a goldfish so could follow through and keep on following through, but I digress.
It’s therapeutic and very lucrative for some to make the rubble bounce in distant places. And it’s the coward’s way because it’s also a psychological avoidance method for not facing up to the issues at home which are going to require bloodletting up close and personal and not via droning third worlders.
If it’s any consolation, the NVA then proceeded to utterly thrash the Chinese PLA when Deng Xiaoping made a demonstration against them in 1979. For all their bravado about Taiwan (pretty effete, militarily) they’re not remotely interested in a rematch with the Vietnamese.
Zaphod:
Ah, once again Zaphod, the great oracle, has spoken. Case closed!!
Read the links, read the books I mention in them, think about it.
Z:
Not your country, remember? We were afflicted with the Jane Fonda’s, Dick Blumenthal’s, John F Kerry’s, and Joe Biden’s (aka Democrats and worse).
“You” lost your country, or was it wanderlust? What is your excuse?
Hi, huxley. I’m glad that diet is working for you. And I agree about the trilobites.
My financial advisor has put forward certain proposals with respect to investing in renewable energy. I have it in mind to make a counter-proposal directed toward investing in nuclear energy instead. Anybody have any thoughts on the investment prospects in that field? Small modular design commercialization, for example?
I wish the Port of Albany would put in some kind of observation area so people could watch the ships in port. It could be somewhat like the little observation parking lot that the airport has. We don’t get much freighter traffic up the Hudson compared to the coastal ports, of course, but it’s been picking up lately. Ships take the better part of a day to make their way up from NYC to either Albany or Coeymans, as they have to work against the current on the one hand and the fact that the Hudson is a little tricky to navigate and to attempt to do so at “highway speeds” is probably rather unwise. It seems to me that Albany is one of the ports relatively far inland in North America to be visited by trans-oceanic shipping with any frequency, leaving the Great Lakes aside.
But but but the world will be DESTROYED in 10 years by GLOBAL WARMING (or was that 1 year, I forgot) unless we all adopt communism and revert to living in stone age hovels NOW!
SS – Let’s not forget the expansions: automatic COLAs, SSI, DI payments, eliminating restrictions on earnings.
[drums fingers]. Referred to above was the Social Security old age program (1935), the survivors benefit (1939), the Disability program (1956), Medicare (1965), and Medicaid (1965). SSI, if I’m not mistaken, is financed out of general revenues because it is specifically provided for disabled people with insufficient contributions (as commonly disabled all their lives); it accounts for less than 6% of all Social Security disbursements.
As for the COLAs, what they do is see to it that Social Security benefits maintain their real value. It prevents an effective reduction in benefits from currency erosion. They should have been included in the beginning.
Medicare – the add ons over the years are too numerous to mention:
No, they’re not. Two of the add ons are options financed by premiums. The one that wasn’t was the extension of benefits to the disabled and to dialysis patients. That went into effect in 1973. As we speak, the median age of persons awarded disability de novo is 49 years. The modal beneficiary is a person in late middle age. It wasn’t enacted by or for Boomers.
It fell to the boomers+ to pay for SS.
The term ‘Boomer’ can be defined in multiple ways, but whichever way you do you’re referring to about 19 birth cohorts, give or take. The mean amount of time people are in the working population in the course of their lives is just shy of 40 years, so 19 birth cohorts would without a doubt account for a large share of the payroll tax payments. I’m not aware people of earlier or later vintage were freed from the obligation to pay payroll taxes.
Privatization of SS never became popular because of the belief that the federal government would be the better manager.
I think you’d have to scrounge to find someone who believed that. Al Gore kept chuffering about ‘lock box’ indubitably because his focus group research told him that there was considerable anxiety that private accounts would reduce benefits to ordinary wage earners and render benefits of more uncertain value. Most people are risk averse.
This was my original point – boomers, impressed with the space program, were amenable to big government solutions and my hope that today’s generation seeing government’s abysmal response to COVID will become free thinkers and head in the opposite direction – and I’m sticking to it.
As for what defines the post war baby boom generation 1946 to 1954. (Although I noticed as boomers got older they stretched the boundary to 1964.)
Privatization of SS – Milton Friedman, the Chicago Boys and the miracle of Chile.
This was my original point
And you’re wrong, as demonstrated.
As for what defines the post war baby boom generation 1946 to 1954.
The size of birth cohorts saw its nadir around 1936 and its apogee around 1957. That’s your baby boom. The significance of the year 1946 is that it saw a year-over-year increase in the number of births to the tune of 21%; that was the largest year-over-year increase. As for behavior and cultural phenomena, the most satisfactory starting point is around 1938 and the most satisfactory terminal point roughly 20 years later. Far too much is made of all of this.
Speaking of Social Security;
Basically employer/employee SS “contributions” are all placed in one asset issued by one institution; i.e., the equivalent of US Treasuries issued by the US govt.
Whatever happened to the notion of not placing all your eggs in one basket?
Think about how pension funds or sovereign wealth funds invest ; they place investment dollars – and they have billions to invest- all over the world into every conceivable type of asset class; stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, govt. issued bonds (from many different nations), private equity, etc.
And the return that these funds have generated far outpaces the “return” of SS.
There is no reason at all that SS should not follow the example of , say, Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund or that of the larger US based pension funds.
So how are SS contributions “invested?”
They are invested in a special type of US Treasury bond (non-tradable in the open market) that pays interest. And where does the money come from to pay that interest?(as well as paying back the principal)?
From existing and future contributions by employers/employees into SS.
The problem with this, aside from this “investing” scheme having lousy returns, is that the payouts will exceed the “pay in” (the number of retirees keeps increasing, relative to the number of workers paying in to support them).
So to “fix” this problem, SS taxes go up and/or the retirement age is increased.
If a pension or any investment fund operated like SS, they would be out of business in less than a year because nobody would have them invest their future retirement dollars.
