Category Archives: Business

Of walking sticks, canes, scepters, and wands.

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Franklin’s walking stick, willed to General Washington. Now in the Smithsonian.

Many famous people carried walking sticks Washington, Churchill, Moses, Dali. Until quite recently, it was “a thing”. Benjamin Franklin willed one, now in the Smithsonian, to George Washington, to act as a sort of scepter: “My fine crab-tree walking stick, with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of the cap of liberty, I give to my friend, and the friend of mankind, General Washington. If it were a Scepter, he has merited it, and would become it. It was a present to me from that excellent woman, Madame de Forbach, the dowager Duchess of Deux-Ponts”. A peculiarity of this particular stick is that the stick is uncommonly tall, 46 1/2″. This is too tall for casual, walking use, and it’s too fancy to use as a hiking stick. Franklin himself, used a more-normal size walking stick, 36 3/8″ tall, currently in the collection of the NY Historical Society. Washington too seems to have favored a stick of more normal length.

Washington with walking stick

Walking sticks project a sort of elegance, as well as providing personal protection. Shown below is President Andrew Jackson defending himself against an assassin using his walking stick to beat off an assassin. He went on to give souvenir walking sticks to friends and political supporters. Sticks remained a common political gift for 100 years, at least through the election of Calvin Coolidge.

Andrew Jackson defends himself.

I started making walking sticks a few years back, originally for my own use, and then for others when I noticed that many folks who needed canes didn’t carry them. It was vanity, as best I could tell: the normal, “old age” cane is relatively short, about 32″. Walking with it makes you bend over; you look old and decrepit. Some of the folks who needed canes, carried hiking sticks, I noticed, about 48″. These are too tall to provide any significant support, as the only way to grasp one was from the side. Some of my canes are shown below. They are about 36″ tall, typically with a 2″ wooden ball as a head. They look good, you stand straight, and they provides support and balance when going down stairs.

Some of my walking sticks.

I typically make my sticks of American Beech, a wood of light weight, with good strength, and a high elastic modulus of elasticity, about 1.85 x106 psi. Oak, hickory, and ash are good options, but they are denser, and thus more suited to self-defense. Wood is better than metal for many applications, IMHO, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. The mathematician Euler showed the the effective strength of a walking stick does not depend on the compressive strength but rather on elastic constant via “the Euler buckling equation”, one of many tremendously useful equations developed by Leonhard Euler (1707-1783).

For a cylindrical stick, the maximum force supported by a stick is: F = π3Er4/4L2, where F is the force, r is the radius, L is the length, and E is the elastic modulus. I typically pick a diameter of 3/4″ or 7/8″, and fit the length to the customer. For a 36″ beech stick, the buckling strength is calculated to be 221 or 409 pounds respectively. I add a rubber bottom to make it non–scuff and less slip-prone. I sometimes add a rope thong, too. Here is a video of Fred Astaire dancing with this style of stick. It’s called “a pin stick”, in case you are interested because it looks like a giant pin.

Country Irishmen are sometimes depicted with a heavy walking stick called a Shillelagh. It’s used for heavier self-defense than available with a pin-stick, and is generally seen being used as a cudgel. There are Japanese versions of self defense using a lighter, 36″ stick, called a Han-bo, as shown here. There is also the wand, as seen for example in Harry Potter. It focuses magical power. Similar to this is Moses’s staff that he used in front of Pharaoh, a combination wand and hiking stick as it’s typically pictured. It might have been repurposed for the snake-on-a-stick that protects against dark forces. Dancing with a stick, Astaire style, can drive away emotional forces, while the more normal use is elegance, and avoiding slips.

Robert Buxbaum, April 20, 2023.

Britons did better than Germans since Brexit

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Britain and Germany are the two largest economies in Europe. When Britain voted to leave the EU seven years ago, 23 June 2016, economists, royals, and the richer, smarter set predicted disaster. The unemployment rate at the time was 5.2% in the UK; economists guaranteed it would rise with Brexit due to the loss of access to the common market. Unemployment fell to 3.7% today: Embarrassing for economists, a bonus for British workers. Germany unemployment today is 5.6%, basically slightly higher than the 4.3% of 2016. There has been a large influx of Ukrainians into both countries, and of illegal boat people into the UK. These are people coming to get jobs, seeking a better life than available in the rest of the EU. That boat people don’t go the other way suggests that things are better in the UK.

Fromm Bloomberg, October 2022. See full article here. UK unemployment is down to 2.5% in February 2023.

Britain’s GDP was supposed to suffer from Brexit, too. Instead, GDP has grown by 18% since 2016, about 2.5% per year on average, outpacing Germany’s 10.6% total growth, 1.5% per year. Between 2016 and 2022, the British GDP rose to $3.19T from $2.7 T. Germany’s GDP increased to $3.57T, from $3.14T (data from the world bank). Separating from the EU helped, it seems and helped us too something Trump promoted. Germany chose close ties to Russia instead. That does not seem to be a big plus.

German Inflation has traditionally been low. It has increased in the past few months due to rising food and energy costs.

