I was married by the time I started graduate school. I suspect that being in a committed relationship, and in particular with someone who was also a grad student, kept me centered during the stressful times. Perhaps these were different times, but a recent study shows that today’s PhD students are struggling with mental health issues: “The researchers compared the rate at which PhD students, people with master’s degrees and a sample of the...

Interesting read as written by Attorney Joyce Vance. by Joyce Vance Civil Discourse On Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a redacted version of Jack Smith’s immunity motion. Now we have a clear view of what Smith believes is still on the table after the Supreme Court’s decision. The short version: just about everything. Smith acknowledges that the Court took Trump’s interactions with DOJ officials out of the case, but he argues that...

Letter: The New Statesman, 6th of September 2024 It is to the great credit of the New Statesman that it allowed two such opposing views on Ukraine to be published in its issue of 23 August. Brendan Simms says that Britain must do everything it can to “empower” Ukraine to restore its 1991 frontiers; Wolfgang Münchau writes that waning German and US support for “doing whatever it takes” to expel Russia from Ukraine will force a negotiated peace. Simms and those like him who advocate...

Running on Empty tonight. VA sent me a letter asking for all the information I believe was already sent to them. Some I have found rather quickly by exploring U of M records. Platelet counts for certain periods when they just almost disappeared. I need to talk to them tomorrow and see what the issue is or was. I have been in some of the little towns near Switzerland Rietheim-Weilheim, Germany comes to mind. Nice read . . . enjoy. Villages...

– by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims will be up against some very challenging comparisons for the next 6 months or so, due to some unresolved post-COVID seasonality. Which means that the headline numbers this week, which look very benign at the surface, are not quite so good as they have been for the past year. For the week, initial claims rose 6,000 to 225,000. The four week moving average declined -750 to 224,250. Continuing claims,...

Somewhere, there is a correlation between the two . . . The Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico dockworker strikes are over. The strike by tens of thousands of dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts has been called off, after the International Longshoremen’s Association and the U.S. Maritime Alliance, representing ocean carriers and port operators, reached a tentative agreement on wages. The two sides also agreed to extend the existing contract...

Remember, stick with the process.

– by New Deal democrat I wanted to follow up on a point I made yesterday: although manufacturing is no longer a big enough slice of the US economy to bring about an economic downturn on its own – unless for some reason the manufacturing downturn were unusually severe – when it is paired with a downturn in construction, that historically has been a reliable (but of course not perfect!) harbinger of recession. And while yesterday’s construction...

This was the only question and answer that mattered. The Times and various other news outlets are elsewhere on the topic of losing the 2020 Election. I remember William Saletan writing articles for Slate Magazine “The Fray” while I was in the comments section reading them and then doodahman;s comments picking Saletan’s commentary apart. William is picking up on an important topic which The Times and other news outlets are purposely ignoring....

1.0 Introduction This post illustrates a derivation of prices of production, based on certain properties of duality theory as applied to linear programming. I strive to be more concise and elementary than previous expositions. This exposition is based on John Roemer's Reproducible Solution (Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1981). You will find no utility maximization or supply and demand functions below. I have no need for such hypotheses....