A few days ago I saw an article that caught my eye, "America's 401(k) millionaires have plunged by a third" (CBS MoneyWatch 24 Feb 2023). It's interesting because (a) I watch news about investing and retirement; and (b) it's another article in a line of junk statistics about 401(k) accounts I've seen covered in the news ( Read more... )

President Joe Biden announced yesterday (30 Jan 2023) that he intends to end the Covid-19 national and public health emergencies on May 11. Biden's move comes only a few weeks after he last extended the emergency on Jan. 11. What's changed in 19 days? His move appears to have been prompted by bills introduced in the Republican-controlled Congress ( Read more... )

Today's the 3rd anniversary of Coronavirus. Well, not the anniversary but an anniversary. It's been 3 years since I first wrote about Coronavirus in my blog on January 30, 2020. (For those who are wondering, the 3 year anniversary of the first human case came in December, and the 3 year anniversary of the first "lockdown" arrives in a few weeks ( Read more... )

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog. My travel is complete for the year- I returned from Five Days in the Desert Wednesday night even though I still have a few more blogs to push out from the trip- so I can tally up my ( Read more... )

It's my 2 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 11 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both ( Read more... )

The world's population will surpass 8 billion on Tuesday, 15 Nov 2022, according to a United Nations estimate (retrieved 14 Nov 2022).


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Yesterday was Election Day in the US. Preliminary results are coming in. While many races are too close to call, the results in California's seven ballot propositions are becoming fairly clear. Here's what I see so far on California's Secretary of State page (retrieved 9am Nov. 9, 2022):

Proposition Title

My Vote

Preliminary Result

1
( Read more... )

On the way in to downtown Detroit yesterday we drove local streets the whole way from Dearborn. Compared to driving around Detroit on the freeways (which is about all I've ever done before) it provided an interesting, closer up view of the cityscape ( Read more... )

August 2022 has been a busy blogging month for me. I've posted a whopping 81 blog entries this month, including this one. That just eclipses my record-setting tally of 80 in September 2020... or does it?

81 is clearly more than 80, so on that basis I've set a new high water mark. But on a daily average basis August 2022 comes up a hair short. ( Read more... )

I've seen a few articles in my newsfeed today that cigarette smoking is down and marijuana use is up in the US... so much so that the latter now outnumbers the former. Rather than cite the articles here I figured I'd go the the source. The source is a Gallup publication, "Americans and the Future of Cigarettes, Marijuana, Alcohol" published 26 Aug ( Read more... )