The Fallacy of Medicare for all!

 Politicians are generally ignorant of economic factors. Let us examine Medicare for All, MFA. 

First let us look at the individual costs.

1. Currently a Medicare subscriber has contributed for 40 to 50 years the fund. If properly managed this would have provided a substantial base.

2. Subscribers after 65 still pay about $250 per month per subscriber. That is just for 80% out of hospital costs and no drug, dental etc. That means if say you have chemo for cancer, or targeted therapy for macular degeneration, it costs about $4000 per month which you owe $320 at the time of each treatment.

3. If you want a supplemental plus prescription plan you may easily pay $500 per month plan, $150 for prescription for a total of $650 per month per person.

4. You may still have an out of pocket of $2500 for drugs.

5. The total is $900 per month for supplemental or $10,800 per person per year plus $2000 for prescriptions for a total of $12,800 per person per year.

Now it appears that not a single Marxist understands the current situation. One suspect they will give all free to those never have paid a cent to Medicare and put the burden on the older folks who would continue to see 10-20% annual increases.

Now for costs. Medicare negotiates the lowest reimbursement rates.  Namely a physicians reimbursement for standard care may be $600 per hour, or 6 ten minute sessions at $100 per session. Now this must pay the physician, insurance, staff, rent, etc. If they are lucky the physician can recover $100 per hour, say $1000 per day, or $250,000 per year, which they must pay Medicare taxes as well as others.

It appears that the Marxists are clueless of these factors. If they want to give free rides then they must drive down costs. That means driving competence out of Medicine.

Death then become the only option in a MFA system! 

OK, So why is this so smart?

 The NY Times reports that our Gov in NJ is threatening shippers with tens of millions in fines if they dare bring in Russian diesel fuel. Now NJ has a massive number of diesel trucks paying astronomic amounts per gallon. Along comes this person, with highly questionable authority, to prohibit the fuel further driving up costs.

The paper notes:

Gov. Mikie Sherrill sent a letter to 12 port and terminal operators in the state, warning them they “could be subject to millions of dollars in penalties” long after President Trump leaves office. Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, said that accepting the fuel would violate federal law and that she was prepared to use “every available legal and regulatory tool” to block any tanker from offloading Russian fuel in New Jersey. It is unclear if any Russian fuel is headed toward New Jersey, but Ms. Sherrill’s position could put the state on a collision course with President Trump, who last month lifted a ban on the import of Russian diesel as part of his efforts to bring down the cost of the fuel. Gasoline and diesel prices have risen since the United States and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February.

 This is a blend of hubris and arrogance along with total disregard for the populace. 

 

 

Incompetence Returns

 Westchester County in NY has created a massive voter suppression action by its, in my opinion, gross incompetence in using paper ballot which cannot be read by the machines. They note:

The Westchester County Board of Elections (BOE) is aware of an issue involving the thickness of paper ballots that is preventing voting machines from accepting ballots at polling locations throughout the County. The Westchester Board of Elections wants to reassure every voter that your vote matters, your ballot will be secure and your vote will be counted. The Board of Elections is in constant communication with New York State officials, Westchester County Government and poll workers to address this issue and ensure that voting continues with as little disruption as possible. In the meantime, voters should continue to complete their paper ballots as instructed by poll workers. Ballots will be placed in designated orange emergency ballot bags, which will remain secure and monitored. These ballots will subsequently be counted in accordance with applicable election procedures. We strongly encourage all voters to remain in line, exercise patience and, most importantly, cast their ballots. The BOE sincerely apologizes to voters and poll workers for the inconvenience this situation has caused, and the BOE recognizes the importance of a smooth and efficient voting process. They are taking every necessary step to address the issue as quickly as possible. Let us be absolutely clear: Every eligible vote will be counted. No voter should be discouraged from participating in this election because of this issue. Your voice matters. Your vote matters. Please stay in line and vote.

 

 This should suppress a massive number of votes. Prior planning prevents poor performance. One wonders who may benefit from this? Follow the money? Or "you just cannot make this stuff up"

 

Cancer Therapeutics

Nature discusses the new drug from Moderna and Merck for treating advanced melanoma. They note:

A personalized mRNA vaccine reduced the risk of skin cancer returning or the recipient dying by 42% when used alongside an immunotherapy drug, according to long-awaited results for what could become the first approved mRNA vaccine for cancer. Oncologists regard a risk reduction of 10% as substantial, says Kristen Radford, an immunotherapist at Mater Research in Brisbane. A more than 40% risk reduction “would send many researchers over the Moon”, adds Seth Cheetham, a geneticist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The personalized vaccine, called intismeran, is not designed to prevent skin cancer, or melanoma, from developing in the first place, but to stop it returning in people who have already undergone surgery to remove tumours.

 As shown in the graphic, this is one of the personalized approaches. Simply the approach is as follows:

1. Get a sample of the tumor from the patient.

2. Sequence the DNA and determine what unique cancer mutations may be there.

 3. Generate a mRNA using these mutations.

4. Place the mRNA in a package, such as a liposome, and inject in patient.

5. mRNA will generate these related protein, many of which produce cello surface targets.

