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Recent headlines about year-over-year consumer prices sensationalize with phrases like “worst inflation in 40 years” and “out-of-control inflation.” The reality of high inflation, its real costs on many American households, and the extensive, sometimes excessive, media coverage has been a drag on Biden administration approval and is among the most prominent talking points in the Republican effort to take control of Congress in the November midterms.

The IRA has received mixed reviews, which is not surprising given the current polarised political, social, and economic conditions existing in the US. However, what strikes even more is that reactions by economic pundits, both from the center-left and the center-right, have been inflated, often relying on dramatic hyperbole and invoking sweeping vistas of (climate) disaster averted and ‘civilization saved’. The (sad) truth is that ‘serious’ establishment macroeconomists are once again having a breathless debate over very little. Let me quickly run through the debate.

Steve Fazzari and Servaas Storm’s breakdowns of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act are acute and persuasive. I think they point inescapably to a striking conclusion: That this flamboyantly contradictory production only looks like a piece of legislation. Really it is a new species of mythical beast – a twenty-first-century counterpart of the ancient Greeks’ fire-breathing Chimera, which notoriously joined the head of a lion with the torso of a goat and the tail of a serpent.

Sick of Manchin and Sinema’s Power Trip? Watch This

Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are on a power trip, but we can make them irrelevant after this year’s election.

Right now,  we have only 48 REAL Democrats in the Senate. Manchin and Sinema are Democrats in name only — and are allowing the filibuster to block the Democrats’ agenda.

They’re acting more like the king and queen of the Democrat’s agenda, deciding on their own to prevent critical measures from being enacted.

by Christy Shaw

There seem to be encouraging signs that more and more average Americans are speaking out and taking action to oppose uncontrolled growth. Concerned citizens are sounding the alarm that too much growth is doing far more harm than good in their towns, cities and communities.

While there does not yet appear to be a coordinated nationwide coalition of activism, there are definitely increasing signs of grassroots efforts to push back against the all-too common,

The post Emerging Signs of Grassroots Resistance to Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

 We've been doing live streams of our songwriting sessions at our studio from our Twitch channel. We just turn on the camera and try out ideas and see where they take us each week.

We took a clip from one of those sessions that we liked recently and posted it on our YouTube channel.

Try it Looney Tunes style? (Live Stream Songwriting Clip)

On a previous live stream songwriting session, we came up with a song we tentatively called Slippery Friction.

Some households bounce back financially from disaster, while others face hardships long after a big storm has come and gone.

Patreon

My latest cartoon for today’s Boston Globe:

As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same.

Since World War II, Britain’s influence in the world has relied on its “special relationship” with the United States, its position as head of the Commonwealth (the British Empire’s successor), and its position in Europe. The Americans are still there, but Europe isn't, and now the head of the Commonwealth isn't, either.

Economist Michael Hudson joins Multipolarista host Ben Norton to discuss partial student debt relief in the US, inflation and the Fed, disaster capitalism in Ukraine, and China’s challenge to the petrodollar. Multipolarista · Economist Michael Hudson on debt relief, inflation, Ukraine disaster capitalism, petrodollar crisis Transcript BEN NORTON: Hey everyone, this is Ben Norton of Continue Reading

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer. None of this is legal advice. All of this might also be a horribly bad idea.

Ah, SEO link spam e-mails. If you have a blog that’s been online longer than, say, three years, you know what I’m talking about:

Hey,

I read your article at <link-to-a-blogpost-of-mine> talking about <actually-not-the-topic-of-the-blogpost>. I think your readers would benefit from a link to <link-to-an-irrelevant-or-trivial-piece>.

Would you consider linking to our article?

For a long time I just ignored these, flagging as spam and moving on. Obviously I am not going to link to some marketing crap that’s there only to drive up SEO of some random site.

But then that one spammer showed up in my mailbox, and he was persistent. Several e-mails and follow-ups within a month. I decided I needed a better strategy.

What if I told them to pay for a link being placed on my blog?

Businesses are facing extraordinary challenges as disruptions in the supply chain echo across the globe. Even as things looked to return to normal, we’ve seen even more chaos as climate change-induced heat waves have resulted in the Yangtze River in China drying up in places. This has curtailed the production of hydroelectric power, and factories…

The post How to Improve Logistics Efficiency appeared first on Peak Oil.