- trivia -

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Nadia didn’t just raise the bar; she became the standard.

The scoreboard said "1.00" and the crowd gasped—then they realized the Olympic system had just malfunctioned because it couldn't display perfection.

July 18, 1976. Montreal Forum.

Eighteen thousand spectators packed the arena for women's gymnastics at the Summer Olympics. The Romanian team had brought several competitors, including a tiny fourteen-year-old girl who stood barely five feet tall and weighed eighty-six pounds.

Her name was Nadia Comăneci. Most of the world had never heard of her.

That was about to change forever.

Nadia approached the uneven bars with an expression that would become iconic: no smile, no visible nervousness, just absolute focus. She'd been training for this exact moment since age six, when legendary Romanian coach Béla Károlyi spotted her doing cartwheels in a schoolyard and recruited her to his elite gymnastics program.

For eight years, she'd trained relentlessly—six hours a day, six days a week. She'd sacrificed everything resembling a normal childhood. No birthday parties with friends. No casual playtime. No teenage social life. Just gymnastics, gymnastics, gymnastics.

Her hands were ...

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Note - I believe that pic isn't from Montreal but rather from a later meet

 

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"Her name was Nadia Comăneci." #41

That was years before the VCR. I believe I saw that as it was broadcast in New York / ET.
It was during the Cold War, suspicions such super-humans would flood the Soviet Union with super-humans that would then take over the world.

 

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I remember watching it in the grad student pub.

 

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Dallas, Texas. 1950s.

Bette Nesmith Graham was a single mother working as an executive secretary at Texas Bank & Trust, trying to support her young son on a secretary's salary that barely covered rent and groceries.

She was drowning—not just financially, but in something that seemed impossibly small: typing mistakes.

In the era of carbon copies and manual typewriters, one mistake meant disaster. One wrong letter and you'd have to retype the entire page. Hours of work destroyed by a single slip of the finger.

Bette watched the bank's sign painters touch up their work when they made errors. They didn't start over—they just painted over the mistake.

And she thought: Why can't ....

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Inventor, and Mike Nesmith's Mom. "Hey Hey We're The Monkeys"

 

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The Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex never coexisted; they were separated by approximately 80 million years. The Stegosaurus lived during the Late Jurassic period (about 150 million years ago), while the T. rex lived at the end of the Late Cretaceous period (about 68–66 million years ago). This means the T. rex existed closer in time to modern humans than it did to the Stegosaurus.

 

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Time is one of those concepts that is profoundly resistant to simple definition. Dr. Carl Sagan

Tell me what you think of time, and I will tell you what I think of you. St. Thomas Aquinas

Vierordt's Law:
roughly the proposition that short durations tends to be overestimated, while long durations tend to be underestimated.
The midpoint is ~94 - 96 beats per minute, called the “indifference point”.

 

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Hardly trivia but an unfortunate necessity



Social Security is bankrupt - the funding shortfall for Social Security and Medicare combined is in the order of $150 Trillion (yes that's with a "T") - the term funding shortfall refers to how much the promised benefits (pensions etc) exceed the value of the Trust Fund that's been established to pay those benefits.

That shortfall is not included in the calculation of the national debt for the simple reason that the definition of the national debt excludes that shortfall. BTW, that funding shortfall doesn't include that of various other government pensions (state and municipal) and we've already seen cities declare bankruptcy so they could stop paying pensions and get out from under those liabilities.

This article is a few years old but explains things quite clearly.

Social Security and Medicare: Trying to Tackle Two 800-pound Gorillas

While many people worry about the billions of dollars spent bailing out banks, auto makers and other sectors, shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security are what could ultimately sink efforts to revive the U.S. economy. As 78 million baby boomers begin to retire, funding for the government's two...

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

As the article points out that $150 Trillion shortfall is increasing at a rate of $2 Trillion a year. And any attempts to solve the problem are going to require (i) an increase in the retirement age, (ii) a massive reduction in benefits, and (iii) a substantial increase in the relevant taxes - most likely a combination of all three.

 

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"Social Security is bankrupt" #50

However well-meaning Social Security (SS) might seem to be, multiple facets of it are destructively wrong-headed. The scale of the destruction is proportional to the scope of the program.

SS may seem a benevolent idea for shielding citizens from the detrimental affects of a long life. BUT !
It also resembles legislator's attempt to shield themselves from constituent complaints. "Why don't you DO SOMETHING about it ?!"

Fundamentally Social Security violates a principle clearly articulated in the 18th Century by Founder Thomas Jefferson:

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." Thomas Jefferson

"The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits." Thomas Jefferson

Thanks T.J.

More fundamentally, due to its design, its failure, its collapse is inevitable. It's what pyramid scams, Ponzi schemes do. It can't not fail.
Why?
Because instead of treating SS as an individual worker's savings / retirement account, current contributions are spent to cover the benefits of prior contributors.
That's fine when the ratio workers paying into the system outnumber retirees receiving benefits from the system by 5:1. BUT !
That ratio has been shrinking for generations.

"When your outgo exceeds your income,
the upshot will be your downfall." Paul Harvey

This doesn't justify our ostensible servant, U.S. federal government insinuating itself as our master. For U.S. workers, participation in SS is compulsory.

"Social Security is bankrupt" #50

IRA / 401k investment is the safer bet.

"Retirement age for Social Security subject to change" #50

That's one solution.
Another is simply to terminate the program.
The more likely option, more red ink. Instead of receiving revenues sufficient to supply current beneficiaries, government borrows the shortfall thereby adding to our already astronomical debt.

"...everyone's for big government. The American People say we hate big government, but we like our social security and medicare. That's 38% of government right there. The biggest components of government are the most popular components of government."

"What's pernicious about deficits for conservatives is this. It makes big government cheap. What we're doing, we're turning to the country, the "conservative" administration turns to the country and says:
We're going to give you a dollar's worth of government, we're going to charge you seventy five cents for it. And we're going to let your kids pay the other quarter." George Will Nov 30, 2003

Social Security is an unnecessary self-inflicted tragedy.
Superior designs to accomplish much the same thing without inevitable economic collapse were available before SS inception, and remain so today. Happy Holidays.

 

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The more likely option, more red ink. Instead of receiving revenues sufficient to supply current beneficiaries, government borrows the shortfall thereby adding to our already astronomical debt.

There's no way the gov't can begin to afford to borrow the necessary funds.

 

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"There's no way the gov't can begin to afford to borrow the necessary funds." S2 #52

The collapse of the pyramid scheme cannot be prevented, merely postponed. AND !!
The longer the inevitable crash is delayed, the more gargantuan its destruction will be, the more catastrophic is consequences.

Congress has a tiger by the tail,
and has neither the brain nor the spine to tame it.