Inflation is higher in the UK than in Germany, 10.4% as of February 2023 versus 8.7% in Germany, or 9.9% in the European Union and a whole. I don’t think that’s Brexit. The UK typically has seen higher inflation rate than Germany, something seen by the steady drop of the pound. They have a tradition of inefficiency and silliness. Part of the problem today is that Britain gets much of its electricity from natural gas, while the French use nuclear power. Nuclear is cheap and clean, compared to natural gas. Coal is cheap and dirty; China uses it extensively and plans to use more. But the real cause of the UK’s higher inflation is inherent in the British and Germans, IMHO. The Germans hate inflation, the Brits don’t mind.

Population growth (green) or decline (orange) in Europe

For high-power, white collar workers, Britain seems to be as good a spot as Germany, maybe better. Maximum tax rates are slightly lower than in Germany (45% vs 47.45%), and the population is growing (slowly). Apparently, people like it enough to come there and have children; children are a good sign, IMHO. It’s harder to get good workers, but population growth suggests that the problems won’t be catastrophic (as they were in Japan, and likely will be in Germany). If you want a developed economy with yet-lower taxes, plus good workers, the US is the place to be, IMHO. Our maximum tax rate is 37%. You get fewer free services (healthcare), but you can earn enough to afford it. Prince Harry moved to the US recently, joining foot-baller David Beckham, and Pele a few years back. Former Python, John Cleese, came here too… They complain that Americans are cheap when it comes to helping others (but that’s out attraction). They claim that we’re violent and crass (true enough!) but say that the UK isn’t what it was. The fact that refugees seem to prefer the UK to Germany, suggests that Britain is a place to go. Britain, I’d say seems to have come out pretty well from Brexit.

Robert Buxbaum, April 11, 2023

Every food causes cancer, and cures it, research shows.

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Statistical analysis, misused, allows you to prove many things that are not true. This was long a feature of advertising: with our toothpaste you get 38% fewer cavities, etc. In the past such ‘studies’ were not published in respectable journals, and research supported by on such was not funded. Now it is published and it is funded, and no one much cares. For an academic, this is the only game in town. One result, well known, is the “crisis of replicability”– very few studies in medicine, psychology, or environment are replicable (see here for more).

In this post, I look at food health claims– studies that find foods cause cancer, or cure it. The analysis I present comes from two researchers, Schoenfeld and Ioannides, (read the original article here) who looked at the twenty most common ingredients in “The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book”. For each food, they used Pub-Med to look up the ten most recent medical articles that included the phrase, “risk factors”, the word “cancer”, and the name of the food in the title or abstract. For studies finding effect in the range of 10x risk factors to 1/10 risk factors, the results are plotted below for each of the 20 foods. Some studies showed factors beyond the end of the chart, but the chart gives a sense. It seems that most every food causes or cures cancer, often to a fairly extreme extent.

Effect estimates by ingredient. From Schoenfeld and Ioannides. Is everything we eat associated with cancer? Am J. Clin. Nutrition 97 (2013) 127-34. (I was alerted to this by Dr. Jeremy Brown, here)

A risk factor of 2 indicates that you double your chance of getting cancer if you eat this food. Buy contrast, as risk factor of 0.5 suggests that you halve your cancer risk. Some foods, like onion seem to reduce your chance of cancer to 1/10, though another study say 1/100th. This food is essentially a cancer cure, assuming you believe the study (I do not).

Only 19% of the studies found no statistically significant cancer effect of the particular food. The other 81% found that the food was significantly cancer-causing, or cancer preventing, generally of p=0.05 to 0.05. Between the many studies done, most foods did both. Some of these were meta studies (studies that combine other studies). These studies found slightly smaller average risk factors, but claimed more statistical significance in saying that the food caused or cured cancer.

0.1 0.2. 0.5 1. 2 5 10
Relative risk

The most common type of cancer caused is Gastrointestinal. The most common cancer cured is breast. Other cancers feature prominently, though: head, neck, genetilia-urinary, lung. The more cancers a researcher considers the higher the chance of showing significant effects from eating the food. If you look at ten cancers, each at the standard of one-tailed significance, you have a high chance of finding that one of these is cured or caused to the standard of p=0.05.

In each case the comparison was between a high-dose cohort and a low-dose cohort, but there was no consistency in determining the cut-offs for the cohort. Sometimes it was the top and bottom quartile, in others the quintile, in yet others the top 1/3 vs the bottom 1/3. Dose might be times eaten per week, or grams of food total. Having this flexibility increases a researcher’s chance of finding something. All of this is illegitimate, IMHO. I like to see a complete dose-response curve that shows an R2 factor pf 90+% or so. To be believable, you need to combine this R2 with a low p value, and demonstrate the same behaviors in men and woman. I showed this when looking at the curative properties of coffee. None of the food studies above did this.

From Yang, Youyou and Uzzi, 2020. Studies that failed replication are cited as often as those that passed replication. Folks don’t care.

Of course, better statistics will not protect you from outright lying, as with the decades long, faked work on the cause of Alzheimers. But the most remarkable part is how few people seem to care.

