A GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman said that there is no evidence that Alli causes liver damage."
If you measure intelligence by standardized test scores then our kids are stupidifying. Sadly the SAT remains the most prominent barometer of our children's education, which to me is much like describing the weather by merely looking at the temperature.
On any given day I could tell you that I've observed the decline of civilization first hand (show me a parent of a teenager who denies this and I'll show you someone even dumber than their kids), but somehow I think my parents would have said the same 25 years ago and their parents would have said even worse 50 years ago. If our kids are so dumb then how the hell did they figure out how to text 4,000,000 words a minute using a phone keypad while their parents struggled to tap out a random OMG in 30 minutes using a QWERTY keypad on a Blackberry?
As part of a post about the economy Mark Cuban makes a very interesting point about differentiating between investors and traders/speculators:
Our government doesn’t know the difference between an investor and a speculator or trader. If we did, we would understand that we should tax the trader/speculator more heavily than the investor.
The investor allows entrepreneurs access to capital and allows them to work with it and build businesses, which in turn build employment and do great things for the economy. The trader/speculator pushes companies to make more money now rather than invest in doing the right thing for the company. The trader/speculator dominates the stock market today, which in turn puts pressure on public company CEOs to cut jobs and play games with their financials in order to give the appearance of stability in a far from stable market. The investor understands the bigger picture and is ok if profits fall for several quarters or even several years as long as the company will maximize its return over the long run.
The government should raises taxes significantly on profits from short term capital gains on the sale of public stocks, indexes, commodities, futures held for 24 hours or less and extend the length of time required to qualify for Long Term capital gains and reduce the tax rate on Long Term gains. This will discourage flash trading, ETFs that move markets purely on cash inflows rather than fundamentals and also reduce the amount of speculation on commodities. It will also reward companies that act in the financial interests of long term holders and their employers. I think the impact on the economy would be far fewer layoffs as CEOs find themselves with more shareholders who think long term rather than short term. Believe it or not, there are shareholders who are fine with companies not beating their numbers if the company is making progress towards a clearly defined goal. I don’t care if the P/E of the stocks I own is 14 or 20. I want the companies investing in being a great company rather than trying to make traders of their stock happy. Most CEOs give great lipservice to this approach, but they are so focused on marking to market their own personal stock portfolios, they emphasize stock performance over doing the right thing for the company. Taxation can change the focus on public companies and stock trading. That would be a great thing for the economy.
What does that do for the family that buys it? Well, if you have one harvest a year and you’re living at subsistence, it means your income is zero, or probably just a little below. If you can irrigate and get two or three harvests a year, though, your income goes up by infinity. Now, instead of making -1 pennies a day, you’re making 100 or 200 pennies a day. That’s a surplus of $700 a year. That’s enough to participate in other productivity or life-enhancing investments, like a well, or a roof, or health care. Now, the edge is a lot further away."
Lex Alexander has a post about the fiasco that is the VA disability program right now. He points out that while the VA health care system is a good one, the VA disability system is in disarray and he provides some startling numbers to back up that assertion. It seems to be particularly bad here in the Winston-Salem area. From his post:
First, it takes too long even for straightforward claims to be processed. As of a week ago today, the claim backlog stood at more than 422,000 cases nationally, up about 30,000 from a year ago. (Winston-Salem’s regional VA office, with a backlog of more than 21,000, had more cases pending than any other regional office in the country except St. Petersburg, Fla.) Nationally, more than 20 percent of cases had been pending for six months or more.
Lex later quotes Abraham Lincoln and I think the quote says it all:
As the Civil War was ending, Abraham Lincoln called on America in his second Inaugural Address to “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” For the vets (and in some cases, their survivors) who depend on these payments, we need to do a better job.
Befuddled 