January 18, 2024

The Telegraph has an updated UK election poll:

The Tory hold over electoral politics has slipped considerably. Of course the Tory hold over the Labour Party has increased significantly.

Such is the nature of UK electoral politics.

Shocking many, some of that money promised by the federal government to shore-up local industrial production is seeping into the real economy.

Industrial production ended the year flat in the USA, rising 0.1% in December. Manufacturing inched up 0.1% too thanks to auto production. At the same time capacity utilization stayed steady.

This is very good news for inflation (from the classical perspective) since long-term unemployment is not growing quickly and input costs seem to have moderated on average.

Europe is focused on the month of June for the earliest rate cuts.

The announcement of a rather firm date for rate cuts to start is an interesting thing for the European central bankers to do. It means that financial firms will have a specific deadline to merge around and a very focused bet to try to exploit of exactly how much and how many times the rate is cut over the year.

This kind of focus is not good for the rest of the economy. With such a specific deadline, firms are going to hold off investments as they wait for near guaranteed rate reductions for their borrowing.

The moves delay everything in the real economy for basically no reason at all.

Similar to the USA, the input costs for Canadian production dropped ever so slightly in December. However, it looks like the higher input costs are here to stay:

Shingles and pneumococcal vaccination data show that reducing the cost of the shingles vaccine would increase its uptake significantly.

It is still astounding to me that after the pandemic vaccines are still shrugged-off as not "necessary" and therefore not sought out.

More than one-third of the unvaccinated think the vaccines are unnecessary

More than one-third of unvaccinated individuals did not think the shingles (40%) or the pneumococcal (37%) vaccine was necessary. Other frequently reported reasons for not getting either vaccine were not knowing about it or the doctor not mentioning it. Additionally, cost was a factor for 12% of those unvaccinated against shingles.

Identifying factors associated with vaccine uptake can help to support efforts to target the promotion of vaccines.

For the flu shot (something everyone should get):

• Getting the flu shoot, going to get other vaccines:

  • 13.5 times higher likelyhood of being vaccinated for pneumonia
  • 5.2 times for shingles vaccination.

More like to get a shot: more affluent women

Less likely: immigrants, those living outside large population centres, and members of South Asian and Chinese population groups

I think that those match economic and readily available information rather closely.

We can do better.

• Massive cosmic corkscrew defies our understanding of the universe

Standard Model for the Universe is being tested and coming up short.