People want to see their favorite food or molecule as a poison or cure and will cite anything that says so. Irreplicable studies are cited at the same rate as replicated studies, as shown in this 2020 study by Yang Yang, Wu Youyou, and Brian Uzzi. We don’t stop prescribing bad heart medicines, or praising irreplaceable studies on foods. Does pomegranate juice really help? red wine? there was a study, but I doubt it replicated. We’ve repeatedly shown that aspirin helps your heart, but it isn’t prescribed much. Generally, we prefer more expensive blood thinners that may not help. Concerning the pandemic. It seems our lockdowns made things worse. We knew this two years ago, but kept doing it.

As Schoenfeld and Ioannides state: “Thousands of nutritional epidemiology studies are conducted and published annually in the quest to identify dietary factors that affect major health outcomes, including cancer risk. These studies influence dietary guidelines and at times public health policy… [However] Randomized trials have repeatedly failed to find treatment effects for nutrients in which observational studies had previously proposed strong associations.” My translation: take all these food studies with a grain of salt.

Robert Buxbaum, April 4, 2023

Abortion and Childbirth in the US vs China

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There are a lot of abortions in China, and not many births. Last year, there were about 9.7 million abortions in the major clinics and almost 12 million live births. That’s about 8.5 live births per 1000 Chinese population and 79.7 abortions per 100 live births. If you include the minor clinics and the abortion pill, it’s likely that there are more abortions than live births in China. It’s the preferred method of birth control. In the US, the ratio of abortions to births has grown but we have only about 1/4 as many abortions as births.

Births and abortions per year in China to 2020, from The Economist, 2023. The biggest change is decreased births, not increased abortions.

The birthrate in China is low and decreasing. China had pushed for one-child families as a cure for overpopulation and a route to a richer China with abortion promoted as a safe, painless way to end an unwanted pregnancy. Billboard ads continue to show happy women who are leading their best life now that they’ve had an abortion. Of course, during the one-child years, if you had that extra baby, the state might take your baby him or her. Condom ads were forbidden, and remain so to this day.

China seems to have succeeded too well. The population has leveled out, and has began to decline this year — likely too fast. Meanwhile the economy has grown by an average of 10% per year for 40 years, so that China is now, likely the second largest economy on the planet, but has such an old population that this is unlikely to continue. One down-side of the heavy reliance on abortion is that it’s produced a severe sex imbalance. The Chinese chose to abort mostly girls. It’s also resulted in an active sex trade. I’ve claimed it will lead to war, famine, or an economic collapse in the next ten years.

Add for a Chinese abortion clinic. See how happy the lady is. Chinese ads have English because it’s cool — it suggests that this clinic serves Americans and British too.

In the US, there were 3,664,000 births in 2022, 12.012 births per 1000 people. That’s 1.5 times the birth rate of China, and a 1% increase from 2020, but significantly below the birthrate of the boomer generation. In the last year, there were 928,000 abortions, see graph below, or 25.3 abortions per 100 live births. Our population is as old as China’s, but the additional children suggests that our society will continue longer.

In America, the case for abortion is that it’s a woman’s right, see ad below. Anti-abortion is presented as slavery and a Republican plot for male domination. Politically, this has been a winning argument for Democrats; helping them win big in elections. They made good on the argument and amended the Michigan constitution to allow abortion till birth with the father having no say. The legal and religious establishment has gone along. They may want some limitations, but there is no consensus on what the limitation should be.

Abortions per year, US, Guttmacher Inst. report, 2022.

It’s been suggested that a good way to lower the abortion rate would be higher taxes to provide more healthcare and child benefits. That may be, though I’m not sure it’s the direct, sure route. China has free healthcare and benefits. I suspect that the preachers should do more personally to deal with the vulnerable. Another thought is to promote is rural living. In the US and China, rural areas have higher birth rates, while the cities have low birth rates and high abortion rates. The highest abortion rate in the US is in Washington DC.

In the US, abortion is presented as a right, and as a Republican anti-woman plot.

My overall sense is that Children are good: Admittedly, they are expensive hobbies, but they are worth it, for the parents, for the nation, and in particular for the child. Children are a beautiful part of life and a beautiful part of any environment, IMHO. They like to grow amid sunshine and fresh air.

Robert Buxbaum, March 14, 2023

Germany is the biggest loser in a long Ukraine war

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Early in the Ukraine War with Russia, Poland sent 200 T-72 battle tanks to Ukraine. Most other NATO members joined in, sending tanks, missiles, guns, supplies and technology. Germany sent nothing and have continued to avoid helping Ukraine as much as possible while the war dragged on for a year. Germany seems to have hoped for a quick Russian victory leading to a quick return to the pre-war, state of affairs. That’s not likely. Even early on, the war looked like a slow, long slog. Reluctantly, this month, Germany promised to send 18 Leopard tanks to Ukraine, requesting as replacements, mothballed tanks from Switzerland.

