The U.S. Government’s credit rating has taken a hit this week. Fitch Ratings downgraded the federal government’s credit rating from AAA to AA+.

Every conscientious adult must see Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer. Nolan deserves our deepest gratitude for using his enormous talent and notoriety to raise awareness of humanity’s nuclear weapons problem. Many critics have justly praised the film’s entertainment and artistic value. This review aims to provide historical context that might deepen the viewer’s appreciation of this timeless film, Oppenheimer. 

Earlier this year, Social Security’s Trustees reported that the trust fund, which supports about one-fifth of today’s Social Security payments, will run out of money at the end of 2033. When that happens, they say that every American who receives retirement or disability benefits will see them reduced by 20%. The program will still be able to pay out 80% of its benefits using what it collects through its payroll taxes.

“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul,” he wrote. “The only difference between this and the use of gas (which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had barred as a first-use weapon in World War II) is the fear of retaliation.”Those harsh words, written three days after the Hiroshima bombing in August 1945, were not by a man of the American left, but rather by a very prominent conservative—former President Herbert Hoover, a foe of the New Deal and Fair Deal.

The Congressional Budget Office has released its 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook. Within it, two charts stand out, which the CBO combined into one figure to convey its message.

Ten House Republicans, Fox News reports, have voted with Democrats to quash a bill that would have forced Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to “report his flight records on government-owned jets.” 

Christopher Nolan further solidifies his reputation as one of the world’s most astute and adroit filmmakers with Oppenheimer, his biopic of the “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” A brilliant physicist before he was put in charge of the Manhattan Project, Nolan’s film provides a strikingly well-produced, nuanced, and layered look at J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life. Audiences will leave with a much better appreciation for the man, the dilemmas facing a nation entrenched in a global war, and the politics of a turbulent and uncertain era in American history.

The long anticipated seventh film in the Mission Impossible movie franchise, Dead Reckoning Part 1, finally made it to the big screens in the U.S. All indications are that Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt) and his co-stars will easily make back the movie’s nearly $300 million production budget. The movie’s plot-driven action will keep audiences engaged throughout while government and AI (Artificial Intelligence) skeptics will be more than satisfied as well.

Whenever politicians and media outlets discuss inflation, they invariably use the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as their measure. The CPI is only one of several price indices on top of the various measures of the money supply that underlie aggregate price changes. Strictly speaking, the CPI does not measure inflation per se, but rather the consequences of monetary expansion on consumer products. In macroeconomics, the CPI is one of the key indicators of economic health, and it is this inflation measure that economists use to calculate real GDP. Naturally, the accuracy of the CPI as a measure of the consequences of credit expansion is critically important, yet the measure is controversial among investors. As Investopedia explains, the CPI is “a proxy for inflation,” and “from an investor’s perspective . . . is a critical measure that can be used to estimate the total return, on a nominal basis, required for an investor to meet their financial goals.”

In recent years, there has been a growing trend in schools and universities across California to introduce dedicated data science courses and departments. Data science, the interdisciplinary field combining statistics with computational science, has garnered significant attention due to its high applicability to numerous real-world applications, from business analytics to political behavior, human-computer interactions, and so forth. However, early drafts of the state’s K-12 mathematics framework promoted the idea of students pursuing math-lite “data science” courses instead of Algebra II. This misguided approach threatened to undermine the foundation upon which data science relies and would have done a disservice to Californian high school graduates.