Speaking a foreign language

One view of tariffs

She makes sense to me.

An Odd Building

And I thought that Singapore was a rather conventional country

Courtesy of a Duncaster resident

Running Dry

Chennai has a population of 4.6 million. It is running out of water. Its largest reservoir and another important reservoir are running dry. Look at the difference in one year.

Here's how it looked in June 2018.

And now in June 2019.

Climate change and horse poop

A Pro at 7

They're getting younger and younger

In rehearsal

A Late Starter

Do you agree?

Traveling to freshwater lakes

That's what some researchers wanted to find out - how do fish get to isolated freshwater lakes. Their theory is that birds bring them there. And they do it via their digestive tract. The experiment involved whole killifish eggs. The eggs were put inside the digestive system of swans in Brazil. They found that an estimated one per cent of ingested killifish eggs were found to be viable in bird feces and capable of continuing their development. One egg in the study even hatched more than a month after its transit through a swan.

Talking Truths to Mitch

Things don't look well..

...at least to Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley. His starting point is "Since the end of the recession, the economy has grown at about 2 percent a year in the United States and 3 percent worldwide — both nearly a point below the average for postwar recoveries." This is the longest, weakest recovery on record. The basic problem, he feels, is that central banks have printed a lot of easy money and given it to inefficient and big companies. These are no longer the times of the entrepreneur. The National Bureau of Economic Research shows that low rates gave big companies an incentive and means to grow bigger. As their power grows, workers’ share of national income has been shrinking, fueling inequality.

The economy is being dominated by big companies; for example, four airlines and three rental car companies account for more than 80 percent of the American travel markets. One company owns just about all major jewelers. It looks as though tech companies sell to Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. rather than try to unseat them. Start-ups represent a declining share of all companies in Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the United States and many other industrialized economies. The United States is generating start-ups — and shutting down established companies — at the slowest rates since at least the 1970s.

Then, there are the “zombie firms,” which don’t earn enough profit to cover their interest payments and survive by repeatedly refinancing their loans. They account for 12 percent of the companies listed on stock exchanges in advanced economies and 16 percent in the United States, up from 2 percent in the 1980s. Companies are surviving in the “zombie state” for longer, depleting the productivity of healthy companies by competing with them for capital, materials and labor.

We all do stupid things

Kyle Kashuv is a survivor of the Parkland shootings. He graduated second in his class and was admitted to Harvard. Somehow, Harvard learned of racist and anti-Semitic comments he made on-line exchanging comments with his fellow students as they were cramming for a test. He was 16 years old at the time. He is a conservative and works hard supporting conservative endeavors. But, he has also worked very hard supporting gun control in schools.

Because of these comments Harvard revoked his admittance. In his defense, he wrote, “I am no longer the same person, especially in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting and all that has transpired since.” He also wrote to the Harvard diversity office, apologizing and asking what he could do to be a better person. When the comments became public last month, Kashuv immediately apologized. “We were 16-year-olds making idiotic comments, using callous and inflammatory language in an effort to be as extreme and shocking as possible.”

What is Harvard afraid of?

Plastic sneakers

When does food expire?

Viri probati

That's an approved man in Latin and Latin is commonly used in the Catholic Church. It was most recently used in a proposal for an upcoming Vatican conference on the needs of communities in the Amazon region. The approved men will be ordained as priests provided they are "elderly men, preferably indigenous, respected and accepted members of their community.” Such men could be ordained “even if they already have an established and stable family.” Is this the first step toward the ordination of married men in other areas of the world?

Another interesting chart

In California local jails have become more dangerous

In 2011 the California prison system introduced some reforms, one of which was the shifting of responsibility from state prisons to county lockups. Since then, the rate of inmate-on-inmate homicides has tripled or quadrupled, and statewide the number has risen 46%. 

But county jails are not equipped to handle those who have been in a state jail; they are designed to hold people no longer than a year. They don't expect inmates to suffer from serious mental illness or chronic medical conditions that those facilities have been unprepared to handle. The majority of people in county jails are accused of crimes, innocent under the law, whereas prisons only hold those who have been convicted of felonies. Jails mix both populations, and the result has been deadly.

