Just Information on supply and what is happening in the short term. I suspect if Trump keeps fooling around with the Middle East, we could experience some types of short-term shortages as reported via news. It will then grow bigger than the reality. Conflicting signals from Washington and Tehran keep oil markets on edge as […]
And in the age of cheap drones, you can’t really defend against it. As we are seeing, it doesn’t take long to deplete any missile defenses you have, and no one has missile defenses covering everything anyway. Maybe most of these attacks won’t amount to much, but sometimes… We are ruled by people who have […]
A rundown of what is occurring with Medicare Advantage as CMS finalizes higher Medicare Advantage rates for 2027 in gift to insurers. An unexpectedly generous rate update for 2026 was scuttled initially. In the end, final rate was almost 2.4 percentage points higher. This was a high bump. This comes after CMS officials spent the last […]
Weekly Indicators for August 3 – 7 at Seeking Alpha The choice of what to highlight this week was very easy, because it was practically screamed from this following graph: Corporate profits were through the roof in Q2, driven not just by AI-related companies but even more by the tidal wave of windfall profits by […]
I’m currently auditing an online lecture series by historian Timothy Snyder on Hitler and Stalin. The most recent lecture was on Communism. Snyder recommends that his students read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. It’s mercifully short and the Kindle version cost 99 cents, so I read it. As I say, it’s short and […]
Bit of an Introduction: Steve Hutkins writes “Save the Post Office.” The website was created in 2011, when Steve’s local post office in New York’s Hudson Valley was in danger of closing. Steve’s “day job” was as an English professor (now retired) who taught place studies and travel literature at the Gallatin School of New […]
Real threats do not require social influencers, since they are obvious to all. No one had to convince Americans after Pearl Harbor that the danger was great and sacrifice imperative. They saw it clearly and acted. When a modern cable news anchor reports with a smirk that the opposition is destroying this once great republic, […]
– by New Deal democrat Yesterday I posted the update of my “consumer nowcast” over at Seeking Alpha. As a refresher, this system looks at the various sources that can power increased consumer spending, which is 70% of the economy. When all of those sources are shut down, a recession almost invariably occurs. Unsurprisingly, the only […]
There is a need in the United States for alternative ways of travel other than by airplane or private vehicles. Trains do offer such a way of longer distance travel. Taking a train often times can be less costly than driving a car and cheaper than flying to your destination. This is considering a day […]
Most days I go on walks of 4-6 miles in the nearby woods. I bring my camera. I tell people that it gives me something to do with my hands. But it’s more than that. I learned the basics of photography in high school. I used many of those skills as a postdoc and well […]