Your toilet seat might be the only thing in your house more sanitary than your floor

Posted on by November 19, 2016
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OK, the headline might be a slight overstatement, but not much of one. At least in terms of the number of disease-causing bacteria, floors tend to be cleaner than kitchen counters and toilet seats cleaner than both. Seriously.

Pediatrician and medical professor Aaron Carroll talks about this below after briefly debunking the five-second rule yet again. (That’s the nonsensical folk belief that if you drop something on the floor it takes five seconds for it to get contaminated, as if bacteria were too initially startled to jump on it, or something.)

As Carroll says, you can react to this information by obsessively cleaning everything, or you can recognize that germs aren’t all that scary a menace. There are reasonable precautions you can take, especially washing your hands with soap and water a lot. (Following food preparation guidelines also makes sense.)


Link: https://youtu.be/XMgBgU8IwfM



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Misunderstanding the Black Lives Matter movement

Posted on by March 26, 2018
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Things often involve more than their names might imply. Case in point: Black Lives Matter.

A lot of people react to the phrase “Black Lives Matter” without taking time to understand what’s behind it. It was prompted by a series of incidents in which government authorities in a number of places in the U.S. seemed to treat black lives as mattering less than others. (This includes not just police killings of black persons but a tendency to treat more seriously crimes committed against white persons.) Members of Black Lives Matter have proposed a number of practical steps to make things better, such as improved police training.

As with anything else, there are legitimate grounds for disagreement. Some cases that have been cited by BLM advocate may not actually reflect racial bias or police misconduct (though plenty of others pretty clearly do). There are other cases involving white victims of police misconduct that would probably be held up as examples of racism were the victim black. (This one, for example.) That is, bad behavior on the part of the police can have other causes besides racial prejudice. It’s worth noting that a lot of Black Lives Matter ideas (including, as mentioned, better police training) would probably help no matter what the underlying cause and regardless of the race of anyone involved.

But a lot of objections to BLM simply miss the point. Yes, all lives matter. Yes, the vast majority of black homicide victims are killed by people of the same race. (That’s also true of white homicide victims, by the way.) Yes, homicide rates are higher for black people than for white people. Black Lives Matter doesn’t say otherwise; it’s just addressing something else that’s a legitimate topic of concern. Maybe it would have been clearer if the BLM movement had adopted the slogan “Black Lives Matter Too.”

Below vlogger Vi Hart summarizes the history of the Black Lives Matter movement. I have quibbles with some of what she says, but in the main I think it’s a useful and interesting video essay.


Link: https://youtu.be/eaEeEbP16Wg

(Updated 2017 August 16 in my usual attempt to express myself better.)



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Political roundup for election day 2016

Posted on by November 21, 2016
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A few items for political junkies in honor of election day:

The North Carolina GOP published a press release today celebrating what they apparently consider good news for Republicans, including:

African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time in 2012.

Caucasian voters early voting is up 22.5% from this time in 2012.

As a share of Early Voters, African Americans are down 6.0%, (2012: 28.9%, 2016: 22.9%) and Caucasians are up 4.2%, (2012: 65.8%, 2016: 70.0%).

This should be eye-opening for people who question whether Republican-authored changes to the state’s election rules were racially motivated, as a federal appeals court concluded in late July.

In North Carolina, county election boards are appointed by the state government, and hence all are currently under two-to-one Republican control. When the legislature’s pretty blatant attempts to suppress turnout were overturned by the court, GOP leaders advised the election boards on ways to get around the ruling and still make it harder for minorities to vote. This press release celebrates their success. For more, see this piece from Talking Points Memo and this one from Salon.

On Friday Donald Trump, not known for being a fan of protesters at his rallies, accused Barack Obama of “really screaming” at a protester in Fayetteville NC, “and frankly it was a disgrace.” What really happened was pretty much the opposite, as you can see in this video. Obama called to his supporters, who were booing the man, to “hold up” and “sit down and be quiet for a second.”

Now, listen up! I’m serious, listen up. You’ve got an older gentleman who is supporting his candidate. He’s not doing nothing – you don’t have to worry about him. This is what I mean about folks not being focused.

First of all, we – hold up! Hold up! First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. So, second of all, it looks like maybe he might have served in our military, and we’ve got to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly, and we’ve got to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don’t boo – vote! Don’t boo – vote!

Finally, here’s the AP’s weekend summary of falsehoods spewed by candidates in this election. No one disputes that both sides do it, but one side does it way more than the other. (See this previous post for more on that.)

Updated 2016 November 21 to add a little additional information and try to improve my usual clumsy wording.