Flood and a Landslide

Your Call

Fighting Crime in Phoenix

Apparently, it must be pretty tough. This video shows the cops' reaction when they learned that a 4-year-old girl walked out of a Dollar store with a Barbie doll she hadn’t paid for — without the parents’ knowledge.

Fighting forest fires can kill you

I guess that's obvious but how they can kill you over the long term. They have studied fighting fires in buildings and have found they bring elevated risks of cancer, heart and lung disease, and even mental health issues. But now they have realized that forest fire smoke is full of compounds and components that are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The wildland firefighters and crews breathe carbon monoxide that can cause a significant and immediate loss in cognitive function. And there is more: a host of other toxins in the smoke, exposure to smoke laced with chemicals from herbicides that were applied to forests before they caught fire.

Their protection? A bandana is the only respiratory protective equipment recommended for firefighters to carry. And the EPA and many other health agencies warn that it doesn't actually help reduce particulate exposure. But experts say there's no easy alternative. The basic N95 respirators available to the general public don't hold up to the intense conditions of a fire. And the respirators that structural firefighters use are heavy, reduce vision and can only supply clean air for a short period of time. Wildfire shifts are generally 12 hours.

Is ICE too busy?

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is supposed to review every case that comes to them for a foreign-born veteran. If a foreign-born service member received an honorable discharge, he or she is eligible for citizenship, provided he applies for it; his case is supposed to be reviewed by a senior ICE official. However, the GAO found that the agency didn’t bother to do this in 70% of the cases.

Historically, non-citizens have been vital to the nation’s military success. More than 100,000 lawful permanent residents have served in the U.S. armed forces since 2001.

Studying Trees

Are you in this group?

From The Big Picture

At least they responded

And they actually did something. "They" is JPMorgan Chase.  Back in May I recounted my experience trying to get Chase to forget about a one penny error I made in paying my monthly bill. Well, my first attempt at solving the problem did not work. Last week I got a notice saying that I still owed them a penny. When I called and asked them for the name of the person running this division, I could not get an answer. So, I wrote a letter to the division, with a copy to Jamie Dimon. They did respond twice - once for the division and once for Dimon. Supposedly, I now owe them nothing.

A Miracle

Assuming it's not fake news.

Dogs in Korea

The Subminimum Wage

Did you know that there are more than 320,000 people who are legally paid a wage less than the minimum. These people are disabled and working for organizations using a section of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This section, referred to as 14(c), says that workers “whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury” can be paid based on their “productivity” or on the “quality and quantity” of their labor.

There are over 1,400 firms - tiny companies and large companies - holding 14(c) certificates in the US. They are referred to as Community Rehabilitation Programs, or more commonly, sheltered workshops. These organizations seek and receive contracts from large corporations to generate products and services that fund their operations. In Nevada one of these 1400 firms is accused of paying its workers 36 cents an hour.

Some of these firms do pay their executives well. PRIDE Industries, a Sacramento-based sheltered workshop, pays its CEO a salary of $792,132, while 906 workers are employed at subminimum wages. 

The Bionic Dancer

JPMorgan Chase has improved

At least in the eyes of the Federal Reserve. In 2013 the Fed required the bank to provide written progress reports to the New York Fed in 2013 until further notice. This was due to JP's secretly gambling with depositors’ money in exotic derivatives in London and losing at least $6.2 billion of those funds. Although the bank has pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts since then, the Fed has removed the restriction.

In the interim JP has been charged by a number of agencies:

Last December the Hong Kong Monetary Authority charged it with anti-money laundering violations.

Also in December the Securities and Exchange Commission fined it 135 million for improperly providing American Depository Receipts (ADRs) “to brokers in thousands of pre-release transactions when neither the broker nor its customers had the foreign shares needed to support those new ADRs.”

In October the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) charged and fined JPMorgan Chase “for 87 apparent violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations; the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations; and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators Sanctions Regulations.”

And it hasn't stopped. Yesterday the Swiss Competition Authority announced that it was fining JPMorgan Chase and other banks for anti-competitive behavior in the foreign exchange spot market.

What about the participation rate?

We're all pleased that the unemployment rate has been low for quite a while now. But the unemployment rate does have a flaw. It does not include those who have stopped looking for a job. That's measured by the participation rate; it measures all active workers divided by the working-age population. The participation rate has been low since the onset of the Great Recession.