Germany is currently the 4th largest economy in the world, just behind Japan, and ahead of India (for now). They also have the 3rd oldest population. Their place as the leading economic and political power in Europe rests on a close relationship with Russia that is fading, bringing Russian goods west and manufacturing with them. Before the war, Germany imported most of its oil and 65% of its natural gas from Russia. Much of the gas came via two direct pipelines, Nord Stream, that bypassed the rest of Europe. Well into the war, while the rest of Europe disengaged, Germany is still buying from Russia and funneling it west: steel, aluminum, titanium, ammonia and platinum. Germany is still buying some Russian natural gas by way of Poland. The German economy is based on turning these materials into cars, high tech machines, and chemicals for export to the US, the EU, and China. Despite the very old population, Germany counts on cheap labor from low wage EU nations. These transient, long term. workers do not get citizenship or retirement benefits. The current war has presented Germany with more potential workers, Ukrainian refugees, but far fewer Russian supplies. The German economy is shrinking, and so far, the Ukrainian refugees have been mostly left unemployed.

Ex German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, with Putin. He’s now head of Nordstream and Rosneft.

German industrial production is down by about 4% this year leaving its GPD at about $4T/year, about where it was in 2018. The US economy and the rest of Europe has grown. For an explanation, consider Germany’s ex-chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, shown at left with Putin. Schroder remains a leader in the ruling SDP party, the party of Ms Merkel and of the current chancellor. He is also the chairman of the board for Nord Stream AG and of Rosneft, (Russian aerospace). He also sits on the board for Gasprom (Russia’s energy conglomerate), Rothschild, a prominent International bank, and is chairman of the board of the Hannover 96 football club. He is symbolic of Germany’s attachment to Putin and Russia. But the rest of the EU, along with the rest of the developed world, has come to hate Putin and Russia (they’re not too fond of Rothchild either). Europe is unlikely to tolerate Germany’s Russian imports, including titanium (65% of Airbus titanium comes from Russia) or natural gas. Germany has asked for a titanium exception (and been denied). What’s more, three of the four Nord Stream pipelines have been blown up (by whom?) leaving Germany to buy natural gas from its NATO allies: Norway, Britain, France Holland, and the US. Gas purchases are expensive for Germany while helping its NATO neighbors — Germany has asked to be subsidized for energy too (unlikely, imho). It has also restarted old coal-burning power plants, an insult to the EU given how hard Germany pushed them on climate change.

Germany is now near recession. Much of Europe is close, but Germany is worse-off since they are buying from the rest.

Percent of population over 65, CIA Factbook.

Much of the EU can sell gas and food to Germany, and Russia can export to China, India, and Iran. German inflation averaged 8.5% last year (9.2% in January). That is not hyperinflation, but a shock for a country that’s averaged 1% inflation over the last 25 years. US inflation, by comparison was 7.5% last year — due to excess spending by the Democrats (imho), the so- called “inflation reduction act,” but at least the US economy grew, along with the US population. It seems to me that, without Russian supplies, Germany will continue to slip versus the world and versus the EU.

Excess mortality for European countries has been very high for the last 6 months, especially in Germany. Death rates are up by 25% or so. Much of it is heart-related. Perhaps it’s COVID, or long COVID, or air pollution, or vaccines, or depression.

The German population is dying too. They too among the highest percent population over 65, see map. The death rate has spiked 25% over the last 6 months, too. Europe and much of the EU saw similar spikes earlier in the pandemic, partially from COVID, the rest is alcoholism, drugs, the vaccine, pollution, or a psycho-somatic response to isolation and the war. Sweden has largely avoided these problems so far.

Germany has been propping up its inefficient industries with low cost loans. The idea, presumably, is that things will go back to normal soon, and the companies will make good. So far, the war goes on, and the loans discourage competition and modernization. It becomes ever more likely that these inefficient German companies will default. If so, they could take down their lenders as happened in Japan in the 90s, and as happened to Lehman Bros. in the US. The same seems likely for China.

It becomes ever more likely that these inefficient German companies will default.

Even if the war ended tomorrow, it’s not clear that Germany could go back to its pre-war status. The blown Nord Stream pipelines will need a year or more to repair. And may never restart, as sanctions might remain long after the fighting ends, as with Cuba or North Korea. Russia seems to have recognized this possibility, and has begun sending titanium, gas, and oil elsewhere, mostly to Iran, India, and China. Iran has become a major customer of Russian aluminum, and food, and is a major supplier of drones and consumer goods to Russia. In the last two years, the Iranian GDP has doubled to about $2T/year. It is now nearly half the size of Germany’s GDP and growing while Germany shrinks.

Russia’s trade with India and China has grown too. They are working to improve the Trans-Iranian railroad that would allow easy shipments from Russia to India and China via the port of Tehran. The first direct shipment of this sort was completed in July 2022– Caspian Sea containers to an Iranian train to ship to India and China. If the war goes on, Iran, India, and China will benefit at the expense of Germany, it seems. India, in particular. India’s economy is already approaching the size of Germany’s, and will probably pass it with the help of Russia’s energy and raw materials. Meanwhile, Germany is left with an aging population and aging industries; with few suppliers, and no obvious competitive advantages. Europe is almost as badly positioned, but they can still sell to Germany. As for Ukraine, it seems to be doing well, despite the war — or because of it. They still grow and export food and energy, and they are holding their own in the war, for now. There is destruction in the east, but Ukraine might come out stronger, as happened with South Korea and Vietnam. Russia too seems to have found new customers and might come out OK. It is hard to see how Germany comes out well. This, at least, is how I see things today.

