Changes in the smaller population states can seen as more statistical in nature than significant, but the 43% drop in California seems hugely important.
Very encouraging. n.b.: I wish we could return to "inflation" as an increase in the money supply, creating higher prices, rather than just any price rise being an inflation (of prices, I guess,) and irrespective of it's cause.
Where I live there's been something of a "Dunkirk to Normandy" reversal of police presence and activity, especially with regards to traffic safety enforcement. Maybe this time the D in D-Day is for Donut, as in, the Dunkirk-like Retreat to the Donut Shop has been reversed to a Deployment From The Donut Shop. With the next generations of GLP1 Agonist miracle drugs coming out, it's probably the end of the Donut Shop era in both the metaphorical and literal senses. It's now entirely plausible that obesity in America will not just stabilize but decrease significantly every year from now on. This will especially be true when so many people look thin that being fat becomes like smoking cigarettes in public and too low status and shunned for people to resist the negative social pressure to lose weight.
Like most attempts to put subcutaneously-applied medicines into oral pills, results are pretty disappointing, require lots more substance, with lots more metabolites with related increase in side-effects. First-pass metabolism issues really are a bitch. The shots are really nothing, tiny pricks with insulin gauge needles.
People are already getting 3rd generation stuff from China via gray market for only $10-$20 a week, which, given the benefits, is crazy cheap. There is just no contest whatsoever between the ease and speed of weight loss via these agonists compared to the old fashioned way.
When I was in training we were told generics are essentially equivalent to brand names and subject to the same FDA rigor. With the entry of foreign generics makers (India in particular) I am no longer confident that is true. I recently switched my dog from generic to brandname Rimadyl for his joints and the difference was huge (anecdotal and it could be placebo effect on my part but that's what I saw)
Chemical synthesis of drugs is almost always a standard industrial process that benefits from huge economies of scale with negligible marginal costs and with outputs which are easy to test with cheap modern analytics equipment for purity up to many sigmas of quality assurance. Often times the core active substances are literally produced in the same mega-facilities with only branding and mostly unimportant tinkering being the only distinction between brand name and generic. The potential markup for brand favoritism is so much that the companies have a bad incentive to get right up to the legal lines to encourage people to believe otherwise.
You ain't seen nothing yet. I think there are about 20 million Americans using currently, and I predict this rises to 100 million by 2030. The only reason Novo Nordisk isn't worth even more and single-handedly responsible for Danish employment and GDP growth is because now they've got serious competition. Wegovy / Ozempic is semaglutide (1st gen) but Eli Lily has already released terzepitide (2nd gen) and is finishing up trials for the truly incredible 3rd gen retatrutide. I'm not exaggerating at all when I refer to it as a true miracle drug. It and other similar substances are going to be genuinely revolutionary. Bye bye 'People of Walmart'. In terms of waistlines, pictures of 2030s Americans are going to look like pictures of 1960s Americans. Like a lot of current AI breakthroughs, very few saw that coming even as recently as 10 years ago.
Most of those anorectics were tolerance-building abs habit-forming psychoactive stimulants (amphetamines, nicotine, xanthines - like caffeine, tropanes - like cocaine) These anorectics are different. We've had a decent biochemical model for over a generation of how appetite works in the interaction between the relevant organs and brain, the question has been how to tweak the big molecular signal processing system, and it took YEARS and a LOT of R&D and new tech to crack that code and be able to mass produce and test the synthetic peptides, but now, they have, leading to a Cambrian explosion of variations on that theme. Something similar can be said for efforts at treating erectile dysfunction. The issue with phosphodiesterase and cyclic-GMP was known for a while, but it wasn't known what might structures might inhibit the particular enzyme involved until discovered by serendipitous accident of middle aged guys being very happy to report to the investigators about the unexpected side effects in the early trials of sildenafil as a possible treatment for angina. After thousands of years of superstition and poor exotic animals pointlessly sacrificed for their spleen biles or whatever, and then just nitrogenic supplements which weren't much better, we finally had a treatment that constituted a genuine historical discontinuity. And now it seems that for obesity, we have another.
