Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• The Tech Antitrust Problem No One Is Talking About

  Americans pay more for broadband internet service and have fewer choices than consumers in other countries.

  The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. "If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples," says Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.
  ...
  Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband-Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T-argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen internet access. A Microsoft study estimated last year that as many as 162.8 million Americans lack meaningful broadband, and New America's Open Technology Institute recently found that US consumers pay, on average, more than those in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in North America.

• AMA? BITFD!

  No, by far the primary annual revenue engine for the AMA is ... royalties.

  In 2018, the American Medical Association made $158.6 million in 100% gross margin revenues by licensing its name and logo and membership lists to everyone from its own insurance brokerage subsidiary - the AMA Insurance Agency - to every pharma co or medical device co or whatever co that was willing to pay for that stamp of approval and halo of authority.

  That's how the AMA makes its money. Not so much by selling TO you - the doctors of America - with membership dues and overpriced PPE and merch, but by selling YOU - the doctors of America - to anyone who wants to buy your name and your reputation.

  ... The AMA is a tax-exempt hedge fund and licensing corporation. The American Medical Association is designed from the ground up to enrich its executives.

• Economics is a disgrace

  Claudia Sahm

  The lack of diversity and inclusion degrades our knowledge and policy advice. We hurt economists from undergraduate classrooms to offices at the White House. We drive away talent; we mistreat those who stay; and we tolerate bad behavior.

• Bjorn Lomborg - False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

  Michael Shermer podcast interview.

  Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it's not the apocalyptic threat that we've been told it is. Projections of Earth's imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education.

• Nanomedicine comes of age with mRNA vaccines

  What's even more striking is that this vaccine is based on an entirely new technology. It's an mRNA vaccine; rather than injecting weakened or dead virus materials, it harnesses our own cells to make the antigens that prime our immune system to fight future infections, exactly where those antigens are needed. This is a brilliantly simple idea with many advantages over existing technologies that rely on virus material - but like most brilliant ideas, it takes lots of effort to make it actually work.

• Sour Grapes

  Peter Beinart

  Settlements like Psagot, where Pompeo sipped wine named in his honor, don't just appear. They are generally the product of land theft. It works like this. The Israeli government employs Ottoman, Jordanian, British mandatory and Israeli military law (pretty much whatever it can find) to declare chunks of the West Bank "state land." In other words, ownerless. Then it parcels that land out for Jewish settlement. The dispossessed Palestinians can lodge legal challenges, but as non-citizens, they almost always lose. The Israeli government is accountable to Jewish settlers, not to them.
  ...
  By any reasonable definition, this is institutionalized bigotry. In a single territory, two ethno-religious groups live under a different law. Jews enjoy citizenship, due process, free movement and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. Palestinians enjoy none of these rights.

• Jordan Peterson Is Not the Second Coming

  So why has a generation of wayward young men welcomed him as their messiah?

  In recent interviews, Peterson has said he needs "three more years" before he can really sort out his beliefs about the Jesus resurrection story in a way he feels comfortable articulating in public. He does not, for example, attend church, but he is wrestling with it all. In 12 Rules for Life, he writes with genuine emotion about the martyrdom of Socrates and Christ's 40-day struggle in the desert with Satan's temptations. From a distance, it looks as though he is preparing himself for a transcendent new level of ministry.

  Therein lies danger. Peterson may articulate an end goal of balance, but at the moment he's offering order against chaos, yang against yin. The effort is, by definition, reactionary, counter-revolutionary. But once you place yourself squarely on one side of the pendulum, you'll inevitably exaggerate the collective demerits of the other while indulging in-group excesses. Dogma throughout history has had its freedom-killing flaws, he readily admits, but, well, sometimes people just need to be told what to do. This is conscious authoritarianism, and Peterson is volunteering for the job.

  Power corrupts, and relationships alter behavior. "This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face," Peterson writes at one point. In setting himself up as rule-maker to an adoring flock and flirting openly with the idea that he is being visited with capital-r Revelation, the professor threatens to become unmoored from the winning pragmatism of his clinical practice. Stepping into an exalted role as avenging angel against a feminine chaos can descend quickly into self-parody.

• How to think for yourself

  Paul Graham

  There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where the most conventional-minded people are confident that they're independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry they might not be independent-minded enough.
  ...
  Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify it, or at least not to suppress it.