Friday Fun

Labor is in short supply.  Just take a look at the current unemployment rate of 3.4 percent (tied for the lowest level going back decades).

With the unofficial start to summer right around the corner, “Summertime” from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess which premiered in Boston in 1935 is frequently playing on the Atlas jukebox.  This story centers around an African American couple living in South Carolina on Charleston’s impoverished Catfish Row.

Stress is endemic in the American culture.  For generations now, we’ve defined ourselves and frankly our value on the type of work we do and how many hours we spend doing it. Other exogenous stresses influence us from time to time and the medical profession doesn’t seem to think it is all that healthy at the individual level.

Unsure if we could use the name of a Beatles song as a title for a note to our audience, Atlas went with Doo-doo-doo-doo, but make no mistake, here comes the sun.  Our planet’s original energy source is spewing solar winds our direction and a second round of them could be arriving today!  Just last week scientists at NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory spotted a coronal hole

The Odyssey is an epic poem written by Homer, telling the story of Odysseus, a Greek warrior embarking on a long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Along the way, Odysseus faces many adventures and must battle monsters, gods, and the sea itself. He eventually makes it home, but not before enduring a series of obstacles and tasks set by the gods.

Music has a magic to it.  Just the other day a young man was practicing the trumpet in a park near my home.  Mind you, he was practicing and miles from Mr. Davis, but the blare of his brass mellowed the moment as the sun was setting.  For me, it was as if everything was all right.

/ˈjäbˌsmakt/

A description of the feeling a person gets after receiving a piece of shock news concerning their employment i.e. demotion, redundancy, loss of benefit, changes to working routines or dismissal. Often due to unforeseen circumstances which lead to the recipient ending up in said state. (www.urbandictionary.com)

Savings are going away.  A few days ago, regular readers were sent a note on income and outlays from the Bureau of Economic Analysis which includes data on the savings rate.  In the note, Atlas highlighted the dismal rate of savings (currently 3.1 percent).  It is understandable that households are less able to stash cash when inflation is rising while markets crash.  But ou

Atlas is a small company.

Software runs our world.  Whatever apparatus you’re reading this note on has programs and operating systems which allow you to receive and delete (hopefully not too quickly) this note.  Some of the code runs in the background doing things I’ll never understand, but other parts of it create feature or functionality designed to be useful to us as users.  Occasionally, a