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.

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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

Insurers Are Dictating Care and We're Sick, Sick, Sick of It! | MedPage Today

A final tactic is step therapy opens in a new tab or window , or the practice of requiring patients to attempt less expensive treatments first, even if a clinician believes another option may offer a better outcome. This summer, government officials in New York negotiated a $1 million settlement with UnitedHealthcare for allegedly failing to cover opens in a new tab or window all federally approved birth control without restriction. The company allegedly denied a patient coverage opens in a new tab or window for a certain progestin-only oral contraception pill, forcing the patient to try alternative treatments, despite the fact that progestin-only contraceptives can be a good option opens in a new tab or window for patients with certain health conditions.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #insurance - medpagetoday.com

For once, Elton John is right – cannabis is deadening to the soul

Cigarettes retain a kind of aesthetic glamour; their use is not at odds with beauty, comfort, decadence and good conversation. Pot-smokers, instead, give off a polluting stink that lowers the tone of whatever environment one is in, makes conversation a thousand times more inane, and seems to celebrate the urge to do less, or nothing, smugly. Cannabis is deadening, however it is consumed.
#pot #nicotine - telegraph.co.uk

Why ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ almost didn’t air − and why it endures

The 1965 broadcast has become a staple – etched into traditions across generations like decorating the tree or sipping hot cocoa. But this beloved TV special almost didn’t make it to air. CBS executives thought the 25-minute program was too slow, too serious and too different from the upbeat spectacles they imagined audiences wanted. A cartoon about a depressed kid seeking psychiatric advice? No laugh track? Humble, lo-fi animation? And was that a Bible verse? It seemed destined to fail – if not scrapped outright.
#narratives #sixties #christmas #traditions - theconversation.com

Hedge Funds Chase `Dumb Money' by Targeting Mini-Millionaires - Bloomberg

Whatever the risks and rewards, the shift is on display at prominent outfits like Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors. For most of its 25-year history, Viking has operated like a rarefied club. The Stamford, Connecticut-based firm attracted pension funds, endowments and foundations the old-fashioned way: with strong returns. Unlike lesser rivals, it has never offered fee discounts. Halvorsen, 63, rarely hit the conference circuit to try to sell anyone on Viking. Nowadays, he’s pitching people with a few million dollars to invest. The staunchly private firm has been holding webinars to educate banks’ private-wealth clients. For the first time, Halvorsen is offering a piece of the action to clients of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
#VC #wall-street #predatory - bloomberg.com

Hospitalization Should Not Mean Financial Ruin for Medicare Beneficiaries | MedPage Today

email article Chatterjee is a physician, health policy researcher, and an assistant professor of medicine. Macneal is a statistical analyst. Patel is a senior research coordinator. Medicare was created to ensure older adults in the U.S. have healthcare coverage while protecting them from financial ruin. But for at least 10 million older adults today, one of the most influential insurance programs in the U.S. is failing. For this financially precarious population of Medicare beneficiaries, a hospitalization costs around $1,600 and triggers an immediate financial crisis. And with the risk of hospitalization rising with age, this kind of threat is all but unavoidable. Nearly 60 years after its founding, Medicare is full of coverage gaps opens in a new tab or window and may be driving many near-poor older Americans into a poverty trap. More than half of older adults in the U.S. are "near-poor," meaning they have incomes ranging from around $15,000 to $60,000 for individuals or $20,000 to $80,000 for couples. They are too well-off to qualify for Medicaid opens in a new tab or window , but often cannot afford supplemental insurance. Some older adults enroll in Medicare Advantage plans or supplemental insurance called Medigap, but each program has a host of its own barriers. Most of these poor older adults live on fixed incomes and modest savings opens in a new tab or window , so they can't just raise their income to pay off medical bills, particularly unexpected ones.
#insurance #medicare - medpagetoday.com

A Montana Hospital Let Dr. Thomas Weiner Continue Practicing Despite Concerns — ProPublica

