We’re The 1%

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

No, seriously. if you make more than $34,000 per year, you’re in the top 1%.

In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. In Australia, the top 3% of households earn more than $250,000 per week, according to the ABS. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?

$34,000.

That was the finding World Bank economist Branko Milanovic presented in his 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. Going down the distribution ladder may be just as surprising. To be in the top half of the globe, you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it’s $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000.

Not only am I in the top 1%, I’m just at the cusp of being in the top .1%, if I only look at gross income. I’m clearly wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, yet I still wince every time I fill up my gas tank.

The OWS who had her $5000 laptop stolen—that laptop represented half-a-year’s income to someone right at the nadir of the top 10% of earners in the world.

Not pointing fingers (well, except at our foreign aid, which clearly needs to be reserved for nations where contract law is enforced and it’s possible for citizens to own private property and build up equity), just sayin’ . . . it’s good to keep things in perspective.

How would you view someone making $350,000 per year who was out in the streets protesting those making $35 million per year, because those super rich folks could afford yachts and private jets and had the financial security that came with owning multiple houses in different countries, and the merely wealthy could only afford one vacation home—and could only lease time on a private jet, but could not own their own?

I doubt there’d be a lot of sympathy for the folks topping $350k or $500k a year, protesting those making tens-of-millions.

Yet to most of the world, that’s what the OWS people look like. Or would look like, if they could afford cable, television, internet, newspapers, or literacy.

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Bits & Pieces (Wednesday Night Ace of Spades)

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Found this Rage Comic over at Ace of Spades HQ, and had to share:

•••
In these days of Michele Bachmanns, Herman Cains, Joe Bidens and Howard Deans, Ace of Spades reflects on what it means to be Reaganesque.
Also from Ace, the Obama Administration is taxing Christmas Trees. As soon as they can figure out how to tax joy, fellowship, and Christmas spirit, they’ll start levying those fines–I mean, taxes–too. 

— KW

It looks like Christmas spirit has prevailed and the tax will be sidelined. No lump of coal for Obama.
-Ashot-

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Bits & Pieces (Tuesday Night Open Mic)

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Will Ferrell answers questions from the Internet. Unsafe for work. Profanity. Strong sexual content. Etc.

•••

Been a busy day. Busy beating Microsoft Sequel Server into submission. Simple enough, but I’m from an era of sequential scripts and Microsoft BASIC. Nesting select statements get just select the records for a school, year, and period with the most recent timestamp took me 3 hours to get working. Anyone who does this stuff knows how simple this is:

select * from (  

select S.schName as School, L.schYear,L.prd as period,jl.date_run as DateRun, ‘Approved’=case when status = 1 then ‘Y’ else ‘N’ end,  L.prvUser as AprBy,  convert(char(10),L.prvDate,101) as AprDate,L.schID as school_id
from adaLock as L 

left join t_SchAtt as S on L.schId = S.schNum       

join Job_Log jl on (L.schId = jl.schoolid and L.prd = jl.period and L.schYear = jl.school_year) 

where  schYear = @schYear and prd = @prd 

union all select schName,@schYear,@prd,null,’Not Run yet’,null,null,null from t_schAtt where schNum not in  ( 

select schId  from adaLock where schYear = @schYear  and prd = @prd rty

)

group by schName  ) subSetx

WHERE subSetx.DateRun = (select max(date_run) from Job_Log jlo where jlo.period = subSetx.period and jlo.school_year = subSetx.schYear and jlo.schoolid = subSetx.school_Id) 

group by school,schYear,period,DateRun,Approved,AprBy,AprDate,school_id

But it took me 3 hours to make it work. I knew at the outset I wanted to select records where date_run = max(date_run), but finally finding the right combination to make it actually work . . . and they call SQL a natural language query language. Oh, brother!

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DC Circuit Upholds Affordable Care Act

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

DC Circuit upholds Affordable Care Act. Was there any doubt? I thought it would be upheld, myself.

Link above goes to a PDF of the opinion.
************************************
Mark added:  I could not open that link, so I am adding this one to Volokh, which in turn also links to the opinion.

http://volokh.com/2011/11/08/silbermans-opinion-as-template/

Recall that Judge Silberman wrote the reversal of the NLRB case two weeks ago that said NLRB could no longer treat union discipline of a member who reported a safety violation  even ‘though he was under a duty to do so as a per se unfair labor practice.
He is a very conservative senior judge, and a mentor to Thomas.  Benjamin writes that his opinion is a template for the conservatives on the Court to uphold the ACA.

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Bits & Pieces (Monday’s Unexpected Party Edition)

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

My Hobbit name is Berilac Bramble of Willowbottom. My Elvish name is Amras Lossëhelin. Follow the links to find yours.

