want to know a price? go f— yourself!

Actually, on this site I am still allowed to say fuck, as far as I know. Why is it hard to type that in the title though? I would probably get more hits. Apologies to any parents out there whose children stumbled across this post. Then again, you should be sheltering them from mind-warping casual violence in entertainment, providing age-appropriate sex education, and teaching them the judicious, appropriate, and occasionally humorous uses of four letter words.

Anyway, this made me laugh. And while it is clearly satire, it is the least fake news I have read today.

Welcome to America General Hospital! Seems you have an oozing head injury there. Let’s check your insurance. Okay, quick “heads up” — ha! — that your plan may not cover everything today. What’s that? You want a reasonable price quote, upfront, for our services? Sorry, let me explain a hospital to you: we give you medical care, then we charge whatever the hell we want for it.

If you don’t like that, go fuck yourself and die…


Fun story: This one time we charged two parents $18,000 for some baby formula. LOL! We pull that shit all the time. Don’t like it? Don’t bring a baby, asshole.

Ha ha. It’s funny ’cause it’s true and it happens to all of us all the time, and we don’t do anything about it.

Nature – global warming will happen faster than we think

The title of this article in Nature pretty much says it all. The authors make a case that the IPCC is underestimating the risk of a rapid deterioration in the climate situation. There are a couple counter-intuitive points here. First, there is good news about air pollution, particularly in China. This is good news for public health in the near term, but paradoxically the air pollution has actually been bad enough in recent years to measurably block sunlight. Second, there really is a non-manmade component to global warming, and it may be significant in the coming decades. This is not good news at all, because the manmade component is of course very real, and the two are additive.

U.S. murder rate down a bit

In a bit of good news, the murder rate in the U.S. appears to be down this year compared to trends in the last several years, according to the New York Times.

In the cities in which data is available, murder has been down about 7 percent on average this year relative to the same point in 2017…

If murder falls about 4.5 percent nationally this year, the murder rate of about 5 per 100,000 will roughly be in line with 2009’s rate and half of what it was in 1980, the highest U.S. murder rate on record. The accompanying chart shows what the national murder rate since 1960 would look like with a 4.5 percent drop in 2018.

Tracking the change in murder nationally is far easier than explaining why it’s happening. There is still no consensus on why murder rose nationally in 2015 and 2016, though various theories have been proposed, including simple randomness. Similarly, a projected drop in murder in 2018 would not have an obvious cause. Employment of smarter technologies, expanded community intervention programs, and even colder weather could help explain year-to-year local changes.

If I had to speculate, it might be that the drugs in question in the current round of the war on drugs are simply not as lucrative, and therefore not as worth killing for, as the ones we saw in the 1990s. The real profits accrue to the people willing to take big risks to get the drugs across the border, and it could just be that the body count this time around has been shifted just outside the U.S. border. It may also be that the U.S. government at various levels has shifted toward a little more of a public health approach and a little less of a law enforcement approach. I could think positive and consider this progress, or I could be cynical and say it is partial because there is a wider range of ethnic and socioeconomic groups being affected this time around.

alzheimer’s disease and insulin resistance

This article in Psychology Today makes a case that there is a very strong link between insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s disease. The bad news, it says, is that the majority of the population is insulin resistant. The good news is that it is something an individual can really do something about. Basically, replace sugar and most processed foods with whole, unprocessed ones. It sounds mostly okay to me except I am really not ready to give up bread any time soon.

what experts worry about

Motherboard asked 105 experts what worries them most and what they are most hopeful about. 

Participants include (but are not limited to) 19 space scientists, 19 biologists and environmental scientists, 11 computer scientists, eight medical scientists, five lawyers, four historians, a musicologist, a paleontologist, an astronaut, and a digital artist who replied with emojis…

Unifying ideas emerged in the responses. By far the most frequently mentioned worry was climate change (29), followed by a spike in political extremism (21), with a subset of answers directly linking these problems. Artificial intelligence, especially its bias and unpredictability, represented another common concern (10). The proliferation of misinformation (8) and insufficient investment in science and STEM education (8) were often mentioned.