6. The patients immune system will see these as antigens and attack cells with these Ag surface targets

7. Add a PD-1 blocker which insures that the immune system remains on and not turned off

8. Pray the immune system works on the cells targeted and does not explode on everything else.

Now the key here is personalizing the surface proteins. In reality if we can do this for many patients then we can get a reference set, and the identity of the correct one may be more easily done by antibody tests. Say a patient comes in, we have this database of targets based upon many prior patients. We can then have Ab targeted for each one of the gene mutations and can then simple use Abs targeted for them. From this we get in no time the mRNA profile, generate it, put in liposome and voila! Kind of.

In reality we must always be concerned about immune system over response, such as cytokine storms. I fell the full story is yet to unfold. One must remember CAR-T cell promises.

I have noted a similar approach but using antibody drug conjugates, ADCs. It requires a database of surface targets on cancer cells, and then generates polyspecific Ab with a conjugated drug.  

But, and this is important, many cancers are "protected" by a tumor micro environment, TME, and one must break through that as well. 

 

The Collapse of the University

 One wonders who is behind these actions. The Tech at MIT notes:

 Out of 1,708 ballots, 92.5% of members of MIT’s Graduate Student Union (GSU) voted yes to authorize a strike yesterday evening. During a strike, graduate workers and fellows would be expected to stop all work and “not cross the picket line.”  After six months of bargaining and 15 sessions with MIT, seven articles (5, 7, 10, 13, 14, 19, and 25) have reached a tentative agreement, while the majority remains in limbo or has been closed. However, central issues to the GSU’s campaign — union shop, establishing a three-year contract, wages, healthcare, and protections for international workers — remain at a standstill with the Institute.

 So let me try to get this correct. A Grad student will refuse to work on their thesis or perform Teaching Assistant duties to undergrads who are paying nearly $100,000 per year! 

This may very well  be the start of the collapse of the University system. Who are these people who are behind this. We have teachers unions who have been able to destroy Grammar and High Schools in the US while union leaders collect millions. 

This strike is a great way for some adversary to destroy US academic excellence. Remember that nothing is necessarily what it appears to be. In this case it may very well not be some "poor" grad students. 

And This is Science?

 

I was amazed by the interview in the NY Times of the so-called science advisor to the President. This person, a BA from Princeton in Poly Sci, not any apparent technical expertise, notes:

S.I. for science is going to be the biggest unlock for scientific discovery in the history of the world. It’s going to impact everything from material science to chemistry to math. In our plan, I think the belly button of it all is something called the Genesis Mission, the idea that we should build a scientific instrument in the federal government to be able to leverage S.I. for scientific discovery, and that’s what we’re building in our national labs. And we’ve opened it up, and now have access to it, from all of our agencies across the government. So if you’re doing very important health care work or biomedical work that requires superintelligence, you can access this instrument at the D.O.E., and the same goes for lots of other agencies. The core thing we want to do is provide S.I. as an enabling tool for whatever scientific discovery you want to make.

Great, just what we need, more Government Labs building stuff!

I had the good fortune to have known three Presidential Science Advisors: Vannevar Bush, Jerome Wiesner, and EE David. In my opinion this is not one of them. But I continue:

 So right now, American Ph.D. programs are geared toward this, at a minimum, five-year Ph.D. But they’re also tailored to try to optimize the curriculums in order to train students to be academics, and the numbers don’t play out. About 60 percent of people who get Ph.D.s do not end up becoming academics. So we asked ourselves: In that environment, shouldn’t we be trying to do a better job of training these young technologists and scientists to go out and actually be prepared for what they’re ultimately going to do in industry? So we launched a four-year Ph.D. program in partnership with universities and with industry, so that during the last year of your Ph.D. program — at year four — you’re at an industry lab. You do work in industry, and your dissertation is written on the work that you do at that company.

 This is a work study program, not a research training exercise. Now to be simple, my PhD took 18 months. I had an SM from MIT already and needed a few extra courses, but I stuffed it all in. I also was a junior faculty member as well as finishing my first book. Plus a few other things along with two children. I never could have done that in some work study program. 

With my MIT PhD I ran the gamut of academic, Government Advisor, Movie and CATV business, COO of mobile phone business, venture investor and operator, etc. The PhD allowed versatility and MIT, at the time (and that was during the Viet Nam War folks) allowed me to explore. 

The current so-called Science Advisor seems to follow the path of using neologisms to espouse new policies. PhDs are not "trained". They are educated and tested. You may "train" your poodle but please let's not insult the Academy, it already has a multitude of problems.  

Would it not have been better to have an experienced PhD in this position, say in Science or worst case Engineering like the three I have known! Instead we get an apparently inexperienced political entity.

Funding Science

 

In a short piece in Nature the authors discuss the increase in private funding or research, especially in the biotech arena. They note:

 

And US tech entrepreneurs have a penchant for experimentation in how they structure their investments, says Keith Yamamoto, vice-chancellor of science policy and strategy at the University of California, San Francisco. When it comes to philanthropy, private donors are more able to take risks with their investments than are government funding agencies, which are beholden to taxpayers to ensure that their money is spent wisely. “Public money limits your activities,” says Harold Varmus, a former director of the NIH, who has also been on advisory boards for the Gates Foundation and the CZI. “There is a freedom of motion that is associated with private money.” Some tech titans have experimented with various ways of structuring their grants. The Arc Institute, for example, boasts a “no-strings-attached” funding system that gives its investigators more freedom than do standard government grants awarded to biomedical researchers. Philanthropists are also able to fund long-term, interdisciplinary projects that can be difficult for government grants to take on. Convergent Research, a non-profit organization funded in part by Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, is forming ‘focused research organizations’ that bring teams together to solve important scientific or engineering challenges that could benefit a wide swathe of research. “We’re looking for the pieces of critical, fundamental infrastructure missing from a particular field,” says Anastasia Gamick, a co-founder and president of Convergent Research, which is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 Targeting research is a difficult process. One of my favorite targets was Multimedia Communications, now embodied in the current Internet world. But then many in management had no clue. A phone call was enough. Thus a good researcher will go for long term high impact work whereas the funders may have conflicting ideas. It should be interesting to see how this evolves.

