Computer Virus in Drones

China Daily reports on computer viruses in Predator drones.

They state:

Government officials are still investigating whether the virus is benign, and how it managed to infect the heavily protected computer systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where US pilots remotely fly the planes on their missions over Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"Something is going on, but it has not had any impact on the missions overseas," said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Armed tactical unmanned planes have become an increasingly valuable tool used by the US government to track and attack individuals and small groups overseas, but the virus underscores the vulnerability of such systems to attacks on the computer networks used to fly them from great distances.

What is interesting is the apparent total lack of reporting in the US of this issue.

More Advances in Health Care: Kill Off the Old Men!

The NY Times has noticed the following:

Healthy men should no longer receive a P.S.A. blood test to screen for prostate cancer because the test does not save lives and often leads to more tests and treatments that needlessly cause pain, impotence and incontinence in many, a key government health panel has decided.  

The test measures a protein — prostate-specific antigen — that is released by prostate cells, and there is little doubt that it helps to identify the presence of cancerous cells in the prostate. But a vast majority of men with cancer of the prostate never suffer ill effects because the cancer is usually slow-growing. Even for men who do have fast-growing cancer, the P.S.A. test may not save them, since there is no proven benefit to earlier treatment of such invasive disease. 

 We have in our book on Prostate Cancer, a draft available,have shown the errors in many of the prior studies. But follow the logic.

1.Healthy Men do not need the test.

2. PSA helps identifying cancer.

3. No benefit to invasive cancer.

Now there is noting wrong with any statement on its own. Taken together it is total nonsense.

1. How does one know one is healthy? You have a test taken.

2. If PSA is effective in identifying then if you have PCa then you are NOT healthy.

3. Invasive or metastatic cancer is cancer which was not detected early, namely a man did not have the test and was a priori considered healthy but was not!

Still following this nonsense. But why now? Well it is the intent of the current Administration to apparently let old men die, imagine what happened when they said something about breast cancer!  But not old men, let them die off, besides they just complain!

Well guess what you have, death panel number 1. Beware for you may be next.

It is also interesting to see how the NY Times has edited their initial posting after perhaps much annoyance at their in my opinion illogical writing. The report to be presented by AHRQ, which according to HHS is:

The AHRQ Prevention and Care Management Portfolio fulfills AHRQ's Congressionally mandated role to support the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). The USPSTF is an independent panel of non-Federal experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine and is composed of primary care providers (such as internists, pediatricians, family physicians, gynecologists/obstetricians, nurses, and health behavior specialists).

The USPSTF conducts scientific evidence reviews of a broad range of clinical preventive health care services (such as screening, counseling, and preventive medications) and develops recommendations for primary care clinicians and health systems. These recommendations are published in the form of "Recommendation Statements."

 The AHRQ also drives Medicare allowances and thus it will most likely prohibit men from having this test.Thus one would suspect like prohibition it will go underground. One can envision personal PSA tests done via the mail over the border to say Canada.

George Will and Galbraith

George Will has written a piece today that describes in parallel terms what I have been writing about for the past three years. Namely he speaks of Elizabeth Warren and Galbraith and the current crop of left wing progressives.

Will states:

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession. 

Warren is the apotheosis of anti-individualism and the very example of Harvard Law School and its Faculty. Progressivism denies individualism. Progressivism denies the individual, and as such it would be impossible for Warren to believe that any person could do it on their own. Yet since she has apparently never done anything the very thought that others have is so foreign she sees its very existence as a threat to human existence as she sees it. 

Further it is Galbraith to whom we all owe a debt, he more than Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, destroyed the very concept of the individual.

Thus Will in many ways is just echoing what I wrote in one of my earlier books, Progressivism and Individualsim. Yet Warren in her arrogant stance based in my opinion on total ignorance may very well get elected. After all it is Massachusetts, we shall see.

The Smartest Economist on the Planet

Now I am not an economist, nor would I ever want to be one. I read Krugman, I know Summers from afar, I even had Samuelson as an instructor and cajoled Solow to give a talk or two for my company a few decades ago. Over the past few years I have been exceedingly critical, especially of the institutional know-it-alls who have gotten us into this mess. No it was not just Wall Street. You see Wall Street is just a bunch of 4 year olds in a sand box. The baby sitters are supposedly those in Government and their advisers.

