This effect may or may not be permanent, but a team of researchers in England has found that long COVID significantly reduces cognitive ability—and the longer the COVID the more it hurts: Six IQ points is no joke, though this loss is found only in the most extreme cases. On the other hand, these are ...continue reading "Long COVID is wrecking our IQs"
Has the internet destroyed reading? Not really: Reading for pleasure has declined by an average of six minutes per day in the internet era, but the truth is we never read very much in the first place. Twenty years ago TV outpaced reading by 7:1. Today it's nearly 11:1. We really love our televisions.
TikTok is a Chinese surveillance and propaganda tool. Chinese-made cranes in US ports are a national security threat. Huawei routers and 5G infrastructure contain backdoors that allow the Chinese government to monitor and disrupt US phone and internet services. Consumer hobbyist drones made in China could provide sensitive images and geographical data to Beijing. Chinese ...continue reading "How big a threat is Chinese tech?"
PCE inflation spiked upward in January: On a conventional year-over-year basis, PCE inflation was up 2.4% in January and core PCE was up 2.8%. This spike is all about services. Goods inflation was negative, at -2.0%, while services inflation came in at 7.4%.
Here's a question for you. Suppose Joe Biden had a change of heart and decided it was essential to broker a ceasefire in Gaza. What could he do? Is there any pressure he could bring to bear on Bibi Netanyahu to force him to stop fighting? Be creative, but be realistic too and stay within ...continue reading "What could Biden do to stop the fighting in Gaza?"
Over at Mother Jones, Noah Lanard comments on the 13% "uncommitted" vote in yesterday's Michigan Democratic primary: The results in Michigan are another sign the president’s team underestimated the level of outrage that its war response would provoke. The New York Times’ Peter Baker reported Tuesday that the president’s advisers had been hoping the war ...continue reading "Israel isn’t hurting Joe Biden"
This is an iris alstroemeria in our front yard, taken at dusk with fill flash. I don't especially like the look, but it's still interesting occasionally to see the difference between artificial and natural lighting.
Mitch McConnell is stepping down as Republican leader in the Senate. Good riddance to him. Still, his departure reminds me of the resignation/firing of Jeff Sessions as attorney general in 2018. When Sessions was initially appointed he seemed to us liberals like pretty much the worst, most ultra-conservative, quasi-racist attorney general imaginable. Then he got ...continue reading "Can we do worse than Mitch McConnell?"
*Not really. But he does say he can't post his $454 million bond unless he sells off some property: Donald J. Trump offered a New York appeals court on Wednesday a bond of only $100 million to pause the more than $450 million judgment he faces in his civil fraud case, saying that he might ...continue reading "Donald Trump says he’s broke*"
Klarna is a Swedish e-shopping site that I had never heard of until yesterday. I remain slightly unsure of what they actually do, but they claim to handle 2 million transactions per day for half a million merchants. This means they employ a lot of customer service agents in their call center. At least, they ...continue reading "Ecommerce giant now using AI for most customer service"
In our last episode, the Alabama Supreme Court effectively abolished in-vitro fertilization by ruling that frozen embryos are human beings, thus making the loss of any embryo a potential murder or manslaughter. Now, in our latest episode, the Alabama legislature is fighting back. Embryos are still human beings, as any God-fearing Alabamian knows, but new ...continue reading "Alabama is loco"
Hey, have you heard that an illegal immigrant killed a nursing student in Athens, Georgia? Maybe not, says Bob Somerby: On one channel, this topic drove eight hours of primetime reporting and discussion. On the other channel, the topic doesn't exist. However you may assess the dueling news judgments, our tribes are now living in ...continue reading "It’s all theater for Republicans"
The good ol' Wall Street Journal reports today on the travails of the hotel industry: Even after clawing back hundreds of thousands of jobs during the past two years, the industry is still light on staff and often struggling to adapt.... At the same time, hotels across the U.S. have held their daily room rates ...continue reading "Here’s the non-fantasy story of how hotels are doing"
Back in 2015, the NIH started a longitudinal research program called All of Us with the goal of collecting genome data from a million Americans of every possible ancestry. The goal was to improve health care by figuring out how best to treat diseases in people of different backgrounds. The program is up to 413,000 ...continue reading "Sorry, but population groups are real"
From the Wall Street Journal: Eating rice and beans instead of meat. Planning out meals a month in advance. Trying to raise more food in backyard gardens. Americans are changing the way they eat, shop and live to cope with a stretch of record food inflation. For chrissake, can we stop this nonsense? Here is ...continue reading "Food inflation is not a problem anymore"
Didn't House Republicans already agree to spending guidelines for the federal budget? So why are they still haggling? Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, announced on Sunday that leaders had failed to reach a deal over the weekend because “House Republicans need more time to sort themselves out.” Speaker Mike ...continue reading "Here’s how the budget negotiations are going"
Today Paul Krugman discusses a new book by Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. In particular, Krugman agrees that rural areas have hemorrhaged jobs, leaving behind a loss of purpose and dignity: This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long ...continue reading "White rural rage isn’t about economics"
I didn't have a hemorrhoid after all. I had an epidermal abscess. All hail Dr. Kim at the Kaiser ER in Irvine, who lanced it and drained it a couple of hours ago. Ten days of antibiotics and I should be right as rain. If I had had any clue what this was, I would ...continue reading "Health update"
This is a street in Ubaté, a town about 40 miles north of Bogotá in Colombia. It's my last picture from Colombia, and for some reason it's taken me the better part of five years to get around to posting it.
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