More than quite likely.....................................

 

They call it ‘crowd control’ for a reason. If you’re in a crowd, it’s quite likely someone is trying to control you.

-Seth Godin, from here

Mel Brooks explaining much................

 

Warren Buffett talks taxation............

 During the decade ending in 2021, the United States Treasury received about $32.3 trillion in taxes while it spent $43.9 trillion. 

Though economists, politicians and many of the public have opinions about the consequences of that huge imbalance, Charlie and I plead ignorance and firmly believe that near-term economic and market forecasts are worse than useless. Our job is to manage Berkshire’s operations and finances in a manner that will achieve an acceptable result over time and that will preserve the company’s unmatched staying power when financial panics or severe worldwide recessions occur. Berkshire also offers some modest protection from runaway inflation, but this attribute is far from perfect. Huge and entrenched fiscal deficits have consequences. 

The $32 trillion of revenue was garnered by the Treasury through individual income taxes (48%), social security and related receipts (34 1⁄2%), corporate income tax payments (8 1⁄2%) and a wide variety of lesser levies. Berkshire’s contribution via the corporate income tax was $32 billion during the decade, almost exactly a tenth of 1% of all money that the Treasury collected. 

And that means – brace yourself – had there been roughly 1,000 taxpayers in the U.S. matching Berkshire’s payments, no other businesses nor any of the country’s 131 million households would have needed to pay any taxes to the federal government. Not a dime.

-via his report to the shareholders

Miracles happen, or fun with numbers........

 There are about eight billion people on this planet. So if an event has a 1-in-a-million chance of occurring every day, it should happen to 8,000 people a day, or 2.9 million times a year, and maybe a quarter of a billion times during your lifetime. Even a 1-in-a-billion event will become the fate of hundreds of thousands of people during your lifetime. And given the media’s desire to promote shocking headlines, you will hear their names and see their faces.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Life its ownself..........................

 We pass our existence within this warm wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.  how many among us know even roughly where the spleen is or what it does?  Of the difference between tendons and ligaments? Or what our lymph nodes are up to?  How may times a day do you suppose you blink?  Five hundred?  A thousand?  You've no idea, of course.  Well, you blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day.  Yet you never have to think about it, because every second of every day your body undertakes a literally unquantifiable number of tasks—a quadrillion, a nonillion, a quindecillion, a vigiantillion (these are actual measures), at all events some number vastly beyond imagining—without requiring an instant of your attention.

-Bill Bryson, The Body:  A Guide For Occupants

Ed Note:  To save you the trouble, a vigintillion is, in US measurements, a number equal to 1 followed by 63 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

You can look up the spleen yourself.

the rare and supremely agreeable condition....

     Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.  No one can say why those 7 billion billion billion have such an urgent desire to be you.  They are mindless particles, after all, without a single thought or notion between them.  Yet somehow for the length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, and to make you you, to give you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life.
     That's a much bigger job than you realize.  Unpacked, you are positively enormous.  Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast.  The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around the earth.  The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid).  You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.  Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system.  You are int the most literal sense cosmic.

-Bill Bryson, The Body:  A Guide for Occupants

The magic of compounding.........

The most powerful force in the universe, as Einstein referred to it, is something that eludes many of us for two main reasons. One, most people just don’t understand how it works. For instance, 10% growth for 25 years is not 250%, it’s 985%! The second reason why many fail to take advantage of compounding is because it takes time. Like, a lot of time. Buffett has been rich forever, but 95% of his net worth was earned after his 60th birthday.

-Michael Batnick, as borrowed from here

I was going to comment that it is a sin that our schools don't teach about the magic of compounding, but then the realization that I haven't done a very good job teaching my own kids about it set in, so, nevermind.

Needy.......................................

"it amuses me how many people talk of the needs of  'the economy' as if it were a demanding relative whose demands we are obliged to satisfy."


-John Kay, as excerpted from this statistically significant post

"one great blooming buzzing confusion..............

The great 19th century psychologist William James was referring to a baby's first experience with the world when he called it “one great blooming buzzing confusion.” But he might as well have been talking about the world in general and our continuing struggle to make sense of it.


Consider the following: there are approximately 7.4 billion people living in the world who communicate in over 6,500 languages, are spread out among 196 countries, and create $75 trillion dollars of economic value each year, either individually or in hundreds of millions of mostly tiny enterprises.


Worldwide there are more than 45,000 listed stocks and $82 trillion worth of bonds. For those who don't feel capable or willing to winnow those choices, there is an equally daunting number of third parties who will do it for you: approximately 3,500 ETFs, 7,500 mutual funds, 11,000 hedge funds, and 70,000 private investment managers, including myself.


-as excerpted from this Think Advisor post

Confidence building................

According to the latest data from the Bank for International Settlements, the central bankers’ central bank, the total amount of outstanding derivative contracts has declined from a 2012 peak of $700tn to about $550tn. To put this into perspective, the figure has fallen from just under three times the value of all the assets in the world to a little over twice the value.

We are reliant on their risk modelling but these models break down in precisely the extreme situations they are designed to protect us against.

Accounting practices provide an appearance of precision that may be a poor guide to a world characterised by multiple risks and radical uncertainty.

-John Kay, as culled from here

On daring greatly........................

It is not the critic who counts;  not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

-Teddy Roosevelt, as excerpted from this speech delivered at the Sorbonne in 1910.

This quote was brought to mind by this post about the $20 Billion real estate development project at the Hudson Yards in Manhattan.  Breathtaking vision combined with incredible ambition.   Do scroll through it.

thanks craig

And approximately none of them read this blog...

...........................................................................back story here.

Success...........................................!

"Better to focus on and delight almost no one."
-Seth Godin, as excerpted from this post

Got that right......................................

Noting that Apple sold more than 34,000 iPhones every hour, 24 hours a day, during the quarter, he said the sheer volume of sales was “hard to comprehend.”

-Fuller story on Apple vs Microsoft is here.

Fun with numbers...............................

34.   In a poll of 1,000 American adults, asked, "How many millions are in a trillion?"    79% gave an incorrect answer or didn't know. Keep this in mind when debating large financial problems.

I'm sort of impressed that 21% could answer the question.  I will confess that this history major reached for a pad and pencil.  You can figure it for yourself, but here are the basics:

One million =  1,000,000
One billion  =  1,000,000,000
One trillion  =  1,000,000,000,000

From this list of 122 Things ...

"fulfilling the dreams of ... curious economists everywhere who love it when cities turn themselves into living laboratories."

At last, a worthy reason for raising the minimum wage in Seattle to $15 per hour.  One man's take (and source of the quote) on the issue is here.  My money says the only winner in this experiment will be the law of unintended consequences.  Heads up folks.  The ride is about to get interesting.

Extrapolation........................

"Astronomers have worked out that there are 70 thousand million million million - or seven followed by 22 zeros - stars visible from the Earth through telescopes."

Full (dated) story here.  Notice the words "stars visible."   Of course they're not even hazarding a guess at how many planets are hanging around all those stars.  Seven followed by 22 zeros is a pretty big number, and yet, we still act as though our little world is the most important thing going.  Wonder why that is?

Thanks Gerard

The criminalizing of daily life....................

40,000 new laws this year?  Can that possibly be right?   It was drummed into me as a youngster that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."  That seems like a long time ago.

Numbers.................................

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” 
-Richard P. Feynman

image via

The physics of Santa..............

More fun with numbers.  As this blog has shown before, numbers can be twisted every which way just to prove a point.  As an example, we have this benighted soul trying to scientifically disprove Santa Claus. What?  Decide for yourselves.  Full post is here.  First paragraph is here:

1.   No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.