A Recession Looms

The U.S. economy appears to be sliding into another recession based on declining consumer sentiment – even though employment and wage growth suggest otherwise, according to two academic economists.

New research published last week by David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Alex Bryson of the University College London suggests that consumer expectations indexes from the Conference Board and the University of Michigan tend to predict economic downturns up to 18 months in advance in the U.S.

BIDEN'S PROPOSED 39.6% TAX HIKE WOULD HIT THESE INDIVIDUALS, FAMILIES

Every recession since the 1980s has been precipitated by at least a 10-point drop in the expectations indices, they found. Other reliable indicators include a single monthly rise of at least 0.3 percentage points in unemployment and two consecutive months of employment rate declines.

"The economic situation in 2021 is exceptional, however, since unprecedented direct government intervention in the labor market through furlough-type arrangements has enabled employment rates to recover quickly from the huge downturn in 2020," Blanchflower and Bryson wrote. "However, downward movements in consumer expectations in the last six months suggest the economy in the United States is entering recession now (Autumn 2021)."

G-7 LEADERS HAMMER OUT A GLOBAL MINIMUM TAX FOR MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES

The Conference Board’s gauge of expectations declined in September to the lowest since November last year, marking the third consecutive month of declines. At the same time, the University of Michigan's gauge actually increased last month.

The economists highlighted data suggesting the Conference Board expectations peaked in March 2021 and then fell by 26 points through September 2021. The Michigan data, meanwhile, likely peaked in June 2021 and fell by 18 points by August, they found. 

TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS POTENTIAL RECESSION, CLICK HERE...

Cats 1

 

Remembering

I remember that last day that my father was alive but I do not remember the year of his death.  He had been admitted into the hospital because of a cold that could have turned into pneumonia and the day before he was scheduled to be released, was Thanksgiving and my mother and I went to visit him, spending the whole day in his hospital room talking as if none of us had any cares in the world.  Late that afternoon, or actually early evening, my mother and I left and stopped at the grocery store to get something for my breakfast the next morning.

While we were eating breakfast, my father called...  I answered the phone, and he said he wanted to speak to my mother...  "let me speak to your mother," he said.  She talked briefly and hung up the phone, saying, "that was weird...  he just wanted to tell me that he loved me."  Fifteen minutes later, I had dropped her off at the hospital, returning home to shower and drive back over to spend whatever time there was together before his release and I would depart leaving to meet my wife at her mother's house in Virginia.

While talking a shower, I heard my sister yelling at me from downstairs and after wrapping a towel around me, walked over to the rail and look down at her and she said, "Dad died."  It was a phrase I thought I would never hear, at least not on the day that he was to be released from the hospital and come home.  "What the hell happened," I questioned? 

My sister informed me that when our mother had called her that she was told by the nurses that his heart and the rest of his organs just gave out.

I don't know why I remembered this today...  this morning...  as it is usually a memory more closely related to Thanksgiving...  but, here it is...  and, I just thought I would share.

Clever

 

Physics Mystery Solved

Technion researchers have found an effective solution to the famous age-old, three-body problem in physics.

The three-body problem is one of the oldest problems in physics: it concerns the motions of systems of three bodies – like the Sun, Earth, and the Moon – and how their orbits change and evolve due to their mutual gravity. The three-body problem has been a focus of scientific inquiry ever since Newton.

When one massive object comes close to another, their relative motion follows a trajectory dictated by their mutual gravitational attraction, but as they move along, and change their positions along their trajectories, the forces between them, which depend on their mutual positions, also change, which, in turn, affects their trajectory et cetera. For two bodies (e.g. like Earth moving around the Sun without the influence of other bodies), the orbit of the Earth would continue to follow a very specific curve, which can be accurately described mathematically (an ellipse).

However, once one adds another object, the complex interactions lead to the three-body problem, namely, the system becomes chaotic and unpredictable, and one cannot simply specify the system evolution over long time-scales. Indeed, while this phenomenon has been known for over 400 years, ever since Newton and Kepler, a neat mathematical description for the three-body problem is still lacking.

Star orbits in a three-body system. Credit: Technion

In the past, physicists – including Newton himself – have tried to solve this so-called three-body problem; in 1889, King Oscar II of Sweden even offered a prize, in commemoration of his 60th birthday, to anybody who could provide a general solution. In the end, it was the French mathematician Henri Poincaré who won the competition. He ruined any hope for a full solution by proving that such interactions are chaotic, in the sense that the final outcome is essentially random; in fact, his finding opened a new scientific field of research, termed chaos theory.  READ MORE...

Leaves

 

Dropping Oxygen

For now, life is flourishing on our oxygen-rich planet, but Earth wasn't always that way – and scientists have predicted that, in the future, the atmosphere will revert back to one that's rich in methane and low in oxygen.

This probably won't happen for another billion years or so. But when the change comes, it's going to happen fairly rapidly, the study from earlier this year suggests.

This shift will take the planet back to something like the state it was in before what's known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) around 2.4 billion years ago.

What's more, the researchers behind the new study say that atmospheric oxygen is unlikely to be a permanent feature of habitable worlds in general, which has implications for our efforts to detect signs of life further out in the Universe.

