Does this tell you anything?

Some employment news from Wall Street:

Citigroup is planning to cut almost 10 percent of its equities trading unit staff following a precipitous decline of 17 percent in its equities trading revenue for the first half of 2019.

In July Deutsche Bank said that it was trimming 18,000 jobs over the next three years and completely exiting its stock trading business.

In March Goldman Sachs began laying off workers, including some traders in its equities trading unit.

Crowd Funding a Hospital

DE-BUG

Getting into college

The world has changed a lot since I went to college. I applied to a few, was accepted by most of them and my parents paid for my college education. No big deal. This year we've seen parents bribing people to get their child into college; some of the bribes were pretty hefty, like a million dollars or more. Pro Publica has discovered another way parents can get out of paying for their child's education - give up legal guardianship of their children during their junior or senior year in high school to someone else — a friend, aunt, cousin or grandparent. The guardianship status then allows the students to declare themselves financially independent of their families so they can qualify for federal, state and university aid.

ProPublica Illinois found more than 40 guardianship cases fitting this profile filed between January 2018 and June 2019 in the Chicago suburbs of Lake County alone. The parents involved in these cases include lawyers, a doctor, an assistant school superintendent, as well as insurance and real estate agents. A number of the children are high-achieving scholars, athletes and musicians who attend or have been accepted to a range of universities, from large public institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, the University of Missouri and Indiana University, to smaller private colleges.

Beating the heat.

Sony has found a way: the Reon Pocket, a device you can wear to lower your personal body temperature by 23 degrees or raise it by about 14 degrees.It's about the same size as a smartphone. And it's only $117.

True or False

Ethiopia claims that it has planted more than 350 million trees in a day. The population of Ethiopia is 105 million. So, each person planted 3.5 trees. India's population at 1.06 billion, just about three times that of Ethiopia. Yet, in 2016 India was able to roust 800,000 to plant 50 million trees in a day, or 62.5 a person.

The purpose of this massive planting is to counter the effects of deforestation and climate change in the drought-prone country. The goal is four billion new trees.

Lead-based paint in our schools

The GAO recently released a report which found that an estimated 15.2 million children in the U.S. go to schools in school districts whose buildings had lead-based paint. You may know that, since 1978, there has been a government ban on the use of lead-based paint in housing. The GAO found that 72% of the school districts investigated are not even inspecting their buildings for lead-based paint hazards. Among the 12% that do inspect for lead hazards, more than half found them.

The schools seem to want to keep things secret as 58% of school districts did not notify parents of their findings and 46% did not tell school board members.

Where does your donation go?

If you donate to the Conservative Majority Fund, a PAC, it goes to those who run the fund. In the past nine years it has raised nearly $10 million, but has made just $48,400 in political contributions to candidates and committees.

A very different company

Ecosia, a German company that has been around for ten years, donates 80% or more of its surplus income to non-profit organizations that focus on reforestation and conservationism. Its revenue comes from advertisements which are generated by its search engine that is used by 7,000,000 people who communicate in several languages. For every 45 inquiries conducted on its search engine, Ecosia has a seedling planted somewhere on the world. They want to fight climate change by using plants to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. 

It also publishes monthly financial reports and tree-planting receipts on its web site. These show exactly how much money was made from searches, and what percentage of revenue went towards trees.

It pays no dividends to the owners.

The odds of dying

Fairness in America

She has something to say

One of Elizabeth Warren's points is that the economy is getting weaker and we may repeat the Great Recession. Whether or not we repeat the Recession, I do think that we are headed for some bad economic times. The following is taken from an article she has in Medium.

Our Precarious Economy

Household debt. A generation of stagnant wages and rising costs for basics like housing, child care, and education have forced American families to take on more debt than ever before. The student debt load has “more than doubled since the financial crisis.” American credit card debt matches its 2008 peak. Auto loan debt is the highest it has ever been since we started tracking it nearly 20 years ago, and a record 7 million Americans are behind on their auto loans — many of which have similar abusive characteristics as pre-crash subprime mortgages. 71 million American adults — more than 30% of the adults in the country — already have debts in collection. Families may be able to afford these debt payments now, but an increase in interest rates or a slowdown in income could plunge families over a cliff.

Corporate debt. Corporations are also deeply in debt. Leveraged lending — lending to companies that are already seriously in debt — has jumped by40% since Trump took office, spreading “systemic risk” throughout our financial system. These high-risk loans now make up a quarter of all American business loans, and they look a lot like the pre-2008 subprime mortgages: poorly-underwritten loans with minimal protections that are then packaged and sold to investors. I’ve warned regulators about my concerns — which experts share — but their tepid response shows they haven’t learned the lessons of the last crisis.

