The Angry Bear

We are almost two years into this pandemic, and a K-8 school in Boston is being forced to close for 10 days due to lack of testing capacity.  First, capacity was inadequate to quell an outbreak: Curley’s school testing program became overwhelmed when more than 500 students a day needed testing. That meant some infected students remained in school before getting tested for COVID-19 or getting their results. And now testing capacity is inadequate...

September JOLTS report: slow progress towards a new equilibrium This morning’s JOLTS report covers September, at the beginning of which the Delta wave peaked and then gradually receded for the remainder of the month. It is also the month that the last of pandemic emergency benefits ended.  We did see the second consecutive decline in job openings, as they decreased 191,000 to 10.438 million (blue in the graph below), while actual hiring...

Disposable time, surplus population, and the limitation of the hours of labour [embedded content] I’m on at 5:35 of the video. A little hoarse at 4 a.m.! Tags: and the limitation of the hours of labour, Disposable Time, surplus population

Seldom do we get the chance to build something the way it should be. For the internet, the first chance was back in the 1990s. Not enough was known then. We’ve learned a lot the hard way since. Let us begin our design by asking, “How best to utilize the internet?” It is apparent that everyone needs, should have basic access. Access on the order of that afforded by the U. S. Postal Service all the years. Like the Postal Service over all the years,...

Commenter and Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666. CPI Rose 0.9% in October on Higher Prices for Food, Shelter, Energy, and Vehicles; Annual Inflation at a 31 Year High And October at +0.94332% exceeds June at +0.90486% so it’s the biggest one month jump in over 13 years.. The consumer price index rose 0.9% in October, the greatest one month jump since June 2008, as higher prices for food, energy, new and used vehicles, furniture and outdoor...

Disposable time, disposable population, disposable products DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME, DISPOSABLE TIME… Did I mention “disposable time”? Marx repeated disposable time seven time in paragraph (three paragraphs in the complete works) I’ve taken the above excerpt from. In English. In capital letters. That, and the fact that his theory of crisis was sandwiched between two...

Where we are in the Conversation VBP: I had stopped the dialogue on Kip Sullivan’s paper Medicare’s “Value-Based Payment (VBP)” programs are Failing on page 3 of 12 pages so as to detail it as much as possible and breaking this portion out for readers. It can be reviewed here. This part of Kip’s paper gets to the root of why Value-based rewards to Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) will not work. It is also detailing why Value Based Payments...

 by New Deal democrat Why Yesterday’s CPI report was so important As promised, here is a link to my article, Why Yesterday’s CPI Report was such a Big Deal, over at Seeking Alpha. I go into a great deal of detail parsing the report, particularly with regard to how the huge increase in house prices as has been recorded by both the Case Shiller and FHFA house price indexes, is now bleeding over into “owner’s equivalent rent,” the CPI’s...

Nobody is (still) getting laid off [Note: This Nov. 10th consumer inflation report was very important, and not in a good way. So I plan on doing a more extensive post on it tomorrow, and I’ll probably put off the next “Coronavirus Dashboard” by Friday.] Initial claims declined another 4,000 this week to 267,000, and the 4-week average declined 7,250 to 278,000, both new pandemic lows: For the past 50 years, initial claims have only been at...

Producer price inflation: it’s a gas! I normally do not pay much attention to producer prices, but with the huge increase in spending earlier this year and the ensuing supply bottlenecks taking center stage, the course of inflation has emerged as the most pressing economic issue. To recap briefly, with the second round of pandemic stimulus checks early this year, retail spending increased over 10% between last October and this past March; and...