Tag Archives: Journalism

The Wall St. Journal quoted Peter Thiel’s business plans. It is mostly behind a paywall. By Peter Thiel          Sept. 12, 2014 11:25 a.m. ET What valuable company is nobody building? This question is harder than it looks, because your company could create a lot of value without becoming very valuable itself. Creating value isn’t enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create. New Republic points us to the politics of Democrats...

All Economists Are Bastards — Except Us Peter Frase has a very interesting post up about the role of popular culture in legitimizing the police.  Frase recounted a forum he attended with Alex Vitale  talking about his book, The End of Policing. In response to a question about why people believe that the function of policing is to maintain peace in the liberal order when its actual practice and history suggest otherwise, Vitale cited television cop shows...

The WaPo Gang Going After The Usual Suspects On the Budget Falls On Its Face Factually All right, all right, that is not completely fair.  Yes, they dump all over Trump and the GOP-run Congress for their massive tax cut directed at the rich, as well as the hypocrisy of the Republicans in so smoothly switching from denouncing budget deficits during the Obama era to a “what? me worry?” attitude now with deficits set to soar in a period of near full...

National Health Spending at $3.5 Trillion in 2017, CMS Says: CMS is reporting healthcare spending was $3.5 trillion in 2017. National healthcare spending grew by 4.6%, up 3 tenths of 1% from 2016. The increase was blamed on increased spending for Medicare and higher premiums for healthcare insurance. The increase in healthcare premiums can be partially attributed to Republicans blocking the Risk Corridor – Reissuances Programs which eliminated competition...

“There’s many a fly got stuck in there.” Who is Charlie Kirk? He is the 24-year old executive director and founder of Turning Point USA. Jane Meyer profiled the organization in the New Yorker in December: Based outside of Chicago, Turning Point’s aim is to foment a political revolution on America’s college campuses, in part by funneling money into student government elections across the country to elect right-leaning candidates. But it is secretive about...

I have been writing on healthcare for a while now and started to look at various topics with regard to pharmaceuticals. In my researching other topics, I found this particular correspondence to the Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Illuminating, if one might call it such? “A 1980 Letter on the Risk of Opioid Addiction” The NEJM published 1980 letter: Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics Recently, we examined our current files to...

(Dan here…another post lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Contra Mannheim First rules of blogging.  I type as I please.I haven’t read anything by Karl Mannheim but I think he wrote the phrase “social construction of truth”. I think that is a bad phrase and all use of it or similar phrases should be criticized. My reason is simple. I think anything true which can be said including the phrase “social construction of truth” can also be said using...

Hat tip Linda Beale contact forwards this Propublica job tracker post: What Happened to All the Jobs Trump Promised? President Trump has made many claims promising that individual companies such as Amazon, Alibaba and Boeing will hire large – and specific – numbers of American workers, a total of 2.4 million in all … We found that only about 206,000 of those jobs have been created so far … Roughly 136,000 of those were genuinely new positions, as opposed...

Along the line in the movie “The Sixth Sense, I see dead people. They don’t know they’re dead.” Repubs; “I see Secret Societies, others do not know they exist. They are everywhere.” Daily Beast’s Rick Wilson; “The story was falling apart even before the Moron Caucus beclowned themselves with the ‘Secret Society’ theme, because the memo obviously hadn’t done enough to reduce the Republicans in stature and seriousness. Seizing on a single, obviously joking...

Distractions,  Distractions Wow!  We have a great controversy!  A squib of a memo by the House Intel Comm has completely devoured the media.  A constitutional crisis!  Egad!  In two weeks, or maybe two months, it will be nothing.  But for now, well, very very very serious. At a minimum it has distracted everybody from Trump’s gloriously successful State of the Union speech, which was so well received until this distraction that he thinks will bring about...