• IMPORTANT TAX IMPACT TO MOST READERS: Be aware that the new tax law stops deductibility of business entertainment expenses – paid directly or indirectly!  Starting 2018, no deduction is allowed for “entertainment, amusement or recreation; or with respect to a facility used in connection with any social, athletic or sporting club organized for business, pleasure, recreation or other social purpose.”
• MALE BEHAVIOR WILL OFTEN BE PERCEIVED AS “CLUMSY, MALADROIT, EVEN SWEET BUT MISDIRECTED, but hardly definable as ‘Sexual Assault’ – a phrase which today has lost all meaning. “Courtship is central to human life. Were men and women not attracted to each other, the human race could not perpetuate itself. Anyone who imagines this will cease, in the workplace or any other place, is delusional. And imagining that it’s easy for a man to figure out whether a woman might like to be kissed is insane; the difficulty of ascertaining whether one’s passions are reciprocated is the theme of 90% of human literature and every romantic comedy or pop song ever written… The insistence that an unwanted kiss (or touch or hug) is always about power, not courtship, simply isn’t a serious theory of the case – not when the punishment for this ‘crime’ is so grave… When today’s frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt does not pause to parse the difference between courtship, rape and stupidity, taking only one accusation to destroy a man’s life, tried & sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing his livelihood and social respectability… The #MeToo movement has morphed into a moral panic that poses as much danger to women as it does to men.” A brilliant article: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/12/06/the-warlock-hunt/

• MUSIC IS CONSIDERED BY MANY TO BE A UNIVERSAL LINK which provides “communication of simple ideas between people even when they have no language in common.” A recent Harvard University study played dozens of musical excerpts (under 15 seconds each) to 750 online volunteers from sixty countries who neither understood the lyrics nor were familiar with the music, but ranked the music by what they “thought the song’s function was” and how confident they were. Options were Dancing, Healing, Expressing Love, Storytelling, Soothing a Baby, or Mourning the Dead. Results were that “perceptions of a song’s function were generally in good agreement with its actual function.” It turns out that Hans Christian Andersen was right in the 18^th century, that music indeed transcends cultural boundaries, with his poetic phrase “Where words fail, music speaks.” [THE ECONOMIST – Jan 27, 18]

• THE STANDARD ECONOMICS CASE FOR ‘EDUCATION’ IS THAT IT BUILDS ‘HUMAN CAPITAL’ – skills, knowledge, and habits that are valuable in the workplace… But most of what people learn in high school & college is unnecessary and quickly forgotten… Meanwhile, people with bachelor’s degrees earn 73% more, on average, than those with a high school diploma.” Why? Reality is that college degrees are “mostly about jumping through hoops on command to show employers that candidates are ready, willing and able to jump through hoops on command…and to convey that, in addition to being reasonably intelligent, they’re willing to slog through arduous and often boring classes, and they know how to fit in (i.e. diligence persistence & conformity) irrespective of what they may have learned.” A recent Harvard study found 2/3 of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, even though only 16% of the employed production supervisors had one. [BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK – Jan 22, 18]

• ODDS & ENDS: Brain scans can now decode ‘thoughts’; A.I. is close to computer visualization of “what a person is thinking about,” according to Kyoto University researchers. /// 20 years after scientists’ first cloned a sheep, another two dozen animal species (cats, dogs, rats, cattle) have been cloned, and now Chinese scientists have cloned primates — genetically identical female monkeys. /// New Zealand and Switzerland have banned the boiling of live lobsters, arguing that the process causes “unnecessary pain” to the crustaceans. /// By 2025, some 20 billion digital devices will be connecting people and physical objects anywhere, instantly & flawlessly for free; Over the past two years, such devices have produced 90% of all the data ever produced; what’s coming is unfathomable. /// Last year, the wealth of a handful of billionaires (including Gates, Buffett, Bezos, Zuckerberg) roughly exceeded that of the poorest 50% of Americans; globally 4 out of every 5 dollars of wealth generated went to the richest 1%, while the poorest half got zero. /// Infant Social Security numbers are for sale on the dark web for $300 of bitcoin. Because child identity theft schemes can go undetected for years, cybercriminals get access to a clean credit history usable for government benefits, credit cards and/or taking out mortgages.

• THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: “People will forget the things you do, and people will forget the things you say. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”  – Maya Angelou