Grumping

Posted on January 21, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

So I pay way to much attention to the internet though I do focus on STEM topics other than libertarian leaning current events and world view ‘stuff.’

One of my favorites is as I have said Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. You can find him on the web quite easily…well unless his support of Orange Man Bad got him kicked off at last.

But one of my grumps ever since the start of Covid has been his ‘blithely panicked’ (yes I meant that) response to what I see as a very serious but never, ever, even close to civilization ending, epidemic.

While I do not agree with those who call it just a flu, I do agree that it has been blown out of all proportion. I suspect that the response has killed more people (untreated conditions, suicide, drug overdose, ennui…) than the disease has.

Also the impact, being highly focused on people like me (a bit older with co morbidities) was tragic but after the first 3 months clearly within the realm of reasonable countermeasures to limit spread among the affected community without broad swath lockdowns (which were and are Fascistic over reactions.)

But Orange Man Bad drove a lot of folks into the fear and freak out theater business and there was nothing that reasonable people (Orange Man Bad amongst them) could do about it. Now ZombieJoe and his HenchWench will use the winding down of the fear frenzy to cover up a lot of their wild eyed supporters power grabs and revenge fantasy role playing.

Now one of the tropes is how hideous this disease is because of its lingering effects. Horrors, you may loose your sense of smell, have brain deficit issues, other health affects lasting who knows how long???

Get a Fucking Grip. I have had several serious infections due to physical damage early in my twenties (bone infection can recur more than once after 40 years!!!!) I also seem to get a really really really bad flue reaction every few years. These episodes have left me depressed and enervated for months…getting on for years. I often hear folks commenting about how serious infections drag out and lead to knock on effects.

This Covid HORROR is only something because we are paying millions of people billions of dollars to pay attention to this one thing.

What that attention has given us is a huge pile of data on what a viral infection can do the human body. And a whole bunch of youngish punkish doctors have seen this effect in detail in multiple patients for the first time and think its something new.

It’s not new, ask any group of older folks with less than perfect health records. And look at reality, this infectious vector and others have been around for hundreds of millions if not billions of years. A variant of this one might have helped kill of the Fucking Neanderthals (along with our ancestors and a few rocks and clubs.)

I was born in the year of the Hong Kong flu, probably a worse flu than this one but much less of a problem because travel was vastly less easy and people didn’t panic when an unknown disease popped up. They had lived with Polio, Typhoid, Yellow Fever, the Mumps, etc, etc most of their lives and were still stunned by the efficacy of the penicillin and its ilk.

I know that few will read this post and even if they did it would have no effect, but as with most Grumps, it helped me. Thank you for your support.

Mice with damaged spine, enabled to walk again…Faster Please…

Posted on January 16, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

JANUARY 15, 2021
Designer cytokine makes paralyzed mice walk again
by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum

“Thus, gene therapy treatment of only a few nerve cells stimulated the axonal regeneration of various nerve cells in the brain and several motor tracts in the spinal cord simultaneously,” says Dietmar Fischer. “Ultimately, this enabled the previously paralyzed animals that received this treatment to start walking after two to three weeks. This came as a great surprise to us at the beginning, as it had never been shown to be possible before after full paraplegia.”
Above article in MedicalXPress via Phys.org

Let’s hope this paves the way for human treatment. Not that I don’t love cyborg exoskeletons in their place, but this is far better.

Charlie Martin @ PJMEDIA Obamacare vs Arithmatic

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Mr. Martin lays out ‘my’ plan for health car, he got it probably long before I did, you should too. This should be the Republican, Tea Party, soft libertarian ‘answer’ to Health Care. @ http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamacare-vs-arithmetic/

In there is Gammon’s Law:

From Milton Friedman: Some years ago, I came across a study by Max Gammon, a British physician who also researches medical care, comparing input and output in the British socialized hospital system. He took the number of employees as his measure of input and the number of hospital beds as his measure of output. He found that input had increased sharply, while output had actually fallen.
He was led to enunciate what he called “the theory of bureaucratic displacement.” In his words, in “a bureaucratic system . . . increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production. . . . Such systems will act rather like `black holes,’ in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of `emitted production.'”

