This version of the blog, extending from April 6, 2009 to March 17, 2011, will continue to be up and functional, but all new content will appear elsewhere.

Why this change? The reason is that LaMarotte here has evidently begun to generate sufficient traffic so that it has become attractive to advertisers. The general arrangement under which one operates here gives WordPress the right to run ads when they so choose. Readers of mine have discovered that ads are showing here. They were not visible to me because–well, they are suppressed if you are logged into your own site!

My problem is that advertising clashes with LaMarotte‘s thematics. Mine is a sometimes wry commentary on matters economic and secular. The casual reader might think me hypocritical: castigating companies, here and there–also praising others, here and there–and benefitting from advertising income. I don’t. I provide the content. Others get what benefits might be available. Hence this change.

As a final comment I would add here that WordPress is a splendid platform and I’ve enjoyed producing LaMarotte here. Nor did even the hint of a cloud of disagreement appear in my dealings with the hard-working WordPress technical staffs.

See you on the Blogger version…

There are nine places with more than a million in population—and 16,580 in the under 10,000 category. The three largest sizes are too small to show up on  the graph, but the number is shown at the bottom. The population associated with each size-group is shown in red (right axis) and the number, in millions, indicated above. In 2009 the U.S. population was 309 million. This chart shows 192.2 million indicating that 62 percent of the population lived in incorporated places in 2009.

Interesting to note that the population is roughly equally divided by size categories. The largest proportion live in cities between 100 and 250 thousand. The average population of the smallest places is 1,731 souls.

So in this context let me ask you: Do you speak Salish, Tonkawa, Keres, Timucua, or Penutian? Well, actually, these aren’t languages. They are linguistic stocks—meaning that each one breaks into two or more actual languages. Have I confused you enough so that you’ve assumed I’m talking of ancient language stocks in Italy? Well, Keres, up there, should have stopped you. The Romans rarely used the letter K. These are American Indian linguistic stocks. There are eighteen. Iroquoian and Algonkian are two others, but I didn’t include them in my list above lest I give the game away. To distinguish between a language stock and a language, Navaho is one language that belongs to the Na-Dene linguistic stock.

According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there are 336 Indian tribes. You can look here to see a list. Years ago now my outfit prepared an award-winning publication entitled Statistical Record of Native North Americans. It was then that I became aware of the very large number of “nations” resident in the United States now—and more yet existed in the days of the European invasion. In that book we found adequate statistics to cover 200 tribes. Others were too small to see even through a statistical lens directly focused on them. And BIA identifies 562 tribal entities, thus further subdivisions of the 336 tribes. The closer you look, the more you see. Ultimately it costs too much to collect statistics at ever smaller scales. The lens loses its resolution.

All this came back to me a couple of days ago when I mentioned Whites, Blacks, Asians, and American Indians. Using that last term I was simplifying. The phrase in my source was “American Indian and Alaskan Native persons.” But that phrase, of course, was also an abbreviation, is also a simplification—when you look closer. The differences between American Indian tribes is significant—meaningfully much, much greater than any differences, say, between Norwegians and Italians, Hungarians and the Irish.

With Christianity in the back- and technology in the foreground, western civilization has produced a great blending of the tribal diversity so puzzling in the writings of Theodor Mommsen. Now we’re much more alike. But we’ve been in the homogenizer for 2,000 years. The American Native tribes have felt it only for about 300. They still tenaciously retain their identities—despite driving pickup trucks just like everybody else.

I thought you might enjoy seeing the linguistic map from which I have been cribbing, courtesy of Wikipedia here. Clicking on the map will give you facilities to enlarge portions of the map.

They were by far the largest east of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. and Canada. The area of strong shaking associated with these shocks is two to three times as large as that of the 1964 Alaska earthquake and 10 times as large as that of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The quake predated seismological measurements in the United States, hence their magnitudes are unknown. The isoseismal map of that quake, thus the intensity of it as it moved outward from its origin, is shown on the next graphic available here from the USGS. As the map shows, quite a few very large cities are in the shadow of New Madrid if that great monster should awaken, and the intensity weakens as far away from the center as Boston in Massachusetts and New Orleans in Louisiana.

Next is a photograph taken in 1912, thus a hundred years after the quake, in Lake County, Tennessee, showing stumps of trees killed by deposits of sand. The first photos taken of the damage all date from 1904 or later.

