Jinn of Quality and Risk

Most viewers of The Matrix consider the more fanciful elements--intelligent computers, downloading information into the human brain, virtual reality indistinguishable from real life--to be fun as science fiction, but quite remote from real life. Most viewers would be wrong. As renowned computer scientist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil explains, these elements are very feasible and are quite likely to be a reality within our lifetimes. 

James K. Glassman: critics often point to the 40 percent decline in the S&P 500 between the start of 2000 to the end of 2002 as evidence that you can't rely on stocks for security in retirement. That sounds logical, but it's not. When you examine every 20-year period since 1926, you find a remarkable consistency of returns for stocks: The annual average for each of the 58 periods ranges from a low of 3 percent to a high of 18 percent. Overall, large-cap stock investments returned a total of 573 percent in the average 20-year period. ... the 20-year period that ended in 2002 - despite the huge drop in the last three years - produced a total return of 992 percent... 

Michael Fumento puts SARS in perspective: Flu causes between "three and five million cases of severe illness and between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths" per year, according to the WHO — far more serious illness and death in a single day than SARS has caused in 21 weeks. Far more Americans die of influenza each year during flu season (about 36,000) than have yet been killed by SARS globally. ... SARS is repeatedly referred to as "killer pneumonia," as if pneumonia normally causes just hiccups. Yet 62,000 Americans died of pneumonia in 2001. ... Even today, malaria and tuberculosis — which like SARS are both essentially localized and yet global — kill perhaps 15,000 people daily. 

The total number of SARS cases so far is about 6000, the huge majority of them in China, the overall death rate is 14-15%, and the daily number of new cases has started to trend down. Doesn't look like the end of the world. SARS Watch: On the basis of more detailed and complete data, and more reliable methods, WHO now estimates ... an overall estimate of case fatality of 14% to 15%. ... Based on data received by WHO to date, the case fatality ratio is estimated to be less than 1% in persons aged 24 years or younger, 6% in persons aged 25 to 44 years, 15% in persons aged 45 to 64 years, and greater than 50% in persons aged 65 years and older. A 15% case fatality rate is high. For context: Measles kills a 0.1-0.2% of people who get it in the industrialized world, and 2-10% of children who get it in the developing world. Even though there is a vaccine, over a million people, mostly children, die from it every year. Malaria, which kills more than a million people a year, has a case fatality rate under 3%.