Monday , March 18 2024
Home / Joel Eissenberg

Joel Eissenberg



Articles by Joel Eissenberg

Death of the 6% commission

1 day ago

Apparently, the National Association of Realtors has agreed to eliminate rules on commissions.“The NAR, which represents more than 1 million Realtors, also agreed to put in place a set of new rules. One prohibits agents’ compensation from being included on listings placed on local centralized listing portals known as multiple listing services, which critics say led brokers to push more expensive properties on customers. Another ends requirements that brokers subscribe to multiple listing services — many of which are owned by NAR subsidiaries — where homes are given a wide viewing in a local market. Another new rule will require buyers’ brokers to enter into written agreements with their buyers.”Some predictions are that commissions will fall by 25-50%,

Read More »

Fixing Social Security

2 days ago

If nothing is done, the Social Security Trust Fund is currently projected to run out in about 2033. At that point, projected benefits will fall by about 20%.The Boston Globe has an opinion piece about the coming Social Security crisis/crunch. It talks about how Canada deals with the problem. I have a subscription and so don’t know if the link below is paywalled, but here are the nut grafs:“Mechanically it works as follows. Every three years, Canada’s Chief Actuary estimates the minimum contribution rate required to finance benefits over 75 years. If this required rate exceeds the current rate — and if policy makers cannot agree on a fix — the backstop kicks in. Contribution rates are then automatically increased by 50 percent of the difference between

Read More »

High school financial literacy?

3 days ago

I thought this might make a fun follow-up on my post on 8th grade algebra. Over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum discusses a proposal to make a semester of financial literacy a high school graduation requirement. He feels that this would fill a much-needed gap:“There are no long-term tests of financial literacy that I can locate, and overall financial indicators aren’t flashing any red lights. Over the past few decades, both mortgage delinquency and credit card delinquency are down. Retirement accounts are up. Installment loan balances are down. Foreclosures and bankruptcies are down. Savings are up. Overdrafts are down.”Drum addresses the trend lines. That tells you where we are relative to where we were, but are the current levels of these metrics

Read More »

King Canute economics comes to Massachusetts

4 days ago

According to legend, King Canute tried to order the tide not to come in. Needless to say, he failed, divine rights of kings nonwithstanding.Back when we lived in North Carolina, we visited the Outer Banks a few times. There were many expensive homes on the shoreline. These were often casualties of hurricanes that would push ocean water up over the islands. Then, as the hurricanes moved up the coast, water that had been pushed into Pamlico Sound would rush back over the island. The Outer Banks were subject to constant erosion. I never understood why anyone would invest in a house there and why any insurance company would sell insurance on it.Now, it seems that property owners along Salisbury Beach MA squandered $600,000 after throwing 15,000 tons of

Read More »

Eighth grade algebra

8 days ago

I took Algebra I in 8th grade. Algebra I and typing were the two classes I took in junior high that I can say I have used regularly for the rest of my life (so far).In the school system I was in, there was tracking. Some kids got to take 8th grade Algebra I. The rest took regular math. The ones who took Algebra I in 8th took Geometry in 9th, Algebra II and Trig in 10th, advanced pre-calculus in 11th and Calculus in 12th. I got off that bus after 10th grade and took regular pre-calculus in 11th grade, then probability and statistics in 12th, along with a full year of computer programming.I took four quarters of calculus in college and never used any of it outside of the exams for the courses. I took college physics that didn’t use calculus. I took

Read More »

The economics of lighting

9 days ago

I grew up with the admonition that you always turn off the lights if you’re the last to leave the room. Or “close the lights,” as my grandma used to say. But home lighting technology has evolved considerably over the past couple of decades.1. Does it save money to turn out the lights when you leave the room?2. Does it shorten the life of the bulb by turning it off and on more frequently?If you have LED lighting, the answers are (1) not enough to notice and (2) not at all.A little more detail, courtesy of the NYT:1. “You could have a dozen of LED bulbs going 24/7, and they would still consume less energy than what a typical fridge uses in a day,”2. “The technology that makes LEDs glow is completely different than that of traditional incandescent bulbs,

