Tag Archives: Hot Topics

Coronavirus update: the virus is back; everyone should return to their prior precautions and get boosted this fall  – by New Deal democrat At the beginning of this year, I indicated that I anticipated only writing about Covid if something significant was happening.  It is, so let’s look at the data. Almost all State and Federal testing data is gone, but we do have a very good source in Biobot’s waste monitoring. Here’s the long term view...

AI is getting a lot of attention these days, and rightfully so. ChatGPT looks to take lots of jobs and to become the plagiarist’s tool of choice. Will AI replace artists, composers and novelists? Time will tell, but to look at what passes for “art” today in the mass consumer market, my money’s on AI.Another technology that is pushing the envelope is CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing. The New Yorker has a nice piece summarizing the state of play. The tl;dr...

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder first came to my attention in a footnote of an article in The New York Review of Books. The footnote gave a link to a series of 23 online lectures on the history of Ukraine, which I binge-watched over a period of about five days. I also read his books “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth.” Snyder also has a subscription-only Substack blog to which I subscribe. Snyder travels frequently to Ukraine these days, and his latest...

Despite 6+ month low in initial claims, yellow caution flag remains  – by New Deal democrat Last week the initial claims numbers justified restarting the yellow caution flag. This week initial jobless claims declined -13,000 to a 6+ month low of 216,000. The 4-week moving average declined -8,500 to 229,250. With a one-week lag, continuing claims declined 40,000 to 1.679 million: Since last year ago at this time also saw a steep decline, it...

In 2016, we had the Clinton v trump election. And trump won via three states swinging to the Repub vot via the anybody but trump or Clinton. There is not argument here and I have presented the data several times. Disney characters, other nonliving entities, pets, and other characters were voted for in the national election. The vote for “others” went up 4-6 times in 2016 as opposed to 2012 and dropping again in 2020. The three states in which this...

Scenes from the August employment report – and a warning  – by New Deal democrat The weekly lull after last Friday’s employment report will end tomorrow. In the meantime, let’s take a deeper dive into a few important trends in that report. First, the unemployment rate rose 0.3% to 3.8% – which is totally not surprising at all. As I wrote last Thursday, initial jobless claims have a nearly flawless 60+ year record for forecasting the trend...

Sorry to be so boring, but now I am angry with Gmail. It seems to me that Alphabet has adopted Elong Musk’s approach to customer service, programming, and destroying value. I wanted to send an e-mail and surfed to gmail.com. I was directed on to mail.google.come/mail/u/0/#inbox screenshot below. Notice there is no otion to use the e-mail site to send an e-mail. I have to click on the 3 horizontal lines to get “show main menu” then...

I am watching the evolution of the American automotive industry from combustion engine driven vehicles to electric driven vehicles. It is interesting to hear about all the potential blood to be spilled as management eventually whacks labor and plants to make the move from combustion to electric vehicles. It is inevitable as a new workforce must be trained and the old one phased out as the vroom-vroom is no longer manufactured. By no means should this...

Vehicle sales and residential and manufacturing plant construction continue to outweigh general manufacturing downturn  –  by New Deal democrat No important economic news today, but on Friday in addition to the employment report we did get our typical 1st of the month snapshot of manufacturing, vehicle sales, and construction, so let’s look at each. The ISM manufacturing index has had an excellent record going all the way back to the 1940s,...

There has been some head-scratching about the recent COVID variant, BA.2.86, which has 34 amino acid changes in the spike protein compared to its closest reference sequence. Commenter rjs asks: “how can one virus suddenly wake up one morning and find it had mutated 30 times overnight? And that all 30 of its mutations were viable? ..it’s difficult for me to understand how such a major change could have possibly occurred as part of what should...