From about the late 1980s until 2008, the participation rate fluctuated around 66% to 67%. But after the Great Recession, the rate dropped more 3 percentage points over the next seven years and has barely budged since. The latest jobs report shows it’s at 62.8%.

The 3 percentage points decline in participation translates to over 6 million people no longer in the labor force. Should we worry?

Texas cops at work

Trump's latest tweet moves the moon to Mars

"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!"

 59.8K 1:38 PM - Jun 7, 2019

The GAO found a few problems auditing the IRS

These control deficiencies are:

nationwide strategy for safeguarding taxpayer receipts and associated information, 
physical security policies and procedures, 
review of visitor access logs, 
transmission of taxpayer receipts,
 designations of unit security representatives, 
review of automated tax refund information prior to certification for payment, 
review of refund schedule numbers for manual refunds, 
and review of suspicious and questionable tax returns in Examination.

Some Truths About Air Power

as seen by William Astore who spent his career as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and now spends his time teaching "military science". He makes his case that there are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses, we are the air power today. His basic tenets: 

1. Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn’t mean that they should.

2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory.

3. No matter how much it’s advertised as “precise,” “discriminate,” and “measured,” bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk) rarely is.

4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works.

5. Air power is enormously expensive.

6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading.

7. Air power is inherently offensive.

8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them.

9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time.

10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war.

His summary:
If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.

Seniors are falling more often

The National Center for Health Statistics found that in 2016 the rate of death from falls for people 75 and older was 111 per 100,000 people. This was more than double the rate in 2000 - 52 per 100,000 people. Why? Elizabeth Burns, an author of the study, says, “The most likely reason is that people are living longer with conditions that in the past they might have died from.” In addition, she continued, older adults are on medications that increase their risk of falling. Women are slightly more likely to fall than men, but men are slightly more likely to die as a result of a fall.

What can we do about it? Exercise at least 20 minutes a day, combining aerobic and anaerobic exercise including weight lifting which strengthens the legs. Tai chi, the Chinese martial art, appears to be an effective way to improve balance.

What should we not do? Minimize the medications we take to sleep as they can compromise balance. Avoid bifocal or progressive lenses when walking outside. Don't wear high heels. Wear shoes that have a back, and a sole with good tread.

Returning to America post WWI

That's what Paul Krugman is arguing about re Trump's moving us toward trade wars. He "is returning America to the kind of irresponsibility it displayed after World War I." As indicated by refusing to join the League of Nations, slamming the doors shut on most immigration, doubling average tariffs on dutiable imports (via Smoot Hawley Act, Emergency Tariff Act, Fordney-McCumber Tariff). Like now,farmers were especially hard hit - low prices for their products and high prices for farm equipment, leading to a surge in foreclosures.

Our tariffs put our World War I allies in an impossible position: We expected them to repay their huge war debts, but our tariffs made it impossible for them to earn the dollars they needed to make those payments.

The combination of trade war and debt nexus created a climate of international distrust and bitterness that contributed to the economic and political crises of the 1930s. But we learned something about a post-war world. After World War II we operated on the basis that free trade and peace went hand in hand.

The decline of diversity in crops

Maybe he just wanted a glass of wine.

No one answered the door at three o'clock in the morning, so an 11-foot alligator broke some low windows and entered a house in Clearwater, Fl. He knocked over a wine shelf and several bottles of wine were broken.

No one was injured during the incident but police said the gator had some minor cuts to its shoulder area. It will be taken to a private alligator farm.

Courtesy of our Florida correspondent

A new sales pitch for toilet paper

Charmin is trying to sell urban millennials and aging consumers toilet paper that will take care of them for three months and not take up much space. They call it the Forever Roll. It comes in two sizes: multi-user, which is 12 inches in diameter, and single user, which is 8.7 inches in diameter. By comparison, conventional rolls measure roughly five inches in diameter.

Two kids fighting

Trading with Mexico

Do you agree?

Nearing the end?

The Top Ten

For the past ten years the World Economic Forum has published a list of the most powerful cities in the world. The goal is to select cities that best attract capital, businesses and people – what it refers to as the cities’ magnetism.

