Finished another mid-sized academic project that floated in the door on the networking winds. Reasonably interesting, it’s the product of an international collaboration whose lead author is clearly a rising young star, on his way no doubt to a deanship or, one day, a presidency. Conveniently, two of his colleagues are Chinese — the work is a study of two management strategies used in China. And so naturally I pointed out to him our specialization in working with ESL authors. Especially Chinese authors.
🙂
Now with nothing else to do, let’s spend the evening perusing the Motley Fool’s news site. The market remained up today — “flat,” says the Fool. I don’t know whether that’s good, bad, or neutral. The latter, I suspect. But who’s to know?
Meanwhile, the dollar falls back and emerging markets rebound globally, as citizens of other countries shake off their shock and horror at their American brethren’s bizarre choice of leadership.
But if hedging your bets is what you’d like to do — building a concrete bunker in the boondocks possibly not in the cards — the Fool recommends investing in products people will have to use no matter what their circumstances, stuff like Clorox, for example. The maker of Clorox also produces Pine-Sol, Glad bags, Brita water filters, and even Hidden Valley ranch dressing. The Fool likes Johnson & Johnson and Berkshire-Hathaway, too.
Five-Thirty-Eight opines that Trump’s disdain for renewable energy won’t make much difference, one way or the other, to its future development. Comes under the heading of wishful thinking, IMHO.
The Christian Science Monitor notes that Mr. Trump’s tax plan is anything but populist. Let’s hope our Republican senators and representatives manage to hang on to what little remains of their wits.
LOL! If you’ve enjoyed a Samsung washer or refrigerator, you’ll know here’s a car not to buy! 😀
Ryan plans to gut Medicare, according to Salon. Luckily, there are enough geezers out here to gut him…so he may want to keep his own wits about him… Seriously, though: if you’re a young person, prepare to add into your financial planning the costs of caring for your elderly parents. Otherwise you’ll be visiting them under the freeway overpass.
Back to the Fool: writers there speculate that Amazon has a new brick-and-board bookstore empire in its bag of tricks. Where have we heard this before? Home Depot, hm? Echoes of the extinction of locally owned hardware stores and American-made home improvement products. Once they’ve killed off all the competition, they raise the prices.
Because, of course, they can…
The day ends as it began: with a helicopter circling overhead, a bullhorn bellowing orders to some wretch below. Actually, this morning’s copter was not a cop copter but a news snoop in the sky, ogling the scene where some hapless jay-walker died. But copters are copters: noisy, annoying, nervous-making. No wonder we have anxiety attacks.
And so, to bed.
The results of the election are quite depressing. The uncertainty of Trump is scary. But the fact that people believed or don’t believe (depending on who you talk) that he could create that much change and no one will have to pay for it….what world do they live in? There are others who believe (cough my husband) he won’t do anything he says, he can’t. Then why vote for him? I have a strong feeling some people said this about Hitler.
This morning’s news (http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arizona-ex-politicians-kyl-brewer-and-arpaio-are-on-trumps-short-list-for-cabinet-picks-8828261) has it that for his cabinet he intends to pick Jon Kyl — a craven right-wing crazy with exactly zero common sense or care for the unfortunate ; Jan Brewer, a woman so mind-bangingly stupid it’s hard to believe she ever learned to tie her shoes; and Joe Arpaio, whose reputation you know if you can breathe and read.
Believe me: all three of these people have done a lot of harm here. They’ll be able to do LOTS more if they attain office on the national level.
Very unnerving. And we have to remember with dismantling Medicare – it will probably be tied to scrapping the ACA (which, in my opinion, only needs the ability to buy into Medicare to fix it), and will in no way be tied to the popular vote. It will be tied to the votes of people in congress, who are very few in number.