Briefly,

If I wrote my autobiography, the title would be There's No Money In It.


That line started as a joke. Then I thought: That's pretty funny for a guy whose primary activity is writing about the economy.


Then I thought: That's why I'm good at it. My personal involvement interferes little with the analysis.

Oops!

From a blurb Google added to my blog editor stats page:

Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019.
...
Google+ Comments: Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. Unfortunately, comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog.

"public health prevention" programs

From Economic Policy as Health Policy at PublicHealthPost.org. The opening sentence:

In the policy debate over how improve Americans’ health, we typically hear ... calls for greater investment in public health prevention programs.

Yeh, the first sentence. I got my money's worth already.

The difference between people and dogs

By chance, I open the door just as the dogs are running toward it The one keeps running to me and is happy to come in. The other, seeing me, stops dead in her tracks.

"Do you want to come in?" I ask. She pretends she didn't hear.

"Okay," I say, and close the door. She can't speak the words "No thanks, Dad." I know that. And she's not allowed to growl at me, any more than I'm allowed to growl at the wife. So if I ask the dog a question and her answer is "no", she just ignores me. We both know how it works.

Then I look, and she's still there. So I open the door and ask again.

She ignores me again. I get the message. She'll let me know when she wants in.

//

It doesn't work like that with people. If somebody asks if I want something I didn't ask for, or if they ask if I'd mind that they do something (which obviously they think I would mind or they wouldn't have asked) my typical response is the cold, blank stare. Something like what I got from the dog this morning, but more obvious what I'm thinking.

But people don't take the cold stare from me the way I take it from the dog. If I don't object in words, they pretend to think I don't object. They go ahead and do.

I wonder if they treat their dogs the same way. Probably.

Oh! She just barked to come in. Gotta run.

"speaking out against mental health"

Go Pete!

We love ya, man.

Not that there's anything wrong with that

Wikipedia -- Gender of connectors and fasteners:

In electrical and mechanical trades and manufacturing, each half of a pair of mating connectors or fasteners is conventionally assigned the designation male or female...

The assignment is a direct analogy with genitalia and heterosexual sex... Extension of the analogy results in the verb to mate being used to describe the process of connecting two corresponding parts together.

Desperately seeking alcohol