Results for “food” 2044 found
LBRY in NYTimes
Last week I wrote about Elrond, yesterday another one of the blockchain firms that I advise, LBRY, made the NYTimes. LBRY is YouTube on the blockchain and it’s not just a White Paper but a working product and potentially serious competitor to YouTube. The piece by Nathaniel Popper, however, is swarmy with a lot of bullshit innuendo like this:
Minds, a blockchain-based replacement for Facebook founded in 2015, also became an online home to some of the right-wing personalities and neo-Nazis who were booted from mainstream social networks, along with fringe groups, in other countries, that have been targeted by their governments. Minds and other similar start-ups are funded by prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.
Get it? Without exactly lying, Popper associates venture capital with supporting neo-Nazis. Garbage reporting. It’s like saying last year 75% of neo-Nazis ate at McDonald’s, their favorite all-American restaurant. Or, neo-Nazis have been known to use Apple phones to arrange their rallies. Or neo-Nazis often pay for their purchases using a private, untraceable means of payment marked by strange symbols and widely used to illegally purchase drugs, guns, and prostitutes.
Surprisingly, the real story is in the sub-head, “companies inspired by cryptocurrency are creating social networks, storing online content and hosting websites without any central authority.”
And do check out LBRY, a platform from which you cannot be deplatformed.
Sunday assorted links
What should I ask Dana Gioia?
Dana is what I call one of the world’s information billionaires. For more specifics, here is part of his Wikipedia page:
Michael Dana Gioia (/ˈdʒɔɪ.ə/; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet and writer. He spent the first fifteen years of his career writing at night while working for General Foods Corporation. After his 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” in The Atlantic generated international attention, Gioia quit business to pursue writing full-time. He served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) between 2003 and 2009. Gioia has published five books of poetry and three volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, song cycles, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies.
Gioia is the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California, where he teaches, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum. In December 2015 he became the California State Poet Laureate.
He is also well-known as a composer of opera libretti, and more recently as a spokesperson for the importance of Catholicism for culture. And he is brother of TedGioia, former CWT guest. And here is Dana’s home page.
I will be doing a Conversation with him — so what should I ask?
How Rapidly ‘First Doses First’ Came to Britain
Tim Harford writes about the whiplash he experienced from the debate over delaying second doses in Britain.
What a difference a couple of weeks makes. In mid-December, I asked a collection of wise guests on my BBC radio programme How to Vaccinate the World about the importance of second doses. At that stage, Scott Gottlieb, former head of the US Food and Drug Administration, had warned against stockpiling doses just to be sure that second doses were certain to be available, Economists such as Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University had gone further: what if we gave people single doses of a vaccine instead of the recommended pair of doses, and thus reached twice as many people in the short term? This radical concept was roundly rejected by my panel
…. “This is an easy one, Tim, because we’ve got to go with the scientific evidence,” said Nick Jackson of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “And the scientific evidence is that two doses is going to provide the best protection.”
My other guests agreed, and no wonder: Jackson’s view was firmly in the scientific mainstream three weeks ago. But in the face of a shortage of doses and a rapidly spreading strain of “Super-Covid”, the scientific mainstream appears to have drifted. The UK’s new policy is to prioritise the first dose and to deliver the second one within three months rather than three weeks…..the recommendation comes not from ministers but from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
Strikingly, many scientists have given the move their approval.
See also Tyler’s previous post on this theme.
By the way, if the J&J single-dose vaccine comes in at say 80% effective it is going to be interesting to see how people go from ‘a single-dose at 80% effective is too dangerous to allow for 8-12 weeks’ to ‘isn’t it great we have a single-dose 80% effective vaccine!’.
What I’ve been reading
1. Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820. One of the best books on the history of Enlightenment science, in addition to the core material it focuses on how the leading researchers went about creating public audiences for their investigations and for the scientific questions that interested them. Indirectly, it is also a good book for understanding the importance of social media today. And unlike many books of science, it properly places the “could you actually make a career out of doing this?” question in the forefront.
2. The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922. It is striking how quickly in his life Eliot is corresponding with very famous people, including Bertrand Russell, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Julian Huxley, Herbert Read, Wyndham Lewis, and others, all before Eliot himself is renowned. I also enjoy the 23 March 1917 letter to Graham Wallas where Eliot boasts about his new job at Lloyds, praises the extraordinary nature of banking work, and roots for a salary boost. Later Hermann Hesse and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are added to the mix, and this is only volume one (out of eight). I have ordered more. Simply reading the short bios of the letter writers, at the end of the book, is better than most other books.
