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Find your passion?

  Spotted this headline for an article in The Atlantic: ‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice A major new study questions the common wisdom about how we should choose our career. The article is paywalled, so I can’t read it. But the headline provoked me to think about my career. I don’t recall being told to find my passion. The closest I can come is my dad’s advice to ask myself what I think about in my spare time. Or my postdoc mentor, who said that a scientist thinks about science in the shower. Those guides fall a bit short of manifesting “passion” as I understand the word. But my 47-year post college-career in science is consistent with a certain enthusiasm for science. It’s easier to get up in the morning and go to work when you are looking forward to your job. There’s a useful distinction to be made between work and toil. Work, while sometimes difficult and challenging, provides opportunities for personal growth and rewards beyond the paycheck. Toil, in contrast, is effort with...
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Funding Medicare for All

Can we afford Medicare for All? Given that health care in America costs per capita twice that of all the other industrialized nations with some form of single-payer with the same or worse outcomes, I should think so. But even with our current Medicare system, there’s an identifiable source of waste, fraud and abuse that could be eliminated—Medicare Advantage. “A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO)  analysis  projects that the federal government will pay between 5% and 10% more for Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollees than traditional Medicare (TM), and estimates that for a given person MA costs about  15% more  than TM. This suggests the federal government will spend about  $1 trillion  on  MA overpayments  over the next decade, which is in line with other estimates.  Reducing these overpayments  can help to  lower health care costs  and reduce budget deficits.   “Medicare Advantage (MA) is the privately-managed, governm...
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Quote of the day

Governments tax labor at much higher rates than capital for what used to be good reasons: labor is less mobile, making such taxes easier to collect, and capital investments tend to boost human productivity and wages, meaning that taxes on labor indirectly capture the upside from capital spending. But if machines start to replace humans rather than complement them, levies focused on labor may fail to capture revenues from AI-generated growth, leaving governments without the resources needed to help the losers in AI disruption. Meanwhile, heavy labor taxes add to companies’ incentives to replace workers with machines, accelerating displacement and driving up unemployment. If the AI industry’s own projections of mass job displacement prove even half true, taxes on labor that accelerate firings will cause voters to revolt against the entire AI project. ~Sebastian Mallaby
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Diesel shortage incoming?

Trump has threatened new economic sanctions on Iran in a tacit admission that his bombing war hasn’t brought Iran to capitulate to his masculine dominance. It’s not clear how these sanctions will relieve the stranglehold Iran holds on the Strait of Hormuz. It’s more likely that they’ll increase the cost of food and gas in the US. “This week the   news broke   that the price spread (“crack”) between the price of a barrel of crude oil and the price refiners want to be paid to produce a refined barrel rose above $100. This statistic translates into a warning that gasoline and diesel prices will remain high for some time to come. That is bad news for Western economies. When you go to the grocery store, there is food to buy there because a truck running on diesel shipped it over. No diesel, no food. Or at least pricey diesel, expensive food. Trucks run on diesel, and some   70% of commodities  shipped in the US are transported by truck. High diesel prices mean high  ...
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Quote of the day

Stalinism is one way of achieving industrialization like cannibalism is one way of achieving a high-protein diet. ~Robert Conquest
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Our digital Dick Tracey

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding Flock cameras. The cops say they help catch crooks. The civil libertarians say big brother is watching you. Some camera operators are using them to spy on girlfriends. Turns out that retail stores have been using them to reduce “shrinkage,” aka shoplifting. But digital surveillance comes at a price. “ Sainsbury’s has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop.   “I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless,” Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal.   “The comedy promoter was buying supplies in the store in East Dulwich, in south-east   London , for a standup event at Dulwich Hamlet football club when, after scanning his items and a Nectar card, he was approached by two managers who told him he could not be served owing to an earlier incident. He was then asked to leave and they tried to escort him from the store...
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Putin is doing it wrong

“ President Donald Trump has declared the Strait of Hormuz as US territory in a new post on Truth Social.   “Sharing a bizarre map of the region with a large blue circle over Hormuz, the picture declared the vital shipping route as “US territory”.” Putin just needs to grab a map, draw a circle around Ukraine and label it “Russian territory.” Think of all the lives that would have been saved if he’d done that four years ago. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-us-war-live-trump-oman-hormuz-peace-nuclear-weapons-b3034640.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=editorial-push
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