Friday, December 23, 2016

Social Security to be exhausted by 2029

"Under current law, CBO projects, Social Security’s trust funds, considered together, will be exhausted in 2029. In that case, benefits in 2030 would need to be reduced by 29 percent from the scheduled amounts." https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52298

The Social Security trustees disagree and say that it will be solvent until 2034.

So, either 13 years or 18 years from now.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

3000 digit prime number

I am playing around and discovered a possible prime number with more than 3000 digits:

2 ^ 10005 * 210 -19 [3015 digits] is probably prime to a certainty of 99.21875%.
I haven't verified this, but it is the largest possible prime number I personally have found.  Of course the world record has 22 million digits so this is nothing.

I will post bigger ones if I find them.

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2 ^ 10017 * 210 -17 [3018 digits] is probably prime to a certainty of 87.5%.
This is a huge number that start with 549143 and ends with 525103.
I turned down the certainty factor to speed up the process.  It takes about 15 seconds to check each candidate.  To verify this to 100% certainty could take hours, and I'm not interested in doing that right now.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

11 year cycle

I keep trying to find patterns and I keep being wrong.  I thought there was a 7-year economic cycle, then a 8-year cycle.  So I am probably wrong on this too.  With that said ...

I think events from 11 years ago might be repeating themselves. (The reason why it is longer than 7 or 8 years is because everything sort of froze up for several years.) Of course not exactly, but look at this.

December 14, 2016 - Fed raises rates to 0.50%
December 13, 2005 - Fed raises rates to 4.25%

The Fed raised rates 4 more times in 2006 before hitting its maximum of 5.25% for that business cycle.  I think the Fed will raise rates about 4 times this time before hitting a peak of 1.5%.

Last time the recession started in December 2007.  So this time a recession starts in December 2018. Last time, the Dow hit a high of 14164 on 10/9/2007.  So 11 years from this is October 2018, when the next crash will occur. So if there is any validity to this, and I think there might be, there won't be a recession or stock market crash in 2017.   The Dow could go up another 40% before the next high.  I don't think it will go up that much, but it could go above 25,000 before the next crash.

Last time the real estate market froze up in mid-2006.  So I expect this to occur again in mid-2017.  The luxury market has already peaked, but the regular market is still booming for now.

So that's my forecast.  Nothing to worry about until October 2018, when everything will go to heck again.

Update:  Sunspots also have 11-year cycles.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

The next Shenzhen

It's called Iskandar Malaysia, which is a 2200 sq. km. special economic region centered on the city of Johor Bahru, adjacent to the city-state of Singapore.

See: http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/china-building-malaysian-version-of.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-11-21/-100-billion-chinese-made-city-near-singapore-scares-the-hell-out-of-everybody

Should California secede?

See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-07/how-to-make-california-great-secede-with-a-little-help-from-putin

As president of Yes California, Marinelli is organizing a statewide referendum on independence to be held in 2019—if he can collect half a million signatures by next fall. He runs the secession movement from 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) away while teaching English at a language school in Yekaterinburg. He is preparing the ground for an “embassy of California” in Moscow, with the help of a vehemently anti-American group supported by the Kremlin. The avatar on his professional Facebook page shows him posing in front of the Voskresenskiye Gates that open onto Red Square.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Largest number which is not prime

This is interesting.  The largest prime number is: 2^74207281-1, which was announced just last month.  It has 22 million digits in base 10.

The largest number which has been factored is:
2^383858863-1 which is divisible by 2385654186158054311

Someone is fascinated with the number 2^383838383-1, which has no factors below 2^83. This appears to be the highest probably prime number.

A lot of work is being done on primes in the range of 2^332,192,831 to 2^332,399,999.  If one of these was proven prime, it would have 100 million digits in base 10.

Update:
The number 2^999999893-1 has been factored.  It is divisible by 5999999359. That is the highest factored number listed in the Mersenne database, so it almost certainly is the biggest factored number.


Thursday, December 1, 2016

Return of the Trillion Dollar Deficit

On 11/30/2016, the national debt was at 19,948 B.  One year prior, on 11/30/2015, the debt was at 18,827 B.  So it increased by over $1 trillion in the following year.  This marks the 9th consecutive month (since March 2016) in which the national debt was at least $1 trillion higher than the same point one year prior.

I don't think we will ever again see a situation in which it isn't at least 1 trillion more than the prior year, unless there is some phony freeze. So with interest rates rising, and the national debt rapidly increasing, interest costs on the debt will rise rapidly as well.

I purposely haven't done a long-term debt forecast in more than 3 years, but I think it is time for another one.