Health Care, American and British

As the battle on Quora over medical care in the U.S. and G.B. continues, this from some studies in 2016:

A recent study found older women are three times as likely to die from breast cancer in England compared with other European nations.

Research on 120,000 patients over the age of 70 shows a gulf in survival between different nations, with major differences in access to surgery and other treatment.

For every three women in England who is diagnosed early, yet dies within five years, just one life is lost in Belgium.
A previous study found that in some areas, no women over the age of 75 were being offered surgery for breast cancer, despite legislation which came into force in 2012 making it illegal to deny treatment on the basis of age.

Legislation was necessary?
 

A study of 1,000 elderly cancer patients found four in five believed they had fallen victim to age discrimination, with some saying they had been wrongly told they were too old for breast cancer screening, while others has been refused treatment.

Every transaction is influenced in some way. This is certainly one way of controlling costs. Loving your triage agent helps too.

Supplements

Over 50% of Americans take supplements. And the non-scientific world has provided some remarkable insights and therapies. Digitalis, the ubiquitous cardiac drug that improves cardiac work without increasing its energy requirements, was originally found in the folk medicine foxglove. (Interestingly, foxglove was used as a diuretic as increased cardiac efficiency often improved kidney function.) Curare was a aboriginal hunting paralytic before it was used by anesthesia. A number of year ago, using the logic that more medicines were available in the world of folk medicine if we only looked harder, a research company called Shaman raised $50 million and started to explore the more primitive therapies in a search for drugs like foxglove and curare applicable to the new technological world.

Regrettably, Shaman went broke.

Yet the nonscientific world slogs on, underwritten by hope and ignorance. Much of that ignorance is legislated. If an over-the-counter therapy actually did the things implied, the FDA would break  the company's doors down and demand they invest $1 billon in trials to prove it. So, in our confused world, companies are dis-incentivized to prove their claims.

The world of supplements is less complex than a folk medicine as those therapies are actually part of our normal diet and not exogenous chemicals.

A paper titled "Supplemental Vitamins and Minerals for CVD Prevention and Treatment" was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology on May 28. Researchers from the University of Toronto and St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, conducted a meta-analysis of relevant data and single randomized control trials published between January 2012 and October 2017. The findings showed some of the most common supplements either provided no benefit or actually increased risk in the prevention of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke or premature death.

"We were surprised to find so few positive effects of the most common supplements that people consume," said lead author Dr. David Jenkins, professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the university, interviewed by MSN. "Our review found that if you want to use multivitamins, vitamin D, calcium or vitamin C, it does no harm — but there is no apparent advantage either."


The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently issued new recommendations for older adults to decrease the risk of falls. In their statement, the use of vitamin D supplements was discouraged due to mixed results from research. On the other hand, the review also linked niacin (vitamin B3) and antioxidants (vitamins A, C, and E) to an increased risk of all causes of death. Previously, a 2014 study by Northwestern University researchers expressed similar concerns about niacin.

"There might be one excess death for every 200 people we put on niacin," said preventive cardiologist Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones from Northwestern Medicine. He called it "an unacceptable therapy" for most patients, explaining how it should only be reserved for those at very high risk for a heart attack or stroke, and are unable to take statins.


That said, the latest review did highlight one supplement that offered the benefit it promised. Folate did show a reduction in cardiovascular disease and stroke, according to the researchers. The effect was also observed in B-complex vitamins which contained folic acid. That is worth attention.


In addition, the paper highlighted the prevalent use of supplements in the United States. Most experts think supplements may only "plug dietary gaps" for certain people. Examples of people who would fall into the category include pregnant women, older adults, those with food allergies and dietary restrictions, etc.

"In the absence of significant positive data — apart from folic acid's potential reduction in the risk of stroke and heart disease — it's most beneficial to rely on a healthy diet to get your fill of vitamins and minerals," Dr. Jenkins said. "So far, no research on supplements has shown us anything better than healthy servings of less processed plant foods including vegetables, fruits, and nuts."


