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.
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.
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.
Matt Levine delivers another excellent Money Stuff piece on the house of cards known as crypto exchanges; an excerpt, where Matt is comparing this crisis to the 2008 financial crisis:
“A quick summary of 2008 is that there was a lot of demand for safe assets, for bonds with AAA ratings. The financial system obligingly manufactured those assets, taking risky assets — mostly subprime mortgages — and packaging and slicing them to achieve AAA ratings. There was so much demand for safe assets that the manufacturing process got sloppy: The subprime mortgages got ever more subprime, the slicing and repackaging got less effective, and ultimately some of the safe assets turned out not to be safe.
Something like that seems to have happened in crypto but there is a critical difference. In crypto, there are no mortgages to speak of. You cannot really start by taking some somewhat risky cash flows and tranching them to make some of the cash flows safer. There are no cash flows. The safe assets in crypto — interest-bearing accounts at Voyager or Celsius or BlockFi or Gemini — are created by making unsecured billion-dollar loans, negotiated in a single phone call, to arbitrage trading firms that are actually just making long-term bets on the marketing abilities of blockchain entrepreneurs. Crypto shadow banks did not manufacture safe assets out of risky investments; they just relabeled the risky investments as safe assets. There were people taking wild speculative risks on brand-new, sentiment-driven crypto projects, and there were people who wanted to invest safely and earn 8%, and they were the same people.”
Jamelle Bouie again does a nice job in the NYT demolishing the inconsistencies in the right’s professed disdain for “woke capitalism.” An excerpt:
“I wrote last year about this notion of “woke capitalism” and the degree to which I think this “conflict” is little more than a performance meant to sell an illusion of serious disagreement between owners of capital and the Republican Party. As I wrote then, “The entire Republican Party is united in support of an anti-labor politics that puts ordinary workers at the mercy of capital.” Republicans don’t have a problem with corporate speech or corporate prerogatives as a matter of principle; they have a problem with them as a matter of narrow partisan politics.”
A study by Cowger and colleagues appearing in the Nov. 9 issue of the NEJM provides new evidence that the removal of universal school masking policies in Massachusetts was associated with an increased incidence of Covid-19.
From the accompanying editorial by Raifman and Green:
“The study used difference-in-differences methods, a rigorous form of causal inference for policies that are infeasible or unethical to assess in a randomized trial. During a 15-week period (March to June 2022), Covid-19 cases in school districts that had ended universal school masking policies (70 districts for most of the 15-week period) were compared with cases in school districts that sustained universal masking policies (2 districts for most of the 15-week period). The removal of universal school masking was associated with an additional 2882 Covid-19 cases among 46,530 staff (an estimated 81.7 cases per 1000 staff) and an additional 9168 Covid-19 cases among 294,084 students (an estimated 39.9 cases per 1000 students) during the 15 weeks. In school districts that had ended universal masking, approximately 40% of 7127 staff cases and 32% of 28,524 student cases were associated with the removal of universal masking policies.”
Even the Economist can see it clearly: “Covid-19 vaccines saved an estimated 20m lives during their first year“:
I thought this iteration of a robotic grasper for delicate objects was rather ingenious:
Good commentary by Matt Yglesias, describing how Elon Musk is quite selective when advocating for his libertarian principles. He’s all for free speech on Twitter, but very quiet when it comes to suppression of free speech in China. He complained bitterly about pandemic-related protocols in Cali, but trumpets China’s “no new domestic corona cases” (no Covid restrictions there, eh Elon?). And he publicly advocated for Taiwan to become “a special administrative zone” of China a day before Tesla was granted a Chinese purchase tax exemption for its Model X and S EVs. It seems that profits take precedence over principle for Elon. Guess he does need the Benjamins for his Twitter purchase…
Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the blinders Republicans seem to have for political candidates failing to live according to their purported values: “Because the so-called “family values” of American fundamentalists now drawn toward Christian nationalism turn out to be mere window dressing that can be tossed for the movement’s true aim: authoritarianism.“