Healthcare Costs

SpaceX launched its huge Super Heavy-Starship mega rocket on its seventh test flight Thursday, successfully "catching" the first stage booster back at its firing stand but losing its new-generation Starship upper stage spacecraft, which apparently broke up as it was reaching space. Falling debris from the destroyed Starship briefly delayed airline traffic out of Miami, Florida, federal officials said.

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Donald Trump wants to create 'Freedom Cities.' The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Alaska and  nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
The vast majority of this land is NOT parks.

Why would the federal government own so much land?
There is plenty of land to build new cities that could be adapted to new technologies such as driverless cars and drones.

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80% of the top 100 Lowell Putnam Math Competition scores are from MIT.

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Our industrial civilization has lasted roughly 300 years (dating, for example, from the beginning of mass production methods and power sources). This is a small fraction of the time we have existed as a species, and a tiny fraction of the time that complex life has existed on the Earth's land surface. 

Amazingly, economists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers can look at that tiny sliver and generalize.

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Healthcare Costs

An interesting article on health costs after the strange murder of the United CEO:

Insurance companies just don’t make that much profit. UnitedHealth Group, the company of which Brian Thompson’s UnitedHealthcare is a subsidiary, is the most valuable private health insurer in the country in terms of market capitalization, and the one with the largest market share. Its net profit margin is just 6.11%:

That’s only about half of the average profit margin of companies in the S&P 500. And other big insurers are even less profitable. Elevance Health, the second-biggest, has a margin of between 2% and 4%. Centene’s margin is usually around 1% to 2%. Cigna Group’s margin is usually around 2% to 3%. And so on. These companies are just making very little profit at all.

if UnitedHealth Group decided to donate every single dollar of its profit to buying Americans more health care, it would only be able to pay for about 9.3% more health care than it’s already paying for. If it donated all of its executives’ salaries to the effort, it would not be much more than that.

Americans’ much-hated private health insurers are paying a higher percentage of the cost of Americans’ health care than the government insurance systems of Sweden, Denmark, and the UK are paying. The only reason Americans’ bills are higher is that U.S. health care provision costs so much more in the first place.

Elizabeth Warren has claimed that switching to national health insurance would save huge amounts of money by reducing administrative costs. But when we look at United Health Group’s operating costs, they’re only 22.6% of the actual cost of medical care.

In fact, the Kaiser Family Foundation does detailed comparisons between U.S. healthcare spending and spending in other developed countries. And it has been concluded that most of this excess spending comes from providers — from hospitals, pharma companies, doctors, nurses, tech suppliers, and so on.

This means that eliminating all administrative waste and inefficiency in the entire U.S. health care system — not just at insurance companies, but administration of government insurance programs — could save Americans at most about $680 per person every year, and probably not anywhere close to that amount. A few hundred bucks a year is not nothing, but it’s only a small fraction of the $5683 more that we pay relative to other countries.

So the fundamental reason your health care costs so much is not that the health insurance companies are lining their pockets. And it’s not that insurers are an inefficient mess. It’s that the actual provision of America’s health care itself just costs way too much in the first place.

The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves.

So the way to make our health care system affordable is not to browbeat insurers, in the hope that they will be able to reduce their profits and pay for us to have cheap health care. Insurance companies simply do not have the power to do that, even if you threaten to shoot them. What we need is to reduce costs within the actual medical system itself. One idea is to have the government insurance system play hardball with providers; negotiating lower prices is what the Biden administration had Medicare do with some drug companies. There are some risks to this approach — if it’s executed clumsily it can suppress innovation — but it’s basically what every other rich country does, so the track record is decent. There are probably other ways to foster competition and increase efficiency in the medical care system.

But focusing all our anger on the middlemen of the U.S.’ bloated health care system is just a way of shooting the messenger.--Noah Smith

Oh, Canada

The guy who has vanished from elected public office while other, unknown people--a small, anonymous cabal---stepped in to run this country in his stead and hid their power assumption and his debilities has just given a national farewell address warning of rising, dark, power-hungry oligarchies opposed to democratic principles.