Nuts.

Colllusion

An American Spectator magazine story, “Russian funding of U.S. environmental groups shows how collusion is done,” points to the kind of Russian collusion and domestic meddling that some approve.

A 2014 U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report identified that the San Francisco-based Sea Change Foundation receives funding from a Bermuda-based shell company known as Klein Ltd. The company was created by attorneys from Wakefield Quin, a law firm that has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The IRS requires nonprofit organizations to file 990 forms that report their activities. Those 990s show that Klein Ltd. contributed $23 million to the Sea Change Foundation in 2010 and again in 2011. The forms show that the foundation distributed more than $20 million in grants in 2010 and 2011 to environmental organizations, including the leftist Natural Resources Defense Council, The Sierra Club Foundation, the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, the Tides Foundation, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the World Wildlife Fund.

In return for the grant money, those leftist environmentalists were “to promote awareness of climate change,” “reduce reliance on high carbon energy,” “educate the public about climate and clean energy” and “promote climate and clean energy communications.” A U.S. House Science, Space and Technology Committee report, titled “Russian Attempts to Influence U.S. Domestic Energy Markets by Exploiting Social Media,” details that the environmental groups used the Russian money to protest the process of fracking and fight the building of the Keystone XL pipeline. If environmentalists can thwart U.S. oil production, Russia stands to gain greater economic and political power.

It is gratifying to see Russia's concern for our environment--and interesting how influence abuts free speech. And how complex the job of monitoring is, even for the most vigilant.

Reverie

"We are the friends of liberty everywhere but custodians only of our own."--John Adams

After terrorists killed 193 people in Madrid, the FBI matched a fingerprint on a terrorist's bag to a man in Oregon named Brandon Mayfield. They arrested him. But Mayfield was innocent. Weeks later, Spanish investigators compared the prints more carefully and found the real terrorist. An article recently used this as an example of the vagaries of science. But science--in this case technology--is not vague and DNA is very specific; this DNA mistake was a human error, the erroneous application of a very settled and understood science. 

The need to explain the creation of wealth is obscured yet again by political debates within modern societies about how wealth ought to be distributed, which presupposes that wealth worth distributing exists in the first place. Economists speak of a “lump fallacy” or “physical fallacy” in which a finite amount of wealth has existed since the beginning of time, like a lode of gold, and people have been fighting over how to divide it up ever since. Among the brainchildren of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created. --Pinker

From a letter to the editor of the NY Post:

When a government diverts more resources to its armies, navies, and air forces, that government does indeed strengthen its military, both absolutely and relative to the strength of other governments’ militaries. In contrast, when a government diverts more resources to export industries and other select firms, that government weakens its economy, both absolutely and relative to the strength of other economies. It does so by starving efficient firms under its jurisdiction of resources while feeding these resources to inefficient firms. Inefficient firms grow at the expense of efficient firms.

Antemeridian: adj: occurring before noon



​What is....naloxone?



Countries with policies that are consistent with more economic freedom show higher levels of prosperity and entrepreneurial activity (see Sobel, 2008a, 2008b; Kreft and Sobel, 2005; Sobel, Clark, and Lee, 2007; Hall and Sobel, 2008; and Hall, Sobel, and Crowley, 2010). Most importantly, these policies include institutions that provide secure property rights, a non-corrupt and independent judicial system, contract enforcement, and effective limits on government’s ability to transfer wealth through taxation and regulation. Another factor is demographics: the entrepreneurial age group is 25 to 49. That is shrinking in the West.


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The concept of abstractions have always focused on their nature itself, as if, in some Platonic way, they had an essence, an ideal form.  We now talk about these ideas differently, giving parsing adjectives to concepts. So now an idea like "justice" can be subdivided and might be something different depending upon circumstances.

