Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:24]
| Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, March 8th, 2025. It's just after 18 UTC as we are starting to record. I am Sam Minter. Ivan Bo is not with us this week. He messaged me actually a couple days ago at this point saying he was sick and he was feeling worse every day than the day before. And he had a lot of other stuff going on too, so he wasn't able to make it. So I put out my usual, hey, does anybody want to join us? And this time we have Ed. Hello, Ed. Welcome back to Curmudgeon's Corner.
|
Ed:
[0:58]
| Hello. It's been a while.
|
Sam:
[1:00]
| Yeah, it's been a while. Oh, I should check my notes. Let's see when you were last here, Ed. You were last here on August 3rd, 2024.
|
Ed:
[1:11]
| My anniversary.
|
Sam:
[1:12]
| Oh, there you go. And so, you know, I will mark that you are now here with us today. Okay. um so anyway we're gonna have our usual sort of thing we will talk about sort of less newsy stuff uh at the beginning of the show and then we'll move on to more current events focused stuff as we progress and as i usually do when we have a guest i'm let the guest drive so ed will determine what topics he wants to talk about and i will react and chat with him and all that kind of stuff, but, but yeah, Ed's going to drive. I will do my media review to start with a, yeah, I have a movie. I have a movie to talk about. It'll be very exciting. I'm sure. Um, and yeah, so, so Ed, what, how, how do you want to start? Oh, first of all, I should just say, you know, it's been since August that I talked to you. Um, how you doing?
|
Ed:
[2:13]
| Pretty well, actually. We just got back Monday from a trip to India and Nepal, which was a fantastic trip. Really had a ball until I came down with influenza the last three days of the trip.
|
Sam:
[2:27]
| Yeah. Good way to end.
|
Ed:
[2:31]
| Yeah, I was almost over it. And then this morning when I woke up, I've got a sore throat and I have a horrible feeling that I'm coming down with a strep throat in addition to that. So if I start coughing or looking sick, I may have to step out for a minute.
|
Sam:
[2:45]
| We'll see. Yeah, yeah.
|
Ed:
[2:46]
| But I already have an appointment with my primary doc next Monday for a routine visit. So I figure rather than going in and get a throat culture now, I'll just wait and have her check that Monday.
|
Sam:
[2:57]
| Yeah.
|
Ed:
[2:57]
| But anyway, I'm feeling better than I did four days ago.
|
Sam:
[3:01]
| Well, that's good. Yeah. Yvonne mentioned, like, I guess wherever he is, something's been going around and he got it. And so, you know, yeah, as far as I know.
|
Ed:
[3:11]
| This, this has been a bad flu year for the whole nation, even with a vaccine. I got the vaccine. I get it every year religiously. In some years I get it twice this year and I don't need it twice because I've got flu.
|
Sam:
[3:25]
| Nice. Yeah. No, I've lucked out so far this season. I haven't really had anything. I don't think, but of course, as soon, because I've said that now I'm going to be like on my ass next week with something.
|
Ed:
[3:38]
| Well, you know, it's been since COVID five years ago right now, I have had, two episodes of COVID, which were incredibly mild. I mean, for a day, I ran a temp of 99 and a half and had a little sore throat and then was well. I have not had anything else, no colds, no flus or anything. So I was really spoiled. And of course I let my guard down on the trip and didn't wear my mask all the time. So I'm paying for being stupid.
|
Sam:
[4:05]
| Well, there you go. So do you have something else in mind for this beginning or do you want to talk about your trip?
|
Ed:
[4:12]
| Well, I could talk about the trick a little bit. It was, this is one of the companies that specializes in working with alumni associations. So the members, the tour group were all people associated with the University of Chicago as alumni or spouses of alumni. So it was right off the bat, it was kind of fun because we had some fairly common denominators. A couple, three of us were doctors, several lawyers, and then various other people in the group. But the trip itself was, you know, I've never been anywhere quite like India. I've been in lots of crowded places. It was fascinating. They have a natural preserve there to preserve an area for tigers that we spent two days in. And as we were going there, the guide said, look, I've been doing this 27 years now. I've only seen tigers about four or five times. Don't get your hopes up. So we got there the first day, went out in the afternoon and saw a mother and her cub and got several pictures of her. Then the next day we went back again and we followed, I think it was four tigers all together for over an hour. They were going around the lake and doing various things. And we just kind of stayed on the road going and walking. And it was incredible seeing them in their habitat.
|
Ed:
[5:29]
| Plus, we saw several other animals. We saw something called a sloth bear. And from a significant distance, we saw one leopard. But, I mean, he was up on the side of a mountain. We could barely see him. But we did see a leopard.
