Nanoparticles for health!

Nanoparticles Stop Multiple Sclerosis In Mice
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/252967.php

This particular article is more interesting because I have very good friend who has dealt with MS for about 15 years now. I also like the idea that it can probably be widely applied to various auto-immune diseases _without_ side effects, so it sounds like it might be a ‘magic bullet’. I am crossing my fingers and hoping that the human studies will replicate the mouse results (not always the case!).

Antifragility

Learning to Love Volatility
In a world that constantly throws big, unexpected events our way, we must learn to benefit from disorder, writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324735104578120953311383448.html

This is a _really_ interesting article, I strongly recommend it to my reader(s). The author’s comments really mesh with my feelings and he hits on all sorts of topics that I also feel are interrelated. Antifragile really seems like it should be the next ‘big thing’. To attempt to whet your interest in reading the whole article, below are his five policy rules he believes should become part of our society’s DNA:

Rule 1: Think of the economy as being more like a cat than a washing machine.

Rule 2: Favor businesses that benefit from their own mistakes, not those whose mistakes percolate into the system.

Rule 3: Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.

Rule 4: Trial and error beats academic knowledge.

Rule 5: Decision makers must have skin in the game.

I would like to particularly highlight that last rule. What we have created today in our so-called capitalistic society (it really is oligarchical and has nothing to do with capitalism) is the exact worst case scenario for a strong and stable economy. By tying compensation to the stock price and to short-term periods we have created an entire culture of senior decision makers whose only purpose is to ‘pump and dump’ their own company. This culture is so pervasive that everyone actually thinks it is normal for CEOs to get paid 10’s of millions a year and then throw stock price bonuses on top! People who lack ‘skin in the game’ have absolutely no incentive to anything other than maximizing their short-term value. We have this giant merry-go-round in our senior CEO ranks where the few at the top take turns running different companies into the ground, then drift off in their platinum parachutes to sit on the bench for a while, then repeat at another company.

But hey, with the oligarchy in control, I don’t see any of the author’s rules being implemented, but it is a nice fantasy to think about as an alternative to dwelling on our current depressing reality.

Nanotube muscles

Tiny muscles pull a big punch
Coated carbon nanotubes form the basis of smart new material
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/346486/title/Tiny_muscles_pull_a_big_punch

Though we are a decade (at least!) away from any practical application, I find this quite interesting. I believe that we are starting to achieve breakthroughs that will enable us (as a species, of course) to build machines that might entirely lack any sort of metal or wiring. Current robots tend to be rather inflexible and the command/control mechanisms seem to be rather complicated, the idea of more organic structures seems to be a practical path forward to increase flexibility. Of course, I am sure the best versions will be hybrids of electromechanical and organic.

Then again, perhaps I am just fantasizing.

Women get younger every year!

Early Arrival
Premature puberty among girls poses scientific puzzle
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/346459/title/Early_Arrival

I find this article quite interesting on several levels. The list of possible ‘suspects’ is quite broad (no doubt they all have some contribution, very little is black or white in the real world) and the consequences interesting. An earlier post talks about how women are actually bearing children much later in age, it is interesting that women (girls) are becoming fertile at earlier ages. When I started to read the article I was wondering if there might be a genetic/epigenetic issue as well. Perhaps with mothers being older when bearing their first children, perhaps that sets up an epigenetic push to reduce the fertile age of the next generations. While it is easier to look at epigenetic data now than in times past, it is still a rather time consuming (hence expensive) process and not one that lends itself to whole genome analysis. I had high hopes that if I were able to build my DNA sequencing chip that it would be able to easily provide epigenetic data as well, too bad it looks like I will never get that chance.

I also wonder if measuring the size of little girl’s boobs is all that great a measurement of the onset of puberty if they are little porkers. As I have ‘matured’ (i.e., got fat as I got older) I also got boobs and looking down at them they look like they flirt with large A or possibly even small B, so fat little girls (and boys) likely have boobs that have nothing to do with sexual maturity. This, to me, is born out by the article’s comments that menstruation hasn’t seen the same ‘acceleration’ as the boob measurement. For boys it is much harder to know when they have reached sexual maturity, so it is difficult to know if there has been a change there.

