Category: General

My vote for the 2016 election is cast, and on its way to the King County Elections mailbox. (We vote by mail in Washington State).  I see I can track my paper ballot on-line, to confirm that it was received by King County Elections.  Great !

Here’s ‘Hillary’ (Kate McKinnon) in Saturday Night Live’s skit about the third Presidential debate, declaring that she has been playing ‘Trump Bingo’ all year, and showing off the collection of five bad bingo things Trump has said.  (I cannot repeat them here).   The SNL writers include some phrases from the debates verbatim, and then add a little twist, or go overboard with it even more – blurring the line between reality and entertainment.

There are 22 days to go to the 2016 US Presidential election on Nov 8.  Early voting has already started in several states, actually – and I expect to cast my vote by Oct. 25 or so, as well. Washington State conduct voting by mail, so voters do not have to show up in person at the polling stations.

I see a  ‘Letter from London’ on politico.com warns the US not to get too complacent about a victory for Hillary (the latest nationwide polls has her up by some 10% over Trump).   All the pollng agencies underestimated Brexit ‘Leave’ vote, and yes : one poll had the Remain vote up by 10%.

The main-stream media spent most of Saturday tracking the fallout from the (latest) Trump firestorm, and from real storm Matthew.  By the time Matthew made land in South Carolina, it had been downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane.  It left a lot of flooding all along the coast in its wake.  Some 10 people in the USA were killed during the storm.  The devastation of Matthew a few days earlier in Haiti was very extensive, with 300 or more deaths there attributed to the storm. Haiti is to the south and east of the Florida panhandle.

I am car-less this week and so I summoned an Uber driver to get me to San Ramon for a meeting this morning, and then another to get me to the eastern end-point of BART’s blue line in Dublin.  (Yes, there is a Dublin in California).

On the way back one of my train’s stops was Fruitvale station, the scene of tragic events on New Year’s Day in 2009 when 22-yr old Oscar Grant was fatally shot in the back while pinned down on the ground, by a BART policeman. (There is a shocking YouTube cell phone video on-line that actually shows what happened; a movie about the events was made in 2013). The officer testified at his 2010 trial that he intended to draw and fire his Taser rather than his gun.

He was sentenced to two years in prison after his involuntary manslaughter conviction – but was released after serving only 11 months.

This was 2009 .. and here we are in 2016, now looking back at a trail of numerous similar incidents.  Young black men interacting with police, with similar tragic outcomes. Is it due to racism? or due to the way the police operates? or due to ‘bad’ individual police officers? asks this article from website fivethirtyeight.

‘We are back in an era of robber barons and wealth concentration’ comments one of the readers on the New York Times expose article about Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return snippet that they had obtained.  (Trump still refuses to release his tax returns, a tradition that had held since the Nixon years for all presidential candidates).   The New York Times writes that Trumps loss of $915 million is ‘so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years’.  (Income in later years can be offset against the loss in 1995). Mr. Trump declined to comment on the documents.

I ran out to the doctor’s office on Friday morning to get my flu shot.  Is it not too early in the season to get the shot? I inquired.  (If one gets it too early, its protection may wear off before the flu season is over).  No, no – cases of the flu have already started to show up here in Seattle, said the doc.

The 2017 Chevy Bolt EV (Electric Vehicle) is said to be a challenger for the Tesla Model 3. The Bolt boasts a range of 238 miles on a full charge.  It’s not cheap at $37,495, but that is what the Model 3 will go for, as well.

On the other hand, as the Motley Fool financial website says : ‘The Model 3 sells customers an entirely electric car brand, unparalleled vehicle software, and access to an expansive charging network offering charging nearly twice as fast as General Motors is promising.  Further, Bolt is more of a compact vehicle and Tesla promises the Model 3 will fit five adults comfortably. Based on the 373,000 deposit-backed reservations the Model 3 garnered in less than 15 days of its unveiling, it likely won’t need to compete directly with the Bolt’s features. Tesla’s Model 3 clearly struck a chord with buyers looking to buy a more affordable EV.

There are several Web-based services and apps available these days, with the goal to improve one’s mood and general outlook: Happify.com is one of them. I did not sign up – I like to think of myself as ‘happy’ already, and not in need of happification.  Still, from reading the ‘science of happiness’ infographic from Happify (below), it’s nice to know that one can be happy, even though life might not be moonshine, and a bed of roses, all the time.

Newton’s famous Third Law of physics states in part ‘to every action there is always an opposed and equal reaction’ .. and so the NoPhone must be the reaction to the iPhone and to other smartphones that have become so ubiquitous and so distracting.  The NoPhone was a useless plastic rectangle that did nothing.  And now there is the NoPhone Air. ‘We took away the headphone jack*, and then we took away everything else’ says Van Gould, the inventor of the NoPhone Air.