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Sam:
[5:42]
| Nice.
|
Ed:
[5:43]
| Yeah. So it was the Taj Mahal, of course, we went to. We went over to the Ganges and spent a day watching people bathing their sins off. So perhaps one of the highlights was one evening we went to spend the meal and a couple, three hours with an Indian family. It's a married couple who had one daughter and then have adopted seven other daughters. So they have eight daughters now. And the girls all were very poised. They all speak English. And one of them sat with each of our tables. We had about six or seven tables and talked with us. And we really had a really an interesting evening. So that was then the other real highlight was one night we went to a sitar concert.
|
Ed:
[6:33]
| OK. And listen to a guy who's one of the more prominent sitar artists in the world. He tours around the world. And, you know, sitar music is if you just listen to it for a minute or two, it doesn't sound like very much. But if you sit there and you watch the performer and realize that it's almost all improvising, they have a very short melody, and then the rest of the concert is improvising off that melody. And like any jazz musician who's improvising, they're laughing as they play because, wow, that really went well. And he was looking over at the percussionist and they would laugh at each other, make faces. God, and the music was just mind boggling, I thought. Not everybody liked it that much, but I could have sat for hours.
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Sam:
[7:20]
| Very good. You mentioned India and one other place.
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Ed:
[7:25]
| Nepal. We went out hoping to be able to see Everest because it's not that we were in Kathmandu, but the smog and dirt in the air was so, we couldn't even see the foothills until the very last day when we were just able to make out the foothills a little bit. But we still, we toured a couple villages and went several places. So it was quite interesting. It was at the end of the Nepal trip is when I came down with my influenza.
|
Sam:
[7:50]
| So you didn't actually climb Everest this time?
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Ed:
[7:54]
| No, no.
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Sam:
[7:55]
| Maybe next time?
|
Ed:
[7:56]
| I didn't do any mountain. My Kilimanjaro was my last mountain climbing. That was five years ago. The friend who talked me into that trip wanted to go again this year. In fact, he went. He wanted me to go. And I said, you know, Bijou, I don't think I'm up to it this year. And indeed, that's right. There's no way I would have made it. I'm 83 now, so, you know, that day has passed me. It was a wonderful trip. Anyone who's in fairly good shape can make it. But when you're in your 80s, whether or not you're in good shape for 80, you're still 80.
|
Sam:
[8:29]
| Right. Yeah. Yeah. So did I sort of hijacked you to ask about the trip? Did you have another non-newsy thing you wanted to talk about that you had in mind before I do my movie?
|
Ed:
[8:40]
| Nope. Nope. That's what I was going to bring up.
|
Sam:
[8:43]
| Okay. See, I just have this mental ability and I was able to like read your mind and guess what you were going to talk about.
|
Ed:
[8:53]
| So, well, it was the last four weeks. I mean, we got back Monday and other than that, it was four weeks over there. So not much else has happened to me. We did. My, my iPad broke down about three days into the trip. So I really didn't get to read news very much. It's hard to read news and interact with, with, with an iPhone, which is all I had.
|
Sam:
[9:12]
| Okay. Okay, so movie for me. We are up to a movie. You know, I have... I have such a big backlog at this point because, you know, I caught up on the show giving the movies that I'd watched before. And then I went a long, long time before I actually, like, updated my master list with all the movies I'd seen and all this kind of stuff. So we've got, like, a few dozen of these. But the problem is, I think I'm actually watching these things at a rate that's maybe even slightly higher than once a week. So, like, I'll never catch up if I only do one review a week. Like, I might need to do two at some point. But I'm going to stick with one a week for now, and then we'll see how it goes. But anyway, the next up is something I watched in June. June 7th, 2024. For Ralph Breaks the Internet from 2018. Have you heard of this thing?
|
Ed:
[10:13]
| I don't think I've heard of that one.
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Sam:
[10:15]
| Okay, so this is a Disney movie. It is a sequel. It is a sequel to Wreck-It Ralph. Have you heard of Wreck-It Ralph?
|
Ed:
[10:24]
| No.
|
Sam:
[10:28]
| So let me talk about both of them in a minute. I did watch Wreck-It Ralph earlier. I'll check. I'll check to see when I watch Rocket Ralph. Hold on a second. But I'm bringing up the wrong website. You know, it is silly of me. Okay. I watched Wreck-It Ralph back, which is a 2012 movie, back in 2022. And then Ralph Breaks the Internet in June 2024, which was from 2018. So basically, the theme of this series is that it's basically about video game characters. So the first movie is in an arcade and you have the characters of a couple of video games. One of them is Wreck-It Ralph, who's sort of a character.
