Guess What?

It’s still Jewish American Heritage Month. Do I have to show the Nobel Prize data again? Sure, this time only since 2000:

Jews comprise just 0.2% of the world population and just 2% of the US population. Since 2000, they have been awarded:

40 percent of all of the Nobel Prizes in Economics and 50 percent of those won by US citizens

26 percent of all of the Nobel Prizes in Medicine and 38 percent of those won by US citizens

25 percent of all of the Nobel Prizes in Physics and 38 percent of those won by US citizens

19 percent of all of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and 28 percent of those won by US citizens

Go shove that where the sun don’t shine, ignoramus anti-Semites.

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I am mostly recovered from what has to have been food poisoning. I did become a tad queasy with my first intake of nourishment today and yesterday, although that passed in just 2-3 minutes. In addition to my usual morning meds, today’s first “meal” was a concoction of iced coffee mixed with an Atkins shake and an Atkins bar. No, I didn’t put all of that in a blender.

With my history of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD), my esophagus is really not happy after a bout of…a bout of…”regurgitating” my food. Remember that I have had my upper GI tract scoped (a procedure called an EGD) 17 times.

In an episode of The Big Bang Theory the “boys” are eating, a common occurrence on the show, when Howard (the Jewish character) complains of an upset stomach while eating a pork dish. Raj, the Indian character, mocks him by asking how he’s going to like being in hell for not keeping kosher. Howard replies, “Jews don’t have hell, they have acid reflux.”

With two 20mg doses of omeprazole (the generic name for Prilosec) daily, exercise and no meal after 2-3 PM, the bouts of “breakthrough reflux” have, thankfully, become infrequent. My GI tract is still messed up, though.

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From a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper by Richard V. Burkhauser, Drew McNichols, and Joseph J. Sabia:

Advocates of minimum wage increases have long touted their potential to reduce poverty. This study assesses this claim. Using data spanning nearly four decades from the March Current Population Survey, and a dynamic difference-in-differences approach, we find that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is associated with a (statistically insignificant) 0.17 percent increase in the probability of longer-run poverty among all persons. With 95% confidence, we can rule out long-run poverty elasticities with respect to the minimum wage of less than -0.129, which includes central poverty elasticities reported by Dube (2019). Prior evidence suggesting large poverty-reducing effects of the minimum wage are (i) highly sensitive to researcher’s choice of macroeconomic controls, and (ii) driven by specifications that limit counterfactuals to geographically proximate states (“close controls”), which poorly match treatment states’ pre-treatment poverty trends. Moreover, an examination of the post-Great Recession era — which saw frequent, large increases in state minimum wages — failed to uncover poverty-reducing effects of the minimum wage across a wide set of specifications. Finally, we find that less than 10 percent of workers who would be affected by a newly proposed $15 federal minimum wage live in poor families. [emphasis mine]

A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study published in 2021 concluded that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would put 1.4 million Americans out of work. The minimum wage in Manhattan CANNOT be the same as the minimum wage in Tunica, Mississippi. Of course, politicians like CrashandBernie are now advocating a $17 minimum wage. Once again, Louis Armstrong: “There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.”

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The Maserati received its first wash yesterday. That included my using a couple of products on the interior. I have this idiosyncratic belief that the first time a person gets a “new” car washed, they should do it themselves if at all possible. The photo below is not the best one I could have taken.

I intend to leave the No Reserve sticker on the windshield as long as possible. In the six weeks since I picked up the car I have driven it about 350 miles. With all of the systems that modern car batteries have to “keep alive” while the car is parked, cars must be driven regularly to keep those batteries charged. A trickle charger can help, but there is really no substitute for the alternator. So endeth the lesson.