Finally, below, a USGS map of earthquake hazard regions in the United States. New Madrid is the bull’s eye there, in the center of the country.

What’s your income? And what about your neighbors’? What do houses sell for around here? Are we growing or losing people? Am I the only Asian living here?

If this sort of data interest you, you should go here. It is the site of the U.S. Census Bureau. There you will find, at present in the right hand column, something called Quick Facts. The resource allows you to set your state. After you do so, a long statistical table, for the state, will appear. But at the top of that table you’ll be able to pick either your county or your city. The cities will be of the larger sort. I happen to live in an inner suburb of Detroit too small to get a table, but it’s possible to look at the nearest largest area, in my case that’s Eastpointe, MI. The place has 33,000 people—and is losing population. Whites are 92 percent, Blacks 5 percent, Asians 0.9, and American Indians 0.4 percent of the population.

Home ownership? 88 percent. The median value of a home? It’s $98,100—over against the average for the state as a whole of $115,600. The median household income is $46,262, and per capita income is $20,665. Household income is higher than in Michigan as a whole, per capita is lower. Some 6.4 percent of all persons live beneath the poverty line.

Intriguing? Inclined to compare this area with another? Fine. Let’s take the much more upscale Rochester Hills, MI. It has 69,800 people, is gaining in population. Whites are 88.8, Blacks 2.4, Asians 6.8, and American Indians 0.2 percent of the population.

Home ownership is 79.1 percent. The median house value is $226,200, nearly twice the Michigan average. Median household income is $74,912, per capita income is $35,070—yet 3.4 percent still live below the poverty line.

Interesting. Have fun. You’ll have fifty data points to examine and always in comparison to the larger entity, the USA in contrast to the state, the State in contrast to the county or the city. 

As I’ve noted a year ago January, we live on a violent earth. That post is accessible here. The image shown today for Asia records 288 earthquakes over the last week. The world map, of which this is just a piece (available here) shows 449 quakes for the same period.

I keep track of the sun and of earthquakes on LaMarotte by way of maintaining my humility while enlarging my perspective. We’re tiny and the world is great and unfathomable.

While we cannot stop referrer spam at the points where it originates (thus outside of wordpress.com) we do take this problem seriously and block reported domains from stats. Of course the spammers know that we block them and, to continue, they just get another domain.

This is a very hard problem to deal with. Based on my experience dealing with spam over the last five years, here is what I think is happening:

1. A spammer finds a lax domain registrar or makes a deal with a less than scrupulous one.
2. Spammer buys a large number of sites.
3. The spammer then fills those spam sites with ads or possibly malware or hate content (the hate content is a new tactic).
4. Spammer then spams thousands of websites. — Thus far he will have bought the domains using a program (electronically, automatically) and put all the ads on using the same technique. His cost is therefore minimal.
5. Spammer hopes people will follow those links back to his site, thus that they will click on them. — Because his costs thus far are small, it only takes a few purchases  (from those whose ads are also clicked in that process) to make money. If the site is serving malware, the spammer is paid for each site infected.
6. Spammer then returns the domains back to the registrar within the accepted time-limit and gets a full refund. Thus he doesn’t even pay for the domain!  — If you buy a domain through wordpress.com, for example, you can cancel within two days. A dodgy registrar might provide a longer period, but it will still be a short amount of time. That’s why spammers appear and then rapidly disappear again. So it’s all profit.

Can we stop it? I’m afraid we can’t simply because it is outside of our control. No blog within wordpress.com is engaged in such spamming. But while we cannot stop it, we do block every domain that gets reported—and, again, thanks for reporting the scams. Doing so helps everyone, not just you!

You can detect spam by looking in the Referrer box on your Site Stats page. The spammer will be a referrer you don’t recognize producing an unusually large number of hits. These are phony hits. Nobody is actually visiting your site; it’s automated. If you detect such spam, Mark advises doing as follows:

1. Copy the spammer’s url (highlight and then Ctrl-C).

2. Go to the WordPress Support site here.

3. Fill in the blanks of the questionnaire. Blog URL will let you pick your own blog. Subject should be “Referrer Spam”. Topic: Select “Traffic”.

