Not everything is a symbol of one’s political persuasions

We seem to be living in a time when the most mundane actions take on political significance.

Take for example the wearing of masks. Rather than taking it at face value, which is that the wearer may have reduced immunity or is taking a cautious approach to the transmission of infection diseases and is trying to avoid getting infected or infect others, some view it as the wearer making a political statement in support of the vaccination lobby and the medical-pharmaceutical-Fauci axis of evil and against freedom-loving Merkins.

The same thing seems to be happening with Tesla cars where drivers report being harassed by other users, often by people driving big, gas-guzzling, smoke-belching trucks. The animosity seems to not be against Tesla particularly but against people who, by driving an electric vehicle, are seen as signaling that they are concerned about the environment.
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US life expectancy drops again

For the second straight year, US life expectancy dropped, according to the CDC. It is now the lowest it has been in 25 years.

As per the 2021 data, Americans are expected to live 76.4 years, down from a peak of 78.8 years in 2019.
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The finalised numbers confirm preliminary ones released by the CDC in August, in which the health agency predicted the worst two-year decline of life expectancy on record in the US since 1923.
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Life expectancy in the US remains lower than the UK, where the average is 80.8 years. It is also lower than neighbouring Canada, where life expectancy as of 2020 is 81.75 years.

Of both countries, the US spends the highest amount of money on healthcare. Per capita, the US pays $12,318 (£10,217), while the UK spends $5,387. Canada’s healthcare spending, in comparison, sits at $5,511 per capita.

Covid-19 and drug overdoses are being blamed from the drop.

“COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths, or 74%, of the decline from 2019 to 2020, and 50% of the decline from 2020 to 2021.”

Drug overdose deaths are also a factor. They now account for more than a third of all accidental deaths in the US, the data shows. Overall, overdose deaths have risen by 16% from 2020.

This includes deaths involving fentanyl, which increased by 22% in 2021.

While the pandemic effect should slowly decrease, there’s no sign that the drug issue will follow.

These are the good old days

There has always been a market for nostalgia. Some of it is due to each person, other than those who had traumatic experiences, looking back on their childhoods with rose-tined glasses. Some commentators, especially right wing ones, alarmed by the progressive changes that are taking place in terms of greater equality for marginalized groups, have seized upon that tendency to proclaim that things have deteriorated from some prior golden age. They seem to have fixated on the 1950s as the high point in US history, completely ignoring the fact that it was not a good time time for anyone other than middle-class white cis people.

Currently, there are doomsayers who try to convince the public of this by picking on some cultural features and complaining that people no longer have a work ethic, have become hypersensitive and lost their sense of humor, and that men have become less manly. These fears are reinforced by the echo chambers of social media, and that constant repetition may convince some that these things are really true.

(Non Sequitur)

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Ignore Musk the troll, focus on the businesses

Elon Musk clearly loves to be in the news and he does so by making outlandish statements about all manner of random topics in the news whenever he has the chance. Jack Shafer provides many examples of this and says that the media keeps falling for it. This has the added advantage (to Musk) of distracting people from the more serious news of the performances of his businesses, which are not good.

What we should be focusing on are the actual facts. One is that in 2021, the last full year when Twitter was public and thus we knew something about its finances, it had gross revenues of about $5 billion ($4.5 billion from advertising) and made a profit of $221 million. This means that its costs were about $4.8 billion. This was a high point for revenues and one of the few years when it made a profit.

After Twitter borrowed about $13 billion to allow Musk to take it private, that added another $1.5 billion in costs to service the debt, meaning its total operating costs are now $6.5 billion. Furthermore, advertisers dropped out, reducing revenues to about $3 billion. This means that Twitter was on a path to lose $3.5 billion a year, which is unsustainable. Musk has cut staff by almost half but that will save at most about $2 billion, leaving a gap of $1.5 billion to close, while risking core operational functions. This problem of a large negative cash flow is what Musk is faced with.
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Unwarranted anxiety over memory lapses

I am at the age when people begin to worry about the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. It does not help that this topic keeps surfacing in conversations among age-peers in one’s family and friends and acquaintances, thus keeping it at the forefront of one’s mind. But it is easy for people who are not clinicians trained in the symptoms of these diseases to become unduly alarmed over things that are merely the effects of normal aging and not signs of serious cognitive decline. Misplacing items, being unable to recall the name of an object or an actor in a TV show or film, forgetting why one went into a room, are among the things that cause unwarranted uneasiness.

