A one-two punch on clinical trials from Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman today: first their on-point agenda for clinical trial abundance as a guest post in Slow Boring, then Ruxandra’s longer essay which has been so thoroughly research that even yours truly gets a name-check. As I noted elsewhere, every US institution has made one bade tradeoff after another in how it conducts clinical trials to the point that it’s impossible to conduct a RECOVERY trial equivalent over here. That needs to change.
Never was a fan of Daylight Savings Time, but knowing that Nate Silver is a proponent gives me additional conviction.
Having three school-aged children in three different grades of (thankfully only) two schools means an unending barrage of information emails and class email newsletters that are — don’t get me wrong — absolutely delightful to receive but also become a game of “find the actionable item and its due date”. That game is no fun, and if it’s a class trip permission or payment may in fact end in tears.
The one thing to read this weekend is this NYT interview with Rick Steves. His answer to “what you would do if you couldn’t travel any more” was pitch-perfect:
I would welcome the day, strangely, when I could not travel anymore, because it would open a gate of things that I’ve not done because of my love for travel.
Which is my feeling as well. You can love what you are doing and still be OK not doing it any more because, and this is Rick again, “[t]his world is such a beautiful place to experience, and there are dimensions of experiencing this world that I have yet to try.”
Mozi is a splendid idea for making serendipitous encounters happen. On the other hand, can you truly call these encounters serendipitous if they needed an app? (ᔥMatthew Haughey)
A few sentences to make your blood boiling in this whopper from Noah Smith:
It’s mostly the providers overcharging you, not the middlemen.
[…] the Kaiser Family Foundation does detailed comparisons between U.S. health care spending and spending in other developed countries. And it has concluded that most of this excess spending comes from providers — from hospitals, pharma companies, doctors, nurses, tech suppliers, and so on.
The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves.
Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much.
And to top it off:
Over at Tyler Cowen’s blog, a commenter argues that profit margins are not a good guide to the financial success of a business, and that instead one should look at return on equity (ROE). But if you look at the list of companies with the highest ROE, you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on.
Using “healthcare provider” to mean pharmaceutical companies is at best careless when the article you are writing is directly tied to a murder of a health insurance executive. But what really upsets me is that he is right: physicians, nurses, etc. have allowed themselves to be tied to these behemoths for the promise of what? A steadier paycheck that is less — for the time spent in school and at work — than what a mid-career IT professional earns? Sad. (↬Tyler Cowen)
As Nassim Taleb likes to say, no rumor is true until officially denied. Godspeed.
On my way back from #ASH24 I’ll go back through the abstract book and check out how many cell therapy oral presentations were given by investigators from China. This is the first meeting I’ve attended since 2019 and the difference is striking. Kudos!
The article is titled I Say Forbidden Things About Sports, and he does! Here are the six actual benefits:
Instead, notes Gioia, the young athletes are taught that:
How very true. To take NBA, an American sport with which I am the most familiar, you can see it in the large swings in score when the losing team snaps and realizes they can’t win the game and therefore they don’t even try.
Do read the whole thing.
🏀 Speaking of sports, how about them Wizards? Of course it happened while we were away and couldn’t enjoy the rare win, but it is also good since it was against the Nuggets and the family is split around which team we would have supported. So it goes…