The Angry Bear

JOLTS report shows stabilization in almost all metrics for May  – by New Deal democrat The JOLTS report for May showed most metrics continued to show a slight rebounding from their March lows. The overall picture for now appears to be one of stabilization, consistent with the fabled “soft landing.” To the data: job openings (blue in the graph below), a soft statistic that is polluted by imaginary, permanent, and trolling listings, rose...

Will Biden drop out?  Should he?  What then? To run or not to run So far Biden seems determined to stay in the presidential race.  He and his campaign have worked hard to tamp down any talk that he might step aside.  Yet there is a reasonable chance he will step aside, especially if his polls drop.  If he stays in and loses, he will have to live with the fact that he lost one of the most consequential elections in American history.  Just as...

Angry Bear has been posting articles on PFAS for a while now. Since I lived in Livingston County, Michigan, this was a problem. You could no longer eat the fish out of Strawberry Lake and some of the shallow wells were contaminated. Other commentaries . . . County shows higher levels of PFAS in blood than the U.S. population – Angry Bear. This goes beyond Livingston County. A Pittance Offered Up for National PFAS Cleanup. PFAS Contamination, the New...

There is a lot going on with SCOTUS this year. The death of Chevron diverts decision making from agencies which have an expertise in particular situations to the courts who lack the technical expertise. So now we have Thomas looking back in his crystal ball to see what they were doing in the 18th Century. Roberts believes the justices know more than the scientists and engineers know. This was done in Chevron which agency experts criticized. And...

If you want to make the big bux as a physician, you need to do procedures (e.g., endoscopies, colonoscopies, surgery). Among the most poorly compensated branches of medicine are pediatrics and geriatrics. And yet:“Pediatricians attend the same medical schools as those who enter other specialties, and education is expensive. Almost half of those who graduated with over $150,000 in debt 20 years ago have still not paid if off completely. In 2020 the...

 – by New Deal democrat As usual, the month starts out with important data on manufacturing and construction. There was bad news and good news. The bad news is that both were negative. The relatively good news is that they were so slightly negative as to be essentially flat. First, the ISM report on manufacturing declined very slightly – by -0.2 – further to 48.5. This is the third month in a row that this index has been under the equipoise...

Struggling to sort out your feelings about the president? So am I. by Paul Waldman The Cross Section The purpose of this piece is not to convince you that Joe Biden should drop out of the race. In fact, I wrote it because I’m not sure if he should, and I think there are millions of people struggling with ambivalent and contradictory thoughts and emotions just as I am. So here are some things to keep in mind — some good, some not so good — as...

One of my favs for legal stuff. Supreme Court rulings on guns, abortion, Constitution: How originalism ate the law. (slate.com) by Dahlia Lithwick SLATE America is being led astray by a small handful of folks who are drunk-driving on originalism—and not in a funny Marx Brothers, spin-around-in-circles-and-all-fall-down sort of way. No, it’s in a children-murdered-in-their-classrooms, women-hemorrhaging-in-parking-lots,...

AB was off the internet. Just about the time I called our hardware computer company, we came back up again.

I put this in line for posting maybe today (Monday), asked Joel to look at it and offer an opinion on it, and was wondering if it had any consequence. By that I mean, the term fascism, fascist, etc. is becoming a popular term in people’s commentary, and is not a scary label when applied anymore. The not so supreme court decided today, our last president is immune from any prosecution for his criminal activities. For all intents and purposes, he...