A question regarding interest rates

A friend of mine sent me an email asking to leverage my MBA education to learn about government manipulation of interest rates. I decided to go ahead and respond to him through a blog post since I figured it might be interesting to some of my reader(s). Warning: an MBA doesn’t make someone actually that knowledgeable about any particular subject. Most of what is below is stuff I have accumulated over several decades of a somewhat relaxed study of business, economics and politics; I might be totally full of crap.

Hey,

I’m going to put your MBA to good use.

    1) When the economy is doing bad, the government lowers interest rates.

    If bad enough, almost to zero.

      a) This makes sense, to spur the business and little people to lend money or growth, thus growing the economy and fixing the problem.

    2) When the economy is doing good, the government raises interest rates.

      a) Certainly, at first when the rates are at near zero (after extended bad economy) – I can buy this one. They generally wait till good growth is going anyway, before lowering the boom.

      b) But once the rates get up to 3 to 4% (which is what it costs them and reasonable profit), why does the government keep raising rates, like up to 18% “to cool the economy”. If growing, let it grow? What’s bad about everything growing? They certainly get more taxes when the economy is growing.

Actually, the government manipulating rates was pretty much discredited back when it was tried in the late ’70s, early 80’s by Carter’s administration. The government has mostly learned that while it can attempt to bolster the economy by reducing interest rates (something that doesn’t have a lot of evidence is successful and instead tends to result in speculative bubbles), raising rates is highly problematic. Now (at least at present), the government tends to let the market set prices, even at when there is need for stimulus. For instance, the reason why US borrowing rates are at historical lows isn’t because of manipulations, it is because investors are afraid to invest and plow their money into what they consider safe assets (e.g., treasury bills). The market manipulation you are likely referring to (keeping the borrowing rates down) is a function of the Fed keeping the interbank lending rate down by acting as lender of last resort. The thought is that by lending to banks at ultra low (near zero) rates, the banks will then turn around and lend that money to consumers at low rates. That approach hasn’t been wildly successful because some of the companies that have access to those low rate are simply buying treasuries to get ‘risk free’ return on their investment and others are hoarding that money. Part of that latter behavior is also caused by government ‘decisions’ (interference) because deregulation allowed companies to become too highly leveraged and now the government is forcing them to deleverage which, naturally, results in the company holding on to profits (some will offer additional equity, but if the market doesn’t care for their equity the bank dilutes the current shareholders value without adding new value to compensate).

So, the government doesn’t attempt to influence rates directly, it relies on the Fed to do so (the Fed, contrary to popular knowledge, is NOT an arm of our government, but is a private, for profit company paid by our government to mange our money for us; think about that for a while!). The Fed does so primarily by setting lower intra bank lending rates (by offering those rates itself), but also by so-called quantitative easing…

‘Quantitative easing’ is where the Fed, rather than simply offering (nearly) interest-free loans, buys up large amounts of debt (in our particular case at present, lots of mortgage debt) thus depressing the price and making it economical to offer lower interest rates to borrowers and still operate profitably. For instance, say that a bank has money to lend (it has made regulators happy with the cash reserves it has on-hand and wants a better return than buying treasuries). If the bank lends that money as part of a mortgage it is making a 30 year gamble that inflation will be reasonable and that the borrower will be able to repay. When economic times are hard, lenders get skittish and tend to insist on higher qualifications, larger down payments and higher interest rates. That, naturally, depresses the number of borrowers which, naturally, depresses any economic recovery and if carried on past a certain point actually reinforces the economic bad times and can trigger (or exacerbate) a downward spiraling economy. Thus, the hope of the Fed is that by hoovering up certain types of debt that the original lenders will re-lend the same money under more favorable conditions, ideally stabilizing the economy or even triggering an upward, self-reinforcing spiral.

What caused huge run-ups in interest rates? Inflation! When inflation runs amok fixed-rate bonds become increasingly worthless (since they are paid back in non-inflation-adjusted dollars). Since any lender (think mortgages) is essentially buying a bond (the promise of fixed payments including interest), if the lender is expecting inflation to reduce the future ‘real’ value of the coming payments, the lender will want a higher rate to compensate. Only once inflation gets under control can interest rated come back down

As a side note, now that the subject of bonds has come up, if your financial adviser ever suggests you have less than 70% of your investments in equities, fire the guy! Even when retired and pulling money out for day-to-day living expense you should have no less than 60% of your assets in equities (stocks) simply because of the inflation protection (equities generally do no worse than track inflation and historically have substantially outpaced inflation). Unless you are retired, investing in bonds (unless you are gambling on the rates changing, you can buy bond options just like stock options) is a very poor way to grow your money. Yes, they pay back the principle, but what value is your same principle if inflation has cut its value in half? Immediate (6-8 month) needs should be held in cash or money markets, intermediate needs (1-2 years) in CDs or high quality short-term bonds and purt near everything else should be in equities (buy and hold is king! Don’t waste your money on funds!).