The six factors scrutinized are: economy, research and development, cultural interaction, livability, environment, and accessibility. These six are, in turn, broken down into 70 different indicators which are all given a score. The cumulative score gives the institute its final rankings. The maximum possible score is 2,600 points.

The 2018 top five remains unchanged from last year – London, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Singapore.

Still Dancing

Pleasing the boss

It may not have been Trump, it may have been a member of his staff but Rear Adm. Charlie Brown, the Navy’s chief of information, said in a statement that a “request was made to the U.S. Navy to minimize the visibility of USS John S. McCain (when Trump was in Japan), however, all ships remained in their normal configuration during the President’s visit.”

No matter who issued the statement, it was still childish.

Read at a funeral I attended

Death Is Nothing At All
By Henry Scott-Holland 

Death is nothing at all. 
It does not count. 
I have only slipped away into the next room. 
Nothing has happened. 

Everything remains exactly as it was. 
I am I, and you are you, 
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. 
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. 

Call me by the old familiar name. 
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. 
Put no difference into your tone. 
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. 

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. 
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. 
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. 
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. 

Life means all that it ever meant. 
It is the same as it ever was. 
There is absolute and unbroken continuity. 
What is this death but a negligible accident? 

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? 
I am but waiting for you, for an interval, 
somewhere very near, just round the corner. 

All is well. 
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. 
One brief moment and all will be as it was before. 
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again! 

Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/death-is-nothing-at-all-by-henry-scott-holland

Rivers can be dangerous

Where should You live?

A third way to go

At least in Washington state. The legislature approved this on May 21

Good Customer Service?

I made an error in paying my last Chase bill. I was short one penny. Rather than go through the hassle of writing a check for that amount, I called Chase on the assumption they would credit my account for the penny. After all, I had just come from CVS where I was very easily able to convince the clerk to take $35.25 in payment for an item costing $35.27. I guess Chase is in tough shape, as I wound up paying them the penny by allowing them to withdraw it from my bank account.

How often will I use my Chase card in the future?

A Waste of Time

Twenty or so years ago I subscribed to Vanity Fair. True, it had a fair amount of fashion articles, but it also had a couple of substantive articles in each issue. However, things changed and I ceased my subscription. About a month ago I got an e-mail from them offering a deal for five issues; I took it. I got my first copy yesterday and the magazine has become a fashion magazine exclusively. Just about every article has a photograph(s) of the subject(s) of the article. Each photograph includes a description of what the subjects are wearing. It still has more pages of advertisements than articles, but the articles have no substance other than fashion. My next four issues will go right to my waste basket.

Changing Cow's Food

C

Doing Good

Calculating Health Risks of Air Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the way it calculates the future health risks of air pollution. It will use what they are calling the Affordable Clean Energy rule. But the methods used in this rule have never been peer-reviewed and are not scientifically sound. It relies on unfounded medical assumptions and discards more than a decade of peer-reviewed E.P.A. methods for understanding the health hazards linked to the fine particulate matter produced by burning fossil fuels.

The rule would slightly improve the efficiency of coal plants and allow older coal plants to remain in operation longer and result in an increase of particulate matter.

Are derivatives still a problem?

You may remember that they were a big factor in the Great Recession. One of the major reasons why was that trading in them was under the table so that the banks did not have sufficient resources to absorb potential losses. Well, as the following chart shows, trading in them is still not exactly crystal clear.

Truly big banks

Did you know that Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo have 50% of the assets of the 5,406 FDIC-insured commercial banks and savings institutions in America? That's what the House Financial Services Committee concluded in their latest report, “As of December 31, 2018, there were 5,406 FDIC-insured commercial banks and savings institutions that held a combined $17.9 trillion in assets…”.  The Committee then notes that there are eight mega banks in the U.S. “that hold a combined $11.1 trillion in assets, comprising roughly 50 percent of domestic banking assets.”

It concludes that these six banks “have engaged in—and continue to engage in—a crime spree that spans the violation of almost every law and rule imaginable. Taking the breadth and depth of their illegal conduct as a whole, the six biggest banks in the country look like criminal enterprises with RAP sheets that would make most career criminals green with envy. That was the case not just before the 2008 crash, but also during and after the crash and their lifesaving bailouts…In fact, the number of cases against the banks has actually increased relative to the pre-crash era.”

