- Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during the pandemic, half were women, and nearly half were people of color.
- More than $200 billion (17%) of small business Covid relief lost to fraud.
- Is pickle ball too noisy?
- College tuition explained: it’s price discrimination.
- GOP Senators: “We were shocked to see the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announce via a tweet that the Administration has ‘taken steps for temporary importation of certain foreign-approved versions of cisplatin products’ – meaning from China – without otherwise informing American oncologists.”
NYT: We’re in a Golden Age of Medicine
The New York Times announced we’re in a Golden Age of medicine, saying:
We may be on the cusp of an era of astonishing innovation — the limits of which aren’t even clear yet.
Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”
Wednesday Links
- An argument that life on earth did not begin on earth.
- Over six million prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work — Depression-era work rates for American men ages 25–54.
- David Friedman asks: why are poor people fatter than the nonpoor? The conventional answer is that fast foods are cheaper than healthy foods. But Friedman shows that the reverse is true – per calorie consumed, nutritious food is half the cost of fast food.
- Without fungi, we not only wouldn’t be alive, we never would have evolved.
- In Uganda, where nearly half the people eat fewer calories than they need each day, excess fat is often a sign of wealth.
Tuesday Links
- Gorman and Goodman: Texas was right not to expand Medicaid.
- Schaeffer Center: Medicare Advantage enrolls lower-spending people, leading to large overpayments.
- Why DC is so dangerous: “the overwhelming preponderance of lethal violence is carried out with illegal weapons” and “most gun arrests don’t lead to charges.”
- Prenatal tests: Very accurate for common genetic disorders like Down syndrome. But for rare diseases, the positive results were wrong 80 percent to 93 percent of the time
- Janitor cut the power to a lab freezer, destroying decades’ worth of research materials valued at nearly $1 million.