*A reference to the brand new iPhone 7 that has no headphone jack.

We are working out of the offices in San Ramon in the East Bay this week.  San Francisco has been taken over by the geeky attendees of the Oracle OpenWorld 2016 conference in the Moscone Center.   I see Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO)  is talking up a storm, and saying that Oracle is going to take on Amazon and be ‘serious competition’ moving forward.  Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd (former CEO of Hewlett-Packard) did a presentation of future trends on Monday, but his claims of dramatic changes from on-premise IT installations to cloud-based installations fell flat.  Many in the audience expressed their skepticism by texting ‘None of these will ever happen’ when they were invited to text their opinions in real time to the display. Ouch.

Here are some eye-catching leaves that I picked up in the street near my house.  The red colors in these leaves are from compounds called anthocyanins (also present in red cabbages and blood oranges). Anthocyanins are synthesized as soon as the green chlorophyll in the leaves start to break down.

The week out at the project site is over .. and the flight out to Seattle went without incident. We arrived at 6 pm at Seattle airport, and then I took the light rail train to Capitol Hill, and the No 10 bus from there up to 15th Ave to get me in the door by 7.  I took out the junk mail from the mailbox, watered my new plants in the pots, made dinner, and watched the day’s news on TV.  Less than eight weeks until Election Day now.

Well, hard to believe it’s been 15 years since the terrible events in New York City (and elsewhere) happened on Sept.11, 2001.  At the commemoration in New York City, Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton fell ill and stumbled a few steps from her motorcade van. (Not good).  It turns out she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday. Elsewhere in the country, the new season’s National Football League matches started up.  In New York City, the 2016 US Open Tennis Men’s final was played, and won by Stan Wawrinka (Swiss), over Novak Djokovic (Serbian).  Check out the beautiful pictures of the tennis stadium and the giant American flag at the start, here.

Well. I drew cash at the fancy Wells Fargo Bank ATM from my account, in downtown San Francisco on Wednesday. Cool! I thought. I can get whatever I need: $1s, $5s, $20s and $100 bills.  (When one travels, those $1s and $5s for tips or even small purchases are still very handy).

Then on Thursday, news broke of the massive fraud committed by Wells Fargo’s own employees over many years.  ‘Our entire culture is centered on doing what is right for our customers’, says their tweeted apology.  Oh really? Since 2011, Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 1.5 million fraudulent bank accounts (to earn more fees for the bank) and applied for 565,000 credit cards.  5,300 employees had been fired.  How many executives? None.

Hurricane Hermine is making trouble up along the East Coast, causing a lot of flooding. But a New York Times article reports that even ‘sunny day’ flooding has increased sharply in recent years.

From the article: Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding — often called “sunny-day flooding” — along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too.

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump made a surprise visit to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Wednesday, acting (gasp!) almost presidential during the whole affair.  Alas, the much anticipated speech he then gave on Wednesday at a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, erased once and for all, any hope that he might strike a conciliatory tone regarding his views and proposed policies on how to deal with illegal immigration. (One of his statements has him deport an estimated 5-7 million immigrants in the first hour of his presidency).

The Pew Research Center says in a new national survey, conducted August 9-16 among 2,010 adults, that a large majority (76%) of respondents says that undocumented immigrants are as hard-working and honest as U.S. citizens, while 67% say they are no more likely than citizens to commit serious crimes. The survey also finds continued public opposition to building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border: 61% oppose this proposal, which is little changed from earlier this year.

Check out the animated Trump ‘constellation’ in this article from The Guardian. The inner circle of planets around the Trump Sun endorsed him; a little further out are the ‘supporters’ (but no endorsement), then the wait-and-see Republicans (time is up, people! make your statements), and finally – reminder : you’re still a Republican, same as Trump – the ‘Never Trumpers’.   The question is what will happen that first Tuesday in November. Will the orange sun explode into a supernova? (President Trump) .. or lose its heat and become a red dwarf? (Fade from the media glare and attention).

From the article : Marsha Blackburn REPRESENTATIVE, TN : ‘I think he is going to be the next president of the United States and he would be an incredible president of the United States’.   Incredible, yes. (Impossible to believe).

I have never studied economics formally, and so I had to look up the ZLB and Great Moderation that economist Paul Krugman refers to in a blog post in the New York Times. ZLB stands for ‘Zero Lower Bound’ and means that a central bank (such as the Federal Reserve in the United States) has no ability, or a very limited one, to stimulate the economy with interest rate cuts.  The ‘Great Moderation’ refers to a reduction in the volatility of recessions and economic growth cycle fluctuations, that started in the mid-80s. The reduction is attributed to central bank independence (from politics), monetary policy and improved economic structures.  But here we are in August 2016 with near-full employment, near-zero interest rates, some eight years after the Great Recession, and wages not going up for the average worker.  We still cannot pay workers a living wage (the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009).