good news/bad news...

[JohnRoberts]

Good news is that drug overdose deaths have peaked and are diminishing, the bad news is that our life expectancy is still dropping due to suicides.

Between all the TV commercials about starving dogs, or kids with desperate diseases, it is hard not to get depressed. Then there is social media where everybody is sure you are a racist, or worse (a drummer?).  :

The only natural remedy to the downer that is social media is watching Hallmark TV Christmas movies.  ;D

We need a better plan... Human life expectancy is literally getting shorter in our lifetime because of suicides. Surely this is preventable.

JR

 

[cyrano]

It's not only suicides, John.

The USA is also the only nation where deaths while giving birth are going up. I expect there to be others.

And, please, no Xmas movies for me. Those are what might get me depressed, together with that hyper commercial plastic feeling of Xmas.

 

[JohnRoberts]

It's not only suicides, John.

The article I read cited suicide as causal factor (now) for life expectancy falling.

The USA is also the only nation where deaths while giving birth are going up. I expect there to be others.

Affordable high quality healthcare remains a struggle.

And, please, no Xmas movies for me. Those are what might get me depressed, together with that hyper commercial plastic feeling of Xmas.

I invented a drinking game for watching Christmas movies. Drink a beer for each cliche sighting, repeated cliches deserve pouring a shot. Do not drive and watch Christmas movies.  :

Trigger cliches in no particular order:
1- Interrupted first kiss.
2-Old man really is Santa Claus
3-Magical icons with special powers
4-Wishes made to Santa Claus come true
5-Accidentally run into ex-lovers.
6-Best friends recognized as love partners
7-True love develops overnight (in less than 2 hours)
8-Big kiss at 1 hour 59 minutes
9-attractive women in too tight pants (is there such a thing?)
10-women wake up in the morning in full makeup
11-women wearing stiletto high heels in snow and mud
12-snow flurries in warm climates
13- deceptive emotional manipulation
14-royalty secretly posing as commoners
15- vehicle problems too easily fixed
16-angels (elves) in real life
17-ettiquite mistakes at formal dinners and friendly staff.
18-impromptu snow ball fights
19- kitchen/cooking disasters (blender/oven/flour).
20-unexpected love triangles
21-literally "saving the farm"
22-silly made up town/country names
23-international travel without securing a passport
24-white lies that snowball into plot lines
25-free evening gowns/wedding dresses
26-solo acoustic guitar/piano that sounds like full orchestra
27-recycled plots from classic movies
28-public enemies become private love interests
29-weather interrupted travel plans, throwing strangers together
30- impractical business plans/solutions
31- unlikely workplace scenes, like unsanitary wine thief used in a winery.

JR

 

[cyrano]

Wow, John. You ARE good at Xmas movies.  ;D

I'll keep to Kubrick, Antonioni and a few others.  8)

 

[boji]

I invented a drinking game for watching Christmas movies.

This game is sure to get one smashed!  ;D ;D

Regarding suicide: In the news today I read Neil DeGrasse Tyson is now in the cross-hairs of #metoo.

I read the claims...and all he sounds like to me is a dorky dweeb trying and failing, in perfect science-nerd fashion, to get laid.

The question not usually asked is, unlike many animals, why have human females evolved so as to not display their ovulation cycles? For half a million years or more, women have had the job of receiving repeated sexual advances and (unless raped) select for male fitness.  Men have had the job of locating the most genetically fit females that will accept them, all the while taking a shotgun approach to the unknown ovulation cycles of potential mates.
So, when society makes it so that any sexual advance can be interpreted as unsolicited and therefore non-consensual and criminal, how does that 'genetic cognitive dissonance' play out in the world?  I'll take a wild guess that male suicides and mass-shootings will go up as a result. I think it may even be triggered epigenetically in some circumstances. When an organism, realizing it can't do anything but foist its outmoded genetic code upon an unforgiving gene pool, what to do?

 

[JohnRoberts]

I've touched on this (good news) before but just read an update suggesting the trend is continuing. World poverty is in decline, but don't expect the doom and gloom modern media to tell you.

As recently as 1980 nearly half the world lived in extreme poverty, <$1.90/day in 2011 dollars considered as minimum requirement to meet basic needs by world bank. Last year that number was <9% and projected to continue falling.

This ignores how much our quality of life has improved from technology and medicine advancements. Nathan Rothschild the richest man in world died in 1836 from an infection we can treat today with only a few cents of medicine.

Individual wealth in china has risen 25x since reforms in 1978. India is now growing their economy faster than China.

Of course it is all relative and as we sit in one of the wealthiest nations we still find numerous things to complain about.
-----

For bad news, I am still a little concerned about stock market behavior. Some high speed trading fraud has been caught and prosecuted, but some is probably still going on. The larger trend is how correlated assets are becoming. Trading AI (artificial ignorance) has too many professional investors making the exact same bets at roughly the same time, and we know what happens when everybody stands on the same one side of the boat. These trading algorithms are very human, written by humans, so imperfect.   

Another factor driving market correlation is increasing use of index funds by small investors instead of actively managed mutual funds or individual company investments. Without discretionary buying/selling the weak sister companies will rise and fall with the tide, instead of getting discarded as dead wood. In many ways index funds are better than mutual funds where you have to pay active managers their cut...  just concerned about unintended consequences.

