“The American Board of Internal Medicine is under fire for a ‘maintenance of certification’ requirement. Their own tweet didn’t help.":

Frustration among physicians who feel they are being asked to do increasingly more to prove their competency has been building for years and in recent weeks, boiled over for many. At least 12,000 people have signed a Change.org petition, which is open to anyone. Many added their name after the petition’s organizer resurfaced a July tweet in which ABIM suggested their ongoing certification was so easy, doctors could do it while on vacation.

I have been meaning to write about ABIM’s train wreck ever since I signed the petition, but yet again my proscratination has been awarded: Philadelphia Inquirer says everything I wanted to, and then some. Ding-dong…

Yet again, The Washington Post is not letting facts get in the way of a good story. This time, under the headline “Credit card debt tops $1 trillion, trapping even six-figure earners” they spin a yarn of high-earners keeping their credit card debt for years as “pet rocks”, not having the discipline to pay them off even as the economy is recovering.

Bankrate found that 72 percent of cardholders with credit card debt and annual household incomes of $100,000 or more have been in debt for at least a year. The percentage drops to 70 percent for households with credit card debt and incomes between $80,000 and $99,999; 63 percent for people earning between $50,000 and $79,999; and 53 percent for folks making under $50,000.

But what do they mean by “credit card debt”?

“More people [are] carrying more debt for longer periods of time,” Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate, said. “The stats that we see from the New York Fed and elsewhere, they don’t distinguish typically between what’s paid in full at the end of the month and what’s not.”

The emphasis is mine, and to be clear this is the gist of their story: more households with incomes >$100,000 carry a balance than those who earn less. But why wouldn’t they? Between credit card rewards (cash back, travel points, etc.) incentivizing use even for daily purchases on one end, and the current ≥4% annual yield on low-risk high-interest savings accounts on the other, why wouldn’t high-earning and — let’s speculate — more financially literate households hold off from paying off the balance to $0 and earn 4% interest on what they held off from paying? There is an important distinction between paying off the balance and paying down to zero which the article never makes.

So, how many households have a revolving credit card balance, the one that actually charges interest? The article has some of that information, burried in the lead and with no context:

Overall, nearly half (47 percent) of credit cardholders have revolving debt, meaning they don’t pay off their balance in full.

They, of course, omit the most important part of the story: proportion of households paying of their balance grouped by income. Because — and I’ll speculate some more — there are two stories here, one of lower-income households saddled with debt that’s not a pet rock but a rock tied to their neck, paying off just enough to stay afloat; and the other of some (many? who knows — they didn’t give that data) higher-income households playing the credit card game, which would account for the first quoted paragraph.

James Fallows had a good story about framing in journalism and this is not a direct example — the boo boos are in the story itself, not the headline and positioning — but it rhymes. Spin it in a way that sells, I guess. Simplify to the point of enough ambiguity to support your preordained, attention-grabbing conclusion. Vague phrases and undefined terms, FTW.

A tornado warning for DC, and another day of 80mph winds. The one las week was a doozy! What was the micro.blog climate emoji, again? 🧨?

Update: It was fine.

The Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam on the average US doctors' salaries:

The average U.S. physician earns $350,000 a year. Top doctors pull in 10 times that.

I will write more about this later but for now I will just note how frustrating it is to read an article that has a premise and conclusion that I completely agree with (America doesn’t have enough doctors so the ones that it does have are compensated way above average) backed up by mishandled and misreported data (first the article doesn’t say whether the “average” is mean or median — it is the median, which is actually good — then doesn’t explicitly mention that the median in question is of the adjusted gross income at the household level, not of individual compensation: the median total individual income is $265,000).

At least the article linked to the NBER paper with all the data, which in turn completely validated my recent quip about economisits. Frustrating throughout, especially if you try reading the comments.

In a scene right out of The Wire, a man was shot while watching a soccer game in Adams Morgan, right next to our kids' old elementary school. In fact, had we not moved a few months ago, it would have been their current ES — this happened not 500 feet from our old back yard, as the crow files.

So anyway, if you cut the police budget, crime goes up. Who knew? (And yes, this continues to annoy.)

This room-temperature superconductor news has potential to be either really big, or just another footnote in the history of physics, but either way the number of hits I got about it from different sources was interesting:

• RSS feeds: 3
• Everything else: 0

RSS wins! Again.

There is predatory, and then there is predatory:

When Björn Johansson received an email in July 2020 inviting him to speak at an online debate on COVID-19 modeling, he didn’t think twice. “I was interested in the topic and I agreed to participate,” says Johansson, a medical doctor and researcher at the Karolinska Institute. “I thought it was going to be an ordinary academic seminar. It was an easy decision for me.”

…

All the scientists interviewed by Science say Ferensby’s initial messages never mentioned conference fees. When one speaker, Francesco Piazza, a physicist now at the University of Florence, directly asked Ferensby whether the organizers would request a fee, Ferensby replied, “No, we are talking about science and COVID-19.”

But after the events, the speakers were approached by a conference secretary, who asked them to sign and return a license agreement that would give Villa Europa—named in the document as the conference organizer—permission to publish the webinar recordings. Most of the contracts Science has seen state that the researcher must pay the company €790 “for webinar debate fees and open access publication required for the debate proceedings” plus €2785 “to cover editorial work.” These fees are mentioned in a long clause in the last page of the contract, and are written out in words rather than numbers, without any highlighting.

What an absolute nightmare. Predatory journals at least have the decency to ask you for them money up front.

And let’s take a moment to contemplate the ridiculousness of the current academic publishing and conference model. Note that there is nothing unusual in academic conferences requiring attendance fees from speakers. If you have an scientific abstract accepted for oral or poster presentation at ASCO, let’s say, you will still have to pony up for the registration fee. And publication fees for a legitimate open access journal can be north of $3,000. So how is a judge to know whether the organizer’s claims are legitimate?

The difference, of course, is that the good ones — both journals and conferences — don’t solicit submissions; you have to beg them to take your money. Which only makes the situation more ridiculous, not less.

Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic:

I first encountered The Making of the Atomic Bomb in March, when I spoke with an AI researcher who said he carts the doorstop-size book around every day. (It’s a reminder that his mandate is to push the bounds of technological progress, he explained—and a motivational tool to work 17-hour days.) Since then, I’ve heard the book mentioned on podcasts and cited in conversations I’ve had with people who fear that artificial intelligence will doom us all.

I can see the appeal, but calling The Making of… “The Doomer Bible” is uncharitable to both books.

Chris Arnade walking across Japan, part 2:

So the technocrat/policy types look at Japan’s last few decades of relative economic stagnation as a failure, while the Japanese just shrug it off and chalk it up to one of the costs of maintaining their cultural identity.

Haven’t thought about it that way before, but isn’t another country set on preserving its identity also in a period of economic stagnation? Craig Mod noted how and why they are not the same, however, and I like Japan’s prospects better.

Christine Emba for the Washington Post:

It is harder to be a man today, and in many ways, that is a good thing: Finally, the freer sex is being held to a higher standard.

Even so, not all of the changes that have led us to this moment are unequivocally positive. And if left unaddressed, the current confusion of men and boys will have destructive social outcomes, in the form of resentment and radicalization.

The headline is so bad I won’t copy it here, but the article is sound and worth sharing. Good illustrations, too.