Read More »

The Change HealthCare hack

11 days ago

This post uses material that a Facebook friend posted. I re-post it here with her permission.Any provider that uses a Billing Software (that has Change HealthCare integrated in their system as the main clearinghouse) can’t get claims to insurance companies once they medically bill for something/services in their software. Change Healthcare is the ‘bridge’. The claim goes from the provider, over the bridge, to the insurance company. Then once the claim and payment process, it comes back over the bridge and dumps into the software.The bridge has been blown up.Aside from not being able to get stuff over, there is a lot of money and explanation of payment/benefits that aren’t coming into the Billing Software from previous cut-off/adjudication cycles..

Read More »

Stand your ground

18 days ago

When we moved to Missouri in 1982, it was a purple state. In the last decade, it has become progressively more extreme right-wing. Now, in Missouri and more than 30 other states, each citizen is their own well regulated militia with the powers of judge, jury and executioner. Law-abiding citizens become collateral damage with no consequences. Sad.“The man accused of firing the first shots at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl rally told authorities he felt threatened, while a second man said he pulled the trigger because someone was shooting at him, according to court documents.“Experts say that even though the shooting left one bystander dead and roughly two dozen people injured, 23-year-old Lyndell Mays and 18-year-old Dominic Miller might have good

Read More »

City mouse, country mouse

20 days ago

Over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum takes on Paul Krugman over his assertion that small-town America is aggrieved because the working-age men are more likely to be unemployed than their metropolitan counterparts. As usual, Kevin brings the charts and numbers to show that while Krugman isn’t wrong, the differences are small and don’t explain “white rural rage.” Kevin notes that while pay is less in rural areas, the difference is mostly compensated by the lower cost of housing.So whence the grievance and anger? Kevin points the finger at right-wing media:“So what’s really going on? I’d guess that part of the answer is economic, but not at the individual level. Main street shops have gone away. Rural hospitals have shut down. The nearest doctor may be

Read More »

Distinguishing science from pseudoscience

24 days ago

When I was in college majoring in microbiology, we were taught that diseases like scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jacob and kuru were caused by “slow viruses.” Over many years, it has become clear that misfolded proteins, not viruses, are the cause of these and other spongiform encephalopathies. Stanley Prusiner struggled for a long time to convince the scientific community of prions, for which he eventually got the Nobel Prize. There are many historical examples of orthodoxy overturned by better science. Science thrives on paradigm shifts. But not every challenge to orthodoxy has equal merit. The molecular cell biologist Peter Duesberg is one of a handful of scientists who have challenged the HIV basis for AIDS. The success of anti-reverse transcriptase, HIV

Read More »

Vaccination works

27 days ago

Other than among Jehovah’s Witnesses, vaccination rightly gained widespread trust and acceptance in America. Innoculation against smallpox was around for hundreds of years before Jenner described the eponymous vaccine. Polio was a scourge in the US through the 1950s until it was virtually eliminated by vaccination. Many deadly diseases like whooping cough and measles were all but elimated in my lifetime through vaccination.Now, thanks to rank politicization, COVID vaccination rates are way down and measles vaccination rates are falling. While I respect personal freedom, your freedom ends where my nose (and life) begins. Viruses don’t respect politics, and measles is one of the most contagious viral pathogens:“Measles is one of the most contagious

Read More »

Just askin’ questions in Utah

28 days ago

In January, the governor of Utah signed the “Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act.” The law sets up a process for the state to overrule or otherwise ignore federal rules and decisions.For now, the law is just performative right-wing Republican bafflegab. While it appears to set up a challenge to the US Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause,” Governor Sandall denies this:“Our attorneys have indicated to me that the process that’s in place is constitutional,” he said. “It doesn’t have a constitutional (issue) simply because it’s a process. Any kind of resolution may or may not be deemed constitutional.”Of course, the Constitution only means what the SCOTUS says it means.It remains to be seen whether Utah has the testicularity to actually defy federal law. For

Read More »

The end of IVF in Alabama?

