Scary Chart of the Day – 1/6/10

EconomPic: ADP Jobs Down 84,000; Services Jobs Grow

If you click through to the original post on EconomPic you will see a tiny red speck as evidence for services jobs growth.  Unfortunately, the copy here does not capture that tiny red speck north of the line.

Some might call this good news (see the tiny red blip upper right corner)

Texting For Health

Texting may lead to improved health care | NewsOK.com

I learned how to text because my children text.  There was a time when I thought this form of communications was silly.  I was wrong.  It’s how you use the technology that matters.

“Did you remember to take your Aricept today?”

Research has shown that up to half of all patients may fail to take their daily medicine properly, with forgetting being a top reason for nonadherence. So, at least in some cases, a text reminder may be all that a patient needs, says Robotham, who has encouraged the use of appropriate texting among pediatricians at Hopkins Children’s.

Read a Book a Week – 2009 Results

1.0 per week in 2009.

Experience matters.  Now I know why from the following NYT article.

Better pattern recognition, significance recognition, and faster solutions.

I hope you kept some of your older underwriters on the payroll.

Adult Learning – Neuroscience – How to Train the Aging Brain – NYTimes.com

Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

Mayo Clinic AZ Ceases to Treat Medicare Patients

Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients – Bloomberg.com

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.

This is not political commentary.  No one should be expected to run a business at a loss.

Facts are facts.

What Matters? A Thought For The Decade

whatwillmatter-1203

A Life That Matters

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.

So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won’t matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end. It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?

What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave. What will matter is not your success, but your significance.

What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught. What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example. What will matter is not your competence, but your character. What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone. What will matter is not your memories, but the memories that live in those who loved you. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.

Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice. Choose to live a life that matters. It really matters!

Michael Josephson

May Be Ugly

Average Income in the United States Will Continue to Drop in 2009

Median household income in the United States has been in a freefall over the past few years due to the “Great Recession”. In inflation adjusted dollars, the last time that the median household income in the United States was $50,303 or lower was 1997. This is a staggering drop that has completely erased all of the gains made in the beginning and middle stages of the decade.

2009 should be even worse, as many are expecting that median household income in the United States could drop as much as 5%. This would leave us with a median household income number of about $47,800. This would be the lowest such number, in inflation adjusted dollars, since 1995.