One way to think about this if your investment advisor tells you, beginning at age 21 and through all your working years, that you need to place ALL the dollars you intend to save for retirement in US bonds, bills and notes and nothing else.
When you hit age 65 or 70, you realize that that was a really bad idea.
“The size of birth cohorts saw its nadir around 1936 and its apogee around 1957. That’s your baby boom.” The baby boom generation is the post war boom. First year post war was 1946. The post war boom – hence the term boomers. Kids born in 1936 had little in common with kids born in 1946+ (although your def. strengthens my point) But go ahead and have your own special definition of the boomer generation.
JohnTyler: great points
My financial advisor has put forward certain proposals with respect to investing in renewable energy. I have it in mind to make a counter-proposal directed toward investing in nuclear energy instead. Anybody have any thoughts on the investment prospects in that field? Small modular design commercialization, for example?
Philip Sells:
My unoriginal take is that energy sector is heavily influenced by politics. Renewable energy gets subsidized. Nukes are reviled and mostly not built, There is movement towards the molten salt reactors. Here’s a Market Watch report claiming a compound annual growth rate of 14%.
I think we are still a ways off before the unworkability of renewable energy becomes clear enough that there’s a real shift on nuclear power. We are seeing places like California, Germany and the UK getting hit hard by energy prices because of their big bets on renewables. I confess I’m shocked that so many STEM people remain irrational about energy.
I do see nuclear as a big part of the energy future. (It’s also been held back by cheaper natural gas.) There’s likely a gold rush on nuclear due when attitudes change.
The late computer scientist, John McCarthy, turned me around on nuclear power. McCarthy argues there’s sufficient uranium available in sea water to fuel breeder reactors for *billions* of years. See his faq here: (I had trouble getting this link to work at times.)
There is no reason at all that SS should not follow the example of , say, Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund or that of the larger US based pension funds.
I can think of some reasons.
Social Security’s problem is that it’s not actuarially-sound. You can do three things simple to describe that would make it sound: (1) procedural adjustments in the award of disability benefits and reviews of said awards (Donald McClarey has examples of what you can do gleaned from observing his clients), (2) substantive restrictions on the award of disability benefits (e.g. ending awards for anxiety disorders and mood disorders), and (3) cohort specific retirement ages. The idea with that is that the retirement age is subject to continuous adjustment so the ratio of beneficiaries to workers varies within a narrow band. For a given cohort, the adjustments could be made every six years, with the age then frozen when said cohort reaches 55.
Kids born in 1936 had little in common with kids born in 1946+
There are several salient changes in tastes and the manner of living for which those born in the late 1930s can be regarded as a hinge:
1. Propensity to make use of divorce courts. There was some mild flux without net change between 1947 and 1967, then the attrition rate of marriages trebles in 12 years. Who has been married for six or seven years in 1967? The mode would be people born around 1938.
2. Relative commonality of military service (among men). One of the Statistical Abstracts published ca. 1971 has some data on the history of military service among various age cohorts. For men born during the nine calendar years 1930-38, about 55% had been on active duty and 9% in the Guard or Reserves. Annual inductions and first enlistments during the period running from 1965 to 1973 suggest that about 45% of the succeeding cohorts had some sort of military service (active duty, Guard, Reserves). If you’re looking at the post 1952 cohorts, the share is around 12% if I’m not mistaken.
3. Popular music styles: they changed quite abruptly around 1955, and the locus of that was a teen audience.
4. The explosion in Index crime, which began in 1963 or thereabouts. Note, in our own time, the median age of an adult subject to an arrest for a felony is about 30. Could have been younger then, and, of course, juvenile offenders are not included in that datum. Still, you’re looking at a point of origin somewhere among the Depression-era cohorts.
The one thing where the point of origin likely was found around the 1946 birth cohort was the use of street drugs and the traffick in them. I think there were a mess of rubrics regulating the lives of post-adolescent youth which evaporated during the period running from 1966 to 1970. Maclin Horton has details.
Kids born in 1936 had to contend with the war years and the attendant worries and insecurities. No (zero) baby boomer experienced their father/brother/relative dying in WW2. That’s why we differentiate the post war generation from the generation that came before it.
Art Deco;
“Social Security’s problem is that it’s not actuaryily sound.”
BINGO !!!!!
And the biggest reason it’s not is because the rate of return on SS “investments” is actually NEGATIVE (when considering inflation).
Look, if only , say, half of the SS bogus “trust fund ” were properly invested, the returns on that half would most likely prevent the constant re-jiggering of retirement ages, payouts, age cohorts, etc.
The prescription you present would make make someone’s retirement date a moving target and given the incompetence and ineptitude of the US govt , the SS system will only get worse.
Why is it OK and not only accepted but demanded that pension funds invest across the entire spectrum of asset classes – both public and private, domestic and international and actually generate positive rates of return, after inflation, – but for some bizarre reason, SS must only be “invested” in US (non-trade-able ) Treasury paper?
Why is it acceptable that the “return on investment” of the SS system is basically NEGATIVE (when adjusted for inflation) ?
I am not suggesting that the US govt. abandon all influence / control over the SS system, but they sure can allocate a certain percentage of it’s assets to generate positive, after inflation, rates of return.
Not to get too personal, but I will guess that you do not, nor did not, place your entire investment / retirement portfolio in US Treasury paper.
And I doubt that you could find an investment advisor that would suggest such an investment portfolio.
The US govt. has a proven, 100 year record of F’ing up everything they touch.
The reason is obvious.
Politicians, regardless of the amount of time they serve in Congress, will be long dead before the policies they implement (to get re-elected) come back to F over the citizenry.
Further, when they do retire, they get retirement benefits that most folks can only dream about.
If the nation like Norway can successfully manage a sovereign wealth fund – the largest by assets in the world – or the retirement systems of teachers, state workers, plumbers, cops, firefighters, etc., can manage to invest the money of their workers, and produce positive after inflation returns (over the long term), and college endowments likewise, why can’t the retirement investments of the American people?