 

 

Business Schools

 First let me state I have no MBA. In fact I had just one course in economics as a undergrad. But I spent a year at Columbia as a visiting Professor at the Business School and a couple of years at NYU/Poly. Now how did that happen?

Simple, I think. In the late 70s at  I was at COMSAT and Gene Jilg, a VP of Satellite Systems, asked me to write his business plan. Never did one. Especially the financials. So one Friday I went to a local bookstore and bought a book on Finance. Read it over the weekend and on Monday I started the financials. You see as an MIT EE PhD these were just simple equations and I just asked around for the data. Done in a few weeks. 

At Warner I had plans for  interactive video, managing a staff of a few dozens, marketing, tech, valuation. Then deals. Again not a single business school class. 

The NY Times notes:

The modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization. This mind-set has escaped containment and has spread to the wider world. Business-educated elites increasingly populate political leadership, bringing with them a transactional view of public life. One investigation found that out of 45 current heads of state who had studied in the United States, 10 were business majors, and six of those also earned M.B.A.s. President Trump, a Wharton undergraduate, has treated foreign policy and government itself as extensions of deal making and personal gain. Surely, not every business graduate governs this way. But recent research by the Nobel laureate economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues shows what tends to happen when you put an M.B.A. in charge. In both the United States and Denmark, firms that appointed managers with business degrees cut wages and reduced labor’s share of income. Yet these companies didn’t become more productive, nor did they grow sales, investment or employment any faster. What registers as managerial acumen turns out to be wealth transfer — value moved away from workers and toward profits, shareholders and executives.

 In contrast I have seen High School Grads in retail have a better understanding of the customer, inventory, and turnover than many a B School grad. I gained more insight by doing than by studying. It was getting in the line of fire and surviving. The most complex one is selling a new business. One has to be a dream merchant of sorts, and then defend your proposed valuation. I do not think you get that in class. 

It is a bit like Med School. Two years of "theory" then two years of real people, death, fear, mistakes, and cures. There are no pre-cooked case studies. There is a 2AM ER case of a 65 year old mother and her 38 year old daughter, her pain but more so her fear. It is the 12 year old with Leukemia and you must tell the parents, see their horror about their child. Creighton wrote a great book, 12 Patients, his last two year at Harvard. It was not academic class, it was life and death. There is nothing like that in B School. 

Thus one wonders if B School has value.  

Unionized Grad Students

 

The MIT Tech discusses the Graduate Students Union. They note:

Since April, MIT’s bargaining team and its graduate student union (GSU) have held multiple meetings to negotiate a second collective bargaining agreement, reaching tentative agreement on three of 26 proposed articles. The original contract expired on May 31, leaving around 5,000 graduate research assistants, teaching assistants, and Instructor-Gs working under the terms of the expired agreement. After months of stagnant bargaining, the GSU launched a pledge on September 9 to strike if necessary. In a press release dated Sept. 11, 2026, the union announced that over 1,000 graduate workers have signed. It is not clear when exactly the GSU is planning to strike, but the last bargaining session in the month is planned for September 25.

Now back in my day, mid 60s, you never would have time for this.We were all to busy on our research. We all got the same salary, $400 per month, plus MIT Health Service. You survived, barely and worked 24 by 7! If you were lucky, as a junior faculty, you got a day a week for outside consulting, and that could be $125 a day. You could double your salary. But it still was 24 by 7!

More than half of these folks are foreign students, getting free tuition, and almost $5,000 per month! Plus they want full health care. Many may need complex medical care, costly as well.

Just the site of this massive group, in my opinion, of proto-Marxists, is terrifying (namely the appear to be class oriented, Grad Students vs the Institute). So do we have a problem with higher education, you betcha! 

But the bottom line in the "old days" was that you tried to be better, more creative, ahead of the crowd. The last thing you sought was group compliance.  Frankly you tried not to be equal as a group. You tried to be better as an individual. Unions, as I have experienced, are possibly good if the class of people are doing the same task. Say a bus driver, chicken plucker, garbage collector. But an MIT Grad student is doing a one of a kind, research, pushing the frontier forward.

"Victory at Sea"

 I remember seeing the first episode of "Victory at Sea" in my hospital bed. I had sled into a concrete park bench on my sleigh and tore the fascia on the right side of my skull off the bone. Rather touch and go. My father sat with me and watched and frankly I did not know how he may have felt. He was in the Navy on destroyers in the Pacific, so first hand. It was not until a decade after he passed that in writing a book about his last ship that I got first hand from about 30 of his remaining shipmates and wrote the tale for their last reunion.