November 2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • Coral reefs are expected to decline 70-90% by mid-century.
  • The U.S. stock market is overvalued by about 40% by historic measures, and some economists think a major recession may be looming.
  • About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: People in Sweden are barely using cash at all, and some are paying with microchips embedded in their fingers. New technology may allow screening of multiple airport passengers from 25 feet away with minimal disruption. This is great for airline passengers who are already expecting to be screened intrusively, but of course raises some concerns about potential uses elsewhere in the public realm. Amazon is hiring about 100,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to about 120,000 in past years, and the difference may be explained by automation. There is a new ISO standard for toilets not connected to sewers systems (and not just your grandfather’s septic tank.)
  • A unidentified flying object has been spotted in our solar system, and serious scientists say there is at least a plausible, if very unlikely, chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
  • People are taking micro doses of LSD on a daily basis, believing it boosts creativity, and there is some evidence for this although the science is not rigorous.

Citizens United caused John Paul Stevens to have a stroke

This article in Abovethelaw.com (quoting the New York Times) says that John Paul Stevens suffered a mini-stroke the day the Citizens United decision was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, legalizing unlimited campaign contributions and essentially legalizing corporate bribery of politicians.

I found this quote interesting:

his missteps that day led him to seek medical advice and after learning of the stroke, he made the decision to quit. Justice Stevens made the responsible move under the circumstances, because if Citizens United tested his health — and he tells Liptak that he views that opinion along with Heller and the whack-a-doodle reasoning of Bush v. Gore as the three worst mistakes for the Supreme Court in his tenure — one can imagine how he’d have reacted to some of the doozies to come out of the Court since 2010.

I looked up Heller and it was a gun control case.

Fourth National Climate Assessment

Another week, another massive and massively depressing climate report. This one is the Fourth National Climate Assessment from basically all U.S. government agencies that have anything to do with climate science. A lot of it seems to have to do with the impacts of severe storms, droughts, and fires, which are already being felt and costing lives and money. I focused in on this paragraph from the executive summary about impacts on agriculture, and I’d like to dig more into the chapter on the subject if I can find the time.

Climate change presents numerous challenges to sustaining and enhancing crop productivity, livestock health, and the economic vitality of rural communities. While some regions (such as the Northern Great Plains) may see conditions conducive to expanded or alternative crop productivity over the next few decades, overall, yields from major U.S. crops are expected to decline as a consequence of increases in temperatures and possibly changes in water availability, soil erosion, and disease and pest outbreaks. Increases in temperatures during the growing season in the Midwest are projected to be the largest contributing factor to declines in the productivity of U.S. agriculture. Projected increases in extreme heat conditions are expected to lead to further heat stress for livestock, which can result in large economic losses for producers. Climate change is also expected to lead to large-scale shifts in the availability and prices of many agricultural products across the world, with corresponding impacts on U.S. agricultural producers and the U.S. economy. These changes threaten future gains in commodity crop production and put rural livelihoods at risk. Numerous adaptation strategies are available to cope with adverse impacts of climate variability and change on agricultural production. These include altering what is produced, modifying the inputs used for production, adopting new technologies, and adjusting management strategies. However, these strategies have limits under severe climate change impacts and would require sufficient long- and short-term investment in changing practices.

NYT on Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Program

The New York Times has a disturbing article about Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program. It is somewhat of an open secret that their nuclear program has been to bankroll Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program over the years. The U.S. and most media outlets that I am aware of have turned a blind eye to that, even as we have been attacked by some of their citizens and fought against their extremist proxies for 17 years now. We also fought two wars in Iraq at least partly to protect their government against aggression. Apparently they are asking for nuclear energy technology that can be used for peaceful purposes, but it can also be weaponized, and they are resisting efforts to include unconditional UN weapons inspections in any deal. Putting more nuclear materials within potential reach of these extremists, whether in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia itself, seems like a bad idea.