Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM for 15h 19m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 33.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1922, the American Professional Football Association is renamed the National Football League.
Footage has surfaced showing a dingo nipping a French tourist on the backside on Fraser Island in Australia. The incident occurred weeks before a 10-year-old boy was dragged underwater by a dingo while he camped with family on the island. [The boy suffered puncture wounds to his shoulder and bruises to his collarbone in the attack, which happened on the west coast of K’gari Island in front of a camping area on June 16.]
The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, which has issued warnings about the feral canines, said the boy was walking alone when he was attacked on June 16.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM for 15h 20m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1962, Telstar relays the first publicly transmitted, live trans-Atlantic television program, featuring Walter Cronkite.
Maya Srikrishnan reports Why the way we measure poverty matters (‘A national panel is recommending changes to a key poverty measurement. It might sound technical, but the stakes are high’):
Some of the debate boils down to which of the Census Bureau’s two poverty yardsticks is more appropriate for determining who qualifies for government aid: the Official Poverty Measure or the Supplemental Poverty Measure.
The country’s Official Poverty Measure was developed in the 1960s, based solely on a family’s ability to purchase food. The supplemental, with data first released in 2011, uses a standard of living based on expenditures that include food, clothing, shelter and utilities, compared against a household’s post-tax income, which accounts for government aid and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
It’s rare for the two measures to go in different directions — but recently they have.
The poverty rate under the Official Poverty Measure grew from an estimated 10.5% to 11.6% of the population between 2019 and 2021, the Census Bureau reported last year. In contrast, the rate under the Supplemental Poverty Measure decreased from 11.8% to 7.8%.
One of the main reasons: stimulus payments from the government to households during the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped raise many households’ incomes temporarily.
That’s the backdrop to a new National Academy of Sciences panel report, requested by the Census Bureau, that recommends the agency make the Supplemental Poverty Measure its official yardstick and incorporate several updates to it.
Unlike the Official Poverty Measure, whose methodology has remained largely unchanged since its inception, the Supplemental Poverty Measure was designed to evolve with the changing demands of society.
The panel was tasked by the Census Bureau to see if the supplemental measure, or SPM, “was adequately measuring the economic needs of disadvantaged households in the country,” said James Ziliak, professor of economics and director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky, who chaired the panel.
A press release from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers additional detail:
The report recommends renaming the SPM which, as currently conceived, fails to convey that it often serves as the primary measure of poverty because, among other things, it allows researchers and policymakers to evaluate the effectiveness of programs designed to reduce poverty. The report proposes Principal Poverty Measure (PPM) as a more apt name. The report also recommends that the PPM replace the Official Poverty Measure as the primary statistical measure of poverty.
Medical Care
Most people consider medical care a basic need. However, because medical care is accounted for based on expenditures reported by households, the SPM does not capture unmet needs for people who are uninsured or underinsured. The estimate implicitly assumes that a family’s basic need is equal to whatever the family spends out of pocket on insurance and medical care, which is often not the case.
The report recommends that:
The proposed PPM should include the need for a basic health insurance plan in estimates of the measure’s threshold and include health insurance benefits provided by employers or the government in estimates of resources. The report notes that the Census Bureau has already begun considering the practical implications of moving toward a health inclusive poverty measure.
For those under 65, the PPM should adopt an Affordable Care Act benchmark health insurance plan to represent the basic health care need for a typical American household.
For those aged 65 and older, and for those under 65 covered by Medicare (e.g., some individuals with disabilities), the basic need level should be set based on the full cost of a Medicare Advantage plan.
Child Care
Among families that pay for it, child care accounts for around 16 percent of direct expenditures, which makes it the third-largest budget component after housing and transportation. Comprehensive accounting of child care needs is essential to understanding families’ economic well-being. The committee proposed that, ideally, child care should become an element of the basic needs threshold in the PPM, similar to medical care. The committee acknowledged additional research is required to implement this approach, as there is currently little consensus on how to value child care provided by parents, family, or friends.
The report recommends that:
In households with children under the age of 13 (or up to age 18 if a child is disabled), the poverty measure should treat parents pursuing education the same as parents who are employed.
Ideally, child care should be included in the PPM threshold, with estimated costs allowed to vary by age and number of children and geographic location (costs could be derived based on federal child care subsidy programs).
For a balanced accounting, financial assistance received for child care should be added to estimates of a household’s resources. Since unpaid child care also has value, it could also be accounted for in the resource estimation.
