Thursday, August 31, 2017

Reverie

When did disagreeing with someone become akin to oppression? --anon







Robert Lewis Stevenson spent the last five years of his life in Samoa. One estimate puts the number of words he wrote during that time at 700,000. 
Stevenson understood Samoan society through his knowledge of ‘the ethos and culture of community’ of the old Highland clan system. According to Joseph Farrell in his new book Treasured Island, Stevenson, the ‘lapsed’ Calvinist conservative, had ‘a quintessentially Scottish state of mind’. He was both comfortable in his new surroundings and impatient to remedy the evils he saw. Much of this came from the European competition for empire and he wrote the politically charged non-fiction work Footnote to History (1892), and also a series of letters to The Times, in defense of the native Samoans. The Times editors worried about him, felt he was wasting his talents and becoming peripheral. Farrell thinks his work erratic but some, particularly Ebb-Tide, quite good.
In December 1894, he died.


Elon Musk, through his various companies, has received so far in government subsidies over $5 Billion dollars.


95 percent of drugs  fail along the way. The 95 percent failure rate is an average; some drugs have a 50 percent chance of success and others have a 1 percent chance. It depends on the drug, the therapeutic area, and the stage of the drug's development. A 2014 study by researchers at Cleveland Clinic found that 99.6 percent of more than 400 Alzheimer's clinical trials had failed. The $2.558 billion tab accounts for those "dry holes."
Between 1999 and 2005, the average length of a clinical trial grew from 460 days to 780 days, while the number of procedures on each patient (e.g., blood draws, scans) grew similarly, from 96 to 158. Comparing the 2001-2005 period to the 2011-2015 period, one study found that the number of study participant visits to care providers (e.g., hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices) increased 23-29 percent; the number of distinct procedures increased 44-59 percent; the total number of procedures performed increased 53-70 percent; and the cost per study volunteer per visit increased 34-61 percent.
in the early 1990s, one of its biggest drugs was Vasotec (enalapril). It was tested in 2,987 patients before FDA approval. Mevacor (lovastatin), another of Merck's big drugs at the time, was tested in 6,582 patients in the EXCEL Study. At the time, that was thought to be a massive trial. But the REVEAL trial, in which Merck is currently testing the experimental drug anacetrapib, includes an unbelievable 30,000 subjects and is being conducted at 430 hospitals and clinics in the United Kingdom, North America, China, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia. (from Hooper)

 
 
I spoke this weekend with a man who owned a vineyard for many years. He said it would be impossible to harvest grapes without immigrant workers and the "sanctuary" being offered in some states is a desperate effort to prevent several state industries from collapse.


Who is...Milton Freidman?


California now has 11 counties with more voters than citizens of voting age.


Well-to-do people are often very clever at using democratic processes as mechanisms for transferring wealth to themselves from people who are poorer than they are.  And part of this cleverness lies in creating the false appearance that the democratic processes are being used to promote the public good.  Because so many intellectuals never bother to look beyond or beneath superficial appearances, intellectuals leap to the conclusion that those who oppose policies that superficially appear to genuinely promote the public interest necessarily are enemies of the public interest.--editorial
 Since 2003, the average household has earned more than 4.5% a year from their investments...exceeding the returns from a diversified hedge fund index, which earned just 1.6% a year.
 
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/cab-thoughts-8313.html
steeleydock.blogspot.com
Every debt is ultimately paid, if not by the debtor, then eventually by the creditor. ~Jim Grant       While the addition of i...





Freidman in an old interview in Reason on why intellectuals espouse collectivism. It is not complementary. The question posed by the interviewer is a complex one:
FRIEDMAN: Well, I don't think we'll get very far by interpreting the intellectuals' motivation. Their critical attitudes might be attributed to personal resentment and envy but I would say that a more fruitful direction, or a more fundamental one, is that intellectuals are people with something to sell. So the question becomes, what is there a better market for? I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there's something wrong pass a law and do something about it. If there's something wrong it's because of some no-good bum, some devil, evil and wicked--that's a very simple story to tell. You don't have to be very smart to write it and you don't have to be very smart to accept it. On the other hand, the individualistic or libertarian argument is a sophisticated and subtle one. If there's something wrong with society, if there's a real social evil, maybe you will make better progress by letting people voluntarily try to eliminate the evil. Therefore, I think, there is in advance a tendency for intellectuals to be attracted to sell the collectivist idea. REASON: It's paradoxical but people might then say that you are attributing to the collectivist intellectual a better feeling for the market.
FRIEDMAN: Of course. But while there's a bigger market for Fords than there is for American Motors products, there is a market for the American Motors products. In the same way, there's a bigger market for collectivist ideology than there is for individualist ideology. The thing that really baffles me is that the fraction of intellectuals who are collectivists is, I think, even larger than would be justified by the market.



