Uncle Sugar - part the first

Well, it's happened again: a new drug for a (relatively) small TAM, expressly depends on Socialized Medicine to foot the bill. I kid you not:

According to a Bristol Myers Squibb spokesperson, the wholesale cost for a month's supply will be $1,850. Depending on people's insurance coverage, that cost could be lower for individual patients. Bristol Myers Squibb estimates that 80% of people with schizophrenia in the U.S. have insurance coverage either through Medicare or Medicaid.

So, schizo's are mostly geezers and/or in shithole circumstances? Is that what Bristol thinks/hopes? What would MAGA do?

And, for what it's worth, I'm still not clear that such would be covered by M/M directly, since this is not a doctor's office drug. It would be 'covered' for those who pay for Part D, which isn't always cheap. And United Health, et al, have built up a deserved reputation of putting profit before patient; will Cobenfy be as cheap as generic SoC? Not likely. So, it's really not Socialized Medicine, as generally defined. Who wooda thunk it?

By The Numbers - part the seventy first

Well, Ohtani did become the first 50/50 ballplayer, and all the lamestream baseball pundits are cumming in their dad jeans. What a crock. There is no question that Ohtani is a major attraction. But the 50/50 gaga is silly.

In 2023, MLB changed the pitching rule to limit the pitcher to three throws to first base, and increased the size of the base. Hmm?

So, enquiring minds need to know: league wide, what happened to stolen bases from 2022 to 2023/2024? You guessed it, up. By a bunch (doesn't say how far into '24 the numbers go).

2022 - 1,261
2023 - 1,820
2024 - 1,851

Not like falling off a log, but c'mon man! Consider what Ricky would have done with these rules?

Life Changing

Here's yet another report on the progress of fusion. To be clear: it's nothing more than another way to boil water to make steam which then spins a turbine connected to a generator which then pushes them wee little electrons down the wire.

It's a long-ish piece, but doesn't (as none that I've seen do) discuss the implications for how we would run a society or economy mostly, if not solely, on wee little electrons in the wire. In particular, the winners, based on current conditions, would be the Europeans (and some Asians) who still have a substantial infrastructure of electric transport. The USofA used to, but as is well known (not propaganda), GM bought up many city light rail systems and sold buses. The argument, then and now, is that buses can easily be re-routed from low ridership to high ridership routes. All well and good. After all, 29% of the USofA's fossil fuel energy consumption is transport. OTOH, as any highway engineer will tell you - once built, a new road (or even, lane) will almost immediately reach its 10 or 20 year design capacity. If you build it, they will come. Come to think of it, rail transport is the perfect way to drive urban design. What a concept.

Another important use of fossil fuels is heating our homes (and workplaces), which comes to 61%. Kinda big. Not surprising, switching building heat (and, you might be surprised, cooling) to 'all electric home' (you may remeber that phrase from decades ago!) requires little work at the infrastructure level. 3-phase transmission lines in housing areas might need a voltage boost to handle the increased load, and of course that oil/gas furnance would needs go away, but that can be viewed as a sociatal cost and mitigated by Uncle Sugar.

The big nut to crack is how to leverage 'nearly free' elecricity (at least at the operating cost level) for transport. Is their enough lithium to be mined to support "a Tesla in every garage"? Not sure. As so often, kinda depends on how you measure. Is lithium re-usable? Sorta. Kinda.

Of course, all that matters more in a car oriented society than a rail transport one. Boston (Charlie of the MTA crowd) once had extensive trackless trolleys, but the last line shutdown last year. Sigh. I suspect baksheesh this time around, too.

So, the moral of the story: They Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. While the direct cost of pushing those wee little electrons in the wire with fusion generation is likely to be quite small, the opportunity to use those wee little electrons is largely a function of USofA's energy infrastructure, and transport habits. Not so much.

This is tokamak.

Future Transcript - part the first

Now that Bone Spur Samurai^© and Just Dumb Vance^© have been playing the poor victim of the Lefties, wrt attempts of Off Bone Spur Samurai^©, I've found a transcript of part of a rally speech from Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© to be given on 31 September, in Tulsa, OK.

Enjoy!

My fellow Americans and Red Neck Sooners, the time has come to stop the bullshit surrounding the two, so far, attempts on Bone Spur Samurai^©. To be clear, the perps were not, nor ever were, Libs from shithole Blue States. No, in point of fact, they were/are died in the Rock Ribbed Red MAGA wool whackoes. What we don't yet know about their motives. It's clear that a disaffected Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut would only drift so far away from Bone Spur Samurai^© to feel the need to off the bastard with some deep provocation.

