The Supreme Court hands down some incomprehensible gobbledygook about canceled federal grants
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/supreme-court-hands-down-incomprehensible-000000487.html
Category: Politics, Religion & Money
Hole. Jackson Hole.
Powell sounds like he will announce a 0.25% interest rate drop in September.
First, Trump demanded Intel’s CEO quit.
Now he wants the United States to own 10% of the company. Huh?
The Dow jumped to a new record after Powell’s speech today. If interest rates drop enough to move money out of Money Market accounts and CDs, that will inflate Wall Street further. Then we’ll have a bubble, and look out when it bursts.
Prior Authorization for Traditional Medicare
Last year, half an hour after hearing my cancer diagnosis on the phone, I had an appointment scheduled with a surgeon for the next day. The appointment was available by chance. Being able to act quickly, without checking with an insurer, was because I have traditional Medicare, rather than a Medicare Advantage plan. Trump wants to eliminate traditional Medicare.
Trump administration tiptoes into testing prior authorization in traditional Medicare
A Likely Story
I meant to post this link a while ago, but lost track of it. Sections of the Constitution, specifically about Congressional powers, recently disappeared from the Library of Congress website. The claimed explanation is that someone failed to close an XML tag.
The LOC link provided on that Tech Crunch page is useless. This is where it should be directed:
Summer in the City
Opposed as Dick Cheney reportedly is to Donald Trump’s version of the Republican Party, they share a pathological sadistic streak. Cheney limited his torture to foreign adversaries during a war, but Trump has no such reservation. Cracking the heads of civilian American citizens is fine with him.
It will be interesting to see if the Washington, D.C. crackdown helps or hurts tourism in the nations’ capitol.
Trump says Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland are Blue Cities, referring to their Democratic populations. But of course what he’s really saying is they’re Black Cities, referring to their racial mix.
Ya gotta admire a record that features both an autoharp and a jackhammer.
Returning to HEAP from STEM
College loans succeeded in burdening many students, especially liberal arts majors, with debts they couldn’t repay. Thanks in large part to the rapid rise of AI, the promise of entry level jobs paying six figures for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) majors appears to be waning. Last week’s Wall St. Week, on defunded PBS, had an unsettling report on the weak job market for recent tech grads, along with some other segments of interest.
For years, the most brilliant computer programmers and scientists of the world have been progressively rendering their less brilliant, yet highly competent, colleagues obsolete. Their code is now generating its own code. Is it too late to cash in being an influencer?
We are at a tipping point in education, where major technology firms are only accepting job applicants from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Cal Tech, and a select few other institutions of higher learning. If you are graduating from a less competitive college or university, forget it. There’s software that can do the work you would have been hired to do ten years ago, for a salary of $125,000 or more.
One notable exception I can think of is the leading healthcare software firm Epic Systems, which treats the University of Wisconsin/Madison as if it were a farm system team for recruiting new talent. Epic’s campus is even on a former farm.
It would be good to see at least a partial return to the idea of embracing education for its own sake. The value of HEAP — History, English Literature, Art, Philosophy — shouldn’t be undervalued. But how to make that affordable again, after so many millions of student loan dollars pumped up school coffers, only to see small, liberal arts colleges shutting down from the rise of STEM? What was the money spent on? Upgrading facilities to luxury accommodations, while adding administrative overhead, reducing the number of tenured faculty and relying upon adjunct professors. Not a good mix.
But there’s the problem of those fields of study being seen as “woke.” In my entire life, from the Cold War, to Viet Nam, through Watergate and its aftermath, I’ve never witnessed such a completely screwed up political environment as what Donald Trump has managed to create.
In my opinion, it all began with Ronald Reagan, acting as “Barry Goldwater Lite,” and being fond of saying, “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” Here’s the funny part. Republicans are acting only on that statement. In one instance, the next thing Reagan said was, “A great many of the current problems on the farm were caused by government-imposed embargoes and inflation, not to mention government’s long history of conflicting and haphazard policies.” Which is exactly what Trump is doing.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/presidents-news-conference-23
Am I ranting today? Sorry.