[unable to retrieve full-text content]I recently delivered my Homelessness 101 workshop in both English and French. All course material is available free of charge at this link: https://nickfalvo.ca/courses/

I’m reading an article about Kamala Harris in the October 21st New Yorker. This paragraph caught my eye:“When Harris talks of the origins of her interest in government, she lingers on a moment from her time in Montreal: a friend from Westmount High, Wanda Kagan, was being physically and sexually abused at home, and Harris’s mother took her in. “A big part of the reason I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her,” Harris has said. In...

Decoding Medicare Advantage by Andrew Sprung xpostfactoid Can STAT’s exposure of UHC’s exhortations to goose Medicare Advantage enrollees’ risk scores spur action to reduce MA overpayment? Load these Codes It is beyond reasonable doubt that the federal government’s payments to Medicare Advantage plans are grossly inflated by the plans’ gaming of the program’s risk adjustment system, designed to deter plans from cherry-picking health...

– by R.J. Sigmund Most of the demographic indicators of this summer’s Covid wave continued to recede rapidly in this week’s reports, and wastewater levels of the virus, the most definitive indicator of infections, have fallen to “low.” Among the CDC’s “early indicators” “test positivity”, or the percentage of tests for Covid that were positive, fell to 7.7% during the week ending October 5th, down from 9.5% positive during the week ending...

In Europe (the Euro area, to be precise), both unemployment and inflation are down, according to Eurostat,. Which, again, shows that the Phillips curve, a crucial concept behind neoclassical macroeconomic thinking that assumes a more or less stable negative relation between unemployment and inflation (high unemployment will bring inflation down), is not the place to go when predicting or analysing inflation. Sometimes, this relation is specified as a relation between wage increases and...

– by New Deal democrat A periodic reminder, real retail sales is one of my favorite economic indicators, because it tells us so much about the state of the consumer, and since consumption leads employment, it is a short leading indicator for that as well. In September retail sales in August rose 0.4% on a nominal basis. After adjusting for inflation, they rose 0.3%. The below graph norms both real retail sales (dark blue) and the similar...

Current Release October 17, 2024 Market Groups The major market groups posted mixed results in September. Among consumer goods, the production of durables decreased 0.7 percent. In contrast, the index for nondurables increased 0.5 percent, boosted by a 1.7 percent increase in energy goods. The output of business equipment declined 3.5 percent in September, weighed down by a sharp drop of 14.2 percent in the production of transit equipment...

July 19, 2024 This essay falls into three parts. First, I  discuss the question of what it is which makes  humans unique — that is, irreplaceable.  Second, I consider whether  machines  on balance  enhance or diminish humanness.   This has become an issue of the moment  with the growth of machine intelligence. Finally, I try to answer two questions: how can we secure our survival as  human beings? Is it worth trying to do so? A quick preview of  my answer to the first question. Some...

17th of October, 2024 Over the years, “Fortress Europe” has relied on a mix of bribery and force to keep out undocumented migrants fleeing wars, famine, and conditions of extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. But such measures are no solution to a problem that ultimately stems from much larger global and historical forces. LONDON – In 2023, 150,000 migrants crossed the Central Mediterranean in small boats from North Africa, fleeing war, pestilence, and starvation in their own...

This is what will be presented at the upcoming BRICS + meeting. Download report at link below.Description on X here. (It's nothing like the cheerleaders have been projecting.)BRICS Chairmanship ResearchImprovement Of The International Monetary And Financial SystemThe Ministry Of Finance Of The Russian Federation, Bank of Russia, Yakov and Partners