I Have a Problem

I have a problem with bacon wrapped dates.

I have a problem with The Vegas Golden Nights in the Stanley Cup Finals, remember New York Islanders 1972-73: 12-60-6. Now that is an expansion team.

I have a problem with students who don’t study…if you only knew me as a student…heee,heee.

I have a problem with our California Governor candidates, really!

I have a problem with the cheapest ticket at Dodger Stadium is $28.00, and you need oxygen to survive the heights watching the game.

I have a problem with (here we go again) “reply all” emails.

I have a problem with Coors Light.

I have a problem with professional golfer Jordan Spieth, boring.

I have a problem with hitting 16 in Blackjack, “the book” says to but I always lose.

I have a problem with Boards of Trustees losing control of their higher education institutions: University of Southern California, Michigan State University, Penn State University, etc.

I have a problem with the drivers in the City of Claremont, CA. on Friday afternoons. God save us.

I have a problem with Fox News.

I have a problem with Interstate 15, Interstate 405, Interstate 210, Interstate 5, need I say more.

I have a problem with sea salt in chocolate.

I have a problem with too few faculty members attending Commencements.

I have a problem with the infield shift in major league baseball.

I have a problem with Dominos Pizza, it has changed.

I have a problem with why no one reads a newspaper any more.

I have a problem with summer being too short.

I have a problem with Canton, New York being so far away.

I have a BIG problem with Clarkson University.

I have a problem with my golf game, out of bounds.

I have a problem with the following cabinet members: Wilbur Ross (Commerce), Betty DeVos (Education), James Perry (Energy), Scott Pruitt (EPA).

I have a problem with why I cannot win the Lottery.

I have a problem with (here we go again) people especially law enforcement officers never using their turn signals.

I have a problem that this has gone on too long…

SCOTUS - The Supreme Court has 29 cases to decide by the end of this month, including all of the term’s biggest blockbusters.

The big questions the court still has to resolve:

•          Is President Trump’s travel ban constitutional?

•          Can a Christian baker refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex couple?

•          Can the police track the location of your cell phone without a warrant?

•          Can public-sector unions collect fees from non-members?

•          Can states collect sales taxes from online retailers?

•          Can purely partisan gerrymandering — not racial gerrymandering — be unconstitutional?

All of these cases have enormous political implications. Some, like the gerrymandering challenges, could directly and immediately affect the actual practice of politics.

POTUS WEEK - Monday: Trump has lunch with VP Mike Pence and Defense Secretary James Mattis. Trump also participates in the Gold Star Families Memorial Day reception.

Tuesday: Trump meets with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump also hosts the Super Bowl champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, at the White House.

Wednesday: Trump will sign S. 2372, the “VA Mission Act of 2018” and he'll visit the Federal Emergency Management Agency Headquarters and attend the "2018 Hurricane Briefing." He's also expected to host a dinner at the White House to recognize the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Thursday: Trump meets with Secretary of State Pompeo.

Friday: Travel to Charlevoix, Canada. (Per the AP, Trump is expected to attend a meeting of the Group of Seven major industrial nations in Quebec, Canada, through June 9.)

500 DAYS- Everything changed:

•          Trump has wiped out a large portion of Obama’s legacy. He’s exited the Paris climate deal; signed major tax cuts, especially for corporations; confirmed an ultra-conservative Supreme Court justice and record numbers of circuit court judges; deregulated like crazy; exited the Iran deal; exited the TPP trade deal; repealed the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate; and moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing it as Israel’s capital.

•          New hardline immigration enforcement is in place, including separating children from parents of illegal immigrants. An extraordinary percentage of Trump’s senior staff has quit or been fired.

•          Only one campaign original remains on Trump’s staff: social media director Dan Scavino.

•          A national security adviser who began with bombastic high hopes of enforcing a new hard line against radical Islam — Mike Flynn — is now at personal peril in the Mueller investigation.

•          Trump no longer talks about wiping out the national debt by ending “waste, fraud and abuse.”

