Up From Facebook

I’m not an investment advisor. I do have personal experience in investing going back over 40 years. I’ve been retired for nearly two years and have no regrets so far. “Rental properties carry concentrated risk, illiquidity, and management overhead…The return needs to be significantly better [than an investment elsewhere] to justify the extra complexity. Often, it's not.” Per the link below, I’ve never owned or managed rental property—too much work and risk for my taste. But any investment portfolio should be diversified, and that includes real estate. If you own your home or at least have equity in it, you already have a real estate investment. For most Americans, that’s most of their personal wealth. Beyond that, you can buy REIT shares if real estate is real to you. But diversified also means equities, bonds, treasuries and, yes, gold. Not in equal proportions—that depends on your appetite for risk. That’s up to you. I haven’t figured out how to monetize a good night’s sleep. But...

“ As the Iran war drags on toward the end of it third month, Fars News Agency, an Iranian government-affiliated news outlet, reports that the country has launched a shipping insurance service backed by Bitcoin for Iranian ships. It cited documents that came from the Iranian Ministry of Economy and Financial Affairs.” *snip* “A report from Bloomberg stated   that Iranian business magnate Babak Zanjani, a billionaire who has been accused of embezzling money from Iran's oil ministry, first began promoting the idea on his social media on May 8.” So “Zanjani” is “Trump” in Farsi. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/iran-turns-bitcoin-shipping-insurance-193018779.html

Sometime around 2033 or 2034, SS benefits will drop by ca. 23% if nothing is done.   One frequent proposal is to remove the cap on payroll taxes. There are at least two problems with this: (1) the wealthiest Americans derive most of their income from non-salary sources, and (2) this just turns SS into welfare, and we already know what Congress does with welfare. SS is retirement insurance paid for by workers. Let’s keep it that way. Another proposal is to cap benefits:   “The very highest income couples can now collect $100,000 a year in Social Security benefits.” That’s gross income, not net income. Couples making $100K/yr pay income taxes on 85% of that. They don’t pocket all $100K, and the more taxable income they have outside of SS, the more tax they pay on the SS income as that income puts them into a higher tax bracket. Furthermore, the Federal income taxes on SS benefits *don’t* go into the General Fund like the rest of federal income taxes. These funds are directed *en...

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...

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  

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 ...

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

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...

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...

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...

Don’t ask me why, but I was listening to Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” yesterday. If you’re familiar with it, you’ll recall a tune that appears five different times: 1.       Part I, No. 21   – "Erkenne mich, mein Hüter" 2.       Part I, No. 23   – "Ich will hier bei dir stehen" 3.       Part II, No. 53   – "Befiehl du deine Wege" 4.       Part II, No. 63   – "Ergötze dich, mein Seele" 5.       Part II, No. 72   – "Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden"   The tune was originally composed by Hans Leo Hassler in 1601 for a secular love song before Bach repurposed it. More recently, Paul Simon re-purposed the melody yet again for “American Tune.” Music is choc-a-block with plagiarism. Handel did it in Messiah. Jazz does it all the time. Hearing it in St . Matthew Passion was like hearing the voice of an old friend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

My mom led an extraordinary and full life. The youngest of three, she was raised in Johnstown PA, northern Appalachia. Her dad died when she was a teenager. Her mom, who never finished high school, went to work as a domestic.     She was able to attend William and Mary thanks to money provided by an older brother who was a football star at W&M and briefly went pro. She met my dad there. They raised five children. Shortly after her youngest was born, she started taking graduate school classes, and in her early 40s, earned a PhD in experimental psychology. After a two-year postdoc at The Rockefeller University in Manhattan, she returned to East Tennessee to teach, and as part owner/operator of The Energy Outlet, a store that sold window heat pumps and woodburning stoves.   A few years before my parents retired, they bought a place in rural Washington County NY. After they moved there, my mom declared that she would live there until she died. She loved the area, and deve...

This is what the MAGA GOP supports: “Workers are earning record low wages and other compensation compared to their labor output, according to the BLS productivity and costs report published Thursday. Called the “labor share,” this indicator essentially measures how much of the nation’s economic earnings is used to pay wages and other worker benefits.    “At 54.1%, workers are netting the lowest earnings compared to the income they’re producing since the data started being collected in 1947. Meanwhile, labor productivity increased 0.8%, output increased 1.5%, and people worked 0.7% more month over month.”  This is what happens when unions die.  When people talk about “The Greatest Generation,” they seem to refer to the generation that fought in WWII*. But it was also the generation of organized labor. While the US economy traded manufacturing for services, there’s no objective reason why workers shouldn’t demand better treatment. That’s the only way things will change...

A typical administrative response to financial difficulty in large organizations is to hire consultants. The theory is that the expertise of consultants will uncover efficiencies that will (a) relieve the difficulties and (b) repay the investment in the consultants. So how’s that working out for American nonprofit hospitals, many of which struggling and threatened with closure? “ Findings     Nonprofit hospitals in the US (n = 2343) collectively spent more than $7.8 billion on management consulting services from 2009 to 2023. A stacked difference-in-differences design comparing 306 US nonprofit hospitals that used a management consulting firm for the first time with 513 matched hospitals that did not use a management consulting firm during the study period found little evidence of substantial, statistically significant, or systematic changes attributable to management consulting engagements.   “Meaning     These findings raise questions about the net value that ...

