Too early to write epitaphs for the GOP

Despite Republicans winning a majority in the House of Representatives, there has been plenty of unhappiness in the GOP camp because the majority they obtained was much smaller than they expected and they even lost a seat in the Senate. This has resulted in calls for a change in party leadership, with challenges to Kevin McCarthy’s attempt to become speaker and to Ronna McDaniels efforts to be re-elected as the head of the Republican National Committee. Add to that the release of the report of the January 6th committee and their four criminal referrals of Donald Trump. The party leadership is clearly concerned that another erratic Trump run for president would lead to more losses, and their inability to do anything about it for fear of alienating the base that is devoted to him have all led to an image of a party in disarray.
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Film review: Glass Onion (2022) (No spoilers)

Yesterday Netflix released the second in the series of whodunits featuring Daniel Craig as the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc, playing him with a caricatured Southern accent, vaguely reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ outrageous French accent as Inspector Clouseau. The writer snd director Rian Johnston is a self-admitted devotee of the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery novel and he clearly brings that sensibility to his films. The first one Knives Out (2019) followed the classic form of the genre, taking place in the large country home of a wealthy person, so that the suspects are limited to being few in number.

The second takes the same form except that location is more exotic, the luxurious home on the private Greek island of a billionaire tech entrepreneur who invites a group of his friends and collaborators for a weekend to take part in a murder mystery game. During the event, old animosities surface because of the arrival of the billionaire’s former collaborator who claims that he cheated her by stealing the idea that made him rich, and that the others colluded with him.
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How should inflation figures be reported?

Inflation has been high recently, not just in the US but in many parts of the world. How inflation is calculated is to take a basket of goods and calculate their cost and see how they change over time. In the US, there are two inflation indices: regular inflation and what is called ‘core inflation’, which omits food and fuel from the basket because those tend to fluctuate more over the short term and thus introduces volatility.

Whichever index you choose, whenever the inflation figures are reported each month in the US, Kevin Drum complains about the fact that it is the year-over-year number that is reported. He says that this gives a misleading picture of whether there is inflation right now and that a month-to-month comparison would be better.
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Not everything is a symbol of one’s political persuasions

We seem to be living in a time when the most mundane actions take on political significance.

Take for example the wearing of masks. Rather than taking it at face value, which is that the wearer may have reduced immunity or is taking a cautious approach to the transmission of infection diseases and is trying to avoid getting infected or infect others, some view it as the wearer making a political statement in support of the vaccination lobby and the medical-pharmaceutical-Fauci axis of evil and against freedom-loving Merkins.

The same thing seems to be happening with Tesla cars where drivers report being harassed by other users, often by people driving big, gas-guzzling, smoke-belching trucks. The animosity seems to not be against Tesla particularly but against people who, by driving an electric vehicle, are seen as signaling that they are concerned about the environment.
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US life expectancy drops again

For the second straight year, US life expectancy dropped, according to the CDC. It is now the lowest it has been in 25 years.

As per the 2021 data, Americans are expected to live 76.4 years, down from a peak of 78.8 years in 2019.
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The finalised numbers confirm preliminary ones released by the CDC in August, in which the health agency predicted the worst two-year decline of life expectancy on record in the US since 1923.
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Life expectancy in the US remains lower than the UK, where the average is 80.8 years. It is also lower than neighbouring Canada, where life expectancy as of 2020 is 81.75 years.

Of both countries, the US spends the highest amount of money on healthcare. Per capita, the US pays $12,318 (£10,217), while the UK spends $5,387. Canada’s healthcare spending, in comparison, sits at $5,511 per capita.

Covid-19 and drug overdoses are being blamed from the drop.

“COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths, or 74%, of the decline from 2019 to 2020, and 50% of the decline from 2020 to 2021.”

Drug overdose deaths are also a factor. They now account for more than a third of all accidental deaths in the US, the data shows. Overall, overdose deaths have risen by 16% from 2020.

This includes deaths involving fentanyl, which increased by 22% in 2021.

While the pandemic effect should slowly decrease, there’s no sign that the drug issue will follow.

These are the good old days

There has always been a market for nostalgia. Some of it is due to each person, other than those who had traumatic experiences, looking back on their childhoods with rose-tined glasses. Some commentators, especially right wing ones, alarmed by the progressive changes that are taking place in terms of greater equality for marginalized groups, have seized upon that tendency to proclaim that things have deteriorated from some prior golden age. They seem to have fixated on the 1950s as the high point in US history, completely ignoring the fact that it was not a good time time for anyone other than middle-class white cis people.

Currently, there are doomsayers who try to convince the public of this by picking on some cultural features and complaining that people no longer have a work ethic, have become hypersensitive and lost their sense of humor, and that men have become less manly. These fears are reinforced by the echo chambers of social media, and that constant repetition may convince some that these things are really true.

(Non Sequitur)

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Ignore Musk the troll, focus on the businesses

Elon Musk clearly loves to be in the news and he does so by making outlandish statements about all manner of random topics in the news whenever he has the chance. Jack Shafer provides many examples of this and says that the media keeps falling for it. This has the added advantage (to Musk) of distracting people from the more serious news of the performances of his businesses, which are not good.

What we should be focusing on are the actual facts. One is that in 2021, the last full year when Twitter was public and thus we knew something about its finances, it had gross revenues of about $5 billion ($4.5 billion from advertising) and made a profit of $221 million. This means that its costs were about $4.8 billion. This was a high point for revenues and one of the few years when it made a profit.

After Twitter borrowed about $13 billion to allow Musk to take it private, that added another $1.5 billion in costs to service the debt, meaning its total operating costs are now $6.5 billion. Furthermore, advertisers dropped out, reducing revenues to about $3 billion. This means that Twitter was on a path to lose $3.5 billion a year, which is unsustainable. Musk has cut staff by almost half but that will save at most about $2 billion, leaving a gap of $1.5 billion to close, while risking core operational functions. This problem of a large negative cash flow is what Musk is faced with.
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Unwarranted anxiety over memory lapses

I am at the age when people begin to worry about the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. It does not help that this topic keeps surfacing in conversations among age-peers in one’s family and friends and acquaintances, thus keeping it at the forefront of one’s mind. But it is easy for people who are not clinicians trained in the symptoms of these diseases to become unduly alarmed over things that are merely the effects of normal aging and not signs of serious cognitive decline. Misplacing items, being unable to recall the name of an object or an actor in a TV show or film, forgetting why one went into a room, are among the things that cause unwarranted uneasiness.

This article tries to dispel some of those concerns, by distinguishing between normal aging-associated memory loss and mild cognitive impairment. Every year about 10-15% of people with mild cognitive impairment will develop dementia.
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