29 days ago

One of the corollaries to the “life begins at conception” view is that all zygotes created by in vitro fertilization are fully human, so their deliberate destruction is ipso facto murder. This would effectively end IVF, since most zygotes will never be implanted. So sayeth the Alabama Supreme Court:“An embryo created through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a child protected by Alabama’s wrongful death act and the Alabama Constitution, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled on Friday.“In a case originating from Mobile, LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic, Inc., the Supreme Court held in a 7-2 decision that parents of frozen embryos killed at an IVF clinic when an intruder tampered with an IVF freezer may proceed with a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic

Read More »

Review of Beyond the wall: A history of East Germany by Katja Hoyer

February 12, 2024

I first met my friend Gunter at a scientific meeting on the Greek Island of Crete in 1986. He was from East Germany. I knew his published work at the time, and when I shared my unpublished data, he agreed to send me some Drosophila stocks that would advance my research.At the meeting, he and the other scientists from behind the “iron curtain” had no western currency, so as to discourage defections. Collections were taken up for them among the western attendees to allow them to join the rest of us in the nearby town of Chania for an evening meal.In the 1990s, Gunter hosted me for three visits in his hometown of Halle. By then, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Gunter had traded in his Trabant for a BMW. I returned the favor by hosting him for a seminar in

Read More »

Fusion power won’t save us

February 10, 2024

“Using the Joint European Torus (JET) — a huge, donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak — the scientists sustained a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. That’s enough to power roughly 12,000 households for the same amount of time.”Progress, yes, but incremental.“And myriad challenges remain. Khan points out that the team used more energy to carry out the experiment than it generated, for example.”The promise of fusion is “limitless energy.” If there’s net energy consumption, that’s not limitless. It’s not even commercializable.“The record was announced the same day that the European Union’s climate and weather monitoring service, Copernicus, confirmed that the world has breached a global warming

Read More »

Is the genome a “blueprint for life?”

February 9, 2024

Not all genes, their mutations, and the conditions caused by those mutations are overwhelmingly complex. We’ve known for decades that sickle cell disease is caused by a specific nucleotide change at a specific position in the human adult beta globin gene, and we can predict the consequences to a patient with the disease to a high degree of accuracy. The fact that there are so many CRISPR trials underway now is testament to the clarity of our understanding of the target genes.Yes, there’s a lot we don’t know about human genes. Some of that is because ethically we can’t do the experiments necessary to test hypotheses. But yeast, bacteria and viruses also have genes and we know a great deal about those genes and the pathways they subserve. This book seems

Read More »

Why does the GOP hate capitalism?

February 8, 2024

From a comment thread over at jabberwocking.com:“The walls are more a sign of desperation than power. A better way is to fix Central America so there is a larger buffer between the US and the problems in South America. Fixing includes making conditions in the continent prosperous enough for all that we don’t have hordes desperately attempting dangerous journeys.”Exactly. Walls don’t work. But the GOP would rather spend billions on futility than spend it on foreign aid to stem economic and political migrants/refugees in the first place. Never mind that most foreign aid also creates jobs in America. Why doesn’t the GOP trust American capitalism?
Tags: Foreign aid, The border

Read More »

What’s holding back Alzheimer Disease therapy?