|
Sam:
[11:21]
| He's the bad guy in a video game that tries to wreck a building. And the hero plumber, you know, clearly inspired by Mario, you know, tries to like, it tries to keep him from breaking the building. But like the conceit of it is that the video game is their jobs. And then the game ends and they go back to their lives. So it's like people clocking out of a job. So like Wreck-It Ralph, whose job in the video game is to be the mean villain trying to break down the building or whatever, is really a really nice guy. And he's good friends with the plumber who's trying to stop him. You know, sort of the bell goes off and they like shake hands. Good day work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. and then go off and go to the bar together and all that kind of stuff. And then the other girl who's in here is Vanellope, who's a character in a sort of a racing video game called Sugar Rush, which is all sort of like candy and popsicles and little cars running around. It's sort of like a version of Mario Kart, but with sort of the candy, girlish theme, etc. And the first movie deals with the candy sugar rush game is malfunctioning and they have to like...
|
Sam:
[12:48]
| They have to do something. Wait, I'm confusing the two movies. I have to make sure I have this right.
|
Sam:
[13:01]
| Yeah, in the first game, Vanellope is a glitchable character, and there's adventures within the thing. And anyway, look, the first movie I gave a thumbs up to, it's a lot of fun. These are both animated Disney movies. They are cute. They are fun. They are the kind of things that are intended for kids, but also aimed so adults will enjoy them as well. There's lots of nostalgia bait for older millennials, Gen X, etc., who went to physical arcades where you put quarters in the video game machines when they were kids. And so there's you know this cameos by all kinds of video game characters that you would remember from when you were a kid in the arcades and the you know the first one's very cute there's sort of emotional heart heartstrings at the end where you know the they they save vanellope they oh sorry spoilers like happy ending sorry i i i maybe shouldn't have given away that there's a happy ending um i'm.
|
Ed:
[14:10]
| Not sure how many of us will be watching it.
|
Sam:
[14:12]
| But you know they they they they, the first one has a bunch of nice heartstrings it works well you end up you know with a little tear in your eye the second one they sort of escape the arcade and have to go to the internet so what i was saying before about like the the the machines malfunctioning and they need to park That's the second one. They basically go to the internet to try to find the broken part for the arcade game. The first one was a lot of drama within, like, within the game itself and trying to go beyond what the programming was and things like that. The second one, they escape to the internet, basically, and are in the wider world of the internet, you know, trying to find this part and get everything saved. The Vanellope character is tempted by getting into sort of grittier, more grown-up games that she finds when she's on the internet. And, you know, and, you know, again, happy ending.
|
Sam:
[15:17]
| Everything's everything's good at the end, but the characters do get to grow and move on and not just do what they were doing before. And if I had to say the first one's probably a little bit better than the second one, but they were both good. I'm going to give a thumbs up to both of them. Enjoyable, fun, animated movies. Yeah. You know, I honestly found myself thinking, hey, it would be nice if there was a third one. There is not a third one yet. I don't even see that they're planning a third one. But the critical response for the second one, looking at the second one now, Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 88%.
|
Sam:
[15:57]
| They actually say it levels up on its predecessor with a funny, heartwarming sequel that expands on its colorful universe while focusing on core characters and relationships. And yeah so audiences pulled give it an a minus on an a to f scale down from an a on the first film so that that sort of coincides with me saying it's down a little bit from the first movie but still both very good and yeah so ralph breaks the internet do watch both of them if you're going to see these movies if you have a kid to watch watch them with even better it'll be fun But really, look, it's it's nostalgia hacking for people, you know, I'd say 40 and above, you know, especially like I said, especially those who are in the the prime age of like actually seeing actually playing video games at physical arcades with quarters, but also going a little bit past that to like home consoles and stuff like that. The first couple of generations of home consoles, but yeah, it was a lot of fun. I recommend them thumbs up. I enjoyed it. You know, watch these movies.
|
Ed:
[17:13]
| I'll have to get after my grandchildren. They have some great-grandchildren. My youngest grandchild gets her doctor's degree in occupational therapy in a month or two. So if they'll just get busy and provide me some great-grandkids, I'll have someone I can take.
|
Sam:
[17:27]
| Well, there you go. Speaking of which, I'll just throw this out here. My sister, my younger sister, who's a veterinarian in Toronto, is like eight and a half months pregnant right now. So, so any moment now I could be an uncle for the first time and, uh, very, very, very excited about that. Haven't worked out when we'll go visit the new youngster yet. I, I, I'm assuming the new parents will need some time and I'm also sort of crushed with some work stuff right now. So, so I, I don't know when I'll get up there, but I'll get up there before the kid is like too old to, to, to, to meet them and all that kind of stuff.