Manufacturing recession. Despite Trump’s promises of a manufacturing “renaissance,” the country is now in a manufacturing recession. The Federal Reserve just reported that the manufacturing sector had a second straight quarter of decline, falling below Wall Street’s expectations. And for the first time ever, the average hourly wage for manufacturing workers has dropped below the national average.

You should have been a doctor

It's a small world

Fake news?

"I was with Prime Minister Modi two weeks ago," Trump said. "He actually said, 'Would you like to be a mediator or arbitrator?' I said, 'Where?' He said, 'Kashmir.' Because this has been going on for many, many years." —Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 22, 2019

"We have seen @POTUS's remarks to the press that he is ready to mediate, if requested by India & Pakistan, on Kashmir issue. No such request has been made by PM @narendramodi to US President," Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar.

Pay for lunch or lose your kids

The Wyoming Valley West School District in Pennsylvania informed parents who owed money for lunch that if they didn't pay their bill, the parents would go to court. "If you are taken to Dependency court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care."

The district is owed more than $22,000 by roughly 1,000 students. Four accounts show parents owe more than $450 each.

If you don't own these stocks, is this a good thing?

Another attempt to reduce plastics

Origin Materials, a small Canadian company, thinks it can make recyclable plastic bottles from sawdust. Some major companies - Nestle SA, Danone SA and PepsiCo Inc. - agree with them as they have signed contracts with the firm. They hope to sell water in Origin’s recyclable plant-based bottles in early 2022.

Other companies are trying other new ways of producing recyclable plastic - sugar, corn, algae, seaweed, sewage and dead beetles.

Preventing Crime

From our Florida correspondent

Plastic curtains can be trees

Build your own coffin

People are doing this in New Zealand and it is starting here (The Cleveland Community Coffin Club), or so says an article in this month's The Atlantic. The Kiwi Coffin Club provides "an environment in which issues of death and loss can be , addressed, understood, and accepted through discussion, support and the activity of painting and lining your own coffins."

Crops or Kids

Farmers use chlorpyrifos to control insect pests that like fruit, nut, cereal and vegetable crops. In 2016, more than 640,000 acres were treated with chlorpyrifos in California alone. It so happens that the EPA staff has linked the substance to serious health problems in children and it has been banned for household use. 

Does the P in EPA still stand for Protection?

Return on investment

People on trial

In an article about risk assessment relative to determining whether those who are awaiting trial should secure bail I found the following statements:

The United States accounts for only 4 percent of the global population, but 20 percent of the global pretrial jail population.  

Current pretrial incarceration rates defy all historical norms. 

There are more legally innocent people behind bars in America today than there were convicted people in jails and prisons in 1980.

The article was written by scientists from MIT and a lawyer from Harvard. Do you think they're right?

Conjoined twins 8 years later

What is the problem with flight attendants uniforms?

It seems that when they get new uniforms, some develop rashes, blisters, hair loss, vomiting, migraines, eye irritation, hives, and shortness of breath. The attendants have filed law suits against the manufacturers.

A research group at Harvard that studies flight attendants’ health found that there is a relationship between flight attendants’ health issues and the new uniforms they wore. The attendants are working under rather unique conditions, such as engine exhaust, long periods in recycled air, and disrupted circadian rhythms. They also wear their uniforms for long periods of time, during long flights or delays, so their exposure to chemicals in their uniforms could be greater than that of other workers, even at the same airline, who wear uniforms for a shorter time or have a different working environment. Flight attendants’ physical activity during their work can also lead to sweating, which can cause certain chemicals to leach onto the skin and cause a reaction.

A way to reach the moon

30 years of climate change in Boston Harbor

L Street Resilient Landscape Video from Stoss on Vimeo.

From the Boston Globe

Separating conjoined twins

Forest fires and climate change

A society of Earth and Space Scientists, known as AGU, has been around for over 100 years. It publishes "Earth's Future", which, I have to assume, publishes serious science. In its latest issue it looks at the forest fires that have hit California from 1972 to 2018. Some conclusions they reached:

Annual burned area in California increased five‐fold during 1972–2018, mainly due to an eight‐fold increase in summer forest fires
Anthropogenic warming very likely increased summer forest fire by drying fuels. This trend is likely to continue 
Large fall fires are likely to become increasingly frequent with continued warming and possibly gradual declines in fall precipitation

The past decade has seen half of the state’s 10 largest wildfires and seven of its 10 most destructive fires, including last year’s Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest wildfire ever.

A strange-looking fish

Firms with no tangible assets are dominating the stock market

For example:

Airbnb, which owns no property, is worth more than the Hilton group. 

Facebook, which owns no content, is one of the world's most valuable advertising platforms. 

Uber and Lyft, which don't own a single vehicle, are the world's most valuable taxi companies. 

Tesla, which is worth more than Ford, has less than one-quarter the employees.

