Visual Thinking and Occasional Odds and Ends

I had the chance to watch President Trump's address live.  Perhaps you did too, or maybe you saw a clip on the evening new.  If you watched Trump, surely you must have wondered how much was true, since usually little is.  Trump claims practically unparalleled growth, and predicts that it will continue into the future.  But  we had higher growth in 2012 and 2014.   Nor does anyone think we will continue to grow at 4%.  We have had a one time repatriation of cash because of the tax cuts.  And the money is not going toward now production, but toward the buy back of outstanding stock - so the spending is considered capital spending, but not productive spending.   Manufacturing growth is nothing new either.  Yes it is growing, but it has been growing all since the collapse and employment is still below that of 2008.   In fact, even if capital spending went towards real work, much o...

The following is from the song  Where or When , originally in the Rodgers and Hart musical Babes in Arms .  It has been sung by many great pop singers as well as by Rock and Roll groups like Dion and the Belmonts.   A portion of is goes:  It seems we stood and talked like this, before We looked at each other in the same way then But I can't remember where or when The clothes you are wearing are the clothes you wore The smile you are smiling you were smiling then But I can't remember where or when The song captures the well known feeling that we have done this all before.  Thus it is with Trump's angry tweets against Iran.  This time the feeling covers two separate disasters.   The first disaster was the Bush II era war against Iraq - yes we won the early rounds, but got outpointed and lost the fight (the fight may still go on, but trust me, there will be no victory parades. The second disaster is t...

I ran into God the other day at our parish's picnic.  He was talking to anyone who would listen.  Dressed in a sleeveless shirt with long hair and a scruffy beard, no one recognized him.  He would often say he liked to be incognito when he walked among his peeps.   This time, he was on a roll, "It's just a cake, a fucking cake."   I assumed he was talking about the Supreme Court ruling that let Masterpiece Cake-shop off the hook.   Hoping to calm him down, I reminded him, "But even a few of the liberals joined the ruling."   He was not mollified.  "Bunch of  assholes." Then he asked me straight out, "Suppose a baker was a Catholic and refused to bake a cake for a fellow parishioner who had been divorced and who was getting re-married?"   I said "that's different."    "How?" Then he said "What about a licensed pharmacist who was a conservative Christian and then decided that it offended his r...

Ivanka Trump is a presidential advisor. She is a public figure, and has access to power that few ever get.  Her security clearance allows her see information that only presidential insiders do.  She pretends to be a softer voice, a nicer Trump.   But  she is a tool and worse than useless.   The media, fueled by conservative push back, are comparing Roseanne Barr's racist tweet to Samantha Bee's carefully constructed angry rant.  Roseanne's slur was the oldest type of slur against African Americans - comparing them to animals.  Samantha Bee's rant was a classic instance of speaking truth to power.  So if Feckless C*** does not suit you?  Pick your own two word description.  Stupid Bitch?  Useless Piece of Shit (oops, four words).  Please add your own suggestions.  

Everybody has jumped on the inequality bandwagon.  First it was liberals who showed concern about the issue while conservatives dismissed it – with conservatives saying either that inequality was a good thing, a sign that we have more opportunity and that the best folks can rise, or that rising inequality was a myth. But as the politics of the issue changed, conservative politicians switched gears, accepting that there is at least some opportunity gap.   But what to do about it?   Marco Rubio made a suggestion that we provide training for better jobs.   His idea is really just a sketch (and impossible to implement).   He gave an example of a poor woman working as a receptionist in a medical office, he noted her low wage and said that what she really needed was to become (for example) an ultrasound tech.   So she needs training.   But in his mind, the training will come (on the cheap) from a mix of on line courses that are free, from cred...

Last week I lost my cell phone. Yep.   And it’s an IPhone 5.   And it was unlocked. What happened next was a miracle. But first let me set the scene.   My wife and I were returning from Rochester, a town that is a five hour drive from our home in Dover NJ.   And since we started the day in Dover, ours was a long day of driving. We were maybe 3 hours from home when we stopped at a rest stop on Interstate Highway 81, southbound at the NY/PA border.   I don’t usually carry my cell phone.   If I take a long drive, it is with my wife – she does all the driving, and carries her Blackberry.   I rarely carry my cell phone, except when I commute to work, and then my phone lives in my brief case, and is turned off.   But on this day my wife asked me to bring my cell phone.   I don’t know why, but she did.   So I put it in my coat pocket and we embarked.   From time to time over a long day, I would pull my phone out to loo...

There is no free market for labor.   Before you start screaming at me that it is the free market for labor that has destroyed US wages, let me elaborate about just how different the market for labor is from what Adam Smith imagined in the 18 th century.   In the US, our labor market may be mostly free from government influence (other than that of fairly innocuous wages and hours laws) but the sellers and buyers are far from equal.   And it is the relative equality between seller and buyers that governs the exchanges between them.   Unfortunately, with labor, the laborers are selling themselves, and since industrialization, the power of large employers has dwarfed that of workers.   If you are a doctor or lawyer, or engineer or programmer (of the right kind of software) your special skill or monopoly license may give you a bit more power than the average worker, but for regular folks with average skills, you are a virtually a pawn.   And the situat...