[Bloomberg] In the relentless political drama of Brexit, the closure of a small ball-bearing factory 95 miles (152 kilometers) west of London barely registered outside the local community.
The loss of the Stonehouse plant will cost 185 jobs, hardly the thousands some companies say are under threat because of the upheaval from leaving the European Union. Nor did the December announcement come with the kind of political noise surrounding Japanese carmaker Nissan Motor Co.’s recent decision to scrap plans to build a model in the U.K.
By ending manufacturing at the site in 2021, though, Swedish owner SKF AB highlighted a dangerous undercurrent in the British economy that exists regardless of what happens with the divorce from the EU: the country’s productivity. And uncertainty about Brexit has made companies cautious about investing in the automation that might help boost it.
The problem has been on the radar of politicians, executives and central bank policy makers for a while, but it’s now becoming more urgent. Businesses are looking to a future outside the common European market as Prime Minister Theresa May tries to get her Brexit deal through Parliament and they face a stark choice: modernize or die.
It’s not that the country isn’t working hard enough, more that it’s not working smart enough. On average, French workers toiled for 10 percent fewer hours in 2017, yet they produced more while they did so.
[Market Watch] U.S. stocks closed higher Monday, with the Nasdaq doing much of the heavy lifting, as investors looked ahead to another week of high-profile earnings and developments in U.S.-China trade talks.
How did major indexes fare?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.70% rose 174.48 points, or 0.7%, to end at 25,239.37, while the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.68% gained 18.34 points, or 0.7%, to 2,724.87. The Nasdaq Composite Index added 83.67 points, or 1.2%, to close at 7,347.54.
What drove the market?
Investors will wade through more corporate earnings this week, with 97 members of the S&P 500 on tap along with one Dow component, Walt Disney Co. DIS, +0.45% reporting Tuesday.
[NYT] SEATTLE ‐ Leslie Christian recently added unusual language to her living will: After death, she hoped her remains would be reduced to soil and spread around to help out some flowers, or a tree. In essence, compost.
"It seems really gentle," said Ms. Christian, 71, a financial adviser. "Comforting and natural."
A bill before the Washington State Legislature would make this state the first in the nation ‐ and probably the world, legal experts said ‐ to explicitly allow human remains to be disposed of and reduced to soil through composting, or what the bill calls recomposition.
The prospect has drawn no public opponents in the state capital as yet, but it is a concept that sometimes raises eyebrows. Funeral directors say a common reaction to the idea, which has been explored and tested in recent scientific studies, is to cringe.
"There’s almost a revulsion at times, when you talk about human composting," said Brian Flowers, the managing funeral director at Moles Farewell Tributes, a company north of Seattle that supports the bill.
In truth, composting is an ancient and basic method of body disposal. A corpse in the ground without embalming chemicals or a coffin, or in a quickly biodegradable coffin, becomes soil over time.
But death certificates in many states include a box that must be checked for burial or cremation, with no other options. Aboveground composting, through a mortuary process that requires no burial or burning of remains, is a new category without regulation about how it should be done or what can be done with the compost. What that means is that hardly any funeral director ‐ even in states where laws about human remains are loosely worded ‐ would risk offering it without state permission.
BLUF:
[American Thinker] I have two explanations for this push for legalized infanticide. One is economic, and the other is a stepping stone.
A small group of people account for significant medical spending. Specifically, "30% of all Medicare expenditures are attributed to the 5% of beneficiaries that die each year, with 1/3 of that cost occurring in the last month of life." Imagine being able to cut these costs from the budget! Free gov't provided human composting for those who 'opt out' of last month.
It's actually on both ends of the spectrum: newborns with serious health problems and the elderly with their own health needs. In my world, patients with macular degeneration in both eyes requiring a monthly injection of medication costing $2,000 can cost Medicare $50,000 per year. That's just for their retina condition. They may have heart or respiratory problems, too, requiring expensive medications and hospitalizations.