Vincent Deluard, the director of global macro strategy at INTL FCStone, thinks current economic conditions are creating a stock-market environment that can no longer be accurately valued. He writes, "Businesses whose value is not grounded in physical assets or labor become more desirable: assets that do not show up financial statements, such as brand name, access to customers' data, or a base of captive users are the drivers of value in the age of free capital."  How we used to value stocks has been rendered irrelevant to him.

Where was Melania born?

Ana Navarro really laces into Trump. Unfortunately, I can't embed the video but you can view it here. Here are two interesting excerpts:

“Listen, Ted Cruz was born in Canada. Marco Rubio’s parents were born in Cuba, Melania Trump was born where, Slovenia? How about her parents who are here through family immigration? I’m sick of that guy’s hypocrisy, pitting people against each other. It is no coincidence, no coincidence that the congresspeople he is picking on are all women of color. Are all women of color.”

“If you go to the Vietnam memorial, you’ll see a bunch of Hispanic names, a bunch of names of people who came from other countries and were willing to do what Donald Trump was too much of a coward to do. Sacrifice and serve for this country and wear this country’s uniform, risking their lives for it. Donald Trump is a nightmare, national embarrassment and a national nightmare that’s going to pass some day.”

Here's a new one

To me, anyway. Hunter College High School in Manhattan bought 12 RealCare Baby 3 robots. They are used by their 10th grade students, who choose a day to take home one of the 12 after school, then return it the next morning. The robots record whether the students provided a bottle or fresh diaper, hit or shook the baby, neglected it or failed to support its head. The students are graded on this.

The manufacturer, Realityworks, claims that the robots, which start at $749, are used in two-thirds of American school districts. I find this hard to believe, primarily because this is the only school I know of that uses robots.

Why Trump scrubbed the Iran deal

Today the London newspaper, The Mail, reported that the British Ambassador to the U.S. wrote to Boris Johnson, who may be the next Prime Minister, that President Trump appeared to be abandoning the nuclear deal for "personality reasons" (i.e, 'to spite Obama') because the pact had been agreed to by Obama.

This goes along with a Trump tweet from June this year,whereby he objected to Obama having given Iran £1.8bn (£1.4bn) as part of the deal. Commentators later pointed out this was related to the settlement of an unfulfilled military order from the 1970s.

The EPA Administrator

The Union of Concerned Scientists thinks Andrew Wheeler, the Administrator, does not like the environment. They give ten examples of where he has screwed up:

1. Sidelined Scientists 
2. Proposed to Restrict the Use of Scientific Data 
3. Gutted the Coal Ash Rule 
4. Recommended Unsafe Levels of Drinking Water Contaminants 
5. Rolled Back Clean Water Act Protections 
6. Suppressed an Inconvenient Formaldehyde Report 
7. Ignored EPA Scientists’ Advice to Ban Asbestos 
8. Weakened the Mercury Emissions Rule 
9. Slammed Vehicle Emission Rules Into Reverse 
10. Rescinded the Clean Power Plan

Our legislators

For the past several years I have felt that the quality of our legislators has fallen remarkably. They are less interested in the country than in being reelected. A recent survey over the past two years by two political scientists, one from Yale, the other from George Washington, seems to agree with me.

They contacted 2,346 state legislators and provided them with access to highly detailed public opinion survey data — more detailed than almost all available opinion polls — about their constituents’ attitudes on gun control, infrastructure spending, abortion and many other policy issues. After all, the legislators should have an interest in what their constituents want. 

However, the study showed that an overwhelming majority of legislators were uninterested in learning about their constituents’ views. Furthermore, when the legislators who did view the data were surveyed afterward, they were no better at understanding what their constituents wanted than legislators who had not looked at the data.

"Our study suggests that for most politicians, voters’ views carry almost no weight at all."

Doctors vs. the NRA

Chase moves cocaine

Last week a container ship owned by JPMorgan Chase was seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection when it found 20 tons of cocaine located in containers on the ship. On the street the cocaine can garner $1.3 billion.

This is not the only ship Chase owns. An article in Institutional Investor states that “J.P. Morgan Global Alternatives has $1.26 billion in institutional client capital dedicated to shipping strategies, and says it ranks in the top 5 percent of ship owners globally.”

Owning companies is not unique to Chase. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a study in July 2012 titled “A Structural View of U.S. Bank Holding Companies.” The study showed that U.S. bank holding companies owned 16 utilities; 479 insurance companies; 2,388 real estate firms; 1,682 healthcare and social assistance companies; and 5 mines. The public also learned from Senate hearings in 2014 that Wall Street’s largest banks own at least 104 metal warehouses with complaints coming from beer and soda manufacturers that these firms control the London Metal Exchange and are rigging the price of aluminum.

