A reasonable summary of the state of the small nuclear reactor industry by Brad Plumer and Ivan Penn appears here in the NYT . I support development of this industry as an adjunct to other carbon neutral sources, since wind and solar’s intermittent availability, combined with the inevitably increasing demands of electrification (as well as the inefficiencies and inadequacy of out transmission grid), make achieving net zero otherwise nearly impossible.
Ezra Klein interviews Zack Beauchamp and they discuss Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 in this excellent podcast.
Katelyn Jetelina talks about the evidence showing that masks do work – especially for individuals who wear a high quality mask (N95 or KN95) correctly. She summarizes the pros and cons well in her Substack post.
Odds Ratios and 95% confidence intervals of a subset of eligible included studies comparing masked versus unmasked.
Source
The Republican party is no longer composed of individuals who respect the rule of law. Apparently even when completely documented violations occur, the lure of power and control will overcome any pretense of respect for legal norms. See: Paxton, Ken
It seems there is no end to the idiocy displayed by some members of the US House of Representative’s Republican caucus, who are opposing renewing the funding for PEPFAR. This was undoubtedly encouraged by the even greater demonstration of irrational thinking displayed in this Heritage Foundation report. Richard W. Bauer, a Roman Catholic priest who spent 25 years working on the ground in clinics for people with H.I.V. in Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia describes the issue in his NYT opinion piece, It’s Not Pro-Life to Oppose a Program That Has Saved 25 Million Lives. An excerpt:
“Despite the impressive successes of PEPFAR, we still have a way to go in the fight against AIDS. Around the world, someone dies from an AIDS-related illness every minute, and only about half of H.I.V.-positive children who need treatment are receiving it. AIDS persists as a leading cause of death among young women in sub-Saharan Africa. Experts warn that we have fallen off track in the quest to end AIDS by 2030. Weakening PEPFAR would all but guarantee we fail to do so.
I remember the days before PEPFAR. We cannot go back to an era when nearly an entire generation was wiped out across Africa. We have come too far in the effort to end AIDS to abandon the course now. Letting PEPFAR lapse would fail to honor the teaching that all human life is sacred and worthy of protection.”
The Royal Society in the UK looked at multiple studies of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19 and issued a report (and summarized here in the BMJ):
“The report is non-judgemental on the timing and manner in which NPIs were applied in different regions and countries around the world. It focuses on understanding the impact of NPIs on SARS-CoV-2 transmission and makes no assessment of the economic or other societal impacts of the different NPIs…
The weight of evidence from all studies suggests that wearing masks, particularly higher quality masks (respirators), supported by mask mandates, generally reduced the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Studies consistently, though not universally, reported that mask wearing and mask mandates were an effective approach to reduce infection…
Stay-at-home orders, physical distancing, and restrictions on gathering size were repeatedly found to be associated with significant reduction in SARS- CoV-2 transmission, with more stringent measures having greater effects…“
There is room to debate the societal risk/benefit ratio of the application of these measures; that’s not the point of the paper. What it does suggest is that blanket statements that “these measures are ineffective” are not true, and they must be weighed carefully in the face of the expected future respiratory pandemics we’ll face.
Writing in the NY Times, David Wallace-Wells compares mortality rates in the U.S. to that in our peer nations, and (no surprise) we don’t match up well. Most of the data comes from a paper entitled Missing Americans: Early death in the United States—1933–2021 by Bor, Stokes, Raifman et al.
I particularly liked the concluding paragraph from Matt Yglesias’ Slow Boring substack post re. the new Ivy+ Admissions Paper:
“Fundamentally, though, you come back to the themes of my Strange Death ofEducation Reform series about improving public education. This proved to be a substantively difficult and politically unrewarding task. But it’s actually very important! The victims of the inequities identified in this paper — kids with good grades, 1500+ SAT scores, generally from families in the 70th-80th percentile of the income distribution — do perfectly well in the United States of America. The much larger problem is poor kids for whom K-12 school quality makes a huge difference but who often don’t have access to the best teachers or the best curriculum. This doesn’t key into the personal identity issues of New York Times subscribers in the same way that arguing about Ivy League admissions does, but it’s much more important.”
Randall Monroe and XKCD serendipitously meet up with JAMA…
Wallace J, Goldsmith-Pinkham P, Schwartz JL. Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA Intern Med. Published online July 24, 2023. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1154
“Findings In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.”
Apparently, (see this science article in the NYT by Raymond Zhong) polar ice cap melting from increased global temperatures is not the only way we affect the wobble in the earth’s rotation axis; there are also effects due to our pumping of ground water! I was completely unaware of the vast volume that must be being pumped in order to have a demonstrable planetary influence.