3. Lara Lee, Coconut and Sambal: Recipes from my Indonesian Kitchen. Yes, I have been learning how to cook Indonesian food, a natural extension of my previous interest in cuisines from India, Malaysia, and Singapore. This is an excellent book for several reasons, and a better book yet for a pandemic. First, you can fold it open easily on the kitchen counter. Second, the pages can take some wear and tear. Third, the key ingredients are readily storable. Galangal, turmeric, and narrow red chiles all freeze very well. Refrigerated lemon grass stays good for at least a few weeks. Shallots and garlic and coconut milk and cream are easy enough to buy and store. This is actually the #1 issue for a cookbook, if like me you cannot so often plan your cooking in advance. The Thai grocery in Falls Church has all the “marginal’ ingredients as well. On top of everything, the resulting food product is yummy!
Money-maximizing macaque thieves demand ransoms
At the Uluwatu temple in Bali, monkeys mean business. The long-tailed macaques who roam the ancient site are infamous for brazenly robbing unsuspecting tourists and clinging on to their possessions until food is offered as ransom payment.
Researchers have found they are also skilled at judging which items their victims value the most and using this information to maximise their profit.
Shrewd macaques prefer to target items that humans are most likely to exchange for food, such as electronics, rather than objects that tourists care less about, such as hairpins or empty camera bags, said Dr Jean-Baptiste Leca, an associate professor in the psychology department at the University of Lethbridge in Canada and lead author of the study.
Mobile phones, wallets and prescription glasses are among the high-value possessions the monkeys aim to steal. “These monkeys have become experts at snatching them from absent-minded tourists who didn’t listen to the temple staff’s recommendations to keep all valuables inside zipped handbags firmly tied around their necks and backs,” said Leca.
After spending more than 273 days filming interactions between the animals and temple visitors, researchers found that the macaques would demand better rewards – such as more food – for higher-valued items.
Bargaining between a monkey robber, tourist and a temple staff member quite often lasted several minutes. The longest wait before an item was returned was 25 minutes, including 17 minutes of negotiation. For lower-valued items, the monkeys were more likely to conclude successful bartering sessions by accepting a lesser reward.
Here is the full story, via David Curran.
Half-Doses as Good as Full?
NYTimes: A top official of Operation Warp Speed floated a new idea on Sunday for stretching the limited number of Covid-19 vaccine doses in the United States: Halving the dose of each shot of Moderna’s vaccine to potentially double the number of people who could receive it.
Data from Moderna’s clinical trials demonstrated that people between the ages of 18 and 55 who received two 50-microgram doses showed an “identical immune response” to the standard of two 100-microgram doses, said the official, Dr. Moncef Slaoui.
Dr. Slaoui said that Operation Warp Speed was in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical company Moderna over implementing the half-dose regimen. Moderna did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Each vaccine would still be delivered in two, on-schedule doses four weeks apart, Dr. Slaoui said in an interview with “CBS’s Face the Nation.” He said it would be up to the F.D.A. to decide whether to move forward with the plan.
Half dosing would double Moderna doses permanently rather than temporarily (as with First Doses First). Thus, I would be very happy to see half-dosing and it would obviate the need for FDF.
I and a handful of others started to discuss and advocate First Doses First on Dec. 8 and many times since then. The advocacy was then joined by Tony Blair and by many epidemiologists, immunologists, vaccine researchers, physicians and public health experts as well, of course, by the British experts on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. It’s clear that the FDA and Operation Warp Speed are now feeling the pressure to take some serious actions to increase supply. If so, my small efforts will have had a very high return.
Keep the pressure on.
Addendum: By the way, the British have yet to approve the Moderna vaccine (probably because they can’t get doses for some time anyway) and the AstraZeneca vaccine appears to work better with a longer dosing interval. So FDF makes sense for the British and we can do half-dosing on Moderna, potentially setting a new and beneficial standard for the entire world.
Globalization is older than you think
Asian spices such as turmeric and fruits like the banana had already reached the Mediterranean more than 3000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. A team of researchers has shown that even in the Bronze Age, long-distance trade in food was already connecting distant societies…
Working with an international team to analyze food residues in tooth tartar, the LMU archaeologist has found evidence that people in the Levant were already eating turmeric, bananas and even soy in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. “Exotic spices, fruits and oils from Asia had thus reached the Mediterranean several centuries, in some cases even millennia, earlier than had been previously thought,” says Stockhammer. “This is the earliest direct evidence to date of turmeric, banana and soy outside of South and East Asia.” It is also direct evidence that as early as the second millennium BCE there was already a flourishing long-distance trade in exotic fruits, spices and oils, which is believed to have connected South Asia and the Levant via Mesopotamia or Egypt.