|
Sam:
[18:11]
| You know? So yeah. So I'm thinking of my sister, Cynthia. So hopefully all, all that goes as smoothly as you would want it to go and all of that. And yeah, I'll mention again, since I just did like, yeah, I'm swamped with job stuff now, but very much interested in trying something new. So abulsme.com, A-B-U-L-S-M-E.com slash resume. If anybody out there has any tips or intros or anybody they'd want to put me in touch with, you can see what's on that resume. But interested in, sure, things that align with my resume. Obviously, that's the most natural path. But also wouldn't mind looking at things that were a change. So I am so like wanting something different. But anyway, yes, which includes, by the way, if you guys want to like put enough into the Patreon to replace my salary so I can just do curmudgeons corner full time, I'd be completely up for that as well. You know, so if you have the resources to add a few more zeros to your Patreon contribution, please go right. I'm not going to stop you, you know. So anyway, that is it, I think, for our intro. So we'll take our first break.
|
Sam:
[19:30]
| And then when we get back, we'll let Ed pick the first of his more serious current events, what's going on in the world right now kind of topics. And we'll go from there. So here comes a break. Okay, we're back here. So, Ed, what are you thinking?
|
Ed:
[21:51]
| Well, I was thinking we might, since I'm a retired physician, there's been a lot of medical stuff lately, and I thought we might just kind of touch on a few of them relatively short at a time. The first one that just kind of, the final steps on it came out yesterday, I think, was Gene Hackman's death.
|
Sam:
[22:08]
| Ah, yes.
|
Ed:
[22:09]
| It turns out after some confusion at the beginning that what happened is he was apparently suffering from fairly advanced Alzheimer's.
|
Sam:
[22:20]
| Yeah.
|
Ed:
[22:21]
| And his wife, who was his caretaker, quite a bit younger than him. I think she was in her mid-60s.
|
Sam:
[22:26]
| Yeah.
|
Ed:
[22:26]
| And he was 95. But she apparently incurred an infection called Hantavirus, which is usually seen in New Mexico and Arizona where they lived. And the desert mice droppings carry antivirus. So it occurs in people who have been cleaning that up. That apparently happened to her. And I'm going to guess that maybe she wasn't doing so well herself because as far gone as he was in the Alzheimer's, it's a 24-hour-a-day job and people who are the only caretaker really get run down. But in any event, she died in their laundry room, I think. and he died several days later.
|
Sam:
[23:08]
| Let me ask a little bit more, not knowing pretty much anything about Hantavirus. Is this something that would have, you know, is it, Could it have been treatable? Like, is this something where she would have noticed and gone to a doctor and it would have been fine? Or is this something that comes on quickly and then it just overcame her?
|
Ed:
[23:27]
| Yeah. I don't know a whole lot about it, but I think it doesn't come out just bang and you drop dead. There's some time. But as I said, if she was exhausted from taking care of him, her own immune resistance would have been diminished. And she probably didn't seek help when she got sick. She figured it was a cold, upper respiratory illness, which is how it presents. And I think it just got ahead of her and she died.
|
Sam:
[23:57]
| So this is one of those things where, you know, you sort of, like you said, it's sort of like, oh, it's just a cold. It's just a flu. I don't even have to worry about this. I'll just like push my way through it. And then it gets worse, I guess, rapidly at some point. And she fell or passed out or something. And that was it.
|
Ed:
[24:16]
| Yeah. Yeah, and as I said, even treated, it's got a fairly high mortality rate. It's not a minor illness at all. It's kind of one of those relatively rare things that a lot of people don't ever encounter and don't think of it. The sad part of this is that he then lived several days and apparently is far enough gone with his Alzheimer's that he didn't realize that she was dead. And he basically starved enough or got weaker and weaker and had a heart attack and died. So it's kind of all around, if there's any take-home advice on this.
|
Sam:
[24:53]
| Just to complete the story, they also had several dogs. One of the dogs was in a crate. The dogs that were not in a crate fended for themselves and lived. The one that was in the crate with no food and no water expired after a few days because no water. Yeah.
|
Ed:
[25:12]
| I think the biggest takeaway I can think on this is if you're taking care of a relative or somebody with dementia, progressive dementia, you need to have some time off now that you absolutely have to find a place where you can have downtime. When my father was fairly far gone and dementia, they had a bus that would come around, pick people up and take them to the park downtown and they could be entertained for several hours. And my mother spent those four or five hours sleeping in bed because she knew he was safe and she didn't have any. And that saved her life because when he finally died of his dementia, she was still going strong.