•          Trump no longer talks about shutting down federal agencies.

Nothing changed:

•          Family survives despite many premature obituaries about Jared and Ivanka (Javanka).

•          Trump still watches a ton of TV, views everything through a media lens, and obsesses over negative coverage.

•          Trump still views foreign negotiations as zero-sum games with a clear winner and loser. The scorecard is the bilateral trade deficit; Trump’s hardline instincts on trade and immigration are unchanged from the campaign trail.

•          There’s no trillion-dollar infrastructure package.

•          Mexico hasn’t paid for the wall — and Congress has only given Trump a pittance so far.

•          The national debt has climbed ever higher under Trump’s stewardship.

•          Trump still lies, exaggerates, distorts and responds to paper cuts by butchering his enemies.

•          Vice President Pence remains — and nobody I’ve spoken to has ever seen him criticize or debate the president in any meaningful way.

•          Trump has the same media diet: heavy on Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and "Fox & Friends" (with a sprinkling of hate-watch channel-surfing to CNN and MSNBC), and the same core diet of print newspapers, led by his hometown New York Times and New York Post.

Be smart: In 500 days, Trump’s hijacking of the formerly conservative GOP is complete — an astonishing accomplishment. The majority party in America is fully defined by his policies, his popularity with the base, his facts-be-damned mentality, his ability to control and quiet virtually all Republican elected officials.

•          Oh, don’t forget: He has 962 days left in this term.

BIRTHDAYS THIS WEEK – Birthday wishes and thoughts this week to Johnny Depp (55) Oceanside, CA; Paul Giamatti (51) Brooklyn, NY; Tom Jones (78) London, England; Seth Kogan …famous UCLA Doctor; Boz Scaggs (74) Maui, Hawaii;  Nancy Sinatra (78) Rancho Mirage, CA; Mike Zazon …famous owner of the “Z” Ranch.

NETFLIX RISE - Netflix Inc. has firmly established itself as the world’s most valuable media company:

•          An 11-year-old app that charges $11 a month is worth more to investors than the legacy conglomerates that earn billions more from TV advertising, box-office hits and cable and internet packages.

•          Netflix leapfrogged at least one traditional media giant in market value each year since 2015, when it became twice the size of ... CBS.

TARIFF - A tariff is actually the U.S. government charging a U.S. buyer to buy a foreign good. It's not charging the foreign country anything.

MARKET WEEK – The Trump administration showed no sign of backing down from tariffs in the face of resistance from allies and China over the weekend, isolating the U.S. and complicating the president’s meeting this week with leaders of Washington’s staunchest partners. Top finance officials from the Group of Seven leading nations met in Canada, where the non-U.S. members—the host country, along with France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.K.—publicly rebuked Washington for its new steel and aluminum tariffs. Beijing said it won’t abide by any agreement to buy more American products if the U.S. goes ahead with trade sanctions. President Trump now must face leaders of countries who have termed his policies extreme, unwise and in some cases illegal when he arrives in Quebec for a summit of G-7 leaders scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

The global growth story is fading. Stock indexes that rode accelerating growth to fresh records in January are now hamstrung by a moderate but unmistakable slowdown in economic momentum in Europe and elsewhere. The Dow industrials have struggled to push past 25000 since March. Hardly anyone expects a recession soon. But with government-bond yields near record lows in many countries and the median S&P 500 stock trading at a price/earnings multiple seen only rarely in the past century, many investors are buying government bonds and other lower-risk assets in a bid to brace against what is expected to be a volatile market year.

ON THIS DATE - June 5, 1968:

Tuesday marks 50 years since the assassination in Los Angeles of senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, age 42, who had been attorney general for his brother, President John F. Kennedy.

•          For 12 weeks he traveled the country, up and down the coasts, to Indiana the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; to Nebraska, where he won a vital primary in a devoutly conservative state; to Oregon, where he suffered the first political loss by any member of his family; and then to California, where he vowed to go on to the Democratic convention 'and let’s win there,' only to walk through a hotel kitchen where it all — the campaign against a long war, the campaign for a new sense of national purpose — tumbled to an end with an outstretched arm and spray of gunfire.

