Cats, charts, and politics
Have you ever wondered what fetal tissue actually looks like in the early stages of pregnancy? Poppy Noor got hold of some pictures from the MYA network and apparently it looks vaguely like a jellyfish. Here's a picture showing tissue at nine weeks:
It doesn't really look all that human, does it?
We are suffering a shortage of certain versions of Adderall. Supply chains strike again! But didn't I say supply chains are recovering?
Yep. There are three reasons for the Adderall shortage:
In other words, don't be too quick to blame supply chains for everything. Shortages are a routine part of the pharmaceutical industry.
Over at Vox, Rebecca Heilweil takes a look at our global supply chains and is skeptical that their problems are behind us:
The structural problems that enabled many of the delays, price hikes, and shortages over the past few years haven’t gone away....More broadly, the capitalist system responsible for manufacturing and delivering goods throughout the world has not been “fixed.” In fact, it remains as vulnerable to disruption as ever.
Where do these brain farts come from? I see this particular one with surprising frequency, as if capitalism were somehow responsible for the fact that condoms and aluminum cans were in short supply during an unprecedented global pandemic.
This is dumb enough as it is, but to toss it off as a casual aside? It's bizarre. After all, it was the most socialist part of our economy—the emergency supplies stockpiled by centralized command and control—that were in the shortest supply during the first year of the pandemic. The fact that this shortage lasted only a few months is largely thanks to the remarkable ability of the free market to adapt to an emergency in practically the blink of an eye.
People are weird. The COVID-19 pandemic was, if anything, a triumph for the robustness of our global supply chains. Considering how big and how deadly the pandemic was, it's nothing short of a miracle that we did as well as we did. Cars and video game consoles were probably the most visible items in short supply, and it's hardly the end of the world if you have to wait a year to buy a new Jeep or Playstation.¹
So just stop it. Capitalism worked fine. Supply chains were astonishingly resilient and shortages were mostly temporary and limited. What's more, after the big Omicron surge passed, it's taken only about six months for supply chain pressure to drop back to 2018 levels, on its way to zero within a few more weeks. Life is pretty good, and it would be better still if everyone—*cough* Jerome Powell *cough*—would quit panicking about things.
¹Baby formula was perhaps more serious, but that had nothing to do with supply chains crippled by the pandemic. It was due to good old fashioned corporate idiocy and greed.
The GAO published a report today about maternal mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the nickel version is pretty simple: it got even worse from an already high base. You can read the whole report here.
But you might be interested in taking a look at maternal mortality pre-COVID. Here's the growth rate from 2007-2019:¹
As you can see, the Black MMR has always been far higher than the others. However, white, Asian, and Hispanic MMRs started out about the same in 2007: high but not outrageously so. Since then the white and Hispanic MMRs have skyrocketed, while the Asian MMR has gone down a bit.²
It's astonishing that we still don't have any good ideas about why our MMR is so much higher than the rest of the developed world, nor why it's increasing so much. Racism may play a role in the high Black MMR, but if so, why is the Hispanic rate lower than the white rate? It might also be due to a change in methodology for reporting MMR, but no one seems to think that's the culprit. Other explanations seem to fall flat too.
Based on this data, however, I might try investigating the Asian community to see what they've been doing differently over the past decade or two. They have cesarean sections at about the same rate as everyone else, so it's not that. On average, they have higher incomes and considerably more education than white people, which probably explains part of it. But what else? There must be something.
¹Why 2007-2019? For some reason the CDC WONDER natality database only goes back to 2007, so that's where I started. I ended at 2019 because there was a big spike in 2020. Since the spike was obviously COVID-related, it would have been misleading to include it.
²The Asian MMR is quite volatile because the numbers are so tiny: in a typical year there are only five or six maternal deaths, so a change of just one or two can make the MMR shoot up or down. However, the trendline is steadily downward.
Candles at the Église Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in Paris.
That is, it's my 64th birthday. Only one year to go until Medicare!
Are you curious about how much of our pharmaceutical supply is sourced from China? Me neither. But I was given this as a homework assignment, so here's the answer:
This is from 2019, when the total US market for pharmaceuticals was about $500 billion and we imported $150 billion of that. It includes everything: prescription drugs, OTC drugs, biopharmaceuticals, etc.
But this doesn't provide the whole picture. We get very few finished pharmaceuticals from China, but they provide a sizeable share of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) used by other countries in the final manufacturing process:
China has about 13% of the API facilities in the world, but they tend to make relatively high volume/low value ingredients. By dollar amount, they are responsible for only 6% of American imports.
If you look only at drugs that are considered essential, the numbers are about the same. It's also worth noting that the dollar figures for Ireland are inflated for all the usual scammy tax avoidance reasons, so don't take them too seriously.
After Robert Mueller finished his investigation of Donald Trump's ties to Russia back in 2019, Trump pressed his attorney general, William Barr, to open a counter-investigation of the FBI's investigation. Barr appointed John Durham, the US Attorney for Connecticut, to lead the revenge-a-thon.
Durham accomplished nothing. He got a guilty plea from one minor player on a minor charge. He lost his case against a second person. And today he lost yet another case. After three years and millions of dollars, he hasn't found even a shred of serious evidence that points toward FBI malfeasance in its investigation of Trump.
But that might not matter.
While this is a major loss for Durham, the reason for his appointment is the final report Barr required him to write. It will be filled with bullshit - just like his so-called “talking indictments” - and right wing media will push it like some kind of holy grail. https://t.co/th39eTLnJh
— Nancy LeTourneau (@Smartypants60) October 18, 2022
Yep. Durham's final report, for which he's accountable to no one, will almost certainly be stuffed to the gills with innuendo and unproven conjectures. Truth will not be the point of the report. Neither will it be an effort to set out a record for history. The point will be to provide Fox News with lots of vaguely worded outrage in order to feed the right-wing conspiracy machine. He's done it before, after all.
Yesterday was Palomar Day, the day when the setting sun lines up perfectly with the runway at McClellan-Palomar Airport. I set out in the late afternoon to get the picture, and after a picturesque drive down Interstate 5 I headed for a spot I had been to before that offered a perfect view of the airport. Here's what I saw when I got there:
It turns out my spot was no secret. There were half a dozen guys there with expensive cameras and huge telephoto lenses mounted on monster tripods, all snapping away at the sun.
But I managed to squeeze in and get plenty of pictures of my own. My best one is a composite of the sun dipping below the horizon and an earlier shot that caught a private plane taking off. Isn't Photoshop a marvel?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, real wages have gone down for practically every occupation over the past year (Q3 to Q3). Here are the numbers for full-time workers:
But wages have not gone down for every race and sex:
Overall, wages for full-time workers have gone down about 1.4% over the past year.