Housing
Housing is often the largest component of a household’s spending, with about a third of U.S. households paying more than 30 percent of their income on it in 2020. The budget share is even higher for renters and households with lower incomes. Rental housing is typically a more attainable goal than purchasing a home. In this sense, the report says, renting represents the baseline housing need.
The report recommends that:
The PPM housing threshold should be set based on costs for renters only, and rental levels should be estimated using the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual Fair Market Rent estimates.
The proposed PPM should discontinue the current practice of maintaining three separate thresholds based on housing tenure status (homeowners with a mortgage, homeowners without a mortgage, and renters). While owners without mortgages have lower monthly housing costs, these differences can be accounted for in the estimate of households’ resources.
PPM thresholds should continue to reflect geographic differences in housing costs as captured in official Fair Market Rent calculations.
Given the report’s recommendations to re-specify components of the SPM threshold, the current 20 percent adjustment to capture additional basic needs would also need to be updated by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to align with these changes.
Tuesday, June 27th at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Moving On @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Comedy
Rated R (language)
1 hour, 25 minutes (2022)
Two old friends (Jane Fonda & Lily Tomlin) reconnect at a funeral and decide to get revenge on the widower (Malcolm McDowell) who messed with them decades before. Revenge is oh so sweet…
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:37 PM for 15h 20m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1978, Charon, the first of Pluto’s satellites to be discovered, is first seen at the United States Naval Observatory by James W. Christy.
Meet the artist who has invented the ‘ecovado’, an alternative avocado that might just trick you into thinking it’s the real deal. Arina Shokouhi was an avo-lover before realizing their farming process has a huge impact on the environment.
She decided to take action. With the help of food scientists at the University of Nottingham, UK, together they developed a more sustainable alternative using local ingredients.
Using broad beans, hazelnuts, apple juice and cold pressed rapeseed oil, she was able to create an alternative that closely matches a real avocado in look, texture, taste and even nutritional value.
Summer in Whitewater will begin with sunny skies and a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM for 15h 20m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1898, the United States captures Guam from Spain. The few warning shots fired by the U.S. naval vessels are misinterpreted as salutes by the Spanish garrison, which was unaware that the two nations were at war.
Whitewater isn’t the oldest city in America, but it’s old. Whitewater isn’t wholly staid, but it’s not wholly modern.
One sees this in the city government, where the last municipal manager was not backwards, but did have moments of governmental somnambulance. Modernization will not come all at once, as the time required to review all current practices would consume time needed for daily services.
Last night’s meeting highlighted areas the city manager and common council have found that require either more information about prior practices or changes from prior practices:
The city has an old fireworks ordinance that will require some reworking to avoid stifling restriction on ordinary residents’ small purchases. An ordinance that requires permits for sparklers is both outdated (and has fallen into desuetude in any event). Seevideo @ 26:48.
Whitewater has a policy for mobile home permitting, the performance of which both city employees and the city council expressed uncertainty. The agenda item was postponed to July to allow for more research. (The next council meeting is 7.18.23). Seevideo @ 31:31.
The way that Whitewater has previously reviewed her city manager, in frequency, procedure, and goals needs updating toward a better practice. There is at least one clear distinction to make: there’s a difference between procedure (how an evaluation is made) and goals (the standards by which an employee or institution are to be evaluated). Both procedure and goals require prior planning, with a written timeline, steps to take, and measurements that are available as a public record. Seevideo @ 39:43.
These items from the 6.20.23 session are tasks to make municipal government more modern (where modern means more efficient, more transparent, or less burdensome). These steps take time, but it’s time worth taking: efficiency, transparency, and temperance are characteristics of good government.
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission flew by Mercury on June 19, 2023. See multiple images captured by the spacecraft’s Mercury Transfer Module’s monitoring camera 3.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM for 15h 20m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1944, the Battle of the Philippine Sea concludes with a decisive U.S. naval victory. The lopsided naval air battle is also known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”
Improvement, but why?
Rapid inflation has been a problem in the United States for more than two years, but the tide appears to be turning. Annual inflation is now less than half of what it was last summer. Jeanna Smialek, who covers the Federal Reserve and the U.S. economy for The Times, discusses whether the decline is a result of careful policymaking, or more of a lucky accident.
We just got back from WonderFest, an annual scale modeling convention, where we met John Sabean and his five-foot long Rebel Blockade Runner model! This build, which took the better part of a decade to complete, recreates the massive studio scale model that ILM built for the opening sequence of Star Wars. John and his collaborators meticulously recreated the miniature using as many original kitbashed parts as possible, and updating it to take advantage of modern electronics and 3D printing.