I recently retired as a professor in the Edward A. Doisy Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. Who was Edward A. Doisy? He was the only Nobel Laureate from Saint Louis University. He shared the 1943 prize in Physiology or Medicine for identifying the two forms of vitamin K and determining their structure, enabling synthetic production to treat bleeding disorders. Vitamin K is routinely given by injection to newborns to prevent Vitamin K Deficiency Bleeding (VKDB), a dangerous condition caused by low clotting factors. Newborns have limited vitamin K stores, breast milk provides low levels, and their intestines cannot yet produce it, making the shot crucial for preventing sudden, severe internal bleeding. Now, in the third decade of the 21 st  century, parents in the richest nation on the planet are refusing to protect their newborns from preventable death because they’ve been duped by conspiracy theories.  “At the morgue,...

  From a PBS post on Facebook yesterday: “ On May 5, 1925, Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution.   “It all began when the state of Tennessee passed a law making it a crime to teach evolution in public schools. The newly-organized American Civil Liberties Union responded immediately, placing an ad inviting a teacher to help test the law in the courts.   “A group of local businessmen selected Scopes to provoke the indictment, both to challenge the law and to draw publicity to Dayton during an economic slump.   “But once the trial got under way, a pair of big-name lawyers—Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution—overshadowed Scopes' role.” I took Biology II as a senior in a public high school in Tennessee, 1972-73. When we reached a section on evolution, the teacher asked if there were any concerns. Nobody voiced any, so we moved on.

As I told a guy today up at Slater Park, I plan to live to 100 because very few people die after that age. I didn’t tell him that I plagiarized that George Burns line. I could also have quoted Woody Allen: I plan to achieve immortality by not dying. There are certainly things one can do to prolong life. The most reliable, in every animal in which it has been tested is caloric restriction. That means  reducing average daily calorie intake by typically 20–40% below normal requirements while maintaining proper nutrition. Is that living? We report, you decide. As for the “Blue Zone lifestyle”: The secret to Blue Zone lifestyle longevity is poor record-keeping. Be careful what you wish for. A long life with Alzheimers is a curse, not a gift. https://science.anu.edu.au/news-events/news/dr-saul-newman-has-uncovered-secret-living-110  

I’ve read over 200 history books and biographies. The two great drivers of history are war and money. For a dose of military history, I recently read “The Dark Path” by Williamson Murray. A big take-home of that book was how often victory depended on superior finances. For economic history, I’ve read “ Money: The true story of a made-up thing” by Jacob Goldstein, “ The world for sale” by  Jack Farchy and Javier Blas   and “Our dollar, your problem” by Kenneth Rogoff. But to understand the history of international finance, I turned to “Money Beyond Borders:  Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto ” by Barry Eichengreen.   This book begins with deep dives into the minting of Greek silver tetradrachms and Roman silver denarius, and the consequences of debasement by rulers like Nero. Both nations reached well beyond their borders with their coins, both through trade and by paying their far-flung militaries in coin.. Eichengreen argues that the fall of th...

  It was clear by the late ‘60s that America was doing far more harm than good in Vietnam and should just sue for peace and get out. Eventually, the US left and the Vietcong took over. Eventually, Vietnam became a reliable US trade partner. America is doing far more harm than good in Iran. Trump should just negotiate the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and get out. Eventually, the religious dictatorship in Iran will give way to a government better able to work with its neighbors and with the US.

Venter died a couple days ago at the age of 79.     As a grad student, I wondered whether it would be possible to sequence the human genome. As a postdoc, I did both Maxam and Gilbert sequencing and Sanger sequencing (first with E coli Klenow fragment, then reverse transcriptase) a couple hundred nucleotides per reaction, each reaction taking up to a week. For the first decade that I had my own lab, we did our own sequencing, but eventually it became cheaper and faster to send the template out to be sequenced by a company.   Venter drove the progress of DNA sequencing with his own company, then allied with the NIH to complete the first draft of the human genome. Genomic sequencing has transformed medicine, as well as evolutionary biology and taxonomy.   In the last five years that I had my own lab, genome sequencing was so cheap that I had a local company sequence the entire genome of a mutant fly line I'd created in order to define the sequence at one gene. And arou...

I’m not enough of a scholar of international affairs to possess a highly differentiated opinion on Taiwan. Superficially, a PRC invasion of Taiwan seems analogous to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the PRC brands Taiwan as a renegade state, just as Putin brands Ukraine as “little Russia.” The historical antecedents are very different, and the historical case for amalgamating Taiwan with the PRC is certainly stronger. That said, Taiwan currently wants independence and Xi plans for an eventual takeover. Most of what I read these days discusses a military takeover of Taiwan. That made little sense to me. How could the PRC justify the billions required to defeat Taiwan and the billions more to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure when they could simply build it on the mainland and outcompete Taiwan?   Eyck Freyman writing in Foreign Affairs envisions a crisis, not a war, as the path to takeover. “It begins not with missiles but with cutter ships. One morning, dozens of Chinese coast g...