The bad news is that, while mendacity and hypocrisy are disfiguring, they are not fatal.

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched carrying two Japanese moon landers.
Blue Origin's massive New Glenn orbiter launched early today and achieved orbit. Apparently, its boosters were not immediately recovered.
It is designed to conduct regular flights using reusable boosters, lifting commercial and national-security satellites into orbit. The rocket is eventually meant to launch astronaut crews.

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Oh, Canada

A lot of fuss about Canada.

If Canada were to become a state, it would be the third poorest in the country, right behind Alabama.

Everybody talks about the American debt issue, but Canadian households bear more debt relative to their income than any other G7 country. The average Canadian now spends 15% of their income on debt servicing.

This is a stark shift from 2008 when Canada emerged from the global financial crisis with a healthier balance sheet than any other G7 nation.

Every year, businesses invest in growth – new technology, new projects, new employees or products. If you take the total number that businesses invest during a calendar year, and divide that by the number of active workers in the country, you get the corporate investment per worker.
In the U.S., businesses invest about $28,000 per worker. In Canada, that number is only $15,000—nearly half.
Corporate investment is what drives future productivity, economic growth, and opportunity. The higher the number, the brighter the future.

What is Canada’s comparative advantage?

They have vast natural resources, with easy-to-navigate geography, the world’s longest coastline that spans three oceans – allowing direct access to every global market, and the largest shared international land border, on the other side of which is the worlds wealthiest, hungriest customer.

They have product. And a direct line to the consumer.

Canada is not capitalizing on these advantages because they have been sold a narrative discouraging investment in the industries where they could outperform the world.

The narrative that Canada should abandon its resource sector to pursue conceptual industries like hydrogen power or electric vehicle production is both misguided and damaging. These are fields where Canada has little experience or infrastructure, where they are not competitive, and the evidence is in their economic data.

Epic Fail

Nearly one and a half million women in this country are currently selling their bodies on the platform OnlyFans.

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EV sales in 2024 (1,301,411) were higher by 7.3% and accounted for 8.1% of total sales, up from 7.8% share in 2023. While the rate of growth has slowed, volume continues to expand. In the second half of 2024, more than 700,000 EVs were sold, accounting for 8.7% of total new vehicle sales.

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Epic Fail

The unfortunate FBI spokesperson, Aletha Duncan, speaking at the New Orleans atrocity, declared that the event was not an act of terrorism and made several syntax errors. Then she made a request of the audiance: "This is my ask..."

Nominalization is the nouning of a verb. Appeared as a verb preceeded the noun "request," borrowed from the French, a few times 1000-1200, then did not reappear until 1700. Still, it is rare, appearing in three specialized uses: in card-playing, finance, and fund-raising. More common in Australia and, lesser, in the UK. particularly denoting size, as in "a big ask."

“Do you have a solve for this problem?” "Enclosed is the invite." “Let’s all focus on the build.” “That’s the takeaway from today’s seminar.” Or, from a No. 1 hit in Britain, “Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?”

Each of these jarring sentences contains an example of nominalization, where a verb or adjective has been transmuted into a noun. There are two types of nominalization. Type A involves a morphological change, namely suffixation: the verb “to investigate” produces the noun “investigation,” and “to nominalize” yields “nominalization.” Type B is known as “zero derivation” — or, more straightforwardly, “conversion.” This occurs when a word has been switched from a verb or adjective into a noun without adding a suffix.

They are associated with bureaucracy and general carelessness.

"Their boosters see them as marvels of concision, but one person’s idea of streamlining is another’s idea of a specious and ethically doubtful simplicity." (Hitchens)

In the case of the unfortunate Ms. Duncan, it's the latter.