When this year's tax bill was passed (at 2 in the morning) Amazon had 77 lobbyists on the floor of the Senate.

PNAS has corrected a highly cited paper after an investigation found evidence of misconduct.

The investigation—conducted jointly by the University of California, San Francisco, and the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center—uncovered image manipulation in Figure 2D, which “could only have occurred intentionally.” The institutions, however, could not definitively attribute the research misconduct to any individual.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. wrote recently: "In America, no family should be forced to put off having children due to economic insecurity." Think about what that means.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has asked questions about the work of a private consulting firm that has undertaken projects for the United Arab Emirates, according to people familiar with the investigation, suggesting his probe is looking more deeply at foreign influence in Washington.

Stanford University's John Ioannidis, in his 2017 publication "The Power of Bias in Economics Research,"  found that the vast majority of estimates of economic parameters were from studies that were "underpowered," and this, in turn, meant that the published estimates of the magnitude of the effects were often biased upward.

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Children’s has performed more than 1,800 pediatric liver transplants – the most in the United States

A judge in Los Angeles ruled Wednesday that Starbuck’s, Peet’s, and many other retailers face potentially massive liability under California law for not warning consumers that naturally occurring substances in roasted coffee beans can cause cancer, at least in lab animals. Acrylamide is a naturally occurring substance formed when many foods are browned or otherwise subjected to high heat, including in many cases grilled burgers, fried chicken, bread, almonds, and potato chips. Like many other constituents of everyday life, it appears to cause cancer in some animals at high dosages. And that brings it under the terms of Prop 65, which has already led to a proliferation of warnings on and around thousands of common goods and services in California, from office furniture to hotel corridors to garages (car exhaust).

The woman identified by police as the attacker who wounded three people at YouTube's headquarters in California was a vegan blogger who accused the video-sharing service of discriminating against her, according to her online profile. I'm not sure I'm ready for militant vegans. Evangelical atheists are bad enough.

The Kremlin is crying foul on Facebook, accusing the social media giant of censorship after it took down more than 200 pages and accounts that were run by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency — the "troll factory" that is under indictment for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election.

The Russians are upset over censorship.

President’s attacks on e-commerce company stem from its CEO’s ownership of the Washington Post, which the American leader says writes unfair stories about him, say people close to the White House.(wsj)

I do not know if the story is attributed to people who are named.

Women are traditionally barred from entering or touching the sumo ring, known as the dohy. Japan’s first female governor, Fusae Ota, has repeatedly clashed with the sumo organization over whether she would be permitted to crown the champion of an annual tournament, a traditional responsibility of the governor of Osaka.

Entrepreneurialism has a lot of qualities; one is age. And the West is having a decline there.

Our responsibilities to our fellow citizens are increasing. USA Today (4/5, Ungar) reports US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams “issued an advisory Thursday urging more Americans to carry naloxone, which can reverse the opioid overdoses that kill a person every 12½ minutes in this country.” USA Today says this is the first advisory from the Surgeon General in 13 years – the last, in 2005, concerned alcohol use during pregnancy.



Phosphorus is one of the most crucial ingredients of life, at least our kind of life. It is critical for storing and transferring energy, which means living organisms can’t really survive without it. So, if it is unevenly distributed in the universe, it may be that life's possibilities are also. And so far, studies seem to indicate it is unevenly distributed.

A Japanese worker has been reprimanded by her boss for “selfishly breaking the rules” after she became pregnant before it was her “turn”, according to media reports. The plight of the woman, who has not been identified, highlights the unsettling practice of some Japanese companies dictating when female staff are allowed to marry and have children, depending on their level of seniority.

A woman in Ft. Myers has married a tree to protect it from some excavation/removal plan. When I heard about this I was worried there was another unhospitalized wacko around but I found a short interview with her and she was really funny.