These individuals, and many more including the disabled, are collecting Social Security each month and not working, not paying into the system. They are only an expense for the ruling class, whose members believe that the federal treasury is theirs to spend as they deem. Damn those people that payed into the system for 55-65 years and now have the audacity to expect a taxed monthly stipend.
Children may be born with Down syndrome or other genetic disorders, spina bifida, clubfoot, and other infirmities that are costly to manage. How much money could be saved and put toward government-paid preschool for healthy kids who need little more than an annual physical and vaccinations?
If only these expensive patients went away, there would be more money available to fund a single-payer system, which would otherwise be unaffordable, as currently proposed by Bernie Sanders and others. What if that's the next step?
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
02/05/2019 8:33 Comments ||
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#5
although not generally discussed, women account for about 60% of health expenditures
some of this is because they live longer, some because they get pregnant, some because the hypochondria rate is higher in females, but that still leaves a remainder unexplained
Posted by: lord garth ||
02/05/2019 8:45 Comments ||
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#6
All through your working life you pay into Medicare whether you want to or not and when get old and you need it they want to euthanize you?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/05/2019 11:19 Comments ||
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#7
So, where can I invest in Soylent Green futures?
[Townhall] This year's Super Bowl was a relatively blasé affair by most accounts. The Patriots won for the six time in its career. There were no memorable commercials except for a "Twilight Zone" reboot tease and an ad celebrating 100 years of the NFL. The halftime show was pretty underwhelming except for a jarring "Spongebob Squarepants" transition. The one good thing that anybody could say about the game is that there were barely any politics throughout the proceedings.
Barely.
About an hour before the game proper started, Al Sharpton gave an accusatory address to the NFL and its fans on MSNBC's "Gotcha" segment.
Sharpton used this time to call out football fans for being racist because they didn't approve of black players kneeling for the National Anthem. The protest, instigated by former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, was a demonstration against police violence against black Americans. Lectured by a grifting racialist huckster bobblehead! We can get no RESPICT!
#5
Big Al is miffed because he has not been invited to the white house left by President Trump. With Obama he was the uncle that kept showing up for dinner.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
02/05/2019 19:32 Comments ||
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[Breitbart] A professor at Linfield College in Oregon claims that the 1964 film Mary Poppins is racist, arguing that the main character can be seen "blacking up" her face with soot as she dances with chimney sweeps.
Professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner accused the classic film of racism in a New York Times op-ed last week, claiming that despite seeming like an "innocuous comic scene," it is racist when Mary Poppins gets covered in chimney soot and doesn’t bother wiping it off her face.
"One of the more indelible images from the 1964 film is of Mary Poppins blacking up," writes the professor, stating that after Julie Andrews’ character charges up a chimney, "her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker."
"This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature," added Pollack-Pelzner.
The professor also mentioned that a housemaid can be heard screaming "Don’t touch me, you black heathen" in the 1943 film "Marry Poppins Opens the Door," as a chimney sweep "reaches out his darkened hand," which is more evidence of chimney sweeps being associated with racial caricature.
"When he tries to approach the cook, she threatens to quit: ’If that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door,’ she says," adds the professor.
#8
Some years back I heard a little furore when a library decided to chuck the Mary Poppins series. Somebody investigated, and found that none of the books had been checked out in something like 20 years. The reporter read one, and concluded that there was a reason for the lack of interest.
I read them ages ago. The movie was more fun. The books--meh.
The professor can't tell the difference between a book and a movie loosely based on it.
Posted by: james ||
02/05/2019 12:50 Comments ||
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#9
This just in: Liam Neeson on 'GMA': I wanted to kill black person but I'm not racist
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Townhall] This year's Super Bowl was a relatively blasé affair by most accounts. The Patriots won for the six time in its career. There were no memorable commercials except for a "Twilight Zone" reboot tease and an ad celebrating 100 years of the NFL. The halftime show was pretty underwhelming except for a jarring "Spongebob Squarepants" transition. The one good thing that anybody could say about the game is that there were barely any politics throughout the proceedings.
Product Recall: Crayola bows to demands. Black to be replaced by clearcoat in all Crayon boxes. 
