Economic Perception and the Partisan Divide
I thought this was a very interesting (and revealing) excerpt from Matt Yglesias’ excellent Slow Boring, Jan 9 edition:
How Americans Pay for Health Care is Broken
• Yet another example of how our American health care payment systems are completely bonkers:
Goodbill researched hospital charges for a liter of saline; available online for about $10, some hospitals were charging many thousands of dollars (in one case $26,667.03!!!) for a bag of N.S. Goodbill used the machine readable lists of hospital prices mandated by the Hospital Price Transparency Rule to grab the data.
What a mess.
On Childhood Vaccinations
Zeke Emanuel and Matthew Guido write in the NYT about declining childhood vaccination rates in the US, leading to inadequate levels of population “herd immunity” and therefore increasing the risks of outbreaks. They advocate eliminating nonmedical exemptions for vaccinations and allowing children 14 or over to get immunized without parental permission. I agree.
on AI
• David Marchese interviews Yejin Choi in the NYT; what I found to be an excellent discussion of where the science stands right now ensues.
Gruber on Twitter
• John Gruber’s Daring Fireball has a good post on Twitter and Musk’s recent machinations; recommended. One excerpt:
“But it gets better. Last night Twitter began classifying all links to all popular Mastodon servers as “malware”. That includes links to one’s own Mastodon account that a Twitter user might put in their account profile”
Thank you and best wishes, Tony Fauci
• I’ll be sad to see the wonderful Tony Fauci step down from his role at the NIAID. He’s a wonderful man, and a true icon — especially for physicians like me who practiced through the beginnings of the AIDs epidemic and the subsequent discoveries of effective treatments. We’ll miss his resolute leadership and integrity. He has a parting message “to the next generation of scientists and health workers” published in the NY Times.
An American Tragedy, Indeed
German Lopez, writing in the NYT’s “The Morning” newsletter, writes on the toll of firearms on child mortality in the U.S.; an excerpt:
“Guns are now the No. 1 cause of deaths among American children and teens, ahead of car crashes, other injuries and congenital disease.
In other rich countries, gun deaths are not even among the top four causes of death, a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report found. The U.S. accounts for 97 percent of gun-related child deaths among similarly large and wealthy countries, despite making up just 46 percent of this group’s overall population.”
The NY Times Magazine has a story on the lives some of the children killed by gun violence lived.
Give DJT his orange jumpsuit already…
• Philip Rotner, writing in The Bulwark, lays out an excellent timeline re. the evidence accumulated against the ex-president in the theft of government documents. An excerpt:
‘The slow drip of information about Trump’s mishandling of those documents, which has lately become a gusher, seems to have had a hypnotic effect on the public. Each new piece of information is duly reported, but quickly cedes its place in the news cycle to the next one. The collective public reaction has become more “That’s Trump for ya!” than “Why isn’t this man in jail?”
He should be.
Take a step back. Get away from the drips and look at the complete picture revealed by a timeline of the saga of the stolen documents. Ask yourself, “What would the government have done to me if I had done this?”’
Fusion!
Very cool stuff; about a megajoule’s worth of net positive energy output from a lab fusion experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We have ignition! Not ready for steady state energy production (likely not for several decades), since it took 300 megajoules of electricity from the grid to power the relatively inefficient lasers’ delivery of 2.05 MJ to the target — but a promising demonstration. Read about it in the NYT here.
Petrocorporate greenwashing
• Some things do stay the same – corporate whitewashing now extends to greenwashing, as petrochemical dollars are spent to slow electrification and obfuscate efforts to do so, all while trumpeting purported efforts to reduce emissions.
• House Oversight Committee Document release
• CNN on Big Oil disinformation
• Reuters on how old lobby teams up with fishing industry to fight offshore wind farms
• And a big culprit – the “Texas Public Policy Foundation“