Reusable giant starships bigger than the Saturn V and landing on a precise spot standing upright, too. Blockchains worth trillions too. 15 years ago I was hearing a lot of malaise, frustration, and grousing by what I guess you might call the venturing class of young and ambitious entrepreneurially talented folks. Now they are all excited, energetic, enthusiastic, exhilarated, eager, and infectiously ebullient. Listen to some of Lonsdale's "American Optimist" podcasts for a taste.
As for a fusion breakthrough, we don't need it. Breeder reactors with reprocessing are old and mean very cheap and plentiful electricity for generations because we can transmute U238 into plutonium. The problem has been not technological but political in terms of risk of diversion to military applications and anti-nuclear public sentiment. If you look up "Deep Fission" you'll see a company trying to resuscitate the old idea of putting passivele failsafe high pressure reactors a mile down rock in a flooded borehole and letting gravity do the pressurization for you for free, you can just lower and lift the whole reactor up and down for maintenance on crane cables. Can't crash a plane into the reactor, control rods fall to automatically stop the reaction if not actively kept up. Need more juice? Drill baby drill, another bore hole close by. You could build a 100 gigawatt, or heck, terawatt, grid complex in the granite heights of West Virginia and run it by rotation like French Areva, and power most of the world's hyperscale datacenters, a third of which are already located next door in Northern Virginia because, by historical contingency of where they laid the original ARPANET lines, happened to put the "center of the internet" in Fairfax and Loudoun counties.
I have a relative applying for college this year. He wants to be a nuclear engineer. Back in the 1980s I didn't know a single nuclear engineering major.
I think that's smart. My guess is for a nuclear renaissance. NuScale just opened their "energy exploration center" (new generation nuclear control room simulator) at George Mason University, in part to encourage bringing up a new generation of engineers and technicians.
In practical terms, fusion energy is very far off. It is also unnecessary. 'Handle,' above, points to a few of the ideas in the currently-percolating "nuclear renaissance." Major problems may crop up for some of the more advanced ideas, but many will turn out to be workable. The constraints are mainly cultural, financial, and regulatory in nature -- not technical.
you might nee to analyze by model year. Honda introduced a chipped key around 2000 and old, pre chip Honda led in thefts. Maybe they are all junked o stolen by now. I don't know but somebody must?
Is 40,000 a good estimate of the absolute number of traffic-fatality excess-deaths, mid-2020 thru late(?)-2024?
For scale-comparison: 220,000 to 225,000 is equal to one-tenth of a TFR-point (0.1 TFR) in the early 2020s I.e., say TFR dropped from 1.500 to 1.400 between two adjacent years: Pegged to early-mid 2020s cohort-demographics in the USA, all races, that -0.1 TFR-point drop would mean an absolute-reduction in about 225,000 "babies not born."
Although it takes a long time for this particular "bill to come due," fluctuations of several-tenths of a TFR-point over 4.5 years have been enough for a reduction of several million babies not born.
The birth-rate drop associated with the early 2020s is 100x greater than the traffic-fatality excess-deaths of the same period (several million babies not born vs. apparently 40,000 extra traffic-deaths).
Those are some really large swings in traffic deaths, both positive and negative. How can that be explained?
Changes in the smaller population states can seen as more statistical in nature than significant, but the 43% drop in California seems hugely important.
The CA practice to license uncitizened drives was ill advised. They might be on the QT.
So, not only are deaths of exhuberance down, but thefts of exhuberance are down as well. Now if we can just get the trannies in line...
Very encouraging. n.b.: I wish we could return to "inflation" as an increase in the money supply, creating higher prices, rather than just any price rise being an inflation (of prices, I guess,) and irrespective of it's cause.
Where I live there's been something of a "Dunkirk to Normandy" reversal of police presence and activity, especially with regards to traffic safety enforcement. Maybe this time the D in D-Day is for Donut, as in, the Dunkirk-like Retreat to the Donut Shop has been reversed to a Deployment From The Donut Shop. With the next generations of GLP1 Agonist miracle drugs coming out, it's probably the end of the Donut Shop era in both the metaphorical and literal senses. It's now entirely plausible that obesity in America will not just stabilize but decrease significantly every year from now on. This will especially be true when so many people look thin that being fat becomes like smoking cigarettes in public and too low status and shunned for people to resist the negative social pressure to lose weight.
I’m amazed by how many people are on the shot.
I probably should be but it still costs so much and I keep thinking I can do it the old fashioned way again.