Thanks, huxley. We decided on a couple of ideas today, so we’ll see what happens with those. I think you’re quite right about the political influence, but I’m trying to get ahead of the game.
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I didn’t see any flooding from global warming, so I guess that’s no longer a problem. Glad to see Australia’s response to China’s claim to fishing grounds.
But will having the US stop using Carbon based energy change this projection. I guess I will have to ask Biden.
Actually, that is very interesting. Going to be a lot of earthquakes along the way.
Interesting. However it assumes the convective currents in the mantle driving the continental motion remain the same as today. Out of the 3 forms of energy transfer, radiation, conduction, and convection; convection is the most difficult to model. Those hydrodynamic equations tend to chaotic behavior.
That’s all well and good, but is the future sustainable, equitable, and just!?!
Don’t Trust Science!
Cool. You can still see Michigan.
According to the climate change fanatics, it’s too late to do anything to save the planet. After all, we had ….. what was it…… 5, 10 years to save the planet and I believe those 5 or 10 years have already “expired,” several times over IIRC.
Anyway, the earth has gone thru many periods of hot, cold, dry, wet…. repeat and rinse…….and each one of these climate regimes ended all by their lonesome’s and, poof, the climate changed into a totally different climate regime.
All without the aid of SUVs and coal fired power plants and the massive emissions of private jets traveling to and fro from those annual climate-change meetings.
CO2 levels on earth, in the past, have been anywhere from 2 to 5 times higher than today; some say even 10 times higher. Each one of these high CO2 periods came to a end and colder climate (if not an ice age) ensued.
And there is ample evidence that CO2 levels fall/rise AFTER the climate has warmed / cooled.
Manhattan used to be under 5000 FEET of ice !
the Empire State Building is less than 1500 feet in height.
The new World Trade Center , including the needle sitting atop its roof, is about 1800 feet tall.
The LIttle Ice Age, which ended in the early 1800s, was a several hundred year period of extreme cold in the N. Hemisphere. It was so cold that the Hudson River froze over a few times.
We are still “recovering” from the Little Ice Age.
By the way, the Little Ice Age was immediately preceded by the Medieval Warm Period; a several hundred year period of warm climate – warmer than today.
The Vikings didn’t settle Greenland because they wanted to live in igloos and stand over ice holes with spears waiting for a seal to stick its head thru the hole.
And the Vikings didn’t leave Greenland hundreds of years later because they got tired of living there.
ALL of the dramatic and extreme climate changes the earth has experienced have occurred well before humans had any affect on the climate, or well before humans even walked upon this earth.
Ask yourself what causes the annual change of seasons. If anything, it tells you that factors that have nothing at all to do with CO2 (an odorless, invisible gas; a plant/tree/crop/vegetation food ESSENTIAL to all life on earth) are what actually determine the climate.
There are a lot of assumptions going on here.
For one example: They were formed by glaciation relatively recently (in geologic terms). Do you really think the Great Lakes of North America will survive that long? Will there be another ice age in that time (or several) that form other, similar, lakes?
Totally fake, I have it on good authority that in 450 million years the land will spell out Let’s Go Brandon.
Per the Daily Wire: https://www.dailywire.com/news/harris-admits-admin-has-not-been-victorious-in-fighting-pandemic-we-didnt-see-variants-coming
“We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming,” Harris told The Los Angeles Times in an interview. “We didn’t see Omicron coming. And that’s the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants.”
I guess the scientists in Oklahoma are smarter than those in DC. There is an epidemiology report published every week on the OK Covid site (https://oklahoma.gov/covid19.html). I reviewed the reports and the May 5 was the first to report variants, though they were identified by number & country. The table lists cases from 1/1. By the July 14th report, the countries were replaced with the Greek letters.
The CDC also has a pdf which lists variants of concern that were labeled as such on December 29, 2020.
Of course, we already knew about mutations, at least those of us who paid attention in science class.
I know I can’t be the first to notice this but if you’re looking for one unifying thread running through all of our problems it is this: A great many adults in the U.S. today are no longer “grown up” in serious ways. They are incapable of in-depth thinking, rational analysis, or contemplating anything other than what is directly in front of them at the moment.
When a child is caught doing something wrong, even when they are caught red-handed, it is pretty normal for that child to lie and deny even the most obvious reality. That’s because all the child can think about in that moment is “I don’t want to get into trouble.” In many respects, the essence of maturity is learning to think beyond the immediate moment, need, or desire.
In order to beat Donald Trump, our elites weaponized COVID. They fear-mongered, fomented hysteria, and reduced the vast and complex challenge of dealing with a pandemic to “It’s Trump’s fault.” It worked, but now they need to teach Pavlov’s dogs NOT to slobber when they hear the COVID bell and that’s turning out to be awfully difficult.
We could very easily have schools in high-population Blue States shut down and go to remote learning AGAIN this winter, which will complete the disaster of losing an entire generation of children. Millions of kids are never going to fully recover from this and that’s going to affect our society for the next 60+ years.
Mike
Truly staggering amount of pro and college athletes testing positive the last few days. These people are close to 100% vaccinated and of course young and supremely healthy but what percentage of people would test positive right now if everyone was tested?
Sports and colleges are the best window into what is going on right now because they are almost totally vaxxed and yet are tested an insane amount.
Pangaea reforms and all the interior of the super continent becomes one big Outback with rain only at the coastal areas just like what was happening until the end of the Triassic as per that video a couple days ago?
MBunge,
Amen. If it wasn’t for Christmas break coming up schools in blue states would be closed right now and I predict they will be after new year’s.
This will be the third school year in a row disrupted. 2nd graders have never had a normal school year.
Evil.
The early indications are that Omicron is mild, yet the fear mongers mainly talk about “ cases”….totally frustrating!
Maybe this will be a generation of free thinkers. Kids are learning that government delivers poor solutions and they need to think for themselves. Boomers learned that government solves problems – it’s how we got to the moon. And that led to a generation of expanding government.
