Cramer's Last Hour -- October 2, 2024

Locator: 48466CRAMER.

Cramer's last hour: like "Cramer's first hour," this is a mix of facts, factoids, opinions from various sources -- often not cited -- while listening to Cramer's last hour on CNBC.  

Cramer: Jim's closing monologue on his show tonight was particularly interesting, informative, and insightful. It will be streamed later tonight and tomorrow. Worth watching. It's only a minute or two long but unfortunately it's at the very, very end of the show. But once found, you can fast forward to it.

America's exceptionalism, link here:

TTE: increases dividend by 5%. Link here. 

Nvidia: and Accenture announce expansion of their partnership. Link here. This is a unique phenomenon among behemoths in the AI sector.

Port strike: one way or the other, the strike will be over by November 6, 2024.

Most remarkable: futures tonight despite wars and hurricanes, a presidential election with two diametrically opposed candidates.

Gasoline demand: link here. Seasonal decline.

LCOE, link here:

Diametrically:

********************************
The Book Page 

Link here. Or here, if that link does not work. May be behind paywall.

Bothers me not. Concerns me not. The "problem" (if it's a problem at all) is multifactorial. And it's not new. In 1969 I was reading SparksNotes. And, yes, the "problem" (if it's a problem at all) is only going to get worse. Link here.

From the linked article, the lede: 

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

A colleague of mine and his wife had three daughters. They all did well in life. The oldest of the three daughters got an engineering degree from a prestigious university, took a job with Microsoft and rose quickly through the ranks. In her late 20's she quit Microsoft after helping her Dad buy a home in San Francisco, and she herself went back to medical school. Today's she's a very successful internist with three wonderful daughters of her own. I have no idea if she ever read a book of literature in her life. It wouldn't matter to me one way or the other and I doubt it's something she thinks about herself. 

*********************
Headlines

At The New York Post.

Link here. 

"Headless Body In Topless Bar."

"Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye."

"Courtus Interruptus."