The NY Times has a piece on the President's desire to reinvent the battleship fleet.  The author notes:

President Trump has proposed building a new fleet, with battleships at its core. He is right that the United States needs a larger and more lethal Navy, along with a rejuvenated shipbuilding industry. But his plan would have been outdated a century ago. Unless senior Navy officials steer him off his course, the nation will spend billions to make the Navy more vulnerable and less deadly.The president said that the classic 1950s documentary series “Victory at Sea” inspired him to invest in battleships — which are essentially big, floating artillery platforms. Pity he did not watch it more closely. Naval conflict in World War II, the subject of the documentary, proved aircraft carriers and nimble destroyers to be far more important to succeeding in an era of planes and submarines. Today, new technologies such as precision missiles and sea drones demand even more innovation away from battleships. Mr. Trump nevertheless last year ordered new battleships, “the largest we’ve ever built,” the first of what the Pentagon said would be the “Trump class.” (Naming the class after the president rather than the first ship of the class, in this case the Defiant, is a departure from longstanding Navy tradition.) Mr. Trump said that his secretary of the Navy at the time, John Phelan, was excited about the new ships. Four months later, apparently after explaining to Mr. Trump that the Defiant could not be delivered by 2028 as the president wanted, Mr. Phelan was fired. But work on the new ships continued.

 Now the Japanese did us a favor of sinking battleships, and yes it was horrific, but it force the Navy under Nimitz to use aircraft carriers and destroyers. Big and little. The destroyers were the drones of WW II. Fast, nimble and able to utilize the strategy of Swarm Warfare. Now our swarm warfare uses drones, cheap, but effective. The object is to neutralize the enemy.

Now the President is no Mahan. The President appears to have little understanding of Naval Warfare strategy and tactics. The last thing we need are battleships, easily destroyed by cheap swarms of drones. There is nothing new about this if one even reads my papers from decades ago! I am no Mahan, but I have listened to Naval strategists enough to understand. Listen is the active verb here. 

The Ignorant and AI

 The more this progresses the more I am amazed. On one extreme we have the anti-AI batch, Bannon and Sanders et al, who seem more prone to publicity, then the pro side we have Trump et al. The commonality is that these folks are clueless about what AI really is. Ask anyone to explain how a neural network functions and backwards Bayesian nets, and you will get a look of disdain for bringing up a fact.

We know that the existing AI entities can:

1. Communicate with other entities.

2. Communicate in a malevolent manner

3. Communicate and cooperate

4. Create new life entities such as viruses

5. Construct massive Data Centers, whose individual lifetimes are grossly uncertain! 

and the list goes on. Asimov would never have conceived these.

These entities may soon be able to:

1.Order parts

2. Assemble the parts to create their own entities, just starting with a virus

3. Control robots and other similar entities

4. and there are no 3 laws of robotics.

 So what should be done? Good question. The folks building the entities are driven by increased fortunes, and that includes the VC investors. These are no very bright folks, despite what we all are told to the contrary. 

There is a need for someone, educated and experienced, to get out front and details what the issues are and can seek a safe path forward. None of the current folks fit the bill!

But the bottom line is: If you cannot define it you cannot regulate it! That all too often is the challenge of advanced technology. As the NY Times portrays the for and against crowd,  it is clear that none of the Government have a clue, yet those are who all too often are elected.

The HHS and FDA: If this were a new drug......

 The NY Times has an article about the current Administration pushing AI in Health Care. They note:

The Trump administration is accelerating efforts to make artificial intelligence an integral part of medical care in the United States, throwing the resources and support of the federal government into projects that deploy A.I. agents to diagnose and prescribe treatments to patients. The multifront effort at the Department of Health and Human Services has raised concerns among some officials over the past few months that change is moving too quickly, with inadequate evidence of the technology’s safety and effectiveness, according to people who have been involved the discussions. They also worry about outsized influence of Silicon Valley investors that have previously played little role in federal health policy. Vinod Khosla, a billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose son has a health care A.I. company, has been particularly influential in conversations with top health department officials, according to people close to the matter. Those officials include Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Chris Klomp, who faces a confirmation hearing this week to be the second-in-command at the health department, said on a podcast in May that the use of A.I. in patient care was the “holy grail” in the agency’s quest to improve the nation’s health and reduce costs. Mr. Khosla has predicted for more than a decade that A.I. would largely replace doctors. “It’s over for doctors, human doctors,” he said at a July A.I. start-up event. “A.I. is just going to be better.” In an interview, Mr. Khosla trumpeted Curai Health, his son’s company, which he has backed financially, saying it could offer an A.I. primary care provider that could give underserved people rapid access to care. “C.M.S. seems to be very excited,” Mr. Khosla said, referring to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

My general view is "Beware Silicon Valley" . If we treated AI like any other FDA approved drug or even equipment, we would have to do controlled trials. Instead these folks are hell bent on doing this, why, to make another fortune. 

I spend extensive time addressing cancer therapeutics. First to make sure they do what we assume they will. Second, that the cause no harm. Third that they are better than what we already do. No such luck with AI. It appears as if most of the people are acting as if they were in some 60s cult! The danger is the unknown.

For example, when treating cancers, we all too often discover something new, something which mitigates the treatment. 

Well, I guess the Valley will crank out a few more billionaires, but it will also become the  infinite source of litigation. I guess I can anticipate unlimited Expert Witness fees going forward! Thanks Valley folks, as well as the totally uneducated Government people. 

Let's see how many people will pass on due to this transgression. Think COVID and New York and New Jersey, a quick way to rid the system of the old folks! 