Here is the full account, I strongly suspect globalization is much older than is commonly believed. Via Bruno M.
Dan Wang’s 2020 letter
Most of it was about China, but here was my favorite part:
The key to reading Proust is not to pay too much attention to the plot. It’s of no great import, and one has to get used to abrupt shifts. In this way the novel is like Moby-Dick, which can shift from the politics of dining at Ahab’s table to a loving tour of the literal interior of a sperm whale’s head. Couldn’t find the transition? No matter, that detracts not at all from the wonderfulness of the scenes. Focus instead on the humor. There are many funny things that take place in the aristocratic set pieces, such as the constant misunderstandings of M. de Charlus at the dinner of the Verdurins, or his suspicion at the violinist who professes to enjoy solving algebra equations until late into the evenings, or his interactions with the Duc de Guermantes. Really anything with Charlus portends comedy.
Interesting throughout. And:
I may not not have accomplished much in life, but I’m proud at least to have eaten thalis in Chennai, pizza in Naples, and mie goreng in Singapore.
I know that Beijing is not the world’s best food city, but it might be the best food city for me. One can grab expensive sushi at the restaurant favored by the Japanese embassy or walk a few blocks and order five plates of dumplings for $20. One can find decent dosas, lots of Thai food, and even a bagel store whose breads would be out of place on the Upper West Side but would not be in San Francisco. Best of all, every region of China is represented in this city. To deal with the various challenges of a pandemic year, I found solace in stuffing my face.
I managed to sample dishes from all the provinces this year, including the relatively obscure cuisines from places like Anhui, Guangxi, and Jiangxi. My favorites are: Shanghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan…
Here is my four-step process for ordering success in China:
- Greens are usually the glories of the cuisine: order as many vegetables as there are people
- If you will have a meat, consider the juiciness that pairs well with the starch: something saucy if you will eat with rice, or less saucy if you will have soup noodles
- Order Yunnan mushrooms if they are on the menu
- Fill out the rest with cold appetizers, they are never a bad idea
Here is the full piece.
Jeff Holmes does a CWT with Tyler
Here is the summary:
On this special year-in-review episode, producer Jeff Holmes sat down with Tyler to talk about the most popular — and most underrated — episodes, Tyler’s personal highlight of the year, how well state capacity libertarianism has fared, a new food rule for ordering well during the pandemic, how his production function changed this year, why he got sick of pickles, when he thinks the next face-to-face recording will be, the first thing he’ll do post vaccine, an update on his next book, and more.
Here is the full dialogue, with audio and transcript, here is one short excerpt:
I think the downside of state capacity libertarianism is simply realizing there are some very nice features to not being surveilled all the time, as they do in China. When I said a moment ago that the United States is not very good at trace, though it’s good at innovating — if you had stronger state capacity, presumably you should worry more about state surveillance, and I do. That, to me, is the best case against state capacity libertarianism as I envision it.
Even though having a good trace regime would have been fine in this instance, I’m not sure it would have been a good precedent.
I also tell you what I thought of the guests we had on for the year, and also which episode had the most downloads. Self-recommended.
And if you have enjoyed this year in Conversations, please consider donating here before the end of the year. Thank you!
Can You Hear Me Now? No.
I know, I know, you are tired of me beating on the FDA. Too bad. The beatings will continue until mortality improves.
Today’s beating, however, concerns hearing aids rather than than vaccines. The current system, much like the optometry racket, requires that hearing aids be purchased through an audiologist:
WEBMD: A pair of hearing aids runs $5,600 on average — a cost that health insurance doesn’t typically pick up. In order to get the devices, people with hearing loss must have a medical exam to rule out the slim chance of a serious medical problem that is causing the hearing loss, or they must sign a waiver opting out of the exam. You can only buy hearing aids through an audiologist or a licensed hearing aid dispenser, who is authorized to test hearing and sell hearing aids.
…choosing a hearing professional limits a person’s hearing aid choices, and changing audiologists as a result of location or personal preference could require a person to change hearing aids, too.