•          He might have won the presidency, he might have brought the Vietnam War to an earlier conclusion, he might have healed a broken nation. Or he might have lost to Richard Nixon (Hubert Humphrey, a more experienced and in some ways more sophisticated politician, did lose), he might have found the conflict in Southeast Asia much more difficult to wind down than he expected (as Barack Obama discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan), he might have stoked resentment from his foes and produced a furious conservative backlash (as Obama, as fluent a campaigner as RFK, surely did).

•          Robert Kennedy was perhaps the most religiously driven of the Kennedy men, and certainly the most self-examining ... By 1968, Kennedy — drowning in despair and inflamed with anger — felt free to speak and act for himself.

•          Jeff Greenfield, the TV journalist, who was an RFK speechwriter: "The Bobby Kennedy campaign was an investment in hope, in the hope that if Bobby were elected, we could end the Vietnam War and bring the country together."

•          Mark Shields, the syndicated columnist, who organized 40 Nebraska counties for Kennedy: “He’d have been a more revolutionary president than Trump ... We have never had a tough liberal. He was the last tough liberal. Every one after him was a can’t-we-get-along, bleeding-heart liberal."

•          Peter Robinson, the conservative Hoover Institution scholar who wrote Ronald Reagan’s “tear-down-this-wall’’ speech: "Bobby is the pivot of the Kennedy family."

•          That is the ultimate meaning of Robert Kennedy — not so much his accomplishments but his legacy as a man whose changed voice changed the American conversation.

SPOTTED – 1,582 University of La Verne graduates this weekend at beautiful Campus West in La Verne, CA. This writer was fortunate to work with 224 of these graduating students, all wonderful, hard working men and woman. Much success to all.

POOR TRAINING IN AMERICAN COMPANIES - The most successful job training through the decades has been organized by companies finding smart people, then skilling them up for specific positions.

But this tradition is long passé. American companies today are only rarely prepared to spend the money to train their own workers.

•          Instead, they want fully formed workers to show up at the door.

One person vexed by this paradox is Kim Arnett, a software developer at Expedia. Arnett posted an open letter on LinkedIn to technology companies, tut-tutting them for setting up a potential future crisis by failing to create enough entry-level positions.

•          Her suggestion: "As an organizer of a meet up that aims to help beginners and marginalized people, I ask you to back up. Start a training program, add internships and entry level positions to help fill the gap. People are here, give them a chance."

Edward Alden, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, tells Rink Rats that European companies naturally train their own workers but "that hasn't permeated U.S. companies" as yet.

•          But, Alden said, some seem to be starting to grasp that they will have to take the lead on training for their own workforces.

OUT AND ABOUT – St. Lawrence University Reunion this past weekend saw some old SLU hockey boys from the 70’s: Gary “Nik and the Nice Guys” Webb ‘73, Terry “The Original Bugsy” Moran ‘71, and Peter Brennan ‘72. Wish we were there to hoist a couple. A thank you to Bruce Carlisle, St. Lawrence ’78 for the picture. Bruce is our west coast St. Lawrence hockey version of Wally “White Shoes” Johnson. He keeps us up-to-date on all the St. Lawrence hockey information.

Stay tuned this summer for Rink Rats Special Edition, "The Way We Were".

SWAMI’S WEEK TOP PICKS –

MLB Game of the Week – Saturday June 9; New York Yankees (37-17) at New York Metropolitans (27-30), Mets suck, Yanks win this one 7 – 3.

The Belmont Stakes – Saturday June 9; Elmont, New York:

1). Bravazo               2). Hofburg               3). Justify

STANLEY CUP FINALS – Though The Swami picked Nashville and Pittsburgh to be in the Stanley Cup Final, we now select the Washington Capitals to win in five games over the Vegas Golden Knights (too much like Clarkson).