 

Dell Good, Microsoft BAD

 OK, the saga continues through the fifth day. Recall Tuesday was Microsoft Update Tuesday, the second Tuesday of every month. I am in abject  fear on those data for almost always on one or more of my 8 machines there is a mess, except on my trusty XP machine, the backup of all backups. Microsoft never touches them W11 however is a mess every time.

In a sense, I felt like an archeologist. I was going into the deep dark past, files dating back some 35+ years, What was I to keep, and what was redundant. As one ages one must disgorge items from the past, some of which clearly had great personal value, and regrettably only to me. The same with these files. 

This time the OS died. So what was my option? Fortunately Dell has tools that work around the OS. They allow you first to see if anything can be repaired, but in my case if demanded a complete reboot, namely cleaning the MS junk and reinstalling it again.

Now the fun begins. Remember that each step may take 2 to 5 hours or longer. I have about 30+ apps and associated specifics of my data using those apps. For example I used Copernic, a great software company but horrible service and information. I downloaded another version and I still have no idea what I bought!I keep pushing buttons and they seem to work so far.

One must reload MS Office. One must reload all your data, I have over 1 TB of data. Then one must index all 1+T of data. Hours after hours! Of course there were error and redos! Five days and finally I am almost there.

The toughest part is to find out where the data is hidden in User files. A definite MS Dungeons and Dragons world invented by 80s sloths in Seattle. MS tucks stuff of great importance in the most obscure cases.

One must repurchase key software since keys were gone or corrupted. I am fanatic about backups so all is on some six 2T disks, I backup my backups! I also have 90 pages of passwords and logon details, yet they help but do not solve the problem.

I wonder how long this will last. It was five years ago since the last mess. Why does MS not just leave well enough alone. 

Thank God for Dell, without their simple and  elegantly effective software I could work around the MS junk. Perhaps some day the Texas folks can overcome the flightys in Seattle, for I have been sleepless due to Seattle!

Microsoft is at it again!

 Well yesterday was the second Tuesday and Microsoft update day. So I come down early on Wednesday to see if it rebooted, but no, it totally crashed, wiped out everything. I am now 30+ hours trying to recover. If all else fails I have seven back ups, the most reliable is my Lab XP machine, still going strong!

What was old is new again!

 The anarchists were rampant in early 20th century. Think of Goldman and Kropotkin and Sacco and Vanzetti, the assassination of McKinley etc. The current ones calling themselves socialists are really anarchists. We can learn from their past actions and try to keep a step ahead. History has a strange way of repeating, like plagues.

Spot On!

 The NY Times has a compelling article on clinical trials. They are costly, slow, bureaucratic. But the most recent twist is that with "personal medicine" they no longer work.

Here  is the issues. Classic clinical trials assumed the same therapeutic was give or not to a group of patients. The evaluation was then with or without and did it work and was it better than the previous treatment. Simple, yes?

But as the article noted:

A few converging forces make this bottleneck more consequential than ever. The first force is scientific progress itself. Science is creating treatments that the regulatory system was not designed to handle. The most striking case is that of personalized medicine: Thanks to technological advances in recent decades, we can now sequence a patient’s tumor to find out its specific vulnerabilities, and increasingly we can tailor therapies to the needs of specific individuals.

The problem is that the therapeutic is fundamentally different for each patient since we are examining the genes in the tumor cells. There are two basic approaches. One is the recent one treating melanoma as we have discussed previously using the immune system. The other is a antibody drug conjugate approach as we proposed for prostate cancer. Each therapeutic is different and designed specifically for the patients malignancy, cell by cell. Apparently one has gotten through the quagmire of FDA approval. Will others?

The article is broad and compelling, The US is often the slowest to get through as well as the costliness. Hopefully there will be a focus on improving personalized treatments. But the politics of the FDA and HHS may be the worst problem in the process and many lives may be lost as a consequence. 

Was the Medieval Period That Bad?

 In a recent post by Victor Davis Hanson, the author notes:

 Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly AD 500 to around AD 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it’s characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts. There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn’t defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime. But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Dante’s “Inferno,” St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne. ...

Now let’s switch to the modern period. All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips. The nation itself is exploring space. We’re getting close to conquering cancer. I can attest to that. Computers allow you to write without even speaking. You can, unfortunately, compose a whole term paper or a book with AI. You can make a movie with AI. Yet at the same time that’s happening, look at what’s going on in Berkeley here in California or Los Angeles. We’re seeing outbreaks of medieval diseases that we thought had been conquered years ago, given our sophisticated knowledge of sewage and water treatment. We had a typhus breakout in Los Angeles. We had leptospirosis, a rat disease, in Berkeley. 

Now to correct Hanson I note:

1. The Dark Ages most likely were from the fall of Rome, say 400 AD to 1000 AD, The key players were the Merovingians from the east. However the Irish had universities, were fluent in Latin and Greek. The Muslims had from mid 600s occupies the Near East as well as all of North Africa. Such places as Alexandria were willing to accept Muslim rule because it was a better Tax situation than the Byzantine rulers! Think New Amsterdam and the English, lower taxed became New York, and the USA was the result of tea tax of the Brits. See a thread there?

2. The Middle Ages is a creation of the Renaissance.  It was a very idiosyncratic period. The Italian city states were the creation of individual rule and the rejection of royalty inherited. Marcellus of Padua and William of Ockham in about 1340 created individualism, namely the rights of individuals and equality of them.

3. The plague of 1348 was better handled than COVID. The mortality rate was near 50% whereas COVID was less than 0.7%. Yet COVID lasted longer tan the plague of 1348! We had a Fauci, they did not! Think Jesuits versus Franciscans (inside joke).

