Covid-19: 2,909 new cases in Singapore; sharp rise in infections in migrant worker dormitories Today Online. From last week, still germane.
It Was A Situation For Despair: Corruption In The Pharmaceuticals — Guest Post by Robert Yoho
I recently published Butchered by “Healthcare”, a book about how medicine has degenerated over the past 20 years. The corporations have been marketing drugs that barely worked or did not work. They gained power by spreading fear and disease-mongering. The covid story is a continuation of the same modus writ large and with astonishing chutzpah. The following is how the parts fit together. The other players in the scrum—the media, the tech companies, and the politicians—have motives related to the Pharma corporations.
Regarding the media, there's this: New York Times issues correction after egregiously exaggerating coronavirus child hospitalizations.
I recently published Butchered by “Healthcare”, a book about how medicine has degenerated over the past 20 years. The corporations have been marketing drugs that barely worked or did not work. They gained power by spreading fear and disease-mongering. The covid story is a continuation of the same modus writ large and with astonishing chutzpah. The following is how the parts fit together. The other players in the scrum—the media, the tech companies, and the politicians—have motives related to the Pharma corporations.
Regarding the media, there's this: New York Times issues correction after egregiously exaggerating coronavirus child hospitalizations.
Seth Godin: Tools For Modern Citizens
Jason Kottke: Ancient Pre-Viking Skis Discovered In Norway
Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries
The Economist – “In many parts of the world, official death tolls undercount the total number of fatalities. As COVID-19 has spread around the world, people have become grimly familiar with the death tolls that their governments publish each day. Unfortunately, the total number of fatalities caused by the pandemic may be even higher, for several reasons. First, the official statistics in many countries exclude victims who did not test positive for coronavirus before dying—which can be a substantial majority in places with little capacity for testing. Second, hospitals and civil registries may not process death certificates for several days, or even weeks, which creates lags in the data. And third, the pandemic has made it harder for doctors to treat other conditions and discouraged people from going to hospital, which may have indirectly caused an increase in fatalities from diseases other than covid-19. One way to account for these methodological problems is to use a simpler measure, known as “excess deaths”: take the number of people who die from any cause in a given region and period, and then compare it with a historical baseline from recent years. We have used statistical models to create our baselines, by predicting the number of deaths each region would normally have recorded in 2020 and 2021. Many Western countries, and some nations and regions elsewhere, regularly publish data on mortality from all causes.
Profits over People: in-home care a cash bonanza for greedy aged providers
A $53,000 home-care package gets just nine hours of support yet the government has slung suppliers an extra $6.5bn. Dr Sarah Russell reports on aged care profiteers and finds self-management is the answer
The table below shows that, in most places, the number of excess deaths (compared with our baseline) is greater than the number of covid-19 fatalities officially recorded by the government. The full data for each country, as well as our underlying code, can be downloaded from our GitHub repository. Our sources also include the Human Mortality Database, a collaboration between UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and the World Mortality Dataset, created by Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak…”
Why are newer, nice neighborhoods so hard to find?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, Scott Alexander has been covering related issues. Here is one excerpt:
I can visit many European cities and find lovely parts of town to walk through. Closer to home, there is no recently created neighborhood in my own Virginia, or nearby Maryland, that can compare to the older homes of Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. The nicest residential neighborhoods of Washington, such as Georgetown, are typically quite old, predating World War II for most of their attractive structures and sometimes going as far back as the 18th century. Do I need to mention Prague, or the contrast between prewar and postwar German buildings?
A few caveats: The modern world has produced striking individual buildings, such as Guggenheim Bilbao or the Seattle Public Library, among many others. And there are neighborhoods that sell a kind of livability, such as the Kentlands in Maryland or Celebration, Fla., and it works well. It’s just not that beautiful or striking. In general, modern residential neighborhoods are not very aesthetically appealing.
This is not a purely subjective judgment (though it is my personal subjective judgment). If you ask the objective and measurable question of which neighborhoods tourists pay money to see, the answers are almost exclusively older neighborhoods, dating as far back as medieval times but pretty much never after 1940. Tysons Corner just isn’t as charming as Old Town Alexandria.
The decline of neighborhood beauty is all the more striking because of economic development. The world is not just two or three times wealthier now as it was in the 18th century, it is dozens of times wealthier. That is why the increasing cost of craftsmanship, while real, cannot account for the decline of neighborhood beauty. And note that when it comes to interior design, product design, cinema and many other areas, there are still plenty of notable and beautiful creations, fueled of course by greater wealth.
And:
One common explanation for the decline of urban and neighborhood beauty is the rise of the automobile, which makes it harder to develop such places. Surely cars and traffic can ruin many an attractive scene. Still, this is not even close to a full answer. For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars.
Or consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre. The beauty of the University of California at Santa Barbara relies a lot on the surrounding scenery, not the architecture.
No need to put this point in the comments:
“Selection effects” are also often cited as an explanation for the decline of neighborhood beauty: The best neighborhoods from the past are (at least partially) preserved, conveying an overly glorified sense of the aesthetics of previous eras. It’s a good point, but it’s hard for me to name many recent neighborhoods that will go down in history as aesthetically admirable.
My solution to the puzzle? I think we’ve given up on coordination and instead we devote our resources to making interiors much more pleasing, beautiful, and comfortable. The modern world is not aesthetically bankrupt! So:
These days, most homeowners decide to “go it alone.” Since they cannot hope for a latter-day Rothenberg ob der Tauber — namely, coordination around exterior excellence in a consistent style — they focus on the interior, and indeed interior design has made huge strides forward. The lovely and comfortable rooms of many modern houses, along with many other recent aesthetic creations, belie the common notion that the world is too depraved to express beauty.
In that equilibrium, the exteriors of houses often end up coordinated — around relatively inexpensive, highly functional, non-aesthetic features so common in suburbs. It doesn’t make sense to aim for a 19th-century-palace look if your neighbor is doing an Art Deco exterior.
We do end up with more beauty on net:
So outward appearances suffer as homeowners save the real beauty for private purchases. And when beauty is privatized, it makes more sense to spend your money on other things — such as a really nice case for your iPhone.
Ever try to sit on one of those older sofas? Ouch!
Addendum: As a side note, wonderful neighborhoods are great for tourists, but perhaps they are slightly overrated? There is one splendid neighborhood of modernist homes in Alexandria, and I could live there if I wanted to. But it would not improve my life, so I am staying put.
Old NY mobsters reportedly fear handing over reins to phone-obsessed, soft millennials New York Post. Paul R: “Bwahaha. I’m glad someone is finally figuring this out, even if it’s the mob.” One pervasive example of street smarts fail for anyone in a city: listening to music while walking on the street. You can’t hear ambient noises, or not well enough. Asking to be mugged
