henry copeland @hc

Creating https://t.co/yaIkIOcF20, an online toolkit the average person can use for personal (n-of-1) experiments. Way back when: Y84, bond trader, journalist.

Recent quotes:

Melania's (CParty) parents bought her sister an apartment in Ljubljana in 1984

Knauss left home to go to the Secondary School for Design and Photography in the Capitol city of Ljubljana at 15, living alone in an apartment their parents bought for her.
#trump #communism #comrade - dailymail.co.uk

Red Light Therapy May Reduce Deadly Blood Clots - Neuroscience News

The team observed that red light exposure is associated with less inflammation and activation of the immune system. For example, red light-exposed mice had fewer neutrophil extracellular traps – aptly abbreviated as “NETs” – which are web-like structures made by immune cells to trap invading microorganisms. They also trap platelets, which can lead to clots.
#vision #red-light - neurosciencenews.com

Op-ed: The Belichick hire could redefine athletes’ academics in a way nobody is talking about -

Belichick can change this. He’s already talked about his holistic approach to player development as a pipeline to the NFL. That’s a great start. But most of his players likely won’t ever play in the NFL, and those who do will average about three years of play.  Belichick gets this. He’s one of the most successful people in the sport, yet he never played a single down of pro football. He and his staff can turn playing football at UNC into a pathway for one of the many jobs in football other than running back or linebacker: coaches, analysts, scouts and numerous front office roles. UNC players will learn many of the skills needed for these jobs through the 40 or so hours a week they commit to football. Why not structure and codify their time into actual classes, complete with papers, exams and grades? What if their coursework could all roll up into a professional sports studies major, which they could apply in a variety of professional roles?  In fact, why not collaborate with other departments to provide real world learning opportunities for a broader group of students studying law, marketing, journalism, nutrition, physical fitness, sports psychology, business and more?
#academia #education #North-Carolina - dailytarheel.com

Dylan Thomas, *Under Milk Wood*

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
#words #poetry #dylan-thomas - oedipa.tripod.com

January 5, 2025 - by Heather Cox Richardson

the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s: the idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends. Ronald Reagan made that argument central to American political debate in the 1980s. Joining those who claimed that the modern American state was creeping toward communism, he warned that the federal government was the current problem in the nation. He championed a mythological American cowboy who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone. That cowboy myth arose after the Civil War, when former Confederates complained that federal protection of Black rights cost white tax dollars. They contrasted the “socialism” in Washington, D.C., with the western cowboys in the cattle industry, portraying the cowboys as hardworking white men who dominated the land and the peoples of the West and enforced the law themselves with principles and guns. The cowboy image of the post–World War II years served a similar function: to undermine a government that, in the process of regulating business and providing a social safety net, defended the rights of minorities and women. After 1980, Republicans increasingly insisted that regulations, taxation, and a social safety net were socialism, and they attracted white male voters by warning that the real beneficiaries of the government were racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities and women. In 1972 the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Reagan took a stand against gun control.
#USAUSA #politics #guns - heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

Niall Ferguson: I was wrong to call Donald Trump a would-be tyrant

“I look back on January 6 as this combination of a genuine belief on his part that the election was stolen and a catastrophic failure of policing that doesn’t look entirely accidental,” he says. “We were all treated to a theatrical event with an amateur cast that really one would be stretching the English language to call a coup or even an attempted coup. With the passage of time, one realises that that episode really belongs, along with the George Floyd riots, in a chapter called The Madness of the Pandemic. The lockdowns created an atmosphere of near collective madness. Things were pretty crazy on both sides.”
#postpandemic - thetimes.com

Niall Ferguson: I was wrong to call Donald Trump a would-be tyrant

How can he be sure Trump won’t now try to be a tyrant? “I’m convinced that whatever impulses he has or has had in the past, the system can contain them as it was designed to,” he says. “I also think that the American electorate was collectively smarter than I was in seeing that January 6 was not quite the earth-shattering event that was presented [on television]. My assumption in January 2021 was that it was a career-ending mistake by Trump. And I was wrong about that.”
#prediction #trump #law - thetimes.com

Federal Debt Grows as Treasury Bond Dealers Warn of Market Pressures - Bloomberg

“Issuance has gone up almost threefold in the last 10 years and the anticipation is for it to close to double to $50 trillion outstanding in the next 10 years, whereas dealer balance sheets haven’t grown at that magnitude,” said Casey Spezzano, head of US customer sales and trading at primary markets dealer NatWest Markets and chair of the Treasury Market Practices Group, the government-debt watchdog sponsored by the New York Fed. “You’re trying to put more Treasuries through the same pipes, but those pipes aren’t getting any bigger.”
#interst-rates #bonds #debt - bloomberg.com

