Things That Make Me Go Hmmm

I assess a great amount of information each week. I read and survey a number of general, economic and political news sites in addition to opinion and commentary materials.

Interesting items that I come across often turns into a blog post that I will share with you. That usually requires additional research on the subject to provide the necessary factual context of the issue at hand.

The items that catch my attention are the outlier facts that often go against the standard reporting or narrative of the day. What I am most interested in are the facts that point away from what you might have been told, or what you may think. to be true.

My biggest goal in writing BeeLine is putting things in context. As I often write in these pages, context is everything when assessing anything. In the news bite era we live in today, context is often no where to be found. I try to provide it when I write about a subject.

Coming into contact with so much material I often find I don't have the time to go deeper with a factoid I have discovered. Sometimes not much else needs to be said. The factoid itself says enough.

Here are a few such items that I have came across recently from Twitter sources I follow.

All I can say is that these are "Things That Make Me Go Hmmm".

• Amazon just bought 20,000 delivery vans. That is 20% of the total number of trucks that UPS has. Wow! What does that means for revenues for UPS and the United States Postal Service going forward?

• Has anyone ever done more damage to their brand in a few days than Nike did with its Colin Kaepernick ad campaign? 

• President Trump has a 54% approval rating among Hispanics in Florida. That is higher than his approval rating among Whites in the state according to a recent Q poll.

• San Francisco and Seattle (a city near you will undoubtedly be next) are banning plastic straws and bags and everything else plastic because of a plastic island in the South Pacific. Perhaps the focus is misplaced?

• Percentage of out of wedlock births in England and Wales (1845-2017). You would think with the availability of contraceptives and abortion the opposite would have occurred. What happened? 

• You might conclude from this graph that Americans have more money in their pockets. How did that happen? 

• The last several years have seen rents and home prices increasing at rapid rates in many major cities. Rents across the United States have suddenly stabilized. Trouble ahead for the real estate market?

If you don't think student debt is a problem, think again. Student debt is now at over $1.5 trillion. More than credit cards or auto loans.

Anything above that makes you go Hmmmm?