It would appear that there's really only three possibilites:
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has not gone unhinged enough that the perp has to take revenge
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has sucked Vlad's dick so much in Ukraine ...
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has caved to the Deep State and gone all soft in the middle (well, metaphorically of course; he's Jabba the Hut IRL) so ...

So, Bone Spur Samurai^© shut the hell up. Just be thankful that a real marksman from one of those shithole countries that you keep pissing on, doesn't see to it that you get your just desserts.

USA!! USA!!! USA!!!! Bomb Moscow back to the Stone Age! We know how to do that!!

[ahem]
really dumb
-- Jonah Goldberg/2024

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the forty ninth

Well, boy howdy!! My early morning sojurn to the grocers and the greasy spoon (the former for foods and the NYT, the latter for a bun, a cuppa joe, and the NYT crossword) takes my by an Exxon station. And, boy howdy!! Regular at cash is $2.99.9!!! Take that Alzheimer's Ronnie, II. Ya gonna give credit to Sleepy Joe and Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©?? I suppose not.

Scaredy Cat - part the first

Well, he could saute himself, although one might surmise that his recent unhinged bloaviating indicates self-immolation. Be that as it may, we have this.

Scared little Bone Spur Samurai^©. I guess not getting the clap in the 60s and 70s qualifies as combat duty.

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the twenty fourth

Today's NYT has a long piece on the dangers of over-automation. Rather than repeat most of it, just this

Opposition from unions is just one obstacle to automation. The installation of new machinery and software can cost many millions and even billions of dollars — investments that can take years to pay off. And some ports may not have an incentive to invest in new technology when shipping companies and their customers can't easily move to more efficient ports.

Sound familiar? Use the automation a little or use it a lot, the cost is nearly the same, because it's all sunk and can't be avoided. What happens to capital when there's no more labor to replace?

By The Numbers - part the seventieth

Sex, lies, and videotape.

Bone Spur Samurai^© a lot, Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© not so much. CNN

Trump ultimately delivered more than 30 false claims during the debate, CNN's preliminary count found, while Harris shared just one false claim, though she also added some claims that were misleading or lacking in key context.

I suppose we'll see updated figures in due time.

And, of course, Bone Spur Samurai^© went totally unhinged afterwards, since every time he loses something, anything, it's because he's been sabotaged. Those six bankruptcies had nothing to do with him, of course.

They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Such a whiner.

Codd's Revenge

Some years ago, this report ran in the NYT, relating the not so spectacular life of IBM Watson. I find it a cautionary tale for those who cleave to the notion that there's some 'post relational' data world. They ain't no such a thing.

This was predicted some time ago

This goldrush is being driven by the hauntingly accurate results AI has delivered in fields like image, audio and video recognition. Yet, at the end of the day, these algorithms are merely correlation machines, sifting through vast piles of numbers to record subtle correlations among inputs without any high order understanding that would allow them to divine causative relationships. In the end, we are building our AI revolution on a correlation house of cards.

It's not widely discussed, but IBM built DB2 on top of mainframe VSAM way back when. Codd was driven to define the RM in the face of IBM's then major database product IMS, which was/is the hierarchical database. It was defined as a way around the network database. If one wished to, one could have built DB2-lite into any COBOL application, since key-indexed files were/are a part of VSAM, and even earlier machines. Codd, essentailly did that. And Watson and AI and what-have-you continues to do that; xml nonsense being an exception, being just a poor man's IMS. For those with faulty memories, Watson (Jeopardy! version) emerged in 2011. That makes it a decade old, a lifetime or two in IT land.

So, what happened?

The company's top management, current and former IBM insiders noted, was dominated until recently by executives with backgrounds in services and sales rather than technology product experts.

"until recently" is gilding the lily just a tad, implying that the probable was specific to Watson. It's not. IBM from Watson, Sr. on down was/is a sales effort; the science and engineering bits are tolerated as begrudged expense. Remember, the IBM/PC which did jerk IT around for some decades, was built almost wholly from bought-in parts; the Suits thought so little of it.

The Watson they built was a room-size supercomputer with thousands of processors running millions of lines of code. Its storage disks were filled with digitized reference works, Wikipedia entries and electronic books. Computing intelligence is a brute force affair, and the hulking machine required 85,000 watts of power. The human brain, by contrast, runs on the equivalent of 20 watts. [my emphasis]

What Watson is: a relational database on super-duper steroids. Or, at least, it ought to be. Imagine if IBM designed the thing to sequencially search all of that text? Of course not. Indexes up the wazhoo. The only real question: is Watson a structural relational database or a correlation engine? Not everyone acknowledges that these are two distinct ways of looking for 'intelligence'. The relational database is grounded in relations, of course. But relations, in Codd's term, is not the PK/FK 'relation' at all but rather the connection of attributes to the defining identity of the entity. IOW, the standalone table. Again, indexed files existed in VSAM very early on. Nearly everyone considers the PK/FK 'relation' the raison d'etre of the RDBMS, in contrast to the hierarchical file systems which preceded. Both systems are grounded in 'relations' specified by the Designer.

