I Told You So - 26 August 2024

So, it was last night that I elevated Dr. McElhone to the long-term (if not permanent) spot at the top of the page. And, boy howdy!! What should I find today? Derek Lowe (you really ought to read him) just posted an essay on the low-level chemistry of cells. Since my biology was one year in high school and chemistry two years in college, I can't claim to be an adept in the field. But I've long wondered how it is that we (well, the actual scientists) can know how these molecules behave? Can we only know now what we know due to electron microscopy and such? Until the Bohr model, how did we know what water looked like? And so on. A fun read.

The authors of the new paper linked above find that the ppGpp system is a very good mimic of "sliding mode control", a control method for nonlinear systems that one might have thought was rather advanced for a bacterium to implement. But they're not working it out mathematically - instead, as usual, there have been two or three billion years of do-or-die optimization that arrived at it.

Turns out, Dr. McElhone is right again. Not to mention Darwin, of course. Oh, and Mother Earth is really 6,000 years old.

By The Numbers - part the sixty eighth

So, you think your life is complicated? I'm not a Starbucks sorta guy; they ain't be one near my neighborhood (shithole that it is). So, it was with some amusement that I encountered this report on their travails

Starbucks says there are more than 170,000 possible drink combinations available, but outside estimates have put the number at more than 300 billion. And the person in front of you always seems to be ordering 100 million of them.

And, of course, the company ethos (like Friendly's in my hometown, and elsewhere since) decrees that staffing always be less than sufficient. The Large Minds that run such retails remain convinced that keeping labour cost under some Magic Number is the key to profit.

Pity that there's no accounting entry for lost revenues from customers who walked away.

And, of course, for those who surmise that "the easy 80%" is a figment of my warped mind

In many businesses, including food and grocery, the 80/20 rule applied. You'd get 80 percent of your business from 20 percent of the product line.

That's not exactly the easy 80%, but in the same family.

So, is there any data which proves that the BoM of retail is dominated by labour? Let's see what our fingers walking through the Yellow Googles can find. Boy Howdy! there is some data.

For fashion retailers, labor costs typically ranged from 10% to 20% of sales
...
Grocery stores, on the other hand, had lower labor costs, as many positions require less specialized skills.

I'll guess that Starbucks falls toward the grocery store end of things: customers know what they want (the more convoluted the better), the baristas aren't helping them get the right look, and so forth.

So, what's the deal? At the store level, managers have no other say in cost control and little to no say in stimulating demand. Knowing a few managers in such retail, about all they do is fill out paperwork, and try to keep a handle on "shrinkage". And, increasingly, as the report shows, Corporate controls staffing pretty tightly. The C-suite denizens feel powerless (and may be right) to control any other costs or increase demand. As a result, profit, such as it is, has to come out of the hides of the worker bees. Ain't capitalism grand?

Simpletons

In the days when I got paid to do econ for a living, the issue of home buying came up, generally during times of shifting interest rates. There were/are some in the field who still insist that mortgage rate and house price are not correlated. Such morons do piss me off. One buys a house on the basis of the monthly nut: the maximum nut varies from time to time and lender to lender, but hovers aroung 30% of gross income.

Luckily, today brings a report on the issue. Thankfully, it makes the case.

If you're old enough, you might remember the 70s with double digit mortgage rates. House prices crashed as a result, but the boomers who bought their Cape Cods found the prices adjusted nicely over the next decade or two. Windfall capital gains with no effort. The American way.

By The Numbers - part the sixty seventh

Killing them softly with his song? What with Baffert still in deep shit, is there much future for killing horseys with races as a side-effect? It appears dicey.

In 1990, for example, more than 40,000 foals were born in the United States
...
Last year, the number of would-be thoroughbred racehorses born was 17,200

Horse racing needs its own JD Vance. Let's make more babies!!! Well, so long as we keep those rich Mid-East Oil State dictators from providing younguns. OH, wait... they buy up most of the good foals.

"Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Bahrain are areas that have an increased interest in dirt racing; and the one thing that is clear, is the best dirt racehorses in the world are coming from the United States," he said. "It is a natural progression that paid dividends today."

W. Edwards Deming is said to have said: "In God we trust, all others bring data." In the racing bidnezz it appears to be, "In money we trust, who cares about deprivation?"

Thought For The Day - 23 August 2024

Well, what to say about RFK Jr.? Just that the nutballs who would vote for him would vote for wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© were he not around. Which he isn't now. Will he slough off the disaffected Progressives from Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©? Hardly.