That did not work out too well. But at the same time I have been following the Canadian Economists in Worthwhile Canadian and frankly they seem to be the only ones making any sense over the past few years, and indeed a great deal of sense. Perhaps that is why Canada has so little a set of problems. Also it makes my wife and her Nova Scotia brethren happy.

But today Nick Rowe had what I could call a brilliant piece, a commentary on knowns, and unknowns. It is really worth the read, as is all of Rowe's works. His final words in the piece are: 

We draw a supply and demand curve and point to where the two curves cross. We shift the supply and demand curves and point to where the two new curves cross. The only people who talk about the process of getting from the first point to the second point are: teachers of Economics 1000; Austrian economists. 

Maybe it takes time to get from the first point to the second point. Not because people are idiots, in not changing their prices, or not figuring out what's going on and how to react. But because the territory is a lot more complicated than the map. 

And it's always going to be hard to build a map of how the territory is more complicated than the map.

 Yes, the territory is quite complicated. The human genome is trivial as compared to the complexities of our economic world. Once we admit that we can then commence the conversation. Rowe has done that quite elegantly. He is always worth the read. Keep it coming!

But extending this thought a bit, I have a modest proposal, an Irish euphemism for a good idea. Perhaps the US should outsource all of its economic planning to the Canadians.  They seem to be clearer thinkers, they seem to have fewer spats, they do not write whatever comes into their minds sans thought in their blogs, they argue in a rather admirable fashion, and sometimes I really enjoy the ideas they bring forth. Imagine instead of what we have had in the States for the past few years we had a group of genteel thinkers say up in Toronto, just a hop skip and jump outside Detroit  but a world away. Just a thought.

An Interesting Question of Doubt

As my readers know I hold little respect for economics as a science. It is a field ripe with political views, what people feel should be but as a science it is not just lacking it is not even close.

Thus I read with interest Krugman's latest blog asking himself that very question, not from a real epistemological viewpoint, no it is Krugman does so often to jab at his foes.

He states:

What I’d add to that is that at this point it seems to me that many economists aren’t even trying to get at the truth. When I look at a lot of what prominent economists have been writing in response to the ongoing economic crisis, I see no sign of intellectual discomfort, no sense that a disaster their models made no allowance for is troubling them; I see only blithe invention of stories to rationalize the disaster in a way that supports their side of the partisan divide. And no, it’s not symmetric: liberal economists by and large do seem to be genuinely wrestling with what has happened, but conservative economists don’t.

And all this makes me wonder what kind of an enterprise I’ve devoted my life to.

 The last sentence is sadly true. The first paragraph is his shot at others. The problem is that in real science, say genetics, since 1971 we have progressed in leaps and bounds to the point at which we can now deal with many cancers, slow them down, cure them, and we have created true value to humanity.

In the world of communications and computers we have advances well beyond anything imagined and at costs well below anything we could have predicted. A telephone call to Beijing is a penny a minute as compared to hundreds of dollars.

Medicine has advanced tremendously, for better and worse, cost being the issue. We can now in seconds determine the cause of a stroke, a block or bleed, and then do something about it. We can keep people with congestive heart failure alive and feeling fairly well. In my 1966 Harrison's we were told how to make them comfortable until they died.

Now what has economics done, Krugman is correct. We all too often have arrogant individuals using meaningless theories destroying human lives with their witch doctor like suggestions. So what can we do, especially when they admit to it?

Health Care Costs

Kaiser reports an annual increase of more than 9% for this year in health care costs. They state:

Employers' spending on health coverage for workers spiked abruptly this year, with the average cost of a family plan rising by 9 percent, triple the growth seen in 2010.

Family plan premiums hit $15,073 on average, while coverage for single employees grew 8 percent to $5,429, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust. (KHN is an editorially-independent program of the foundation.)

Workers paid an average of $921 toward the premium of single coverage and $4,129 for family plans.

The results mark a sharp departure from 2010, when the same survey found average family premiums up only 3 percent. 

Although many benefit analysts say the federal health law’s requirements played only a small part in the rise, the results could provide political fodder for both supporters and opponents of the law. 

 The detailed report by Kaiser is worth the review.

Now some observations. The last sentence above says "many analysts" that is deceptive. For many others say otherwise. The new health care plan mandates excess spending on such things as paying for your 26 year olds, added testing for women, and the like. While the current Administration is gutting $500 Billion from Medicare they have placed trillions on the backs of companies, most likely as a strategy to drive them from the market and turn it into a UK style system.