Just wait a year, the pill version is coming soon
I might jump on that. I just want a few more years to see if dead bodies start piling up.
Like most attempts to put subcutaneously-applied medicines into oral pills, results are pretty disappointing, require lots more substance, with lots more metabolites with related increase in side-effects. First-pass metabolism issues really are a bitch. The shots are really nothing, tiny pricks with insulin gauge needles.
Agree, but there must be a pill that can help lose last 10 lbs. Not every one needs the whole 9 yards.
People are already getting 3rd generation stuff from China via gray market for only $10-$20 a week, which, given the benefits, is crazy cheap. There is just no contest whatsoever between the ease and speed of weight loss via these agonists compared to the old fashioned way.
When I was in training we were told generics are essentially equivalent to brand names and subject to the same FDA rigor. With the entry of foreign generics makers (India in particular) I am no longer confident that is true. I recently switched my dog from generic to brandname Rimadyl for his joints and the difference was huge (anecdotal and it could be placebo effect on my part but that's what I saw)
Chemical synthesis of drugs is almost always a standard industrial process that benefits from huge economies of scale with negligible marginal costs and with outputs which are easy to test with cheap modern analytics equipment for purity up to many sigmas of quality assurance. Often times the core active substances are literally produced in the same mega-facilities with only branding and mostly unimportant tinkering being the only distinction between brand name and generic. The potential markup for brand favoritism is so much that the companies have a bad incentive to get right up to the legal lines to encourage people to believe otherwise.
That's the reasoning but my experience as an adult says that bad QC and greed can mess up anything
You ain't seen nothing yet. I think there are about 20 million Americans using currently, and I predict this rises to 100 million by 2030. The only reason Novo Nordisk isn't worth even more and single-handedly responsible for Danish employment and GDP growth is because now they've got serious competition. Wegovy / Ozempic is semaglutide (1st gen) but Eli Lily has already released terzepitide (2nd gen) and is finishing up trials for the truly incredible 3rd gen retatrutide. I'm not exaggerating at all when I refer to it as a true miracle drug. It and other similar substances are going to be genuinely revolutionary. Bye bye 'People of Walmart'. In terms of waistlines, pictures of 2030s Americans are going to look like pictures of 1960s Americans. Like a lot of current AI breakthroughs, very few saw that coming even as recently as 10 years ago.
I hope you're right. Every past miracle cure for obesity has turned out to have terrible consequences.
Most of those anorectics were tolerance-building abs habit-forming psychoactive stimulants (amphetamines, nicotine, xanthines - like caffeine, tropanes - like cocaine) These anorectics are different. We've had a decent biochemical model for over a generation of how appetite works in the interaction between the relevant organs and brain, the question has been how to tweak the big molecular signal processing system, and it took YEARS and a LOT of R&D and new tech to crack that code and be able to mass produce and test the synthetic peptides, but now, they have, leading to a Cambrian explosion of variations on that theme. Something similar can be said for efforts at treating erectile dysfunction. The issue with phosphodiesterase and cyclic-GMP was known for a while, but it wasn't known what might structures might inhibit the particular enzyme involved until discovered by serendipitous accident of middle aged guys being very happy to report to the investigators about the unexpected side effects in the early trials of sildenafil as a possible treatment for angina. After thousands of years of superstition and poor exotic animals pointlessly sacrificed for their spleen biles or whatever, and then just nitrogenic supplements which weren't much better, we finally had a treatment that constituted a genuine historical discontinuity. And now it seems that for obesity, we have another.
Good Lord, I had no idea. Perhaps we’ll go right back to the days of being fat as a signifier of wealth.
Robo-taxis, too.
Now, all we need is a massive fusion energy breakthrough.
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by '76 we'll be A-OK
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone
See rock shows near New York
Get tickets as low as $60
You might also like
Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
Taylor Swift
Fresh Out The Slammer
Taylor Swift
don’t wanna break up again
Ariana Grande
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(more leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Donald Fagan (A Half Steely Dan) modernist fusion lyrics; groovy Steve!
Reusable giant starships bigger than the Saturn V and landing on a precise spot standing upright, too. Blockchains worth trillions too. 15 years ago I was hearing a lot of malaise, frustration, and grousing by what I guess you might call the venturing class of young and ambitious entrepreneurially talented folks. Now they are all excited, energetic, enthusiastic, exhilarated, eager, and infectiously ebullient. Listen to some of Lonsdale's "American Optimist" podcasts for a taste.