|
Sam:
[25:55]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[25:55]
| But it's just to think you can take care of somebody alone with dementia is a bad mistake. People need to get help. They need to get some time off at least a day or so a week in which you're on your own and somebody else comes in, family member, nurse, whatever.
|
Sam:
[26:13]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[26:13]
| But they obviously had no help because they were dead for over a week before the bodies were found. If they had had a visiting nurse, there would have been a different outcome there.
|
Sam:
[26:25]
| Right. Yeah. No, it's sad all around on that one. Just the sequence events that played out. And like you said, there are a variety of opportunities where even if you just had somebody else checking in occasionally to say hi. Things could have turned out a little bit differently, you know, at various stages. Could have saved the dog, could have saved Hackman a little longer, maybe even could have saved her, like if, you know, depending. So, yeah. So, okay. What other medical thing did you have in mind?
|
Ed:
[27:02]
| The next thing on my list is we have the measles epidemic going on in the States.
|
Sam:
[27:06]
| Yep.
|
Ed:
[27:07]
| And there's a couple observations on that. Number one, measles is probably one of the top two or three most infectious diseases that we deal with. There's a mathematical formula called R-naught, which is abbreviated with a capital R and a zero, that measures how infectious diseases are. It's a scale of zero to 16 or 17, something like that. Measles comes in at 15, meaning that as a minimum, it means that if one person is with a bunch of people who haven't been immunized, at least 15 of them will become infected with measles. To compare that, for instance, COVID, which we thought of as being a highly contagious disease, has an R0 of two to three.
|
Ed:
[27:55]
| Polio has an R0 of two. Several other illnesses, I think even And smallpox, they have to estimate, but it's our value somewhere in three to five, which is much lower. So 15 is huge. Absolutely. And the only way to treat it is to not get it through vaccine. If 95 or more percent of the population are vaccinated, that other 5% will be likely to get measles because the virus is out there all the time. But it won't spread as an epidemic like what's happening in Texas and New Mexico right now. And the chances of people dying from it would be very little. As a rule, about one out of every 1,200 kids who gets infected dies. And we've had one already.
|
Sam:
[28:42]
| I think the latest update is one kid and one adult have now died.
|
Ed:
[28:46]
| Yeah, an adult. Neither of whom I think were vaccinated. I don't know if it's...
|
Sam:
[28:50]
| No, that's correct. No vaccinations.
|
Ed:
[28:52]
| Yeah. Now, the other thing is that, There are some over-the-counter remedies pushed by the anti-vaxxers and other people. One of those is vitamin A. And there is a little science behind that because in countries where malnutrition and health is very poor, vitamin A supplements can help kids who get measles and maybe even lower the incidence slightly. But in a country such as ours, where vitamin A deficiency is rare, almost non-existent, getting extra vitamin A is not without hazard. Because vitamin A is one of the fat-soluble vitamins, which means that it's taken up in fat in the liver specifically and stored, and your body doesn't get rid of an overdosage very rapidly. So one of the side effects of an overdosage of vitamin A is liver failure and death, which strikes me as not a great idea. The other thing that's...
|
Sam:
[29:54]
| And especially, like you said, Americans typically have enough A anyway. So even taking the supplement might already be more than you need. But also there seems to be a tendency, and I'm not going to say this is universal, but among the kind of people who would respond and say, hey, I can avoid measles just by taking vitamin A to also just think, hey, well, if a little bit is good, a lot must be better.
|
Ed:
[30:21]
| That is, we saw that during COVID with the, that, like, what's the hell, the stuff they were taking was supposed to take care of parasites.
|
Sam:
[30:31]
| The invermicin or whatever it was?
|
Ed:
[30:32]
| Yeah, yeah, ivermectin, yeah.
|
Sam:
[30:34]
| Yeah, ivermectin.
|
Ed:
[30:35]
| Yeah, a little bit's good, taking an IV is even better. And, you know, and then, of course, the side of, the other side of that, cod liver oil has a lot of vitamin A in it. So there are those out there. I'm not going to mention names, but there is one fairly prominent citizen. I'll mention it.
|
Sam:
[30:51]
| It's RFK Jr.
|
Ed:
[30:53]
| Yeah. He is sending vitamin K saying this will help. It doesn't help. There's absolutely no studies showing that cod liver oil is a benefit. Maybe because it has the A in it, it would have a slight benefit. Not enough to prevent death. Not enough to prevent infection. It's quackery, basically. And it's kind of sad. But what they need to do, and I don't see it happening, is they need to be getting down there and having emergency vaccination of everybody who hasn't had the vaccines.
