1. That presser where FoxNews kept asking CircleBack “So, where can these people you just laid off go apply for the new jobs you say they can have?” and her responding with “by taking a time machine to the future” was something else

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2. These guys will never be put back to work at anything approaching their previous salaries under a Democrat administration.

   Sure they will. It’s just, at the recent rate of real inflation increasing (thanks, Big Joe!), that selfsame salary won’t buy nearly as much as it used to.

   (Yes, I know the official inflation numbers are still quite low. Gasoline has gone up by 33% locally; food prices are starting to climb also, since it costs, you know, fuel to harvest, process, prepare and transport. Also, note that inflation is a rate of increase (1st derivative); if inflation is constant, prices linearly increase with time. If the inflation rate itself is rising, prices increase parabolically with time.)

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   1. Actually, if inflation is constant, prices rise exponentially.

      A while ago I looked at TIPS, the “inflation adjusted” Treasury securities. As far as I can tell, they use a definition of “inflation” carefully chosen to produce as low a number as possible, so the actual “protection” delivered by those “inflation protected securities” is not particularly real.

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      1. You are correct; I formally misspoke. Inflation and compound interest are essentially identical mathematically speaking. In the relatively short term, however (over a few years), low inflation “looks like” linear price increases (when compared to the start of the period) if it’s constant.

         My concern is that changes upward in inflation can result in the cost of living – wages – not going up as fast as prices do, as what happened in the late 1910s / early 1920s in Weimar Germany. And that can happen relatively quickly.

         Re TIPS, yes, that’s been noticed. 🙂 Especially when the base rate is so low, as it is now.

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3. I’ve been meaning to post about the myth of global warming.

   I am not a climate scientist, but if you only go back 1,000 years to do your graphs, you are doing it wrong.

   I posted this elsewhere:

   Global warming is a myth, and not reality. Really. The Earth is 4.5 BILLION years old. Over most of that time, it was hotter than it is now.

   There is a cycle of cold and hot that pre-dates Humans by Billions of years. There are eras in the past where it was a lot hotter than now, and eras in the past where it was a lot colder than now. The Quaternary glaciation is an alternating series of glacial and inter-glacial periods that began 2.5 million years ago, and is ongoing.

   So we are in the middle of an ice age, but not in a glacial period at present. No matter what humans do, the global temperature will fluctuate as it has done for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years.

   We cannot control the weather. Taking us back into the stone age will avail us nothing, since, sooner or later, the Earth will warm up. Also, sooner or later, the Earth will cool down. Do not believe all of the pundits who have convinced the world that Humans are bad and destroying our planet.

   It is not true.

   — Tell your friends!

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   1. Dig up the database called GISP2 — a record of temperatures from Greenland over the past 40,000 years or so. Graph it… it’s an interesting picture.

      In Caesar’s time, it was several degrees warmer than today.

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      1. Roman Warm Period. There’s also the Medieval Climate Optimum, when it was warmer than today.

         Warmer means better crops, healthier people. Cold years means less food and more disease. Outbreaks of the Black Death were preceded by cold years; it apparently lets infected rats live long enough to reach more populated areas and kick off the spread.

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         1. Interestingly enough people are fast to dismiss these “climate optimums” as not relevant, because they were “regional”.

            But when a city has one day of record temperatures it’s an undeniable prove for global warming 😀

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            1. Except, of course, history and archeology shows they were widespread. The Wikipedia article on the MCO claims the Mississippian city of Cahokia “showed decline due to droughts” — except Cahokia’s lifespan corresponds to the MCO. The city grew in population and power through the 9th to 11th centuries when the MCO was starting, then collapsed in the 13th as the MCO was ending.

               Whoopsie!

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            2. So regional that they show up in the central Greenland ice record? Hm. 🙂

               I’ll start paying attention to “climate models” when they can do a model run starting at 40k BC and reproduce the GISP2 temperature graph. Good luck with that.

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