NBA FINALS – We are sticking to our original picks of Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Golden State Warriors Final. With The Warriors winning in six games.

Season to Date (15 - 10)

DRIVING THE WEEK – Tariffs will remain the center of attention all week with a list of Chinese goods to be subjected to the new levies expected by mid-June at the latest ... G7 meetings begin Friday in Quebec following a rare rebuke of the U.S. from G7 finance ministers ... House Financial Services subcommittees hold hearings Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. homeless youth and 2:00 p.m. on the CFPB ...

ISM Non-manufacturing on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. expected to tick up to 57 from 56.8 ... Productivity and Unit Labor Costs on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. expected to rise 0.7 percent and 2.7 percent.

Tuesday (June 5): Midterm primaries in eight states, including California; Tesla's annual shareholders meeting.

Wednesday (June 6): 74th anniversary of D-Day

Next Blog: Summer Reading and lollygag.

Until next time, Adios

Claremont, California

June 4, 2018

#VIII-29-371

CARTOON OF THE WEEK – The New Yorker, Alex Gregory

Decoration Day

This year we celebrate one hundred fifty years of what was once called Decoration Day and now called Memorial Day.

MOST Americans know that Memorial Day is about honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a holiday devoted to department store sales, half-marathons, picnics, baseball and auto racing. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

At the end of the Civil War, Americans faced a formidable challenge: how to memorialize 625,000 dead soldiers, Northern and Southern. As Walt Whitman mused, it was “the dead, the dead, the dead — our dead — or South or North, ours all” that preoccupied the country. After all, if the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, four million names would be on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, instead of 58,000.

Officially, in the North, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, called on communities to conduct grave-decorating ceremonies. On May 30, funereal events attracted thousands of people at hundreds of cemeteries in countless towns, cities and mere crossroads. By the 1870s, one could not live in an American town, North or South, and be unaware of the spring ritual.

But the practice of decorating graves — which gave rise to an alternative name, Decoration Day — didn’t start with the 1868 events, nor was it an exclusively Northern practice. In 1866 the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Columbus, Ga., chose April 26, the anniversary of Gen. Joseph Johnston’s final surrender to Gen. William T. Sherman, to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers. Later, both May 10, the anniversary of Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s death, and June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis, were designated Confederate Memorial Day in different states.

Memorial Days were initially occasions of sacred bereavement, and from the war’s end to the early 20th century they helped forge national reconciliation around soldierly sacrifice, regardless of cause. In North and South, orators and participants frequently called Memorial Day an “American All Saints Day,” likening it to the European Catholic tradition of whole towns marching to churchyards to honor dead loved ones.

In a grand ceremony on Nov. 11, 1920, an unknown French soldier from World War I was buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe. That same day, the British entombed their own unknown soldier with similar honors in Westminster Abbey.

Other European nations followed, but the United States, having lost 116,516 men in 19 months of fighting—and with more than 2,000 unidentified Americans still buried in France—had no plans for the same.

It was not until the next month that Hamilton Fish, a New York congressman who had served in combat on the Western Front, introduced a bill providing for the repatriation of “a body of an unknown American killed on the battlefields of France, and for burial of the remains with appropriate ceremonies.” Congress passed Fish’s Public Resolution 67, and on his last day in office President Woodrow Wilson signed it.

Sgt. Edward Younger, who on the morning of Oct. 24, 1921, in the town hall of Châlons-sur-Marne, France, was given the honor of selecting the Unknown Soldier from four caskets of unidentified remains recently exhumed from American cemeteries in France. “I had gone over the top many times, had known the agony of waiting for the charge,” the twice-wounded combat veteran later recounted. But he felt almost “paralyzed” as he selected the remains by placing white roses on one flag-draped casket.

The body chosen by Sgt. Younger was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery on Armistice Day 1921. After the ceremony, Gen. James Harbord, who had commanded thousands of American soldiers and Marines in combat, remarked: “Whether an anonymous hero who died, we know not how, is more fitting for commemoration than those whose names we have and whose gallant deaths we can describe, may be a question.”

