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rjs
denizen of a rural NE Ohio swamp
unencumbered by education, affiliations, beliefs or agenda; im not advocating anything
Recent Activity
hi anne; i just nominated you to be made administrator of Economist's View. (i also suggested someone pay you to run it):
https://angrybearblog.com/2019/12/does-menzie-chinn-or-tyler-cowen-replace-mark-thoma.html#comment-3143890
as you can gather from that url, there's talk of drafting menzie or tyler cohen to replace mark. i don't think anyone can, but you're the next best thing..
Thread
Having trouble keeping up. More thread for comments...
i read that at Ecowatch last night. my first thought was that we are so polarized now, half of those who read it won't get past Reagan's name before coming to a conclusion...
What’s the value of a clean beach? Here’s how economists do the numbers
I was asked to write an article for The Conversation that explains how economists place values on environmental goods (with examples). Here's what I came up with. Apologies to all of those involved in the research if this comes across as self-promoting--the perils of writing with an editor. ...
what you're talking about may work in an upscale suburb, but i dont know anyone in my rural Ohio county who doesn't own guns. i suspect that's also the case in most of rural America...
When ALL Gun Owners are Shunned
When it comes to politics, it should be of no surprise to anyone that we're in uncharted, nonlinear territory now. Weaponized social networks have seized control of the political process from the traditional political parties and their media gatekeepers. They are in charge now and, more impor...
that's someone who hasn't seen the Browns play..
"Giants’ worst-to-first turnaround could be stunningly fast"
Hope for fans of lousy NFL teams: A remarkable and confounding trend was strengthened this season. The Jaguars and Eagles, last-place finishers in 2016, won their division titles this season. If the Panthers do the same, three last-place finishers winning their divisions the next year would tie ...
Mr Righteous Conservative, my reference to my now deceased neighbor as a neanderthal was not meant to be a description of his physical characteristics or behavior; it was meant to describe his thought processes, as originating in a time when people grabbed whatever they could for themselves and screwed the other guys, long before civilization brought people together to look out for one another and for the greater good...
there was no hatred of the gentleman involved....offhand, i couldn't think of a better word to use...
What is the GOP goal? A return to the "gilded age" (or worse)
When right-wing Roy Moore said that the time when America was great was during slavery, he revealed something key to the current GOP members of Congress and state legislatures--their primary goal is to return to a time when owners of property held all the keys to the kingdom and workers were jus...
like my neanderthal neighbor used to say, "this was a great country before Roosevelt"
What is the GOP goal? A return to the "gilded age" (or worse)
When right-wing Roy Moore said that the time when America was great was during slavery, he revealed something key to the current GOP members of Congress and state legislatures--their primary goal is to return to a time when owners of property held all the keys to the kingdom and workers were jus...
whatever Trump bump there was in GDP is going to get whacked when the revisions to international trade data released last week are incorporated:
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/october-trade-deficit-86-revisions-whack-3rd-quarter-gdp-6123
moreover, more than a quarter of the jump in 3rd quarter GDP was inventory building, and October data looks like that will all be given back in the 4th quarter...
all that said, there's not a lot in GDP i can see that one could attribute to any president...the biggest contributor to growth in recent months has been auto sales, as people replaced their insured vehicles that were damaged by flooding in southeast Texas...
Ten Years of Select Economic Data in Graphs
A pet peeve of mine as an economist is giving too much credit to the current quarterback , er...President for [economic] wins and too much blame for [economic] losses. To give a better picture of what's going on with the economy, here are some graphs of the past decade of select economic data f...
we're all so much safer under Pruitt's EPA, don't you think? two weeks ago, they ruled that radiation from a dirty bomb or a nuclear meltdown posed "no harmful health effect", then yesterday they said that water drawn from wells at a hazardous waste site in Puerto Rico was fit for consumption, and today we know longer have to be concerned about air pollution...with all these threats eliminated, our quality of life is just getting better all the time...
If you hold your breath, air quality doesn't matter either
And then there's this... Citing the risk of conflicts of interest, the EPA administrator instituted a sweeping change to the agency’s core system of advisory panels on Tuesday, restricting membership to scientists who don’t receive EPA grants. In practice, the move represents “a major purge of...
i breed bees for their own sake, no capitalist motive...i haven't sold honey or any bee products in over 30 years...
"How Capitalism Averted The Bee-Pocalypse"
Capitalism certainly does things like this. In 2016, there were 2.78 million honeybee colonies in the United States—16 percent more than when the disorder hit in 2006. In fact, there are more honeybee colonies in the country today than in nearly 25 years. Honey production also shows no pattern o...
wrong title. should be "man loses money, finds forture living alone on a desert island"
"Man loses fortune, lives alone on desert island for 20 years"
He says there are some dangerous animals to content with, but he feels he's safe from terrorists.
that's true in my experience...neither my wife and i nor many of our liberal friends have children...when we all die off, you'll be stuck with the society the conservatives have made, with no one around to show you how to make it better....