|
Sam:
[31:29]
| Yeah, I mean, like, this is one of those clear breaks that having someone like RFK Jr. In charge of HNHS, which in turn has all of these health agencies under it. Is clear immediately. Like if you had a flat out, like straight up science-based response to this, it would be exactly what you said. It would be like, holy crap, You know, we thought we had eliminated this disease in this country a while ago. Yep.
|
Ed:
[32:01]
| Actually, around 2000, they said it's not there anymore.
|
Sam:
[32:05]
| Yeah. And vaccination rates have dropped. We are now having an outbreak in a part of the country that has low vaccination rates. We are immediately going to go in there with a really strong campaign about how you need to protect yourself. you need to protect your family, get the vaccine. Here it is. It's free. There are clinics set up all over the place. You can get it at your local drugstore or whatever, and just have a massive campaign trying to get that to happen. Now, we know from what happened with COVID that those kinds of things can get politicized and people can be like, no, it's the government trying to control me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the one advantage of having somebody like Trump or even RFK Jr., if he'd actually like suck it up and just follow the science here, is that you can perhaps get some of those skeptical people to trust you if you're coming from that point of view, if you're someone who they trust anyway.
|
Sam:
[33:07]
| You know, and you don't let it become a wedge issue. I mean, even during COVID, there's no reason that had to be a wedge issue. That could have been a consistent bipartisan. And I mean, hell, the vaccine came, you know, Donald Trump was a big pusher of getting the vaccine developed early. And he was an early like proponent of it until like it was clear, like various other people in his party were like, ah, we don't like this vaccine thing. But yeah, no, that would be the approach. Instead, we've got RFK Jr. Talking about like cod liver oil, vitamin A and various holistic things. And it's just the result is going to be greater spread than we'd see otherwise in more dead people. I mean, it's not.
|
Ed:
[33:51]
| The other thing we always forget in measles is that one out of every 1,200 kids dies. Two or three out of every 1,200 kids has permanent brain, visual, and hearing damage because it gets into the brain and does nasty things to them. And it's a heartbreaking story early on in this thing of a man who works in public health now, whose daughter came down with measles years ago before the vaccines were there. And she was doing great. And he was reading her stories at night and entertaining her. And then one night she seemed a little drowsy and not responding to well. And she was dead 18 hours later.
|
Sam:
[34:33]
| Oh, this is Roald Dahl, right?
|
Ed:
[34:35]
| I don't remember who it was. It was an editorial. I didn't pay attention to who it was. Maybe it was him.
|
Sam:
[34:40]
| Let me make. Yeah, this is a famous editorial, and I believe it is Roald Dahl, but let me get the difference. Yeah.
|
Ed:
[34:52]
| But I think that was before vaccine. So this was like 60 years ago.
|
Sam:
[34:55]
| Yeah.
|
Ed:
[34:56]
| Yeah, that would be right his age. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[34:59]
| Roald Dahl. Okay. My spelling is my, like, my, my, I'm horrible. I'm trying to like Google this and like, I can't spell the guy's name. I can't spell measles. I can't. Anyway. Yes.
|
Ed:
[35:14]
| D-A-H-L.
|
Sam:
[35:14]
| It is indeed Roald Dahl. R-O-A-L-D-D-A-H-L. He's famously, he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He wrote Matilda. The letter comes from 1988, which I hadn't realized it.
|
Ed:
[35:29]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[35:30]
| Which is right before he died. And it's basically, like you said, it's begging. I'll read a little bit of a quote from it that ties along with what you said. The full letter is longer. You can find it on, if you just Google Roald Dahl measles, you'll find it right away. But the quote here, Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course, I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of colored pipe cleaners. And when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything. Are you feeling all right? I asked her. I feel all sleepy. She said in an hour, she was unconscious in 12 hours. She was dead. So she died in 1962. Like you said, before the measles vaccine.
|
Ed:
[36:40]
| Yep. That's the year I started med school.
|
Sam:
[36:43]
| And he dedicated a couple of his later books to our James and the Giant Peach and the BFG. And yeah, he was just a big... He spent a lot of his life after this advocating for vaccines. And he was of the opinion that refusal to vaccinate your kids was almost, quote unquote, almost a crime. And he was one that was pushing for mandatory vaccinations for a lot of things. And what we see here is just like over the last couple of decades, I mean, for something like measles specifically, like independent of some of the misinformation about the risks of vaccines, there's been also the sort of thing where, like, well, measles is gone. Why, why do we need to vaccinate for it anymore? You know, and so a lot of people think that way of like, you know, well, this is, this is useless. And the thing is, it's because it's not really gone.