“Proper cynicism is not a matter of personality, but of intellectual attitude. Their goal (the Greeks that is) was to blow away the fog and confusion and see reality with lucidity and clarity. The contemporary cynic (of which Mencken is an example) desires the same. The questioning and doubt is not an end in itself, but a means of cutting through the crap and seeing things as they really are.”--Baggini
“On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of this land will reach their heart’s content at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”--Mencken

And, from a correspondent:
 
 
 
 
My pain manager doc had lunch with the Governor earlier this week. He reports that the Governor has no understanding of the health care issues at all.
 

 
 

 
In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” – James Madison, 4 Annals of Congress 179 (1794)      

A small but growing number of investors is buying the rights to musicians’ future earnings, lured by returns that can run the potential for higher rates of return than traditional investments. (wsj)


Consumption in the U.S., per capita, measures about 50 percent higher than in the European Union. American individuals command more resources than people in countries such as Norway or Luxembourg, which have higher per capita GDP. The same American consumption advantage is evident if you look at dwelling space per person or the number of appliances in a typical home.
Once we focus on consumption, America’s high health-care expenditures no longer appear so unusual. (cowen)


The Pirates are playing bad baseball but you can tell that without having to suffer through their games: Simply look at their charities. When they start losing, they ramp up their charities. If they get real bad, their charities will surpass their patriotism. When they are really terrible they look like a charity with a ball team attached.


President Trump is expected to make a speech and sign a memorandum at the White House Friday that will target China's intellectual property and trade practices, effectively firing the first shot in what could escalate into a major US-China trade war.


Oscar Pistorius became the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics, running in an opening heat of the men’s 400-meter. Pistorius finished second out of five runners and advanced to the semifinals, where he finished eighth out of eight runners. Most thought this a heartening human achievement; others did not see the success of adaptation to a disability but the risk of a dehumanizing mechanical enhancement in competition.

Mark Zuckerberg appears to be building an army of presidential advisors.

More numbers:
Productivity growth (TFP) continues to fall and is quickly approaching zero. It is currently in decline in many developed economies.


In 2016, the first baby boomers turned 70 marking an acceleration point for retiring workers and those taking retirement distributions. 10,000 boomers are now retiring daily, which adds pressure to fiscally unstable government programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

State and local pension funds are hugely underfunded. According to a Hoover Institute study published in May 2017, current pension shortfalls total over $3.8 trillion versus the GASB cited shortfall of $1.3 trillion.

Gore's climate sequel is out this month. He is having some trouble with it, even from the Left.

Two weeks ago, Gore came under fire by comparing climate change to slavery abolition, saying both movements were “met with ferocious resistance.”

And the approach to the problem is evolving. Up-and-comers such as the Copenhagen Consensus Center’s Bjorn Lomborg have called for making green energy cheaper by increasing funding for research instead of entering into sweeping global treaties like the kind Gore favors.
A Bloomberg poll this month found that only 10 percent saw global warming as the most important issue facing the country. A Chapman University poll released in October found that those surveyed were more afraid of clowns than global warming.


The economic phenomenon that people who call for higher minimum wages ignore is that when the price of anything rises, people seek substitutes.--Williams
This is one of the arguments against people voting on the basis of the price of a new car; like people priced out of the downtown housing market, people adapt, they buy a used car or do Uber or car pools. The cost of something causes a reaction, it is not a sentence.

Here's a scary early study: Prions are insidious proteins that spread like infectious agents and trigger fatal conditions such as mad cow disease. A protein implicated in diabetes, a new study suggests, shares some similarities with these villains. Researchers transmitted diabetes from one mouse to another just by injecting the animals with this protein. The results don't indicate that diabetes is contagious like a cold, but blood transfusions, or even food, may spread the disease.


"These sanctions, which I pray Europe can independently judge and discard, are as dumb as giving out medals to Generals who keep losing wars...With all the computer geniuses we have in our country, can we not even accept the possibility that perhaps our intelligence agencies are not doing their job, and maybe, just maybe, are deliberately misleading us to continue their false-flag war against Russia?"--the highly self-esteemed Oliver Stone


Alkaline batteries can be made far more cheaply and safely than today's lithium-ion batteries, but they are not rechargeable... Ionic Materials could change that with an alkaline battery the company said could be recharged hundreds of times. One additional benefit of the company's breakthrough: An alkaline battery would not be as prone to the combustion issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries in a range of products, most notably some Samsung smartphones. Cheaper and more powerful batteries are also considered by many to be the driver needed to make the cost of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar competitive with the coal, gas and nuclear power that support the national energy grid.


AAAAAaaaannnndddd......a graph:
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