"Are Liberals Dying Out?"
Do the math. Nevertheless, despite cultural trends, the best available evidence suggests that political ideology is heritable, and that people with liberal personality traits currently have far fewer children than conservatives.
i was amused that someone called him out on that "billions and billions and billions of dollars" -- he would have been right if he had just said billions, but in attempting to embellish his claim, he repeated it, and thus was left with a statement that, taken literally, could not add up to any less than $6 billion dollars, double the actual amount...
"Fact check: Trump’s reasons for leaving Paris Agreement"
It would be better if the stated reasons for leaving the the Paris Agreement made better sense: During a White House news conference, Trump outlined his reasons for leaving the agreement. Many of them, however, were based on questionable data. Here are some of Trump's main arguments for exiting...
Dodge Dart, circa 63 thru 69, almost never needed repair, but one could disassemble and reassemble them in an afternoon..
"From a mechanic's perspective, what car is the easiest and cheapest to repair and maintain? Or, conversely, what cars rarely need repair?"
Quora discussion with a variety of answers.
thing is, for 8 years, half the country was thinking that the more Obama fails, the better off they'd be...
The More Trump Fails, the Better Off We’ll Be
I have a new column: The More Trump Fails, the Better Off We’ll Be: The Trump administration has gone to war against independent sources of information that pose a challenge to its policy goals and the narratives it tells to support them. One of the most recent targets is the Congressional Budg...
in the 60s, i flew everywhere in the US on standby...i can't recall how much i paid, but it couldn't have been much becasuse i was never employed...i would have to bet that it was less than Greyhound...
"There Was No ‘Golden Age’ of Air Travel"
Worth remembering: For my parents’ generation, it cost several thousand dollars in today’s money to travel to Europe. Even coast-to-coast trips were something relatively few could afford. As recently as the 1970s, an economy ticket from New York to Hawaii cost nearly $3,000, adjusted for inflati...
ok, while using natural gas has reduced our CO2 emissions, fugitive methane releases from fracking have increased our methane emissions, and methane is a much worse greenhouse gas...and just this wednesday, Trump's EPA rolled back the regulations that required oil and gas companies to detect and repair leaks of methane at fracking sites...
"Why Dropping the Paris Agreement May not Matter Anyways." (Updated)
Brent Sohngen, (Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at Ohio State University, climate economics expert, member of the Nobel Prize winning IPCC writing team, fairly conservative academic, and rapidly developing departmental curmudgeon) submitted the letter below to the Columbus Disp...
and because defense is 54% of discretionary spending, all that would probably increase the deficit anyway..
Graphic of the Day: Wither Environmental Protection?
...and here's the graphical version (from FiveThirtyEight) of the Washington Post story on the proposed budgetary demise of environmental protection:
take it one provision of Ryan's bill at a time...for instance, Portman of Ohio supports Kasich's Medicaid expansion, so he would vote against the Medicaid phaseout in the AHCA...finding two more should be easy...
Links for 05-08-17
Less is more when it comes to Federal Reserve policy - Larry Summers “Troubled Wisconsin Man Goes on 50 State Killing Spree” - Econbrowser Inflation targets and the benefits of an explicit tolerance ban - VoxEU On Health and Welfare, Moral Arguments Outweigh Economics - NYTimes Can France ...
A conversation about the Fed’s balance sheet at FT Alphaville -
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/04/28/2187827/a-conversation-about-the-feds-balance-sheet/
Links for 04-28-17
Trump is undermining his own treasury secretary - Larry Summers Conversation: Brad DeLong and Marshall Steinbaum - Equitable Growth On the heterogeneous impact of free trade agreements - VoxEU Rules vs. Discretion Historically Contemplated - Uneasy Money Global value chains and the increasin...
trouble is, at today's $3.00 per mmBTU, they can't afford to drill, baby, drill...
"The US Geological Survey may have found the largest untapped natural-gas deposit in the country"
Good. Drill, baby, drill.
US consumer price index for dairy products, 1935 to March 2017:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SEFJ
1982-1984=100
they've also got 'milk, cheese and egg' indexes for dozens of other countries:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/search?st=consumer+price+index+dairy
Milk is mind-bogglingly cheap.
The Canadian Cook Book was first published in 1923. My copy is the twentieth edition, published in 1949. It dates from the heyday of home economics, a time when scientific principles were being applied to domestic life. Recipes are mixed in with nutritional information, guidance on the finer p...
drink? if you could bottle that, you could sell it as a sedative...
