PREAMBLE
While it might seem a good idea to relocate to a small town with lovely views, cheap real estate, air service, a decent hospital, and Amazon Prime delivery, you’re missing at least one thing. Towns without said thing are a risky destination for you, even if you are crazy enough to build a spreadsheet and spend fifteen years looking.
That thing? A high likelihood of people — especially young people — getting hurt in disproportionate numbers. The presence of that cohort — in a time of aging populations — brings in expensive doctors, which helps make hospitals viable, which helps make towns viable, which helps make relocatees … viable.
Viable hospitals matter for health, but they also matter for a local economy. After all, small-town hospitals are often the largest employers in their region, and their disappearance cuts into the economy, as well as scaring off would-be relocators. A double whammy.
This is why small places like Mammoth and Jackson are, perhaps surprisingly, good relocation bets, while, say, Celina, Tennessee, which recently lost its hospital, is much less so. What Celina needs, to my way of thinking, is a few bike parks, a wingsuit club, possibly a thriving surf scene, and maybe an indoor ski hill or a top skate park.
While I’m mostly kidding, I have a genuine point. Towns that want to remain vital and viable in the upcoming Dual Age of Senescence and Remote Work are going to have to move closer to a societal risk frontier, one that they may not like.
HEALTHCARE
- Revenue-hungry elite US hospitals are now hawking unproven stem cell treatments: Elite hospitals plunge into unproven stem cell treatments
- US healthcare continues to combine all the worst bits of Black Mirror and Monty Python: Canadian man dies on Florida road trip, family drives to border to avoid US hospital bills
- Multiple stents can create unexpected effects in human blood flow, like standing waves in arteries: Dispersion of waves and transmission–reflection in blood vessels with structured stents
- Why human birth is so physiologically awful: Humans as inverted bats: A comparative approach to the obstetric conundrum
- Orthopedic surgeons continue to lead the way in compensation, especially orthopods in Oklahoma: Physician Salaries Up in 2019, Report Shows Who Earns the Most
- Pharma companies are busy trying to medicalize obesity so they prescribe expensive new NASH drugs: Intercept (ICPT) Tries to Outrun Pharma in Race for the Next Hit
- Comparing the competing hypotheses for the persistence of aging, especially antagonistic pleiotropy: Why hasn’t evolution dealt with the inefficiency of aging?
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
- Hey, I’ve found your 13-year-old over here: Roblox Reaches 90 Million Monthly Active Users
- There are almost too many nuggets here, so let’s just that this interview with neuroscientist Ed Boyden is excellent reading: Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain
- Why so many economics are going to tech companies, and what they are doing there about their crap models: Economists (and Economics) in Tech Companies
- Human society can be modeled using fluid flow equations with energy fluxes: The Dynamics of Human Society Evolution: An Energetics Approach
- People shouldn’t be so damn sure they’re not zombies, maybe: How to Tell If You’re a Zombie
FINANCE & ECONOMICS
- Before a crash, nodes in the financial network flicker “in” and “out” of the network rapidly, which the authors claim they can use to predict crashes a year in advance: Flickering in Information Spreading Precedes Critical Transitions in Financial Markets
- Economists are puzzling at entertaining length (and with good data) why higher minimum wages aren’t causing job losses: The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs
- Yoga as ponzi scheme, and why you maybe reconsider being a yoga teacher: Should every American citizen be a yoga teacher?
- Sabotage works best when practiced by leaders on low-ability teams: Dissent, sabotage, and leader behaviour in contests: Evidence from European football
- US for-profit colleges are closing at the rate of 20 per month: How America’s College-Closure Crisis Leaves Families Devastated
- Politics has saturated bitcoin and the numerous rival cryptocurrencies it has inspired, but it’s the politics of technologists, not politicians: Pick a nonce and try a hash
- The economics of mass fetishization means that people will pay more for worn-out things, if other people overvalue worn-out things because they see them on TV: Old Wood Can Cost More Than New Lumber. People Want It Anyway
STILL PICTURE OF THE WEEK
MOVING PICTURE OF THE WEEK
Hedge fund investor, scientist, and philanthropist Dr. Jim Simons on the life and career of Dr. Jim Simons.
