Share comments

(cont'd)

Comments at the end of yesterday's sited article are so interesting that I decided to "share" some:

"I drive for Uber and I love my job. It's BETTER than driving a yellow garage because I don't have to endure a dispatcher, dictating when I work. I'm 60 and I RELISH the freedom Uber provides."

". . when the old ways involve powerful interests with deep pockets and friends in high places, we can count on our leaders to screw over consumers, all for our own good, no doubt."

"When cars replaced horses, the buggy whip makers adjusted. Our current economy will adjust too . ."

IMO - I question whether the government should really protect "old ways" when people come up with better ways.

Sharing

Software that you can carry in your pocket is changing the way everyone transacts business, that is, buys stuff they want or need. Part of the picture is the "sharing economy," which would include "car sharing."

"Uber" is a convenient way to match up a driver with someone who wants a ride. Here is the simple idea,  "I want a ride, and you have a car and a few minutes. We could never find each other on our own [without Uber's software platform] . . "

But California wants to jump in and spoil the simple idea. CA lawyers claim that drivers are not independent contractors, but employees - which would allow the government to add costs and regs.

"California is on the verge of freezing out one of the most useful and innovative software platforms of the last decade."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Unique U.S.

Right there on an American coin are things that make America unique, three ideas which combined to create the "American experiment:"

According to Margaret Thatcher, Britain's prime minister in the 1980's: "Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy [ideas]."

Weather man

Jerrid Sebesta calls himself a "small town trailer park kid." He climbed the television celebrity ladder for about ten years in Minnesota and got to what could be called the cream of the crop at Kare11 -  then he quit.

Jerrid quit his income, his healthcare, his popularity, all for a quieter life that would include family reunions and kids' bedtimes. You've heard of executives quitting their high-income jobs to own a business, like a B & B or a bakery, right? But Jerrid had no job and no business.

His wife says they could now live for a few years without income if necessary because they got debt-free while enjoying the high income, and learned to live on less than they made.

But that may not be necessary. Read his story here to learn about a new direction that has opened up for him.

Surviving

Joseph Kim says that you have to choose to have hope, that hope kept him alive. He escaped North Korea after losing his parents and living as an orphan, homeless on the streets.

But life didn't get easy after escaping across the border either. In the video below, he tells how a chicken wing changed him.

Power future

Tesla Motors has officially offered its gigafactory-produced batteries to the market. Because of that new "gigafactory," some think the field of energy (power production) is on the way to big change. According to this writer, it's going to start the "First Energy Revolution."

A vast volume of solar energy rains down on the earth, so wouldn't it be great if every residence and business could have a solar panel that provided enough energy cheaply. So far that is not the case, partly because sunshine varies. To provide power all the time, in spite of clouds and darkness, you'd have to have a good way to store it. Up til now, no batteries were up to the task.

On April 30, Elon Musk announced that Tesla Energy is ready to fix that gap with their "powerwall," which apparently is up to the task. Result? "[P]ower generation will become clean, reliable, ubiquitous, and very low cost . . .  a revolutionary transformation of our society and the world at large."

“Tesla Energy took orders for about US$800 million in stationary batteries in the first week following the announcement…”

Trade freely

Economic freedoms make for a more prosperous people according to the article sited in last Friday's post. How does freedom to own and manage your property, to trade with whomever you wish, do this? That question could stump a lot of people.

Economist Dr. Anne Bradley explains it in this article, "Free Trade Frees Us - and the Poor - for Better Things."

"To focus on your comparative advantage, you do not try to do everything. You specialize by producing what you are relatively better at making compared to others, and then trade for what you are relatively worse at . . . 

"Free trade frees me up to do other things: the things that I am relatively better at doing. It does the same for you . . .

"Left entirely to our own devices, most of us would be either dead or rubbing sticks together in a cave somewhere . . .

"The lack of free trade keeps the poor in chains."

Fewer poor

Most people think global poverty is increasing. So I guess most people would be surprised to hear that global poverty is decreasing.

The World Bank says that over half the world lived in extreme poverty in 1981 (defined as $1.25/day/person). By 2011, thirty years later, that percentage had gone down to 17% of the world's people - a stunning reduction of over 900 million people.

Charitable giving helps out in emergency situations, but no country becomes prosperous just through charity. Freedom to protect and manage one's own property plays a big part. More economic freedom in, for example, Botswana has led to less poverty and more prosperity.