4. In the message block, underneath the preprinted I did: I saw: and I expected: lines, simply insert the spammer’s url (Ctrl-V).

That’s it. Mark requests that you enter nothing else. It speeds up their processes, and they recognize what you are doing if you follow the rules above.

That’s it. Please cooperate. Many visitors to my site have done just that, and the more of us do it, the more rapidly this attack will be foiled. All for one and one for all!

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realisation, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organisation and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

The site then, under Basic Principles, lists six.

1. The principle of compulsory insurance
2. The principle of financing through contributions
3. The principle of solidarity
4. The principle of self-government
5. The principle of free movement
6. The principle of equivalence

The first is self-explanatory. The second, financing through contributions, emphasizes that the primary, but not the exclusive, financing should be by contributions of employees and employers. The third, the principle of solidarity, says the following:

Risks to be insured are borne collectively by the community of all insured persons. Irrespective of how much each person has paid into the social insurance system, all have access to comprehensive coverage. This solidarity-based approach creates an equilibrium between the healthy and the sick, between those at the bottom and the top of the earning scale, and between families and singles.

This principle contains within it the idea that coverage must benefit everyone in the same way regardless of contribution. Thus in effect it affirms redistribution of contributions based on need—whereas contribution by any individual is based on ability.

The principle of self-government makes the point that accomplishing these common goals should be at the lowest appropriate level, not at the level of the State. Thus these programs should be managed by insurance funds. The Germans label this the “subsidiarity principle.” But what does that mean? Here is a quote (thanks, Online Etymology Dictionary) that brings it home. It is from a papal encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (Pius XI, 1931):

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.

The principle of free movement pertains to the European context. Programs should be portable across borders. Indeed this principle is implemented between our SSA and other countries as well under international agreements, although I’m vague on details.

The last principle, that of equivalence, is restricted to pension programs. It says, in effect, that in the case of pensions the solidarity principle may be modified. Thus pension benefits should not be equal but be proportional to the pension contributions made by an individual.

*     *     *

It’s worth our time as citizens to contemplate these principles with some concentration. I note that tensions exist between them. Remove the limiting contexts of these as found on the German site, and it is clear that the principles of the subsidiarity and of the equivalence principles clash with the others. Subsidiary suggests a tension between requiring compulsory contributions by the State, the equivalence principle with the principle of solidarity.

This tension is quite obvious in the debates that form our own “national dialogue.” The debate takes place between those who would deny the government any kind of role in pensions or health care (subsidiarity) and think that people should get what they put in and nothing more (equivalence)—and those who, under the principle of human rights would grant all of the principles stated and feel that unless the highest power is actually involved, the whole concept of social insurance becomes meaningless.

Excel provides an excellent function to let us do that easily. Let me demonstrate that function using tabular data as these might appear in a spreadsheet. AGR in the table represents Annual Growth Rate:
           

Let us say that B and C are companies, and these are data from 2000 through 2010. To calculate the compounded annual growth rate experienced by Company B, you would type the following formula into cell B-12:

=RATE((A11-A1),,-B1,B11)*100

The results, as shown above, is growth at the rate of 0.96 percent, round that to 1 percent a year. Let’s look at the formula. Ignoring the references embedded within it, it calls for:

=RATE(number of years,,-First Year, Last Year)

In the trade’s jargon, this is rendered as =RATE(n,,-PV,FV) where n stands for number of periods (they could be months, days, years), PV stands for Present Value or Starting Value, FV stands for Future Value or Ending Value. Present and Future are used because the same formula is also used to calculate interest required to produce a future value at the end. But we’re making a special use of this formula to calculate compounded annual growth rate.

In the first mention of the function, I’m letting Excel calculate for me the value of n (number of years) by deducting the beginning year in Cell A1 from the ending year in cell A11. There are 11 years here, but we’re ignoring the first, therefore n=10. Note carefully that two commas follow each other. One variable is being left blank, Payment. We’re not calculating an annuity and hence we’ll ignore Payment, usually abbreviated PMT. Note also that the beginning value must be rendered as a negative (held in B1) and the ending value as positive (in B11). The function is designed to return the answer in percent. Without adding that * 100, we would be getting 1% as our answer. I prefer to get the percent as a raw number, thus with decimals and without the % symbol. So I modify the formula by adding * 100 behind the last parenthesis.

