During the presser, Nancy Marshall of Marketplace asked Powell, âHow closely are you watching rent and housing prices as you elevate whether and when to cut rates? It seems like housing prices are not coming down as quickly as you expected.â
Standing at the podium, Powell responded [to hear for yourself, go to the 42-minute mark], saying that the Fed isnât directly âtargetingâ home prices, and insinuated that the real culprit for elevated home prices is that âthere hasnât been enough housing built.â
Linkage
Things Katy is reading.
Whatâs to blame for high home prices? Fed Chair Powell says âthere hasnât been enough housing builtâ
in Fast CompanyâIt will be the end of democracyâ: Bernie Sanders on what happens if Trump wins â and how to stop him
in The GuardianIt is âbeyond patheticâ, he writes in the book, that a phoney corporate hack like Trump should be able to present himself as the âchampion of the working classesâ, while the Democratic party stands back and cedes territory to him. He caricatures the Democratic promise to voters as, âWeâre pretty bad, but Republicans are worseâ, and warns that is simply not good enough.
Which brings us to Biden.
Sanders describes Biden, whom he has known since he was elected to the Senate in 2007, as a likable and decent man. But he has a clear message for the sitting president: step up to the plate or the future of the United States, of the world, is in peril. âThe challenge we face is to be able to show people that government in a democratic society can address their very serious needs. If we do that, we defeat Trump. If we do not, then we are the Weimar republic of the early 1930s.â
A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. Thatâs Bad News for All of Us.
in SlateThe new study comes from the University of Nebraska, which received funding from the U.S. Army to examine the impact of electric vehicles on guardrails. The university is a natural location for such research; its Midwest Roadside Safety Facility designed and tested the metal barriers known as the Midwest Guardrail System that are a familiar sight along American highways. The MGS is a beam with a dip running horizontally in the middleâif you think of a guardrail, youâre probably picturing one. âItâs the most frequently used guardrail system, because itâs the cheapest to install and maintain,â said University of Nebraska engineering professor Cody Stolle, noting that all 50 states use it.
The current version of MGS was developed to withstand cars weighing a maximum of 5,000 pounds, but many of todayâs SUVs and trucks exceed that threshold. A Cadillac Escalade, for instance, now weighs over 6,200 pounds, and the latest model of the Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in America, can tip the scales at almost 5,700 pounds. You donât really want to hit a guardrail with a vehicle like that, but electrification can make things even dicier. Electric cars often weigh around 30 percent more than a gas-powered counterpart, because big vehicles require enormous batteries to propel them hundreds of miles between charges. The goliath-like GMC Hummer EV weighs a staggering 9,083 pounds, 2 tons more than a gas-guzzling H3.
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Itâs worth highlighting that this study isnât really about the merits of EVs. After all, you can buy an EV that weighs less than 5,000 pounds. You just canât electrify your favorite already-large carâor even buy a hulking gas-powered carâand expect guardrails to work as intended.
Inquiry into price gouging and unfair pricing practices
for Australian Council of Trade Unions ACTUThis report concludes that business pricing has added significantly to inflation in recent times.
âProfit pushâ or âsellers inflationâ has occurred against a background of high corporate concentration and is
reflected in the surge of corporate profits and the rise in the profit share of Gross Domestic Product. There
is much support for the view that prices have added much to inflation. This is to be found in research from
OECD, IMF, BIS, European Commission, European Central Bank, US Federal Reserve Bank, Bank of England
and many think tanks globally and locally and many detailed research studies. Claims that the rise in profit
share in Australia as explained by mining do not hold up. The profits share excluding mining has risen and
energy and other prices associated with mining have been a very significant contributor to Australian inflation.
In a world built by plutocrats, the powerful are protected while vengeful laws silence their critics
in The GuardianWhy are peaceful protesters treated like terrorists, while actual terrorists (especially on the far right, and especially in the US) often remain unmolested by the law? Why, in the UK, can you now potentially receive a longer sentence for âpublic nuisanceâ â non-violent civil disobedience â than for rape or manslaughter? Why are ordinary criminals being released early to make space in overcrowded prisons, only for the space to be refilled with political prisoners: people trying peacefully to defend the habitable planet?
Thereâs a simple explanation. It was clearly expressed by a former analyst at the US Department of Homeland Security. âYou donât have a bunch of companies coming forward saying: âI wish youâd do something about these rightwing extremists.ââ The disproportionate policing of environmental protest, the new offences and extreme sentences, the campaigns of extrajudicial persecution by governments around the world are not, as politicians constantly assure us, designed to protect society. Theyâre a response to corporate lobbying.