Friedman referenced health care in general but it applies to the square with Obamacare…

Megan McArdle on Obamacare, calm analysis rather than overheated hyperbole

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

11 Pieces of Obamacare Conventional Wisdom That Shouldn’t Be So Conventional
By Megan McArdle Sep 27

ViaMeadia // The Miracles Wrought by Price Transparency

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

A surgery center in Oklahoma has started a bidding war by offering drastically lower prices than other providers and posting them online. The center describes itself as “free-market loving”—an unorthodox but welcome branding for a health care provider. The evidence of its success, however, is eye-popping. Where some hospitals charge more than $16,000 for a breast biopsy, Oklahoma Surgery Center charges $3, 500, according to a local Oklahoma news station. And that’s just one of many impressive examples.

Read more at: IndyStar: Abdul: Why our health-care system needs a single-payer – you

The recent move by the Obama administration to delay implementation of the employer mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act means this is the perfect time to have a grown-up discussion about how we deliver health care in this country. As a free market-conservative, social-libertarian political pundit, I am convinced more than ever that it is time in this country for a single-payer health care system.

Get rid of employer ‘health insurance’ go with health savings plans and catastrophic medical insurance AND PUBLISHED PRICING then we at least know what the real price is and stop paying for so many empty suites…

On a very related note, at least in my mind: There is a great debate about the collapse of the demand for lawyers and the issues with ‘Higher Ed’ payoff vs price in general outside of core STEM. But as a practicing engineer, business development type I have to tell you that one of the most pernicious problems in today’s world is an over supply of pure play MBA’s, business school PhD’s, Operations consultants, etc, etc, et-bloody-cettera. I’m not saying that the tech types know all, do all, but when they are ignored the company ( practice, clinic,….. ) in which they work becomes a zombie…and as we all know zombies can win in the short run, even proliferate, but in the end they either rot out or pull down the society (economy) around them.

Rudimentary Liver from Stem Cell, 3D Printed Ear and 3D Printed micro Battery ? What does the future hold

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Theres a huge amount of research going on in fields that don’t at first appear to have much to do with each other that could in the next few years to few decades lead to a world where the possibility of building new organs either as replacements or upgrades is possible, even common.

Those worried about the future of employment in America—for themselves or for the country as a whole—should look to this data. As of now, many of the jobs of the future are going to be health care jobs, and that will only become more true if Obamacare stands and the pool of insured patients expands dramatically. To understand what the jobs of the future will be (or to land one), go where the money is: services, and especially, according to this data, health services.
For those unlikely to take up health jobs, this graph might seem discouraging. After all, more doctors and health workers points to more health care costs, in a system that’s already vastly too expensive. As the Atlantic points out on its piece on the graph, “There are a couple stories that branch off from this graph. One is the unchecked growth in health care prices over the last few decades, which has made the medical industry the one truly recession-proof job engine of the economy.”
But there’s also a case of optimism here. The Atlantic notes that the two kinds of health care jobs most likely to grow in coming decades are personal health aides and home health workers. This is good news even on its own; achieving a better balance between hospital care and home care is an important task for health care reformers. Moreover, it means there’s a lot of room for entrepreneurial individualse to come up with new and creative ways to cater to a growing demand for personalized health care.

Dr Ben Carson, conservative health system

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CONSERVATISM
DR. BEN CARSON
Last Thursday’s Annual Dinner of the Center of the American Experiment. This year’s speaker fDr. Benjamin Carson, one of the most eminent physicians in the United States, whose speech at the National Prayer Breakfast made him a household name. There was a lot of excitement about Dr. Carson’s appearance, and 1,000 people, a sellout crowd, attended the dinner.

a market-based, consumer-oriented alternative that starts with expanded health savings accounts. Carson points out that 80% of an individual’s encounters with the health care system need not, and should not, involve insurance. That would be the realm of HSAs. Then, with respect to insurance, better information and the simplest forms of incentives can easily bring down costs. The truth is–this is me speaking–it wouldn’t be difficult to improve the health care system, if health care was your real concern, and you weren’t motivated mostly by a desire to increase government power.

