John Oliver on the evil UnitedHealthGroup

Luigi Mangione is scheduled to be sentenced on December 18, 2026. He became something of a folk hero after killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthCare, a health insurance company widely reviled for its practice of putting up block after block to prevent having to pay for the health care of its subscribers even when they faced life-threatening situations and even died because of the denials.

In his usual through way, John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight dissects the odious practices of UnitedHealthCare and the even worse practices of its lesser-known but even bigger parent company UnitedHealthGroup which, it turns out, is the third biggest corporation in the US. He looks at how it got so profitable by adopting practices that have infuriated both patients and doctors alike.

The obscene profits and behavior of these health insurance companies have to end and we have to create a single payer system that puts them out of business. As Oliver says, “at best they are pointless time wasting middlemen and at worst algorithmically driven, ruthless arbiters or who lives and who dies.”

The Lincoln pool debacle continues

I have to admit that ever since I discovered the existence of the livecam that points directly at the Lincoln Reflecting pool, I have been checking it regularly to see what progress is being made in fixing what has clearly become yet another symbol, if a minor one, of Trump’s utter incompetence at doing anything. While nowhere close to the cost in lives and money of his blundering in Iran and the economy, shredding formerly good relations with allies such as Canada and others, and so many other missteps, this failure is highly visible, even if he tries to hide the debacle by surrounding the pool with high metal fencing and then covering that with black tarpaulin. I am surprised that he has not ordered the livecam to be removed, since it directly contradicts in real time his repeated claims that the pool is almost fixed.

I asked my browser search engine whether the pool can be fixed and its AI replied with a confident ‘yes’ and then linked to a New York Times article from a week ago, presumably in support of its answer. But reading the article, one gets the sense, reinforced by the accompanying photos, that while work is being done on the pool, the problems may well be insurmountable. In reports to the administration, the contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings conceded that it was their own fault, and not that of vandals as claimed by Trump, that created this fiasco.
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Widow’s Bay shows how out of touch I am (minor spoilers)

Yesterday was the annual Emmy’s awards event that honors TV shows and it provided yet more evidence that when it comes to popular culture, I am hopelessly out of the mainstream. Usually I have not even seen any of the nominees, let alone the winners, of such awards but in this case I had watched the series Widow’s Bay that won a slew of Emmys since my daughters recommended it to me and there was a massive amount of positive publicity about it. So I watched the entire 10-episode series.

To say that I was disappointed is putting it mildly. I thought it was pretty bad. While there were some funny bits, what the series lacked was a story that made any sense. It is not the fact that it involves the supernatural that I found problematic. What is hard to stomach is when people act in utterly irrational ways in response to it.

Take for example, the basic premise that there is a small island off the coast of Massachusetts which has suffered from a curse for over three hundred of years. What caused the curse was never made clear but it manifests itself in many ways that are disjointed and lack coherence. One effect of the curse is that any resident born on the island dies as soon as they leave it. You would think that such a situation would create considerable unhappiness and trigger a massive investigation into what causes the deaths and how to escape the curse. But nothing. Nobody even talks about it, seeming to accept it with a “What can you do?” equanimity.
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AI generates a Navier-Stokes controversy

There is no question that AI systems, in addition to producing vast amount of junk known as AI slop, are also capable of solving major problems in mathematics and science. The problem is that the culture in which these private companies operate is very different for the culture of academic research. While academic researchers can be very competitive and argue over priority, there are some basic norms that they adhere to, such as acknowledging and giving appropriate credit to others in the field. This last week saw those two cultures collide.

Most people are familiar with Newton’s laws of motion that relates the forces acting on a system to its motion. The simplest case that is used in introducing the subject is where there is a constant force acting on single solid object. The situation becomes more complicated when there are multiple variable forces acting on many particles that are under various constraints, and thenthe equations take much more complicated forms.

One of the most important of such cases is where variable forces act on fluids, and the most general form of that situation is the Navier-Stokes equations that were developed by various people and achieved their final form around 1850. These equations are applicable to a vast array of physical phenomena, such as weather or shock waves or currents. They are partial differential equations which are notoriously difficult to solve and my own research did not deal with them at all. But the equations are of such importance that in 2000, one important aspect of the equations was selected as a Millennium Prize Problem, with a prize of $1 million to whoever solved it.
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What the hell is x?