Looks like the UK is going to lockdown after Christmas (that makes sense) for 2 weeks which of course will be extended and extended and extended.
Boris is basically in a coalition with Labour on lockdowns now as over a 100 Tory MPs revolted on his latest authoritarian measures.
Brits who have any interest in freedom are pretty much screwed at this point. They don’t have a Florida to escape to.
“Truly staggering amount of pro and college athletes testing positive the last few days. These people are close to 100% vaccinated and of course young and supremely healthy but what percentage of people would test positive right now if everyone was tested?”
This morning I looked at the CDC page that Nonapod linked to a few days ago which lists variant percentages. Unfortunately they haven’t updated since the 11th. which still listed 3%. And worse, if you look carefully, that 3% is based on a projection model.
Data this morning for new cases was not out of line with numbers from the past two weeks…. ie no explosion of cases as the press is reporting, but maybe that shows up next week.
Try this thought experiment: suppose it’s 1955 and there’s no genetic testing etc. News reports an outbreak of a flu bug with mild symptoms in South Africa, and seems to be spreading. Does the world go into a panic??
physicsguy,
Interesting thread from this U. of Johannesburg data analyst on how things are going in Gauteng province the ‘hot zone’ for the Dread Variant Omicron.
https://twitter.com/pieterstreicher/status/1472272816141651974
Looks like Australia will become part of China. Continental drift is driven by geopolitics?
Meanwhile, Antonio “Il Duce” Fauci has “canceled the holiday for his family. ‘For the first time in more than 30 years,’ he said, ‘I’m not spending the Christmas holidays with my daughters. He claimed everyone doesn’t have to cancel get-togethers, as long as they “ask and maybe require that people show evidence that they are vaccinated.”
https://ricochet.com/1107487/always-winter-never-christmas-in-covidland/
Maybe Fauci’s daughters are relieved that Dr. Grinch isn’t visiting them this year.
The other interesting thing we are seeing in sports is numerous people are testing positive for the second and third times.
Part of that is the fact that this scam has been going on for almost two years now plus the cycle thresholds on the PCR tests are still to this day all over the map (an under the radar massive scandal) so who knows if they actually have had it all these times.
Again, sports and colleges are a great window into this because they are almost 100% vaccinated (and increasingly boostered) and tested constantly so anybody that says testing and vaccinations are a way out is flat out lying they are only a way to extend this forever.
This will help I’m sure.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/biden-to-deliver-tuesday-speech-on-omicron-variant-as-covid-cases-rise.html
Revolver has a new deep dive on how the FIB stage managed the January 6th riot to create an Insurrection” — the Reichstag fire excuse Hitler needed to grab totalitarian control of a once democratic republic — that CommieCrats needed to assert totalitarian means commensurate with their Post-Constitutional authoritarian goals. The Deep State is no narrow cabal, as we’ve all learned since the Great Biden Cheat dangerously made a senile quasi-octogenarian “President.”
Like the first Revolver report, it’s very long and graphics heavy, so much so that my device cannot load it all. Their tease is “Damning New Details.”
https://www.revolver.news/2021/12/damning-new-details-massive-web-unindicted-operators-january-6/
Therefore, without editorial, let me tease this monster with a summary post, up only in the 8 or 6 hours since the thread went live. I hope this synthetic reduction is veridical:
Stephen Triesch
20 minutes ago
Here’s my summary:
1. Despite numerous advance warnings of potential trouble, security was remarkably – suspiciously – light for such a massive crowd. (The original breach of the outer security fence was so easy because that area of the perimeter – on the direct route from the rally site – was only protected by five police officers. The FBI sends twice that many agents to arrest an unarmed old man like Roger Stone.)
2. A handful of men with a military demeanor seemed to be the ringleaders of the breach, yet none have been charged despite ample video evidence of their actions. The ringleaders seemed to have little interest in the actual rally and speeches, but were busy arranging the breach of the Capitol well before the rally and speeches had even ended.
3. The purpose of these unindicted men seems to have been twofold: (1) to encourage (and assist, in some cases) unstable members of the crowd (e.g., “Antler Man”) in engaging in unlawful acts such as fighting with police and breaching the Capitol; and (2) to herd as many ordinary, non-violent Trump supporters as possible into the Capitol and its immediate vicinity. This was facilitated by removal of the barriers and the warning signs prior to the arrival of the crowd, who – by entering a restricted area without realizing it – unwittingly broke the law.
4. The purpose of herding in as many Trump supporters as possible was to reinforce the impression of a huge, violent mob (an “insurrection”) threating our nation’s very existence, whereas the reality is that the number of people who actually engaged in violence and other overt crimes was probably limited to one or two hundred (if that) out of a crowd of 200,000 or more. But the sight of the large crowds in and around the Capitol was essential for the “insurrection” narrative that was immediately put in place.
4. For “conspiracy theorists,” the question of “Who benefits?” is always paramount, and is believed to provide a clue as to who actually orchestrated a particular event. In the case of January 6th, it is clear that the only people who have benefitted are the enemies of Trump and the populist movement that he helped trigger.
Continental drift and climate change. No doubt that the positions of land masses affect climate. But continental drift takes millions of years. Climate alarmists worry about the next decade. Or at least they say they do.
However, think about this. Every day on Earth there is someplace that records 70 degrees below zero or colder and someplace else that records 100 degrees above zero or warmer. And people live in those places. And have for centuries. How do they do it? Adaptation. They developed strategies for coping with those extreme temperatures. And coping has become easier since the introduction of fossil fuels. Not only has adapting been made easier by using fossil fuels, but it has improved their standard of living as well.
A simple statement of fact: Abandoning fossil fuels will result in much lower living standard for all who go that route. Whatever climate change occurs, we are much better off adapting to it as humans always have. And fossil fueled energy will make it much easier to adapt while maintaining our standard of living.
Griffin, that SA twitter thread is fascinating. The real tell will be in another week to see if the predictions bear out.