Turning now to Company C, =RATE(10,,-C1,C11) will return 3%. Adding *100 will produce 3.15 — or however many decimals you like to see. Company C was growing at a rate slightly above 3 percent annually.

The underlying math formula for this calculation is the following:

^-n
√ PV/FV  = 1 + i

The -nth root of PV divided by FV equals 1 plus the growth rate. By deducting 1 from the result we get the actual rate. Multiplying that by 100 gives us the percent.

If we want to get fancy, we can also translate this equation into an Excel command as follows:

=(EXP((1/-10)*(LN(B1/B11)))-1)*100

In this I have simply typed in 10 for the number of years. The first phrase could also be keyed as EXP(1/-(A11-A1)). It takes more keying to type this formula, hence I prefer to use the RATE function instead.

You can also calculate a growth rate using a slightly advanced hand calculator, e.g. a Texas Instruments TI-30 SLR or the like. The calculator needs to have parentheses and an ^x√y key. You type the following on the calculator’s keyboard:

(1 ÷ ((PV ÷ FV) ^x√y n)) -1 =

What you get is a fraction. Multiply that fraction by 100, and you have the compounded annual growth rate for the series described by PV to FV. It’s simple with the right calculator.

Income is derived from contributions, earnings on short-term investments, fees, and miscellaneous sources not further defined. Expenditures are principally pension payments, pensioners’ health insurance (equivalent to our Medicare) and long term care insurance premiums paid out by DRV, and administrative costs.

In the 1991-2009 period, DRV’s income has amounted to 76.1 percent of its expenditures, thus requiring 23.9 percent in Federal funding. In the earlier 1960-1990 period, DRV did better. Its income was 80.8 percent of expenditures, the Federal portion 19.2 percent. The Germans view 1991 as a watershed. East Germany became part of Germany in that year. And the higher tax-based (versus contributions/earnings-based) support in the post-1990 period is due to the higher costs produced by unification. Herewith a chart, obtained from DRV-research here, but in German, showing the 1991-2009 period in highlights.

Note the very close relationship between income and outflow—and further that the total income less federal contribution is below total income throughout this period. This means that in Germany social security never has any surpluses. Our system has produced annual operating surpluses as far back as the eye can see. DRV is carefully managed so that annual contributions match, with a federal add-on (Zusatz is the German word), actual outflow. The structure of this program therefore is quite different from ours. We use the term “trust fund,” which is suggestive of invested resources generating an income; functionally, of course, we also pay all expenditures from annual contributions and miscellaneous earnings.

While it is a public corporation, not-for-profit, the DRV is entirely independent of the government and self-administering. What surpluses it generates it invests on its own account. By law, paragraph 217 of the German Social Law, these investments are required to be liquid and short term, maximally 12 month investments; they may, of course, be investments in stocks as well. The Federal contribution is based on a complex formula, also set out in law, therefore not an automatic payment of whatever short-fall may actually occur.

Let’s compare that system to ours using data from this Social Security Administration document, updated one year from other sources. The following graphic shows the same data for the same years on the OASI, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance portion of Social Security. Social Security also has another portion, the DI, Disability Insurance. DI is smaller but equally solvent:

All income here is from contributions, hence no curves showing other Federal involvement. No additional tax revenues were, or had to be, used. The fund is in surplus. Indeed, the cumulative surplus for the program, in 1991 was $267.8 billion, in 2009 $2,336.8 billion. Our system is not based on an annual balancing act! It has a huge surplus, in 2009 more than four times the expenditure level in that year.

Our Social Security system has problems because it is conceived of as an annuity, a trust fund but does not actually operate as one. The surpluses shown just flow into the general tax base. They are not independently invested. As shown, for most of its history it has generated rather massive surpluses—whereas the German system, based on an annual focus, has not. It seems to me that social security reformers in this country might examine at least two alternatives—a system like Germany’s or a true trust fund approach where our Social Security Administration also becomes an independent, self-administered corporation with oversight by, say, the Department of Labor.

In actual fact, Social Security here is much better off, much more solvent, and today uses zero percent tax revenues. Yet here we wring our hands and have coniption fits over Social Security whereas in Germany, where contributions only cover only 75 percent of costs, they are happy as clams with their system. Go figure!