Good news.

Over-worked

I don't know a single person who willingly spends every waking hour at his or her job. But apparently some do, because Goldman Sachs (the global finance company) is now telling them they must go home by midnight, and cannot start work in the morning before 7 a.m.

Banking interns were told the new rules when they showed up the first day for their summer internship. The new rules come after a tragedy - a Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern, 21 years old, was found dead in the shower after working straight for 72 hours.

"Goldman Sach’s chief executive Lloyd Blankfein told his interns that they shouldn’t give over their whole lives to the firm. “You have to be interesting, you have to have interests away from the narrow thing of what you do,” he said. “You have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to.”

Good advice.

Future fast

(cont'd)

Most of us thought the Hyperloop concept was a long, long way off. Most of us thought it was just another theoretical Jetsons-type idea. But no, the first test track (yesterday's post) is scheduled to test the winner of a pod design competition in just one year.

If you're curious how it would really work (for one tenth the cost of California's bullet train plan), this video is a good explanation:

Design a pod

If you have been thinking about a cool hyperloop pod design, the time has come for you - just submit your design here at the new hyperloop website put up by SpaceX, open-sourced.  SpaceX is building a test track on which to test those designs a year from now, June 2016.

Two years ago in August (2013) Elon Musk revealed his proposal for the transport plan - even though neither he nor his companies are developing a commercial hyperloop:

"While we are not developing a commercial Hyperloop ourselves, we are interested in helping to accelerate development of a functional Hyperloop prototype."

Two startups did begin development and both of them plan to build test tracks. If I were in their shoes, I'd have to wonder exactly when and to what extent I might soon be competing with Elon Musk.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Free will?

In spite of the fact that we consciously make choices every day, it is sometimes taught that we don't have freedom to actually make a choice. The thinking is that our choices are determined by the experiences we've had up to that point.

Here is one argument that can be made in support of "free will." Our past experiences influence but do not determine our free choices.

"Alien tech"

(cont'd)

Dr. Stephen Larson has degrees in neuroscience and engineering - but I think you'll enjoy his TED Talk below anyway! He works in computer-related biology research and "open science."

But this interests me more:  he has come to the same conclusion that Dr. Behe (yesterday's post) did in the 1990's - tiny "molecular motors" in the cells of all living creatures appear to have been built by an intelligent designer. He says, "I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that this stuff was built by aliens!"

When confronted with genuine machines in living cells, reason and life experience would tell us they were built, as he says, "by an engineer a million times smarter than me." But he can only imagine "alien technology."  :)))

His training and associations limit his imagination. Those of us who were not systematically trained to filter out the supernatural can imagine another possibility - we see the fingerprint of our Creator.

Design

Darwin's Black Box was published by a practicing biologist in 1996. It caused something of an uproar in the science community because they regarded it as heresy.

Author Michael Behe of Lehigh University claimed that microscopic "motors" made up of chemical molecules operate within living cells, motors that appear to be built by an intelligent agent - just as, say, an outboard boat motor appears built intentionally rather than thrown together by chance.

Science for many decades has assumed only a material universe - no creator, no purpose, no design. To suggest that there may be evidence for an intelligent designer upset a lot of people, even though Dr. Behe didn't address who that designer might be.

But tomorrow's post will be about a biologist who is struck by the same evidence, even though he doesn't believe in a creator, and even though he "hates" that there's evidence for design in nature.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Lived D-Day

(cont'd)

Today Ralph Manley is 91 years old and lives in a home with other veterans. But 71 years ago, he jumped out of a plane at midnight in enemy territory over France, 20 miles inland from the coast.

As a high school senior from a dairy farm in Missouri, Ralph joined the paratroopers like his brother had done earlier. He learned while in training that his 19-year-old brother died on his first combat jump in Europe. He could have discharged for that (see "Saving Private Ryan") but stayed in.

A few dark hours before the D-Day invasion, he was the third of only five surviving jumpers from his plane. Enemy fire took it down and the rest all died. He carried 200 lbs. of gear and explosives for his mission to impede the Nazis by blowing up bridges and guns before the troops landed.

Surviving the Battle of the Bulge and other battles, he received five Purple Hearts and two Bronze Stars. He says "war is hell," but he's not angry about it. Like so many WWII vets, he's thankful for the troops and for America. See the rest of his story here.

