Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Medicare is almost $200 billion in gross drug spend: Who gets the blame? — 46brooklyn Research This is a complex issue as there are many moving parts to drug pricing and their costs. Perplexing in describing the drug spend issues would seem appropriate. I am not even sure if this long post will adequately define the issue of how drug prices are set. However, here is another article which I believe may break this down even more so. Later on...

Just finished “Africa, A Biography of a Continent”” by John Reader. I don’t recall how this book came into my possession. It may have been on my mom’s bookshelf when we stopped by after they moved to take whatever we wanted. Whatever its provenance, I had only read a little African history: “King Leopold’s Ghost” and a book on the Boer War are the only ones I can recall. I also read Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which is a thinly veiled account of...

Two posts are at the bottom of this one. Just talking about on-purpose emission of exhaust by pickup trucks which have had the emissions control devices altered. They did this to blow black exhaust out of their exhaust. This report on Treehugger is an update on how well the world is doing. Simple terms, it ain’t. The goal with the implementation of conditional NDCs, plus additional net-zero commitments, was to achieve a 1.8°C rise. The United...

“A global house-price slump is coming,” The Economist, edited. I find this article to be interesting although I do not agree with much of it. Prices are an issue; but so are interest rates. Much of the costs of housing can also be from house manufacturing waste. I was watching my new home being built. The scrap is horrendous. The do-overs because of a lack of critical path are numerous. Quality is inspected into homes and not built into a home. I...

I bought a bottle of Belgian beer here in Rome. The guy behind the counter guessed I was from the USA (might have been my Joementum t-shirt) and said something which I now understand was “want a glass”. I said huh and he said “hai bisogna di un bichiere” so I said no. On my one block way home I saw 4 girls very cheerful about 6 to 8 years old. another with dad was arriving. They said that the had done “dolcetto/scherzeto” that is trick or treat....

Because Hayek would, right? I have previously discussed Donald Boudreaux’s penchant for encouraging vaccine hesitancy (see here, here, here).  This is disgraceful, it kills people. But he’s at it again.  This time he uncritically quotes a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the crank Surgeon General of Florida, Joseph A. Ladapo, arguing that young men should not be vaccinated against COVID.  (Boudreaux’s headline states that Ladapo is opposed to...

Seems that gas, fuel, gasoline is being used as a marker to understand just how horrible we have it as a result of the current inflation. It’s just sooooooooooo terrible. I’ll just say this. As a marker of inflation and our personal economic experience all it shows is how terrible we are at remembering. Unfortunately for us, such a bad memory leads us to terrible voting decisions. Though, it does allow for easy emotional manipulation of the citizenry...

The usual mix of articles on the internet. The important ones are healthcare and legal issues. The usual legal issues going on with trump who is flinging as much mud against the wall to confuse the issue of his attack on the US. Eventually, this will come to an end. Hopefully, there is an end where trump is prosecuted to the fullest extent he can be . . , jail. Jail, even if it is for one year. The other big issue I am seeing is commercial...

I’m ambivalent about this Ezra Klein piece: Trump’s efforts to stay in the news, however, are matched by Biden’s efforts to stay out of it. Biden gives startlingly few interviews and news conferences. He doesn’t go for attention-grabbing stunts or high-engagement tweets. I am not always certain if this is strategy or necessity: It’s not obvious to me that the Biden team trusts him to turn one-on-one conversations and news conferences to his...

Brett Crosby currently serves as Region IV Director for the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, representing Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. He taps into the current trends in the beef market from a producer side, and I couldn’t have said it any better than he has in his opinion piece in Northern Ag Network. Here’s Brett: A blog post published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on July 12, 2022, claimed that Congress is “rushing” to consider “aggressive...