Your point about pro sports teams and colleges is quite valid I think to the efficacy, or lack of, the vax for the omicron. Just Darwin at work…mutate to render the vaxed host vulnerable so can still reproduce.
I just hope DeSantis can shield us here in Florida for the massive overreach that we can all see coming from Washington…. they are drooling to go after everyone.
This Graham Medley clown is one of the chief modellers for the UK gov’t.
He openly admits they only model for the worst case scenarios because that is all they are asked to do.
https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1472183666336059393
‘For the first time in more than 30 years,’ he said, ‘I’m not spending the Christmas holidays with my daughters.
1. His wife can’t travel; or
2. They didn’t invite him.
Boomers learned that government solves problems – it’s how we got to the moon. And that led to a generation of expanding government.
The ratio of government purchases of goods and services to domestic product in this country increased in a stepwise fashion from 1933 to 1974, then hit a plateau. Obama’s attempt to add another step failed. If we’re talking about people born during the years running from 1938 to 1957, they were all still in their young adult years when this plateau was reached, and the very youngest were minors. The median age of people in institutional leadership in 1974 would have been around 55, born in 1919. If it’s generations that interest you, the people who presided over the reconstruction of political economy after 1931 were drawn from the “Lost Generation”, the “Greatest Generation”, and the older among the “Silent Generation”. The people countenancing it in the voting booth were a mix of every generation too young to produce Civil War veterans.
It worked, but now they need to teach Pavlov’s dogs NOT to slobber when they hear the COVID bell and that’s turning out to be awfully difficult.
Pavlov’s dogs are members of the teachers’ unions, the administrators for which they work, and their counterparts in higher education. The first two sets have long been collecting pools for what my mother called ‘the world’s inadequate people’. The third exhibits a mix of inadequacy, deceit, and malice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bzIVYyVNUY
Eydie.
Art Deco: expansion of government is not calibrated by the ratio of government purchases of goods and services to domestic product.
This 250 million years into the future was cool – but I don’t believe the current trends will continue that long without more meteorite collisions that are big enough to change the current magma patterns under the plates.
My own untalked about guess, less than a theory, is that Pangea was formed due to a large meteorite, smaller but later than that which broke in and out to form the moon. Then Pangea broke because of other big hits – and this simulation won’t be accurate because of future big meteorite hits.
Instapundit linked to an article about potassium feldspar and how it affects cloud formation, plus its connection to extinction events. I far more fear another ice age over global warming.
https://www.sciencealert.com/it-is-not-bolide-size-that-determines-how-deadly-a-meteor-is
The USA should promise to offer land to those on any island who lose 30% (50%? 10%?) of their land area to rising ocean levels. (And also build more nukes)
Woopsie 1:
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-administration-offers-bonus-to-doctors-who-implement-anti-racism-plans/
Woopsie 2:
https://freebeacon.com/campus/rabbis-college-diversity-officers-promoting-irrational-hatred-of-jews/ (woopsie 2)
File under: “Build Back Better”!!! (AKA Unity, Transparency, Heh!!!)
Art Deco: expansion of government is not calibrated by the ratio of government purchases of goods and services to domestic product.
Yes it is Eva, it’s just inconvenient to your thesis.
And if you wish to discuss the volume of regulation, don’t use NASA as your example of Big Government.
While we’re at it:
1. Diversity is our strength.
2. Who would ever be so unjust to accuse higher ed administrators of being hypocritical crapweasels?
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/12/19/usc-under-fire-over-students-anti-zionist-threats-on-social-media/#more-181976
This morning I hit my first diet goal of 175# — down 31# since I started in early August. This weight was hard to imagine then. All my clothes, except a suit I bought in 2000, are now comfortable, even loose, fits.
My next goal is 164, which for my height puts me into the upper end of the “Normal” weight range. That doesn’t sound far-off, so I’m starting to think about the transition of my diet to whatever’s next.
I’ve been using Tim Ferriss’s Slow-Carb Diet. I eat protein, veggies and beans at each meal, but no “white foods” — sugar, flour, grains — plus no dairy or fruit (except tomato and avocado). The idea is to keep your blood sugar steady.
However, one day a week is Cheat Day and I can eat and drink whatever I want (though Tim recommends starting with a diet breakfast). I’ve chosen Sunday to cheat, so right now I’m sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and nibbling Ghirardelli chocolates.
It’s a pretty livable diet. I’ve been losing 1-3# per week.
–Tim Ferris, “How to Lose 100 Pounds on The Slow-Carb Diet – Real Pics and Stories”
https://tim.blog/2012/07/12/how-to-lose-100-pounds/
geoffb —
Pangaea reforms and all the interior of the super continent becomes one big Outback
At least we’ll all be able to get a steak.
Re: Pangaea
I too noticed the video looked like the reformation of the supercontinent, Pangaea.
Which is a bit worrisome, albeit long-long-term. Pangaea is considered a factor in the Permian Extinction, the worst extinction event in Earth’s history:
_______________________________________
As the supercontinent formed, the ecologically diverse and productive coastal areas shrank. The shallow aquatic environments were eliminated and exposed formerly protected organisms of the rich continental shelves to increased environmental volatility.
Pangaea’s formation depleted marine life at near catastrophic rates. However, Pangaea’s effect on land extinctions is thought to have been smaller. In fact, the advance of the therapsids and increase in their diversity is attributed to the late Permian, when Pangaea’s global effect was thought to have peaked.
While Pangaea’s formation certainly initiated a long period of marine extinction, its impact on the “Great Dying” and the end of the Permian is uncertain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event#Supercontinent_Pangaea
_______________________________________
That’s when the trilobite died off. As a kid I was sentimental about trilobites.
Art Deco: expansion of government is measured by the expansion of regulations – the financial burden falling on individuals and businesses.
Huxley, all that without any organized exercise program? And/or no periodic fasting?
(Pretty amazing, actually.)
Or measured by the headcount of government civil servants and agencies that must be supported by taxes and borrowing regardless of their output of regulations or dear colleague letters or lawsuits.