This article tries to dispel some of those concerns, by distinguishing between normal aging-associated memory loss and mild cognitive impairment. Every year about 10-15% of people with mild cognitive impairment will develop dementia.
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Self checkouts are to be avoided

My local grocery store has self-checkout lines. These were introduced about three decades ago but I almost never use them. This is partly because I do not like to feel that I may be contributing to the elimination of jobs for cashiers and partly because while it is fine for reading bar codes for items, it is a nuisance when I buy unpackaged fresh produce that requires me to weigh the item and then press the correct code identifying the item. The cashiers do this much more efficiently. In addition, over time you get to know the cashiers and can engage in pleasantries with them. But I sometimes wonder whether I am some kind of closet technophobe and should use them more.

But this article says that self-checkouts are not good for the workers nor the stores nor customers.

In 2018, just 18% of all grocery store transactions went through a self-checkout, rising to 30% last year. Walmart, Kroger, Dollar General, and Albertson’s are now among retail chains testing out full self-checkout stores.

That’s not something we should get excited about, says Christopher Andrews, a sociologist who examined the kiosks in his 2018 book, The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. Despite what grocery stores and kiosk manufacturers claim, research shows self-checkouts aren’t actually any faster than a regular checkout line, Andrews says. “It only feels like it because your time is occupied doing tasks, rather than paying attention to each second ticking away.”
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“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad”

The sentiment “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” has ancient roots but was perhaps most famously found in the poem The Masque of Pandora written in 1875 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who put these words into the mouth of Prometheus. How I interpret it is that if you make people mad, they will destroy themselves, saving you the bother of doing so.

I was thinking about these words while pondering the actions of three people: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Donald Trump since all three seem to be on the path of self-destruction. I am not implying that they are mad but they do seem, on the basis of past success, to suffer from an irrational overweening confidence in their own powers, and this has led to rash decisions that threaten to bring them down.
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The January 6th committee hearings end with criminal referrals for Trump and others

The hearings have just wound up with a unanimous vote to make criminal referrals to the department of justice on four counts:

I. Obstruction of an Official Proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512(c))
II. Conspiracy to Defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371
III. Conspiracy to Make a False Statement (18 U.S.C. §§ 371, 1001)
IV. “Incite,” “Assist” or “Aid and Comfort” an Insurrection (18 U.S.C. § 2383)

While the department of justice is not obligated to prosecute based on these referrals, they will add to the pressure to do so. These charges all carry length prison sentences if found guilty and Trump in particular would be disqualified from any future federal or state office if found guilty of the insurrection charge.
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The invention of the table knife

One tends to think of everyday objects that are not technologically advanced as if they had somehow more or less accidentally come into being, not that they were designed by someone. Take for example the common table/dinner/butter knife. It appears that it was invented by Cardinal Richelieu in 1637.

Perhaps weary of watching dinner guests picking their teeth with the points of their daggers, Cardinal Richelieu orders the blades of his dinnerware to be ground down and rounded off. Et voilà, the modern dinner knife is born.

Prior to Richelieu’s flash of inspiration (or simple revulsion at bad manners), diners typically used hunting daggers to spear their morsels, which were then conveyed to the mouth by hand or with the help of a spoon. The fork, the implement that really revolutionized chowing down, had existed since biblical times. Despite its utility, however, the fork remained a relative rarity in the West until the 17th century, even among the French royals whom Richelieu served with unswerving devotion.

Richelieu’s knives became the rage among the court, and soon everyone who was anyone in France had a set. The dinner knife became commonplace throughout France after Louis XIV — who, like most kings, had his own reasons for not wanting sharp blades and pointed tips around — decreed its universality. Soon afterward, the dinner knife found its way throughout continental Europe to England and, eventually, the American colonies.

So there you are. An answer to a question that you may have never thought to ask.

Get rid of penalty shoot outs in soccer

Argentina beat France in the World Cup final earlier today. The game was decided by a penalty shoot out after the score was tied at 3-3 after extra time. Five of the 15 games in the knockout round were decided by this method: Croatia v. Japan and Morocco v. Spain in the round of 16; Croatia v. Brazil and Argentina v. Netherlands in the quarter-finals, and the final. This was the most number of shoot outs in the knock out rounds in World Cup history.

I think the penalty shoot out is an unsatisfactory way of deciding games. I think this system does not adequately reflect the merits of the competing teams. Each of the five losing teams (Japan, Spain, Brazil, Netherlands, and France) may feel that they should not have lost. I wrote about this back in 2021 (revised slightly here) after Italy beat England on penalties in the European Cup, describing what I think might be a better system.
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