Post-Luigi, the "Extremist" Threat is You

If you’re wondering why this sounds so different from the hysteria that’s played out in the media, intelligence reports like the NYPD one we published above are a big part of the reason why. Not only do these reports stoke fear and inflate threats, but the furtive way in which they’re circulated shields them from public scrutiny. The deal the media makes with their law enforcement sources not to publish documents in full results in big, splashy headlines and pull quotes focusing on the most sensational passages but devoid of any context. The victims of these distorted narratives aren’t just ordinary people, but corporations as well, many of which enjoy privileged access (just like the media) to these government intelligence reports. The NYPD’s intelligence bureau is just one node in a web of around 70 state-level “fusion centers” surging these kind of threat reports to companies. Presumably the companies just think they’re being responsible by signing up for the reports. In reality they’re being subtly indoctrinated into the national security state’s way of seeing things. When this apparatus of fusion centers emerged in the wake of 9/11, the warnings pertained to al Qaeda. But as the global war on terror draws down, the supposed bad guy is increasingly the American people, on both the “far-right” and “far-left” (who decides what counts as “far”?), from MAGA to anti-corporate “extremists” online.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #police #nationalism #luigi - kenklippenstein.com

Wayne Merry Dissent Channel Cable from American Embassy Moscow to Secretary of State, “Whose Russia is it Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect” | National Security Archive

This cable, written by Wayne Merry as a Dissent Channel message, reminds one of the famous Long Telegram written by George Kennan in 1946 in its analytical power and predictive precision. He expresses his disapproval of the U.S. attempts to impose its vision of radical economic reform on an unwilling Russia. The cable analyzes Russian political landscape after the Duma elections of December 1993, where, in Merry’s description, “the radicals lost a general election, lost it badly, and lost it fair and square.” He gives vivid portraits of leading Russian economic reformers Yegor Gaidar and Boris Fedorov, explains the success of anti-Yeltsin forces, the pain of reforms, and the growing “frustration tonged with animosity” toward the West on the part of the population. Merry warns his government that if the present U.S. policy to Russia continues, it will “assist Russian extremists to undermine the country’s nascent democracy and will encourage a renewal of Russia’s adversarial stance toward the outside world.”
#Russia #USSR #experts - nsarchive.gwu.edu

Russia news: A newly declassified document suggests things with Russia could have turned out very differently.

I asked Merry if the world would look different today had his advice been taken 31 years ago. He paused and replied, “If we’d been less know-it-all, less ‘we’re from Harvard, so we know how to run your country and you don’t,’ do I think our relations could have developed differently? Yes, I do.” Washington’s views were so blinkered by the free-market dogma that, as Russians cast their ballots in the election, Vice President Al Gore and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott flew to Moscow, expecting to throw a party at the embassy celebrating Gaidar’s victory. Gaidar lost badly; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the most crudely right-wing candidate, won by a wide margin.
#Russia #USSR #democracy - slate.com

Encompassing view of spatial and single-cell RNA sequencing renews the role of the microvasculature in human atherosclerosis | Nature Cardiovascular Research

Atherosclerosis is a pervasive contributor to ischemic heart disease and stroke. Despite the advance of lipid-lowering therapies and anti-hypertensive agents, the residual risk of an atherosclerotic event remains high, and developing therapeutic strategies has proven challenging. This is due to the complexity of atherosclerosis with a spatial interplay of multiple cell types within the vascular wall. In this study, we generated an integrative high-resolution map of human atherosclerotic plaques combining single-cell RNA sequencing from multiple studies and spatial transcriptomics data from 12 human specimens with different stages of atherosclerosis. Here we show cell-type-specific and atherosclerosis-specific expression changes and spatially constrained alterations in cell–cell communication. We highlight the possible recruitment of lymphocytes via ACKR1 endothelial cells of the vasa vasorum, the migration of vascular smooth muscle cells toward the lumen by transforming into fibromyocytes and cell–cell communication in the plaque region, indicating an intricate cellular interplay within the adventitia and the subendothelial space in human atherosclerosis.
#heart #LAD #lipids - nature.com

Cutting Government Is Easy... If You Go After McKinsey

Why take on management consultants? Well, for starters, the government spends far too much on people giving it advice. In it's 2024 budget, the Biden administration requested $70 billion for management consulting, aka “professional services,” which is 5% of all discretionary spending. The Defense Department alone asked for $32.9 billion. So just cutting all management consulting would be a big chunk of savings. But it goes beyond just the raw spend on consultants, to how consultants misdirect other monies. An important study in 2023 on what it costs to resurface roads at a state level - a very simply and standard need everywhere - showed why procurement waste in America is so persistent. A key reason is consultant bloat. It turns out, when you hire government employees for long-term planning, costs go down, but when you use third party consultants, they go up.
#USAUSA #consulting #DOGE - thebignewsletter.com

