Month: July 2024

Here are a few assorted short takes that are on my mind right now. They are worth exactly what you paid for them.

Is Donald Trump losing his edge? Kamala Harris has been the Democratic nominee for a week now, and she's hardly immune from criticism. But so far Trump has called her a "bum" and "the most liberal person ever in US history"—not exactly biting attacks. What's going on?

I just finished a biography of John von Neumann, and it prompts a question: Is game theory actually useful for anything? It got famous in the '60s as the foundation of Cold War nuclear planning, but it never really told us anything we didn't already know without the math. I gather it's had some useful things to say about the design of auctions, but what else? There are some things like kin selection that you can explain in a game theoretic way, but you can usually explain them in other ways too. So what is its real-world value?

Why do so many people object to their content being used for AI training? I understand copyright infringement, if that's going on, but it generally isn't. The words and images are just used as part of an ocean of input that makes AI better. Why would I care, for example, if Google or OpenAI trawled my blog and turned it into tokens for use in AI training? Am I losing anything?

Am I the only one who didn't care much for the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies? My main complaint is that, until the very end, it was essentially a pure TV event. You couldn't really watch it in person since it was so spread out, and it included video snippets that only made sense (barely) as part of a TV show. That didn't sit right with me. (My other complaint is that so much of it seemed amateurish. How can that be with the kind of budget they have to work with?)

By the way, I'm now done with four weeks of radiation therapy (two to go) and so far I've had no big side effects to speak of. Hooray. I've been getting more and more tired, though, but I'm not sure if that's because of the radiation or the hormone therapy.

Today Donald Trump promised to create a strategic bitcoin reserve if he's elected. Even for Trump, does this make any sense?

Put aside the question of whether bitcoin is a real thing or just a mass delusion. Let's assume it's real. We still don't stockpile every real thing. We don't have a strategic Lego reserve or a strategic airplane reserve. We only stockpile things that we might suddenly need in large quantities.

We stockpile oil because we might need it if OPEC cuts off supplies. We stockpile vaccines because they take a long time to manufacture and we might need them quickly in case an epidemic strikes. We stockpile rare earth minerals in case China decides to get nasty about them.

But what conceivable emergency would prompt a sudden need for bitcoin? And if, for some reason, we did suddenly need a huge amount of bitcoin, what would prevent us from just buying it on the open market? The whole point of crypto is that it's decentralized and under the control of no government.

Before you tell me: Yes, I know this is just Trump pandering to his fans. Still, his actual policy pronouncements generally make some sense. This one is like promising to create a strategic baseball card reserve. Is there any possible way of interpreting it that isn't completely out to lunch?

What's up with the widespread mispronunciation of Kamala Harris's name?

The origin is simple enough. In English it's most common for the stress to be put on the second-to-last syllable of a word. This means a two-syllable word most often has the stress on its first syllable. A three-syllable word most often has it on the second syllable. So by default you'd pronounce Harris's first name as:

Kuh-MALL-uh

But this is far from a universal rule, and Kamala isn't an English name anyway. It has the stress on its first syllable:

KOM-muh-lah

It's a perfectly ordinary mistake for an English speaker to say this wrong. The real question is why so many conservatives who do know how it's pronounced are aggressively continuing to say it wrong. What's the point?

There isn't one, really, except to show that, by God, they aren't going to take orders from some liberal woman. Plus there's the usual Trumpism of refusing to ever admit a mistake, no matter how slight or obvious. And their deep habit—practically subconscious at this point—of disrespecting women and people of color. As a result, we have crowds of MAGA fans chanting kuh-MALL-uh as if they're showing her who's boss. It's kind of pathetic.

The Washington Post has a story today about the fact that medical providers are now required to make test results accessible to patients as soon as they're available (generally via phone or online portal). This is a very popular rule, but it can cause problems if the results are (or seem) scary and it takes days before you can talk to your doctor about them.

All true. But why does it take days for doctors to call and let you know what the tests mean? And why is it all but impossible to call a doctor yourself?

I'm here to tell you the answer. But first, a reminder that here in the US we spend more—way more—on health care than any other rich country in the world:

And what do we get for all this money? Not a lot of doctors:

This explains why doctors don't get back to us quickly: we don't have very many and they're overworked. We're nearly 30% below the average of rich countries. But it's actually even worse than that. Check this out:

Among primary care physicians, the US is dead last by a considerable margin. We are more than 70% lower than the average of rich countries. And believe it or not, it's even worse than that:

Not only do we have a minuscule number of primary care doctors, but the number has been essentially flat for more than 20 years while other countries have been steadily adding primary care doctors.

So what do we spend all our money on? The answer is:

• We pay doctors and nurses more than other countries.
• We pay specialists fantastically more than other countries.
• We pay more for pharmaceuticals than other countries.
• We pay more for machines than other countries.
• We pay a cut to insurance companies.

