Pondering Numbers

1. As a young comic book kid, I looked forward to seeing the circulation figures in the October issues. Total Paid Circulation was the number that mattered. The New Yorker is the last magazine I subscribe to by mail, and the total paid distribution of the print edition is down to only about 650,000 copies.


2. I have a digital-only subscription to The New York Times. It recently had a feature on physical fitness, and I did a double-take on the percentiles by age and time to run one mile. When I was 17-21 years old I could run a mile in 6:15. I was never good enough a runner to qualify being on a track team. It’s laughable that I was in the top 1% of males. How many people run at all after high school, anyway?


3. You know how I go on about the dominance of Epic Systems in the electronic medical records market? Here’s a chart showing how Epic has performed since I retired, relative to the other two prime vendors.

Feeling Loanly?

I put myself through college, which was something a person could do while attending a small state school fifty years ago. Today, attending that same state college costs $20,000/year. No student could possibly earn enough to put a dent in that cost.

John Oliver once again connects the relevant dots and provides a clear explanation of a topic. This time it’s student loans.

Boomers Old and Older

I could have picked any number of items about retiring Boomers. It just happens to be this one, because I came across it today.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/younger-boomers-less-avoid-running-183834669.html

On The CBS Evening News a while back, Robert Costa referred to the aged presidential candidates as belonging to the Baby Boom generation. NO! Definitely no for Biden, and also no for Trump. Biden’s father was born in 1915, and Trump’s in 1905.

I am proclaiming a new qualification for the start of the Baby Boom, that better defines what actually drove the trend: People whose parents had their first child after WWII.

This implies young couples in their 20’s, as my parents were. Not someone whose father was born before America entered WWI, and certainly not a post-WWII baby with a father who was my grandfather’s age.