Sunday--May 14

Happy Mothers' Day to all.

I found this delicious article this morning that had me in stitches. I am a comic book fan from way back and especially of the Marvel line. And, by the way, I just did put in "hail-hydra.com" in my browser and it went right to #45's web page. Who ever did this is f**king brilliant.

I saw this on MSN. At first the reactions of outrage didn't surprise me but I had second thoughts. First, let's consider the case of the community college president who capped off a 42 year career getting a nice pension and a $266k payout for 1260 sick days he never used. Those number of days amount to just under three years which amount to about $80k. He worked those days because he wasn't sick but at the time got no extra pay or other compensation for that work. You can look at the other examples the same way. Perhaps the compensation for such benefits not used should be paid yearly. Then they wouldn't have been so noticeable. The only reason people are outraged is because they see the size of what they think is an unearned windfall. Au contraire--those people earned it.

Large numbers are always mind blowing. The story from MSN took a minute or two to process and realize that the large number is simply a matter of small numbers accumulating over time--rather like the "miracle" of compound interest. This story concerns a similarly large number: 252K+ pounds of prepared chicken and beef burrito products recalled because of listeria contamination. On the one hand we aren't overly concerned for ourselves. We don't buy highly processed foods and if we want burritos we can make them ourselves. On the other hand, I find such waste offensive. But such stories coming out of our industrial food processing system are increasingly common place.