Tag Archives: Hot Topics

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...

Is anyone else having trouble with Chrome. I get a page not private error when I tried to open this page. I am now using Firefox. Chrome seems to have added a popup which, first of all, demands attention, but second of all causes older Chrome to correctly note that Chrome has become malware and block my access (for example to this page). Now many companies do this sort of stuff, but, until now, Alphabet has behaved well. I think it...

The topic is important as too much resource and funds may be being spent on care with little return. Eighty-one percent of combined low value care was by out of network clinicians of which 90% was by specialists. There is some issues here. If I can find more detail, I will revise this short blurb. The impact of low-value care received by Medicare beneficiaries outside of their health systems (medicalxpress.com), Timothy Dean. Results from a new...

Burger King Whopper is 4 ounces. A Wendy;s single is 4 ounces. The real question is, can you misrepresent a product in advertising? Everyone may know the product is not what it is claimed to be. However, does this relieve the seller of responsibility for misrepresentation? The ten and fifteen cent McDonald’s burgers were tiny at the time. The McDonalds Quarter Pounder weighs 4.25 ounces. Did McDonalds brag of their size? or is it all in what you...

Weekly Indicators for August 28 – September 1 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The long leading indicators continue to forecast that a hard landing is out there, while the short leading indicators – aided by a sharp increase in consumer spending in the past few weeks – say it isn’t close to being here, at least not yet, As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the...

I believe the key words here are taking a break from free trade. Mostly too, I believe the free-trade-motif (so to speak) has been used enough times to line the pockets of the upper income percentile. Time for a change. While labor has disappeared to overseas facilities, the nation has not moved in a direction to assist Labor with other alternatives or opportunities to prosper. Accusing the president’s thinking of being “increasingly dangerous”...