|
Sam:
[37:45]
| It's just very, very, very rare at this point. And people are protected from it. And the reason it's gone is because everyone was vaccinating. And for a lot of diseases, I'm not sure if this is the case with measles, but even after you don't have human cases for a while, you can have reservoirs hiding out in the animal population, or you can have similar diseases that the vaccine would also protect against that could recur. There are all kinds of ways for things to come back. Now, if you really and truly get to the point where, hey, it's been 150 years and there's nothing similar out there at all, okay, maybe you could consider that. But take the scientific recommendation on that, not just be like, oh, me as a lay person decides there's no risk anymore, so therefore I'm not going to take it or have my kids take it. Let me ask you one more question about measles before we move on to other stuff. Sure. Given the, you know, like you were saying, this has an R0 of 15 compared to like two or three for COVID. So why do we only have two deaths so far? Why isn't this like going crazy?
|
Ed:
[38:58]
| Well, we've had only a thousand cases so far or it's getting close. No, it is a couple hundred, I think, so far.
|
Sam:
[39:05]
| I know two deaths, but I'm not sure on number of cases.
|
Ed:
[39:10]
| The death rate usually is around one out of every 1,200. So we won't have that many deaths. And I don't know if they if we haven't had any of the brain infections yet or what, but it's it's a relatively small population there, apparently of one of the I think of Mennonite sect that have decided they didn't need to vaccinate. The majority of the infections have been in those people.
|
Sam:
[39:34]
| Well, the thing is, and maybe a majority of the cases are here too, but the overall vaccination rate has dropped somewhat just because of the vaccine skepticism stuff, like the stuff RFK Jr. Is doing in terms of trying to scare people about side effects that don't really exist or are incredibly rare. trying to connect things like this to autism, which, like, no, again. And even if it were, by the way, with an entire family on the spectrum, including myself, I believe, even though I've never been officially diagnosed, like, you shouldn't be afraid of that like it's a death sentence anyway. But it's not related to the vaccine. Yeah.
|
Ed:
[40:21]
| You know, this concept of it's all gone worked with smallpox because the only reservoir for smallpox was human beings. As far as we know, there aren't any animals that this monkeypox is a similar infection, but a lot lower mortality rate. Smallpox had 30 to 40 percent mortality rate. But there is no smallpox in the world right now. So we don't need to vaccinate for it.
|
Sam:
[40:46]
| There's still a couple in vials in a lab somewhere, right? Like, you know, somebody could like take one of those vials out and like intentionally reintroduce it at some point.
|
Ed:
[40:56]
| Which is why for a long time, the military kept on vaccinating us. And then somewhere around 1980, they said, we're hurting more soldiers than we're helping. And so they quit vaccinating us. And I think that was a wise idea. But we still have vaccines.
|
Sam:
[41:12]
| You have to do the math. You have to approach it like scientifically. You have to say, you have to look at the probabilities correctly in terms of like, and this is something that people have trouble with, with anything, right? Like they're like, oh, there's a one in a gabillion chance of something really awful happening if I take this medicine. So I don't want to take it. Well, meanwhile, the chances of you getting some disease and having a bad outcome are one in a thousand if you don't take the medicine. So like it's, it's, you know, yes, there's a chance that something goes wrong, but it's a much smaller chance than the chance of something going wrong if you don't take it. So you have to do the math. You have to figure this out. You have to like pay careful attention to the studies. You also have to like know what the hell you're talking about. Like, cause if you look at some of the data sheets on possible side effects and stuff, you know, like even the stuff they list on the TV commercials and stuff, you know, It's just like, hey, has anybody ever reported this alongside while they were taking the medicine? There's not necessarily all the time. Sometimes there is, but there's not necessarily proof of a cause effect relationship.
|
Sam:
[42:26]
| Those like warnings on the TV commercials don't give you numbers in terms of like how likely particular outcomes are. There are also certain things that are more or less likely depending on your own current medical history. So like, if you've got X, Y, Z, then this is counter indicated. If you don't, then it's not, you know, it, the point is it's complex and there's all kinds of information. There's all kinds of uncertainty. And to make a rational decision, you have to actually have some, have some expertise and know what the hell you're talking about. And the danger is when people come in and see one thing, have no idea what they're really looking at and make an off-the-cuff decision that, you know, is not an educated decision and is often a bad decision. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, patients shouldn't have some right in their own treatment. Of course they should. But it's important, like, you know, there's this whole death of expertise thing going on where everybody thinks that they can figure out everything they need and they don't have to pay attention to experts. And, you know, I'm sorry, there is a reason you want to pay attention to people who spend their whole lives studying something over somebody who spends five minutes, if that.
