What News Was in My In-Box, Dec. 14, 2022

Rents decreasing, CPI slowly decreasing, and questions on whether any of this is due to the FED’s actions. Industrial production is still the same and gasoline prices have dropped. According to New Deal democrats’ analysis, real sales and real income have increased (still lower than they were one year ago), and payrolls have continued to increase but at a decelerating rate. Jobless claims have not yet reached the signal a recession point yet. If the Fed holds steady, the economy will slow and maybe into a somewhat soft landing.

SCOTUS is attempting to decide how elections should be. Should state legislatures have the ultimate and final say?

Business and Economics

Why Are Market Rents Decelerating? It’s Probably Not Because Of The Fed, (employamerica.org), Alex Williams. Market rents are decelerating, which means CPI-measured rents – and with them, core and headline CPI – should ultimately decelerate as well, with a lag. But is this deceleration due to the Fed’s actions?

November Inflation Preview: The Goods Deflation Cavalry Is Coming, But OER Can Upset an Optimistic Consensus Tomorrow (employamerica.org), Skanda Amarnath. The forecasting consensus has shifted down from its 0.5% expectation for core CPI in October to a more optimistic 0.3% expectation in November.

Nearly half of Americans age 18 to 29 are living with their parents, (qz.com), Tiffany Ap. Nearly half of all young adults in the US ages 18 to 29 live with their parents, and this living arrangement is boosting the profits of luxury goods companies, according to Morgan Stanley.

Wholesale inflation seems to be ebbing. Will it be enough for the Fed to ease up on rate hikes? Marketplace, Mitchell Hartman. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and company got one of their last data points on inflation before the Fed meets next week to hike interest rates: The November producer price index — that’s prices at the wholesale level — was up 0.3% over the month before and 7.4% from a year earlier.

CEPR Sanctions Watch, November 2022, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Michael Galant. Since the Taliban takeover in 2021, the Biden administration has blocked Afghanistan’s central bank from accessing roughly $7 billion in its foreign reserves held in the United States.

Japan to Join US Effort to Tighten Chip Exports to China, Bloomberg. Takashi Mochizuki, Cagan Koc, & Peter Elstrom. Japan and the Netherlands have agreed in principle to join the US in tightening controls over the export of advanced chipmaking machinery to China, according to people familiar with the matter.

Usefulnomics — an example – The one-handed economist, (one-handed-economist.com), David Zetland. I’m not shy about criticizing the weakest elements of economics (there are many), so it’s sometimes a good idea to remind myself (and you!) of the strengths of economics, i.e., those characteristics that make it useful.

Why Stellantis is laying off workers at its Jeep Cherokee plant, (qz.com), Ananya Bhattacharya. It specifically blamed costs related to electric vehicle manufacturing for its decision, which comes on the heels of disappointing sales for the Jeep Cherokee model built at the Illinois plant.

The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer, The New Yorker, Stephen Witt. Quantum computers, like the ones Google is building, use qubits, which can take a value of zero or one, and also a complex combination of zero and one at the same time. Qubits are thus exponentially more powerful than bits, able to perform calculations that normal bits can’t. 

Healthcare

Physical and Occupational Therapy Are on the Medicare Chopping Block, MedPage Today, Nikesh Patel. Eliminating or reducing access to physical and occupational therapy due to Medicare cuts would be devastating to patients’ health outcomes.

CMS Adds Stricter Health Insurance Exchange Enrollment Rules, (healthpayerintelligence.com), Jesse Migneault. New regulations will require applicants to submit documentation that proves their eligibility for special enrollment status. Enrollees will then have a 30-day period to mail or upload the required documents to HealthCare.gov. AB

Economic Well-Being and Health: The Role of Income Support Programs in Promoting Health and Advancing Health Equity, Health Affairs, Authors. People with low incomes have poorer health outcomes, including greater risk for disease and shorter lifespans. This pattern has the least favorable outcomes for those living in poverty but is present at every level of the income ladder.

