Every American alive for sixty years or more has subconsciously experienced being poorer year after year after year. It has been accomplished slowly and unnoticeably through inflation, flat salaries, poor personal savings rates, more expensive products, immoral flow of profits to the top, disappearing union agreements, reduced retirement and employee profit sharing, disappearing job opportunities, and lack of growth in funding of discretionary government programs. The premise of the article in Atlantic cited below asks a simple question:

If you had to raise $400 in cash today without fail, could you do it? The article says nearly half of all Americans would be unable to do it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/

REFERENCE SECTION

• Caution/construction. Apologies from the mariner as he tries to implement any number of operations that engage readers. If you need special instruction, the mariner will provide it to you.
• While on apologies, the mariner misquoted a source. He has cited the book many times but had to draw it from the shelf to correct himself. The book was referenced in the post Whence Jobs? Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions by Paul Tillich – not Methodist – Lutheran. Copyright 1965 by Columbia University Press, ISBN 63758.
• Ready for some hard thinking while you postulate meaning from the Stephen Hawking proposal: Black Holes open to different universes on the other side.
• Does each universe have its own God? Life? Does light travel at the same speed? Are these universes larger or smaller? Do they have their own Stephen Hawking? Accepting the premise may fit our own big bang experience as a black hole first reached black hole status. Further, space is so elastic it is no measure of any form of linear measurement. Mariner made up a physics joke that fell flat on his high school track mates: Did you know that if you run a hundred yard dash at the speed of light, you need only run fifty yards? Yes, fell flat here, too.

• The mariner clipped this website from an article related to evolution about the evolving features of Darwin’s finches. It serves only to point out that you and the mariner both are evolving, too – generation by generation – and for what adjustment? See: http://www.nature.com/news/evolution-of-darwin-s-finches-tracked-at-genetic-level-1.19795 . In the 1970’s, a cartoonist once depicted our future hand to become one large, dominate finger for pushing buttons, a useless stub of a little finger, a ring finger that looked like a little finger, a normal middle finger for assisting the elongated thumb which had grown a muscle on it, to grab things.

Ancient Mariner