As a result of all this we can't afford to have a lot of doctors—and the ones we do have all want to become specialists because the pay isn't just better, it's massively better.

And that's why it takes a long time for your doctor to call you back.

POSTSCRIPT: In case you're wondering, even with the enormous salaries we pay specialists we're below average on per capita numbers even there. But only by about 4%, which means that specialists don't really seem to have a workload excuse for not calling back quickly.

Give or take a bit, primary care physicians in the US see 20 patients per day while specialists see 2.5 patients per day. Specialists spend a lot of their time doing procedures, of course, but with a patient workload like that you'd still think they could be a little more available. I'm not sure what their problem is.

From Donald Trump during a rally in Florida:

I'm not Christian.

I'm sure he meant to say "I'm a Christian," but his mind's not really all there these days. Alternatively, this is what's known as a Kinsley gaffe, where you accidentally tell the truth.

This was all part of a passage in his speech where Trump told the crowd they would never have to vote again if he won in November. This is being interpreted as a promise to end democracy, but no fair reading supports this. It was just a normal Bizarro world blend of Trump's narcissism and his ego. He's never really cared whether his fans vote for anyone else as long as they vote for him, and that's what's going on here. He's telling them, just vote for me this one time and that's all that matters. In four years America will be so great you won't have to bother voting again.

Or, who knows? Maybe he's promising the rapture will come on his watch and God will do all the voting after that. With Trump these days you really never know for sure.

Here's an intriguing little factoid:

I was prompted to look this up by a Wall Street Journal article claiming that Botox was on the rise among Washington DC politicians. As usual, though, it provided no evidence for this aside from two (2) doctors who said business was good.

But if ISAPS is correct, we're in the middle of a Botox boom that started in 2021 for some reason and has kept going since. Maybe everyone wanted to look good when they finally started socializing again after the pandemic? Or maybe stimulus money was burning a hole in their pockets? Who knows? But whatever the reason, maybe politicians are hopping on the Botox train along with everyone else.

J.D. Vance has been running for vice president less than two weeks and has already racked up an impressive list of recently uncovered greatest hits:

• Suggested that parents should get more votes than people without children.
• Said Kamala Harris is part of the community of "childless cat ladies" who want to make the country as miserable as they are. He later explained himself by saying he didn't actually have anything against cats.
• Went on at length about the prospect of George Soros filling 747s full of (mainly) Black women who want to fly out of Ohio to get abortions. Said he was sympathetic to arguments this should be banned.
• Became the target of a meme that he had fucked a couch in his youth. It is unclear how or why this started.
• Wrote the foreword for a book by the head of the Heritage Foundation's ultra-right-wing Project 2025, which the Trump campaign is desperately trying to distance itself from.
• Praised a book written by a right-wing conspiracy theorist that calls leftist protesters "unhumans" who want to kill anyone who has more than they do.

J.D. Vance is a very strange guy. I'm not sure how well this is going to play in the ol' heartland.

This is Hilbert on the front lawn getting ready to eat some grass. He likes grass because it clears out his digestive system, which then ends up on our floor. I wouldn't mind so much except that he always heads for a carpet instead of just barfing on the hardwood floor where it's easy to clean up. Stupid cats.

The New York Times informs us today that the latest trend is not to buy stuff just because you saw it on TikTok. Brett House, an economics professor at Columbia University, says this is probably thanks to bad economic times:

After years of being told what to buy, TikTok users are trying something new: buying and using only what they need.

....After a major economic downturn, usually about every decade or so, a similar back-to-basics trend follows, Mr. House said.... This recent cycle may have begun in the wake of post-lockdown “revenge spending,” when shoppers bought large amounts of goods to make up for time lost to the Covid-19 pandemic. As that boundless period gave way to the “vibecession,” a term for consumers’ general feelings of anxiety about the economy, many people responded by tightening their budgets.

As I keep saying, we don't actually have to rely on vibes. The federal government tracks how much we spend on stuff and updates it regularly. One thing that's crystal clear is that, in general, consumers haven't been tightening their budgets, something House should know. Beyond that, here's spending on items that I figure are probably fairly common among TikTok influencers:

Jewelry and personal care have been flat or down since 2022. There's nothing new going on. Everything else is up.

What does this mean for the thesis that TikTok influencers are losing their influence? There are two possibilities:

• It's wrong.
• It's right, but TikTok accounts for such tiny sales that it doesn't have any effect on the broad market.

In either case, it's hard to know why anyone should care. It's frankly a little hard to know why we all seem to care so much about social media in general, since it's largely just the latest version of teenagers and their fads. But apparently we do care, so it would be nice to know if these supposed fads are backed up by anything more than a few days on a "trending" list or a single reporter's vibes. Speaking for myself, I am massively skeptical that teenagers in large numbers have decided they're tired of buying stuff. That would be a truly remarkable development, after all.

The Fed's preferred measure of inflation, PCE, remained very low in June:

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE came in at 2.5% and core PCE was 2.6%.