She kindly granted me permission to take photo

So ……

We will not have health insurance for the second half of August. 

We had to reapply for health insurance by phone. By computer the cost was based on annual income, and I had income for the first half of the year. By phone you get to be more sophisticated. 

My unemployment insurance hasn’t been approved yet, so we’ve gone from income to no income and now, with no income, qualify for Medicaid, which was a complete shock. But it won’t necessarily stay because we WILL get unemployment at which point we’ll have a small income.

And I don’t want to go on Medicaid and then go through this all over again as soon as the unemployment is approved, so we picked not-Medicaid. 

One would think, when filling out complicated and confusing forms, that there would be an upper limit on how many times you can be told that if you get anything wrong you’ll go to jail for fraud, but one would be wrong. 

So it was a complex and confusing and upsetting day. 

Business activity in Russia has fallen. The businesses are receiving fewer orders. They have higher costs including utility prices. Labor costs more. In July Russia’s service sector activity index dropped to 48.6 points from 49.2. The Service Sector Activity Index is an economic indicator that provides insights into the services sector. Policymakers need the index if they want to make effective, evidence-based economic and trade policies and students need it to write papers. Putin needs to find the head of the organization that puts out these statistics and fire them because that will solve everything. 

(When Trump fired the head of the labor statistics bureau that put out the jobs report my memory immediately went to an econ class I took as an undergraduate and the professor going nuts because Reagan was thinking about cutting back on some of the statistics work the government does and the impact that this would have on research, forever. I remember being in the library, getting numbers from these things called books, and carefully transcribing them, which wasn’t as boring then as it is now that we seldom have to do stuff like that anymore.). 

(If you were wondering, the US services sector activity “flatlined” in July with no change in orders and weaker employment even though input costs climbed by the most in nearly three years.)

The European Commission’s 18th sanctions package is going into effect this week. 

In January 2024 Latvia confiscated the House of Moscow, a cultural center. They passed a bill that was intended to prevent threats to the democratic state system. In March 2024 they decided to auction off the plot of land it is on and use the money to support Ukraine. It is being put up for action for the fifth time with a starting price of 2.14 million euros. I’m seeing a number of articles that say the above but do not explain why it is being auctioned for a FIFTH time but finally found a pro-Russia news site that says investors view it as risky and the starting prices for the other auctions were too high. Another pro-Russian news site has the heading, “no shame, no conscience.” Don’t you hate it when governments do things with no shame and no conscience? 

“Trump announced plans to double tariffs on imports from India, to 50 percent, as punishment for its continued purchases of oil from Russia. The higher tariff will take effect later this month.”