6,940 - Today is the 17th Memorial Day since 9/11. Since then, 6,940 U.S. military service members have died for America.

Every part of the country has lost soldiers to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Average age: 26½.

Some counties in the Mountain West also have very high death rates, but that's a function of very small populations that skew the data.

Several parishes in southern Louisiana have suffered a disproportionate number of soldiers lost. Of the five places with the most military deaths per population, three — Tangipahoa Parish, East Baton Rouge Parish, and Calcasieu Parish — are in Louisiana. (The others are Mineral County, Colo, and Garfield County, Mont.)

Many of the dead came from big cities, including 167 from Los Angeles County, the most of any county.

Of all U.S. counties, remote Mineral County, Colo., had the highest rate of service members killed in proportion to population — one. The Rocky Mountain county was home to Sgt. Clinton Wayne Ahlquist, who was killed in Ramadi, Iraq, on Feb. 20, 2007, at age 23.

The state with the highest rate of service members killed was Vermont — the state lost 26 troops out of a population of about 624,000. The state with the lowest rate was nearby Connecticut.

Most of the fallen — 5,019 men and women — served in the Army. 1,484 were in the Marines, 248 were in the Navy, and 189 were in the Air Force.

98% of the fallen were men: 6,772, with 168 women.

You all are not forgotten.

POTUS WEEK - Monday: Trump will go to Arlington National Cemetery for a wreath-laying ceremony and a Memorial Day event. Tuesday: The president will eat lunch with VP Mike Pence and HUD Secretary Ben Carson. He also plans to meet with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and NIH Director Francis Collins. He then will travel to Nashville....

... Wednesday: Trump will meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and he'll participate in a White House Sports and Fitness Day event. Thursday: Trump will go to Houston and Dallas. Friday: Trump will meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Day 494 of President Trump (966 days left in this term):

CHINA 101 - Two decades ago, China's gross exports were on par with the Netherlands. Only North Korea relied on the world's most populous country as its primary source of imports.

Now, China exports far more than any country on earth, and is the top supplier of countries in every corner of the world.

Relative global power is a zero-sum game. Even though the U.S. is growing alongside China, the younger power's newfound influence will impact the U.S. role on the international stage.

China's Artificial Intelligence (AI) plan is part of the Chinese government's blueprint for becoming a superpower and achieving "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," while maintaining Communist Party control.

Kai-Fu Lee, founder of Sinovation Ventures and a world-renowned AI researcher, and Paul Triolo, head of Eurasia Group's Geo-technology practice, argue that China and the U.S. are already in a global AI duopoly.

In January, Amazon attracted intense attention when it opened Go, its cashless convenience store in Seattle. But that still leaves the e-commerce giant far behind its Chinese rivals, which are already staking out new ground in retail.

The future of retail in the world's leading economies is increasingly expected to be not online shopping, but a melding of e-commerce and physical stores. Chinese Big Tech appears to be in the vanguard of how to pull this off.

Chinese internet giants led by Alibaba are becoming online-offline behemoths, investing in or acquiring some 30 physical retailers in the nation since the fall.

It would be like Amazon buying a stake in every major offline retailer in the U.S.

BIRTHDAYS THIS WEEK – Birthday wishes and thoughts this week to Greg Ball ….famous amateur golfer; Reggie Jackson (72) Scottsdale, AZ.; Ron Reagan (60) San Diego, CA.; George Strait (66) Garland, TX; David Yoshida …still my RA.

COLLEGE CHRONICLES – Congratulations to Rink Rat reader Dr. Gail Tang, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, for being selected to the Fulbright Scholar Program. The program will aid Dr. Tang in her studies in Burma next Spring 2019.

SMARTPHONE THE NEW DESKTOP COMPUTER?  - What’s the difference between your phone and a computer? Seriously, look at your phone, and at your laptop. What separates them? You’re probably thinking about power, memory and all the Serious Stuff phones can’t do.

