The Angry Bear

From time to time, Mark Jamison or myself would feature articles from the Save the Post Office blog as authored by Steve Hutkins, a literature professor who teaches “place studies” at the Gallatin School of New York University. Mark Jamison a retired Postmaster for a small town in North Carolina would often write there also. This particular post was featured in October of 2016. Where FedeEx, UPS, DHL or other services do not go, the US Postman still does...

Interesting development last week, Missouri’s state Legislature decided a minimum wage of $10/hour is a hardship for business and too much for Labor. This comes after the MSC sided with St. Louis and Kansas City in setting a minimum wage of $10.10/hour. The Republican legislature decided differently and passed legislation to prevent local communities from establishing minimum wage above what the state mandates. “ Thousands of workers in St. Louis will...

The Military Times reports: A handful of Pentagon nominees will be waiting for Senate confirmation when the upper chamber returns in September from its summer recess, but the administration still has dozens of Defense Department positions to fill. Leaving State Department vacancies aside, I thought the Trump readiness rhetoric applied to DOD…not so much I guess.

[embedded content] Published on Mar 18, 2016 “I am probably the greatest politician that ever lived.” “It’s amazing what I say and what I do and what I get away with.” Clip and quote from the feature documentary The Joe Show

This shows <a href = “http://www.businessinsider.com/employee-retention-rate-top-tech-companies-2017-8”>how long employees stay at major tech companies</a>: Not having worked for a tech company, I found these tenures to be pretty short.  I Googled retention at Google (I’m trying to stay on their good side) and found an article suggesting the  median tenure at Google is 1.1 years. I imagine this sort of thing is hard to measure from the...

I met Cathy in Cambridge when she spoke at MIT a few years ago. This is  re-posted from Naked Capitalism.  Cathy’s whole TED Talk can be watched after the fold. Data Scientist Cathy O’Neil: “Algorithms Are Opinions Embedded in Code” Cathy O’Neil has a PhD in mathematics from Harvard and is the author of the best seller Weapons of Math Destruction. She is also involved in Occupy Wall Street. In this TED talk, she describes how algorithms routinely...

Pres. Trump decides on pardoning Sheriff Joe for all of his community service work in Maricopa County Arizona. What an achievement for a man who can be a racist, defy a Federal Court, and gain the support of a US Pres.

An economy on autopilot between Scylla and Charybdis Interest rates are a vital determinant of longer term growth. While the economy has remained on autopilot for the last several years, with almost no political stimulus or disruption — though that may well change next month — the Fed has to steer a course between the Scylla of an interest rate spike and the Charybdis of an inverted yield curve.  The Presidential election spike in long term interest rates...

Reports of Obamacare’s death are greatly exaggerated: All counties to be covered for 2018 Obamacare has now obtained an insurer for every county in the country, defying Republican claims that the program is collapsing. As reported by The Hill, “At one point or another over the past year, more than 80 counties have been at risk of having no ObamaCare insurer on the exchanges in 2018.” On Thursday (Aug. 24), the last “bare” county, in Ohio, was covered by...