"The model projects that a deoxygenation of the atmosphere, with atmospheric O2 dropping sharply to levels reminiscent of the Archaean Earth, will most probably be triggered before the inception of moist greenhouse conditions in Earth's climate system and before the extensive loss of surface water from the atmosphere," wrote the researchers in their published paper.

At that point it'll be the end of the road for human beings and most other life forms that rely on oxygen to get through the day, so let's hope we figure out how to get off the planet at some point within the next billion years.  READ MORE...

Wave

 

A Blue Luminous Event

On October 8, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet captured something strikingly rare from on board the International Space Station (ISS).

The photo – which is a single frame taken from a longer timelapse – might look like it shows a cobalt bomb exploding over Europe, but this scary-looking blue light didn't do any damage. In fact, most people would never have noticed it happening.

Instead, the frame shows something far less ominous called a 'transient luminous event' – a lightning-like phenomenon striking upwards in the upper atmosphere.

Also known as upper-atmospheric lightning, transient luminous events are a bunch of related phenomena which occur during thunderstorms, but significantly above where normal lightning would appear. While related to lightning, they work a little bit differently.

There are 'blue jets', which happen lower down in the stratosphere, triggered by lightning. If the lightning propagates through the negatively charged (top) region of the thunderstorm clouds before it gets through the positive region below, the lightning ends up striking upwards, igniting a blue glow from molecular nitrogen.

Then there are red SPRITES (Stratospheric/mesospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification) – electrical discharges that often glow red, occurring high above a thunderstorm cell, triggered by disturbances from the lightning below – and slightly dimmer red ELVES (Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources) in the ionosphere.

Sticking with the theme, there are also TROLLs (Transient Red Optical Luminous Lineaments) which occur after strong SPRITES, as well as Pixies and GHOSTS. We're sure the scientists had lots of fun naming all of these phenomena.   READ MORE...

Run!

 

An Analysis

 

[For more analysis and commentary, please join me at robertreich.substack.com]

The General Strike of 2021
On Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that some 4.3 million people had quit their jobs in August. That comes to about 2.9 percent of the workforce – up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting.


All told, about 4 million American workers have been leaving their jobs every month since last spring.


Add this to last Friday’s jobs report showing the number of job openings at a record high. The share of people working or actively looking for work (the labor force participation rate) has dropped to 61.6 percent. Participation for people in their prime working years, defined as 25 to 54 years old, is also down. Over the past year, job openings have increased 62 percent.


What’s happening? You might say American workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions.


No one calls it a general strike. But in its own disorganized way it’s related to the organized strikes breaking out across the land – Hollywood TV and film crews, John Deere workers, Alabama coal miners, Nabisco workers, Kellogg workers, nurses in California, healthcare workers in Buffalo.


Disorganized or organized, American workers now have bargaining leverage to do better.


After a year and a half of the pandemic, consumers have pent-up demand for all sorts of goods and services. But employers are finding it hard to fill positions.


This general strike has nothing to do with the Republican bogeyman of extra unemployment benefits supposedly discouraging people from working. Reminder: The extra benefits ran out on Labor Day.


Renewed fears of the Delta variant of COVID may play some role. But it can’t be the major factor. With most adults now vaccinated, rates of hospitalizations and deaths are way down.


Childcare is a problem for many workers, to be sure. But lack of affordable childcare has been a problem for decades. It can’t be the reason for the general strike.


I believe that the reluctance of workers to return to or remain in their old jobs is mostly because they’re fed up. Some have retired early. Others have found ways to make ends meet other than remain in jobs they abhor. Many just don’t want to return to backbreaking or boring low-wage shit jobs.


The media and most economists measure the economy’s success by the number of jobs it creates, while ignoring the *quality* of those jobs. That’s a huge oversight.


Years ago, when I was Secretary of Labor, I kept meeting working people all over the country who had full-time work but complained that their jobs paid too little and had few benefits, or were unsafe, or required lengthy or unpredictable hours. Many said their employers treated them badly, harassed them, and did not respect them.


Since then, these complaints have only grown louder, according to polls. For many, the pandemic was the last straw. Workers are burned out, fed up, fried. In the wake of so much hardship, illness and death during the past year, they’re not going to take it anymore.


To lure workers back, employers are raising wages and offering other inducements. Average earnings rose 19 cents an hour in September and are up more than $1 an hour – or 4.6 percent – over the last year.


Clearly, that’s not enough.


Corporate America wants to frame this as a “labor shortage.” Wrong. What’s really going on is more accurately described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a health care shortage.Unless *these* shortages are rectified, many Americans won’t return to work anytime soon. I say it’s about time.

Had Enough

Falling

Becoming Human

READER QUESTION:   We now know from evolutionary science that humanity has existed in some form or another for around 2 million years or more. Homo sapiens are comparatively new on the block. There were also many other human species, some which we interbred with. The question is then inevitable – when can we claim personhood in the long story of evolution? Are Chimpanzees people? Did Australopithecine have an afterlife? What are the implications for how we think about rights and religion? Anthony A. MacIsaac, 26, Paris, France.