February 3, 2024

My dad died a few years ago with dementia. The diagnosis was Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia (FTD), based on a psychiatric evaluation and brain imaging. After he died, we had a brain autopsy done, which returned a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. So which was it? As far as I know, it could be both. But what this little anecdote illustrates is the tension between diagnosis of dementia in a living patient and the use of histopathological diagnostic criteria postmortem.The New York Review of Books has a review of “How not to study a disease: The story of Alzheimer’s” by Karl Herrup. The review itself is paywalled, but I’ve attached a link to a summary of the book’s premise by the author. Alzheimer’s disease was first described in 1906, based on a single

Read More »

Getting control of the border

January 28, 2024

The single most significant thing Republicans could do to reduce undocumented immigration is to require E-Verify for all hires and jail employers who don’t use it or who hire in spite of it. Why not use this?“At the same time, ordinary economic migrants could be most effectively dealt with via E-Verify. If you make it hard to hire undocumented workers, they’ll stop coming. The problem is that even immigration hawks tend to downplay this because it might actually work, and that would piss off the business community that wants lots of cheap foreign labor.”Follow the money, peeps.How do we get control of the border?
Tags: E-verify, economic migrants, Southern Border

Read More »

Messaging the 2024 election

January 25, 2024

This post is long and flirts with the 10% fair use limit, but I’ll try to keep under it.Dave Kellogg has a blog post up from a few days ago comparing the messaging of Team Trump vs Team Biden. Read the whole thing, but here are some core points. Kellogg distills the Democratic two-word message to “Save Democracy” and the GOP two-word message to “Save America.”In short: • “Republicans want to save the country, Democrats want to save an idea. Saving the country is infinitely more visceral and motivating.

• “Republicans want to fight crises, Democrats want to fight a man. This positions the Republicans as trying to help the average American and the Democrats as fighting a personal battle.“Logically, the Republican message almost auto-justifies

Read More »

Personalized medicine

January 23, 2024

I went to an optometrist yesterday. Among the various gizmos I was assaulted with was a device that imaged the back of my eye. The doc showed me the images. In addition to my blood vessels, my optic nerves and my macula visible directly, the software also supplies tomography at various position across the field to reveal the thickness of my retina at any position. It was very cool.I had a similar experience with imaging in the dental surgery office when I had my dental implants a few years back. The x-rays immediately showed up on a large monitor, where I could see the details of jaw bone tissue relative to the implant base. Again, very cool.Of course, imaging has been a feature of colonoscopies for many years, but I missed it because I elected to be

Read More »

Sports Illustrated RIP

January 21, 2024

I remember reading SI occasionally when I was a kid. I liked the writing and the photos. As a long-distance runner, I was mostly interested in articles on track, cross-country and marathons. I wasn’t interested in ball sports. And don’t get me started on calling auto racing a “sport.”I see where Sports Illustrated is on the ropes. It’s another symptom of the collapse of the dead tree journalism industry. I’ve certainly contributed to that collapse by moving mostly to online news and blogs. Hell, I read most books on my Samsung ereader these days. But I still get the dead tree issues of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.Is the world poorer without SI? Probably not. Sports is entertainment. The scientific world still needs journals. History

Read More »

“On-the-fence voters” are OK with Trump’s contempt

January 20, 2024

According to yesterday’s navel-gazing piece in the Boston Globe*, “on-the-fence” voters are edging to supporting Trump because they feel looked down upon by Democrats. WTF? Do they seriously believe that Trump *doesn’t* look down on his supporters? It is blindingly obvious that the only person on the planet that Trump cares about is Donald Trump. The toolkit of Trump and the Trump GOP consists entirely of cultivating resentment: resentment of American laws, American law enforcement, the American judicial system and anything that will distract his base from the fact that he’s a billionaire under criminal indictments exploiting the very system he’s telling his base is exploiting them.In the polls I’m reading, the American people place the economy at the

Read More »

The medium is the message

January 19, 2024

The alleged “appeal” of Ron DiSantis is that he’s “Trump without the baggage.” So why is DiSantis (and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other Trump imitators) doing so poorly? The answer is that the Trumpenproletariat *want* the Trump baggage. To them, that’s his appeal.The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan nailed this decades ago: the medium is the message. Trump is the medium and thus Trump is the message. Anyone else is a different medium and thus cannot be the same message. If you, like me, listen to the actual, you know, content of Trump’s speech and are puzzled, it’s because you don’t understand McLuhan’s point.I had the same problem with Reagan. When I listened to him, he always sounded to me like a genial old fool. After his debates, I

Read More »

Is America a racist country?

