Thought For The Day - 31 October 2023

Well, it seems to be true that beer drinkers are just knuckledraggers. Bud continues to find that out.

The company reported a 13.5% decline in third-quarter US revenue per 100 liters, a key measure of beer sales, as an ongoing backlash to Bud Light continues. The brand's customers turned their backs on Bud Light after the company partnered with a transgender influencer — and then muddled its response.

But, there is the bright side: I guess Mike Johnson feels vindicated. Even a smidgen of tolerance is too much. Today, of course, is a Pagan Holiday. Of course it is. They all are.

By The Numbers - part the thirty sixth

crypto:

Cryptocurrency has an energy consumption problem. Bitcoin alone is estimated to consume 127 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year — more than many countries, including Norway.

AI:

These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.

Back in the beginning of the USofA (call it circa 1800), most Americans were subsistence farmers. Don't take much resources or education to walk behind a mule and breed kids. Mike Johnson wants us to do that.

By The Numbers - part the thirty fifth

If you've taken in the recent reports on economics of the USofA, you might be wondering what the pundit class, and econ class, have to say about it. They have much to say, of course. What none of them that I've seen has said squat about the elephant still sitting in the room: Covid savings. Here's a survey of some pundits. You can guess which scenario fits my brain.

One of the more pessimistic takes out there, from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, takes this approach. They calculate that excess savings peaked at about $2.1 trillion in August 2021, but by the second quarter of this year less than $190 billion remained, putting them on pace to be depleted in the current quarter.

If that were true, it would be hard to explain the latest growth figures. Well, unless they're just Fake News ginned up by the Fed (no cabal of Left Wing progressives, ya know). Where'd the Bongo Bucks come from? No explanation yet offered that I've seen.

Goldman Sachs, for example, calculates that as of July there were $1.3 trillion in excess savings, an amount equal to about 5% of gross domestic product.

Now that is something to behold. And would go a good way to explaining how the USofA economy keeps chugging along. The worry for Sleepy Joe and his acolytes: will the Good Times Roll until next election? Or will they disappear just before said election, a la Dubya? Only the Shadow knows.

Put Your Money...

Well, the USofA Bidnezzmen are cheering Sleepy Joe's initiative to send Bongo Bucks (about $106 billion of them) to Israel, Ukraine, and such to battle for truth, justice, and the American way. It'll be quite interesting, and informative, to see how many of them are willing to ante up the Bongo Bucks (corporate and personal) needed to reimburse Uncle Sugar's generosity. My guess is: not a penny's worth. There'll be more on the subject anon.

Thought For The Day - 2 October 2023

Xi Donjon and his acolytes are bleating to a faretheewell, out of court, of course; there be sanctions from Da Judge for such behavior if they pulled such stunts in front of Da Judge. Chief among these bleats: no harm, no foul; we never missed a payment on these loans. Which sounds like a sound argument, until one considers the whole point of the fraud: get a smaller vig. Now, the fact of the lying is fraud in and of itself, which is how Xi Donjon got hoisted on his petard, so it matters not whether the loans were repaid on schedule. But would they have been as easily paid off if the loans had been based on the true value of the collateral? How much more would the vig be, in that circumstance? Only the Shadow knows. Perhaps James does, and we'll find out as the trial progresses. I'll bet Tim O'brien has an inkling.

... had written that Trump was not a billionaire and that his net worth actually ranged between $150 million and $250 million.

That's in 2005 dollars. Trump sued for $5 billion. Lost, of course. Alas, O'Brien is bound by NDA.

Types is Types

Derek Lowe is my favorite drug blogger, and this latest is worth reading. You'll likely need a bit of The Wiki to get a bit of jargon, but again, it's worth it.

This new paper is going to annoy a lot of people, but I think that's fine. Its author, Arash Sadri, has undertaken an extensive review of the origins of all approved small-molecule drugs (1144 of them). His claim is that only 123 of them were discovered by purely target-based assay methods, and that the rest have to be described as discovered through phenotypic means. He notes that the share of target-based drugs in new approvals has grown over the years, but that there has never been a year when they surpassed the phenotypic ones.

In a nutshell: the Drug Industrial Complex has spent many Billions of dollars in an attempt to find a new and betterer way of finding drugs. Turns out, according to the paper, not so much. And, in fact, it doesn't surprise me; I've always been unconvinced that chemists, et al, have truly reliable methods to document and directly measure what happens at the atomic level.

Potency and selectivity for the stated target are simply not sufficient (by themselves) to make a drug, as anyone with any experience knows, but if we really believed in the "strong form" of the target-based drug discovery paradigm, wouldn't they be (outside of tox failures, of course).

Which is another way of saying, through the side door of course, that the Drug Industrial Complex's bleating that it costs billions and billions of Bongo Bucks to get a 'new' drug to patients; and therefore the Drug Industrial Complex needs yet more billions in profits to carry out its mission. That unit cost of success is driven up by the massive count of candidates that never make it through a 'good' PIII trial.

Sadri concludes that "even if target-based drug discovery recorded the effects of molecules on all proteins and every othersingle component of the human body, as in a hypothetical and impractically ideal polypharmacological target-based scheme, it would still have inferior efficiency compared tophenotypic drug discovery."

One has to constantly wonder whether keeping a compound 'in development' without regard to incremental results just to keep the flow of salaries going is really just confined to one-trick pony nano-caps?