Anon. – exactly. Also let’s look at government spending as a percentage of GDP. In 1965 under 20% – approx 15%. In 2021, federal spending was equal to 30% of the total gross domestic product. Then there’s the additional spending at the state and local levels.
The NYT weighs in: “On this episode of “Sway,” Ms. Mazzucato tells Kara why the 1960s Apollo program proved that bold, empowered governments can solve our biggest problems; how that model might work to tackle challenges like climate change; and why the Covid crisis is the best time to put moon-shot thinking into action.”
The episode: Stop Whining About Big Government
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-mariana-mazzucato.amp.html
Anon. – exactly. Also let’s look at government spending as a percentage of GDP. In 1965 under 20% – approx 15%. In 2021, federal spending was equal to 30% of the total gross domestic product. Then there’s the additional spending at the state and local levels.
You’re comparing the spending puke of the last two years to abiding phenomena.
Art Deco: expansion of government is measured by the expansion of regulations – the financial burden falling on individuals and businesses.
You haven’t attempted to measure that and your example referred to a public spending program.
Huxley, all that without any organized exercise program? And/or no periodic fasting?
Barry Meislin:
I’m impressed myself. In the past when I dieted, I only lost 1-1.5# / week.
Tim Ferriss is big on the kettlebell, so I’ve been doing KB swings 2-3x/week. I’ve worked up to 300 x 45# swings interspersed throughout the day. But nothing too organized or time-consuming. Though the swing will get one’s heart pumping and stregthens the all-important core.
However, as Tim says, you can’t outwork your mouth, so the main focus is to reduce daily calories and emphasize slow-burning ones.
Fasting — I’ve taken to skipping breakfast after Cheat Day, but that’s it.
It’s an interesting diet. I recommend it. The main trick for me was to find beans I liked. Fortunately, there is a Mexican restaurant a half-block from my cafe which cooks great pinto beans for $3/lb.
Art Deco: then you missed my point and/or I wasn’t clear. My point was that the fact that the government was so spectacularly successful with the moon program changed the way people (boomers and those who came after them) saw the role of government. The view became exactly what Mazzucato states – far better than I did.
And it’s ironic – because at the very same time we (the US government, actually) were losing the war in Viet Nam.
If you scroll down in this article, there’s a very nice graph of government spending
https://ourworldindata.org/government-spending. For the US big jumps for WW1, WW2, and then 1960+ onward and upward.
And of course this doesn’t include spending on regulatory compliance which began in earnest 1970+
For the record, the Bureau of Economic Analysis sorts public expenditure into four categories. You can assess the ratio of these expenditures to nominal gross domestic product for each year running from 1929 to 2019, 91 readings in all for each category.
1. Public consumption: median value, 0.157; range, 0.064 to 0.18; last, 0.14 No secular trend since 1946.
2. Interest payments: median value, 0.04; range, 0.0086 to 0.066; last, 0.042; no secular trend since 1970
3. Subsidies: median value, 0.0038; range, 0 to 0.0062; last, 0.0032; no secular trend since 1960.
4. Transfer payments: median value, 0.088; range: 0.0077 to 0.156; last, 0.148; secular trend since 1929.
This last metric is driven by demographics and by the price dynamics within the medical sector. Over 90% of the expenditure is accounted for by five programs enacted (respectively) in 1935, 1939, 1956, 1965, and 1965. There were no Boomers in Congress when they were enacted. Up until about 20 years ago, Medicaid was the only program among them from which it was common for the post-1937 birth cohorts to draw.
As far as regulations on businesses: here’s an interesting statistic: “ In 2013, 400,000 companies were started, compared to 450,000 that were started in 1980. Population grew 40%, while start-ups fell 11%.”
https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/how-regulations-every-level-hold-back-small-business
“ Over 90% of the expenditure is accounted for by five programs enacted (respectively) in 1935, 1939, 1956, 1965, and 1965”
SS – Let’s not forget the expansions: automatic COLAs, SSI, DI payments, eliminating restrictions on earnings.
Medicare – the add ons over the years are too numerous to mention: https://www.medicareresources.org/basic-medicare-information/brief-history-of-medicare/
Eva Marie:
Do a search for my Vietnam posts to see in what sense we were losing the war. It may not be quite as you think. See in particular this, this, this, and this.
I want to add 2 things:
1. It fell to the boomers+ to pay for SS. Privatization of SS never became popular because of the belief that the federal government would be the better manager.
2. This got me thinking – if we had lost the space race as well as the Viet Nam war, what a disaster that would have been. Neo, I will read your links. But in the end it was a loss.
Eva Marie:
Saying “in the end it was a loss” is very different from “we lost the war.” As I said, read the links.
Neo, I read the links. Well that was sad.
You did lose the war. It sucks. But you did.
There’s lots of Cope-ium imbibed about thrashing the NVA in every pitched battle and decimating the VC during Tet… And it’s all correct. But War by Other Means (to flip it on it’s head) and All That…
If you can be defeated by your myriad enemies foreign and domestic doing an end run through your effed up domestic politics every. single. time. since Vietnam, then that’s all she wrote. Game over. Tactical victories don’t mean Jack @#$% if you don’t win the wars *and* achieve your desired strategic and political outcomes. Of course it would help if you actually had *coherent* and sane achievable dittos and a collective ruling establishment memory longer than a goldfish so could follow through and keep on following through, but I digress.
It’s therapeutic and very lucrative for some to make the rubble bounce in distant places. And it’s the coward’s way because it’s also a psychological avoidance method for not facing up to the issues at home which are going to require bloodletting up close and personal and not via droning third worlders.
If it’s any consolation, the NVA then proceeded to utterly thrash the Chinese PLA when Deng Xiaoping made a demonstration against them in 1979. For all their bravado about Taiwan (pretty effete, militarily) they’re not remotely interested in a rematch with the Vietnamese.
