Category Archives: Economics

Business, Culinary, Economics, Health, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society, Weird

Pig-Human Organ Farming

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“…doesn’t look promising yet.”

[Update a while later]

On the other hand, there’s this: They’re figuring out how to make store-bought tomatoes taste good. But we have to encourage them:

Consumers, known to gravitate towards the least expensive option, will have to vote with their wallets to keep flavorful tomato options on market shelves.
“The next time you’re in the store, you might consider paying a little more for a more flavorful tomato,” Klee says. If you do, you might find that the tomatoes of the future taste a little sweeter.

As someone who does shop price on tomatoes, I’ll have to try that. Lately I’ve been using fresh where I used to use canned, partly to avoid the extra salt (though you can get canned with no salt added). I may try better ones in my next tomato sauce.

[Update a few minutes later]

Forget growing organs in pigs; we may be able to 3-D print them soon.

Business, Economics, Health, Technology and Society

Curing Mouse Diabetes

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…with pancreases grown in rats:

“These results demonstrate not only that the rat-grown mouse pancreas is functional, but also that it is readily accepted by the immune system of the genetically matched recipient,” said Nakauchi. “In the future, any human organs generated in this way may also be functional and accepted by the immune system of the patient who donated the pluripotent stem cells.”

These results are exciting, but it’s ultimately a proof of concept if you look at what scientists hope to accomplish in the long term. “Their study is well executed and we’re happy to see the result,” Jun Wu, a research associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California who was not involved in the study, told Gizmodo. “But that’s rats and mice. To move to humans you have to take another step forward.” Rats and mice are much closer on an evolutionary scale than say, rats and people, or people and sheep, though scientists are working on growing human cells inside pigs as we speak.

Faster, please.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The “Hottest Year On Record”

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What are they hiding?

I was very gratified to see that all of the climate BS on the White House web site is now gone.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama did leave one more last-minute turd in the punch bowl; he outlawed three-way bulbs. That should be one of the first things that Trump undoes. In fact, Congress should repeal that idiotic law.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Department Of Energy

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Rick Perry now regrets wanting to say he’d abolish it:

“My past statements made over five years ago about abolishing the Department of Energy do not reflect my current thinking,” Perry said at his confirmation hearing Thursday to be secretary of Energy.

“In fact, after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination.”

Here’s the thing: Just because an entity does a lot of things doesn’t mean that it needs to be a department, with a cabinet secretary. All of the nuclear stuff was happening before the department was created in the Carter administration. The renewable R&D (if we should be doing it with federal money at all) could just as easily be done at (e.g.) Commerce. Or it would be an independent agency, like NASA. If you want to trim government, it starts by eliminating departments.

[Update a while later]

I hope this is true:

The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.

Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.

The screams of the stuck pigs will be deafening.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ignore the fake news about Rick Perry:

None of this is to make a positive case about Perry, who lost my vote (such as it is) when he walked back his bold and eminently sensible plan to get rid of one more usless cabinet-level department and reassign its core functions. But the treatment of Perry by the legacy press—Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree yesterday with journalists and other media types hyping and amplifying the Times’ story—is an object lesson in the urgent need for media literacy during the Trump presidency.

Simply put: Don’t believe everything you read, especially if you basically agree with the outfit reporting it and want to believe whatever moral lesson is being imparted (this goes for Reason loyalists, too, of course). I write this not as a Trump supporter or even as a Trump apologist. I would rather that he not be president of the United States. But he is and much of the media despises him while a solid chunk will also explain all of his bullshit moves. In either case, caveat lector, friends: Let the reader beware. We are entering one of the least-expected and weirdest episodes in American history and I remain optimistic that what we are witnessing are the death throes of a post-war Leviathan that is ideogically exhausted, financially unsustainable, and wildly unpopular.

I hope so.