Disaster Equity

Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men’s performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal charges, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small, detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men’s perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers’ perceptions of workplace quality, with the effects driven by units integrated with a woman in a position of authority. We discuss how these findings shed light on the roots of occupational segregation by gender.--Kyle Greenberg, Melanie Wasserman & E. Anna Weber.

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The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn’t work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good.--Sowell

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The leader of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Los Angeles Fire Department addressed concerns that female firefighters may not be strong enough to carry a man out of a burning building, responding: 'He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.'

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Disaster Equity

A startling 2023 FEMA webinar features federal health and disaster personnel trumpeting the urgent need to move away from policies that benefit the greatest number of people and instead turn focus toward “disaster equity” where aid is distributed based on innate characteristics like sexual orientation and gender identity.

The roundtable discussion, recorded in March of last year, was entitled “Helping LGBTQIA+ Survivors Before Disasters,” included panelists like Maggie Jarry of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and was moderated by Tyler Atkins, an Emergency Management Specialist at FEMA who uses he/they pronouns.

The panelists covered a range of topics around the notion that disaster services are short-changing marginalized groups when it comes to relief efforts.

“LGBTQIA people, and people who have been disadvantaged already, are struggling. They already have their own things to deal with. So when you add a disaster on top of that it’s just compounding on itself,” Atkins mused to the group.

“I think that is maybe the ‘why’ of why we’re having these discussions, because it isn’t being talked about, it isn’t being socialized, we’re not paying attention to this community,” he claimed.

As the remaining panelists nodded in enthusiastic agreement, Jarry made a startling revelation that federal agencies ostensibly tasked with saving as many lives as possible in a disaster should be focusing their attention elsewhere.

“The shift we’re seeing right now is a shift in emergency services from utilitarian principles — where everything is designed for the greatest good for the greatest amount of people — to disaster equity. But we have to do more,” she urged.
She then suggested existing disaster management agency policies may have been deliberately engineered to leave out vulnerable communities.
She was not referring to the policy to withhold help from Trump supporters after the hurricaine as that occurred later.

“The topic at hand here is, are the policies that have been developed actually biased in benign neglect or intentional erasure of the specific communities that are probably most in need of those services, and does the aid then bias toward people with assets or other types of situations that weren’t part of the norm of this industry in the past.”

Atkins, visibly moved by her oratory, capped off her words with a DEI word salad.“The topic of preparedness and preparedness resources and the intersectionalities within equities and discrimination and hate — it’s a real thing that needs to be discussed, needs to be vocalized, and we need to start looking at how we can find solutions to this.” 

The initiatives raised at the panel discussion echo many of those on FEMA’s own website, which proudly proclaims instilling “equity as a foundation of emergency management” as goal 1.“Underserved communities, as well as specific identity groups, often suffer disproportionately from disasters. As a result, disasters worsen inequities already present in society,” the declaration reads in part.“This cycle compounds the challenges faced by these communities and increases their risk to future disasters. By instilling equity as a foundation of emergency management and striving to meet the unique needs of underserved communities, the emergency management community can work to break this cycle and build a more resilient nation.”

FEMA has come under fire after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted to reporters that the agency “does not have the funds” to safeguard Americans through the remainder of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, its coffers depleted in part by the more than $1.4 billion it has spent addressing the migrant crisis since fall 2022.

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment by The Post inquiring whether the sentiments expressed by the panelists are reflective of the agency as a whole. But this may explain the strange FEMA directive in the hurricane to avoid homes with Trump signs.

Self-inflicted Wounds of the Righteous

... among corruptible human beings, the power to weaponize a vision of justice and impose it on a world of alternative visions is toxic.--Schmidtz

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Roger Federer said, “In the 1526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Now, I have a question for you. What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%.”

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Blue Origin is preparing to step into a new chapter of rocketry, by debuting its first orbital class rocket, New Glenn, Bezos' entry into the spaace race. It will also attempt to recover the first stage booster on landing platform the Atlantic Ocean. Its launch was planned for today but cancelled early this morning.