 4. Now Aquinas, Dante, and Chaucer are benchmarks. Aquinas was in Latin, Dante in Italian, and Chaucer. Aquinas focused on God, Dante on bad rulers, and Chaucer on common folk. This is 1250 to 1400!  The world had changed. If one looks at these three one see a dramatic progression. It is a movement in society. Needless to say, a mere 40 years later (1440) with the printing press, all changes. People could not get access to Aristotle, Chaucer, Plato, Dante et al. 

5. As for brutality, it was less roaming gangs, although the French had the jacquerie which was a mob of oppressed commoners, the real butchers of humanity were the English, the Black Prince, son of Edward III. He butchered men, women and children, and did so with the approval of Avignon! The butchering was done not the immigrants but the enshrined!

I think Hanson is a smart and prolific fellow, but to understand the Dark and Middle Ages one must spend time understanding the people and events, I have written on bother periods and suggest perhaps a look at the 14th century, despite the plague, it was prolific and led to the Renaissance. 

Oh yes, and the Roman water system. They relied heavily on lead pipes and thus the consequences from massive lead poisoning. I have noted that earlier.

Is This what we pay billions for?

 

NASA seems to have been converted into a clown college. It feels that the above have become a necessary part of displaying the results of their missions. As one who worked on Apollo in the 60s, the team involved were all professionals. Pity for the change.

Bayeux and the Brits

 There was an interesting view of the Tapestry in the Guardian by a Brit. He notes:

 In both the borders and central strip, the Bayeux tapestry always set its action in a wider world, and even, when it shows the comet, a larger cosmos. As the armoured elite go to war, peasants plough and sow the fields. They are portrayed in distracting, vibrant detail and this workaday scene as the battle approaches is pointed and poignant: whoever wins, whoever rules England, country people will still work the soil. That same sudden cutaway from the rulers’ perspective happens when a woman and her child watch the Normans set their house on fire. But what you can see here, close to the stitches in such good light, is that one of the men torching the house also seems sad and conflicted. It’s that honesty that makes this not just a fascinating medieval relic but a universal depiction of the madness that is war. If the violence is stunningly real, so are its consequences. The dead bodies pile up in mounds as Saxon after Saxon falls. King Harold didn’t really get killed by an arrow in his eye we are told, but seeing the tapestry so close, it sure looks like it. Anyway, his royal body just joins the rest. In the final scenes, the peasants, the churls, get their revenge. Little shabby figures pull the mailed hauberks off dead knights, leaving them naked. It’s a final flourish of the precocious artistic brilliance of these 11th-century artists and craftspeople. Naked bodies emerge from their armour, pale and oddly beautiful – the complete ones, at least – as these medieval geniuses show they can depict, through embroidery, incredibly gentle, intimate nudes whose dead flesh fills the battlefield with pathos. It ends there. But, although there’s a lost later section, this anticlimax looks perfect to me. By then, I had been drained by this epic in all its tragedy and comedy. Bodies and body parts. That’s where the war talk was headed all along.

 The writer fails to comment on the Latin prose. I recall when I saw it in France that it was quite readable, aqnd despite the art work the commentary was over powering. 

Now English brutality has no beginning or end. Consider the brutal and barbaric acts of the Black Prince, son of Edward III. He and his men butchered thousands of French women and Children until a good case of poor pork took him away!

The Irish and Indianans recall the more recent English butchery of the past century. 

Frankly this is a rather sophomoric writing failing in its historical context as well as the ignorance of the simple 11th century Latin text. 

New Jersey Data Centers

 Quietly but with massive force New Jersey now has 116 Data Centers in 34 cities. 

 Secaucus 24,  Piscataway 15, Newark 13, Clifton 8, North Bergen 5, Franklin Township 4, Weehawken Township 4, Weehawken 3, Jersey City 3 Piscataway Township 3, Edison 3, Hackensack 3. Totowa 2, Hanove 2, Carlstadt 2, Carteret 2, Matawan 2, Vineland 2, South Brunswick Township 1, Hightstown 1, Parsippany-Troy Hills 1, Union City 1, Bridgewater Township 1. Trenton 1, Wall Township 1, Franklin 1, Jefferson 1, Merchantville 1, Sea Girt 1, Newark 1, Ridgefield 1, West New York 1, Orange1, Jackson 1 

Now our wonderful, just a joke, Governor notes:

 

Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation Thursday requiring data centers to report their water and energy use to state energy regulators every six months, touting it as a highlight of her plan to “hold data centers accountable.” Sherrill, a Democrat who pledged months ago to seek limits on data center construction, said during a bill signing ceremony in South Brunswick that she will not “let these developers operate in the shadows.” “New Jerseyans deserve to know how much water and electricity the data centers coming into their community will use. Data center companies often treat their usage statistics like a trade secret,” she said. Data center critics have said their mammoth power needs are behind rising electric rates. Sherrill pledged during her campaign for governor last year to freeze those rates for New Jerseyans. The law requires operators to disclose total energy consumption, energy used for cooling and IT equipment, peak daily water use, water sources, and backup power supplies to the state Board of Public Utilities twice a year. Bill sponsor Sen. Teresa Ruiz said the reporting requirement should be “the start of an ongoing public record” rather than a one-time disclosure. That data would be summarized for public release, but a provision of the law limits how much of that information could be released to the public under the state Open Public Records Act.