Drink at each awkward pause / stupid mistake / embarrassing gesture
he can approve it all he wants, it ain't gonna get built...as i wrote a few weeks ago, "it seems certain that oil prices at these levels make it extremely unlikely that Transcanada can continue to pursue the Keystone XL pipeline, simply because oil sands expansion is out of the question at these price levels...because they have to burn one barrel of oil to extract three, the breakeven cost for extracting oil from Canada’s tar sands is much higher than most other places around the world; most figures i've seen indicate they need $50 US oil prices just to operate the extraction facilities now in existence, without any expansion...Keystone was originally proposed at a time when oil prices were twice what they are now., but 64 of the tar sands projects that were on the drawing board when oil prices first started falling have since been cancelled, with many of of the oil companies involved taking large losses, so the oil that was to fill the Keystone will no longer be there if the pipeline were to be completed...about a year ago, IHS estimated that a new greenfield oil sands mine (without an upgrader) required a WTI price between $85 to $95 per barrel on average to breakeven...a month ago, petrogeologist and oil analyst Art Berman at oilprice.com also showed that it would take at least $85 oil prices for 10 years to develop enough new oil sand projects to fill the Keystone XL…furthermore, there are already two massive Canadian tar sands pipeline projects already approved, which would ship any new dilbit production to the west coast and to the east...the major oil companies see the writing on the wall; just this week, Shell decided to divest nearly all of its Canadian oil sands interests in exchange for $7.25 billion, and Marathon announced an agreement to sell its Canadian subsidiary, including their interest in the Athabasca Oil Sands, and use the proceeds to buy Permian basin assets in Texas...all the deep pocketed major oil companies are getting out of the oil sands, and the small companies left with an interest there do not have the capital wherewithal to expand..."
links for all that are here: http://focusonfracking.blogspot.com/2017/03/oil-price-breaks-as-crude-supplies-hit.html
Quote of the Day: President acknowledges women know more than men about technology
'It's going to be an incredible pipeline, greatest technology known to man - or woman,' Trump bragged from the Oval Office. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4345754/Trump-administration-approves-Keystone-XL-pipeline.html#ixzz4cGOKoyZ
it's obvious that Conway was reading about the wikileaks release of the CIA's Vault 7, which shows they have the capability of remotely turning over the counter smart phones and TVs into spying devices...the release was widely covered in the foreign press, not so much here..
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/wikileaks-cia-what-are-they-explained-vault-7-year-zero-julian-assange-secrets-a7616826.html
1) The CIA has the ability to break into Android and iPhone handsets, and all kinds of computers. The US intelligence agency has been involved in a concerted effort to write various kinds of malware to spy on just about every piece of electronic equipment that people use. That includes iPhones, Androids and computers running Windows, macOS and Linux.
2) Doing so would make apps like Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp entirely insecure Encrypted messaging apps are only as secure as the device they are used on – if an operating system is compromised, then the messages can be read before they encrypted and sent to the other user. WikiLeaks claims that has happened, potentially meaning that messages have been compromised even if all of the usual precautions had been taken.
3) The CIA could use smart TVs to listen in on conversations that happened around them. One of the most eye-catching programmes detailed in the documents is "Weeping Angel". That allows intelligence agencies to install special software that allows TVs to be turned into listening devices – so that even when they appear to be switched off, they're actually on.
4) The agency explored hacking into cars and crashing them, allowing 'nearly undetectable assassinations'
5) The CIA hid vulnerabilities that could be used by hackers from other countries or governments Such bugs were found in the biggest consumer electronics in the world, including phones and computers made Apple, Google and Microsoft. But those companies didn't get the chance to fix those exploits because the agency kept them secret in order to keep using them, the documents suggest.
6) More information is coming. The documents have still not been looked through entirely. There are 8,378 pages of files, some of which have already been analysed but many of which hasn't. When taken together, those "Vault 7" leaks will make up the biggest intelligence publication in history, WikiLeaks claimed.
Links for 03-14-17
Trumpcare vs. Obamacare: Apocalypse Foretold - Paul Krugman Wages Are Up? Not For Ordinary Workers, They Aren't - Kevin Drum The Trump administration dons a tinfoil hat - The Washington Post On the Cost of Holding Reserves. Sometimes It Is Not That High - Brad Setser Differing Productivity...
except for the 58,000 construction workers put on the job early this year because of a record warm February, the employment report was mediocre...meanwhile, every other January metric was negative on a real basis, with real PCE down 0.3%...Q1 GDP will be lousy.
Fed Watch: Green Light
Green Light, by Tim Duy: If there was truly any potential impediment to a rate hike from the Fed this week, it would have come from a weak employment report. The employment report was decidedly not weak. Instead, it finished paving the way to a Fed rate hike. Not enough yet, however, to justi...
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