The median selling price of a U.S. home rose 15 percent to $373,300 in March, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), a record dating back to at least 1999. At the same time, sales fell 2.7 percent nationwide from February, and 4.5 percent year on year, as rising mortgage interest rates combined with...
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TRANSPORTATION STOCKS HIT THE BRAKES
The Dow Jones Transportation Average, which tracks share prices of 20 major freight-moving companies, declined 13 percent in value from 29 March through 12 April, The Wall Street Journal reported. Many investors see transportation stocks as leading indicators, losing value when business and consumer spending decline and often signaling a broad economic slowdown ahead. The...
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LOUDER WAR DRUMS BEAT, HIGHER DEFENSE STOCKS RISE
Keeping the war talk going, share prices of aerospace and defense-related companies were leading the broader market this year by 17 points as of 23 April, the most in a decade and only the third time since 1999, according to an MSCI index. Investors see Western nations adding to military budgets as a result of...
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BLOCKCHAIN BATTLES
ECB MEMBER COMPARES CRYPTO SECTOR TO SUBPRIME MORTGAGE CRASH The European Central Bank, busy along with the rest of the West trying to fuel WWIII over Ukraine, took time out to say cryptos are a risk comparable to the subprime mortgage crash of 2007-08. “[The] strong appeal of crypto-assets, especially unbacked ones, is a cause...
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DAOS THE UNIONS OF THE FUTURE?
It’s an optimistic view. But some believe unions might be ready for a 21st century make-over. Instead of being run by union bosses, unions might be a perfect use case for being organized via Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Experiments are already happening, including the first known instance of a “brick-and-mortar” (ie. business with physical locations)...
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U.K. RESEARCHERS DE-AGE CELLS BY 30 YEARS
It sounds like bad clickbait, but a team of British biologists has found a way to reverse the symptoms of aging in skin cells by about 30 years, according to their research published this month in the online journal eLife. De-aging is old news; over the last decade, researchers have reprogrammed human and rodent cell...
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NEW LIQUID STORES SOLAR ENERGY FOR YEARS
Solar power is greener than conventional electric power and now almost as cheap. But sunshine isn’t reliable. Thanks to an innovation from Sweden’s Chalmers Institute of Technology, it doesn’t need to be. The researchers have created a novel molecule of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. When sunlight hits the molecule, it rearranges its atoms in a...
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CHIP AUTOMATES CREATION OF NEW CELLS
Imagine your hand has been crushed in an accident. The blood vessels are damaged. Not enough blood is getting to your fingers. You could lose them. To save your hand, scientists can take cells from your body—skin cells, for example—and “devolve” them back into stem cells, the embryonic “blank slates” that then can be biochemically...
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TOP 2022 UNIONIZATION TREND UPDATE
At the end of November 2021 we issued our Top Trends for 2022. One of them was “LABOR UNION COMEBACK.” As forecast, it has come back. In October 2021, Trends Journal asked, “Where have all the workers gone?”; see “SPOTLIGHT: WORKERS ON DEMAND,” which told of a labor market already at historically low levels and...
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CEO PAY INCREASED 31 PERCENT AS REAL WAGES DECLINE FOR WORKERS OF SLAVELANDIA
While real average hourly earnings for the plantation workers of Slavelandia fell 1.7 percent from January 2021 to January 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, CEOs at the largest 100 companies in the U.S. saw their pay increase an average of 31 percent in 2021, according to a newly released study. “A lot...