How Southern Season, a Chapel Hill Foodie Dream, Met Its End

Hamner loved A Southern Season, said Cooper. He shopped there and thought it was a great concept that ought to enter a larger world. He planned to establish Southern Season in as many as 10 cities around the country—places like Charlotte, Asheville, and Wilmington, but also Atlanta, Nashville, Northern Virginia, and Florida—build sales to about $400 million a year, take the company public, and then go nationwide.  Michael Barefoot and his late husband, Tim Manale. They say love is blind, which is perhaps why Hamner and others didn’t see the looming pitfalls. They led to recriminations, lawsuits, regrets, and hurt feelings. Some former employees don’t want to talk about it, even today.  The new management changed the store’s look, making it feel more open by shortening the metal shelves that held the thousands of items. They even slightly changed its name. It had been “A Southern Season” for years because Barefoot believed the “A” meant the name would come up high in any kind of search. Now it was just “Southern Season.” “It was a little thing, but was also a big thing,” said White. The new name seemed less distinguishing to many employees.
#food #VC #chapel-hill - theassemblync.com

The High Price of Fertility: Tracking the Global Trade of Human Eggs

By the time the 27 eggs reach their destination, they will have generated revenue for doctors, agents, airlines, lawyers, counselors, couriers, insurers and drug companies. Karen is paid $35,000.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #IVF - bloomberg.com

Other People’s Blood | Online Only | n+1

In his memoir, Volcker writes, “The real danger comes from encouraging or inadvertently tolerating rising inflation and its close cousin of extreme speculation and risk taking, in effect standing by while bubbles and excesses threaten financial markets.” Statements like this make clear the connection between the scourge of the unions and the critic of the bankers, between the Volcker Shock and the Volcker Rule. Both inflation and bubbles create fictitious money claims in excess of the wealth a society actually possesses, leading to spurious GDP gains that must give way—whether in an inflationary spiral or financial panic. In both cases, temporizing economists, the enemies of practical bankers like Volcker, claim that things can be finely measured and controlled—through fiscal policy and price indexes, hedges and efficient markets—and in both cases pride brings a fall.
#inflation #GFC #financialization - nplusonemag.com

Other People’s Blood | Online Only | n+1

Beyond his “rule,” Volcker has been a consistent critic of financialization. He once told an audience of bankers that the only financial innovation that had improved society was the ATM. More seriously, he believes we have done little to prevent another crisis on the scale of 2008. Despite his hostility to certain elements of activist government, Volcker (son of a New Jersey town manager) has always believed in public service: his cheap suits and ten-cent cigars advertised his indifference to the elite culture of the 1980s. He has an uncommon contempt for think tanks, policy institutes, and elite law schools, and he has lately taken to describing his country as a “plutocracy” and admitting that the concerns of industrial workers have been too easily dismissed with vague promises of “job retraining.”
#inflation #banking #volker #GFC - nplusonemag.com

Other People’s Blood | Online Only | n+1

Liberals at the time were sure there was another way. They cheered Ted Kennedy at the 1980 Democratic convention, when he said, “Let us pledge that we will never misuse unemployment, high interest rates, and human misery as false weapons against inflation.” That same year, Kenneth Arrow stated his disagreement “with those who suggest we use shock methods or a very severe economic slump to eliminate inflation. It could have permanently bad consequences. People don’t get over a depression easily.” And Paul Samuelson argued that to change the “present inflation-growth path quickly will take severe measures—which I’m not for. . . . My personal judgment is that this is too severe a price for less advantaged people to pay.”
#inflation #interst-rates #80s - nplusonemag.com

Other People’s Blood | Online Only | n+1

Those who praise Volcker like to say he “broke the back” of inflation. Nancy Teeters, the lone dissenter on the Fed Board of Governors, had a different metaphor: “I told them, ‘You are pulling the financial fabric of this country so tight that it’s going to rip. You should understand that once you tear a piece of fabric, it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to put it back together again.” (Teeters, also the first woman on the Fed board, told journalist William Greider that “None of these guys has ever sewn anything in his life.”) Fabric or backbone: both images convey violence. In any case, a price index doesn’t have a spine or a seam; the broken bodies and rent garments of the early 1980s belonged to people. Reagan economic adviser Michael Mussa was nearer the truth when he said that “to establish its credibility, the Federal Reserve had to demonstrate its willingness to spill blood, lots of blood, other people’s blood.”
#economics #interst-rates #80s #neoliberalism - nplusonemag.com