Or is a Watson a correlation machine, continually calculating R among gallions of data points?

The former is structural, dictated by the Designer, while the latter is explorational, hidden in the data.

In the end, so far, Watson would be the Health Guru to smarten doctors. Not so much:

Now IBM is paring back Watson Health and reviewing the future of the business. One option being explored, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to sell off Watson Health.

This essay sat in the queue since 2021. Not much has changed, except to increase the AI hype. And to create the WatsonX brand as some vehicle to re-coup all that moolah. They'll end up throwing good money after bad. It will still end badly.

Nuthin

Once again, with vigour: yet another report 'proving' that real estate, particularly residential, is a non-producing 'asset'. A house ain't anything like an ASML litho machine. And even that real asset can only turn a profit for the owners if it can run 24/7 and can shift all that output.

The company's newest lithography tool weighs a staggering 165 tons and will cost up to $380 million, roughly double the price of its previous low-NA EUV lithography machines.

The capital/labour ratio for such automation has to be sky high. Let's see if we can find some numbers. Well, not specific to ASML, but to high-NA EUVL machines in general

Perhaps surprisingly, operating labor costs are expected to be relatively stable. Leading-edge fabs are extensively automated because that approach is less likely to introduce contaminants or defects in the production process than with human intervention. As a result, staff size and responsibilities — mostly in engineering, technical, and operations functions — won't need to change substantially.

So, at the least, labour cost isn't going to rise with The New Machine (with or without a Soul).

Therefore, we see another case of the Tyranny of Fixed/Average Cost.

China's problem today, is just a worst case scenario of any pyramid scheme: it only works if the Next Buyer has more available cash than the current owner. Housing, as a non-producing asset, can only be profitable to the mortgage holder if incomes of those in the buyers class (a bit different for each profitable price point) continue to rise. Inflation, according to the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, is always bad; unless and until they go to sell a house! Then it's God's Gift of Capital Gains.

Sane Washing - I learned a new term

By now, those who read the NYT on the innterTubes have long since encountered Peter Baker's execrable paean to Bone Spur Samurai^©. I just got through it in my dead trees version. Clearly, the Money People at the NYT are fully in control, and fully deeply closeted MAGA.

That the NYT refuses to headline every story about Bone Spur Samurai^© - "Unhinged Narcissist Goes Nuts Again" is evidence enough. They sure did about that with Sleepy Joe.

The tell, so to say, is at the end where Baker leaves Bone Spur Samurai^©'s verbal diarrhea on tariffs paying for child care stand uncontested. To be clear, as the GED level crowd knows from high school (or GED, a ha), a tariff is paid for by the consumers of the importing country. No country has the (direct) authority to impose taxes on other countries' companies. Well... in 19^th century (and earlier) regimes where Western powers plundered colonial areas that sorta, kinda is what happened.

But, to give Bone Spur Samurai^© his due, how would things work out if his wet fever dream were true: the US Treasury forces Chinese companies to remit billions and billions of dollars to Uncle Sugar? Do you really think said companies would not raise their prices to cover this new cost of production? Damn right they will. I mean, where else is the USofA going to go for EV batteries and drug API? You guessed it: about nowhere. You see China has cornered the market on those goods, and lots of others. The beauty of off-shoring. Who has who by the nuts?

By The Numbers - part the sixty ninth

The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts are, once again as always, claiming voter fraud without, as always, even a mere shred of evidence that raping and murdering wetbacks are voting Damnocrats into office. Even the President. And they mean to stop it.

But, one might muse, what's the fair way to establish eligibilty to vote? At the beginning one had to be, more or less, a rich (if only land holding) white guy to vote. About 6% (lost the link, boo hoo, but various pages make that reference) of the population!! Ain't minority rule grand?

In the states that did hold elections, suffrage was generally restricted to white men who owned property.

What that means: some states assigned electors by the legislature. An even teenyer minority rule!!

Yes, that's what the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts want to make the (Federal, just like abortion) law again, with no mistake.

