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Remembering Milton Friedman

Mike Brock has a long piece up at his substack on Milton Friedman. For the tl;dr crowd, here’s the money quote: “ The honest historical record is that Friedman made substantive contributions that the contemporary American left has absorbed without recognizing and that the contemporary American right has invoked without honoring. Both receptions are defective. The historical figure is more interesting than either.”   I’ve never taken an economics course. What little I know of the subject I’ve picked up on the fly while reading history. I certainly don’t know enough to criticize Friedman’s writings. But from what I gather in Brock’s article, much of what passes for praise or attacks on Friedman in the popular press are as wide of the mark as praise and criticism of Karl Marx. I’ll just post a couple of nut grafs from the Brock piece. “The contemporary American left’s framing of Friedman as an opponent of human freedom requires the audience not to read what he actually wrote. He wrote...
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Quote of the day

It’s the grimmest moment in my political lifetime. Not only do we have a president devoting to enriching his friends and starting a brutal, mad war––we’ve had those before––but he’s one who doesn’t even pay lip service to democracy. Why did we get here? Because people voted for him. Why did they vote for him? Because he brilliantly and falsely convinced them he would address their grievances. ~Adam Hochschild  
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Gas prices

I’ll admit that gas prices at the pump have no significant effect on me. I live close to everything I need to be in person (food, healthcare), and I drive a sub-compact fuel-efficient car. I combine trips and keep my tires inflated.   The reality is that oil prices affect much more than your personal mobility. Much of the retail in the US depends on trucking, which is highly sensitive to oil prices. The GOP’s indifference to this is a major campaign issue for Democrats it they choose to use it. It’s not going away anytime soon. “ SCHIPPER: People shouldn't actually expect gasoline prices to be back down to where they were at the beginning of the year until after 2027. So, we could be talking about 18 months to 2 years before we start seeing gasoline prices like they were at the beginning of 2025.” I’ll confess to being ambivalent about this. I don’t want working-class Americans to be hurt, but ultimately America needs to wean itself from hydrocarbons. If you seriously want to hurt ...
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Vitamin K fearmongering kills

There’s no question about the safety and efficacy of vitamin K shots in newborns. They’re not vaccines. “Amid a rise in broader anti-vaccine sentiment, some influencers and media figures have cast doubt on the routine vitamin K shot given to newborn infants – and new reporting from ProPublica suggests such rhetoric may have had deadly consequences.” *snip* “For years, some influencers and media figures have described the warnings of potential health consequences of not getting a vitamin K shot as “emotional blackmail” and claimed those that refuse the shot are “more responsible” parents.” As usual, this is right-wing projection. The anti-vitamin K conspiracy theorists are the blackmailers, and they are killing American children. Feh. https://www.mediamatters.org/propublica/new-reporting-links-skepticism-vitamin-k-shot-newborn-deaths-influencers-and-media
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Academic tenure

Academic tenure is a commitment by a college or university to award permanent employment status. Most faculty contracts stipulate that tenure can only be removed for cause or for financial exigency.   In the last year of my postdoctoral fellowship, I applied for tenure-track positions at various universities around the US. Tenure-track means that the university is looking to hire someone they believe will end up getting tenure. It’s not a guarantee of tenure; I’ve known plenty of people hired on the tenure track who were later denied promotion and tenure and had to leave for failing to meet performance criteria. In the event, I accepted an offer as an assistant professor and was tenured as an associate professor six years later. Recently, some universities have tried to work around the tenure commitment by cutting faculty salaries. Particularly at medical schools, non-clinical faculty are expected to recover 50% or more of their compensation from extramural grants. Faculty who fail...
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HPV vaccination

HPV infection accounts for 99% of cervical cancers. There’s a vaccine against HPV.   Back when we still lived in Missouri, we had our teenage daughter vaccinated against HPV. Glad to see that in our adopted state of Rhode Island, 95% of adolescents got at least one dose of the HPV vaccine. Why would any parent deny their child this vaccine? “Comparing adolescents ages 13-17 years across the country against Alabama -- where the 21% without at least one dose of the HPV vaccine approximates the national goal -- several Northeast states did significantly better, including Rhode Island (adjusted OR 3.05, 95% CI 1.40-6.66), Massachusetts (aOR 2.19, 95% CI 1.24-3.88), and New Hampshire (aOR 1.72, 95% CI 1.03-2.88).” *snip* “In the South, rates of unvaccinated adolescents ranged from 14% in Delaware and Virginia to 39% in Mississippi. The West saw unvaccinated rates ranging from 14% in Hawaii and 15% in New Mexico to 29% in Alaska and 30% in Idaho . . .” With real estate, it’s “location, l...
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Microplastics and RFK Jr’s brain

There’s no question that microplastics are ubiquitous our planet. Are they a threat to human health? RFK Jr, who is neither a physician nor a scientist, thinks so. “ Reaching for a number to convey the urgency of the problem, he cited research that "reports concentrations [of plastic] in the brain equivalent by mass to   roughly a spoonful ," a value he said "has gone up by 50 percent since 2016. And inevitably, it's going to go up exponentially if we continue along the same road." Unlike other claims RFK Jr has made, this one is actually based on a publication in a refereed journal. Unfortunately, the measurement technique is flawed, in that it cannot distinguish microplastics from other natural brain biomolecules. In other words, this is likely an overestimation. A second recent study that used four different measurement techniques found 100-fold less microplastics in the brains they analyzed. Which study is correct? As we say in the science biz, extraordinary...
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