The Angry Bear

How should we grade our collective response to the covid pandemic?  What lessons should we draw for the future?  I believe that our response was poor.  To see why, just imagine where we would be today if effective vaccines had not been developed.  Our current strategy of moderate social distancing, intermittent partial lockdowns, and economic assistance for businesses and the unemployed would not have been sustainable for another 1 or 2 years as...

Steve Hutkins from Save the Post Office. As you can see, postal service delivery would lengthen from a maximum of 3 – day delivery to 4 and 5-day delivery service for First Class mail and Periodicals. The impact of the changes in delivery would would slow approximately 20.7 billion pieces of First Class Mail, or about 39 percent of FCM volume (see chart below). The Postal Service has requested an Advisory Opinion from the Postal Regulatory...

Coronavirus dashboard: entering the home stretch? G*d willing, I will only feel the need to update this information for another month or two. The US is simply making great progress on all fronts, and there are no new outbreaks in any of the States. Close to 40% of the entire US population is totally vaccinated, and almost 50% has received at least one dose: As a result, both cases and deaths are lower than their troughs last summer,...

Big Pharma says they need to charge astronomical prices to pay for research and development. Yet, the amount they spend on manipulating the market to enrich shareholders completely eclipses what's spent on R&D. Today, I confronted a CEO about the industry's lies, with visuals ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/c3jSLr0yVd— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) May 18, 2021 Tags: big pharma, drug prices...

Unfortunately, carbon pricing does not seem to be on the agenda of either the Biden administration or progressive advocates of an aggressive policy response to climate change.  In part this neglect reflects ideological bias against market-based approaches to regulation and in favor of methods that are more direct in their effects.  But it also reflects hard-headed political considerations.  Carbon pricing is unpopular because it makes energy more...

The Public Reappearance Of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict  Sigh, so much that is so obvious, and so much that is not, but so much that is so sad, especially as there seems to be little real prospect of any serious improvement or settlement on the underlying issues.  Indeed, it is probably the case we did not see anything happen for a good 7 years because from the Palestinian side things looked so hopeless in the face of ongoing Israeli expansion...

Hear that China is in trouble with an aging, decreasing population. Headline says that California is in trouble; decreasing population for the first time ever. Years ago now, we heard that Japan was in trouble with an aging, decreasing population. Japan’s doing fine, thank you. And, China and California will both be better off for the decrease. More is not always better. We know where they are coming from with this stuff. They bought into the old...

China successfully lands a rover on the red planet, National Geographic, Andrews The Zhurong rover survived the harrowing “seven minutes of terror,” touching down on a vast plain called Utopia Planitia that may once have been the site of an ancient ocean. Zhurong will search for evidence of water and past habitability on Mars, possibly paving the way for future human missions. China is now only the second country in history to explore the Martian...

Today (Saturday, May 15th) I learned that my EconoSpeak post, “Disposable People” (which has over 2500 views) has been reinstated by Blogger. I never knew it had been removed. If I was a GOP whiner, this would be a prime example of cancel culture in operation. But of course, it’s only an artefact of “moderation that has to rely on algorithms” to identify potential community guidelines violations. ...