Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

The Future of Medicare and Advantage Plans

This post comes by way of Joel Eissenberg’s Facebook blog and is an edited recital of Juan Cole’s presentation at Informed Comment. “Stop Wall Street from Grabbing Traditional Medicare,” F. Douglas Stephenson __________ I am going to add to Joel’s depiction of the future as I too had heard of the coming attempt to force […]

Letters From An American – Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson

Last night, Professor Heather Cox Richardson discusses the undermining of a citizen’s civil rights by SCOTUS in support of a state law which allows state citizens to infringe upon the rights of other citizens, female citizens within the state even though the actions of the later cause no harm to the former. It is appearing […]

“Farmers Markets Are Too Expensive”

Farmer and Agricultural Economic Michal Smith I hear this from time to time both at the market and also from the general public even in the agricultural community. It elicits a response longer than what I can usually muster as I pull my quill of sharpened microeconomic arrows of defense around to meet my macroeconomic […]

Immune Memory

One non horrible effect of the Covid 19 epidemic is that people have become interested in immunology. I am pleased by this, but have the sense that journalists over-simplify. Roughly they act as if the immune system consists of circulating antibodies and killer t-cells. I think this post might be of some interest to some […]

Get A Booster shot

Many months and many mutations ago, I argued that one shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was enough to protect against the original Sars Cov2. Since then delta. It doesn’t especially evade, but is more generally fit and I thought (and probably didn’t post) that two shots are needed given delta. Now omicron. Pfizer just claimed […]

Construction Spending up .2% in October, Prior Months Revised Higher

Construction Spending Rose 0.2% in October after Prior Months Were Much Revised Higher, MarketWatch 666, RJS The Census Bureau’s report on construction spending for October (pdf) estimated that the month’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,598.0 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 0.2 percent (+/-1.2 percent)* above the revised September […]

Moderna’s Intellectual Property

Robert Waldmann has some questions and thoughts! Hi Robert, AB upgraded the way we post now. (run75441). I am going to ask someone to engage your post who has far greater knowledge than I or anyone else has. He is a Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and participated in the Moderna clinical trials. I […]

Explaining Mutations and Variants

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 […]

Pessimistic and optimistic scenarios for the winter wave

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 […]

Oct. Durable Goods: New Orders Down 0.5%, Shipments Up 1.5%, Inventory Up 0.6%

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 […]