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A gymnist pauses for a glass of wine:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DD-crSMSNoz/?igsh=MTM1b2JiOGc3eWVjeg%3D%3D

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Self-inflicted Wounds of the Righteous

Global warming beliefs have created dangerous waters.

The Germans have a word for periods of simultaneous low wind and sun. Literally. It's Dunkelflaute, meaning "flat, dark calm." The word elsewhere is "winter."

Dependence on unreliable energy sources (wind, solar), combined with the hasty phase-out of nuclear power, has made Germany's electricity the most expensive in Europe and compromises the country's -- and ultimately the continent's -- energy autonomy.
On December 12 of this year, for example, German electricity production from wind and solar power was thirty times lower than the demand for it.

To make up for energy shortfalls they have increased reliance on coal and lignite. This raises their carbon footprint. More importantly, they have to compete for energy on the open market.

Germany's high electricity prices are leading to the relocation of its industry, as companies look for sites where energy costs are more affordable. In Germany, industry pays up to three times more for electricity than itscompetitors.

Whole swathes of Germany's proud industry are collapsing. Not just the big names -- VW, BASF, Mercedes-Benz -- but every big company that disappears or downsizes takes with it a myriad of small and medium-sized affiliated enterprises that end up collapsing along with it.

None of this is accidental. None is the result of weather whimsy. This is administrative, the consequence of government decisions from faith-based "conceptual frameworks." Most importantly, these decisions, made by a small group of idealogues, summate to swamp the average working guy in changes that may not be shared by the law-making elite.

That is Germany's, and Europe's, true rising tide.

Sunday/Some Religious Bits

"You are the children and we are the mother." Nortth--or maybe Townsend--in an interview with Franklin, the Colonies' ambassador to the Court of St. James to smooth relationships between Britain and the Colonies.

"There will be war." Franklin's letter home after the interview.

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"Ships are damaging major undersea cables in the Baltic Sea almost every month," German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Funke media group.
 
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Sunday/Some Religious Bits

Pelagianism: a 5th-century Christian heresy taught by Pelagius and his followers that stressed the essential goodness of human nature and the freedom of the human will. Pelagius was concerned about the slack moral standards among Christians, and he hoped to improve their conduct by his teachings. Rejecting the arguments of those who claimed that they sinned because of human weakness, he insisted that God made human beings free to choose between good and evil and that sin is a voluntary act committed by a person against God’s law. Celestius, a disciple of Pelagius, denied the church’s doctrine of original sin and the necessity of infant baptism.

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Marcionite: any member of a gnostic sect that flourished in the 2nd century AD. The name derives from Marcion of Pontus (an ancient district in northeastern Anatolia), who, sometime after his arrival in Rome, fell under the influence of Cerdo, a gnostic Christian, and went on to expand upon his theology. Cerdo’s stormy relations with the church of Rome were the consequence of his belief that the God of the Old Testament could be distinguished from the God of the New Testament—the one embodying justice, the other goodness. For accepting, developing, and propagating such ideas, Marcion was expelled from the church in 144 as a heretic, but the movement he headed became both widespread and powerful.

The basis of Marcionite theology was that there were two cosmic gods. A vain and angry creator god who demanded and ruthlessly exacted justice had created the material world of which humanity, body and soul, was a part—a striking departure from the usual gnostic thesis that only the human body is part of creation, that the soul is a spark from the true but unknown superior God, and that the world creator is a demonic power. The other god, according to Marcion, was completely ineffable and bore no intrinsic relation to the created universe at all. Out of sheer goodness, he had sent his son Jesus Christ to save humankind from the material world and bring about a new home.