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Bill Maher on false equivalency

Posted on by November 6, 2016
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In this bit from the October 28 edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher Maher takes issue with false equivalency, aka both-siderism, as in “Both sides do it.” A lot of the time they do, but not to the same degree. Warning to those with sensitive ears: This is Bill Maher on cable.


Link: https://youtu.be/B-HDsmJbm_E

Maher is a bit incorrect in his characterization of Politifact‘s ratings. Politifact doesn’t evaluate everything a candidate says, only those substantive assertions of fact that sound questionable. So it isn’t true that if P percent of a given candidates’ statements examined by Politifact are rated false, that means the candidate is lying P percent of the time.

In addition, Maher mistakenly says that the percentages he quotes are for statements rated at least somewhat false. In fact, the numbers in question represent the fraction of statements rated “Mostly False,” “False,” and “Pants On Fire.” They don’t included the categories “Half True” and “Mostly True,” both of which include statements deemed at least partly false.

Of course, given that Politifact only looks at statements that arouse suspicion, it’s not surprising they’d rate most of them at least a teeny bit false, and by that strict standard, they judged only 25 percent of Clinton’s statements, and a pitiful 4 percent of Trump’s, to be entirely True.

At the other extreme, they rate 17 percent of Donald Trump’s statements false at the Pants-on-Fire level, while a relatively tiny 2 percent of Hillary Clinton’s statements are judged that bad.

Quibbling aside, Maher’s basic point remains: Trump says things that are demonstrably not true a lot more often than his opponents, both Republican and Democratic.

(Updated 2016 November 6 to correct a couple of typos, add a little additional information, and try to improve the wording in a few spots, I hope.)



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John Green explains the past and future of U.S. health insurance in under 10 minutes

Posted on by October 21, 2016
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Novelist and polymath John Green manages to cram a lot of information about the recent history, current state, and possible future of health insurance in the United States in less than ten minutes:


Link: https://youtu.be/p3mYrOnq2Z4

For sources and background information see the video description at the link above.

Here’s an even shorter summary:

U.S. healthcare has mediocre outcomes in comparison with those of other wealth countries, despite the fact that those countries spend a lot less per person than we do.

In fact, they spend so much less that if we adopted, say, the French system or the Australian system, our healthcare outcomes would be about the same or better, and our current government spending on healthcare would be more than enough to pay the total cost. Green doesn’t spell this out, but we could do away with deductibles, copays, coinsurance, and health insurance premiums, and we wouldn’t have to spend a penny more in taxes. (Yes, that does sound too good to be true, but look at the numbers.)

Multiple independent non-partisan analyses agree that Trump’s healthcare proposals would drastically increase the number of uninsured and out-of-pocket medical spending while increasing the budget deficit. Clinton’s proposals would increase the deficit even more than Trump’s, but would cut out-of-pocket costs and decrease the number of uninsured Americans. And overall, Clinton’s tax and spending proposals would increase the deficit far less than Trump’s. (The deficit figures he quotes appear to be for a frame of more than one year, but the comparison is what’s important.)

One more thing: I agree with Green’s praise of the Healthcare Triage YouTube channel, but I wish in the interest of full disclosure that he had mentioned that he’s partly responsible for Healthcare Triage, so he’s not entirely objective about it.



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Is Medicaid a better deal than we think?

Posted on by October 21, 2016
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Pediatrician, writer, and medical school professor Aaron Carroll MD discusses the evidence that Medicaid has a large positive return on investment.


Link: https://youtu.be/vx1-X9wpUk4

If you’re still young and healthy — just you wait — you might be among the people who get Medicare and Medicaid confused. Medicare pays some of the cost of medical care for people 65 and older and for people with serious kidney disease. (In the U.S., I mean; in Canada it’s for everybody, and similar terms are used in other countries, but I digress.)

Medicaid is for very low-income people and for elderly persons in nursing homes who have no other way to pay for it. In fact, most Medicaid spending, like almost all Medicare spending, goes to services for the elderly, so there’s overlap between the programs.

Medicare is financed by federal taxes and partly by premiums paid by the insured. Medicaid is a joint federal-state program with eligibility rules and benefits that vary state by state. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid eligibility so that, for example, low-income people without dependent children could get coverage (which was not the case in many states). The additional cost of expanded Medicaid are paid almost entirely by the federal government, with states contributing at most ten percent.

However, a questionable Supreme Court decision held that states not wishing to follow the new rules could keep following the old ones even thought the law had changed. The result is that in 19 states many impoverished people have no way to pay for medical bills. Depending on their condition they go without care or they get hospital care that they don’t pay for, which means the losses are passed through to the rest of us in the form of higher hospital bills or picked up by the state government. In practice, states that refuse to expand Medicaid are actually losing money, which is why a series of anti-Obamacare Republican governors and legislatures have come around to grudgingly accept Medicaid expansion.



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