Others are calling October at 8.6% equal to September’s record, but adding additional decimal points shows October +8.6265% clearly higher than September’s +8.5931% “Record 8.6% Annual Increase in October Producer Price Index; Record 14.2% Increase for Final Demand Goods, and a 46 year Record for Prices of Intermediate Goods,” RJS, MarketWatch 666 The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final […]
Infrastructure week: organs of the human brain, created by the human hand Who owns general social knowledge? Who owns the general intellect? Alf Hornborg pointed out that without the fuel to run it, a tractor is simply a piece of sculpture. It is not even a sculpture, though, if there is no one to design it […]
Farmer and Economist Michael Smith In this AgDaily piece, they do a great job of outlining the history of agriculture and sort of where it is headed, pretty much the same as it always has been, with a few caveats. Over time it has gotten much harder and now even more so with equipment prices […]
Sesame Street’s Big Bird Gets a Covid Vaccination After Sesame Street’s Big Bird tweeted that he received the COVID-19 vaccine, Sen. Ted Cruz and other right-wing media figures criticized the character for promoting “propaganda” to children. Sesame Street launched a promotional campaign during the past week after the COVID-19 vaccine was authorized for ages 5-11, […]
Anti-Racism and Democracy in Our Schools It’s generally conceded that Terry McAuliffe’s statement “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” was a big blunder that contributed to his defeat last week. The context was a debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, who had used his party’s playbook on Critical […]
Focus on Fracking: gasoline supplies lowest since November 2017 despite gasoline production above prepandemic levels; Focus on Fracking, Commenter and Blogger RJS US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending October 29th indicated that after a modest increase in our oil production and only minor changes to our oil imports, our […]
Kind of a surprising take on a potentially new Corps being touted in “The Hill” article. The Corps announces a new plan signaling changes to recruitment and retention by targeting individual talents rather than gathering volumes of younger personnel, who are very trainable, training them in an MOS, and making them fit the model of […]
Appears that Parents’ Rights is the Republican Party’s latest wedge issue. My how they do love wedge issues. And, this one goes so well with their States Rights. Lot in common, the two. States’ Rights allowed a state to keep doing the same old. Parents’ Rights give parents the right to appropriate their child’s life. […]
MarketWatch 666: Commenter and Blogger RJS; October’s jobs report; September’s trade deficit, construction spending, and factory inventories, et al Major economic reports that were released the past week included the Employment Situation Summary for October from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and three September reports that included metrics which were either estimated or included in last week’s […]
Money Illusion in the Twenty-First Century The starting point for any consideration of inflation is that wages (and interest, profits, and rents) are prices. Every transaction has two sides, and one person’s price is another’s income. In the aggregate, leaving aside international complications, inflation can’t have either a negative or positive effect on aggregate real […]