Odds And Ends -- June 12, 2019

US spending: hits record. US spends $3 trillion in first eight months of the fiscal year, October, 2018, - May, 2019. The good news: the deficit for the current fiscal year is still less than a trillion dollars.

Boeing: further delays. Now, September at the earliest. From an earliest post:

May 25, 2019: that didn't take long. Two days ago I suggested it was going to be a lot longer than Boeing suggested before the 737 Max 8 was back flying. Now this, from The Wall Street Journal, "MAX's return to flight delayed by FAA's re-evaluation of safety procedures for older 737 models. The agency is considering changes in how pilots are trained to respond when the flight-control computer or other systems erroneously pus the plane's nose down."

Apple: to lease a large office complex in Seattle's booming South Lake Union neighborhood. Will be located near Amazon.  The good news that was not reported: Occasional-Cortex does not represent Seattle/Washington state in the US Congress. 

Amazon out of the food delivery business. Gig economy is not all that it's cracked up to be.

Bragging rights: Amazon surpasses Apple and Google to become world's most valuable brand. The list: Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Visa, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent, McDonald's, ATT.

Cramer: apparently Jim sold his company, TheStreet, for $16.5 million.

Retailers: this is the last month (June), maybe we can extend it to July, before their (US retailers)  Chinese orders go in for the US Christmas holiday retail season --

Jobs: two critical things nobody is talking about. Link here.  Whether "the jobs story" is a good story or a bad in the US, analysts over-think it while mom-and-pop retailers and Joe Six Pack/Wendy Wine Cooler can figure it out in a New York minute. From the linked story:

• there are way more job openings than people looking for jobs
• employers are looking for folks with skills
• analysts unable to explain why there is minimal (no?) wage inflation
• but the lack of wage inflation is easy to explain: it's the law of large numbers

Can't link it but Newt Gingrich has a great op-ed over at FN. I always check in on FN to see the "worse thing" trending. When the lead story is about the US debt, one knows it's a slow news day.

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Notes to the Granddaughters

Pre-History -- Timelines

It's just a matter of time:

It's Just A Matter of Time, Randy Travis
A reminder: Helen’s story -- "Helen of Troy" -- begins in the Late Bronze Age. The Late Bronze Age died with Helen, and was replaced by the Iron Age. 

From: Helen of Troy: The Story Behind the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Bettany Hughes, c. 2005.

[Timeline: volcano eruption: 1550 BC; Trojan War: 1200 BCE; Homer: 800 BCE; defeat of the Persians: 480 BCE; Classical Age: 50 years following the defeat of the Persians in 480.]

The Recuyell (collection) of the Historyes of Troye: first book ever to be printed in the English language when Caxton brought the printing press to Westminster in 1476. (It sounds like he began printing this in English while he was still in Germany.) 

 From: The Torah, Henry Holt and Company, c. 1996. First American edition, 1996, p. 9:

To speak of the origins of the Torah is, for Orthodox Jews, to speak of the moment on Sinai when Moses received not only the two tablets of stone, but the written Torah dictated to him by the God of the Exodus, and all the oral interpretations that were to be the substance of Rabbinic teaching in subsequent generations.

The Bible itself, however, speaks of books that appear to pre-date the Torah, such as The Book of Yashar and the books of The Wars of the Lord, neither of which has survived. [Think: Lord of the Rings.]

Certainly from around the thirteenth century BCE, which is the general period in which Moses is placed [Trojan War above, 1200 BCE], to the first hints of written texts in the tenth century BCE, it is clear that books such as these, as well as the oral poetic traditions of the people of Israel, were the means by which the core of the Torah was preserved.

Some of the evidence of the earlier oral tradition is to be found in the fragments of songs that can still be detected within the body of the Torah. For modern biblical scholarship, the Torah did not achieve its present literary form until the fifth century BCE with the return of the exiles from Babylon.

Having developed through the period of the first Monarchy, the separation of Judah and Israel, the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile, it is clear that the Torah is not simply the Five Book of Moses, but a literary mosaic of the experience of the people of Israel through its first commonwealth and return from exile, as well as being the repository of its received pre-history.