Another one bites the dust…

Hostess Brands closing for good
http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/16/news/companies/hostess-closing/index.html?hpt=hp_t4

Unions are not automatically bad, just like private equity is not automatically bad. However, just like private equity (something that should be very familiar to anyone who didn’t sleep the last two years; Romney represented the ‘best’ of private equity) is incentivized to make short-term decisions to maximize investor’s profits, unions are incentivized to grab the biggest piece of the pie they can. This, naturally, provides for a rather robust adversarial relationship betwixt ‘management’ and ‘workers’, one that can trivially devolve into personal acrimony that winds up in idiotic decisions that result in the worst case for everyone. This is a classic case. Hostess was struggling financially for the better part of a decade (I didn’t do any research on the whos, whys or werefores, but I speculate that it was crappy management decisions that triggered the angst of the workers that lead to the massive levels of distrust we see today), has already been through bankruptcy and is in bankruptcy again. It says that it will liquidate if one of the unions that represent its workers goes on strike and what happens? The union goes on strike! Result: instead of an 8% paycut to this particular union members (which, btw, would be made up in the next several years and replaced with a cumulative 25% cut of the company AND representation on the board), now they get a 100% paycut, but most critically, the _other_ 15,000 employees of Hostess ALSO get a 100% paycut as well.

Yes, there are good unions and unions have played pivotal parts in our nations successful industrialization. Yes, there are ‘vulture capitalists’ that take perfectly good companies and drive them into bankruptcy. But just like there are good private equity firms that makes the decisions the original owners could not (or would not) do, thus reviving a failing organization, there are idiot unions, managed, no doubt, by people who have never worked a day in their lives, that destroy perfectly good companies through their idiot demands. If a company is publicly traded then their books are wide open. If the books are not a faithful representation of the business, guess what? That is fraud and people go to jail for that. If the union doesn’t trust management to represent their best interests, I understand, but unless management is committing fraud (and it is publicly traded, naturally), the numbers don’t lie and any independent auditor can tell the union that their demands will drive a company out of business.

Were I one of those other 15K workers now unemployed because of those baker’s and their idiot decisions I might be doing some rampaging on their asses right about now!

Will Democratic success result in the extinction of our species?

How Republicans persuaded women to re-elect President Obama
For the activists of Emily’s List, working to improve women’s political representation, Republicans like Todd Akin were a gift
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/15/republicans-persuaded-women-reelect-obama

Yes of course my headline is a bit of hyperbole, but I really do have a point. As I was finishing up my previous post, mentioning the previous high birth rate, the idea that we are creating a society that will eventually stop breeding enough to continue made me think about birth control and the shifting of women’s child bearing patterns. The article above sort of crystallized the thought, so even though the article is at best tangentially related to my thesis I will be outlining below, I felt it was worth making the association.

It is rather well known that as a nation gets industrialized that its birth rate decreases. In fact, it tends to rapidly decrease to the point where the population growth actually turns negative (meaning that there are not enough children born to replace the old fogies as they die). France has got to the point they are actually paying women to bear children. The Japanese government wants to encourage immigration (I guess they know it is pointless to pay women to produce more children) but the native Japanese are extremely racist as a group and are strongly resisting the efforts (they are happy with short-term visitors, just not making them citizens). While the US has a net increase in population, ‘native’ members (i.e., second and subsequent generation immigrants) tend to birth at less than the rate needed to sustain a population (about 2.33 children per female). Something the rabidly anti-immigration Tea Party doesn’t realize is that without immigration there won’t be anyone to purchase their houses when they dodder off to a nursing home (staffed, of course, by immigrants on visitor visas because Americans don’t want to wipe each other’s butts), but hey, intelligence and forethought has never been an American strong point.

