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Reflections on retirement

I retired nearly two years ago. I’ve occasionally been asked if I miss working, and the answer is a hard no. I liked my job, and I was well-compensated, but by the time I retired, I was ready for it. Partly, this may be owing to having taken the five-year phased retirement path, which afforded me the opportunity to transition. It also helped that my wife had retired two years earlier. Certainly, life is very different. I live in a different state, far from all the friends in St. Louis. The house still feels more like a rental after leaving the house in St. Louis we lived in for 35 years and overhauled during that time. I still need Siri for directions to most destinations outside of the most routine. My lifestyle is changed considerably. I don’t play my guitar or banjo anymore. I had to give up cycling due to sciatica, although I’m outdoors walking in nature nearly every day for 1.5-2 hrs. I’ve replaced the musical instruments with photography. On the other hand, I still wake up betwee...
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The future of AI in medicine

From a friend who has worked at the NIH for many years: “ Can AI help doctors make better decisions? At NIH, we brought together scientists and clinicians from across the country to explore exactly that. Their consensus was that with continued research, ethical and responsible guardrails, and strong collaboration, AI could become a helpful and powerful tool for healthcare. Imagine tools that help doctors spot problems earlier, personalize treatments, and ease clinical workload, without replacing the human touch. Recommendations of the workshop participants included:    * Build AI that is useful, safe, and protects privacy.  * Improve health data systems so AI works better.  * Make sure AI works for all communities.” In radiology, AI has already made significant inroads in speed and accuracy of interpreting images. But recent research suggests some refinements need to be made: “ “We find that different radiologists, indeed, react differently to AI assistance — some ar...
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Is AI coming for your job?

Gallons of digital ink are spilled weekly about how AI will be a job-destroying juggernaut. But it’s far from clear that all jobs will be vulnerable and on what time scale the AI replacement will occur. “ Who gets laid off first? Writers and editors are at the greatest risk, the report says — 57 percent of such jobs are destined for the chopping block. Maybe they should have learned to code.   “But the coders come in at second place, with 55 percent likely to be pink-slipped. And the hits keep coming. Mathematicians, website developers, database architects, even atmospheric and space scientists are all in big trouble.     “At least journalists catch a break. They’re broken out in a separate category from other writers and given a decent shot at survival. Only 35 percent of these jobs will be AI’d to death.   “Whose jobs are secure? “The three safest jobs are if you are a human dishwasher, if you’re a floor finisher, or if you are a technician in a surgical room,” sai...
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Book review: The Death of Trotsky

Several years ago, I read Isaac Deutcher’s monumental three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. Naturally, it included an account of Trotsky’s assassination. I’ve also read a couple of Stalin biographies and Richard Pipes’ “The Russian Revolution.” I don’t recall how “ The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy” by Josh Ireland  came to my attention; probably a review in New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. Ireland turns the history of Trotsky’s murder into a book-length narrative by drawing on the various threads of Trotsky’s biography, the biography of his assassin,  Ramón Mercader , and the contemporary events and personalities of people in their orbits. These are all woven together in a style more commonly found in novels.  The weather, sights and smells, landscapes, and personal quirks of characters are described in vivid detail. This gives the story a pacing and color absent from most histories. In several places, I found t...
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What’s in a name?

Godwin’s law states:   "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. ” In my experience, a similar law applies to the words “socialist,” “communist” and “Marxist.” All three words are used interchangeably and as epithets, not descriptions of governments or economic systems. Let’s start with Marxist: “The assumption behind most political debate is that Marxist texts contain a detailed design for a “socialist” society. That assumption collapses into oblivion on contact with the actual literature.   “Marx spent the overwhelming majority of his intellectual energy analyzing capitalism — how surplus value is extracted, how class relations form, how markets expand, how crises emerge from systemic contradictions.   Das Kapital , all three volumes of it, is fundamentally a forensic examination of capitalism’s mechanics. Volume I alone runs to nearly 900 pages of dense analysis of the commodity form, the working da...
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Lying liars and the desperate lies they tell

“Health and Human Services Secretary  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , who has spent decades spreading dangerous disinformation about the safety of vaccines, insisted Tuesday that he’s played no role in the resurgence of measles cases in the United States. “I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” Kennedy repeatedly claimed during testimony to a House committee about President Donald Trump’s 2027 budget request.” LOL! The only thing saving RFK Jr is a Y chromosome. All of the Trump cabinet members fired to date have been female. They’ve all been replaced by men.   https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rfk-measles-never-been-anti-vaccine_n_69e139dae4b0555d213a61a5?origin=home-latest-news-unit
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Quote of the day

Yes, the faux godly Hegseth should really be a bit more versed in the bible. But it’s really perfectly apt that he’s not. If you remember, Winnfield is a hitman, a killer, a man of meaningless violence. He wraps his murders in stylized bible verse imitations to give them some mix of giving them retributional ooomph and just for kicks. Is there any better description of Pete Hegseth? I can’t think of one. Hegseth’s brand of Christian nationalism is a permission structure for domination and violence. The biblical text is a source of handy quotes to the extent it advances those aims. But he’s neither smart enough nor serious enough to mine the text in any serious way. He’s just a different version of Jules Winnfield. ~Josh Marshall
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