Interesting discussion of how a labor shortage makes some jobs less attractive.
A Black family got their beach back — and inspired others to fight against land theft
Delagar with some graphs
Why everything is getting more expensive
Minnesota parents eagerly await Covid 19 vaccine for kids
Baby with a twist on entropy
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
October 23, 2021 at 11:26 am
THANK YOU.
October 23, 2021 at 12:12 pm
Yikes that inflation one is scary. I don’t want it to be true, but it does sound mostly true. (The New Deal did internalize some of the costs with things like shorter working hours and Social Security, and we have cleaned up some pollution and rescued some species on the verge of extinction.)
October 23, 2021 at 4:56 pm
https://postcardstovoters.org/
October 23, 2021 at 6:18 pm
That inflation article thoroughly depressed me for an entire day. Just the general gist of how badly we’ve destroyed our environment and the lack of hope for how we’re going to pull back from that is too much to process.
October 23, 2021 at 6:20 pm
:(
October 24, 2021 at 7:52 am
That thread on how just-in-time combined with a labor shortage leads to excessive overtime which in turn makes it even harder to keep workers is yet another example of how just-in-time made the world extremely vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. We *should* have learned more from the 2017 hurricane that took many drug manufacturing plants in Puerto Rico offline for multiple weeks, leading to shortages. Especially we should have learned from the ONE such plant in PR that kept operating: it made something on the Pentagon’s list of essential supplies because their product would be needed should some terrorists use a “dirty bomb” to make a US city radioactive. Because it was on the Pentagon’s list, and because the Pentagon has a unique ability to create a sense of urgency in the US Government, that plant had extra generators and huge amounts of diesel fuel stored on site.
So with the supply chain as with many other issues in the US, the real lesson is: we as a society must figure out some way of getting people to think of NON-military stuff with the same sense of urgency as we think about war.
October 24, 2021 at 3:01 pm
I just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading this. Thank you.
And I’m thinking of ways of doing a little less just-in-time at my house. Like, I would have gotten two replacement sink faucet cartridges today instead of just the one I need right now, but they only had one. (I guess most people understand this when we’re talking about toilet paper.)
I have no idea how to get people to care about issues that are not their own specialization. Yet, the specialists do sometimes need help from the general public. Like right now, medical workers need us to protect ourselves as best we can. And reporters need us to respond and make things happen when they find horrors (but there are so many horrors, and we also need to maintain our sanity).
October 24, 2021 at 3:33 pm
Excellent points.