A major problem with Chinese pigs

Millions of them have died and are still dying from African swine fever. The nation’s stock of live pigs has fallen by a fifth from a year ago. They expect that China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of pork, will produce 150 million to 200 million fewer pigs this year because of deaths from the infection. Last year 700 million pigs were slaughtered in China.

African swine fever, for which no treatment or vaccine exists, has spread to every Chinese province and region, and has also jumped the border into Cambodia, Mongolia and Vietnam.

What's with JPMorgan Chase?

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks, says that, as of December 31, 2018 the bank held $2,212,311,000,000 ($2.2 trillion) in equity derivatives.This is 65.5 percent of bank trading in the derivatives market. You remember derivatives from the Great Recession?

According to the OCC, JPMorgan Chase lost $644 million on its equity positions in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Not only is JPMorgan Chase Bank NA engaging in risky stock derivative trades, but according to the OCC just 31 percent of these trades are centrally cleared. The other 69 percent are what are called over-the-counter or OTC derivative trades, meaning they are “bilateral,” or secret contracts between JPMorgan Chase and a counterparty with little daylight available to Federal regulators. That also would suggest that they are highly illiquid.

Do you believe this?

This appeared in June 2016 re Trump:

"An exclusive USA TODAY analysis of legal filings across the United States finds that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits."

That's about 100 a year or 2 a week. I have not heard or seen any comments by Trump quarters.

We're having fewer kids

The CDC reports that the number of births last year dropped to its lowest in about three decades. Birth rates declined for nearly all age groups of women younger than 35 but rose for women in their late 30s and early 40s. Overall, the provisional number of births in 2018 for the United States was about 3.79 million, down 2% from the total in 2017. The finding marks the fourth year that the number of births has declined, after an increase in 2014.

The fertility rate has also declined. Last year it was 1,728 births per 1,000 women, a decrease of 2% from 2017 and a record low for the nation. The total fertility rate in 2018 was below what is considered the level needed for a population to replace itself.

Should we worry?

From Wolf Street

How much did you pay for your last prescription?

Growing food in the Arctic

Dealing with plastic waste

The Basel Convention is a treaty that regulates movement of hazardous materials from one country to another. Governments of 187 countries have signed this treaty, but we are not one of the 187. Now they have added plastic to the materials to be better managed. So, contaminated and most mixes of plastic wastes will require prior consent from receiving countries before they are traded. We will have difficulties in trying to trade plastic waste to virtually any country in the world.

An estimated 100 million tons of plastic is now found in the world's oceans, up to 90% of which comes from land-based sources, studies have found.

Living with snipers

Not pleasant news early in the morning

From today's NY Times:
After Big Loss for Market, Fears of a Lasting Effect 
Wall Street had its worst day in four months as the U.S.-China trade war showed no sign of ending. 

With new measures from both sides, it will be hard for businesses and consumers to avoid the fallout.

White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War 
The plans envision sending up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack U.S. forces or accelerate nuclear weapons work, officials said. 

They were updated at the insistence of hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser.

Taking care of baby

Finally some action on prescription drug prices

Americans pay far more for prescription drugs than the people of any other industrialized nation. The attorneys general of 40+ states have filed a lawsuit accusing 20 major drug manufacturers—including Pfizer, Teva, Novartis, and Mylan—as well as more than a dozen senior executives, of conspiring to inflate prices.

A 20th century star

Looking at the lower end of the economy

Federal Minimum Wage 1978 to Last Update in 2009

Total Consumer Credit Owned and Securitized, Outstanding (Source: Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System)

One view of the Border Patrol

What's going to happen with Italy and India?

Crossing the Atlantic

Jean-Jacques Savin did it in a different way - he lived in a large, barrel-shaped capsule made of plywood; it measures about 10 feet long and 6 feet 8 inches wide. He depended on winds and currents to go from place to place. It took him 127 days to make the 3,125-nautical-mile trip from the Canary Islands to the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius.  He did have a satellite connection with Europe, which connected to a GPS device and software that relayed weather forecasts, wind speed and direction. Through the satellite, he was able to get emails, text messages and make calls.

