Dow ends 275 points higher as stocks post another round of records

U.S. stocks ended higher Wednesday, with all three major benchmarks registering all-time closing highs, buoyed by signs of a slowdown in the number of new cases of COVID-19 — a strain of coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China late last year.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.94% rose 275.08 points, or 0.9%, to end at 29,551.42, while the S&P 500 SPX, +0.65% added 21.70 points or 0.7%, to finish at 3,379.45. The Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.90% ended at 9,725.96, a gain of 87.02 points, or 0.9%.

Just to pick a date, on the day I was born, $1 would buy what today it takes $9.54 to buy. If I take that multiplier of 9.54 and divide today's DJIA by it, I get 3099.

But the DJIA was worth 451.38 in the month I was born. The ratio between the two numbers is 6.8; that is, even after adjusting for inflation the DJIA is worth almost seven times today what it was worth 64 years ago.

In 1955, the richest man in the world couldn't have an iPhone, couldn't use Google to get the answer to complex questions in seconds, would have to undergo exploratory surgery to see if he had a lesion on his colon, or inside a lung, or inside his brain.

The best weather reports available were not much use beyond 24 hours in the future, and even then were questionable.

A "long distance" phone call from coast to coast cost about $1 per minute, which is almost $10 per minute today; nowadays, the cost of such a call is $0 per minute on an incremental basis, at least if you have an unlimited calling plan.

The richest man in the world could choose from three TV channels to watch. That was it. He couldn't record anything on TV, and to record sound required a machine that was about the same size as a tower PC, although there were miniature tape recorders that cost about as much as a BMW would cost in today's money. They could record at most an hour or so of single-channel audio.

There were only a few thousand computers in the whole world, and memory cost around $1 per bit (of course the "byte" hadn't been invented yet). There was no such thing as a GUI, or a modem, or a mouse. When you drag a window from one part of your "desktop" to another, you are using more computing power than the best military missile guidance computers of that time possessed, probably by a factor of a thousand.

There was no such thing as "data compression," although Bell Labs was beginning to work on it for the PicturePhone, and other more secret things.

There were only a few thousand computers in the whole world, and memory cost around $1 per bit (of course the "byte" hadn't been invented yet).

I remember when I was in a computer course decades ago and got to handle some memory cores - toroid donuts that each represented a bit. Now we have USB sticks the same size with billions of bytes capacity.

Anyway, watched a video about Elon Musk regarding his early companies in the mid-1990s. In Zip2, he developed a mapping program to search for services and represent it digitally, tried to sell it to phone companies. They threw a heavy yellow pages book and him and kicked him out, saying it'll never replace yellow pages. He soon sold it to newspaper giants for millions. A few years later everyone took online lookups for granted. There's a lot of stuff we have now, that we didn't have 25 years ago, let alone since 1955.

In 1955, if you lived in the tri-state area of NYC, there were SEVEN different T.V. channels you could choose from and the programs were far superior to ANYTHING you can find on regular, cable, and "streaming services today! And yes, a rich person could even buy and watch color T.V. shows.

Doctors still made house calls, milk & eggs were delivered, the schools of every kind were far better ( facts and skills were taught sans left indoctrination !), and you didn't need a college degree to be a bank teller.

Most of today's weather reports aren't even worth a damn, for the next day!

People actually talked, face to face, to one another, kids dated ( learning social skills most adults no longer have today ), kids played outside, obesity was rare, Hollywood was still mostly pro-American/patriotic, there were fantastic Broadway shows, which did NOT cost more for one ticket than a week's worth of groceries for two people, and more "good" things now lost.

Of course there were "bad" things too; as there are during all eras. But your post really set my teeth on edge...hence my reply.

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