Robert Buxbaum, March 8, 2023.

Yiddish newspapers and talking cows, a case for Jewish education

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Jewish education is a mess according to the Times. Most anyone outside it, who’d look in would agree: Ancient books, pre-science outlooks, anti-inclusive, and taught in a garble of languages, Yiddish, English, Aramaic, Hebrew. The New York Times has runs regular editorials claiming that Jewish education robs children of a future, or an entrance to society, producing adults who know nothing of geometry or higher math, or modern history, incapable of voting intelligently in today’s elections (they often vote Republican). The Times’s experts, are often the products of this education, but claim to have risen above it, only because of extra work. As a proof, they often cite the Talmud as a source of useless knowledge of ancient Jewish law, rejected Bible history, and only the most basic views of math. By way of a response, I’d like to quote something I’d heard in synagog a couple of weeks back:

“I’m so glad that I learned geometry in school, and not taxes. It’s really come in handy this parallelogram season.“

The speaker was an accountant, and the point of the joke is that there is no parallelogram season. There is a tax season, though, and tax law follows a bizarre logic that is not geometric, but is somewhat talmudic. As for the useless languages, they are all in use, both as spoken languages and written languages, no less useful than Latin, and certainly more alive. There are currently 5 yiddish-language newspapers being published in New York alone, see below. They compete with each other for readers, while competing also with the Times, the Post, and with another ten or more Hebrew and English journals, several of them Jewish, either published on paper or as web-journals. People read them, though the Times prefers to ignore their existence.

There are five newspapers published currently in Yiddish in New York. The Forward (Tony Curtis and duck) and the Vort are left-leaning, the Algeminer, the Blat, and the Zeitung, are more right and center. There is a readership. Why a duck?

And that brings us to the subject matter, Talmud. Much of Jewish learning is Talmud, either distilled or pure, study of a set of books written between 1000 and 2000 years ago in Israel, Babylon, and France mostly, with commentaries from Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Germany, and Poland. Those who learned talmud tend to find it useful. The legal organization and approach resonates to them in the understanding of taxes, contracts, building, damage assessment, marriage, ethics, even in dealing with alcoholism. Talmud is so useful that it’s common for working, orthodox Jews to continue their learning it throughout their lives. A common practice is to learn a page every day in synchrony with other Jews. Today’s page, when I started writing this post, was Nazir 10. It includes a talking cow, just the sort of section that the Times likes to cite to show the uselessness of it all. I’ll forgive their lack of understanding, but not their laziness for not even bothering to try to understand.

Nazir 10 begins by saying: “If a cow says, ‘I will be a Nazir (that is, I will give up wine for a month) if I stand up’. Then, if it gets up, one school of rabbinic thought (Bais Shammai) says he is a nazir. Another school of thought (Bais Hillel) says he is not a nazir.” The page goes on to speak about taking doors, but I’ll stop here after the first 2 sentences and will try to explain what the Times does not care to examine.

Notice that cows are female, and they typically don’t speak, but here you find a “he” who might have to give up wine. This “he”, this male, is understood to be a person looking at the cow, likely a person with an alcohol problem. He sees a cow lying on the ground (in the mud figuratively) and identifies it to himself. That is, he sees himself lying in the mud. He thinks it’s impossible for the cow to get up because he imagines that he himself can not get up. (This is just the Talmud’s way of discussing things). According to Bais Shammai, the person is understood to have said to himself, “if that cow can get up, I will take it as a sign that I can get up, and I will take it on myself to avoid wine and wine products for a month.” Now, according to Bais Shammai, if the cow gets up, the man is obligated to stop drinking for a month.

“I love television, and find it very educational. When someone turns it on, I go read a book.” G. Marx

Bais Hillel says he is not obligated at all. They say that a drunk who wants to change, must do more than be inspired, he must make a real verbal commitment. He must verbally obligate himself to give up drink. We follow this latter opinion, but learn Bais Shammai’s view too, because there are important ideas about self-identity.

Those are just the first two lines of the page. In secular school, you learn stories too, sometimes stories with talking animals, but these are usually modern stories, where the challenges are external, bullying say, but in a sense such stories are sanitized. The internal demons are removed, and these are often the hardest to battle. Even dealing with external problems is often pushed on an external authority, a teacher usually. You are considered to be too weak to deal with a problem. Sometimes that’s true, usually there is at least some part you could deal with. The lack of self-obligation leaves modern school stories flat. Few kids enjoy them, or feel they get anything from them. A result in Detroit is that schools have <50% attendance. Kids leave barely literate with appalling math skills. We blame the teachers and the subject. It’s the book: Sally has 15 tomatoes and wants to give 4 to a friend, how many will she have left? is this relevant? Does this excite?