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AAAAaaaannnnnndddddd....a picture/graph:

Altruism and the Cult of the State

As Sanders shows, there is a growing altruism in politics. And some articles and books---Junger's Tribe, for example--are purporting to show that the altruism of small groups is inherent to us, part of our DNA. This is complicated, of course. We are not a hunter-gather species now. What new elements have been added to us in our growth? What new emergent qualities have...well, emerged? Not that altruism is unreasonable; nor is it necessarily subject to Naturalistic Fallacy arguments. What is curious is the proposed agent of these arguments, the executor of these plans: The State.

Has there ever in history been a benign State, a State where altruism would be compatible? Even the Americans, whose State created a new baseline in human freedom and whose founding documents were actually suspicious of itself, had to compromise with slavers--the essence of anti-freedom--to create it. How is it that people are able to dismiss the brutality and callousness of every State ever created and assume that some remarkable ideal change is going to occur in their State to facilitate their optimism?

Or is that ideal State only the State of Their Minds?

Quora and Health Care

There is a phenomenon on Quora: The health care debate. Most posters laud the European--and especially the British--system with an enthusiasm that is almost evangelical-- usually with a distinct and pointed dismissal of the American system. The general approach is to declare the British system free of any financial bias, accommodating to everyone with illness--all with the implication that the American system is rife with bigotry, bias and financial advantage.

 

There are certainly many elements to health care and how it is paid for; personally the complexity is overwhelming and it is gratifying to see so many people with deep and heartfelt certainty about America's problems and solutions. For those less insightful and certain there are reasonable questions that, when asked, might clarify differences: Given that illness and death are inevitable aspects of every citizen's life, and given the demands for health care are not tempered by those making the demands, how are the inevitable shortages of health care --which must exist in such a system--managed? And how are advances in those health care systems pursued and financed?

Reverie

"I have not the pleasure of knowing my reader but I would stake ten to one that for six months he has been making Utopias, and if so, that he is looking to Government for the realization of them."--Bastiat

 

Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness. (from an article by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal)

Led by a president who doesn’t appear to understand basic economics and who insists that the long-term drivers of America’s unsustainable national debt—Social Security and Medicare—can’t be touched, the mainstream GOP has proven that the grumbling about big government under Obama was mere political posturing. After years of swearing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, unified Republican power has instead come with a noticeable new taste for Medicaid expansion and support for other provisions of the law. --deRugy

In 1869, Americans spent 95% of their food budgets on food prepared at home and only 5% on food away from home, mostly at restaurants but also for “food purchased at hotels and motels, recreational places, vending machines, and schools and colleges.” But the turn of the last century, it wasn’t much different, Americans spent 90% of their food budget at home and only 10% away from home. By 1950 the shares were 75% (food at home) and 25% (food away from home), as Americans gradually became wealthier and restaurants became more popular and more affordable. In 1970, the shares were 2/3 (food at home) and 1/3 (food away from home). And then in just the last few years, Americans spent slightly more on food away from home (50.2% in 2016 and 50.1% in 2017) than on food at home for the first time in history.

To offer to rent a room in your own home through Airbnb in Arlington County, Virginia, now requires a business license--to rent a room in one’s own home---a 7.25 percent tax and filing a monthly tax return for the unit.

Today only one organization in the world legally does not have to make others happy but can be happy on its own. That organization is government. Government receives revenues through taxes. Taxes are forced, not voluntary, because the government has the power to collect taxes forcefully. Even if in theory we require government to serve the people and to provide public goods to citizens, we have no way of guaranteeing that the taxes collected by the government are not higher than the value of the public goods provided while serving the people. In fact, taxes collected by government often exceed the value of services provided. --Weiying Zhang

Who is...Christopher Thomas?

"Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class – the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition."

Pinker means by this, I think,  they hate progress without their specific intervention, the idea that improvement of the human condition can develop without their help--and usually violence under their leadership.

Walmart is said to be considering buying Humana.