If you read the wiki piece, you'll discover a fact not necessarily obvious: the Constitution accrues almost all voting authority to the states, separately. I suppose it's a recurring wet dream for the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts to have the Right Wingnut Supremes declare the 15th and 19th and 24th amendments unconstituional! And, without doubt, what's left of the Voting Rights act!! Party like it'a 1788!!

Since many of the uber-rich never pay any taxes:

We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.
-- Leona Helmsley/1989 (or earlier)

May haps the right to vote should accrue only to those who actually pay, not simply file, taxes. So, let's look for some numbers. And, of course, the point is that some number of non-legal immigrants still pay taxes. (The numbers come from different sources and slightly different times.) Green Card status doesn't explicitly confer National or State voting right. There are small exceptions. Suffrage based on paying taxes would change that, of course, and would not, in and of itself, require a Constitutional amendment. It would require a change in Federal law. Good luck with that.

number of eligible voters: 252 million

number of taxpayers: 128.7 million (and, no, I can't find an explanation for the size discrepancy)

number who voted: 122 million

For perspective, Sleepy Joe got 7 million more votes than Bone Spur Samurai^© in 2020, and one could expect that most of that 7 million other difference is largely W2 bound voters. Not likely to be MAGA morons. One hopes, anyway. So, one hopes, a ~14 million landslide for the Damnocrats is feasible.

So, who's more entitled? The Leonas who merely slurp from Uncle Sugar, or those W2 bound losers? It's your choice. But if you don't want dictatorship, which is just how the rich minority keep most of a country's resources in order to stay rich, then giving the vote to those who actually work and pay taxes and live here, irregardless of status, is most fairest. .

NIMBY

Not In My Back Yard is an age old epithet, but so is Not Invented Here. Too often, in PhARMA, where the advances come from is at the least elided, if not concealed. And so it is with the mRNA Covid vaccines.

About the most stupid vector of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts cabal that appeared during Covid was the assertion that the mRNA vaccines were conjured up immediately to suck of Uncle Sugar's Bongo Bucks, and to poison the population, and so forth. The knee jerk affirmation of the sub-GED cult happened right on cue. About that time, and in more than one venue, I noted that mRNA had been around (well, it's been around pretty much forever, but it took some time for us bipeds to notice) for a very long time in medchem years. It was well understood by the time of Covid, and so on. Of some note, especially to those who call bullshit on PhARMA's bleating poormouth, these mRNA discoveries were done in academia and NGOs, not Big PhARMA.

Which brings us to Derek Lowe's current report on the subject. Again, well worth the read, even for those who aren't university trained medchemists. The delivery tech of mRNA vaccines is not exactly olde hat, but close.

Among those people who have now heard of LNPs [lipid nanoparticles], I would guess that many of them have the impression that these are a new development. They likely also have a similar impression that the idea of an mRNA vaccine itself is a new idea, but neither of these are true.

There was a time when gaining new knowledge was The Best Thing, but with the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts attempting to subvert intelligence and science, we may well fall into a very long Dark Age if the likes of Putin, Orban, and wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© run the world. I often wonder why they all don't sign up for Islam: a more Male Chauvinist Pig ideology is difficult to conjure. Ya don't need no book larnin to walk behind a mule and make babies!! Preferably fishbelly white, of course; none of those shithole country shades. "Party like it's 1829"^©

Yeah, Right

So, this is where the latest white folks killing white folks happened

We know you've made the best decision by moving inside the City limits of Winder, Georgia, founded in 1893. Originally called Jug Tavern, Winder gained its new name from railroad builder John H. Winder.

So, a joint that proclaims its existence as white trash. Perfect.

Leave it to the Brits to explain the corruption in Georgia.

In 2022, Georgia enacted a permitless carry law, repealing provisions requiring people to obtain a license and be subject to fingerprinting and a background check before carrying concealed weapons in public spaces.

In sum: party like it's 1829!!! We don't need no laws.

Likely not in what's left of my life span, but nobody with brains will live in these stupid Red States.

Nom de Guerre

As regular reader is aware, one of the joys of these missives is the opportunity to skewer prominent folk, mostly the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts of this world. On occasion, I've adopted their epithets for the progressive minded, Sleepy Joe being first among equals.

A whlle ago, I invented (so far as I know) Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© as a skewer to the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts' increasingly unhinged half-wits. Well, what do you know?

And in a reprise of past GOP campaigns branding Democratic nominees as extreme liberals, Trump and his supporters are trying to frame Harris as a communist and a "Bolshevik." South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem blasted Harris' running mate, Tim Walz, as a "security risk" because he once taught in China.

Life, sometimes, does imitate Art.