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So far John Patrick has created 367 blog entries.

Should crypto be a no-go?

Excellent article on the grid and environmental consequences of bitcoin mining in the U.S. by Gabriel Dance in the NYT here. Excerpts:

“34 of the largest mines identified by the Times together use more than 3,900 megawatts of electricity”
and
“The analysis found that the 34 mines’ power use was causing nearly 16.4 million tons of carbon pollution each year.”

To what end?

2023-04-10T13:20:11-05:00April 10th, 2023|Home, Musings|

The kids are not all right…

• David Wallace-Wells has another must-read piece in the NY Times: “It’s Not ‘Deaths of Despair.’ It’s Deaths of Children

Some excerpts:

“Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon.

One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations.

Mortality is still increasing more quickly for those without a college degree, but as John Burn-Murdoch demonstrated vividly in The Financial Times, except for a few superrich Americans, individuals at every percentile of income are now dying sooner than their counterparts in Britain, for instance. For the poorer half of the country, simply being an American is equivalent to about four full years of life lost compared with the average Brit.

Black Americans, on average, can expect to live five fewer years than white Americans; Black American men have lower life expectancies than men in Rwanda, Laos and North Korea. White Americans, in turn, can expect to live seven fewer years than Asian Americans. Life expectancy in the Black Belt of the Deep South is as much as 20 years lower than it is north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi, according to the American Inequality Project.

The horror is that, as Burn-Murdoch memorably put it, in the average American kindergarten at least one child can expect to be buried by his or her parents.”

Wallace-Wells also refers to this viewpoint article published in JAMA Network by Woolf, Wolf, and Rivera.

2023-04-07T12:01:27-05:00April 7th, 2023|HomeRecommended|

ETOH? Nah, not really good for you…

As those of us who carefully read the literature suspected, the alcoholic beverage industry’s support for “research” was carefully crafted to demonstrate some benefit to alcohol consumption.  But when corrected for a number of factors (especially the so called “sick quitters”, people who stopped drinking because of underlying medical issues and ended up skewing the non-drinking population) a large meta-analysis by Zhao, Stockwell, Naomi at al in JAMA Network  shows that in fact, drinking turns out to have on average no real benefit at all. The fact that previous research tended to focus on cardiovascular health and ignored the increased risks of breast, esophageal, and head and neck cancers associated with alcohol consumption also contributed to the false sense of harmlessness or even”benefit.”  Thankfully, many health organizations now specifically state that one should NOT consume alcohol in an effort to improve health. The National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics estimates that there are over 95,000 alcohol-related deaths annually in the U.S., and the WHO estimates that worldwide, 3 million people die annually due to the harmful use of alcohol, representing some 5.3% of all deaths. Anyone who has worked in Emergency Medicine has seen firsthand ethanol’s heavy societal toll.

2023-04-07T11:36:24-05:00April 7th, 2023|Home, Musings|

The Republican War on America

Jamelle Bouie has it right on some conservatives blaming “wokeness” for the banking industry woes — that claim has no basis in reality, but is just another attempt to stoke the culture wars:

“It is unclear whether these conservatives are working from the same memo or just have the same narrow obsession. Regardless, there is no evidence that any diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives were responsible for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. It is nonsense. And while it shouldn’t be taken seriously on its own terms, this deflection is worth noting for what it represents: the relentless effort to mystify real questions of political economy in favor of endless culture war conflict.”

2023-03-18T11:15:14-05:00March 18th, 2023|Home, Musings|

And yes, human nature does not rapidly change

In the “the more they stay the same” category, Jamelle Bouie, writing in his March 11 NYT Opinion piece, quotes from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:

“It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.”

And now I’ll quote Bouie himself, as he decries the decline in local news coverage that he believes contributes further to the undermining of American democratic institutions:

“One of the most striking aspects of the modern information environment, as many people have observed, is the almost total collapse of local and even regional news outlets. Where once every town or city of even minor consequence had a newspaper — with reporters who helped the community understand itself through their work — now there are large parts of the country that exist in news deserts, where there is little coverage of anything, from local government to local events.

I think that this decline has played an important role in undermining America’s democratic institutions, as well as the public’s faith in democracy. It’s not just that the collapse of local news has made it harder to hold any number of public officials accountable — contributing to general cynicism about the ability of government to do anything constructive — but that Americans increasingly lack the information they need to participate in the political process in their communities.”

