The Angry Bear

Let’s just start with the acknowlegement that most of the internet is porn. Make of that what you will. I ignore it. For the residual, well, there’s Facebook. I haven’t been sent to FB jail recently, so I am favorably disposed towards it. I get all my news online these days, so I like it for that. And thanks to my university, I have access to all the published scientific literature (and other journals) online, just a couple of clicks away. Don’t have...

The DHHS report (Michigan) found age, gender and other factors contributed to differing PFAS blood levels Kyle Davidson @ Michigan Advance Angry Bear: Shortly before we left Michigan for other digs. the pollution of water ways due to PFAS was coming more to light where we lived in Livingston County as well as other parts of Michigan. There was an advisory not to eat the fish out of some lakes. PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a...

The wealth of people and the wealth of nations Originally Published at Wealth Economics If you read this blog much, you’ll find many careful definitions of terms — something that the economics profession is terrible at. A blog called Wealth Economics really has to start at the top, with wealth. So here it is. “The only real, true wealth is…” You hear that sentence a lot — from economists, pundits, and all sorts of everyday people. It has...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog Yesterday I wrote of how Fed rate hikes had not translated into a decline in the amount of housing under construction, and without that I did not see how a recession could occur. And in reaction to January’s housing construction report I concluded, “To signify a likely recession, units under construction would have to decline at least -10%, and needless to say, we’re not there. With permits having...

A repost of a Bruce Webb take on Social Security and what happens if the Trust Funds go to zero. This is from 2015 and as you know, not much has been done. In one respect, maybe nothing should be done as long as it does not become a major crisis. By that I mean, we should be sure our actions are not over-zealous in solution. Do enough to stabilize it for the future as Dale Coberly and Bruce Webb proposed with the Northwest Plan. The timely is now...

To follow up on an earlier post on the future of artificial intelligence, AI has been making serious inroads in radiological imaging for a while. Unsurprisingly, histological imaging is the next frontier, and AI is conquering that as well. A subset of lung cancer patients will see metastatic spread to their brains. A recent study reports that deep learning algorithms can distinguish which cancers will, and which won’t, metastasize to the brain based...

 – by New Deal democrat at the Bonddad Blog Prof. Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser makes the point that the yield curve is still inverted, and has not yet eclipsed the longest previous time between onset of such an inversion and a recession. So he believes the threat of recession is still on the table. And he’s correct about the yield curve, although it is getting very long in the tooth. In the past half century, the shortest time between a 10...

Noah Smith has a blog post arguing that AI won’t take away all the jobs from humans. It’s a clever and well-written post that deserves your attention.Here are some money grafs:“So as AI gets better and better, and gets used for more and more different tasks, the limited global supply of compute will eventually force us to make hard choices about where to allocate AI’s awesome power. We will have to decide where to apply our limited amount of AI, and...

Employ America’s current corecast is for a 2.86% YoY core PCE print for February. The six-month growth rate of core PCE, which was under 2% in December, should now be over 3% in February. Core services ex-housing inflation will be up on a year-on-year basis versus the previous meeting. Many FOMC members, especially among the moderates in the committee (Daly, Mester, Powell, Waller) have expressed a willingness to look through a hot January...

Center for Economic Development and Policy Research, CEPR Dean Baker When we hear about inflation most of us probably think of items like food, gas, and rent, but when it comes to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the most frequently cited measure of inflation, auto insurance has played a very large role in recent years. The index for motor vehicle insurance rose 0.9 percent in July. It was responsible for 0.024 percentage points of the 0.4...