Zaphod:
Ah, once again Zaphod, the great oracle, has spoken. Case closed!!
Read the links, read the books I mention in them, think about it.
Z:
Not your country, remember? We were afflicted with the Jane Fonda’s, Dick Blumenthal’s, John F Kerry’s, and Joe Biden’s (aka Democrats and worse).
“You” lost your country, or was it wanderlust? What is your excuse?
Hi, huxley. I’m glad that diet is working for you. And I agree about the trilobites.
My financial advisor has put forward certain proposals with respect to investing in renewable energy. I have it in mind to make a counter-proposal directed toward investing in nuclear energy instead. Anybody have any thoughts on the investment prospects in that field? Small modular design commercialization, for example?
I wish the Port of Albany would put in some kind of observation area so people could watch the ships in port. It could be somewhat like the little observation parking lot that the airport has. We don’t get much freighter traffic up the Hudson compared to the coastal ports, of course, but it’s been picking up lately. Ships take the better part of a day to make their way up from NYC to either Albany or Coeymans, as they have to work against the current on the one hand and the fact that the Hudson is a little tricky to navigate and to attempt to do so at “highway speeds” is probably rather unwise. It seems to me that Albany is one of the ports relatively far inland in North America to be visited by trans-oceanic shipping with any frequency, leaving the Great Lakes aside.
But but but the world will be DESTROYED in 10 years by GLOBAL WARMING (or was that 1 year, I forgot) unless we all adopt communism and revert to living in stone age hovels NOW!
SS – Let’s not forget the expansions: automatic COLAs, SSI, DI payments, eliminating restrictions on earnings.
[drums fingers]. Referred to above was the Social Security old age program (1935), the survivors benefit (1939), the Disability program (1956), Medicare (1965), and Medicaid (1965). SSI, if I’m not mistaken, is financed out of general revenues because it is specifically provided for disabled people with insufficient contributions (as commonly disabled all their lives); it accounts for less than 6% of all Social Security disbursements.
As for the COLAs, what they do is see to it that Social Security benefits maintain their real value. It prevents an effective reduction in benefits from currency erosion. They should have been included in the beginning.
Medicare – the add ons over the years are too numerous to mention:
No, they’re not. Two of the add ons are options financed by premiums. The one that wasn’t was the extension of benefits to the disabled and to dialysis patients. That went into effect in 1973. As we speak, the median age of persons awarded disability de novo is 49 years. The modal beneficiary is a person in late middle age. It wasn’t enacted by or for Boomers.
It fell to the boomers+ to pay for SS.
The term ‘Boomer’ can be defined in multiple ways, but whichever way you do you’re referring to about 19 birth cohorts, give or take. The mean amount of time people are in the working population in the course of their lives is just shy of 40 years, so 19 birth cohorts would without a doubt account for a large share of the payroll tax payments. I’m not aware people of earlier or later vintage were freed from the obligation to pay payroll taxes.
Privatization of SS never became popular because of the belief that the federal government would be the better manager.
I think you’d have to scrounge to find someone who believed that. Al Gore kept chuffering about ‘lock box’ indubitably because his focus group research told him that there was considerable anxiety that private accounts would reduce benefits to ordinary wage earners and render benefits of more uncertain value. Most people are risk averse.
This was my original point – boomers, impressed with the space program, were amenable to big government solutions and my hope that today’s generation seeing government’s abysmal response to COVID will become free thinkers and head in the opposite direction – and I’m sticking to it.
As for what defines the post war baby boom generation 1946 to 1954. (Although I noticed as boomers got older they stretched the boundary to 1964.)
Privatization of SS – Milton Friedman, the Chicago Boys and the miracle of Chile.
This was my original point
And you’re wrong, as demonstrated.
As for what defines the post war baby boom generation 1946 to 1954.
The size of birth cohorts saw its nadir around 1936 and its apogee around 1957. That’s your baby boom. The significance of the year 1946 is that it saw a year-over-year increase in the number of births to the tune of 21%; that was the largest year-over-year increase. As for behavior and cultural phenomena, the most satisfactory starting point is around 1938 and the most satisfactory terminal point roughly 20 years later. Far too much is made of all of this.
Speaking of Social Security;
Basically employer/employee SS “contributions” are all placed in one asset issued by one institution; i.e., the equivalent of US Treasuries issued by the US govt.
Whatever happened to the notion of not placing all your eggs in one basket?
Think about how pension funds or sovereign wealth funds invest ; they place investment dollars – and they have billions to invest- all over the world into every conceivable type of asset class; stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, govt. issued bonds (from many different nations), private equity, etc.
Just check out the investment portfolio of CALPERS or see here:
https://www.pgmcapital.com/the-sovereign-wealth-fund-of-norway/
And the return that these funds have generated far outpaces the “return” of SS.
There is no reason at all that SS should not follow the example of , say, Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund or that of the larger US based pension funds.
So how are SS contributions “invested?”
They are invested in a special type of US Treasury bond (non-tradable in the open market) that pays interest. And where does the money come from to pay that interest?(as well as paying back the principal)?
From existing and future contributions by employers/employees into SS.
The problem with this, aside from this “investing” scheme having lousy returns, is that the payouts will exceed the “pay in” (the number of retirees keeps increasing, relative to the number of workers paying in to support them).
So to “fix” this problem, SS taxes go up and/or the retirement age is increased.
If a pension or any investment fund operated like SS, they would be out of business in less than a year because nobody would have them invest their future retirement dollars.
One way to think about this if your investment advisor tells you, beginning at age 21 and through all your working years, that you need to place ALL the dollars you intend to save for retirement in US bonds, bills and notes and nothing else.
When you hit age 65 or 70, you realize that that was a really bad idea.
“The size of birth cohorts saw its nadir around 1936 and its apogee around 1957. That’s your baby boom.” The baby boom generation is the post war boom. First year post war was 1946. The post war boom – hence the term boomers. Kids born in 1936 had little in common with kids born in 1946+ (although your def. strengthens my point) But go ahead and have your own special definition of the boomer generation.
