Afternoon entertainment

I lived in upstate New York when I was a young teen and spent my hard earned babysitting money primarily on my little brother and the New York City Ballet Summer Season at the Saratoga Performing Arts Festival.  Matinees were about $2 bucks a pop.  Sometimes, I was forced to bring my little sister with [...]

Resolving drug shortages shouldn’t be a political “opportunity”

Barack Obama is finally starting to notice that there is a shortage in the production of some older prescription drugs and is offering some carrots and sticks to resolve the problem: WASHINGTON — President Obama will issue an executive order on Monday that the administration hopes will help resolve a growing number of critical shortages of vital [...]

Sunday Morning Stuff

Hi guys, I found a lot of stuff in the spam filter this morning and have released them.  I have no idea why your messages are getting sent there.  There’s no obvious trigger words or filtered IDs.  It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma.  I’ll have to be more diligent about fishing them out. ************************************************ [...]

Good Morning

Cue the music Some more bad news on the research front.  Earlier this week, Merck laid off a number of employees from the parent company and Schering-Plough, the company it merged with a couple years ago.  I can’t find a firm number for the total layoffs.  In some reports, it’s 17,000, in others it is [...]

Yeah, why *did* we do that?

There is some convergence about why we slit our own throats to protect the bankers that is starting to gel in some thought provoking ways. First up, if you haven’t read it yet today, is Krugman’s Friday column in the NYTimes from Iceland.  By the way, to get a better idea of what happened in [...]

Clap harder, CLAP HAAAARDER!!!

Typed “daily” into the Google search bar looking for the Daily Show, got DailyKos instead.  What the heck, let’s see what they have on the first page.  Oh, it’s a post by DemFromCT titled “What if the Economic News Gets Better?“ {{faceplant}} First, there’s an oh so brief blurb on the Greek sovereign debt crisis, [...]

Precariat- Learn this word

No, precariat is not a misspelling of a group of single celled organisms.  It’s a very disturbing word, an ominous word, a word that has already arrived here in the United States and is slowly moving up the food chain: Precariat- a social group consisting of people whose lives are difficult because they have little or [...]

The Jews conduct a crafty battle against OccupyWallStreet

Just like Joshua and his rag tag band of travel weary Israelites, they took on OccupyWallStreet.  Their weapons were a handful of palm fronds and their clever disguises.  Like cats stalking their prey, they snuck up on the unsuspecting, shoving their palm fronds in faces and conducting a mic check prayer in Hebrew. They were [...]

OccupyScience: More evidence that the bottom is falling out of research

  Lambert and ralphb pointed me to a blog post, Hungry for Jobs and Change, Scientists Join the Occupy Movement in Scientific American reporting on the growing number of scientists at occupy events.  We’re always the ones that fly under the radar of the politicians and policy wonks so it is significant that we’re finally [...]

Sacrificial offerings and pleasing aromas

Update: Novartis announced today that it is eliminating 2000 jobs.  1000 of those jobs will come from the US.  700 positions will be added in China and India.  It sounds like a lot of IT jobs will be moved, but the way things are going lately, it’s probably just the start of things to come. [...]