Other People’s Blood | Online Only | n+1

t the height (or nadir) of the Volcker Shock, benchmark interest rates were over 20 percent—and worse if you had bad credit. The exorbitant cost of borrowing put tens of thousands of firms out of business, and led to twenty-two months of negative growth. In December 1982, unemployment was at 10.8 percent—closer to 20 percent if you include workers who wanted jobs but had stopped looking, and underemployed workers who could not find steady full-time work. In absolute terms, twelve million Americans were unemployed that month, plus another thirteen million “discouraged” and underemployed.
#interst-rates #80s - nplusonemag.com

With Beehiiv, Tyler Denk Is Riding the Newsletter Wave

Recently, Denk has been taking the fight to Substack. In a December 10 newsletter post titled “Death by a Thousand Substacks,” Denk argued that Substack is more interested in building out its own brand and ecosystem than helping its less-popular newsletters find an audience. He wrote that Substack is deploying “the classic social network playbook” that platforms like Facebook and Twitter have used to hurt publishers in the past: “Gradually eroding the ownership, identity, and independence of writers on the platform.” With Beehiiv, Denk wants to restore that sense of ownership.
#newsletters #substack #beehiiv - inc.com

What Learning by Doing Looks Like - by Brian Potter

More generally, when a technology is first being developed, its behavior and performance won’t be understood particularly well. There won’t be an obvious “theory” of the technology or any sort of body of knowledge surrounding it — how manipulating various aspects of it changes its performance, how different parameters relate to each other, what governs the ultimate ceiling on it, and so on. As more experience is accumulated with a technology, beyond simply learning what works and what doesn’t, practitioners will gradually develop more sophisticated models of how it works, and use those models to push performance even further.
#innovation #theory #trial-and-error #models - construction-physics.com

What Learning by Doing Looks Like - by Brian Potter

For a given technological concept in the arc of PDC bit evolution, it’s striking how non-obvious the best way to implement it is. The idea behind PDC bits sounds straightforward enough: use drill bits with cutters made of extremely hard synthetic diamond. But there are an enormous number of ways that such an idea can be implemented. What should the size and shape of the cutters be? How should they be arranged on the drill bit? What material should you attach the cutting disks to, and what should the bit body be made of? What type of drilling fluid should be used, and how should you direct the flow of it over the drill bit? What drilling parameters — RPMs, bit weight, torque, type of downhole motor — work best, and in what types of rock? When a technology is first developed, there’s often very little that can guide you other than trial and error. PDC bits progressed in large part by testing out bits, seeing how they behaved, and gradually modifying them in response. The specific implementation details of a technology matter a great deal, aren't obvious, and take time, effort, and experience to figure out.
#innovation #more-moore #trial-and-error - construction-physics.com

Your Lab Tests - by Eric Topol - Ground Truths

You can see in the graph below that inter-individual vacation is far greater than intra-individual variation for each of the CBC metrics, and that long-term (15-year+) variation is similar to short-term at the individual level. On that note, these same researchers had previously shown that even after an acute event such as infection, trauma, or marked inflammation, the CBC setpoint values for that individual return to baseline. There are examples when that isn’t necessarily the case, as seen with the increase in hemoglobin and hematocrit in women after menopause (as presented in the Supplementary material) but overall the stability of the CBC metrics in any given individual over decades is notable. That was also shown to be th case across age, sex, race and ethnicity.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #n-of-1 #precision-medicine - erictopol.substack.com

OSA 2x macular degeneration

According to him, "one theory is that the intermittent nighttime hypoxia caused by OSA leads to oxidative stress and inflammation, which can damage the retina and contribute to AMD. There's also evidence that OSA is linked to thinner choroids -- similar to what we see in AMD -- which might reduce blood flow to the outer retina."
#sleep-apnea #macular-degeneration - medpagetoday.com

How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them — ProPublica

The vague wording made van Terheyden suspect that Dr. Cheryl Dopke, the medical director who signed it, had not taken much care with his case. Van Terheyden was right to be suspicious. His claim was just one of roughly 60,000 that Dopke denied in a single month last year, according to internal Cigna records reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum. The rejection of van Terheyden’s claim was typical for Cigna, one of the country’s largest insurers. The company has built a system that allows its doctors to instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, leaving people with unexpected bills, according to corporate documents and interviews with former Cigna officials. Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show. The company has reported it covers or administers health care plans for 18 million people.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #insurance - propublica.org