Opinion

Connecticut is a blue state, with a serious case of the job market blues. In December, the state added just 600 jobs, a sad number, and even sadder because the likely cause is abandonment. That is, workers are leaving the state. The December number leaves state employment at about 1,625,000, still about 75,000, or 4.4%, below its pre-pandemic level of 1.7 million in February 2020, according to the Connecticut Department of Labor. National employment is only 1.8% below its February 2020 level. While December was a bad employment month for the whole nation, Connecticut’s employment woes are not a one-month

When I read two very different news stories about our trains last week, Charles Dickens came to mind:   “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” – A Tale of Two Cities Oh, it’s our winter of our despair, alright, especially for Metro-North when the NY Times last Friday so cogently summarized the commuter line’s near-term future as being “Devastated by Remote Work”, almost verbatim repeating my predictions of one year ago:  commuters are not coming back. Late in 2021 the weekday ridership on

Thorium, formed by radioactive decay of uranium, is a naturally occurring radioactive metal found in rock, water, and soil. Found in monazite and other minerals, it’s 3X more abundant than uranium. Despite its radioactivity, small amounts of thorium were used in lantern mantles for brightness, ceramic glazes and welding rods. Until the 1950s, thorium dioxide was used as a contrast agent (i.e. Thorotrast) in medical radiology. Between 1930 and 1950, after 2.5 million people were injected with Thoroplast worldwide, resulting lifelong exposures to thorium produced higher than normal incidences of liver tumors. Inhalation of thorium dust by townspeople near mining

In the early days of COVID, the key objective was herd immunity. Today, we are there, or very nearly so. We should declare victory. It has been a costly victory. It may be a Pyrrhic victory, unless we pivot rapidly from COVID to the economy. According to CDC data, we have reached herd immunity, consisting of immunity conveyed by vaccination plus natural immunity borne of survival of the virus. 250 million, or almost 80% of, Americans have received at least one shot, and 65 million, or about 20%, have contracted COVID and survived. We are about as close to full

Whenever we’re on the verge of avoiding disasters and accomplishing something meaningful for America’s future, international welfare and life itself, obstructionists sabotage our progress. Both major parties, GOP extremists especially, take the myopic view human existence revolves around profligate economies ─ prices at pumps, tenderloin sales (subsidized by taxes), mortgages; car loans. Levying a $175 billion/year, decade-long tithe on tax-avoidant rich and corporations to fund Build Back Better is somehow too expensive, delaying passage of transformative, desperately-needed initiatives. Yet, the world’s most gluttonous military budget ($770 billion/year or $7.7 trillion projected over 10), emptying the government’s coffers, sails through Congress

Bribing people with their own money is a standard technique of politics, and with a state election coming up, Connecticut’s Democratic and Republican leaders are already at it. Governor Lamont, who will be nominated by the Democrats for a second term, says he is likely to propose increasing the property tax credit on the state income tax. The Republican minority in the state Senate proposes cutting sales taxes a little. Both sides assume that these tax cuts are possible without cutting spending because state government is rolling in money at the moment, as a booming stock market has produced lots

Our love affair with the automobile depends on one thing:  free parking.  After driving on our “free” highways, we have to park someplace, and we all hate to pay for what’s really a privilege.  It’s as if there’s some constitutional right to free parking. But free parking is actually expensive and paid for in more than just dollars. The industry standards setting group known as the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) has defined 266 different types of businesses and has determined the amount of nearby parking they require.  So when your local Planning & Zoning Commission is looking at proposals for, say, a new

Life’s impossible without viruses. But, Gaia hypotheses aside, 2021 was a grim reminder of our tendencies towards self-destruction. Vaccine-averse pandemic deaths, pervasive climate change disasters, political toxicity, supply-chain bottlenecks and dim-witted insurrectionists were unwanted hallmarks. Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, was correct in saying “human beings are a worse poison than schnapps and tobacco,” adding “the more primitive we are, the more we believe ourselves to be.” Yet, however Cassandra curses dog us scientists and social critics’ writings project dissatisfaction (as Dickens, Sinclair, Orwell and Huxley once did), it’s time to focus on what

The suburban myth of a mass exodus from a virus-plagued New York City to the supposedly safe environs of Connecticut died with the recent release of Census Bureau interstate migration data. While New York State lost over 400,000 residents to other states from April 2020 to July 2021, Connecticut attracted a mere 226 net new residents from other states. Incoming New Yorkers were offset by outgoing Nutmeggers. And that’s the good part. Connecticut’s labor force plummeted by 100,000, or more than 5%, from February 2020 through November 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only two state workforces

The New York Times woke up this week to the biggest underreported story of 2021.  Children are in crisis across the country as a direct consequence of Covid-19 protocols.  As I wrote back in September, the CT Department of Education (only one among many states to issue such findings) issued a report detailing student outcomes on tests run by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Not surprisingly, the results indicate that students in Grades 3- 8 who were in-person for 75 percent or more of their classes last year outperformed those in hybrid models and significantly outperformed those who were fully

Tom Kaminski is like an omniscient guardian angel, floating in the heavens and keeping motorists in the tri-state area safe from motoring mayhem. For 34 years Kaminski has been a traffic reporter for WCBS 880 radio, heading a team of producers, spotters and tipsters covering traffic and transit from his vantage point 1500 feet above the city in the station’s Bell 206 helicopter. Most of the time he’s in the chopper, but always with a pilot and, more recently, a camera operator for his twice hourly updates for PIX-11 TV.  Six times each hour (“on the 8’s”) from 5:30 am

A term that few are familiar with is worth some attention in the coming weeks, as Connecticut’s population is divvied up into what are known in technical jargon as Public Use Microdata Areas, or PUMAs. PUMAs are geographies that include multiple towns and allow the public to access data for an entire region that is not available in other ways. This data is called Public Use Microdata (PUMs). The data allows people to analyze relationships between economic, demographic, or housing variables, or create new measures that aren’t included in the standard American Community Survey data tables, released periodically by the