We’re there! And here’s a bit of a travel journal for both family/friends and blog readers. (Family: when I say “my husband” and “the kids” instead of naming them, that’s just due to the nature of the blog. And yes, I have pictures with the family in them, too.) We arrived at Heathrow on Sunday. Flight was delayed, and passport control lines were long, so we finally made it into the city in the early afternoon, got to the rental... Read more
The two emerging narratives coming across my facebook and twitter feeds could not be more different. In the one, we need to face up to, and respond to, the fact that ISIS, and Islam in general, are hostile to homosexuality*; the attack at the Pulse nightclub is no different than ISIS attacks in Paris and Brussels. In the other, the killer’s religion is immaterial, his anti-gay animus came from the wider (Christian) culture, and the way to stop these attacks... Read more
The first installment in the Jane the Actuary “10 and change” project: Let’s talk about retirement solutions. So, yes, one obvious but trite solution is “people should just save more,” and the current “progressive” solution is “Social Security should just provide more generous benefits.” But people aren’t saving, trying to save enough to follow the 4% rule and meet your pre-retirement income standard may not be possible, and the government is not going to now, in contrast to the entire... Read more
So here’s the deal: I spent all of Saturday travelling; Sunday noontime (UK time) we arrived at our destination, tried to fight back jet lag to walk around some, then came home for dinner and aimlessly watched TV until I crashed and sent the kids, who’d gotten their second wind, to bed. I’d checked twitter a bit via my phone, but hadn’t logged in on the computer, which I now have. And I’ve read a bit of the CNN reporting... Read more
Yeah, I told you about the “100 and change” project sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. If you’re a nonprofit with a great idea, you can compete for $100 million to implement it. I don’t have $100 million to spare. But I do have a couple bucks. And we’re heading out on a vacation (FYI: even if you’ve been determined enough to figure out who I am and where I live, we’ve got stay-at-home, work-at-home, and retired neighbors keeping an eye... Read more
In case you’ve been living under a rock, a 20-year old man was sentenced to 6 months in jail and a lifetime on a sexual offender registry for the sexual assault of a 23-year-old woman, generating considerable outrage at the leniency of the sentence. Here’s a report from CNN, and here’s the letter that the victim read in the courtroom, which provides further details. The attack in question occured in the back alley of a fraternity at Stanford University after both... Read more
You know, it’s clear that the press is not the objective reporters of fact we learned about in school, but the AP’s declaring Clinton to be the Democratic nominee last night, just before the key primaries, really takes the cake. This is old news by now, but the AP announced yesterday that it had re-tallied its numbers and moved a few formerly-undecided superdelegates into the Clinton column, to determine that she had clinched the nomination. Given that the superdelegates have... Read more
Or, more precisely, should the US Census Bureau’s racial categories include as a “race” the characteristic of having ancestors predominantly indigenous Central or South American? Or take the existing definition of “American Indian”, which reads, “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment,” remove the requirement for “tribal affiliation or community attachment,” and rename it “Indigenous American”? (Numbers of “true American Indians”... Read more
Yeah, I know, not really any of my business whether Muslims believe that their religion obliges them to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, but the reality is that it’s problematic, to say the least. Consider that the ever-growing numbers of Hajj-attendees lead to stampedes, with the 2015 stampede the worst so far, with a death toll of 2,411, according to AP reporting in Wikipedia. The crowds have grown so large, with 3 million a year, that these stampedes seem near-unavoidable,... Read more
So I checked my twitter feed this morning and saw a link to an article on the impact of the $15 minimum wage in New York on car washes. According to the article, New York, unlike much of the rest of the country, relied on manual labor rather than automated car washes because of the abundance of cheap, immigrant labor, which, until a decade ago, worked under the table for small hourly wages plus tips. But, as the Reason article... Read more
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