Some Funny Trump Signs

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Some Fascinating Statistics On Marijuana Consumers.

Marijuana’s New Crop of Consumers, by the Numbers By JILL COWAN Cannabis buds on plants at New Family Farm in Sebastopol. Jim Wilson/The New York Times Good morning. Nobody said it’d be easy, exactly. But nobody anticipated it’d be quite this hard to get Californians to buy legal weed. That’s been the dominant takeaway from the Golden State’s first year of legalized recreational marijuana sales. My colleague Thomas Fuller reported this month on how the promised flourishing cannabis economy and corresponding tax windfall haven’t materialized. Rather, sales fell: About $2.5 billion of legal cannabis was sold in California last year, which was half a billion dollars less than the year before, when just medical marijuana was legal, the sales tracking firm GreenEdge found. Still, analysts predict there will be plenty of money to be made. A report from Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics recently estimated that spending growth on legal cannabis will speed up this year, hitting almost $17 billion worldwide, and ballooning to $31.3 billion in 2022. In its annual State of Cannabis report, the cannabis delivery platform Eaze highlighted that the market is rapidly expanding beyond young men — even if, as Peter Gigante, the company’s head of policy research, noted, one in five people surveyed admitted to buying from an unlicensed source in the last three months. “I think there’s a lot of focus on getting consumers into the legal market,” he said. Part of that will certainly involve tailoring products especially to new consumers, who may not have been willing to try out cannabis when it wasn’t legal. So who are those new customers? Here are some of the stats from Eaze’s report, which was based on data from 450,000 buyers and about 4,000 survey respondents. 25 percent That’s how much the number of baby boomer — or age 50 or older — consumers grew last year, making them one of the fastest growing demographics for cannabis use. $95.04 That’s how much baby boomers spent each month, on average — the most of any age demographic. (By comparison: Generation X-ers spent $89.24, millennials spent $72.94 and members of Generation Z spent $62.35.) Millennials are still the biggest group of Eaze customers, though. 38 percent That’s the percentage of cannabis consumers who are women. Mr. Gigante predicted that by 2022 it’d be 50-50. Female and baby boomer cannabis consumers, the report found, are driving a surge in CBD oils and more wellness-oriented products. In fact, the report found, here’s the share of consumers who primarily use CBD products who are baby boomer women: 21 percent. C

Guns: Shots Heard Round The World

GUNS

Shots Heard Round the World

Brazil leads the world in homicides.

Newly elected President Jair Bolsonaro believes making it easier for Brazilians to own guns would help address the problem.

Recently, he signed legislation that loosened restrictions on gun ownership, though would-be buyers of firearms still must be at least 25 years old, sport a clean criminal record, and pass a psychological exam and a gun club course. The new rules will let people defend themselves, said Bolsonaro.

It’s not clear if Brazilians agree. Polls show that more than 60 percent of them believe firearms should be prohibited, the Associated Press reported. But the South American country’s voters also rejected a ban on making and selling guns in a 2005 referendum.

Brazilians aren’t the only ones who share Americans’ stance about self-defense and the role of guns in violent crime.

Civilian ownership of firearms worldwide increased by almost a third between 2007 and 2017, according to Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research group.

Berlin student Carolin Matthie, 26, applied for a gun permit after she heard about North African or Arab migrants allegedly assaulting hundreds of German women in Cologne and other cities on New Year’s Eve three years ago. “If I don’t do it now, I will have to wait maybe another half year,” Matthie told the Wall Street Journal.

She represented a trend. Europeans are buying more guns amid a spike in terror attacks, fears over immigration and a rise in gun-toting criminals. Germany’s strict gun control laws might delay Matthie’s purchase. But they haven’t stopped a black market in deadly weapons from thriving on the continent, the Journal added.

American firearms companies have capitalized on the trend, exporting 64 percent more handguns, rifles and shotguns for civilians between 2010 and 2016, according to Small Arms Analytics, another research firm.

Those commercial connections have led the National Rifle Association (NRA) to take positions “that are hard to square with its all-American persona,” wrote Bloomberg. The NRA supported Iran, North Korea, and Syria’s objections to an arms trade treaty and criticized the US government for slapping sanctions on the Russian maker of the AK-47 over the issue of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

Still, the pushback against gun violence is also strong. After a spate of shootings in Toronto last year, Canadians are debating stricter gun control, reported the Atlantic. South Africans are sick and tired of the shootings that mar their daily lives, according to Forbes.

It’s a cycle of violence that seems impossible to stop without at least the threat of more violence. And in Brazil, and elsewhere, scholars say that’s what’s to come.