Sense of Humor - part the second

Yet another series, based on a previous essay: the NYT sometimes displays a cruel sense of humor in printing contradictory reports on topics of national interest.

Today's duet: does the Deep State really impeded progress or stifle it? Two reports, one about ketamine and the other about sweatheart regulation. It's hard to take the NYT seriously, at times.

The first deals with Matthew Perry's OD death by ketamine, and puts the spotlight on what FDA approval really means.

Because the Food and Drug Administration approved ketamine for one purpose — sedating patients during surgery — more than 50 years ago, doctors can prescribe it for other uses.

So, it was perfectly legal to give Perry ketamine in any amount they wanted. The fact that he died as a result may be criminal, but charging them for over-prescribing is iffy. IOW, FDA isn't really some Deep State actor putting handcuffs on drug companies. As the report implies, may haps it's not such a good thing to have off-label prescribing? But, of course, that would entail forcing drug companies and FDA to fully test (at least one PIII trial) some drug for each indication. There are drugs that already go through that regimen, but not for clinical reasons. It's all about the money. Insurers generally don't cover off-label use, so getting FDA's OK for a large use population can be worth the grief.

That brings us to clearly corrupt conflict of interest by a C-suite FDA critter. It's a very long report, and smells to high heaven. He is head of device approval at FDA, and she (Wifey) is a lawyer working for companies seeking approval of devices. While the Perry story is about one sad fuck up, this one is about myriad corrupt events.

Their job is to protect the public health. They're doing the opposite. Anybody who doesn't see that is not looking.
-- Paula Cofer

Among other things, it reports that FDA, much after the fact, admits that the two engaged in conflict of interest activities. She actually backed Theranos, of all things.

Her partner at the helm of the firm's life sciences team began representing Theranos, the discredited blood testing company, in 2015, demanding that the F.D.A. halt an inspection at its sites in California.

Up to 1962, before the Kefauver-Harris Amendment, FDA's remit was safety. Yet, under his involvement

Reports of device-related injuries soared to 900,000 in 2023, up from about 190,000 in 2012, according to Device Events, a company that makes F.D.A. data user-friendly for subscribers.

Now, that's doin the job Sparky.

So, yeah, FDA is all about persecuting drug companies in a Socialist frenzy. Sure.

By The Numbers - part the sixty sixth

With the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts revving up their Founding Fathers engine, let's have a look at one of the bigger lies they rely on: socialized medicine for geezers is a cost we can't and shouldn't afford because Americans are living so much longer than they used to. Keeping geezers alive is an unjust burden on the Young (tee hee).

Well, as mentioned before in these essays, it depends on how you measure. Here's one report (from the esteemed school that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© claims to have "gone to") that provides some data.

In 1900, one in 40 Americans died annually. By 2013, that rate was roughly one in 140, a cumulative improvement of more than two thirds. As shown in Figure 1, life expectancy at birth rose by more than 30 years over this period, from 47 to 79.

All well and good. And true. But not relevant to the question of the burden of keeping geezers alive now versus 1900. To be blunt: 65 year old geezers will not now, or likely ever, live to 95 as a matter of course. The 30 years is almost wholly due to the Younger Generations not dying like flies. If you made it to adulthood in 1900 or 2024, your cohort of geezers will be about the same.

So, what?

[T]he average life expectancy at age 65 (i.e., the number of years a person could be expected to receive unreduced Social Security retirement benefits) has increased a modest 5 years (on average) since 1940.

And, one might expect, not much different if using 1900 as base: almost all the interventions keeping geezers alive longer have happened post WWII.

So, you guys, shut the fuck up. It bears repeating - since SS is a current account system (NOT an individual retirement account), getting babies to live to adulthood (and contributing) is a Good Thing. It's why the parents of Baby Boomers got fat and happy on SS - more workers. Just Dumb Vance^© is a dumb motherfucker, fur shur, but if Mother Earth weren't overstocked as it is, then rebalancing the age distribution with scads of sub-GED fishbelly white babies would also be something of a Good Thing (if it weren't powered by eugenics, of course). But Mother Earth is overstocked, and the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts and fellow travelers deny that Mother Earth is hot under the collar. And ready to burn the whole thing down. Mother Earth got along just fine without humans for Billions of years. She will again. She's nostalgic.