Oil producers, not consumers, are the anti-carbon activist's target.  Coal producers, petroleum producers and natural gas producers draw all their fire while the eager consumer, the other half of the supply and demand equation, gets a pass. But it is more complicated than simply the producer being the favored target. Multinational oil companies produce just 10% of the world's oil and gas reserves. State-owned companies now control more than 75% of all crude oil production. Yet it is the private companies that get the activist's ire despite the fact they produce only a fraction of the carbon fuel.  Saudi Arabia and Russia come to mind. So the carbon activists attack the private companies despite knowing that the impact--even with success--will be minor.

Why is that?

Suzanne Patmoe Gibbs, a widely respected TV development executive who shepherded “Grey’s Anatomy” during her time at ABC and most recently headed Sony Pictures TV’s TriStar TV banner, died  after complications from minor surgery. She was 50.

According to a new report by a steel lobbyist group called the Coalition for a Prosperous America, the Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will create 19,000 jobs and reduce the United States’ gross domestic product by only $1.4 billion.

First, let’s consider these findings in the most favorable light. Let’s assume that the tariffs will actually produce 19,000 jobs. Let’s also assume that the creation of these jobs will cost only $1.4 billion in economic growth. As George Mason University economist Donald Boudreaux notes, “each job created will cost $73,684 (which is $1.4 billion divided by 19,000). The typical worker in a steel mill earns in annual wages about $55,556. If we assume that this worker gets another 20 percent of this pay in the form of fringe benefits, each steel-mill worker, on average, is annually paid about $66,667. It appears, therefore, that the price we Americans will pay per job created will be roughly $7,000 more than each of these jobs is worth.” (de Rugy)

The Los Angeles Times (3/29, Kaplan) offers coverage of a report issued Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which says opioid overdose deaths continue to rise across the US. “From 2015 to 2016, opioid-involved deaths increased in males and females and among persons aged ≥ 15 years, whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians/Pacific Islanders,” the researchers from the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control wrote. “Deaths involving synthetic opioids increased in every subgroup examined.”

The Republicans are discussing a Balanced Budget Amendment, probably a Russian idea. This after passing a 1.3 trillion Omnibus Bill, a bill that grants, but does not direct, money to the government. The original uprising in the Republican party was over spending--and the debt. It morphed into a Trumpish nationalism. It is hard to imagine the original enthusiasm returning. But all the talk about the health care expenses being a drain on the economy might imply that some are beginning to feel that taxes and spending are actually important.


Enterprise is the largest of the car rental companies, as big as the next three combined. It owns one million cars and has annual revenues in the range of 14 billion dollars. It includes National Car Rental and Alamo Rent a Car. And it is private, family owned.

Christopher Thomas was released in January from prison in New York. He, in 1984, murdered 10 people. He must be all better now.

The Giant Brains in Washington are planning a "Family Leave Bill" to subsidize the desires of new parents. Amazingly, this will be added on to the already insolvent Social Security program.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/12/wild-pigs.html

Wild Pigs steeleydock.blogspot.com Pigs were domesticated in China around 4900 B.C. (although some experts claim 7000 to 6000 B.C. in Western Asia) and were being raised i...

Justice Stevens wants to repeal the Second Amendment. So does that mean these people really do want to be able to outlaw guns?

The constitution of Wisconsin prohibits the governor from coining new words:
“... the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill ...”

From 2007-2015 there was a decrease in the proportion of vasectomies performed in all age groups and in all locations of the country.

AAAAaannnndddd.....a graph ( “When someone says ‘diversification is the only free lunch in finance,’ the phrase may not truly resonate as well as a picture, and the picture above says it all,” he wrote on The Disciplined Systematic Global Macro Views blog. “I can honestly say that for all of the educating in investments, this picture is not used enough.”