Should Doctors Warn Patients About the Downsides of Medicare Advantage Plans? MedPage Today, Cheryl Clark. The patient doesn’t realize it, but he is no longer in Medicare. He has been enrolled in a commercial Medicare Advantage (MA) plan run by a private company with a provider network to which his long-time doctor does not belong. AB

Environment, Consumerism,

When someone asks you to share a Facebook post, don’t. It’s probably a scam, (consumeraffairs.com), Mark Huffman. Scammers have now figured that out and have devised a sophisticated scheme to get unsuspecting Facebook users to do their bidding. They are creating posts about an event or news story designed to tug at your heartstrings.

The Obvious Answer to Homelessness, The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas. When we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. 

Buses Shouldn’t Be Free, The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas. Fare-free transit sounds great in theory, but American bus networks are far behind global leaders in offering good service.

The Dead Sea is dying. These beautiful, ominous photos show the impact: The Picture Show: NPR, Ofir Berman. It’s a human-made problem. In a region where water is scarce, Israel, Jordan and Syria in the last several decades have diverted the freshwater sources that feed the Dead Sea.

A Blind Couple and Baby Were Blocked from Boarding Two Flights by Airline, (businessinsider.com), Stephanie Stacy. A blind couple and their baby had to wait an entire week to travel home from their holiday in Greece after they were blocked from boarding two separate flights.

Looking for a place to rent? Then, scammers are looking for you! (consumeraffairs.com), Gary Guthrie. If you’re moving someplace and need temporary housing or thinking about renting a home or an apartment where you are, proceed with caution. Rental scams are sweeping the U.S.

The Apocalyptic Vision of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ The Atlantic, James Parker. One hundred years after the publication of The Waste Land, its vision has never been more terrifying.

Railroad Fight Was Eight Years of Militant Rank-and-File Organizing, (theintercept.com), Ryan Grim. Railroad unions haven’t been known for putting up a fight since the 19th century, but newly radicalized workers forced their way into the national conversation.

A US lab’s nuclear fusion breakthrough could transform clean energy, (qz.com), Aurora Almendral. A lab in the US may have had a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, the potentially limitless alternative energy which produces no carbon emissions.

If you use Virtual Try On software your face and body images may end up in a database, (consumeraffairs.com), Mark Huffman. Researchers tried on a pair of glasses on the Gunnar site using Fittingbox’s VTO technology. They noticed data was being sent to outside servers. They identified the data as a coded image was sent to Fittingbox’s server. When they used an image decoder to see what the image was, they discovered that it was a picture of one of the researcher’s face.

Politics, Law

A Supreme Court Case That Threatens the Mechanisms of Democracy, The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz. At stake in Moore v. Harper is the question of how elections should be run—and who should resolve the inevitable disputes when they arise.

Appeals Court: Catholic Providers Can Deny Gender Care To Trans People Kaiser Health News (khn.org), Daniel Weisner. unanimous 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a North Dakota federal judge. U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) rule infringes on the religious freedoms of the plaintiffs, including a group of nuns who run health clinics for the poor and an association of Catholic healthcare professionals.

Government raises minimum wage for domestic workers, SWI swissinfo.ch, Domestic workers in Switzerland will have to be paid a minimum of CHF19.50 ($20.90) per hour from 2023.

Deconstructed Podcast: How Purple is Georgia? (theintercept.com), Georgia is actually still a red state, but with blue characteristics. It took Warnock an inconceivable amount of money — $175 million — to win a race against a guy who seemed not to know what chamber he was running for.

More Links to be Read

Infidel753: Link round-up for 11 December 2022, Infidel753 Blog.

Tuesday’s Treasons updated …, Homeless on the High Desert, December 13, 2022.

What News Was in My In-Box, Dec. 7, 2022, Angry Bear, angry bear blog.

What News Was in My In-Box, Nov. 30, 2022, Angry Bear angry bear blog.