What to do on your 100th birthday

Eisenhower on the Military-Industrial Complex

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry... 
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions... 
Added to this, 3½ million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment...
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience... 
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Courtesy of Tomgram

Climate change may kill the internet

That's what some scientists think. That's because a lot of the physical infrastructure supports the internet connections that touch nearly every aspect of modern life. Delicate fiber optic cables, massive data transfer stations, and power stations create a patchwork of literal nuts and bolts that facilitates the flow of zeros and ones.

This is likely to happen within 15 years. 

Chase Manhattan still has a problem - a major one

They still think I owe them one penny. A month ago I wrote about the company's attempts to collect a penny from me. Yes, I did owe it because I made an error writing a check to them. I went through a fair amount of hassle about it, sent them a check and eventually, after a letter to Jamie Dimon, they wrote it off. And told me they did.

Well, yesterday I got another statement from them claiming I owe them the money. Why do they want to waste time and money?

Saving the Amazon

Quotes from UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Ms. Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:

“As a pediatrician, but also as a mother and a former head of state, I am deeply shocked that children are forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded facilities, without access to adequate health care or food, and with poor sanitation conditions.”

“Detaining a child even for short periods under good conditions can have a serious impact on their health and development — consider the damage being done every day by allowing this alarming situation to continue.”

These comments were probably based on a report by the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog. In five facilities visited by inspectors in June, they found children had few clothes, were given few means to clean themselves, were provided with inadequate and unhealthy food, and were held in severely overcrowded facilities. Adult migrants in one center had been held in standing room only conditions for a week.

The company made me do it

That in essence is the argument that families of France Telecom employees who committed suicide are using in a criminal trial against France Télécom. Today, there are 39 cases that have been presented to the court. The cases present details of working lives that were made unbearable and ultimately unliveable as a result of the company’s official policies. The union claims that there were 60 employee suicides at the company between 2006 and 2010.

The problem seemed to have started when France Telecom ceased being part of the government. When that happened, the company changed its name to Orange S.A. and developed a restructuring plan that set a goal of cutting 22,000 jobs over three years by pressuring employees to leave the company.

Management is accused of implementing tactics across the whole company based on what prosecutors are calling psychological bullying. Some employees were forced to change jobs or move to new cities on an almost continuous basis. Many highly skilled engineers and technicians were demoted to jobs working on the phones in call-centers. Others received a barrage of emails from their managers suggesting that they leave the company to open a pizzeria or a rural guest house. Others still were intimidated, belittled or verbally abused. Many employees report that they were “forgotten” and left behind in an empty office when staff had moved on to a new site.

A 2019 dancer

More trees equal less carbon

I think most scientists would agree. The question is how much less. Scientists in Switzerland think that the earth could support nearly 2.5 billion additional acres of forest without shrinking our cities and farms. The mature trees would store 200 gigatons of carbon, whatever a gigaton is. But they also assert that this would store two-thirds of the carbon generated by industrial activity over the last 150 years. Other scientists dispute these numbers but do agree that more trees should be part of our battle against climate change.

The major planters of these trees would be Russia (with 373 million acres of forest); the U.S. with 255 million acres and Canada with 193 million acres.

Adopt a puppy

A history lesson from our President

“In June of 1775 the Continental Congress created a unified Army out of the Revolutionary Forces encamped around Boston and New York, and named after the great George Washington, commander in chief,” Trump read in his speech. “The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis at Yorktown. Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports, it did everything it had to do and at Ft. McHenry under the rocket’s red glare had nothing but victory. When dawn came, the star-spangled banner waved defiant.”

We lead more painful lives

From The Atlantic

Another hard to believe case

What do you recycle?

Iraq is going dry

It was a legitimate political expense

That's the campaign money that Congressman Duncan Hunter spent on affairs, vacations, clothes, and video games. The affairs were with three lobbyists, a staffer in his own office, and a Republican National Committee official. His lawyers are arguing that the money he spent in the course of having affairs with them should count as a legitimate political expenditure. After all, the women were also business contacts.

The Golden Girls

Why doesn't Amazon comply with Proposition 65?

Proposition 65 is another name for California's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. It requires that companies label products containing significant amounts of chemicals on its list of hazardous substances. Amazon has no such label on the skin creams, which often contain various chemicals that can cause birth defects, kidney problems, and scarring.

George Soros and Charles Koch working together!

That's right. THE Liberal and THE Conservative have founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Institute is committed to promoting "ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace." It wants a world based on diplomacy and restraint rather than threats, sanctions, and bombing.

They are aiming for a $3.5 million budget organization and a staff of policy experts in 2020. Soros and Koch have each contributed half a million dollars; other donors (including Andrew Bacevich) have put up another $800,000.

This is Guadalajara in the summer of 2019

That's ice you're looking at, five feet deep in some places. It was caused by a hail storm. Climate change, anyone?