The Angry Bear

It is getting serious now. Kroger is willing to sell off more stores in order to consolidate with Albertsons. The one thing we keep on seeing is the manipulation of supply chain due to circumstance to achieve manufacturing shortfall, and influence, to maximize profits. Much of what we have and are experiencing was avoidable. The tools exist to give better perspectives of what is going on from start to finish of product. As you read through my telling...

In many capitalist European countries, college students do not have to pay tuition fees out of their own pockets. Here in America, most students have to fund their own college costs, which for many students means student loans. Whether or not they complete the degree, student loan borrowers can’t discharge these loans through bankruptcy.Of course, college isn’t free in Europe, it’s paid for by taxpayers. Presumably, those countries believe the...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog As per my usual caveat, while new home sales are the most leading of the housing construction metrics, they are noisy and heavily revised.  That was true again this month, as sales (blue in the graph below) increased almost 9% m/m to 693,000 annualized, after February was revised downward by -25,000 to 637,000. As the five year graph below shows, after the initial Boom powered by 3% mortgage rates,...

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/04/11/homeowners-face-a-25trn-bill-from-climate-change

by Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early Washington Monthly Trump has mocked veterans and privatized their health care. Biden honors them but hasn’t challenged Trump’s privatization policies. Currently, they are moving more and more veterans to commercial healthcare. This rather than restoring VA healthcare to a better place for veterans to be and at a lower cost. Think of Medicare Advantage. From mocking John McCain’s military service...

by Tom Dinger The Bell A commentary by an acquaintance of mine and from years ago. I believe there is only one person who might recognize the author. He was well liked amongst his fellow writers. Americans Doubting the Big Bang Is a Healthy Thing A new Associated Press-GfK poll asked approximately one thousand U.S. adults to rate their confidence in science and medicine.  The results showed surprising skepticism in various scientific...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog This is an update of some information I last posted several months ago. Real median household income is one of the best measures of average Americans’ well-being. However, the official measure is only reported once a year, in September of the following year. So right now the most recent official measure is for calendar year 2022 (when you might remember gas prices surged to $5/gallon). In other...

by Laurelle Stelle msn.com, The Cool Down Nice read on geothermal energy produced from pumping water into fracked rock formations in deep dry oil wells. In Texas, several innovative new companies are combining clean energy technology and the expertise of former oil and gas industry employees to create a whole new generation of geothermal power plants, Grist reported. Geothermal energy is a promising source of power because it’s so...

by an old friend from “The Fray” Claude Scales Self-Absorbed Boomer Your smartphone, like mine, likely has the logo at left on it somewhere. I knew that “Bluetooth” was the name given to an ancient Scandinavian king, but had no clue why the app was named for him. Now, thanks to Rick Spilman in The Old Salt Blog, I know the reason.  The logo is the Viking rune of King Harald “Blåtand” Gormsson, “Blåtand” is “Bluetooth” in English. The rune...

by Steve Roth Wealth Economics Imagine a five-player poker game. Assume all the players have equal skill, so the flows across the table over the course of the game are just a random walk. “It’s just how the cards fall.” All the players start with the same number of chips. But there’s one difference: four of the players don’t have any more assets/money to buy new chips. If they lose all their chips, they’re out. The fifth player has...