He starts with a risk-adjusted return of a single asset and then adds asset classes that have the same risk but different correlations. )

Congenital Grievance

When intellectuals are unable to find enough contemporary grievances to suit their vision or agenda, they can mine the past for harm inflicted by some members on others. By conceiving of those involved in the past as members of intertemporal abstractions, the intelligentsia can polarize contemporary descendants of those involved in past acts. The kind of society to which that leads is one in which a newborn baby enters the world supplied with prepackaged grievances against other babies born the same day.--Sowell

The insult-from-the-grave mentality allows the living no progress, no improvement. Every ounce or inch of achievement comes with the asterisk that reminds everyone of some deed or attitude one may have no sympathy with--or even knowledge of--which hangs over the present innocent like original sin, damning him by his very nature. Reminds you a lot of bigotry.

Being held responsible for the errors or circumstances of distant strangers is a classic in modern homicidal European thought. And, of course, it is always on display--with less philosophy--in the Middle East.

We are all allowed to chose our models. But, as always, knowledge helps.

AlphaZero

A few months after demonstrating its dominance over the game of Go, DeepMind’s AlphaZero AI has trounced the world’s top-ranked chess engine—and it did so without any prior knowledge of the game and after just four hours of self-training.

AlphaZero taught itself its first chess lesson. The quality of chess in game two was a just a tiny bit better than the first. Nine hours and 44 million games of split-personality chess later, AlphaZero had (very possibly) taught itself enough to become the greatest chess player, silicon- or carbon-based, of all time.

And a provocative generalization from Kissinger's article in The Atlantic:

"On its own, in just a few hours of self-play, [AlphaZero] achieved a level of skill that took human beings 1,500 years to attain. Only the basic rules of the game were provided to AlphaZero. Neither human beings nor human-generated data were part of its process of self-learning. If AlphaZero was able to achieve this mastery so rapidly, where will AI be in five years? What will be the impact on human cognition generally? What is the role of ethics in this process, which consists in essence of the acceleration of choices? . . .. . . The Enlightenment started with essentially philosophical insights spread by a new technology [printing]. Our period is moving in the opposite direction. It has generated a potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy."

Sunday/Truth

A recent article by Gershowitz laments the decline of truth in American politics. He originally described the rise of "The Narrative" as Truth's replacement. So our leaders call Cormac McCarthy as witness for their defense. This recalls Zito's wonderful and insightful description of Trump: "The Press takes him literally but not seriously, his voters take him seriously but not literally."

The partisanship in American politics has made all analysis insincere. The Press supports their liars--the Progressives, the Clintons--and FOX theirs, Trump. The Gershowitz article has the openhandedness to blame both.

President Trump defines truth as being that version of events that best satisfies his needs or objectives, or salves his sense of self. Hence his inaugural crowds were the largest ever, and he would have won the popular vote but for the three million illegals who voted for Hillary Clinton. Both ridiculous assertions. President Trump simply says what serves his interest with complete abandon. For example, he blithely stated that his budget plan would offer “one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.” But in fact, Congress raised defense budgets by larger percentages than the 10 percent increase that Trump proposed three times since 2000. The base defense budget grew by 14.3 percent, in 2002; by 11.3 percent, in 2003, and by 10.9 percent, in 2008.

After all, President Barrack Obama knowingly assured the nation that under his healthcare program, (1) premium costs would decline $2400 by the end of his first term, (2) that everyone who wanted to keep his or her doctor could, (3) everyone who liked his or her plan could keep it, and (4) that he would veto the Affordable Care Act if it increased the deficit by one dime. To which, for emphasis, he added “period!” It wasn’t true.  It was never true, and the President knew it wasn’t true.


Remember when one of the key architects of the federal healthcare law, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber told a panel that a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” were essential in getting Congress to approve Obamacare. “Lack of transparency, he said, “is a huge political advantage,” Gruber continued, “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.” He said that voters would have rejected Obamacare if the penalties for going without health insurance (the so-called mandate) were interpreted as taxes, either by budget analysts or the public. “If CBO scored the individual mandate as taxes, the bill dies,” Gruber said. “If you had a law that made it explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people are going to get subsidies, it would not have passed."