Anyway, my point is that the US already has a real problem with keeping its population stable (even if we open our arms to immigration, the fresh immigrants tend to drop right into our less than replacement birth rate in 1-2 generations) and this has been true with the GOP steadfastly doing everything in its power to marginalize women in an attempt to keep them barefoot and pregnant. Now, with the apparently clear repudiation of that effort (helped, of course, by the idiotic ‘coming out’ by the Todd Akins of the party) it seems highly likely that it will become even more difficult for America to maintain a positive birth rate. I can’t blame women for wanting control over their wombs (rather the opposite as regular reader(s) should no doubt know), but unless medical science figures a way to make child bearing easy, inexpensive and painless for 40 and 50 year olds, I see the success of this last election as likely putting the US on the fast track to extinction.

Of course, this somewhat changes if we manage to radically extend our (healthy) lifespan, something I also hold out strong hope for, but if women continue to reach the end of their child bearing ages at 40-50, then increasing lifespan doesn’t necessarily translate to satisfying the replacement rate. Each woman (on average) would have to choose to bear her 2.33 children before she reaches menopause, something already increasingly unlikely with our lifespan of ‘only’ 80 years. Doubling that life span doesn’t double the chance of children (unless menopause is also put off (and women still want to bear children when they are 80)), so as the third world gets industrialized (as it is quickly doing), I think that it is rather realistic to suppose that our species will go extinct with a whimper rather than a bang. Of course, those who breed the most will last the longest (as genetic strains are concerned), but while I am sure that some women will produce more children through the love of children or some personal obligation, I expect that most of her daughters won’t, unless, of course, they are part of some fundamentalist order where they are coerced into being barefoot and pregnant, but, my mind, that is taking huge steps backwards in civilization and not the direction I care to go.

Is there a solution? Should there be a solution? There are many realistic arguments to be made that the human population could use a large dose of population retrenchment, but reversing (or even stabilizing) that trend is the trick. Unless we go the opposite of China’s one child per couple restriction and create a 2.33 child per couple requirement (how the hell to enforce that!?), we would have to rely on much more passive, market driven processes. France’s idea of paying women to produce children is actually a fairly good one, it seems very plausible that many women put off child bearing because they want to have a stable home environment, if they could be compensated well enough that they could be confident that they could raise their children that, I am sure, would help a lot. Another thing, though, is the opportunity cost. Many women I know were/are quite intent on their careers and, absent a radical extension of human life span and coupled with the ever present ‘ageism’, is still likely to result in enough women putting off child bearing until it becomes very difficult to produce children. Something that _might_ work, but would require a rather radical redesign of our societal mores, is for some women being paid to be baby ‘factories’ and put their little dears up for adoption to the couples in their 40’s who have now managed to have their successful careers. Were this to become culturally acceptable (I see that as being a rather huge challenge to surmount) then that might go a long way toward stabilizing our population. Those women who really enjoy the child producing process (I am not talking about sex, you pervert!) could operate in a nice safe, financially secure environment and have their future looked after. They, of course, would have to produce well in excess of 2.33 children each, probably well over 10, possibly as many as 20 (it would all depend on what percentage of women born each generation were happy with a career of being ‘barefoot and pregnant’), so that, in and of itself, would be a massive challenge.

I expect, though, that either we will to extinct as a species (it might take a few thousand years, of course, but it would be very hard to reverse) or revert with a ‘bang’ to some sort of fundamentalism that traps women ‘barefoot and pregnant’ with no opportunity for anything else. Given my love of women who are _not_ barefoot and pregnant, I can’t support the fundamentalist direction. Additonally I see the culture change toward baby factories as unlikely, so I am someone convinced that we really will have an ‘apocalypse’ that we won’t recover from. Who knows, with longevity treatments we might all get to witness the end of our civilization.