In our mythologies, there’s often a singular moment when we became “human”. Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge and gained awareness of good and evil. Prometheus created men from clay and gave them fire. But in the modern origin story, evolution, there’s no defining moment of creation. Instead, humans emerged gradually, generation by generation, from earlier species.

As with any other complex adaptation – a bird’s wing, a whale’s fluke, our own fingers – our humanity evolved step by step, over millions of years. Mutations appeared in our DNA, spread through the population, and our ancestors slowly became something more like us and, finally, we appeared.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Clever Dog

 

A Dangerous Dance Miles Away

Hubble Space Telescope image of Arp 91, a pair of intertwined galaxies (NGC 5953 and NGC 5954). Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

This Picture of the Week features two interacting galaxies that are so intertwined, they have a collective name — Arp 91. This delicate galactic dance is taking place over 100 million light-years from Earth, and was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. 

The two galaxies comprising Arp 91 do have their own names: the lower galaxy, which in this image looks like a bright spot, is known as NGC 5953; and the ovoid galaxy to the upper right is NGC 5954. 

In reality, both of these galaxies are spiral galaxies, but their shapes appear very different because they are orientated differently with respect to Earth.

Arp 91 provides a particularly vivid example of galactic interaction. NGC 5954 is clearly being tugged towards NGC 5953 — it looks like it is extending one spiral arm downwards. It is the immense gravitational attraction of the two galaxies that is causing them to interact. 

Such gravitational interactions between galaxies are common, and are an important part of galactic evolution. Most astronomers nowadays believe that collisions between spiral galaxies lead to the formation of another type of galaxy, known as elliptical galaxies. 

These immensely energetic and massive collisions, however, happen on timescales that dwarf a human lifetime — they take place over hundreds of millions of years. So we should not expect Arp 91 to look any different over the course of our lifetimes!

Great & Small

 

It's Just Trains

 

Ever since the invention of the steam locomotive in 1802, trains have been a driving societal force.

Invented in Britain at the height of the Industrial Revolution, steam trains gave the empire an unparalleled advantage in transporting goods and people. Soon it spread around the world as other nations scrambled to build their own railway networks to facilitate growth and commerce.

But just as nations rushed to build more railways, they also tried to build faster trains. Japan’s Tōkaidō Shinkansen or “bullet train” in 1964 was the first high-speed rail system, achieving a speed above 124 mph or 200 km/h.

How do other countries and trains compare?

Let’s dive into the fastest trains in the world using data from Travel and Leisure magazine.
Who Has The Fastest Trains in the World?

Japan started the high-speed train revolution in earnest, and it’s still at the top of the charts.

Though it’s fastest regular operating bullet trains (the N700A Shinkansen) can reach a top speed of 186 mph or 300 km/h, the country’s new development in magnetic levitation (maglev) is breaking speed records.

In fact, the top two fastest trains in the world are maglev, using two sets of magnets to elevate the train and propel it forward without friction to slow it down.

World's Fastest Trains                             Country                Speed Record

L0 Series Maglev                                        Japan                    374 mph (602 km/h)
CRRC Qingdao Sifang 2021 Maglev*        China                    373 mph (600 km/h)
TGV POS                                                    France                  357 mph (575 km/h)
CRH380A Hexie                                         China                    302 mph (486 km/h)
Shanghai Maglev                                        China                    268 mph (431 km/h)
HEMU-430X                                              South Korea         262 mph (422 km/h)
Fuxing Hao CR400AF                                China                    260 mph (418 km/h)
Frecciarossa 1000                                       Italy                      245 mph (394 km/h)


*No official name or designation has been given yet, so currently listed under the manufacturer’s name, CRRC Qingdao Sifang.

Japan’s L0 Series Maglev is still in production, but with a land speed record of 374 mph or 602 km/h it is the fastest train in the world.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Crash

 

Heart Cath Procedure

On the 28th of this month, I will be having a heart catherization procedure to further explore the results of my nuclear stress test that indicated my LAD was displaying a limitation of air flow...  however, while there was an abnormal reading, I was able to achieve my target hearf rate for my age...  which typically does not happen if there is a restriction of air flow especially inside the LAD...  so, this procedure will provide results that will confirm either there is a problem or there is not or the problem does not warrant anything to be done about it at this time...

In other words:

• do nothing
• insert more stents
• have a bypass

Now...  depending upon the result...  I will make two different decisions...  either stay with UT Medical Center - Cardiology or asked to be referred to Vanderbilt Cardiology.  And, my reasoning?  I believe Vanderbilt has more experienced cardia surgeons.  For example, UT has only been putting in stents for the last 5 years and I just have the mentality that experience makes for a better surgeon, espeecially when one is dealing with the heart.

Twelve years ago when I had my 5 stents put in at NYC Presbyterian Hospital, I knew that stents were more often than not a temporary fix...  more than likely I would end up having a bypass at sometime down the road...  maybe now is that time...  or maybe not...

What I do know is that bypass surgery is commonplace and that it takes a good 12-18 months before the bypass patient is back to normal.  And, while I am still fairly young, my recovery will be a llittle longer that it might have been 12 years ago and it will be even longer if I get to wait another 12 years...