Gershowitz' overall point, however, is not criticism of liars but rather of their acquiescing victims who continue to excuse the lies to advance the narrative they favor.

Reverie

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.--deTocqueville

There's a Nobel prize-winning economic model that explains why even the most irrelevant coursework and silliest majors can be financially rewarding.  It's called signaling.  Basic idea: Academic success is a great way to convince employers that you've got the Right Stuff - to show off your brains, work ethic, and sheep-like conformity.  Since people with these traits are productive workers, employers happily reward people who display them - even if the display itself has nothing to do with the job.

The opening of a Lemeiux thought experiment: Assume that the state is not a benevolent organization. It pursues its own interests, which means the interests of those who occupy positions of command at its helm. These interests may require it to satisfy the interests of certain electoral or quasi-electoral clienteles whose support is necessary to those in power. Under our assumption, the state will use the rule of law and the constitution as mere commitment devices to gain the confidence of the populace. State rulers will ignore the rule of law when they can get away with it--while proclaiming that "we are a nation of laws."

Olson on the WashPo's recent editorial to lower the voting age to 16:

At what point are young people to be entrusted with important life responsibilities? The Post has repeatedly opposed easing the drinking age from 21 so as to allow persons of 18 or 20, who may include service members returning from combat missions, to enjoy a glass of beer. It opposes subjecting late-teen juvenile offenders to the level of accountability applied to adult criminal defendants. Its coverage suggests sympathy with proposals to raise the marriage age to 18, which would mean that a couple of 17 is not deemed mature enough to enter on binding vows of mutual support even with parental blessing and judicial ascertainment of their independent choice.
Now the Post supports slashing the voting age to 16. Perhaps the pattern here is that the Post sees 16 year olds as incapable of making decisions to govern their own lives, yet competent to govern everyone else’s.

An interesting thought about over-fished areas. The writer said the reason areas were overfished is that they were not owned, that property rights had not been established and so there was no incentive to preserve or protect the fish.

HealthLeaders Media (3/25, Commins) reports hospital prices increased 3.8% last month, compared to February 2017, which was “the highest growth rate in more than a decade, according to Altarum’s Health Sector Economic Indicators.” Charles Roehig, a healthcare economist at Altarum, said, “Hospital prices averaged 1.6% growth in 2017, increasing to 3.5% during the first 2 months of 2018. Further, growth has accelerated for each of the three main payers: Medicare, Medicaid, and private health plans.”

So when planners and politicians say they want to cut the costs that health care runs to the economy, they do not mean simply shifting from the private payer to the public state payer, they mean decreasing what is paid, period. A decrease in health care costs means a decrease in health care work, right?

Holy smokes 1! Pitt has hired Jeff Capel as their new head basketball coach. Most did not think Pitt would even have their phone calls accepted. He has been head coach at both Oklahoma and VCU. The past seven years, he's been the right-hand man and top recruiter for Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski, most recently holding the title of associate head coach.

Capel owns a 175-110 record as a head coach with three NCAA Tournament appearances, taking Oklahoma to the Elite Eight in 2009. 

He is 43 years old and was named coach of VCU in 2002 at age 27 — the youngest in the country at the time — and took the Oklahoma job four years later at 31.

His departure from Oklahoma came under the specter of NCAA sanctions levied on the program within months of Capel's firing in 2011. The NCAA said its findings included unethical conduct by assistant Oronde Taliaferro, extra benefits, preferential treatment and ineligible participation. Capel was not implicated by the NCAA.

What is....the CBO?

Holy smokes 2! During a three-day stop in Beijing, Kim met Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials, where they discussed bilateral ties and Korean peninsula tensions, Chinese state media said Wednesday.

In a meeting, Kim told Xi that North Korea is committed to denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, and is willing to start dialogue with the U.S. and hold a summit meeting, the government-run Xinhua News Agency said.
April Fool!




