Facts and foresight that may interest you. Not guaranteed, but interesting if so or
probable.
Generally,
afactis defined as something
that actually exists, or something having objective reality that can be verified according to an established standard of evaluation...Wikipedia
Foresight is the secret ingredient of success, because without it we cannot prepare for the future or create
the future we desire. But in an age of hyperchange, developing foresight and seeing our way to the future is harder and harder...WFS
According
to a recent Rasmussen poll 80% of Americans believe that individuals learn more practical skills through life experience and
work rather than through college.
Only 20% of parents believe their children “will keep our family’s wealth secure for
future generations,”
Only 32% of survey respondents say their kids are “willing to make financial sacrifices.” -Annual
Bank of America U.S. Trust survey of wealthy Americans (2008)
64% of Americans are worried that they won’t have enough money to pay for retirement.
56% are worried about not being able to maintain their current standard of living. -USA
Today/Gallup Poll, Sept. 26-27, 2008
Minorities particularly suffer from financial literacy. African-American
students are only about 80% as financially literate as white students. -2008 Jump$tart Coalition for Personal
Financial Literacy Survey
Only 59% of young adults (ages 18-29) pay their bills on time each month.
One-third of Americans do not know their credit score. -The National Foundation for Credit
Counseling’s 2008 Consumer Financial Literacy Survey
Only 28% of Americans view their financial knowledge as “good” or “excellent” -August
2007 Networks Financial Institute
A majority of Americans believe that labor saving technology is harming the economy. -Myth
of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan, 2007
74% of parents feel unprepared to teach their kids about personal finance. -FleetBoston
survey, 2003
Though the personal savings rate averaged 9.4% from 1970 to 1989, it had dropped to 2.3% by 2000
and to 0.4% in 2006. -The Bureau of Economic Analysis Data, 2007
Only 22 states require testing students’ knowledge in economics (three fewer than in 2004). -NCEE
Survey of the States, 2007
Only 7 states require students to take personal finance for graduation. -NCEE Survey
of the States, 2007
The rate at which Americans filed for bankruptcy increased 350% between 1980 and 2005. -Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, January/February 2007
25% of all employees who are eligible to enroll in their employers' 401(k) savings programs don't
contribute a dime. -Profit Sharing/401(k) Council of America
Most Americans believe that international trade is bad for the economy. -Survey of Americans
and Economists on the Economy
Though the top 1 percent of income earners pays 40% of the total taxes, a majority of Americans mistakenly
believes that middle and lower income citizens pay the highest tax rate. -National Public Radio, Kaiser Family
Foundation and the Kennedy School of Government survey
Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed did not know that in times of inflation money does not hold its
value. -NCEE Harris poll
Most Americans believe that corporate profits average nearly 50% of revenue, when in fact the average
is 8%. -Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post survey
48% of American credit card owners only pay their minimum monthly payment each month. -Senate
Resolution 48, 2003
A much-needed population dropoff is imminent. The US Census recently released its projections
for global population expansion and decline over the next few decades. Although the population is growing, its rate of growth
isentering
a steep decline.
Next decade may be the beginning of the end of the population explosion, which is good news for everyone - especially people
who will be living on the planet 100 years from now.
DATA DATA
If the data devoured in theUnited Stateslast
year were converted to text there would be enough books to bury the country under a pile seven feet (two meters) deep, according
to a study released Wednesday.
US residents consumed about 1.3 trillion hours
worth of information from radios, televisions, computers, newspapers, mobile telephones, and other sources, according to researchers
at theUniversity of California,San Diego.
That translated into an average of nearly 12
hours spent daily by each US resident watching television, listening toMP3 players,scouring the Internet or tapped into other sources of
data.
The information tally was the equivalent of 3.6 zettabytes
of data, or 34 gigabytes per person per day. Thirty-four gigabytes of digital data would fit on about seven standard DVD disks.
________________________________________
Very soon all human knowledge will be
stored, handled and reported digitally. The whole digital information storage system is measured in bits and bytes. Eight
bits make a byte. The units of measurements in information storage grow through kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte,
exabyte, zettabyte, to finally the biggest, yottabytes. One yottabyte is equal to four terabytes.Hard drives storing two terabytes are now available for your home computer at very reasonable prices. One zettabyte equals 1,000,000,000 trillion
bytesor to be exact:1,180,591,620,717,410,000,000
bytes or 9,444,732,965,739,290,000,000 bits.