Talmud teaches some logic, some math, and some geometry, but only for measuring distances and volumes, the application that geometry was named for (geometry = measuring the earth). They learn the rest as needed, and often learn quite a lot.

As Groucho Marx said: “My education is self inflicted.”

The products of Jewish education become successful, often in business, hiring their better-educated brothers. Some become lawyers, accountants, writers, businessmen, or psychologists — more than our share in the population — or mathematicians and scientists. Some even excel in academics or journalism. The Times does not mention this.

Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl Marx

My three children all went to Jewish, religious school and got the education that the Times calls abuse. So far, my son (31) has two masters degrees, both in artificial intelligence/ computer science. My older daughter (28) is getting her PhD in Psychology, and my younger daughter (23) is working on her masters in epidemiology. I suspect they benefited from the education. My suggestion to the Times, is in another Marx quote: “If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.”

Robert Buxbaum, March 1, 2023. “History may not think with its feet, but it certainly doesn’t walk on its head.”– Karl Marx, the less-funny, Marx brother. Jewish educated, he became a journalist.

Social science is irreproducible, drug tests nonreplicable, and stoves studies ignore confounders.

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Efforts to replicate the results of the most prominent studies in health and social science have found them largely irreproducible with the worst replicability appearing in cancer drug research. The figure below, from “The Reproducibility Project in Cancer Biology, Errington et al. 2021, compares the reported effects in 50 cancer drug experiments from 23 papers with the results from repeated versions of the same experiments, looking at a total of 158 effects.

Graph comparing the original, published effect of a cancer drug with the replication effect. The units are whatever units were used in the original study, percent, or risk ratio, etc. From “Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology,”
Timothy M Errington et al. Center for Open Science, United States; Stanford University, Dec 7, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601.

It’s seen that virtually none of the drugs are found to work the same as originally reported. Those below the dotted, horizontal line behaved the opposite in the replication studies. About half, those shown in pink, showed no significant effect. Of those that showed positive behavior as originally published, mostly they show about half the activity with two drugs that now appear to be far more active. A favorite web-site of mine, retraction watch, is filled with retractions of articles on these drugs.

The general lack of replicability has been called a crisis. It was first seen in the social sciences, e.g. the figure below from this article in Science, 2015. Psychology research is bad enough such that Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, came to disown most of the conclusions in his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. The experiments that underly his major sections don’t replicate. Take, for example, social printing. Classic studies had claimed that, if you take a group of students and have them fill out surveys with words about the aged or the flag, they will then walk slower from the survey room or stand longer near a flag. All efforts to reproduce these studies have failed. We now think they are not true. The problem here is that much of education and social engineering is based on such studies. Public policy too. The lack of replicability throws doubt on much of what modern society thinks and does. We like to have experts we can trust; we now have experts we can’t.

From “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” Science, 2015. Social science replication is better than dance drug replication, about 35% of the classic social science studies replicate to some, reasonable extent.

Are gas stoves dangerous? This 2022 environmental study said they are, claiming with 95% confidence that they are responsible for 12.7% of childhood asthma. I doubt the study will be reproducible for reasons I’ll detail below, but for now it’s science, and it may soon be law.

Part of the replication problem is that researchers have been found to lie. They fudge data or eliminate undesirable results, some more some less, and a few are honest, but the journals don’t bother checking. Some researchers convince themselves that they are doing the world a favor, but many seem money-motivated. A foundational study on Alzheimers was faked outright. The authors doctored photos using photoshop, and used the fake results to justify approval of non-working, expensive drugs. The researchers got $1B in NIH funding too. I’d want to see the researchers jailed, long term: it’s grand larceny and a serious violation of trust.

Another cause of this replication crisis — one that particularly hurt Daniel Kahneman’s book — is that many social science researchers do statistically illegitimate studies on populations that are vastly too small to give reliable results. Then, they only publish the results they like. The graph of z-values shown below suggest this is common, at least in some journals, including “Personality and social psychology Bulletin”. The vast fraction of results at ≥95% confidence suggest that researchers don’t publish the 90-95% of their work that doesn’t fit the desired hypothesis. While there has been no detailed analysis of all the social science research, it’s clear that this method was used to show that GMO grains caused cancer. The researcher did many small studies, and only published the one study where GMOs appeared to cause cancer. I review the GMO study here.

From Ulrich Schimmack, ReplicationIndex.com, January, 2023, https://replicationindex.com/2023/01/08/which-social-psychologists-can-you-trust/. If you really want to get into this he is a great resource.

The chart at left shows Z-scores, were Z = ∆X √n/σ. A Z score above 1.93 generally indicates significance, p < .05. Notice that almost all the studies have Z scores just over 1.93 that is almost all the studies proved their hypothesis at 95% confidence. That makes it seem that the researchers were very lucky, near prescient. But it’s clear from the distribution that there were a lot of studies that done but never shown to the public. That is a lot of data that was thrown out, either by the researchers or by the publishers. If all data was published, you’d expect to see a bell curve. Instead the Z values are of a tiny bit of a bell curve, just the tail end. The implication is that these studies with Z= >1.93 suggest far less than 95% confidence. This then shows up in the results being only 25% reproducible. It’s been suggested that you should not throw out all the results in the journal, just look for Z-scores of 3.6 or more. That leaves you with the top 23%, and these should have a good chance of being reproducible. The top graph somewhat supports this, but it’s not that simple.

