Tag Archives: politics

Conspiracy Theories: How to Pick Out the Plausible Ones This is an age of rampant conspiratorialism.  Bill Gates is behind the pandemic because he wants to shoot you full of vaccines.  No wait, it’s all those 5G cell towers.  Or maybe it’s bioterrorism from China.  Or just a hoax perpetrated by international capital to undermine Donald Trump, the people’s tribune.  The right wing disinformation machine cranks out this stuff constantly, but paranoid...

Conspiracy Theories: How to Pick Out the Plausible Ones This is an age of rampant conspiratorialism.  Bill Gates is behind the pandemic because he wants to shoot you full of vaccines.  No wait, it’s all those 5G cell towers.  Or maybe it’s bioterrorism from China.  Or just a hoax perpetrated by international capital to undermine Donald Trump, the people’s tribune.  The right wing disinformation machine cranks out this stuff constantly, but paranoid...

Coronavirus, the economy, and the election: the jury is still out on all three There is some housing data out today; I’ll probably have a post up about it tomorrow at Seeking Alpha, and I’ll link to it here. Meanwhile, the jury is still out on the effects of the “reopening” of many States on coronavirus infections. Here’s a graph of the 7 day average of tests, new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, divided between the Boston, NYC, Philadelphia...

Woke Is Reactionary: The Small Business Lending Edition We live in a drastically unequal society.  Everywhere you look you will find injustice, constraint and exploitation.  Being a member of a racial or other minority increases the odds you will end up on the short end, so what should we do about it?  There’s a progressive solution, to change the system so injustice, constraint and exploitation are minimized.  And then there’s the woke solution, to...

(Dan here…NDd’s post points to more than the impact of the US catching up in testing only recently, but also points to beginning answers readers have asked in comments about what the statistics show regarding re-opening and where we might be failing to report. ) Coronavirus dashboard: emphasis on testing I want to focus this edition on testing issues. While the seven day average number of deaths continues to decline: The seven day average number of...

Bad news and good news on coronavirus; plus, implications for Election Day No economic news today as we head into the Memorial Day weekend, but there are a few coronavirus and economic/political developments of note. First, the bad news: the declining trend in new diagnosed cases of coronavirus in the US has stopped in the past week. Instead new cases have leveled off. Here’s a graph from Conor Kelly’s excellent tableau coronavirus dashboard page:...

“Obamagate!” I know, I should probably not waste everybody’s time commenting on this nonsense, but the push on it has been massive, with it seeming to influence a lot of people it should not, so I have decided some push back is called for, even if those who should see it do not.   I am partly triggered in this by getting defriended on Facebook yesterday by a generally intelligent libertarian academic economist I know who started massively linking to...

I am reading this on Bloomberg entitled “Saudi oil rush threatens to disrupt stabilizing U.S. oil market.” These shipments are planned, Saudis are not sending this over out of the goodness of their hearts. Furthermore, the shipments themselves take roughly 21 days to get to the US. The orders were placed over 3 weeks ago. When you have a lot of US capacity which produces at a higher price and we are seeking to become oil independent and we are seeking to...

This is an interesting study.  This link is to the summary.   There is a link there to the full study.   600 people with active disease of over 2 weeks completed a survey to find out just what people are experiencing with the illness.  I find the following most interesting: ● Early testing is crucial, and questions remain around test accuracy: Despite all respondents showing COVID-19 symptoms, 47.8% were either denied testing or not tested for another...

by Ken Melvin Economy’s Role Economy: An Economy is a social entity’s aggregate activity of producing and exchanging goods and services. To date, a large body of knowledge about how economies work has been accumulated; a body of knowledge known as the science of economics. In a Well Functioning Economy, the requisite goods and services are efficiently produced and equitably distributed whilst all the while giving utmost consideration to Human Welfare and...