As for a fusion breakthrough, we don't need it. Breeder reactors with reprocessing are old and mean very cheap and plentiful electricity for generations because we can transmute U238 into plutonium. The problem has been not technological but political in terms of risk of diversion to military applications and anti-nuclear public sentiment. If you look up "Deep Fission" you'll see a company trying to resuscitate the old idea of putting passivele failsafe high pressure reactors a mile down rock in a flooded borehole and letting gravity do the pressurization for you for free, you can just lower and lift the whole reactor up and down for maintenance on crane cables. Can't crash a plane into the reactor, control rods fall to automatically stop the reaction if not actively kept up. Need more juice? Drill baby drill, another bore hole close by. You could build a 100 gigawatt, or heck, terawatt, grid complex in the granite heights of West Virginia and run it by rotation like French Areva, and power most of the world's hyperscale datacenters, a third of which are already located next door in Northern Virginia because, by historical contingency of where they laid the original ARPANET lines, happened to put the "center of the internet" in Fairfax and Loudoun counties.
I have a relative applying for college this year. He wants to be a nuclear engineer. Back in the 1980s I didn't know a single nuclear engineering major.
I think that's smart. My guess is for a nuclear renaissance. NuScale just opened their "energy exploration center" (new generation nuclear control room simulator) at George Mason University, in part to encourage bringing up a new generation of engineers and technicians.
In practical terms, fusion energy is very far off. It is also unnecessary. 'Handle,' above, points to a few of the ideas in the currently-percolating "nuclear renaissance." Major problems may crop up for some of the more advanced ideas, but many will turn out to be workable. The constraints are mainly cultural, financial, and regulatory in nature -- not technical.
Thank you for taking the time to make these comments. It’s amazing what can be learned from the commenters here.
Beautiful World
DEVO
It's a beautiful world we live in
A sweet romantic place
Beautiful people everywhere
The way they show they care
Makes me want to say
It's a beautiful world
It's a beautiful world
It's a beautiful world
For you, for you, for you
It's a wonderful time to be here
It's nice to be alive
Wonderful people everywhere
The way they comb their hair
Makes me want to say
It's a wonderful place
It's a wonderful place
It's a wonderful place
For you, for you, for you
Hey, tell me what I say
Boy 'n' girl with the new clothes on
You can shake it to me all night long
Hey, hey
It's a beautiful world we live in
A sweet romantic place
Beautiful people everywhere
The way they show they care
Makes me want to say
It's a beautiful world
It's a beautiful world
It's a beautiful world
For you, for you, for you
It's not for me
(It's a beautiful world)
For you
(It's a beautiful world)
For you
(It's a beautiful world)
For you
(It's a beautiful world)
Not me
It's a beautiful world, it's a beautiful world
It's a beautiful world, it's a beautiful world
It's a beautiful, beautiful world
It's a beautiful, beautiful world
It's a beautiful, beautiful world
It's a beautiful, beaut...
Wasn't the car theft because new and used car prices shot up during the pandemic?
Why did homeowner's insurance jump so high the last 5 years? More claims or the cost of construction?
you might nee to analyze by model year. Honda introduced a chipped key around 2000 and old, pre chip Honda led in thefts. Maybe they are all junked o stolen by now. I don't know but somebody must?
Is 40,000 a good estimate of the absolute number of traffic-fatality excess-deaths, mid-2020 thru late(?)-2024?
For scale-comparison: 220,000 to 225,000 is equal to one-tenth of a TFR-point (0.1 TFR) in the early 2020s I.e., say TFR dropped from 1.500 to 1.400 between two adjacent years: Pegged to early-mid 2020s cohort-demographics in the USA, all races, that -0.1 TFR-point drop would mean an absolute-reduction in about 225,000 "babies not born."
Although it takes a long time for this particular "bill to come due," fluctuations of several-tenths of a TFR-point over 4.5 years have been enough for a reduction of several million babies not born.
The birth-rate drop associated with the early 2020s is 100x greater than the traffic-fatality excess-deaths of the same period (several million babies not born vs. apparently 40,000 extra traffic-deaths).