Over at Pharyngula PZ had a post about Tucker Carlson and some guy mocking algebra, describing it as just inserting letters into numerical calculations for no apparent reason, and thinking that we could well do without it. It always amuses me when people take some deep subject and dismiss it as absurd simply because they are ignorant of it or they do not see any sense in it. What kind of mind must they have to so casually dismiss a venerable field of study that has been around for over a thousand years, developed by some of the finest minds, and is a bedrock of mathematics and science?

But I don’t want to waste any time on Carlson and his idiot friend but instead want to look at what algebra is about.

In learning mathematics, the first major stumbling block is fractions. Children find it hard to wrap their minds around fractions, how to add, subtract, divide and multiply them, and even locating them on the number line.

The next stumbling block for students the world over is algebra because it is their first experience with abstract mathematical manipulations. Indeed it is algebra that is the gateway to real mathematics. Up until that point students were doing arithmetic, which is what manipulating specific numbers is, and not mathematics, Mathematics is not about working with numbers (although they do appear) but about relationships between quantities and involve proofs and theorems to get widely applicable general results, all done symbolically using letters and other characters.
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The shaky business model behind AI

The New York Times Magazine has a very long article that asks the question, being posed in many quarters, as to whether we are in an AI bubble. The argument that we are hinges on the massive amounts of money that is being spent on data centers and computers estimated by Cory Doctorow to be currently running at about $1.4 trillion while the AI companies are getting revenues of only about $50 billion from subscriptions to their services. So where is the rest of the money coming from? From borrowing, as rich investors pour money into these AI companies in the belief that they will grow rapidly and be profitable at some point. This belief drives up the stock prices. As Doctorow says:

I’m pretty baffled that there’s people who say it’s not a bubble. Let’s just run the numbers again. Trillion dollars in expenditure this year, over $1.4 trillion total, $50 billion revenue. Seven companies, the magnificent seven that are 35% of the S&P 500. Six of them lose money on AI, and the seventh one makes money from the other six. [The ‘other six’ are Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Anthropic and the seventh is the chip maker Nvidia – MS]
…

That’s Nvidia, yes. They’re all passing around the same hundred-billion-dollar IOU really fast and pretending it’s in all of their bank accounts at once. The assets depreciate really quickly. They amortize those data centers and the GPUs in them over five years. They actually replace them every two to three years. The replacements, pretty intense.
…

GPUs, data centers, and the AI that runs on them, right? They’re saying that these things are going to last them about five years. The reason that matters is if you spend $1 trillion on stuff that’s only going to last five years, then in five years, you’re going to need another $1 trillion if you want to stay in business at least. Nvidia is actually doing some pretty amazing things with new generations of chips every year.

One of the ways they’re getting such performance out of these chips every year is they’re throwing away one of the principles that normally constrains new technology manufacturers, which is backwards compatibility. These new chips, they have really different heat dissipation, networking, power consumption, and often you can’t put them in the same building. You need to basically tear the data center down to the foundation’s lab and build another one for the next generation of chips.
…

These are not durable assets in this model. A third of the stock market, their assets depreciating every three years. They’re spending $1 trillion a year. They’re making $50 billion a year.

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The Facebook/Meta settlement

In a recent post, I discussed the book An Ugly Truth that looked at how Facebook/Meta valued engagement on the site as the most important goal because its profits depended upon having more and more users and having them spend more more and more time on the site. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic and other hateful posts had the effect of creating more engagement and so the company was reluctant to crack down on on them, doing so only when their was a massive public outcry.

Now Facebook/Meta has settled a lawsuit brought by various states alleging that, among other things, the company was cavalier with the harm done to young children.

Last Wednesday, Meta reached a settlement with the attorneys general of forty-seven states, who had sued it for illegally manipulating the attention of children. The settlement will cost the company, which didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing, up to seventeen billion dollars, a striking figure. Even more striking is a detail reported by the Wall Street Journal: during the second quarter of 2026 alone, Meta spent more than two billion dollars on its legal defense.

