Yes, yes. A day late. But what is time if life is an eternity?

  • You are exhausted with special events—Tax Day, National Parks Week, Derby Day—so you may have failed to notice that May is Older Americans Month. You should go to the web site, funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration on Aging, which encourages you to play. Medicare runs out in 2024, but it is worth whatever this costs to remind old people to play. (And stay “involved in their own lives.” I am not making this up.) By the way, your money has been flowing down this rat-hole (Older Americans Month) since 1963.
  • While we’re contemplating ways that older Americans are or are not adequately celebrated and entitled in this culture, the Boston Globe’s web site has a thoughtful piece by an older American on the practice of throwing senior discounts at anyone over 62. Clearly, many older Americans are having a difficult time making ends meet in this economy. Clearly, if you lost your job in the Great Recession and you were over, say, 55 at the time, your odds of getting rehired are slim. There should be a way to help people in such circumstances, or make their lives more palatable, but it should be based on need, not age. If it is going to be based on age, the discounts should go to younger people because, as staff writer Barry Bluestone points out, “the gap in net worth between seniors and youngsters is growing exponentially.” Specifically, between 1967 and 2010, if the oldest person in a home is 35 or younger, income rose by 27 percent; it rose 48 percent for those age 35 to 44. “But for those 65 and older, income more than doubled (+109%).”
  • The Social Security Administration has discontinued mailings of paper statements. Instead, the benefits estimates are available online. We will miss the periodic updates on how rapidly the program is hurtling toward insolvency. From a recent (February 2012) paper statement: “Without changes, in 2036 the Social Security Trust Fund will be able to pay only about 77 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits.” (Since then, it’s been revised to 2033, information that remains available on the web site but requires some poking around.)
  • Back in November, we were pleased to report NASA’s estimate of a low likelihood that Yellowstone (and much of the western United States) would be vaporized this year, due to the eruption of the supervolcano beneath the park. Now even better news: researchers at Washington State University believe that “Yellowstone’s supervolcano has erupted more frequently but with less violence than previously estimated.” It appears that a massive eruption two million years ago was actually two, smaller eruptions six millennia apart. Before you uncork a celebratory bottle, consider that the smaller eruptions were still massive enough to kill you and everything you love: The “ output of the first eruption was 644 cubic miles…and then a second eruption of 85 cubic miles took place more than 6,000 years later. By comparison, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens produced 0.26 of a cubic mile of ash.”

Photo of Durdle Door, a natural limestone arch on the Jurassic Coast near Lulworth in Dorset, England. By W. Lloyd MacKenzie, via Wikimedia Commons.