Structured Investment, Anyone?

JPMorgan Chase is offering one. You can buy a six-month note that promises to pay investors annualized interest of 16 percent under certain circumstances. The circumstances depend on the performance of G.E.’s stock. As long as G.E.’s stock stays within a certain range each month for six months — basically not falling more than 30 percent from roughly where it has been — then JPMorgan Chase will pay you at least 1.333 percent per month interest on your investment, or 8 percent for six months, or an annualized rate of 16 percent.

This is not the only structured investment you can buy. The market is around $60 billion a year in the United States, and growing; in Europe is closer to $180 billion, or three times larger; in Asia, it’s closer to $350 billion. Goldman Sachs has created a company called Structured Investment Marketplace and Online Network (or SIMON). SIMON supposedly provides increasing transparency and information for these investments.

Doesn't this sound like the CDOs of The Great Recession?

Compulsory voting

Why do salmon cross the road?

They are crossing the Skokomish River in Washington. The river flooded and they're going upstream.

Courtesy of a Duncaster resident

It's a different economic world

Some Tax Info

From Tim Taylor

Friendship

The record of a great business man

He's doing something smart at last.

Health and Human Services has announced that drug makers will soon have to include their sticker prices in TV ads if the drugs cost more than $35 for a month’s supply.

The Dancer

We're not doing too well

What if?

We are really in trouble

Or so says the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in its 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies. Here are their main points for we citizens: 

Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’ 
Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’

Current global response insufficient; ‘Transformative changes’ needed to restore and protect nature;
Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good 

Most comprehensive assessment of its kind;
1,000,000 species threatened with extinction

We need to restore the IRS so that it can audit everybody who...

... should be.

Since 2010, the IRS has lost thousands of employees because the budget has been cut by almost $3 billion. What this has meant is a decline in auditing companies and rich people. Now about half of the companies we used to audit we no longer do so. And the same is true for individuals making $10 million or more a year.

However, the number of poor people audited has not diminished. More than one-third of all audit targets are recipients of the earned income tax credit; the major audit question is to prove these low-income taxpayers are eligible for government programs.

Criminal tax enforcement has also faltered. More than 150 million income tax returns were filed in 2017, but the IRS brought fewer than 800 cases in which someone was charged with making legal income but criminally evading taxes.

What do you recycle?

Another view as to how bad it is

From the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Drugs in the water far from the ocean

Researchers in England have found cocaine in all samples of shrimp tested in a rural area of eastern England. A researcher said, “Cocaine was found in all samples tested, and other illicit drugs such as ketamine, pesticides and pharmaceuticals were also widespread in the shrimp that were collected.” Contamination of the water supply by drug waste is an increasing problem, with residue from insecticides and recreational drugs finding their way into the system.

A mystery is solved

What does this portend?

It looks like Barr misspoke

Here's what Mueller said about Barr's report:

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” the special counsel wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Don't get bitten by a snake

It will cost you a ton of money. For example,last summer a 9-year-old girl from Indiana was bitten by a copperhead. The cost to treat her was $142,938. Almost half the bill was for four vials of antivenin. That works out to $16,989.25 for each vial—more than five times the average list price of $3,198. The bill also included $55,577.64 for air-ambulance transportation. But she she was released within 24 hours of the bite.

It's getting worse

Minimum Taxes of $0

These are the 11 most profitable companies that paid no federal income taxes in 2018. In many cases, the companies also received tax rebates that could be used to reduce their tax burdens in other years.

Minimum Wages

A new form of compost

The Washington state legislature recently passed a bill that allows human bodies to be composted — and used for mulch. It awaits the governor's signature.
So now you will have another choice - beyond cremation and burial - as to what to do with your body when you die.

Here is what your body will look like when it has been converted to mulch.

Human composting is being billed as an eco-friendly option by a Seattle-based company called Recompose. It already as two patents pending for “natural organic reduction”, which uses microbes to transform the departed — skin, bones and all. Microbes go to work within a large vessel, about eight feet tall and four feet wide, that fits a single body along with alfalfa, straw and wood chips. Over the course of 30 days, as temperatures in the vessel rise to 150 degrees, decomposition destroys the body, along with most pathogens and pharmaceuticals