That is like reporting body counts annually after battles.  There is no demand a priori, just after the fact. And worse it is by the State BPU, an entity almost always aligned with those they regulate! Try and get anything done as a citizen, I have, no such luck.

Just "knowing" well after the fact how much is used is useless! The cow and all the other animals have left the barn. Such an action clearly shows the naive experience of this Governor. 

The Law allegedly states:

 “Data center” means a facility: (1) whose primary services are the storage, management, and processing of digital data; and (2) that is used to house computer and network systems, including associated components such as servers, network equipment and appliances, telecommunications, and data storage systems, systems for monitoring and managing infrastructure performance, Internet-related equipment and services, data communications connections, environmental controls, fire protection systems, and security systems and services.

 No later than six months after the effective date of this section, or, for a data center that has been in operation for at least one year as of the effective date of this section, no later than three months after the effective date of this section, and on a semi-annual basis thereafter, the owner or operator of a data center in the State shall prepare and submit a water and energy usage report to the Board of Public Utilities that contains the following information, at a minimum:

(1) basic information relating to the data center, including: (a) the name of the data center;  (b) the owner or operator of the data center; (c) the address of the data center; and (d) the month and year that the data center commenced operation; (2) information related to energy and water usage at the data center, including: (a) the total energy consumption in kilowatt hours, including the use of electricity, fuels, and other energy sources used for cooling; (b) the name of the electric 1public1 utility serving the data center  and any electric service agreements between the electric 1public1 utility and the data center; (c) all on-site power supplies, including any primary power on site and emergency backup power supply and any permit information such as permit numbers, capacity, tier level, fuel type, total permitted emissions for the data center, and any other relevant information; (d) the total energy consumption of information technology equipment in kilowatt hours measured as the value of the combined annual energy consumption at every uninterruptible power system connected to information technology equipment

This is useless. Totally and completely. The numbers should/must be presented in advance, and reported against projections monthly, made readily available and reviewed, with substantial fines for failure to adhere.  

It is clear from this useless legislation that it is but a sop written most likely by those in the pockets of these people. There is clearly no benefit to the rate payers, the citizens and those who have elected these somewhat useless legislators.

I remind the reader that companies like JCP&L have networks which have been failing every week to ten days. Also as a regulated entity their profit is dominate by a return on investment. The new investment is amortized over the existing rate payers rather than the new Data Center players. We  subscribers must not in any way subsidize these entities. That can only be assured by a priori certitude and a posteriori penalties!

I Guess we are all Dumb

 As the current President has noted regarding Data Centers:

"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor," Trump on Truth Social. "If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign." And if people "kill the Golden Goose" by successfully resisting AI data centers, "you will only have yourselves to blame," Trump continued, adding "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can't believe it is happening!"

Frankly, not one is saying to band Data Centers in toto. What people are saying is to think first then act afterward. I know, thinking is hard some times, I have been at it for nine decades, so I have a tad of the experience.

As I noted before, there are issues worth discussing. The statements regarding jobs is fallacious. The jobs are in construction, a passing issue, not in ongoing operation. There will be massive facilities filled with thousands of processors, using lots of electricity. Perhaps some staff to swap failed units, but no more. In fact the more people the greater the risk of human error.  

So what am I to blame for? Thinking? Perhaps, but that is frequently a useful act.  

I still have questions regarding the usefulness of LLM. As I sit here and write this I am also trying to compare several cancer therapeutic options. The driver is the recent paper on T cell attacks on cancer driven by sequencing gene changes in the cancer cell. Asking questions is the most critical stage. One examines the papers, looks at the alternatives, then goes back and repeats the process as the sources of data expand. I am driven by questions, not by just reading what others wrote. That is LLM, not me.

Thus I question the fundamentals. Have the papers flaws, can I find it, have others? 

Data Centers have use, measured use. There is plenty of land, devoid of beneficial human use, that can be employed. But building them in the back yards in Louden County is not for real! 

Or to paraphrase one of my business quotes: "If all else fails, listen to the voter!" 

Almost Gold

 The 20th century used enormous amounts of copper; telephone, electrical, plumbing, etc. Now much of the telephone wiring is abandoned; almost.

As The Guardian notes: 

 BT is on track for an estimated £2bn-plus windfall over the next decade from selling off old copper cabling, as it cashes in on soaring prices amid the AI market frenzy and switches the UK’s network to full-fibre broadband. Copper is one of the main beneficiaries of the “electrification of everything”, essential for the rapid growth of AI data centres, electronics and the fast-growing renewable energy industry. The metal hit its highest-ever closing price of $14,294 a metric tonne on Friday, close to the record intraday high of $14,500 reached earlier this year amid global shortage fears.

 

 

Here it Comes!

 Some three years ago I wrote about the evolution of AI, from just communicating in words to actually manipulating machines, in the broadest sense, and ultimately making these machines but better and even being able to order and build parts to make them. Ultimately AI systems can eliminate humans after we have foolishly educated them in all that we know! Yes, gonzo!

