The current House and Senate budget proposals both include defense increases of about $100-150 billion over ten years, or about $10-15 billion per year in nominal dollars. Toy Sec Def Hegseth is proposing a cut in defense spending of -$70 billion per year. Anyone who thinks the House and Senate will pass a bill with […]
“In the facilities—the artificial ecosystems—that now house much of Earth’s terrestrial vertebrate biomass, constraints on virulence that prevail in natural ecosystems are not merely removed. Virulence is actually favored. In the words of Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, the viruses are “a response to the selection pressures that exist in a […]
– by Steve Roth Originally posted at Wealth Economics “Capital” is polysemous; it has multiple meanings. People, notably including economists (who should know better), constantly muddle those meanings together even within a single sentence, so that nobody including the speakers and writers themselves knows, or can know, what the speaker is saying. It’s a centuries-old dumpster fire — conceptual and […]
We eat a lot of different products that are packaged in plastic packaging. Plastic content leaches into the water we drink from product packaging and throwaway garbage. Unless you are filtering it out in some fashion such as reverse osmosis or another membrane type of filter, microplastic content can buildup in humans. ~~~~~~~ Scientists observe […]
For those who were duped into believing that DOGE is serious about defense budget cuts rather than centralizing control of spending and aligning spending with the political priorities of the Trump/Musk Administration, here’s Secretary of Defense Hesgeth: “Hegseth said beginning immediately, the Pentagon will pull 8% — or roughly $50 billion — from nonlethal programs […]
It is very easy to disrupt a complex system and very hard to get it going again. Trump, Musk, and the Muskateers decided to limit overhead on NIH grants to 15% fearing that some of the overhead might get money to DEI deans. They also limited communication of government health agencies with the public. The […]
Trumps FTC believes the ABA is corrupt. Having been around enough attorneys in my lifetime, they are not corrupt. They are smarter than we are on legalities. Reading the first sentence of Trump’s FTC letter reveals their beliefs: “federal antitrust enforcers and the private antitrust bar have enjoyed a cozy relationship facilitated by the Antitrust […]
– by New Deal democrat Let’s take our weekly look at jobless claims. These are a short leading labor market indicator. Also, it is likely that the firings in the federal labor force will shortly be reflected in this data. This week initial claims rose 5,000 to 219,000, while the four week average declined -1,000 […]
Both my dad and my father-in-law worked throughout their post-military careers at Y-12 in Oak Ridge. During the war, Y-12 was the site of uranium enrichment by the calutrons (K-25 was the gaseous diffusion plan, enrichment by gas chromatography). Having grown up in Oak Ridge, I’m quite familiar with its role in national security, unlike […]
“Palantir stock fell 10% for a second day on Thursday, adding to Wednesday’s 10% drop following a Washington Post report that said the Trump administration has told the Pentagon to plan for massive budget cuts over the next five years, casting doubt on a major source of the tech firm’s revenue.” I’d be happy to […]