The market capitalization of General Motors in 1929 was $4 billion.
The market capitalization of General Motors at the beginning of this decade was $66 billion.
The market capitalization of General Motors today is $1.6 billion.
(Market capitalization is the number of shares of stock multiplied by the price of one share.)
Source: Planet Money
Today, the commemoration of Nov. 11 varies greatly across Europe. For Poles, the holiday is not a day of mourning but rather of celebration, commemorating the rebirth of their nation in 1918 after more than a century of occupation by Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia. In Italy, the war dead are remembered on Nov. 4, “the feast of the fallen,” the day in 1918 that fighting came to an end on its battlefront. Across Central Europe though, the greater horrors of the Second World War have subsumed those of its predecessor within popular memory; in Germany, for example, commemoration of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities now takes precedence over the losses of the last century’s first conflagration.
Yet in France, where the death toll of 1914 to 1918 exceeded that of 1939 to 1945, the dead of World War I retain a strong grip on the national conscience. Across the country today, local mayors will lead remembrance services, the names of long-buried soldiers will be read out, military bands will play and citizens will sing “La Marseillaise.”
In Britain, where an estimated three-quarters of the population paused during the two-minute silence on the armistice’s 80th anniversary and where, in 2002, a BBC poll rated the Unknown Warrior as the country’s 76th greatest citizen, public memory of the war is even stronger. Visit the country (or its former dominions including Canada and New Zealand) in November and you will still see paper poppies being widely worn — a reference to the blood-red flowers which grew on the shell-torn battlefields and to John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.”
“It’s a really nice office.”
President-elect Barack Obama on seeing the Oval Office yesterday for the first time, as quoted by his press secretary Robert Gibbs.
“This may not be the ideal ‘Our Gang’ collection, but it’s perfectly ‘otay.'”
From a review of a new “Our Gang” DVD box set. NewMexiKen’s generation knew them on TV as “The Little Rascals.”
Three-time Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio is 34 today.
Calista Flockhart is 44.
Demi Moore is 46.
Stanley Tucci is 48.
Jonathan Winters is 83.
The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922.
He was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and was forced to work in a Dresden factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. He slept in a meat locker three stories underground, and that was the only reason he survived the firebombing on the night of February 13, 1945, when British and American bombers ignited a firestorm that killed almost all the city’s inhabitants in two hours. When they walked outside, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were just about the only living people in the city. They were then forced by the Germans to help clean up the bodies.
Vonnegut spent the next two decades writing science fiction, but he knew he wanted to write about his experiences in Dresden, and finally did in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about a man named Billy Pilgrim who believes that he experiences the events of his life out of order, including his service during World War II, the firebombing of Dresden, and his kidnapping by aliens. He decides there is no such thing as time, and everything has already happened, so there’s really nothing to worry about.
George Patton was born on November 11, 1885. From his New York Times obituary in 1945:
Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. was one of the most brilliant soldiers in American history. Audacious, unorthodox and inspiring, he led his troops to great victories in North Africa, Sicily and on the Western Front. Nazi generals admitted that of all American field commanders he was the one they most feared. To Americans he was a worthy successor of such hardbitten cavalrymen as Philip Sheridan, J. E. B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
His great soldierly qualities were matched by one of the most colorful personalities of his period. About him countless legends clustered–some true, some untrue, but all testifying to the firm hold he had upon the imaginations of his men. He went into action with two pearl-handled revolvers in holsters on his hips. He was the master of an unprintable brand of eloquence, yet at times he coined phrases that will live in the American Army’s traditions.
“We shall attack and attack until we are exhausted, and then we shall attack again,” he told his troops before the initial landings in North Africa, thereby summarizing the military creed that won victory after victory along the long road that led from Casablanca to the heart of Germany.
You might want to think twice before you give any gift cards this Christmas.
For example, how much do you think those Circuit City gift cards are worth today?
(Circuit City filed for Chapter 11 yesterday.)
Veterans Day originated as “Armistice Day” on Nov. 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the end of World War I. Congress passed a resolution in 1926 for an annual observance, and Nov. 11 became a national holiday beginning in 1938. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation in 1954 to change the name to Veterans Day as a way to honor those who served in all American wars. The day has evolved into also honoring living military veterans with parades and speeches across the nation. A national ceremony takes place at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
23.6 million
The number of military veterans in the United States in 2007.
Source: Table 502, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2009Female Veterans
1.8 million
The number of female veterans in 2007.
Source: Source: Table 502, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 200916%
Percentage of Gulf War veterans in 2007 who were women.
Source: Table 503, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2009Race and Hispanic Origin
2.4 million
The number of black veterans in 2007. Additionally, 1.1 million veterans were Hispanic; 278,000 were Asian; 165,000 were American Indian or Alaska Native; 27,000 were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; and 18.7 million were non-Hispanic white. (The numbers for blacks, Asians, American Indians and Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, and non-Hispanic whites cover only those reporting a single race.)
Source: 2007 American Community SurveyWhen They Served
9.3 million
The number of veterans 65 and older in 2007. At the other end of the age spectrum, 1.9 million were younger than 35.
Source: Table 503, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 20097.9 million
Number of Vietnam-era veterans in 2007. Thirty-three percent of all living veterans served during this time (1964-1975). In addition, 5 million served during the Gulf War (representing service from Aug. 2, 1990, to present); 2.9 million in World War II (1941-1945); 3 million in the Korean War (1950-1953); and 6.1 million in peacetime.
Source: Table 503, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2009
In particular he is talking about the mountains and rangelands of New Mexico. Always shaped by fire, lately they have been shaped by fire suppression. Always modified by grazing elk and other animals, now they are threatened by overgrazing of livestock. Always vulnerable to drought, now they are stricken by drought and heat together. And the heat is not the heat of a normal warm year, it is the heat of human-induced climate change, he says.
“Say hello to the Anthropocene,” he writes, using a relatively recent coinage for the geological time we live in. Not the Holocene — the name earth scientists give to the era that began about 11,000 years ago, when the last glaciers of the last Ice Age made their last retreat — but the Anthropocene, the new era when people’s actions alter conditions on Earth.