_______________________________________
The amount of traffic generated each month by
YouTube is now equivalent to the amount generated
across the entire internet in all of 2000.
_______________________________________
In 1985 there were 700,000 cell phone users in the world. Today
there are 4 billion. We have added a billion new cell phone users in the last 12 months or close to 3
million new users a day!
150 years ago the speed of human communication was a horse day, how far a horse could travel
in a day. Now there is no real time difference between calling someone in the next room or someone
15,000 miles away.
Thus there is no time, distance
or place any longer limiting human communication, making cell phones the most transformational technology today. Cell phones are now becoming mobile devices with greater power and more features than the laptops we used a decade ago.
_____________________________________
By early fall 2008, one percent of Americans
watched television exclusively on computers.
.
Data from the Year 1909 :
************ ********* *********
******
The average life expectancy was 47 years.
Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
There were only 8,000 cars and only
144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
The tallest structure in the world was the EiffelTower
The average wage in 1909 was 22 cents per hour.
The average worker made between $200 and $400 per year ...
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year,
A dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000
per year.
More than 95 percent of all births took place at home.
Ninety percent of all doctors had no college education.
Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which
Were condemned in the press AND the government
as 'substandard. '
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used
Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering
their country
for any reason.
Five leading causes of death were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke
The American flag had 45 stars.
The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was only 30 persons.
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea
hadn't been invented yet.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's
Day.
Two out of every 10 adults couldn't read or write.
Only 6 percent of all Americans had
graduated from high school.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at the local corner drugstores. Back then pharmacists
said, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind,regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect
guardian of health."
Eighteen percent of households had at
least one full-time servant or domestic help.
There were about 230 reported murders
in the entire U.S.A. !
The American-born children of parents who arrived in the vast immigrant
tide from Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America since 1980 now constitute a majority of Hispanic youngsters
in the United States.
Sleep
Nanotechnology fabricates and manipulates
objects at a very small scale, less than 100 nanometers in size. For an idea of how small that is, a sheet of paper is 100,000
nanometers thick. A red blood cell is 7,000 nanometers across while a DNA molecule is 2.5 nanometers across. The fullerene,
a ball-shaped molecule with wide-ranging potential in commerce and industry, is a man-made sphere of carbon with a diameter
of just 2 nanometers and can be fabricated using as few as 60 individual carbon atoms.
At the nanoscale, some materials show unusual properties not
apparent in bulk-size versions of the same materials. For instance, carbon atoms formed into nanotubes have exhibited tensile
strength many times that of steel, while at the nanoscale, substances that are normally chemically inert like gold, can act as a powerful chemical catalysts.
Governor of Georgia Eugene Talmadge is remembered as asegregationist and for
his book-banning agenda in state colleges. He was also a man who loved to
wield power. When Talmadge was touring the Georgia State Penitentiary in
1936; he asked prisoners; as he passed their cells one question, "Are you
guilty?" The answer to the question always came back an emphatic no. But
when he approached the cell door of Leland Harvey and Aubrey Smith, who were
serving 150-year terms for armed robbery, he was shocked when both men
answered;; "Yes!" "It seems you only have two thieves in your
penitentiary," Talmadge said to the warden. "I will pardon these two men."
Harvey and Smith did indeed receive pardons from the governor; who later
explained, "Truthful men should never be confined with a bunch of liars."
The number of Americans who describe themselves as Christian has fallen from 86 to 76 percent between 1990 and
2008 while the secularists have doubled from 8 to 15 percent of the population.
A brief history of the internet
1969The internet is created by the US
Department of Defense with the networking
of computers at UCLA and the Stanford
Research Institute.
1979The British Post Office uses the
technology to create the first international
computer networks.
1980Bill Gates's deal to put a Microsoft
Operating System on IBM's computers paves
the way for almost universal computer
ownership.
1984Apple launches the first successful
'modern' computer interface using graphics
to represent files and folders, drop-down
menus and, crucially, mouse control.
1989Tim Berners-Lee creates the world wide
web – using browsers, pages and links to
make communication on the internet simple.
1996Google begins as a research project at
Stanford University. The company is formally
founded two years later by Sergey Brin and
Larry Page.
2009Dr Stephen Wolfram launches Wolfram
Alpha.
It
takes an estimated 32.7 hours to complete a standard 1040 income tax form, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
In
1918, only 5% of Americans earned enough to file returns.
.
60% of the world's population now have mobile phones. Developing countries account for about two-thirds of mobile phones. In Africa 28 per
cent of the population now has a mobile phone, compared to just two per cent in 2000.compared
to less than half in 2002.