Monday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM for 15h 20m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Galveston, Texas, United States, are officially informed of their freedom. The anniversary was officially celebrated in Texas and other states as Juneteenth. On June 17, 2021, Juneteenth officially became a federal holiday in the United States. See alsoThe Story We’ve Been Told About Juneteenth Is Wrong (‘The real history is much messier—and more inspiring’).
LA CROSSE – Wisconsin’s top state legislative Republican continued his attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the state’s public universities, calling the programming “the single most important issue” and claiming he was embarrassed to be a University of Wisconsin System alumnus because of it.
“This is probably to me the single most important issue that we are facing as a people, as a nation and as, really, humanity,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in remarks Saturday at the state Republican Party convention.
Vos, of Rochester, relabeled the DEI acronym “division, exclusion and indoctrination” and suggested the UW System, and in particular UW-Madison, the state’s flagship university, puts an outsized emphasis on diversity efforts, which he sees as a waste of taxpayer money and source of racial division.
If Robin Vos doesn’t like what the UW System has done, and how embarrassing System policy has become for him, he might want to make changes to his legislative profile page, burn his diploma, shred his university apparel, and throw away all his memorabilia.
There is, however, much worse than embarrassment that encrusts Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: he’s remained speaker because he serves in one of the most gerrymandered legislatures in America. So often he talks as someone who earned his position after a fair legislative election with fair maps. It’s been over a decade since Vos has served in a legislature with fair district boundaries.
Vos speaks and acts as though he’s earned his position honorably. He hasn’t.
In this, Robin Vos is much like a thief who steals a Rolex and then lectures others on the benefits of hard work. History will remember him that way, if it remembers him at all.
The official audio of Max Roach’s “Freedom Day” from the newly remastered album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite. At once an avant-garde masterpiece, a vocal-instrumental suite, and a work of collective improvisation directly addressing the racial and political issues of its day, We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite is one of the most important artistic statements of the Civil Rights Movement and one of the most groundbreaking jazz albums of all time.
Father’s Day in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with afternoon showers, and a high of 82. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM for 15h 20m 14s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1812, the War of 1812 begins when Pres. Madison signs a declaration of war against the United Kingdom.
The ‘do not disturb’ sign is on for this pack of javelinas. Doug Parsons posted this cute footage of the desert family camping out right in front of a trail cam in Tucson, AZ. They must have sensed someone filming them because they quickly got out of their slumber and were ready to get on the move.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM for 15h 20m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 0.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
“Here we are, then, on this so renowned river, all of whose peculiar features I have endeavored to note carefully.” It’s important to recall that Marquette and Joliet did not discover the Mississippi: Indians had been using it for 10,000 years, Spanish conquistador Hernan De Soto had crossed it in 1541, and fur traders Groseilliers and Radisson may have reached it in the 1650s. But Marquette and Joliet left the first detailed reports and proved that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, which opened the heart of the continent to French traders, missionaries, and soldiers. View a Map of Marquette & Joliet’s route.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM for 15h 19m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1911, IBM is founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York.
As an ideological matter, one would not expect a libertarian to find inspiration in Franklin Roosevelt. That would be a mistake, as this libertarian blogger finds much to admire in Roosevelt apart from the New Deal. Indeed, there’s not one of Roosevelt’s speeches, whether read, heard, or seen that I do not find inspirational in some way. As Lincoln was transformative of America in the 19th century, so Roosevelt was in the 20th. They were, in ways more thorough and profound than their contemporaries, both shaped and shapers of America.
Recently, Jamelle Bouie mentioned favorably Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address (commonly called his ‘Four Freedoms’speech). Bouie’s right: it does pop, each word, line, and paragraph:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change–in a perpetual peaceful revolution–a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions–without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle.
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
Of his critics, Roosevelt expresses no hatred, but boldly welcomes their opposition, even their hatred:
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.
There, in full: a worthy man. Words and convictions that are inspirational this century later even to ordinary people as we are.
Wednesday, June 21st at 1:00 PM, there will be a showing of Triangle of Sadness @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Comedy/Drama
Rated R (language, sexual content)
2 hours, 27 minutes (2022)
On an eventful cruise for the super-rich on a luxury liner, social hierarchy turns this voyage into a literal ship of fools. Think “Love Boat” meets “Survivor.” Winner of Best Film at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for 3 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Stars Woody Harrelson and an international cast.