For years, that was right. Phones were painfully slow next to desktops and laptops. Now, though, the iPhone’s processor bests the MacBook’s in many benchmarking tests.

Most recent handsets can handle video editing and intense games, plus Word and Excel. A few even have docks or software that adapts to the big screen to serve up an experience virtually identical to a traditional PC.

The phone has unique advantages, too: It’s likely the device you use most and carry with you always. It can access your most important files and personal data. You understand the interface. In many ways, your phone might be a better computer than your computer. If you’re going to pay as much as $1,000 for it, it better be.

Using a phone as your primary computer isn’t always easy: Apple ’s iOS and Google’s Android software weren’t designed with desktop multitasking in mind. The idea works, though.

Over the years, lots of companies have devised ways to bridge the gap between phone and PC. In 2011, there was Motorola’s Lapdock, an otherwise-useless clamshell powered by its Atrix 4G phone. Asus built an elaborate system where you’d dock your phone into a tablet like an X-Wing entering a space frigate. Most recently, Razer ’s Project Linda advances the idea that a phone could slot into a laptop’s palmrest to double as a trackpad. Apple patented a similar idea in 2017.

For now, it’s best to go a simpler route, with a Bluetooth keyboard and a display connection. I’ve come to like Logitech ’s Keys-To-Go ($70 at Apple.com, bundled with an iPhone stand). It’s light and durable enough to stay in my bag all the time.

To connect an iPhone to a display, you’ll need an HDMI cable, which works with nearly any modern television or monitor, plus Apple’s $50 Lightning Digital AV Adapter. Many Android phones will work with a single USB-to-HDMI cable. (You can use an Apple TV or Chromecast to connect wirelessly to a big screen, but it’s a bit more hassle.)

These accessories have completely changed the way I think about my phone. Not everyone believes in this one-computer-to-rule-them-all future. Every device could be equally smart as processors and memory chips become less expensive and more plentiful, bandwidth gets faster and less costly, and more data and computing move into the cloud.

Microsoft, Apple and Google all have services that let you carry activity from one device to another. But to build a truly cross-platform computing system, they’d all have to put down their swords and work together. I’m not holding my breath.

I like the idea of having one device that contains my whole computing life. I could focus my money on one great machine. That device would have all my settings and data, kept in apps I know how to use. It would also feel safer to me, not to be logged in on a bunch of machines. My phone is probably harder to steal than my Google password. I’d just be in big trouble if I lost it.

MARKET WEEK – Netflix has become as valuable as Walt Disney and Comcast, the latest sign that investors remain faithful to the handful of technology and internet firms that have long powered the broader market.

The streaming company on Friday closed with a market value of $151.8 billion, after earlier in the session passing Disney for the first time a day after it eclipsed Comcast. Disney is valued at $151.2 billion and Comcast $145.5 billion. The milestone for Netflix highlights investors’ interest in shares of rapidly growing firms they think will disrupt industries, a trend also seen with Amazon.com and the retail sector.

Worries about the high concentration of gains—namely in the popular FAANG stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet—have continued, with some analysts hoping for returns to be spread more evenly as the nine-year old bull market matures. Some are encouraged by the recent surge in small-cap stocks, but for the most part, the S&P 500’s leaders remain the same.

“It’s just evidence of way too much popularity in concentrated bets being made by the masses, which historically has always been an indication of risk,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Leuthold Group.

Netflix has a price-to-earnings ratio of roughly 97 based on projections for profits in the next 12 months, according to FactSet, compared with 14 for Disney and 12 for Comcast. The S&P 500 trades at a multiple of 16.

Netflix shares have added 7.8% this week after the firm signed former U.S. President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama to a multiyear deal to produce content. The stock is now up 82% in 2018, making it by far the best performer in the S&P 500. The next best performer, XL Group, has added 58%.