2023-03-11T15:22:32-05:00March 11th, 2023|Home, Musings|

Rant on Fox “News”

I know I’ve commented before on my belief that Fox News has been a destructive force for American society, aided and abetted by certain social media elements, but I just can’t get over how clearly the Dominion lawsuit has demonstrated this as fact.   Siloed media feeding into fear and ginning up anger have been tragically bad for America, and it’s all been done for profit.  The following text is from the as-always-excellent John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, where he quotes in turn from Dominion’s brief in support of a motion for summary judgement:

“Finally. Fox has conceded what it knew all along. The charges Fox broadcast against Dominion are false. Fox does not spend a word of its brief arguing the truth of any accused statement. Fox has produced no evidence — none, zero — supporting those lies. This concession should come as no surprise. Discovery into Fox has proven that from the top of the organization to the bottom, Fox always knew the absurdity of the Dominion “stolen election” story. Now, having failed to put in any evidence to the contrary (because no such evidence exists), Fox has conceded the falsity of the Dominion allegations it broadcast.

That concession is no small thing. Thirty percent or more of Americans still believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The heart of that lie remains the false conspiracy theory that Fox legitimized and mainstreamed starting on November 8 — that Dominion stole the election, using secret algorithms in its software originally designed for a Venezuelan dictator. Because of these lies, Dominion now may be “one of the most demonized brands in the United States or the world.” Dominion employees still endure threats and harassment. So it matters that Fox in private ridiculed — and never believed — the lie. And it matters that Fox has now in this litigation conceded these allegations were false.”

Later:

“Fox seeks a First Amendment license to knowingly spread lies. Fox would have this Court create an absolute legal immunity for knowingly spreading false allegations — lies — for profit, regardless of how absurd the lies are, regardless how many people in the chain of command know the lies are false, and regardless how many people are hurt — so long as the false claims are “newsworthy.” Fox proffers a completely made-up “rule,” contrary to decades of jurisprudence since New York Times v. Sullivan. As Judge Nichols ruled in rejecting MyPillow’s analogous argument that the First Amendment provides “blanket protection” from defamation for statements about a “‘public debate in a public forum,’” “there is no such immunity. Instead, the First Amendment safeguards our ‘profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,’ by limiting viable defamation claims to provably false statements made with actual malice.””

 

2023-03-11T15:07:09-05:00March 11th, 2023|Home, Musings|

Failing to learn from the past…

Heather Cox Richardson’s March 5 newsletter, recounting the events surrounding Selma’s 1965 voting rights protests, is definitely worth a read.  Her important conclusions:

“But less than 50 years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, states have made it harder to vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, Republican-dominated legislatures in at least 19 states passed 34 laws restrict­ing access to voting. In July 2021, in the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision, the Supreme Court ruled that election laws that disproportionately affected minority voters were not unconstitutional so long as they were not intended to be racially discriminatory. 

When the Democrats took power in 2021, they vowed to strengthen voting rights. They immediately introduced the For the People Act, which expanded voting rights, limited the influence of money in politics, banned partisan gerrymandering, and created new ethics rules for federal officeholders. Republicans in the Senate blocked the measure with a filibuster. Democrats then introduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have restored portions of the Voting Rights Act, and the Freedom to Vote Act, a lighter version of the For the People Act. Republicans blocked both of those acts, too. 

And so, in 2023, the right to vote is increasingly precarious.”

We ignore the lessons of Selma at our peril.

2023-03-06T00:30:11-05:00March 6th, 2023|Home, Musings|

Masks can make sense

• Tomas Pueyo, writing in his Uncharted Territories  substack blog takes a good hard look at the Cochrane Library’s meta analysis of the “Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses” by Dooley et al. used by some (e.g. Bret Stephens in the NYT) to erroneously conclude that mask mandates are ineffective.  In reality, no such conclusion can be drawn from the Dooley review — the authors themselves state “The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions.” and “We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.”  Pueyo does a good job of analyzing why this review does not provide any substantive evidence that mask mandates are ineffective.

2023-02-28T17:33:18-05:00February 28th, 2023|HomeRecommended|
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