JohnTyler: great points
My financial advisor has put forward certain proposals with respect to investing in renewable energy. I have it in mind to make a counter-proposal directed toward investing in nuclear energy instead. Anybody have any thoughts on the investment prospects in that field? Small modular design commercialization, for example?
Philip Sells:
My unoriginal take is that energy sector is heavily influenced by politics. Renewable energy gets subsidized. Nukes are reviled and mostly not built, There is movement towards the molten salt reactors. Here’s a Market Watch report claiming a compound annual growth rate of 14%.
https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/molten-salt-reactors-market-report-2021-trends-market-research-analysis-and-projections-for-2021-2031-2021-11-29
And here’s a story on a new design for a small molten salt reactor being tried in Wyoming:
https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/small-wyoming-city-to-go-nuclear-with-bill-gates-backed-novel-reactor/
I think we are still a ways off before the unworkability of renewable energy becomes clear enough that there’s a real shift on nuclear power. We are seeing places like California, Germany and the UK getting hit hard by energy prices because of their big bets on renewables. I confess I’m shocked that so many STEM people remain irrational about energy.
I do see nuclear as a big part of the energy future. (It’s also been held back by cheaper natural gas.) There’s likely a gold rush on nuclear due when attitudes change.
The late computer scientist, John McCarthy, turned me around on nuclear power. McCarthy argues there’s sufficient uranium available in sea water to fuel breeder reactors for *billions* of years. See his faq here: (I had trouble getting this link to work at times.)
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html
There is no reason at all that SS should not follow the example of , say, Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund or that of the larger US based pension funds.
I can think of some reasons.
Social Security’s problem is that it’s not actuarially-sound. You can do three things simple to describe that would make it sound: (1) procedural adjustments in the award of disability benefits and reviews of said awards (Donald McClarey has examples of what you can do gleaned from observing his clients), (2) substantive restrictions on the award of disability benefits (e.g. ending awards for anxiety disorders and mood disorders), and (3) cohort specific retirement ages. The idea with that is that the retirement age is subject to continuous adjustment so the ratio of beneficiaries to workers varies within a narrow band. For a given cohort, the adjustments could be made every six years, with the age then frozen when said cohort reaches 55.
Kids born in 1936 had little in common with kids born in 1946+
There are several salient changes in tastes and the manner of living for which those born in the late 1930s can be regarded as a hinge:
1. Propensity to make use of divorce courts. There was some mild flux without net change between 1947 and 1967, then the attrition rate of marriages trebles in 12 years. Who has been married for six or seven years in 1967? The mode would be people born around 1938.
2. Relative commonality of military service (among men). One of the Statistical Abstracts published ca. 1971 has some data on the history of military service among various age cohorts. For men born during the nine calendar years 1930-38, about 55% had been on active duty and 9% in the Guard or Reserves. Annual inductions and first enlistments during the period running from 1965 to 1973 suggest that about 45% of the succeeding cohorts had some sort of military service (active duty, Guard, Reserves). If you’re looking at the post 1952 cohorts, the share is around 12% if I’m not mistaken.
3. Popular music styles: they changed quite abruptly around 1955, and the locus of that was a teen audience.
4. The explosion in Index crime, which began in 1963 or thereabouts. Note, in our own time, the median age of an adult subject to an arrest for a felony is about 30. Could have been younger then, and, of course, juvenile offenders are not included in that datum. Still, you’re looking at a point of origin somewhere among the Depression-era cohorts.
The one thing where the point of origin likely was found around the 1946 birth cohort was the use of street drugs and the traffick in them. I think there were a mess of rubrics regulating the lives of post-adolescent youth which evaporated during the period running from 1966 to 1970. Maclin Horton has details.
Kids born in 1936 had to contend with the war years and the attendant worries and insecurities. No (zero) baby boomer experienced their father/brother/relative dying in WW2. That’s why we differentiate the post war generation from the generation that came before it.
Art Deco;
“Social Security’s problem is that it’s not actuaryily sound.”
BINGO !!!!!
And the biggest reason it’s not is because the rate of return on SS “investments” is actually NEGATIVE (when considering inflation).
Look, if only , say, half of the SS bogus “trust fund ” were properly invested, the returns on that half would most likely prevent the constant re-jiggering of retirement ages, payouts, age cohorts, etc.
The prescription you present would make make someone’s retirement date a moving target and given the incompetence and ineptitude of the US govt , the SS system will only get worse.
Why is it OK and not only accepted but demanded that pension funds invest across the entire spectrum of asset classes – both public and private, domestic and international and actually generate positive rates of return, after inflation, – but for some bizarre reason, SS must only be “invested” in US (non-trade-able ) Treasury paper?
Why is it acceptable that the “return on investment” of the SS system is basically NEGATIVE (when adjusted for inflation) ?
I am not suggesting that the US govt. abandon all influence / control over the SS system, but they sure can allocate a certain percentage of it’s assets to generate positive, after inflation, rates of return.
Not to get too personal, but I will guess that you do not, nor did not, place your entire investment / retirement portfolio in US Treasury paper.
And I doubt that you could find an investment advisor that would suggest such an investment portfolio.
The US govt. has a proven, 100 year record of F’ing up everything they touch.
The reason is obvious.
Politicians, regardless of the amount of time they serve in Congress, will be long dead before the policies they implement (to get re-elected) come back to F over the citizenry.
Further, when they do retire, they get retirement benefits that most folks can only dream about.
If the nation like Norway can successfully manage a sovereign wealth fund – the largest by assets in the world – or the retirement systems of teachers, state workers, plumbers, cops, firefighters, etc., can manage to invest the money of their workers, and produce positive after inflation returns (over the long term), and college endowments likewise, why can’t the retirement investments of the American people?
Thanks, huxley. We decided on a couple of ideas today, so we’ll see what happens with those. I think you’re quite right about the political influence, but I’m trying to get ahead of the game.