D-Day

World War II started when Hitler's Germany invaded neighboring Poland in 1939, and by the end of 1940 much of Europe was under his heel. France was conquered in 1940 and would remain occupied for four years - until D-Day, June 6, 1944.

While Hitler slept in that morning, and his generals were undecided, one-hundred-fifty-thousand troops landed along the Atlantic coast and began taking back the nation of France for the French people.

American General Eisenhower told those troops, "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you." 

It was a day of heroic effort by many, and some won the Medal of Honor. Read their stories here, including the story of one Army private who "arose as a leader" on the beaches of Normandy.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Make it stick

Mr. Hannan makes a good point in his WSJ article on the Magna Carta of 1215:

"The bishops and barons who had brought King John to the negotiating table understood that rights required an enforcement mechanism. The potency of a charter is not in its parchment but in the authority of its interpretation. The constitution of the U.S.S.R., to pluck an example more or less at random, promised all sorts of entitlements: free speech, free worship, free association. But as Soviet citizens learned, paper rights are worthless in the absence of mechanisms to hold rulers to account."

We just passed the 71st anniversary of D-Day (June 6, 1944), when the Allies led by an American invaded France to drive back the Nazis. If we had lost World War II, would liberty have been the result? The Magna Carta tradition of limiting the king would have been buried under Hitler, who believed in ultimate power - for himself.

As you've doubtless heard, freedom isn't free. Somebody who believes in it must defend it. In 1957, a memorial was erected where Magna Carta was signed, by people who believed in it - by the American Bar Association.

Limit the king

It would be easy to get the impression that freedom from oppression is the natural state of nations and governments. Easy to miss the fact that there was a serious fight for freedom from tyranny, and by no means did the fight always go to the people. But in England, 800 years ago, it did.

photo: lincolncathedral.com

England's king relinquished some of his power to some of the people, not easily, but under pressure.

"It was at Runnymede, on June 15, 1215, that the idea of the law standing above the government first took contractual form. King John accepted that he would no longer get to make the rules up as he went along. From that acceptance flowed, ultimately, all the rights and freedoms that we now take for granted: uncensored newspapers, security of property, equality before the law, habeas corpus, regular elections, sanctity of contract, jury trials."

Learn how it came about here from Daniel Hannan, Member of the European Parliament from Britain.

For a fictionalized account of what it took to limit the king, watch the Russell Crowe movie of "Robin Hood".

Inspiring

Be inspired by this young man's courage and endurance in suffering - and what he does now that he is free. What North Korea does to its own people is evil.

Low price

Still love paying paying low prices to fill your tank with gas? We are all paying roughly a dollar per gallon less than we were last summer, with the American national average at $2.75 just yesterday. Last October the average went below $3.00/gallon in ten states and it's stayed there ever since.

How many gallons do you use per month? That number is also the number of dollars you are saving in the cost of gas for your car every month. If you drive 1000 miles/month and you get 25 miles per gallon, your savings is $40.00 per month or $480 per year.

There's a prediction at Forbes that oil is going to stay at about this price point for years, and they give four reasons for that prediction here.

Churches give

Robert Putnam of Harvard makes this claim:
“The obvious fact is that over the last 30 years, most organized religion has focused on issues regarding sexual morality, such as abortion, gay marriage, all of those . . and not at all focused on issues of poverty.”

On the contrary, "organized religion" has given huge attention to the issues of global poverty  as this rebuttal editorial states:

"Broadly speaking, American churches are incredibly generous to the needs of a hurting world." Just one year as an example given by The Philanthropy Roundtable: "In 2009, overseas relief and development supported by American churches exceeded $13 billion . . "

For much more data which would probably surprise Dr. Putnam, go to the library and get the book  Who Really Cares by economist Arthur C. Brooks.

Maybe Dr. Putnam has been misinformed.

Taken back

About three months ago, Islamic State (IS) conquered villages in northern Syria and took hundreds of Syrian Christians. Now Kurds and Assyrian Christians have successfully taken back a string of those villages.

But IS destroyed the life they had there, as evidenced by this photo of the ruin of the Church of the Virgin Mary in Tal Nasri, Syria:

It was blown up on Easter Sunday.

Too bad the displaced families can't go home even now that IS has been driven out - because the villages have been mined.

"That leaves about 1,400 Assyrian families—nearly 7,000 persons—unable to go back to their homes and villages . . . “Their grandfathers survived the Christian genocide of 1915, and now, the grandsons are trying to survive the new massacre.”