Tag Archives: Hot Topics

I had an email exchange a couple days ago with Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo about polls (which he’s written a lot about recently) and the election betting market (which he had never mentioned). Yesterday, he used our exchange as a jumping off point to explain why he doesn’t believe the betting market is reliable and certainly no improvement over polling. The money grafs:“First of all, as I said, bets are largely made on the basis of...

The old model of a single doc running a practice is disappearing in America. Between the overhead and the reduced compensation, this model of health care delivery looks increasingly anachronistic.When I started as an assistant professor at a medical school in 1987, there was a lot of money sloshing around. Patients and their insurance companies would pay a premium to be seen by docs in an academic health care practice. Managed care put an end to that,...

One of several articles I picked up on over the last few days. and decided to post at Angry Bear. Younger people are having to overextend themselves financially to buy housing. Not so different than a few decades ago. Except they are more in debt and more apt to go bankrupt due to a lost job, etc. Income does not appear to be keeping up with the price of housing and loan interest rates. Or perhaps, mortgage increases have outstripped income? A...

I’ve posted here before about herd immunity. Prior to inoculation/vaccination, herd immunity was the result of enough people dying or surviving that the transmission of the disease (plague, smallpox, etc) was arrested in that population until the next generation of uninfected people grew up, whereupon the substrate for another round of death appeared.But let’s be clear: the survivors weren’t necessarily healthy. Many polio survivors spent the rest of...

Just some political ranting on an old topic . . . He couldn’t beat Debbie Stabenow to get into the Senate. So, he retired from the House. Funny how Mike Rogers returns to Michigan after Senator Debbie Stabenow announces her plan to retire in 2023. But then when he left Michigan, he knew he could not beat Stabenow. A senate seat was the next step in his political climb and Stabenow was unbeatable. So off to Florida he went for 10 years. Now...

Last year, mRNA vaccines won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This morning found RNA once again the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. By the time I finished college, RNA was familiar to me as a family of biopolymers that together specified the manufacture of proteins in cells. Ribosomal RNA made up the platform and enzyme that performed the assembly of amino acids into proteins. Transfer RNAs were the small adapter...

As Category 4 Hurricane Helene approached the Florida Panhandle, a number of Republican senators and representatives voted against supplementing disaster relief in a government funding extension which was passed by both houses of Congress. Many of the Republican lawmakers voted against the provision of additional necessary funding to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) represent states that were hit particularly hard by Hurricane...

Is it ok to forgo the “needless to say” phrase to introduce an idea or expectation already known? Yeah probably. What is going to happen on October 1 is a cage fight or no holds barred mental-wrestling event with no physical contact. The two VP candidates will go at it on national TV with probable open (or hot) mikes (it sells more advertising). Moderators will not be able to challenge a candidate’s statements for authenticity. I am sure we will...

Good Old Days? A story . . . I was at Parker-Hannifin Fluid Power for a bit over 4-years. Due to the economic slowdown in 1982, they let me go. I was replaced by someone out of sales. The explanation? His wanting to learn about manufacturing hydraulic and air cylinders. It was obvious he was losing his job in Sales. My boss came out of Sales and knew little about production planning and control. Over 4 years I made him look good by cutting inventory...

-by New Deal democrat The monthly personal income and spending report is now the most important report of all, except for jobs. That’s becuase it tells us so much about the state of the consumer economy. It is the raw material for several important coincident indicators that the NBER looks at, as well as several leading indicators on the spending side. And to put this month’s report into the perspective of the imminent baseball postseason, it...