Many (private) assisted living facilities have started relying on 911 for lifting residents who have fallen down — a massive waste of (public) resources. WaPo asked one of the companies to comment:

Co-president Julie Simpkins declined to answer specific questions, but said in a statement that the company works “to create a collaborative approach to the over utilization of nonemergent lift assist calls” through “cross training, resource availability discussions and collaboration.”

An LLM would do a better job of deflecting than co-president Julie Simpkins, who seems to have proposed a collaborative approach through collaboration — embarrassing even by corporate-speak standards.

Of course, the problem is that firefighters don’t take money for their services, but in this particular case they may consider starting to invoice. After all, those same assisted living facilities charge their residents up to $7,000 per month for the privilege of laying on the floor until real adults come.

As a long-time subscriber to the FT and a fan of Janan Ganesh I was glad to see that they both got head-nods from kottke.org (and before that, Robin Sloan). Yes, it is well worth the price.

Always great to see a treatment mature from the lab to clinical trials to a write-up in The Atlantic. This is about post-transplant cyclophosphamide, initially developed at Hopkins for haploidentical (“half-matched”) stem cell transplants, now used even for full matches as it works so well in preventing graft versus host disease. Cheap as chips too, if you can get it (but of course low price and short supply are closely related).

The previously mentioned Axios Local newsletters continues to be a delight to read every morning. To take a quote from today’s edition, discussing the absolute horror of someone cheating at bar trivia:

In a town filled with people trying to relive their Model UN glory days, trivia isn’t just some silly bar game — it’s the D.C. equivalent of flexing shirtless on Muscle Beach.

While this isn’t what most of DC is actually like, there are many people living here who would like it to be this way and that also tells you something.

I forgot to mark the 25th anniversary of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, a childhood-defining event if there ever was one (I was 15 at the time and a high school freshman). Well, today marks 25 years since the modest Yugoslav Army missile defense shot down the F-117 stealth bomber. The story is as good as a wartime story can get: there were no fatalities, the two main characters became friends, and the wreckage is now in a Belgrade museum, ignored by schoolchildren for whom these events are ancient history.

Janan Ganesh’s FT column today ends with an excellent quote which can also serve as the motto of American politics:

“We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”

He doesn’t cite the source because the FT readership would of course know who it was (I didn’t): Jean-Claude Juncker, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission. I thought re-election wouldn’t be a problem in Luxembourg since there were so few politicians around you were bound to circle back to the top spot, but there you go.

One of the problems I have with journalism is that too often style takes precedence over precision. This is obviously fine for fiction books, less so with non-fiction although who can tell the difference these days, and should be less and less acceptable as you go from monthly magazines, to the weeklies, to the dailies, until you get to real-time 24/7 news that should be all facts, all the time.

Har har.

As an example, here is a Washington Post article about the Dutch food industry described the Netherlands as “a bit bigger than Maryland”. The article’s whole point is how much food can be produced in a tight space, so having the readers understand how big or small the country of Nethelrands actually was is important. I have ties to both of these places and some sense of their relative sizes, and I always thought the Netherlands to be more than a bit bigger than Maryland. My adopted home state may take a while to drive across, but since it’s being eaten by the Commonwealth of Virginia from one corner and the Chesapeake Bay from the other, there isn’t much land there.

To confirm my suspicion I went to Wikipedia, which said that the land area of Maryland was 25,314 km² while the Netherlands had 41,865 km² total area, 18.41% of which was water, yielding 31,457 km² of land — a full 25% more than Maryland. ⊕ If if you wanted to be more conservative you could say that Maryland was 20% smaller than the Netherlands, but that is not the comparison WaPo made. See also how percentages change with different framing — caveat lector. If I thought a meal cost $35 with tax but then the bill showed $43.75 I’d be asking for an explanation, and so would WaPo writers.

Or is 25% margin of error good enough, if you are to preserve the tired journalistic trope of comparing one thing to another? Because this is a clear case of precision being sacrificed to the gods of style: at 25,314 km² Maryland truly is the closest to the Netherlands of all the states of the Union and also has the benefit of being in WaPo’s local domain. The next closest, West Virgina, is at 62,259 km² twice the size of the Netherlands. Or rather — let’s not make the same sacrifice here — almost twice the size.

On the other hand, this is a 2-year-old article and who cares anyway? While I did stop paying attention to the newspaper noise a while ago, I still leave space for it to change my perception — which this article would have done were the relative sizes within a single-digit percentage of each other. But then I check, and nope, another disappointment.

(↬Marginal Revolution)

Yesterday I came upon an article about the increasing disconnect between US wealth and GDP growth and this morning I read this personal account of the egg freezing process, and all I can think about now is that both could be the same thing: taking from the future. For better or worse.

Hah: U.S. Sues Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly.

I can only hope this is a case of an unfortunate headline, not the actual substance of the lawsuit. What would be next, suing BMW for maintaining a BMW monopoly?

I thought we got rid of this nonsense last year, but apparently not. Remember, it’s never too late to resurect Swatch Internet Time.