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Using the mantle of science to advance reactionary views

At the dawn of what is now called the New Atheist movement, I proudly called myself one, seeing myself as an ally in the fight against religious obscurantism. I now feel embarrassed by being identified with that label and distance myself from it. This is not because of what the label itself might signify. Labels (and language) are malleable and transitory and the meaning that I ascribed to it, that it meant that I believed that at a fundamental level, science was incompatible with anything at all supernatural which, inter alia, means that there are no gods of any kind, is something I still believe.

The problem is that New Atheists are now identified not by any definition but by a group of people who wrapped themselves with that label in the early days and thus is now associated with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, along with those who later chose to be aligned with them. Three of them (Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) have been revealed to have deplorable political and social views unconnected to the ones that attracted me. I now feel that the New Atheist label cannot be reclaimed from those associations and so feel compelled to abandon it in order to avoid being grouped in with them and their views.

Dennett and Hitchens have since died but others have joined with Dawkins and Harris to become part of the culture wars, moving away from dealing just with science and religion and going on to attack postmodernism and so-called ‘woke’ ideologies that they attack in the name of science. In the process, they have started to espouse deeply reactionary views and seem to now be more at home with right wingers and even MAGA types, as can be seen by their vociferous opposition to what they consider to be censorship by the left and what they call ‘cancel culture’. Under the banner of defending free speech and science, they now defend those who have been condemned for their sexist, Islamophobic, racist, and transphobic views.
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RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine crusade may have led to the deaths of 83 Samoans

RFK Jr has been a long-time vaccine skeptic. When he was up for his senate confirmation hearings for the post of secretary of health and human services, he downplayed that. But there was an incident in 2019 when he went to Samoa to spread his vaccine denial and afterwards there was a deadly outbreak of measles there. He had been chair and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit group known for its anti-vaccine activism. In July 2018, two children died in Samoa even though they had been vaccinated and Kennedy and CHD exploited that tragedy to cast doubt on vaccines. It later turned out that the fault was not the MMR vaccine itself but that it had been improperly prepared and thus contaminated and two nurses were criminally charged and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

When questioned about that during his senate conformation hearings, he said that his visit to Samoa had nothing to do with vaccines. But now a letter, obtained through lawsuit filed against the State Department by the AP and the Guardian with the aid of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has surfaced that shows that the visit was all about vaccines.
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The rise and fall of the evil Sackler family and the opioid addiction crisis

I have written multiple times before about the opioid overdoses crisis and the major role in its growth played by the Sackler family and their family-owned company Purdue Pharma. I just finished reading the excellent book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe that carefully reveals the sordid history of the family in creating the crisis, something that the family went to great lengths to conceal from the public. He shows that while other companies also manufactured, distributed, and marketed the opioids that have caused so much suffering and deaths and continues to do so even today, the Sacklers played a special role in creating the crisis.

Drugs obtained from the poppy flower (opium and morphine) had long been known to be powerful in combating pain but were prescribed and used very sparingly because they were known to be highly addictive. They also carried with them social stigmas. Opium was associated with seedy underworld opium dens where people smoked pipes in dreamy semi-conscious states while morphine was a powerful drug that was injected and mainly used to treat incurable pain such as from cancer and was also used as a palliative at the end of life. Both those associations discouraged casual use.

What the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma did was develop and market a drug based on the opiod oxycodone under the brand name OxyContin. They claimed that they had eliminated the addictive aspects of the drug by encasing oxycodone in a coating that allowed the drug to be released slowly over a 12-hour period. They said that this eliminated the immediate highs and the subsequent lows of the drug that led to addiction. Furthermore, the drug could now be delivered in a tablet form, even though it required a prescription, and they made it seem like a mild over-the-counter painkiller like aspirin and acetaminophen. They marketed it with a vengeance to physicians and pharmacists, claiming that it should be the painkiller of choice for even everyday pain like that associated with sprains and arthritis and backache, and used their lobbying clout with the FDA and DEA to avoid close scrutiny of their claims by regulators in those agencies, even though they had little or no data to support those claims.
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