“If the East India Company was the first drug cartel, then the Royal Navy was the first band of violent cartel enforcers. After the two Opium Wars, the company won the right to traffic in 1860. The Chinese kept smoking and took the poppy with them in their diaspora round the planet.”
Ioan Grillo, via Dutty Artz, puts Mexico’s criminal insurgency into historical perspective
“

Rather than making themselves bigger and more visible, advanced civilizations may try to make themselves smaller, less visible, and thus more robust. These civilizations will devote their wisdom and energies to digging inward and exploring the life of the mind. After all, it is bigger, expansionistic civilizations that are going to collide or serve as targets for more advanced competitors. Perhaps galactic evolution and competition favor the small, just as insects seem to be doing so well here on planet earth…

[One annonymous commentator] had an interesting hypothesis in response to a post of mine about the Fermi Paradox:

‘Sufficiently advanced civilizations probably become utterly dependent on pervasive low-latency communications protocols, such that their members need to permanently remain within a fraction of a light-second’s distance from one another. … [They] will probably live accelerated lives: they will have a much higher clock speed, because electronic or photonic devices run much faster than the chemical reactions that power an electronic brain … due to speed of light issues, their entire civilizations may be constrained to exist within a sphere of a few hundred meteres in radius or less.’

”
Age of the Infovore, Tyler Cowen

arrogance as survival strategy

Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford has been making the rounds in the wake of his passing. Robin Hanson zooms in on Jobs’ exhortation to never settle:

“Since following this advice tends to go better for really capable people, they pay a smaller price for following it. So endorsing this strategy in a way that makes you more likely to follow it is a way to signal your status. It sure feels good to tell people that you think it is important to ‘do what you love’; and doing so signals your status. You are in effect bragging. Don’t you think there might be some relation between these two facts?”

Fair enough.

That, combined with all the storys of Jobs’ legendary outbursts, got me thinking to how arrogance was an optimal strategy for Jobs. If you are frequently proving other people wrong, either by well-thought-out arguments or your uncanny vision, it is likely that you will upset many people, independent of how nicely you treat the incorrect. An arrogant posture assumes that recovering your likeability would be stupid expensive via provision of more sympathy to your audience or interlocuter. On the other hand abandoning the remainder of your likeability probably comes at a low cost (what is the difference between a 25% and 35% approval rating for a politician; she is still going to lose). Adopting an arrogant posture makes it easier to value your own opinion most, a genuinely poor strategy for most people, but a costly position to not take for a person like Jobs. 

just got to keep this traffic flowing and accept a little sin thuc: Road Traffic Accidents : The Modern Killer

just got to keep this traffic flowing and accept a little sin

thuc:

Road Traffic Accidents : The Modern Killer

Today in eschatology

Over at MR, Tyler Cowen sums it up

If you study tech, you will see a bright present and also a bright future.  If you study K-12 education, you will see a mixed to dismal present and a possibly bright future.  If you study energy economics and the environment, you will see an OK present and a dismal future, no matter what policies we choose.

More later?

abstemiast: told you so….

abstemiast:

told you so….

Doctors Sue to End AMA's Role in Setting Medicare Payments

jayparkinsonmd:

I’ve written about this in the past. Here’s the gist:

Imagine there is a committee of politicians made up of 24 republicans and 5 democrats. Their job is to decide a politician’s salary—for democrats and republicans—and decisions are made by majority rule. Which party do you think would have the highest salary?

Much like American politics, doctors have a two-party system. It’s the Primary Care Party versus the Specialist Party. For the past 20 years, the specialists have been pummeling the primary cares. In 1991, the AMA formed an expert committee called the RUC in response to a Congressional mandate to provide recommendations to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on the worth of every visit and procedure a doctor can perform. CMS then accepts, rejects, or modifies these recommendations and effectively places a dollar amount on the thousands of codes doctors use to get reimbursed. CMS sets the standard. Private insurers then use these standards to decide how much they reimburse physicians in their own networks.

thuc:

Family doctors go after American Medical Association in hopes of ending wage disparity

Six Georgia primary care physicians have filed a lawsuit seeking to end the cozy relationship between Medicare administrators and a committee of doctors that influences the fees physicians are paid by the federal health program for the elderly.

A draft of the suit, which was obtained by iWatch News , alleges that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) violate several federal laws, including the2010 Affordable Health Care Act, in relying on the American Medical Association / Specialty Society Relative Value U pdate Committee, or RUC, to value physician services paid for by Medicare.

I do hope this suit is successful and we take a first step toward ending the massive salary discrepancy between much needed primary care doctors and specialists.

latimes:

They celebrated Go Skateboarding Day in Kabul, Afghanistan, too!

Photos credit: Musadeq Sadeq / Associated Press

“Need is not quite belief.”
Anne Sexton

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

eternal living

when it dies, it rots

and when it lives, it gives it all it gots

“‘Then what do you believe in, Doctor?’
‘I believe in certain laws of economics.’
‘Religion is the opium of the people,’ I quoted flippantly at him.
‘I don’t know where Marx wrote that,’ Doctor Magiot said with disapproval, ‘if he ever did, but since you were born a Catholic you should be pleased to read in Das Kapital what Marx had to say of the Reformation. He approved of monasteries in that state of society. Religion can be an excellent therapy for many states of mind – melancholy, despair, cowardice. Opium, remember, is used in medicine. I’m not against opium.”
Graham Greene, The Comedians

(Source: books.google.com)

that gaping hole was once a foundation

“Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The Internet is as natural as a spider’s web. As Margulis and Sagan have written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as a means of genetic survival: “We are part of an intricate network that comes from the original bateriological takeover of the Earth. Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.” Thinking of our bodies as natural and of our technologies as artificial gives too much importance to the accident of our origins. If we are replaced by machines, it will be an evolutionary shift no different from when bacteria combined to create our earliest ancestors … species are only currents in the drift of genes…”
John Gray, Straw Dogs and Other Human Animals, via The Abstemiast
“From an early period, the children of Israel were called ‘Hebrews’ - usually (even in the Tanakh itself) by those who did not think much of them. The word is well authenticated beyond the Bible; it appears as ‘Habiru’ in a wide variety of times and places from Egypt to Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). What is striking about these other references is that they seem to concern a social rather than ethnic grouping, and their context invariably suggests people who were uprooted and on the edges of other societies, people of little account except for their nuisance value. That is a plausible origin for the people who gathered as ‘Israel’ under the rule of the Judges in the land of Canaan/Israel. They were those who had been marginalized: nomads, semi-nomads, the dispossessed who now began to find new ways of settling down and building new lives. While such people were not unique to this area, something remarkable seemed to have happened to the group of Habiru who massed in Canaan from the late thirteenth century BCE, whether from Egypt or elsewhere: they constructed a new identity, sealed by a God who was not necessarily to be associated with older establishments or shrines. It would be natural for the worshipers of this God to begin a long process of refashioning a patchwork of ancient stories from their varied previous homes into a plausible single story of common ancestors, among whom may be numbered Abram/Abraham and Jacob/Israel. It was significant that these Patriarchs had experienced their God changing their names. Perhaps the Habiru felt that this was happening to them: God was giving them a new identity.”
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Chistianity: The First Three Thousand Years

(Source: books.google.com)

“It was an evangelical church, gaunt and willfuly ugly, with texts about blood and fire blazoned on the walls, and a hymn-book containing twelve hundred and fifty-one hymns, I concluded that the book would do as it stood for an anthology of bad verse.”
Down and Out In Paris and London

(Source: books.google.com)