Facial Recognition Software And Genetic Defects

Face Value

Patients may not have to undergo extensive clinical tests to diagnose some genetic disorders in the near future.

US company FDNA has developed facial recognition software that quickly identifies genetic syndromes by scanning a person’s face, the Verge reported.

In a recent study, researchers described how they trained the software – known as DeepGestalt – by feeding it 17,000 images of 200 different syndromes.

During tests, DeepGestalt’s algorithms accurately spotted specific disorders more than 90 percent of the time, such as the Cornelia de Lange syndrome and Angelman syndrome, both of which affect intellectual development and mobility. Medical experts got it right 70 percent of the time.

In another experiment, the software tried to identify the specific mutation causing a particular syndrome. This time, it was less accurate, with a hit rate of 64 percent.

Bruce Gelb, a medical professor who was not involved in the study, called the findings impressive but said traditional testing was still needed to identify specific mutations.

“It’s inconceivable to me that one wouldn’t send off the panel testing and figure out which one it actually is,” said Gelb.

FDNA seems aware of the software’s limitations, saying it can serve as “a reference tool” rather than replace medical tests.

“We showed that this system can be used in clinical settings,” Yaron Gurovich, chief technology officer at FDNA, told CNN.

Jack's Pearl Of Wisdom For Saturday 19 January, 2019

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China: Population Bust

CHINA

Population Bust

Remarkably, the world’s most populous nation might suffer from a personnel shortage in the coming years.

As China struggles with an economic downturn and trade war with the United States, the East Asian superpower’s population shrank last year for the first time since the 1940s.

Experts said the decline signaled a “demographic crisis” that stemmed from the one-child policy that Chinese leaders implemented in 1979 in a bid to tame runaway population growth, reported Agence France-Presse.

Enforced with fines, loss of employment and sometimes brutal oppression, the policy was a classic case of communist social engineering.

“It’s been 26 years since Hong Guilian watched as a doctor drowned her newborn child. She begged him to stop, but her protests were futile,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “Three years later it happened again. This time she was six months pregnant when they took her to the family planning clinic for a forced abortion.”

Chinese leaders ended the one-child policy in 2016. But the effects linger.

Today, the policy is to blame for an “aging population with 30 million fewer women than men,” wrote Bloomberg.

Unlucky Chinese bachelors in the so-called “lonely generation” of one-child families are called “leftover men,” hardly a term that instills self-confidence in guys looking for love.

“The women’s expectations are high. … They’re spoilt for choice,” lamented factory worker Wang Haibo in an interview with Channel News Asia. “Sometimes you take the initiative to contact them, but they’d tell you they’re not willing to go out with you (on a date).”

Now government campaigns are calling on couples to “have children for the country,” the BBC reported.

Their efforts might be too late. China faces a potentially unstoppable population decline, CNN wrote, saying the population will likely peak at 1.44 billion in 2029.

It’s a familiar pattern. As China grows more prosperous, its career-minded young people will put off starting families, like their counterparts in Japan and the West, NBC News explained. That, in turn, will slow economic growth as the population shrinks, but folks still need to pay for the care of their aging parents. A slower economy makes it harder to raise a family. And so the cycle goes.

As Time magazine reported, the US is hardly immune to the phenomenon. Its population is still growing, but at the slowest rate since the Great Depression, according to recent census figures.

Moreover, both countries’ populations are aging. In the US, people 65 and older are expected to account for nearly a quarter of the population by 2060.

But China is aging even faster. Its 65-and-older population will reach that mark by 2040, Bloomberg noted.

That’s an enormous burden on the young in a country where people are taught to revere their elders above all else.

The Human Toll Of The Government Shut Down

I am doing some careful thinking on the human cost of this record-breaking government shutdown. Some 800,000 Federal workers have been with pay for over three weeks. If we assume that each household has three people (domestic partners, wives, kids, and parents) we have over 2,400,000 people affected.

Next comes the government contractors as follows:

Mr. Light estimates there are 4.1 million federal contractors and grant recipients, not all of whom have been affected by the shutdown. The majority — about 2.8 million — are in service jobs, from health aides to computer programmers.

Let us assume the 25% are affected or roughly one million workers. They too have families and dependents. This brings this total to three million additional people.

It is hard to quantify and identify all the small businesses that provide services to the government employees affected by the shutdown. I would guess 300,000 workers. applying the same formula, we have 900,000 people in this category suffering without pay.

I come up with a total of 6,300,000 people suffering without checks.

Politicians doing battle, please think about all the suffering out there.