Willem's Planet

(Late post).  There was so much talk Wednesday and Thursday on TV about Social Security apparently being part of the debt-ceiling-and-balance-the-budget negotiations that I had to dig up my two Social Security cards.  I got the first one when I arrived in the USA in 1995 – you cannot legally work and pay taxes without one.   It says ‘Valid for work only with INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services, now called Homeland Security) authorization.    Then I got the ‘permanent’ one when I became a US citizen in 2007.

Social Security is not out of money, but the contributor-beneficiary ratio was 40-1 when Social Security became law in 1935 after the Great Depression — and is 3-1 now.  And over the years the trend have been for people to retire earlier and live much longer.    So current projections show that in 2023,  total income and interest earned on assets will no longer cover expenditures for Social Security.   (In the mean time, I wondered : what happens with the excess money the system collects?  Well the Social Security Administration system buys US Treasury Bonds with its surpluses. Essentially, the government – in the form of the Social Security Administration – loans the surplus to itself).

What to do, to head off the shortfall ?  Some possible remedies are :

Raising the maximum taxable earning levels  (for 2011, the maximum taxable earnings amount for Social Security is $106,800.   The Social Security tax (OASDI) rate for wages paid in 2011 is 4.2 % for employees and 6.2 % for employers);

Increasing the retirement age;
Reducing cost of living adjustment (COLA);
Changing of the benefit formula.

Ouch.  All of them are painful !  I guess we all have to work harder – those of us that have jobs – and save more.    But hey, if you have enough money, please go on a shopping spree at the mall, go eat out lots and go the theater for a show every week !  Go !  : ).

We’re into the last half of 2011 .. amazing.   The sky is blue and the house behind mine used to be green, but is now getting painted blue – but a very different blue than the sky!  Which Crayola crayon color would that be, I thought?  I recalled a color called midnight blue, but checking out the Crayola color chart, it seems violet blue is closer.    (There is a full listing of the Crayola colors in an entry in Wikipedia).   The chart below was published by Stephen Von Worley on his blog named Data Pointed.    The person that created the chart for him (someone called ‘Velo’) posits from the years and the number of colors Crayola’s Law : the number of Crayola crayon colors doubles every 28 years! *

*A tongue-in-cheek reference to Moore’s Law which says the number of transistors which can be placed on a silicon chip inexpensively doubles approximately every two years.

This interesting ‘guide to splattered bugs’ is posted at some ’76’ gas stations here in Seattle.  (Thanks to Bryan for sending me the picture!).   ’76’ is a brand from Conoco-Philips oil company and is well represented here in Seattle.    Anyway, once you have identified your splattered bug, the guide will tell you the insect’s classification order as well.     Insects are classified into 29 orders in total.   The ladybug (top row on the right) actually belongs to the largest order, one with some 300,000 species of beetles, weevils and fireflies.

I got this picture of the streets in Athens from close Seattle friends that are there right now!   Why the riots?   Previous Greek governments (‘administrations’ as we call them in the USA) incurred massive budget deficits, and for a long time misrepresented how big the total debt outstanding was to foreign investors.    In Oct 2009 the new government revised the estimate of their 2009 deficit from 6.7% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to 12.7%.*    There’s more information in the Bloomberg Business week article.   Greece already got a loan of € 110 billion last year, and had hoped to increase its revenues after receiving the loan by 8.5%.   Instead it has fallen by 9.2% so far this year, no doubt because of decreased economic activity (including tourism).    So the government has no choice but to raise taxes and curtail its spending, which makes people used to paying lower taxes and getting jobs, pensions and social security types of payments from the government, very angry.

*In the USA our deficit is currently about 7% of GDP (rough numbers, $1 trillion deficit, $14 trillion GDP).    The national debt as of May 6, 2011, is $14.32 trillion.   The Federal debt ceiling needs to be raised, and soon.

My friends and I went to the Greenwood Car Show on Saturday (Greenwood is a neighborhood in Seattle).    Some 700 vintage cars were on display as well as a handful of the newest electric/ hybrid cars.    I picked just a few of my pictures and I’ll try my best to get the vintage cars correct from top to bottom.   Here goes :  1955 Nash, 1960s(?) Chevy Truck, Dodge Truck, 1958 Cadillac Eldorado, Volkswagen like the one my mom had, 1963 Mercedes-benz 300 SL Gullwing, 1939 Studebaker L5 Coupe-Express.    There was a lot of nostalgia going around .. as the one car website says ‘For those of us who can remember these cars, can we ever forget them?’.

The sight of some electric cars fast forwarded us to 2011.  The red Tesla Roadster Sport (see teslamotors.com and the Wikipedia entry for Tesla Roadster) has a base price of US$109,000 and is billed as the first highway-capable all-electric vehicle in serial productionavailable in the United States.   Construction of the car needs no rare-earth metals whatsoever and is based on the cheap and rugged alternating-current (AC) induction motor patented by Nikola Tesla; get this – back in 1888.  In the past the main problem with asynchronous induction motors was the difficulty of varying their speed, but the speed of these motors can now be controlled with modern semiconductors.

Finally, some pictures of a 2011 Chevy Volt with a white diamond tri-coat of paint.  It goes for US$42,000.  It has a Li-ion battery (8 year, 100,000 mile warranty) as well as a 1.4l internal combustion engine).   And of course it is loaded with electronics for audio, video and navigation.

On Friday night, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill into law that give gay and lesbian couples the right to marry in the state of New York.   New York is the sixth state in the USA, but a state that is far bigger than the previous five.  Elsewhere, states have NO rights, limited rights or civil unions on the law books – see chart.     This creates all kinds of legal disconnects.  For example, last year a Texas court ruled that married gay couples (that moved there from out of state), cannot get a divorce in Texas.

And of course there were opponents of this New York legislation that spent millions of dollars to try to defeat it.  ‘We worry that both marriage and the family will be undermined by this tragic presumption of government in passing this legislation that attempts to redefine these cornerstones of civilization’,  the state’s Catholic bishops said in a joint statement released late Friday.  Well, is that a valid concern?   I really don’t think it is.