Interesting perspective piece, this was a great statement of what I think we need for health care in the US. Just add a very basic safety net for those who are not able to save enough or unable to plan well enough for themselves, and this might not be pretty for those too lazy to do the minimal work they should to ensure coverage.

Entrepreneurial Drought Limiting job and wealth creation

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Where are the entrepreneurs? More evidence the very heart of the US economy is failing
James Pethokoukis | June 3, 2013

In my opinion the culprits are easy to discern…..

Uncertainty
Regulation
Taxes
intellectual property law breakdown ( too much, too long, too easy)
Healthcare
Retirement
Risk aversion by banks

I am also thinking that:

the informal economy is more active than is accounted for
people who are paid can in fact support more hangers on than one might expect
especially away from the ‘urbs’
significant numbers are hidden on disability of one sort or another

Which may be hiding lots of small scale entrepreneurial efforts.

But in the main what we are seeing is the aggregate effect of the first list which significantly suppresses the urge to grow. Many commentators miss that the way so much regulation is structured once you reach a certain size it suddenly becomes asymptotically more difficult / expensive / stressful to operate. This makes even starting much less attractive. It also means that we are suppressing companies just as they start to kick up into a realm where they could potentially quickly accelerate out of small business land into middle sized and become more consequential.

This is a socio-economic problem that has to be solved on a broad scale:

Lower but still progressive taxes
Brute simple tax code
Individual focused health care
Individual focused retirement
Small business non interference focus in government rules setting
Standards setting and supporting organizations for: health, safety, financial stability, etc, instead of regulatory administrations
Return IP law to its small creator anti monopoly roots
Support a couple of ‘international’ banks but return banking to moderate scale focus
Eliminate subsidies
Continue deep and wide science support with focus on stimulating commercial support like NASA’s ISS assured access program.

Both main parties need to develop their versions of this list, the massive scale, top down, big corporation supporting model both have devolved into has come to the end of its efficacy and we need to go back to our roots. Those roots are individuals acting on, in and through the small scale collective, which both Dem and Rep should be able to support. Of course the downside is that large scale pandering and petty corruption are less hide-able in such a polity.

MIT TR | Synthetic Biology Could Speed Flu Vaccine Production

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

….researchers are hoping to engineer entirely new circuits into cells to help diabetes patients. Martin Fussenegger, a bioengineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, described a molecular system in which cells are modified with genes that can detect low pH levels in the blood, a sign of a diabetic state. In response, he says, the engineered cells will produce insulin to better regulate blood sugar levels and calm the diabetic state.
This kind of engineering typically depends on viruses to modify genes so that cells will perform useful tasks. But that method is risky: the introduced DNA could integrate into the genome at an unfortunate location that might lead to cancer. Harvey Lodish, a cell biologist at MIT, is working on a technology that could avoid that problem: lab-made red blood cells. After these cells are modified, they will kick out the virus in the course of their natural development process.
“The beauty of red blood cells is they are pretty much the only cell in body without a nucleus,” says Lodish. “By the time they get into circulation, they have lost their DNA and are stable for 120 days with no risk of tumors.”
In Lodish’s method, a retrovirus carries a new gene into the genome of progenitor cells that will eventually produce red blood cells. The cell uses that new gene to produce a modified version of proteins that sit on the surface of the mature red blood cell even after the cell has lost its DNA. The modified surface protein has been engineered so that other compounds can easily be attached to it—antibodies that could mop up toxic substances in the blood, or small-molecule drugs to attack cancers or other diseased cells. Lodish believes the technology is a safer approach to putting synthetic biology to use in the human body.

As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit says, “faster please”