Blogger and Commenter Professor Joel Essenberg addresses Covid variants being called mutations. As a geneticist, I am troubled by the promiscuous use of the word “mutation” to describe amino acid or nucleotide differences from a reference sequence. In nearly all cases, there is no known functional significance attached to these differences. Accordingly, the differences are […]
An Intro and some history: Alan Collinge at Student Loan Justice Organization. Alan has collected 1,065,931 signatures on his petition asking President Joe Biden to cancel student loan debt. His new goal is to reach 1.5 million signatures. If you believe in the cause you should sign his petition. Petition · President Biden: Cancel Federal […]
Coronavirus dashboard for November 26: pessimistic and optimistic scenarios for the winter wave, New Deal democrat I hope all of you had a Happy Thanksgiving. Since I haven’t posted one in a bit, here is an update on the pandemic.As an initial matter, in the last day or two, there has been a mini-panic about […]
RJS at MarketWatch 666, October Durable Goods: New Orders Down 0.5%, Shipments Up 1.5%, Inventories Up 0.6% The Advance Report on Durable Goods Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders for October (pdf) from the Census Bureau reported that the value of the widely followed new orders for manufactured durable goods decreased by $1.2 billion or 0.5 percent […]
New home sales for October continue slow upward trend New home sales, while very noisy and heavily revised, tend to lead all of the other housing indicators, even permits. The heavy revisions figure, well, heavily, into this morning’s report. New home sales (blue in the graphs below) usually slightly lead to the much less volatile […]
Commenter and Blogger RJS at Focus on Fracking and MarketWatch 666 brought up the past history of US SPR oil releases and the impact on oil prices in the Comments section. Since 1990, each time releases (SPR) have been made, there has been a countering reduction of oil by OPEC which could include Russia this […]
The consumer spending spree continued in October, New Deal democrat Real personal income and spending held up well throughout the pandemic, due to a vigorous government response. With special benefits ended, the question has been: will they hold up? This month, the answer was a definite “yes.”In nominal terms, personal income increased 0.5% and spending […]
EconoSpeak: Playing With The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Barkley Rosser Over the last month crude oil prices have noticeably declined from in the neighborhood of $85-86 per barrel to $78-80 per barrel. But there has been only a very small decline in retail gasoline prices, and the headlines even as of yesterday was all about “sharply […]
Thanksgiving finds Bill is in Arizona in a new home. If he is not on site early in the morning, you will know why in the Midwest and East Coast. He reports the ordering of a turkey dinner this year as it was too difficult to move all the people together for a family dinner […]