Due in part to these hurdles, once a person starts to lose their hearing, they wait an average of 7 years before they seek help.
The NYTimes continues the story:
By now, we were supposed to be swiftly approaching the day when we could walk into a CVS or Walgreens, a Best Buy or Walmart, and walk out with a pair of quality, affordable hearing aids approved by the Food and Drug Administration….in 2017, Congress passed legislation allowing the devices to be sold directly to consumers, without a prescription from an audiologist. The next step was for the F.D.A. to issue draft regulations to establish safety and effectiveness benchmarks for these over-the-counter devices.
Of course, the FDA is likely to miss the deadline. But even I am willing to cut them some slack, given other more pressing concerns. The real issue, however, is one that the NYTimes doesn’t confront and that is why does the FDA regulate hearing aids at all?
Headphones and earbuds are not regulated as medical devices and hearing aid technology is similar to hearings buds with a sophisticated equalizer. Indeed, you can even buy “personal sound amplification products” that are not FDA regulated or approved. It’s only the somewhat arbitrary declaration that these products are “medical devices” that brought them under FDA regulation to the detriment of consumers. The National Academy of Sciences report agrees writing:
FDA has established regulations for hearing aids, including quality system regulation requirements, mandatory labeling, and pre-purchase medical evaluation (or a documented waiver). These regulations, along with a number of state regulations, have largely restricted the availability of hearing aids to being mainly dispensed through medical, audiology, or hearing instrument specialist venues.
…In examining the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) requirements for physician evaluation prior to obtaining hearing aids, the committee finds no evidence that the required medical evaluation or waiver of that evaluation provides any clinically meaningful benefit.
Addendum: In some positive news the FDA lifted its ban on the first non-prescription, at-home SARS-COV test and also on a prescription, paper-strip test. Now all we need is a non-prescription paper-strip test! Come on guys.
Are IPO price pops signs of market irrationality?
Maybe not, or so I argue in my latest Bloomberg column. As you may know, the first day price pops for Airbnb and Doordash were considerable, Airbnb more than doubling in its first day of trading: Here is one excerpt:
On IPO day, each prospective buyer is wondering what the shares will be worth, and to a great extent looking to the judgment of the other investors. A buyer might start the day willing to pay $60 a share, but upon seeing that many others are willing to pay more, maybe she will, too. It is like Keynes’s famed “beauty contest,” where investors are guessing as much about each other as about the company.
In such a setting, prices can rise or fall extremely quickly, as the very process of trading reveals information about the stock’s value. That in turn makes it possible for the share price to soar on the first day of trading, creating the “pop.”
Now consider this scenario from the perspective of the issuing investment bank. If it sets the IPO price too high, it may set off a downward spiral of negative enthusiasm. Traders will see that most of the other traders think it is overpriced, leading to a plunge.
It’s all a bit like a restaurant on a Saturday night. If the place is seen as “cool” — whether because of its food and service (the product), its setting (the physical asset) or its ambience (the brand) — there will be a line out the door. Otherwise it will be fairly empty. Furthermore, the presence of a line will draw continued interest over time. It is hard or maybe even impossible to set prices so that every table is filled yet there is no line. To deploy some technical language, the demand curve may be discontinuous.
In this position, the IPO issuer likely will set the initial price too low — leading to a “line,” excess demand, and a big run-up in price on the first day. If the price is super-high in the first place, the market mood would be nervousness rather than eagerness, and most investors wouldn’t be able to see the surges in demand visible in lower price ranges.
Keep in mind that this surge in buying interest only has to make investors modestly more enthusiastic about the quality of the firm to generate a potentially big increase in final valuation.
All this said, in the current case, there is the question of why the initial prices were so low. Several theories present themselves: The markets for DoorDash and Airbnb might be more “winner take all” than usual. The value of those companies might be more closely linked to the value of their intangible assets. Or maybe the future of online services might be especially hard to predict in the midst of a pandemic, thus inducing larger bandwagon effects.
It is worth noting that differing auction systems for IPOs have not produced obviously superior results.
This has been quite a week for science
Vaccine approval in the UK, protein folding advances, isn’t there a SpaceX launch today?, and now this:
Cultured meat, produced in bioreactors without the slaughter of an animal, has been approved for sale by a regulatory authority for the first time. The development has been hailed as a landmark moment across the meat industry.
The “chicken bites”, produced by the US company Eat Just, have passed a safety review by the Singapore Food Agency and the approval could open the door to a future when all meat is produced without the killing of livestock, the company said.