Another classic way to cook the books, as it were, and make irreproducible studies provide the results you seek is to ignore “confounders.” This leads to association – causation errors. As an example, it’s observed that people taking aspirin have more heart attacks than those who do not, but the confounder is that aspirin is prescribed to those with heart problems; the aspirin actually helps, but appears to hurt. In the case of stoves, it seems likely that poorer, sicker people own gas, and that they live in older, moldy homes, and cook more at home, frying onions, etc. These are confounders that the study to my reading ignores. They could easily be the reason that gas stove owners get more asthma toxins than the rich folks who own electric, induction stoves. If you confuse association, you seem to find that owning the wrong stove causes you to be poor and sick with a moldy home. I suspect that the stove study will not replicate if they correct for the confounders.

I’d like to recommend a book, hardly mathematical, “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff ($8.99 on Amazon). I read it in high school. It gives you a sense of what to look out for. I should also mention Dr. Anthony Fauci. He has been going around to campuses saying we should have zero tolerance for those who deny science, particularly health science. Given that so much of health science research is nonreplicable, I’d recommend questioning all of it. Here is a classic clip from the 1973 movie, ‘Sleeper’, where a health food expert wakes up in 2173 to discover that health science has changed.

Robert Buxbaum , February 7, 2023.

Use iodine against Bad breath, Bad beer, Flu, RSV, COVID, monkeypox….

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We’re surrounded by undesired bacteria, molds, and viruses. Some are annoying, making our feet smell, our teeth rot, and our wine sour. Others are killers, particularly for the middle aged and older. Despite little evidence, the US government keeps pushing masks and inoculations with semi-active vaccine that does nothing to stop the spread. Among the few things one can do to stop the spread of disease, and protect yourself, is to kill the bacteria, molds and viruses with iodine. Iodine is cheap, effective even at very low doses, 0.1% to 10 parts per million, and it lasts a lot longer than alcohol. Dilute iodine will not dye your skin, and it does not sting. A gargle of iodine will kill COVID and other germs (e.g. thrush) and it has even been shown to be a protective, stopping COVID 19 and flu even if used before exposure. On a more practical level. I also use it to cleanse my barrels before making beer — It’s cheaper than the Camden they sell in stores.

Iodine is effective when used on surfaces, and most viruses spread by surfaces. A sick person coughs. Droplets end up on door knobs, counters, or in your throat, leaving virus particles that do not die in air. You touch the surface, and transfer the virus to your eyes and nose. Here’s a video I made. A mask doesn’t help because you rub your eyes around the mask. But iodine kills the virus on the surface, and on your hands, and lasts there far longer than alcohol does. Vaccines always come with side-effects, but there are no negative side effects to sanitization with dilute iodine. Here is a video I did some years ago on the chemistry of iodine.

Robert Buxbaum, February 1, 2023. I don’t mean to say that all bacteria and fungi are bad, it’s just that most of them are smelly. Even the good ones that give us yogurt, beer, blue cheese, and sour kraut tend to be smelly. They have the annoying tendency to causing your wine to taste and smell like sour kraut or cheese, and they cause your breath and feet to smell the same. If you’re local, I’ll give you some free iodine solution. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy it through REB Research.

Birth dearth in China => collapse? war?

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China passed us in life-expectancy in 2022, and also in fertility, going the other way. In China lifespan at birth increased to 77.3 years. In the US it dropped an additional 0.9 years, to 76.8. US lifespans suffered from continuing COVID and an increase in accidents, heart disease, suicide, drugs, and alcohol abuse. Black men were hit particularly hard, so that today, a black man in the US has the same life expectancy as he would in Rwanda. China seems to have avoided this, but should expect problems due to declining fertility and birth rates.

China passed us in life expectancy in 2022.

Fertility rates will eventually burden the US too, as US fertility is only slightly greater than in China, 1.78 children per woman, lifetime, compared to 1.702 in China. But China has far fewer people of childbearing ages, relatively, and only 47% are women. Three decades of one child policy resulted in few young adults and a tendency to abort girls. Currently, the birthrate in China is barely more than half ours: 6.77 per 1000, compared to 12.01 per 1000. And the proportion of the aged keeps rising. China will soon face a severe shortage of care-givers, and an excess of housing.

Years of low birthrate preceded the “Lost decades” of financial crisis in Japan and the USSR. Between 1990 and 2011, business stagnated and house prices dropped. China faces the same; few workers and more need for care: it’s not a good recipe.

Beginning about 1991, Japan saw a major financial collapse with banks failing, and home values falling. China seems over-due.