This correlation extends to assets around the world. Since economic stimulus is fungible and doesn't respect borders, as we withdraw stimulus in the US, we our economy may get the sniffles but world economies could get the flu.  The markets seem overly fixated on central bank interest rates while not paying close attention to the withdrawal of central bank debt buying (providing liquidity). The bond market is noticing. (Trade negotiations are another wild card. It may get worse before better as we work to stop IP theft, and the beneficiaries of that IP theft will resist any change.)

I remain optimistic because we have already gotten this far and are still standing... but it isn't over yet.  Many (younger) people who have only been following the markets for the last decade or so, have never experienced how normal markets behave (without a central bank bid inflating asset values). While the future is always impossible to predict with any certainty.

HNY, 2019 will be a great year especially if we compare it 1919, or 1819. 

JR

 

[madswitcher]

The article I read cited suicide as causal factor (now) for life expectancy falling. Affordable high quality healthcare remains a struggle. I invented a drinking game for watching Christmas movies. Drink a beer for each cliche sighting, repeated cliches deserve pouring a shot. Do not drive and watch Christmas movies.  :

Trigger cliches in no particular order:
1- Interrupted first kiss.
2-Old man really is Santa Claus
3-Magical icons with special powers
4-Wishes made to Santa Claus come true
5-Accidentally run into ex-lovers.
6-Best friends recognized as love partners
7-True love develops overnight (in less than 2 hours)
8-Big kiss at 1 hour 59 minutes
9-attractive women in too tight pants (is there such a thing?)
10-women wake up in the morning in full makeup
11-women wearing stiletto high heels in snow and mud
12-snow flurries in warm climates
13- deceptive emotional manipulation
14-royalty secretly posing as commoners
15- vehicle problems too easily fixed
16-angels (elves) in real life
17-ettiquite mistakes at formal dinners and friendly staff.
18-impromptu snow ball fights
19- kitchen/cooking disasters (blender/oven/flour).
20-unexpected love triangles
21-literally "saving the farm"
22-silly made up town/country names
23-international travel without securing a passport
24-white lies that snowball into plot lines
25-free evening gowns/wedding dresses
26-solo acoustic guitar/piano that sounds like full orchestra
27-recycled plots from classic movies
28-public enemies become private love interests
29-weather interrupted travel plans, throwing strangers together
30- impractical business plans/solutions
31- unlikely workplace scenes, like unsanitary wine thief used in a winery.

JR

John
have you got a similar list of clichés for the almost endless list of Christmas  drivel pop songs?

Mike

 

[JohnRoberts]

John
have you got a similar list of clichés for the almost endless list of Christmas  drivel pop songs?

Mike

Maybe next year but my all time favorite christmas ditty is this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPUwv_20p5I

JR

 

[ruffrecords]

Talking of drinking and good news, bad news.

They are closing down the pub. Boo!
There are building a bigger one. Hurray!
They are not selling beer. Boo!
They are giving it away. Hurray!
There is only one bar. Boo!
Two miles long. Hurrah!
There's only two bar maids. Boo!
To every customer Hurray!

Kind of the antithesis of the Mony Python 'we had it hard when I were a lad' sketch

And so on.

Cheers

Ian

 

[JohnRoberts]

This is subtle and I am on record as being critical of "debt ceiling authorization" votes as ineffective to provide budget spending discipline. Generally the debt ceiling needs to be increased well after the spending was already authorized by legislation, so this is kind of double jeopardy for the original spending decision.  As often happens in the swamp, this degenerates into the typical political theater where the party out of power is attracted to TV camera lights like moths to hypocritically criticize government spending, by the other party.  :

While ineffective, at least it serves as an embarrassing reminder for the public about government spending, but since it was raised in 2017, there have been discussions about repealing the debt limit entirely.  While I dislike political theater, I hate anything that makes increased spending easier.

JR

PS; Lest anyone think that the refusal to fund the President's $5B budget request for southern border security is remotely about spending discipline, in the context of $22.5T federal debt this is not even a rounding error (0.0002). Of course opinions vary. 

[edit- another tidbit of good news for all our addicted drug users, beside narcon becoming more widely available to rescue them from overdoses, fentanyl reagent test strips (originally intended for urine testing) has been used off label to test drug samples for presence of fentanyl, to maybe prevent overdoses before they happen, from drugs juiced with fentanyl. Both could be life savers. [/edit]

 

[JohnRoberts]

The USA is also the only nation where deaths while giving birth are going up. I expect there to be others.

I couldn't find the more recent US criticism about this, but this was one of the items on Lomborg's short list of "best things first". Of course he addressed this issue worldwide, but among developed nations the US could do better.

I will speculate that access to prenatal care is somewhat conflated with abortion access/promotion. Letting mothers die over an argument about baby's lives is tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We need to be smarter than this.

JR

 

[hodad]

Antonioni

Blow-Up & The Passenger are favorites, but I can't really get into his early movies. I did enjoy his book, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, though. I need to see if I can dig up my copy & reread it.

 

[cyrano]

Never knew Antonioni wrote a book. Fiction, I suppose?

 

[hodad]

Fiction, I suppose?

Short fiction pieces, yes. Very Antionioni-ish stuff.