Angry Bear has been posting articles on PFAS for a while now. Since I lived in Livingston County, Michigan, this was a problem. You could no longer eat the fish out of Strawberry Lake and some of the shallow wells were contaminated. Other commentaries . . . County shows higher levels of PFAS in blood than the U.S. population – Angry Bear. This goes beyond Livingston County. A Pittance Offered Up for National PFAS Cleanup. PFAS Contamination, the New...

There is a lot going on with SCOTUS this year. The death of Chevron diverts decision making from agencies which have an expertise in particular situations to the courts who lack the technical expertise. So now we have Thomas looking back in his crystal ball to see what they were doing in the 18th Century. Roberts believes the justices know more than the scientists and engineers know. This was done in Chevron which agency experts criticized. And...

If you want to make the big bux as a physician, you need to do procedures (e.g., endoscopies, colonoscopies, surgery). Among the most poorly compensated branches of medicine are pediatrics and geriatrics. And yet:“Pediatricians attend the same medical schools as those who enter other specialties, and education is expensive. Almost half of those who graduated with over $150,000 in debt 20 years ago have still not paid if off completely. In 2020 the...

 – by New Deal democrat As usual, the month starts out with important data on manufacturing and construction. There was bad news and good news. The bad news is that both were negative. The relatively good news is that they were so slightly negative as to be essentially flat. First, the ISM report on manufacturing declined very slightly – by -0.2 – further to 48.5. This is the third month in a row that this index has been under the equipoise...

Is the market on the verge of another big advance?

Theory and reality in economics So, certainly, both non-theorists and some theorists have little patience for research that displays mathematical ingenuity but has no value as social science.  But defining this work exactly is impossible. This sort of work is like pornography quite simple to recognize when one sees it. Jeffrey Ely As researchers, we (mostly) want to try to understand and explain reality. How we do this differs between various disciplines...

Podcasts Why the far right is winning in Europe, with Yanis Varoufakis Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is joined by Yanis Varoufakis By Ayeisha Thomas-Smith 02 July 2024 In the recent European elections, the far right won unprecedented gains. From the...

Struggling to sort out your feelings about the president? So am I. by Paul Waldman The Cross Section The purpose of this piece is not to convince you that Joe Biden should drop out of the race. In fact, I wrote it because I’m not sure if he should, and I think there are millions of people struggling with ambivalent and contradictory thoughts and emotions just as I am. So here are some things to keep in mind — some good, some not so good — as...

One of my favs for legal stuff. Supreme Court rulings on guns, abortion, Constitution: How originalism ate the law. (slate.com) by Dahlia Lithwick SLATE America is being led astray by a small handful of folks who are drunk-driving on originalism—and not in a funny Marx Brothers, spin-around-in-circles-and-all-fall-down sort of way. No, it’s in a children-murdered-in-their-classrooms, women-hemorrhaging-in-parking-lots,...

Still have to watch net government transfers. If they keep falling, economic growth may go flat.