$100 million a year is lost by soft drink companies due to thefts
committed involving vending machines.
Counterfeiting
of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society. Sophisticated new optical scanning technologies could, in the next five years, be a boon for currency
counterfeiters, so societies are increasingly putting aside their privacy fears about going cashless. Meanwhile, cashless
technologies are improving, making them far easier and safer to use.
60,000 persons now earn accounting degrees annually
In 1894 Asa Candler bought the Coca-Cola formula for $2,300.
Charles Guth became president of Pepsi Cola after Coca-Cola refused to grant price concessions on
the sale of Coke in his drugstores. He resurrected the beverage in 1932 but was nearly forced into bankruptcy.
At one point Guth sent ambassadors to Atlanta to attempt to sell the rights of Pepsi to Coca-Cola. Assuming that the drink
would soon disappear of its own accord Coke officials refused to purchase the company. In the decision
not to purchase Pepsi, Coke officials, to their lasting regret, allowed Guth to continue to manufacture the drink.
The Hydrogen Economy will seriously begin to supersede the Oil Economy by about 2020. The portability, power, and connectivity of media devices will make entertainment-on-demand
a force to be reckoned with among mass-entertainment providers. Space tourism is on the verge of "a golden age," as short,
suborbital flights become more affordable--and whet the public's appetite for longer adventures...WSF TechCast Project
In
all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold has been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than
half of that was extracted in the last 50 years, and there have been few recent discoveries…Sun Times, 3/2/09
The total weight of insects on the
planet is more than all other species put together.
The total biomass (weight) of ants is greater than the biomass of all human
beings.
Con
12,000 especies conocidas hasta ahora y otras 8,000 sospechadas pero aún
no descubiertas, la hormiga es uno de los insectos de mayor éxito en el
planeta.
Over 90% of Australia is dry, flat and arid. Almost three-quarters of the land cannot support agriculture in any form.
*Kangaroo - The name for the Australian marsupial Kangaroo came about when some of the first white
settlers saw this strange animal hopping along and they asked the Aborigines what it was called. They replied with'Kanguru',
which in the native language meant 'I don't know'
A trillion dollars in perspective:
A million dollars in tightly bound $1,000 dollars bills would create
a stack 4 INCHES high.
A billion dollars in tightly bound $1,000 dollars bills would create
a stack 300 FEET high.
A trillion dollars in tightly bound $1,000 dollars
bills would create a stack 63 MILES high.
......Thanks to the late Larry Burkett's book, "The Coming Economic Earthquake",
written in 1991. An amazingly prescient book!
If you
had gone into business on the day Jesus Christ was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, day in and day out,
7 days a week, 365 days a year, it would take you until October 2737 to lose a trillion dollars. That's right, after 2009
years of losing a million dollars a day, you'd still have over 700 years left to spend or waste one million a year.
Triskaidekaphobia - a morbid fear of the number 13
The first surgical anesthetic use of ether is credited
to Dr. Crawford Williamson Long, MD, of Jefferson, Georgia.
On March 30, 1842, he removed one of two tumors from the neck of Mr. James Venable under ether anesthesia.
The number of Americans who describe themselves as Christian has fallen from 86 to 76 percent between 1990 and
2008 while the secularists have doubled from 8 to 15 percent of the population.
.
TIMELINE OF EDUCATION 1657-2045
A look back at the history of education and forecast for the next 35 years.
"Utilizing many of the best resources for projecting futures for human capital development, this
timeline presents a glimpse of the past, present, and plausible futures for education," Among
the timeline's forecasts: New York City will close 80% of its public schools by 2023 due to shifts in
demographics and competition
from informal modes of learning. By 2032, teachers and faculty who refuse to upgrade their cognitive
functioning will be asked to resign. By 2035, intelligent machines deciding to have children will lead
to a "golden age" of nonhuman creativity.
<<<USE
YOUR CURSOR TO CONTROL SCROLLING SPEED BELOW>>>
Whenever you find you
are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect
--- Mark Twain
We have never observed
a great civilization with a population as old as the United States will have in the twenty-first century; we have never observed
a great civilization that is as secular as we are apparently going to become; and we have had only half a century of experience
with advanced welfare states...Charles Murray
Kella
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certain issues affecting democratic governance of interest to me and my friends, associates and seminar participants. The
financial information, charts, etc., consist of items I find interesting. Draw your own conclusions from it.
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