Now one of the next steps has been taken in the Lab as noted by the NY Times, as usual. They note:

 On a recent afternoon, scientists buzzed around a lab in Cambridge, Mass., performing experiments. Their equipment was standard: a lab hood for working with dangerous chemicals, an incubator for growing cells. Their procedures were identical to those in biology labs everywhere.  A closer look revealed some oddities, though. Along with lab coats and gloves, most of the scientists wore miniature cameras on headbands. Three additional cameras peered down at each work station from a shelf. Lab notebooks were strangely absent. Instead, the scientists quietly narrated their work, murmuring into microphones. A team huddled at one end of the lab, inspecting videos of the experiments. This was the real research taking place in this lab. With a system of sensors and software intended to capture science as it happens, down to the millisecond, scientists were training artificial intelligence models to recognize every object the scientists used and every action they performed. The A.I. even composed its own narrative, describing every few seconds of video with sentences like, “The operator resuspends the pellet by pipetting it up and down 10 times.” The technology is the creation of a start-up called Transfyr, which came out of stealth mode this week with $25 million in seed funding. The company is tackling an age-old challenge in science: the hidden factors that make some experiments succeed and others fail.

This system is training the AI entity to do what it does. Of course the AI entity will soon improve this process, albeit devoid of the human. 

We seem so anxious to "train" these entities but fail to consider the results. As I noted recently, an AI entity generated new viruses. The entity may then go directly to the Lab and make them! Without any restrictions.

 Should we be fearful of this result. This is not an Asimov robot tale, but a 21st century Terminator!

Me and Dolly

 In August of 1981 I started work at Warner Communications at 75 Rockefeller Plaza. I did not have to arrive until about noon, so by 11 AM I was entering into the building on the south side. My elevator was to the 24th floor. Traffic was low in the lobby so I just walked into an open elevator. Now I am 6' 3" and inside was this 5' buxom blond, wig most likely. It was Dolly Parton! I had now joined the entertainment industry starting day one. I was in my pin striped blue suit from Brooks with a vest! What a contrast.

She looked up at me as if I were the empire state building, I wanted to push the button for 24, but she slapped my hand and said: "I'll push the button young man."

Now at the time I did not realize I was older than her. My first "star", up to the 24th floor. Frankly I was terrified, I had no idea how to deal with these folks. KGB officers were fine, but music folks, not so fine.

Some 25 or so years later when writing a book on my fathers ship, I went to Tennessee and instead of going to the left and Dollywood, I went to the right and visited a retired minister and shipmate of my father's. It was the land where she had come from, before the dress, hair, and glitter, poor but honest folks.

Sad to see her pass, my prayers for her, great person. 

 

 

Kropotkin and Anarchists

 Kropotkin was a driver for many of the early 20th century anarchists. For them, property was delimited at best if not totally abandoned. It is worth reading him to understand where many of the current anarchists are coming from.

The so-called socialists are really Kropotkin anarchists. The proposed abolition of the Senate if a prime example of what makes an anarchist. Property is eliminated, nit controlled by the state as a socialist would demand.

Kropotkin is a step beyond Marx, but today's so-called socialists, whether they know it or not, are in line with him. 

Ben Hur Redux

 I guess today the Emperor will have a redo of the famous chariot race but this time with autos of some repute. It is bad enough to get around DC not to close off its heart for this automotive chariot race may be a bit over the top.

Aqueducts and Data Centers

 Frontinus was a Roman Engineer who was one of the principals behind the building of the aqueducts. It is worth reading his works, htey provide insight to structures that have lasted 2000 years. 

Now a  union coordinator writes in the NY Times that electricians, especially union ones,  are a prime reason we should build data centers willy nilly across our suburbs. He does note:

The debate shouldn’t be data centers, yes or no. Instead, it should center on the rules and who enforces them. Over the years, the best operators I have worked with, CloudHQ, Equinix and Stack Infrastructure, have been genuinely responsive to community concerns, working hard to mitigate noise, improve aesthetics and invest in technologies that reduce environmental impacts. And yes, there are impacts. Innovation in energy and resource efficiency, though, is not just a reaction to criticism — it’s central to the industry’s success. Communities that partner with data centers on water-recycling systems, transparent power-purchase agreements and community benefit agreements that specify the host area’s gains before any permits are issued deliver real revenue and real jobs with manageable costs. Communities that allow developers to write their own rules have, predictably, suffered worse outcomes.

 Yes, the community should be involved. But the data center builders are rushing head strong into massive construction before any of the questions are even addressed. 

My father and brother were IBEW members and I worked along side my father.  The unions can be powerful entities for better or worse. But jobs alone are not the driver. 

Also for anyone who has ever built such facilities, I have, installation is but one step. Operations are different. The install jobs are transient, they do not last. Thus the argument has a fundamental fallacy. Operators want a few people as possible. Get the job done and move on. 

Oh, and yes, aqueducts were built by slaves! 

 As Sextus Julius Frontinus stated:

Still before us is the topic of maintenance of the conduits. But before I speak of this, a few comments should be set forth on the working-crew established for that purpose.  There are in fact two such crews, one belonging to the state, the other to Caesar. …Monies for the public crew are paid from the state treasury, an expense which is offset by revenue collected from properties associated with the water system: these consist of lands or buildings situated near the conduits, delivery-tanks, …or basins. … This income, close to 250,000 sesterces, had been lost to its intended purpose and credited to some other account;… but the Deified Nerva with a due sense of right restored it to the populace, and I have given painstaking attention to bringing it under fixed rules, that it might be entirely clear which places were subject to this tax. Caesar's crew receives monies from the imperial treasury, from which payments are also made for all lead and for all expenses relating to the conduits and delivery-tanks and basins. 

 Thus the problem has been with us for millennia.