The hospital fired Weiner on Nov. 17, 2020. Johnson, the CEO, convened a meeting with the cancer staff, telling them Warwick’s death was “the tip of the iceberg.” He barred attendees from recording the meeting, court documents show, and the hospital’s chief nurse paced the room, instructing employees to put their phones away. All of Weiner’s patients should seek second opinions, Johnson said. Johnson also told the staff, “Don’t be surprised if black suits show up.” Weiner’s nurses understood this to mean that federal law enforcement or the Department of Health and Human Services would be investigating. “He explained it to be suits — there were going to be suits coming into the office and asking for things,” according to the testimony of nurse Andrea Thies, who, despite Johnson’s orders, took notes during the meeting.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #doctors #diagnostics #overdiagnosis - propublica.org

A $500 Billion Haul Reignites Passive Controversy on Wall Street - Bloomberg

Contrary to popular claims that the price-agnostic money is fueling market distortions by blithely lavishing capital just to the largest companies, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. study showed the role of fundamentals, like the stability of corporate earnings, remains an all-powerful driver for stock valuations. Meanwhile, passive players hold a far weaker sway, if any. Similarly at Citigroup Inc., a team led by Scott Chronert found that active managers themselves exert a far bigger influence than their passive rivals on a stock’s performance relative to its industry. It’s a rebuttal to critics like AllianceBernstein’s Inigo Fraser Jenkins, who have alleged that index players are distorting asset prices to a unique degree.
#predictions #stocks #etf - bloomberg.com

Low daily dose of 3 mg monacolin K from RYR reduces the concentration of LDL-C in a randomized, placebo-controlled intervention - ScienceDirect

Previous studies have demonstrated a cholesterol-lowering effect of red yeast rice (RYR) supplements which contained 5 to 10 mg of monacolin K. We hypothesized that the intake of a low monacolin K dose may likewise reduce low-density lipoprotein–cholesterol (LDL-C) and other plasma lipids.
#LAD #RYR - sciencedirect.com

Study Links Muscle Loss to Alzheimer’s Risk - Neuroscience News

A study of 621 older adults found that those with smaller temporalis muscles were 60% more likely to develop dementia and experienced greater cognitive and brain volume decline over nearly six years.
#aging #Alzheimers #muscles #dementia #strength - neurosciencenews.com

Jonah’s Prayer by Mihaly Babits - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry

Words have become unfaithful things to me, or else am I an overflowing sea, goalless and hesitant, without a shore. Vain words, articulated once before, I carry like dikes, or signposts made of wood, torn hedges carried by a straying flood. Oh if the Master only would provide a bed for my brook’s current and thus guide my steps on sheltered pathways toward the sea; if only He would carve a rhyme for me, a ready-made rhyme, I would avail myself, for prosody, of the Bible on my shelf, so that like Jonah, lazy servitor of God, we hid from Him and later bore not three brief days or months of agonies, but three long years of even centuries, when he went down into the living Fish, in dark hot torments more than he would wish, I too, before I disappear, might find in an eternal Whale whose eyes are blind my old accustomed voice, my words arrayed in faultless battle order; as He made His whispers clear, with all my poor throat’s might I could speak out, unwearied till the night, so long as Heaven and Nineveh comply with my desire to speak and not to die.
#Hungary #poetry #svaby - allpoetry.com

The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry - The Verge

“I do think that there’s space and definitely enough money for everyone that’s in [the Amazon influencer] program,” she tells me as we sit on her cream sofa. After all, Sheil’s aesthetic is spare, bland, or, if you wanted to be ungenerous, you could call it basic. It’s a look and feel so commonplace on the internet that I can’t imagine anyone claiming ownership over it, especially in a legal context. The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis. Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set.
#USAUSA #social-media #amazon #lawyers #influencers #style-substance #affiliate - theverge.com

Americans Risk Losing Life Savings When Retirement Homes Go Bust - Bloomberg

“They spend a bunch of that upfront fee and then they don’t have the cash reserves that they need for the long-term care,” said Jack Barker, a former McKinsey & Co. partner and former principal at the Carlyle Group who has studied CCRC finances. Residents “are taking major league credit risk on those fees and nobody really likes to talk about that.” To be sure though, CCRCs that have filed bankruptcy are just a fraction of the roughly 1,910 facilities in the US. And it remains rare for residents to be displaced and lose their entire entrance fee in a bankruptcy. In some cases, though, residents have been left with as little as 25 cents on the dollar. “Ideally, they don’t discharge the obligations to the residents for refundable fees because it’s very hard to attract new residents when that has happened,” said Katherine Pearson, a law professor at Penn State Dickinson Law.
#retirement #CCRC - bloomberg.com