Evidence Undermines âRapid Onset Gender Dysphoriaâ Claims
in Scientific AmericanThe American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providersâ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as a clinical diagnosis. And a steadily growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that it does not reflect transgender adolescentsâ experiences and that âsocial contagionâ is not causing more young people to seek gender-affirming care. Still, the concept continues to be used to justify anti-trans legislation across the U.S.
âTo even say itâs a hypothesis at this point, based on the paucity of research on this, I think is a real stretch,â says Eli Coleman, former president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Coleman helped create the organizationâs most recent standards of care for trans people, which endorse and explain the evidence for forms of gender-affirming care.
âThe government must act now to protect grassroots music venuesâ: An open letter from Jeremy Corbyn
in Kerrang!The economic and cultural case is strong enough, but the significance of grassroots music venues doesnât end there.
These creative spaces also offer a vital escape from an occasionally harsh and misunderstanding reality faced by too many in our society.
The Music For The Many campaign has sought to champion these spaces as an absolute essential to building solidarity networks and battling underrepresentation of marginalised groups. Walk into any grassroots music venue in any town or city and, amongst promotions for upcoming shows and memorabilia from past concerts, you will see posters for LGBTQ+ advocacy, opportunities for BAME creators and vital mental health support for people of all ages.
These creative spaces allow for so much more than simply expression.
BREAKING: Court of Appeal SIDES with the Tories to further crack down on activists
in The CanaryFollowing a pattern of jury acquittals of environmental defenders and anti-genocide activists, which exposes the media fiction that the British governmentâs âcrackdown on protestâ is in any way democratic, the Court of Appeal has today backed the Attorney Generalâs call to remove what was for many their last remaining line of legal defence.
It has ruled that mass loss of life from climate breakdown and the governmentâs failure to act on the science are irrelevant to the circumstances of an action, for the purposes of the defence of consent to damage to property (Criminal Damage Act 1971, s.5(2)(a)). That is â protesters deeply-held and factual beliefs are no defence.
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In the absence of any defence, some judges, such as Judge Silas Reid at Inner London Crown Court, have taken to banning activists from explaining their motivations to the jury and banning them from using words such as âclimate changeâ and âfuel povertyâ in their courtroom. Judge Reid has sent 3 people to prison just for using those words in court.
Such measures prompted an extraordinary intervention by the UN Special Rapporteur, Michel Forst, earlier this year:
"I was ⊠alarmed to learn that, in some recent cases, presiding judges have forbidden environmental defenders from explaining to the jury their motivation for participating in a given protest or from mentioning climate change at all.
"It is very difficult to understand what could justify denying the jury the opportunity to hear the reason for the defendantâs action, and how a jury could reach a properly informed decision without hearing it, in particular at the time of environmental defendersâ peaceful but ever more urgent calls for the government to take pressing action for the climate."
Joe Biden Is Shipping Weapons to Israel Every 36 Hours
in JacobinIn the one hundred fifty days after October 7, Israel killed thirty-one thousand Palestinians, injured seventy-two thousand, displaced 1.7 million, and razed or damaged more than half of Gazaâs buildings. Joe Biden sent over one hundred weapons shipments to Israel during the same stretch. In a recent classified briefing, US officials told members of Congress that the Biden administration approved and delivered more than one hundred separate weapons sales to Israel in the one hundred fifty days after October 7, âamounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid,â the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. That works out to one new arms deal every thirty-six hours, on average.
These transfers are classified as sales, but very few of them meet that definition in the conventional sense. The vast majority are funded through State Department grants. Biden made just two of these publicly funded sales to Israel public, and the only reason he did is because he had to. Section 36 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires the president to notify Congress when a proposed arms sale exceeds a certain value. The notification threshold depends on the type of matĂ©riel (for âsignificant military equipmentâ itâs $14 million; for other military articles and services, $50 million; for military construction services, $200 million), but also the recipient. For NATO countries and South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Israel, the notification thresholds for these three categories are considerably higher ($25 million, $100 million, and $300 million, respectively).
While Biden is loud and proud about arming Ukraine, he prefers to arm Israel in secret. The quantity of sales since October 7 is case in point. By spreading his military support for Israel across more than one hundred sales, Biden kept pretty much all of them âunder thresholdâ per the AECA, thereby avoiding congressional and public scrutiny.