Our ancestors were pretty damn smart

Stone me! Spears show early human species was sharper than we thought
Evidence of hunting with spears 500,000 years ago suggests common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals was ‘very bright’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/nov/15/stone-spear-early-human-species

People way too often equate ‘things’ with intelligence. How many of us, if plunked down in the middle of a jungle (or wherever) have the means to survive long enough to get rescued, let alone survive indefinitely, find a mate, raise a family, etc.? I bet the answer to that is ‘a very tiny number, statistically equal to zero”. I have studied survival tactics quite a bit over my life (am a big fan of Survivorman, though I expect he would also tell you that surviving is _way_ different from thriving) and I know that, unless you are lucky enough to be stranded in a place with plentiful food (which also tend to be places where there are a crap load of predators!), you will be spending nearly all your time producing enough food to keep from starving to death, and be hard pressed to produce enough to carry you through winter. Next year, presuming you survive, you get to start that process all over again! Modern farming/ranching/fishing is so incredibly efficient that 99%+ of our population no longer has to engage in food production or preservation (no, shopping at the grocery store is NOT the same!). Even those who engage in food production tend to be so highly specialized that they likely would die of malnutrition if they had to depend on themselves. That ‘ancient’ humans were smart enough to produce weapons like spears isn’t surprising or shocking to me, our intelligence didn’t spring out of a single mutation (or wave of God’s hand), it was something that slowly, incrementally grew over 10’s of thousands of generations (and millions of years). Take a baby Homo heidelbergensis and raise them in a (normal, healthy, stable) household today and I doubt that beyond genetic analysis and perhaps their bit more rugged physique (but then again, they might just look like a footballer), no one would know a thing. They would speak the same, have the same IQ (on average, of course, so were this a real experiment we could carry out, we would want to replicate this 100’s of times), etc. Our ancestors were no dummies, quite the contrary; I expect they were, on average, a lot more intelligent than we are and were _certainly_ more perceptive (you don’t pay attention to your surroundings, you die! No walking and texting for them!).

What is ironic to me is that the very success of our super intelligent ancestors is what has allowed our species to degenerate into a bunch of useless boobs who text themselves to death because they can’t be bothered with paying attention. It is that success that lead to the technological explosion that has allowed the incredible survival of the individual members of our species (except when we kill one another, but then again, we very quickly fill in the missing gap, so in as little as a generation we have surpassed the original population). Big families were the norm up until a few generations ago because you needed to produce a dozen babies to expect to carry on your genes through the next generation.

Pendulum swinging back?

Phony school “reform” agenda takes a beating
The media barely noticed, but voters in three states rejected the profit-driven fraud that is education “reform”
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/13/phony_school_reform_agenda_takes_a_beating/

I have decried our education system several times, particularly with respect to the ‘educational industrial complex‘ (see also here). It is interesting (and heartening) to me to see that this approach is being rejected, particularly by so-called ‘red’ states. I am somewhat optimistic that the pendulum is now swinging back towards the center (where it will race by to some other extreme, but such is the nature of pendulums). As a side note (but tangentially related), I am also glad to see that the huge ‘investment’ (to rich people, any money spent is an ‘investment’) made by the oligarchy to purchase our election was largely wasted. Clearly it was a close thing and without a doubt the Democrats were very well organized and laser focused on the parts of the country that mattered (which is all the more ‘shocking’ that someone supposedly as smart as Romney is to fuck up so much, but then again, his whole strategy was simply to be ‘not Obama’, so why waste resources, eh?), but the oligarchy poured lots of money into a whole suite of contests and lost so many of them, one has to wonder if they will continue to throw good money after bad or if they will decide that it is cheaper to buy the elected official after they have taken office.

Bit on the ass by the police state

FBI’s abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation
That the stars of America’s national security establishment are being devoured by out-of-control surveillance is a form of sweet justice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/petraeus-surveillance-state-fbi

As Glenn put it: “…there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America’s national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside”. I also find amusing the hypocritical behavior of the elite:

Recall how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman – one of the most outspoken defenders of the illegal Bush National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless eavesdropping program – suddenly began sounding like an irate, life-long ACLU privacy activist when it was revealed that the NSA had eavesdropped on her private communications with a suspected Israeli agent over alleged attempts to intervene on behalf of AIPAC officials accused of espionage. Overnight, one of the Surveillance State’s chief assets, the former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, transformed into a vocal privacy proponent because now it was her activities, rather than those of powerless citizens, which were invaded.

Maybe the national security state will devour itself and be gone in a puff of greasy smoke. However, I just can’t seem to bring myself to believe that will happen; these sorts of things are very difficult to eradicate once in place. They will just implement a layer of political correctness so only little people get bit on the ass as originally intended.