In 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island failed to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people. At the height of the crisis, plant workers were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, but no one outside Three Mile Island had their health adversely affected by the accident. Nonetheless, the incident greatly eroded the public’s faith in nuclear power. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again. In the more than two decades since the accident at Three Mile Island, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States.

When you're admitted to a hospital, you are given the option to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order, also known as a DNR.

New research shows having those three letters on your chart could put you on course to getting less medical and nursing care throughout your stay. Fewer MRIs and CT scans, fewer medications or even fewer bedside visits from doctors.

What did they expect?

After the Pirates traded McCutchen and Cole, the NL Central-champion Cubs added pitchers Tyler Chatwood and Yu Darvish, the second-place Brewers added outfielders Lorenzo Cain and Christian Yelich and the third-place Cardinals added outfielder Marcell Ozuna.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/03/watching-injury-happen.html

Watching the Injury Happen steeleydock.blogspot.com This strange health care event continues on. Like a plane that has lost its air pressure it flies on, a death ship, everyone watching silent...

The business world has a different lens. Here is an interesting note on that lens: Selling in Telsa bonds has intensified, driving prices to fresh lows, a day after the electric-vehicle manufacturer suffered a credit-rating downgrade.

In a study of 2,232 broken bats, the league found that maple bats were three times more likely to shatter than bats made with ash. Maple bats are also more likely to explode when they shatter, while ash bats more often splinter into small fragments. Maple bats became popular after Barry Bonds started using them about a decade ago and are used by about half of the players in the Major Leagues. It seems to me there are fewer such incidents this year.

The written words of a constitution do not enforce themselves.  People must be generally willing to abide by its letter and spirit both, instead of regarding it as something to be twisted or ignored as suits their immediate purpose.  A tradition of political morality is necessary to keep a written constitution meaningful. This is an observation from Yeager. This may be a very profound point. The culture may change and the underlying constitution that created it may just hang on, perhaps against the culture's will.

From Bloomberg:

"Affiliates once had to guess what kind of person might fall for their unsophisticated cons, targeting ads by age, geography, or interests. Now Facebook does that work for them. The social network tracks who clicks on the ad and who buys the pills, then starts targeting others whom its algorithm thinks are likely to buy. Affiliates describe watching their ad campaigns lose money for a few days as Facebook gathers data through trial and error, then seeing the sales take off exponentially. “They go out and find the morons for me,” I was told by an affiliate who sells deceptively priced skin-care creams with fake endorsements from Chelsea Clinton."

CBO, a nonpartisan independent government agency responsible for providing economic and budgetary analyses, projects the federal deficit — the net difference between incoming revenue and outgoing spending — will swell by about 188% over the next 10 years, increasing the deficit from its current value of $487 billion to more than $1.4 trillion in 2027.

By 2028, the value of net interest payments will equal about 3.1% of U.S. GDP, "nearly double the 1.6% projected for 2018."

In most markets, solar and wind power survive purely because the states mandate that as much as 30% of residential and commercial power come from these sources. The utilities have to buy it regardless of price. The California state legislature just mandated solar panels for homes built after 2020 (an added construction cost of about $10,000 per home).

A November 2015 New York Times/CBS News poll found that 56% of Democratic primary voters said they held a positive view of socialism. A Morning Consult/Politico survey in June 2017 asked if a hypothetical replacement for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi should be a socialist or capitalist. More Democrats opted for socialism, with 35% saying it's somewhat or very important that her replacement be a socialist, while only 31% said the same for a capitalist.

Americans currently carry about $765 billion in credit card debt. That represents money already spent to buy goods and services. Comparing that debt to the average disposable personal income, we find the typical American carries credit card balances equal to about 6% of DPI. That number jumped sharply in the last recession but never came back down. It’s kept growing, although at a slower rate.

AAAAaaaaannnnndddddd......a graph:

Image: realinvestmentadvice.com