The Angry Bear

Black and Brown Americans suffer the most in biggest U.S. drop in life expectancy since WWII, Modern Healthcare, June 2021 In an earlier post listing a series of articles I thought might be interesting to AB, this one Modern Healthcare article was listed as one of interest. I decided to expand on the article and allow it more space and subsequent detail. The advent of Covid, lack of medical access, and subsequent resistance to vaccinations has...

It is an unfortunate fact that many think tanks funded by conservative plutocrats and nominally devoted to spreading free-market ideas actively foster the politics of white grievance.  I believe the evidence for this claim is quite strong, but it is not always immediately obvious that this is happening.  Classical liberals and libertarians generally do not engage in overt race-baiting, and they make arguments with at least a thin veneer of...

House prices continue to surge, with affordability near its worst since the Great Recession The FHFA and Case Shiller house price indexes for May and April, respectively, were released this morning. Because housing affordability is very much an issue, let’s take a look. YoY the FHFA index is up 15.7%, and the Case Shiller national index is up 13.9%: Not shown, but recall that last week the median price for new single-family homes was...

Socially Necessary Labour Time: outline of a review I have excerpted all the passages in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value in which Marx explicitly discusses the concept of socially necessary labour time by name and will go through them in manageable chunks. My first pass through the excerpts suggests to me that 13 segments would be a reasonable division of the material. Subsequent segments will superficially examine a few of the many Marxists...

“Getting to Yes: COVID Vaccine Edition,” Ken Haller, June 25, 2021 Pediatrician Dr. Ken Haller comes by way of AB Commenter and blogger Professor Joel Eissenberg. You can find Ken’s commentary on his site “Ken Haller.” Just follow the article title link or click on his name. If you have not been vaccinated yet, you putting your health and/or life in danger. Ken offers up a common sense discussion with two of his parents about their child and...

Not the Northwest, but still…Massachusetts is Cooking too!

Coronavirus dashboard for June 28: comparisons with one year ago as “delta” spreads Let’s begin this installment with a look at vaccinations by county from a different source that a reader pointed me to last week, COVIDactnow:  The urban/rural and Red State/Blue State divides are pretty obvious. Conor Kelly (whose work I was highlighting one year ago) also has a more detailed breakdown: He notes that income level also...

Dear readers, There are upcoming improvements to the function and looks of Angry Bear which are intended to enhance the readability, searchability, and usefulness of current posts and of the 20,000 posts of our blog from 2003 to now. The look of the site includes a wider width of the overall page, adjusted overall font size and line height, and re-organization of other default legibility settings. Posts will be displayed with titles and with...

“Could it be a better result? By this, I mean should there really have been an extreme shortage and long lead times?” A fellow writer was an engineer at OnSemi. As he stated once, his job was watching the crystals (future “wafer material) grow. More coming on this comment shortly. You will not be experts (I am not either) in the process. Hopefully, you will understand why the issues associated with manufacturing semiconductors are questionable. I...