…The product would be significantly more expensive than conventional chicken until production was scaled up, but Eat Just said it would ultimately be cheaper.
…The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption. A plant-based serum would be used in the next production line, the company said, but was not available when the Singapore approval process began two years ago.
As Eli said on Twitter, what are they planning for Thursday? Here is the full story, via Michelle Dawson. Just yesterday I was rereading my CWT with her, it is very good.
Best movies and films of 2020
I categorize them on the basis of when I watch them, so there is always some slippage at the beginning and the end of the year, all the more for foreign films, which can come to the U.S. as much as a year or two later than their original release dates. Of course this year was very different and there was hardly anything wonderful from Hollywood. Here is the list, as usual in the order I saw them:
Monos, Spanish-language, Lord of the Flies-type elements.
The Guilty, Danish police story, mainly talk, limited settings, really good.
Just 6.5, Iranian war on drugs movie, brutal at times, culturally fascinating.
The Wedding Plan, a few years older, a Rama Burshtein movie, imagine an Israeli woman setting out to get married by a particular date no matter what.
Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy. I think you need to have a preexisting connection to Mexico and Mexican food to enjoy it. I do.
Graduation, 2016 Romanian movie about trying to cheat on your kid’s exam. Excellent.
An American Pickle, Straussian critique of the Woke.
Tenet, if only to see a blockbuster again.
Cuties, yes it was really good, even if sometimes uncomfortably exploitative in its treatment of the source material, namely dancing young teen girls.
My Octopus Teacher, god-awful sentimental and storified, but everyone loved it.
The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman, set in Cameroon, about cross-cultural differences.
Chez Jolie Coiffure, set in a Brussels hair salon, women from Cameroon and DRC talk to each other, from the same director as Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman, they make a nice set piece and are both quite short.
The Wild Goose Lake, set in Wuhan, a kind of Chinese noir, you have to already like Chinese cinema for this one.
Talking About Trees, Sudanese movie about the reopening of cinema.
Lovers Rock, Small Axe, Jamaican emigres in 1980 London.
Usually I put this list out later in the year, but what is the point of waiting?
MIT graduate micro exam, 1961
From the archives of Irwin Collier (I won’t do any extra indentation):
Economics Candidates: Answer any FOUR questions (thirty minutes each).
S.I.M. Candidates: Answer any TWO questions (thirty minutes each).
- Within the framework of static, partial-equilibrium theory, indicate under what circumstances advertising will reduce product prices in the long run, (a) if the advertiser is a simple monopolist, (b) if the advertisers are members of a large, perfectly symmetrical, Chamberlinian group of suppliers of differentiated products (the number of firms being large enough to rule out oligopolistic relationships, and variable in accordance with a long-run-equilibrium condition of zero profit for all firms).
- How is a firm’s demand schedule for a particular factor of production derived (a) when that factor is the only variable one, and (b) when the quantities of all factors are variable? Show which of these demands is, if anything, the more elastic.
- The demands for two products are: q1 = q2 = 54 – p1 -p2. How would you characterize their relationship? If they are produced by separate sellers at constant average costs of c1 = 12 and c2 = 6, respectively, calculate each man’s equilibrium price, quantity, and profit under each of the following conditions:
- Each seller assumes that the other’s price is a constant;
- The second seller behaves that way and the first seller realizes that he does;
- Both sellers maximize their joint profit and share it equally.
- Two countries can produce food (F) and clothing (C) with labor (L) as the only factor of production. Country A has 20 billion units of L, each of which can produce either 5 units of F or 2 units of C. Country B has 10 billion units of L, each of which can produce either 8 units of F or 6 units of C. Everyone always spends half of his income on F and the other half on C. In a purely competitive equilibrium with balanced trade between the two countries (and no transportation costs), what is the effect on the quantities of F and C produced and consumed in each country? Could either country benefit by imposing a tariff on the imported good?
- What are the various reasons why a free-private-enterprise economy may fail to allocate its resources in an optimally efficient way? Explain.
- Discuss the roles of “real” and “monetary” elements in a satisfactory theory of interest. Is it logically possible to fashion an interest theory exclusively in terms of one or the other of those elements? Explain.
TC again: I don’t think current graduate students (outside of MIT and a few other places) would do very well on #1, nor do I think they would understand what is being asked on #6, much less have a good answer. On #5, I wonder how many would give a sufficiently analytical answer rather than just repeating a bunch of cliches from media and social media?