Few children also signals a psychic lack of confidence in the country, and suggests that, going forward, there will be a lack of something to work for. Already Chinese citizens don’t trust the state to allow them to raise healthy children. They have stopped getting married, especially in the cities, and look more to have fun.

Affluent women claim they can’t find a good man to marry: one who’s manly, who will love them, and who will reliably raise their standard of life. Women seem less picky in China’s rural areas, or perhaps they find better men there. However it goes, urban women get married late and have few children, both in China and here. China produces great, sappy, soap operas though: a country girl or secretary in a high-power job meets a manly, urban manager who lovers her intensely. A fine example is “The Eternal Love” (watch it here). It involves time travel, and a noble romance from the past. Japan produced similar fiction before the crisis. And a crisis seems to be coming.

While Japan and Korea responded quietly to crisis and “the lost decades,” allowing banks to fail and home values to fall, Russia’s response was more violent. It went to war with Chechnya, then with Belarus and Ukraine, and now with NATO. I fear that China will go to war too — with Taiwan, Japan, and the US. It’s a scary thought; China is a much tougher enemy than Russia. There is already trouble brewing over new islands that they are building.

Robert Buxbaum January 25, 2023. If you want to see a Korean soap opera on the Secretary – manager theme, watch: “What’s wrong with Secretary Kim”. (I credit my wife with the research here.) I suspect that Americans too would like sappy shows like this.

Almost no one over 50 has normal blood pressure now.

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Four years ago, when the average lifespan of American men was 3.1 years longer than today, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology dropped the standard for normal- acceptable blood pressure for 50+ years olds from 140/90 to 120/80. The new standard of normal was for everyone regardless or age or gender despite the fact that virtually no one over 50 now reached it. Normal is now quite un-common.

By the new definition, virtually everyone over 50 now is diagnosed with high blood pressure or hypertension. Almost all require one or two medications — no more baby aspirin. Though the evidence for aspirin’s benefit is strong, it doesn’t lower blood pressure. AHA guidance is to lower a patients blood pressure to <140/90 mmHg or at least treat him/her with 2–3 antihypertensive medications.4 

Average systolic blood pressures for long-lived populations of men and women without drugs.

The graphs shows the average blood pressures, without drugs in a 2008 study of the longest-lived, Scandinavian populations. These were the source of the previous targets: the natural pressures for the healthiest populations at the time, based on the study of 1304 men (50-79 years old) and 1246 women (38-79 years old) observed for up to 12 years. In this healthy population, the average untreated systolic pressure is seen till age 70, reaching 154 for men, and over 160 for women. By the new standards, these individuals would be considered highly unhealthy, though they live a lot longer than we do. The most common blood-pressure drug prescribed in the US today is atenolol, a beta blocker. See my essay on Atenolol. It’s good at lowering blood pressure, but does not decrease mortality.

The plot at left shows the relationship between systolic blood pressure and death. There is a relationship, but it is not clear that the one is the cause of the other, especially for individuals with systolic pressure below 160. Those with pressures of 170 and above have significantly higher mortality, and perhaps should take atenolol, but even here it might be that high cholesterol, or something else, is causing both the high blood pressure and the elevated death risk.

The death-risk difference between 160 and 100 mmHg is small and likely insignificant. The minimum at 110 is rather suspect too. I suspect it’s an artifact of a plot that ignores age. Only young people have this low number, and young people have fewer heart attacks. Artificially lowering a person’s blood pressure, even to this level does not make him young, [2][3] and brings some problems. Among the older-old, 85 and above, a systolic blood pressure of 180 mmHg is associated with resilience to physical and cognitive decline, though it is also associated with higher death rate.

The AHA used a smoothed version of the life risk graph above to justify their new standards, see below. In this version, any blood pressure looks like it’s bad. The ideal systolic pressure seems to be 100 or below. This is vastly too low a target, especially for a 60 year old. Based on the original graph, I would think that anything below 155 is OK.

smoothed chart of deaths per 1000 vs blood pressure. According to this chart, any blood pressure is bad. There is no optimum.

Light exercise seems to do some good especially for the overweight. Walking helps, as does biking, and aerobics. Weight loss without exercise seems to hurt health. Aspirin is known to do some good, with minimal cost and side effects. Ablation seems to help for those with atrial fibrillation. Elequis (a common blood thinner) seems to have value too, for those with atrial fibrillation — not necessarily for those without. Low sodium helps some, and coffee, reducing gout, dementia and Parkinson’s, and alcohol. Some 2-3 drinks per day (red wine?) is found to improve heart health.

I suspect that the Scandinavians live longer because they drink mildly, exercise mildly, have good healthcare (but not too good), and have a low crime rate. They seem to have dodged the COVID problem too, even Sweden that did next to nothing. it’s postulated that the problem is over medication, including heart medication.

Robert Buxbaum, January 4, 2023. The low US lifespan is startling. Despite spending more than any other developed countries on heath treatments, we have horribly lower lifespans, and it’s falling fast. A black man in the US has the same expected lifespan as in Rwanda. Causes include heart attacks and strokes, accidents, suicide, drugs, and disease. Opioids too, especially since the COVID lockdowns.