Initial and continued jobless claims: signs that the worst of the pandemic related layoffs may be behind us Some – very relative – good news in unemployment claims this week. It looks like the recent increase in new claims has peaked, while continued claims continue to decline. With new daily infections, still horrible at 100,000/day, […]
AB currently uses a WordPress comment system which has been problematic. As a result, I have been researching other plug-in systems when readers have asked about functionality not available in WP. The Disqus system seems to have the functionality that was requested (may be dependent upon web browser being used). An ad-free version can also […]
The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon, Osita Nwanevu, staff writer, The New Republic. We are smarter than they are or at least better educated or are we? Commenter Dale Coberly: I am offering this post to AB because I have seen a great deal of “us smart, them dumb” in […]
Welcome to the vaccination Hunger Games That, dear reader, is a slight variation on what my sibling unit said to me when I related the saga of my attempts to schedule a COVID-19 vaccination. As I have mentioned from time to time, I am an Old Fossil. And, well, the supply shortage of the COVID […]
Is Bitcoin Really Real Money? Ontological and Epistemological Questions The movement to make Bitcoin into a de facto form of money has taken a step forward when Elon Musk declared that he would be purchasing over a billion btc. Some are claiming that Musk did this to pump up an alternative asset because Tesla stock […]
Impeachment: What’s the Message? The mantra of the moment is that impeachment is not a trial and shouldn’t be governed by the same rules that apply to a court of law. True, but that means it’s really a political event, where the verdict matters less than the message. What’s coming through the media reporting is […]
Joel Eissenberg, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Associate Dean for Research at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. In Our Image: The Ethics of CRISPR Genome Editing , Joel C. Eissenberg, De Gruyter | 2021 Humanity has been busily modifying plant and animal genomes for centuries. It has long been a dream to speed up […]
Normalizing Foreign Trade Relations The Biden admin has not yet made moves to undo elements of Trump’s trade war, and some parts of it may not get undone, perhaps especially some directed at China. But at least one move towards normalization with the rest of the world has just happened as the Biden admin has […]
We made many mistakes in our response to the coronavirus over the past year. One of the most critical was our failure to massively expand our capacity to produce coronavirus tests and masks and other PPE. As many economists including Paul Romer noted last spring, mass testing and wide distribution of high quality masks would […]