Coronavirus dashboard for June 30: 2 to 4 weeks until a likely major “Delta” outbreak in unvaccinated regions Missouri has been the US bellwether for the onset of the “Delta” variant of COVID. This makes the below graph by Charles Gaba of infection rates by county for June in Missouri particularly insightful: As has been […]

CMS bans Surprise Billing The issues here were medical services practitioners not being on hospital staff. Practitioners not subject to hospital billing practices and bargaining contracts with Healthcare insurance were billing at their rates to recover what they deem to be reasonable. In the end, the patient pays whatever can be worked out. Radiology and […]

In a comment on my earlier post, Bill H. (run75441) mentioned that he thought at first this series on socially necessary labour time (SNLT) would be about Sydney Chapman’s theory. That comment stopped me short because I hadn’t thought about the connection between Marx’s analysis of SNLT and Chapman’s theory of hours. Recall that Chapman […]

“A Review of “The American War in Afghanistan,” Carter Malkasian, Foreign Affairs In 2008, I interviewed the United Kingdom’s then outgoing military commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, in a dusty firebase in Helmand Province, where international troops had been battling the Taliban on a daily basis for territory that kept slipping away. Carleton-Smith stated […]

RIP Steve Horwitz Steven G. Horwitz died the day before yesterday of lymphoma at age 57.  Probably most reading this do not know who he was, but he was somebody I knew quite well, even as I disagreed with him quite a lot about economics. He was arguably the leading monetary economist out of the […]

General Milley during the hearing: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country from which we are here to defend?” “I personally find it offensive we are accusing the United States military, our […]

Black and Brown Americans suffer the most in biggest U.S. drop in life expectancy since WWII, Modern Healthcare, June 2021 In an earlier post listing a series of articles I thought might be interesting to AB, this one Modern Healthcare article was listed as one of interest. I decided to expand on the article and […]

It is an unfortunate fact that many think tanks funded by conservative plutocrats and nominally devoted to spreading free-market ideas actively foster the politics of white grievance.  I believe the evidence for this claim is quite strong, but it is not always immediately obvious that this is happening.  Classical liberals and libertarians generally do not […]

House prices continue to surge, with affordability near its worst since the Great Recession   The FHFA and Case Shiller house price indexes for May and April, respectively, were released this morning. Because housing affordability is very much an issue, let’s take a look. YoY the FHFA index is up 15.7%, and the Case Shiller […]