There’s a new production video from The Hobbit on Facebook now. In it, Peter Jackson others discuss shooting in 3D and 48 fps, but there’s lots of nifty studio footage. Given that they wrapped studio shooting several months back, it must take awhile to get one of the video diaries together.

Eric Vespe from Ain’t It Cool News has a new set report (this one involving his cameo in The Hobbit), making me wish I wrote for an entertainment website and was in New Zealand.

Looking forward to The Hobbit. December 2012. I can’t wait that long. Arrrghh!

• • • 

It’s illegal in China to use an ultrasound to determine the sex of your baby. I didn’t know that. I learned that from the Freakonomics podcast on China’s one child policy. Also touches on legalized abortion leading to a drop in crime (the most controversial assertion from their first Freakonomics book).

That’s it (from me) for today. Namaste. — KW

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Bits & Pieces (Friday Night Tiger Blood Edition)

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Winning! I asked yesterday Autotune The News basically rebranded themselves as Songify This. Here’s a much more recent piece: they Autotune Charlie Sheen.

Speaking of news. Epic news fails. Some don’t merit the lead up. Still . . . worth watching once. 
“Dana is off tonight. He was murdered and set on fire while celebrating his birthday!” I’m so glad my job doesn’t involve being on live television.
•••
Some days, I miss Drew Carrey’s take on Whose Line is it, Anyway? 

The Bad Lip Reading people do music videos, too, where they take real music videos, mash ’em up, and write a whole new song. I love this song. I think I’m gonna by the actual song on iTunes. “Morning Dew”.

Have a good evening, my friends. — KW

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Bonds & Pieces (Thursday Night Shaken, Not Stirred)

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Because, of course, stirring bruises the gin. Or the vodka. Or shaking does. Or Sean Connery just sounds great saying the line.


And thus, to attempt to live up to my title as master of pop culture, it is my duty to inform you that Bond 23 now has a name: Skyfall.
Apparently, the evil environmentalist, Dominic Greene, and Quantum won’t be back as a plot element in Daniel Craig’s 3rd outing as Bond.
Speaking of evil environmentalists, Michael Crichton wrote a rip-roaring action-adventure novel about evil environmentalists in State of Fear. It would make a great movie but, alas, is not likely to ever be a movie, because the bad guys aren’t just a few guys posing as environmentalism, but environmentalists, environmental lawyers, Hollywood environmentalists, etc. These environmentalists are willing to destroy the planet (or big chunks of it) in order to save it, in Crichton’s novel, and the famous environmentalist actor (probably a stand in for Martin Sheen) ends up getting eaten by cannibals. There are a few dry bits where characters become mouthpieces for Crichton’s concerns regarding climate science, but for the most part, it’s good versus evil versus nature in techno-thriller set piece after set piece.
It’s unfortunate that the heavies are clearly environmentalists, and not just poseurs, and that the point is made on multiple occasions that Crichton sees the current state of global warming science as incomplete in some place, and flat out wrong or false in others (with footnotes). Because with the credible passes at weather control, and the use of subsonic deep-cavitation devices to carve off part of an island and create a monsoon to destroy the west coast, cell phones that can attract lightning, and a jeep stuck in a flash flood (not to mention some straight-up hand-to-hand fighting), this movie would surpass Jurassic Park in it’s techno-thrilliness. But it’s never going to happen.
Oddly, another very exciting novel he wrote, Prey, also doesn’t seem destined for the big screen, even though the only bad guys in this case are big corporations and short-sighted scientists taking short cuts to achieve results-for-profit.
Next, his last novel published before his death, may actually make it to the big screen. It’s not bad, but is not nearly as exciting as Prey, or State of Fear.

•••

Mitt Romney makes it clear that he will not stand for Winnona Ryder pissing off people with a guitar, and that he wants a cookie:


Not quite the Rick Perry video, but close.
Whatever happened to Autotune The News? Those things were awesome:

Good evening, all. — KW

This is for quarterback:

— Michigoose

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Mark: Have You Seen This Rick Perry Video?

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

You know, the guy makes a lot of sense.

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Bombs & Pieces (Wednesday Night Smack Talk)

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

How do you drop bombs from an airplane?

It’s actually quite an interesting engineering problem.

“Gosh, that was loud!”

The British Air Force testing the UK’s first hydrogen bomb.

Miniature nuke set off on a table-top? No, it’s a trick. But good camera tracking.
There ya go! Merry Christmas, everybody!

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How Income Inequality Harms Societies

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Given various recent conversations:

How income inequality harms societies. At no point is there any demonstration (unless I’m missing something) of causation over correlation. I think the scatter charts are a little misleading, as well. But, interesting . . . as a conversation starter.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

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