Meanwhile, shares of Disney and Comcast have fallen this week with Comcast escalating its threat to disrupt Disney’s megadeal to buy the bulk of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets.

Despite worries about higher regulation and lofty valuations, the market’s favorite names have recovered from a recent period of turbulence. Even with Facebook dealing with fake-news and privacy scandals, shares have added 16% in the past month. Apple is up 15% and Amazon has climbed 9.8%.

CAREER SERVICES - Most companies that pay six figures to the majority of their workers aren’t finance jobs in big banks or money managers, but biotech firms that rely on medical

researchers, and energy and technology companies with a large number of engineers and technical staff.

More than 100 companies in the S&P 500 routinely awarded employees $100,000 or more in 2017, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Nearly half of those were in the energy industry, including oil and gas drillers, refiners and electric utilities. Together, the energy companies employ more than 600,000 people, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of federal filings and company-employment data from S&P Global Market Intelligence Capital IQ.

Public companies in the U.S. are offering a first-ever glimpse into how they compensate rank-and-file employees, thanks to disclosure requirements under the federal Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 that took effect this year. The disclosures show total compensation for the median employee at each company; until this spring companies were only required to detail the millions that top executives often take home in bonuses and stock.

The data reveal the types of firms where lucrative jobs are the norm rather than the exception. Some of the highest reported median wages were paid by pharmaceutical companies. Four firms in the S&P 500 paid workers in the middle of their payrolls more than $200,000. Facebook Inc. was one of them; the other three are developing drugs to fight everything from cancer to psoriasis. At Incyte Corp. , Celgene Corp. and Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., the middle earners last year made $253,000, $213,000 and $211,500, respectively.

One financial firm ranked in the top 25 for highest median earnings: At boutique asset manager Affiliated Managers Group Inc. last year, the typical pay package was $157,384. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. came in 46th, with $135,165, the midpoint among roughly 34,000 employees at the bank.

Several big tech and oil companies disclosed larger median pay packages. Exxon Mobil Corp. ranked 20th, with its typical worker earning $161,562. Salesforce.com Inc. ranked 28th, with a median pay of $155,284.

Ten of the 25 highest median salaries last year were found at companies based in the Midwest or South, where $150,000 stretches farther than it would in many cities on the coasts.

The average overall compensation figure for the roughly 400 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported median pay so far is $78,830. The median for all U.S. workers was just under $38,000 last year, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

ON THIS DATE - Marks Sixty Five years since the first public television station began broadcasting — KUHT, right from the campus of the University of Houston.

WHAT’S ON THE iPHONE? – five songs we are listening to this holiday weekend:

1). “El Paso”, 1959 – Marty Robbins

2). “Somebody’s Been Sleeping In My Bed”, 1970 – 100 Proof Aged In Soul

3). “Just One Of Those Things”, 1969 – Frank Sinatra

4). “Question”, 1970 – Moody Blues

5). “Peer Gynt Suite #1 Opera 46”, 1867 – Edvard Grieg

SWAMI’S WEEK TOP PICKS –

MLB Game of the Week – Saturday June 2; Boston Red Sox (36-17) vs. Houston Astros (34-20), Major League Baseball’s top teams, Astros win 6 – 5.

STANLEY CUP FINALS – Though The Swami picked Nashville and Pittsburgh to be in the Stanley Cup Final, we now select the Washington Capitals to win in five games over the Vegas Golden Knights (too much like Clarkson).

NBA FINALS – We are sticking to our original picks of Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Golden State Warriors Final. With The Warriors winning in six games.

Season to Date (15 - 9)

DRIVING THE WEEK – With the scandals of management at Michigan State, University of Southern California, and other higher education institutions, this should be an interesting week as finally the attention is being paid to inactive Boards of Trustees who during their watch have done nothing to monitor or correct poor management.

Next Blog: I have a problem and Summer Reading.

Until next time, Adios

Claremont, California

May 28, 2018

#VIII-28-370

CARTOON OF THE WEEK – The New Yorker