January 17, 2024

Decades ago, I read a column by Andrew Young, the former Atlanta Mayor and UN representative, in which he wrote that you should never trust anyone who says they aren’t racist. You should say I’m working on my racism.Recently, the former South Carolina governor and current GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley omitted to mention that slavery was a cause of the Civil War (it was *the* cause–see the Cornerstone Document, as just one exhibit). Now, Haley says this: “We’re not a racist country, Brian. We’ve never been a racist country.”As a country, the United States was conceived in chattel slavery. That’s encoded in the Constitution. Those slaves weren’t White, they were Black, and the reason for their enslavement was racist, full stop.Never mind that

Read More »

Advances in Parkinson’s research

January 17, 2024

Every day brings new of “breakthroughs” in biomedical research. Most of these are incremental advances, and many you never hear about again because they couldn’t be replicated, failed in early clinical trials, or some other problem.But as described in this link from Wired, I think this could be real progress for Parkinson’s therapy research. While I’ve checked for all the known risk alleles in genes like SNCA, PINK1, LRRK2, PARK7, etc. in my genome sequence and I don’t have ’em, there are sporadic cases that aren’t associated with specific genetic risk. It looks like there are now new tests–one involving cerebrospinal fluid and one scratch-and-sniff test–that predict Parkinson’s years before the pathological symptoms appear. This will impact drug

Read More »

Capitalism prevails

January 15, 2024

I’m reading Homelands: A personal history of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash. The book is organized by decades, and the decade of 1980-89 was a historically significant one for Central Europe. By the end of the decade, the “communist” dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had collapsed.Real history resists simplification, but to simplify, the seemingly permanent division of communist East and capitalist West succumbed to the reality that the economic regime of the East was fanciful. It simply couldn’t compete in delivering material goods and innovation. The physical and regulatory barriers separating the two systems were too porous.I’ve thought for years that the reason Castro survived for so long in Cuba was that US

Read More »

The People’s State (book review)

January 12, 2024

My friend Gunter grew up in the German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”). He eventually established himself as a professor at the Genetics Institute at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenburg, He first came to my attention through a series of papers he published in the early 1980s that I read as a postdoc. Then, in the summer of 1986, I got to attend a meeting on the Molecular and Developmental Biology of Drosophila, sponsored by the European Molecular Biology Organization on the island of Crete. There, I met Gunter in person, where he shared with me some unpublished data that helped advance my research at the time. He later sent me some useful fly stocks, for which I included him on a publication from my lab.After the wall fell, I visited Halle

Read More »

It ain’t over, folks

January 8, 2024

Here we are in a presidential election year, and one of the two major party candidates certain to get the nomination is still claiming the last one was stolen from him. Now, he refers to the criminals who were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison over their Jan 6 crimes as “hostages.” When did the party of “law and order” become the party that attacks the American criminal justice system?“The ongoing Republican defense of the failed coup means January 6th never really ended. Politically we’re still living in an open-ended January 6th. You can see it every time an elected Republican refuses to admit who won the 2020 election, the refusals to admit that Trump attempted a coup and failed. You have to look long and hard to find an elected Republican

Read More »

I love predictions

January 1, 2024

As a career research scientist, I’ve made many predictions in my time. It was fun and rewarding to design controlled experiments to test my predictions. And the wonderful thing about science is that, if your prediction is wrong, you learn something new. I don’t make many predictions myself these days. But I’m interested in the predictions of others. Not because I necessarily trust them. But when someone shows their work, you can weigh their judgment going forward.About ten years ago, I was following a blog of a guy I went to high school with. In the comment threads, there were forever these dire predictions of hyperinflation in America around the corner because of the national debt. Of course, they proved wrong, and foreseeably so. People who know

Read More »