Marcion is perhaps best known for his treatment of Scripture. Though he rejected the Old Testament as the work of the creator God, he did not deny its efficacy for those who did not believe in Christ. He rejected attempts to harmonize Jewish biblical traditions with Christian ones as impossible. He accepted as authentic all of the Pauline Letters and the Gospel According to Luke (after he had expurgated them of Judaizing elements). His treatment of Christian literature was significant because it forced the early church to fix an approved canon of theologically acceptable texts out of the mass of available but unorganized material.

The Marcionites were considered the most dangerous of the gnostics by the established church.

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“England, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century seems to have been one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, became, by the seventeenth century, the most virulently anti-Catholic, and the almost dominant ideology of anti-Catholicism fueled the civil wars that engulfed all parts of the British Isles in mid-century and later provoked the Bloodless Revolution, from which what passes for a British constitution derives” (Collinson, 2004, )

Sat/Stats

"The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States."--George Soros, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom

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Trump is now a felon. The President of the U.S. has been convicted of o misdemeanor-made-felony, a result that will most certainly be overturned on appeal. The real point is that this damages Trump and America in the world's eyes because the world does not understand American law and how it has been distorted by the Banana Republic prosecutors. This will deminish his standing--and America's standing--in the world, exactly what the Left wants.

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A combat veteran from the Russian paramilitary group Wagner was arrested as he illegally crossed the border in Rome, Texas with two passports and a drone.

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Sat/Stats

A Stanford study examined how EV growth in the western United States will impact the regional electric grid by 2035. If current trends persist, with the majority of charging occurring at home overnight, peak electricity demand could surge by up to 25%.
This increase would necessitate significant investments in new generation and storage capacity, likely involving natural gas—a counterproductive measure for decarbonization efforts.

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Nationwide student test scores show that girls have lost ground in reading, math, and science. For instance, in 2019, eighth-grade girls scored a math average of 517 and boys 514 on a scale of 0 to 1,000, but by 2023 this had dropped to 481 and 495, respectively. Boys have been losing ground as well, but not as fast as girls, who have traditionally outperformed boys in the classroom.

Are the boys' scores indicative of discrimination? What methods of redress should be taken?

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More than 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America between the 16th and 19th centuries, while only about “6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America,” according to historian Steven Mintz.

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Citing a “crisis” in healthcare, nearly 400 primary care physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are taking steps to unionize, a move that medical professionals are calling “historic."

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More than 2,000 U.S. corporations have market capitalizations larger than U.S. Steel, which has fewer employees (21,800) than Krispy Kreme, which manufactures doughnuts. The U.S. military requires a minuscule portion (in 2017, 3 percent) of domestic steel production. Japan is a steadfast ally that, while Nippon’s $14.9 billion purchase is being blocked, is purchasing vital U.S. weapons systems. Biden is allergic to such facts, as is his successor, who also opposes the sale even though:

Nippon has promised to pay $5 billion more than the company’s market capitalization. And to keep U.S. Steel’s headquarters in Pittsburgh. And to give $5,000 bonuses to the company’s steelworkers. And to abide by all union contracts. And to let the U.S. government reject any reductions in U.S. Steel’s production capacity. And to spend $2.7 billion modernizing what Biden delusionally calls “this vital American company,” which has withered by becoming dependent on U.S. government tariffs, subsidies and “Buy American” rules.--will

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The gender pay gap statistics do not control for occupation or other relevant factors. In other words, they are not, in fact, about the same work or equal work. Rather, almost all of the gap is due to men and women doing different work.--Huemer

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The total payroll of the federal government is about $110 billion a year. Federal government spending was $6.1 trillion.
You cannot meaningfully shrink the federal government by firing “unelected bureaucrats.”

But you can stop them from spending money according to their whims.

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The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that CNN's viewership was down 46 percent since the election when it had 5.1 million viewers - a number that dropped to 419,000 the following Thursday.

Moreover, from the day after the election through last week, MSNBC has averaged only 603,000 total viewers in primetime. Right-leaning hosts like Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld are averaging 2.8 million in the same timeslots.

While that is a significant disparity, it is still a tiny portion in a country of over 300 million.