Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Pension Alto, California

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The city where I live, Palo Alto, is not very big. The population is about 50,000 people. I was therefore more than a little surprised to see this on the front page of our little daily newspaper:

0924-pension

So let me get this straight………in a town with 50,000 people, there is approaching half a billion dollars in unfunded pension liabilities? That comes to over $8,000 for every man, woman, child, and blogger in this town. (more…)

Ye Olde Stocke Charte

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This is dumb, silly, and just for fun………

On Sunday night, I happened to stumble across some really old index data (yes, my friends, this is the kind of thing I do FOR FUN on a weekend). It was from the late 1700s up until 1900, and it was representative of the US stock market. This was before the days of even the Dow Industrials, of course, so I’m not sure what they cobbled together, but it was interesting data nonetheless. I made a simple line chart out of it:

0924-ancient

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