February 17

 Cloudy and cold enough that the slight snowfall we got yesterday is still around. It is a Saturday so we have a couple of soccer games on the TV. Great way to evade a lot of the repetitious news. I saw several discussions of the penalty Judge Engoron has handed Trump and his sons. I hope it gives him a severe case of apoplexy. Unfortunately, Trump is already fund raising off it with the usual mewling complaints that he is so persecuted.

I saw this NPR story about a recent case of bubonic plague in Oregon, the first in a decade and unusual because the victim acquired it from his cat. He, his cat, and all their contacts have been treated with antibiotics. One interesting piece in the history the story included was a study published in 2022 which said that the 14th century plague pandemic changed the human genome which had the interesting effects of 1) boosting a victim's chances of surviving infection by 40% and 2) suppressing the immune system making autoimmune diseases like Crohn's disease. Both traits are transmitted genetically. Just for the heck of it I looked up what animal vectors/reservoirs can pass on the plague bacillus and there are way too many to list here. I am not surprised that a domestic cat would be involved since one of the listed species is its wild cousin the bobcat.

I believe, and have for some time, that we are way too dependent on technology. This piece on Naked Capitalism covers a new aspect of AI in medicine that I REALLY don't like: automatic recording of doctors' visits. During my life time doctors have gone from independent entrepreneurs who may have had associations with a hospital to either proprietor of a chain of physicians offices or employees of the same or of hospitals. And I don't think the changes are necessarily good--for the doctors or their patients. The changes detailed in the article (which the author says are in beta form) would move them toward the status of "piece workers." I have read a couple of articles written by doctors complaining about the pressure the accountants put on them to push the patients through often setting time limits for consultations which consider profits only and take no account of the complexity of the cases. All of this is part of what Ives Smith calls crapification of everything. Others call it shitification.

Robert Reich posted two good articles today. The first involves the price hikes which has led to record corporate profits over the last couple of years. As he put is in his title: their profits come out of our pockets. And the claim by Pepsi that they raise prices because they can--because their products are popular. That reminds me of the quote from a meeting of CEOs a couple of years ago that the increase in costs meant they had the freedom to raise prices as much as they wanted--and those increases in prices vastly outstripped the cost of inputs.

The second article from Reich was a good review of the massive fraud judgement against Trump and the argument that because the banks were paid back there was no fraud. That reminds me of the old conundrum of whether a  tree falling in the forest makes a sound if there is no one to hear it. The whole thing depends on the definition of sound. If you mean a sensation people can perceive as sound. If you use a physics based definition then it does make a sound--disturbances traveling through the air which is what can be perceived as sound. Focusing on banks defines the situation too narrowly as Reich demonstrates.