|
Sam:
[43:46]
| Pop and open a Wikipedia page, you know, or, or, or even worse. Oh, well, Joe Rogan said so, or RFK Jr. Said so.
|
Ed:
[43:56]
| Yep.
|
Sam:
[43:57]
| Sorry. I went off for a second.
|
Ed:
[44:00]
| Yeah, no problem. I think the, the, the, the reason the justification for having mandatory vaccines for kids to go to school is to prevent epidemics in schools, obviously, but even beyond that is that there are all sorts of kids anymore who have been treated for leukemia and various other things who have compromised immune systems. And if your kid takes measles into school, even though that child might've been vaccinated, their protection may not be very good and they may get it and die of it. I said one patient die of chickenpox when I was in practice. It was a little girl. This was before we had the vaccine for chickenpox. And this little girl was treated for acute myelogenous leukemia, which I had diagnosed. And we were treating her, I was treating her in conjunction with the real oncologist. It was a hundred miles trip to the oncologist. So they would send the drugs back and I would give them to her and she would see them once a month and me a couple of times a month. Anyway, her little brothers caught chickenpox at school and five days later she was dead. And, you know, I'll never forget sitting there with her mother, who's friends of ours, as a child died. So, yeah, the vaccines prevent that. If there had been a vaccine then and the brothers had been vaccinated, that little girl would probably still be alive because she was just then going into remission.
|
Sam:
[45:28]
| Yeah.
|
Ed:
[45:29]
| Anyway, on that high note.
|
Sam:
[45:31]
| It is extremely frustrating when, you know, it's one thing like when COVID was brand new, we didn't have treatments. We didn't have a vaccine. We were still trying to figure out what the hell was going on. There was a lot of people get, you know, informed people like doing their best with very limited information. And some of the things that were suggested at the beginning turned out to not be relevant. For instance, you know, like in the end, it is absolutely clear COVID was airborne and not really droplet based surfaces weren't really an issue. So like, if you remember at the very beginning, everybody was talking about cleaning all the surfaces.
|
Ed:
[46:13]
| You know, and we did that when he got back from the grocery store.
|
Sam:
[46:18]
| Wipe everything down, wipe everything down now. That's good for some other diseases. You know, it's probably a good practice anyway. But, you know, and like a lot of the protections that were advocated at the beginning assumed droplet was the primary mode of transmission. It turns out, no, it wasn't droplet. It really was truly airborne, which is really, really fine particles as opposed to bigger droplets. And so there, But at first we didn't know anything. And so there was a lot of being, you know, we erred perhaps towards overprotection or protecting the wrong things in some cases. There was always sort of a reluctance to truly embrace the airborne thing. I mean, even now people aren't doing what they need to with ventilation. But the point is, though, now we do have treatments. Now we do have vaccines for COVID, for measles, for chickenpox and all the other things you're talking about and a whole host of childhood diseases. And thankfully, most people still at this point follow the recommended guidelines for young children and get all the vaccinations they're supposed to. But the fact that there's a growing percentage who don't and are like, yes, science has found good ways to avoid this disease, but we don't want to.
|
Sam:
[47:44]
| What? It's just incredibly frustrating. Yep. Especially when, like you said, the fact that these, the people who decide not to vaccinate are not just affecting themselves because for all of these diseases, they can make it easier for it to transmit to other people. They can, once they get sick, they get other people sick. It's just, you know, it's, it's not, it's not a case where this decision only affects you when you have things. And measles is a primary example of this, where it really is like, if you get that vaccination rate, like really high, like over 95%, it makes a huge difference compared to if it's even 90, you know?
|
Ed:
[48:32]
| Absolutely.
|
Sam:
[48:33]
| So, okay. One more, one more health thing, or did you have another? I have another, if you don't.
|
Ed:
[48:39]
| Well, I've got another quickie. What is it?
|
Sam:
[48:41]
| Well, it may be the same one. What's your, what's your last one?
|
Ed:
[48:45]
| Okay. Well, I was just going to comment that there's been some more uproar about fentanyl deaths and importing of fentanyl. And just, I think it was earlier today or last week, whatever, the fentanyl deaths in the United States began dropping in January of 2024. At this point, it's down about 60%. Of what it was at the peak. It's unclear just what has caused that. But one of the things is a drug called naloxone, which probably a lot of people should just simply have it. You don't know when you're going to be walking down the street and some guy will collapse of an overdosage and you can save their life with a dose of naloxone.
|
Sam:
[49:24]
| Yeah. My wife is a big proponent of these kinds of things. I believe she carries around some and we have some somewhere in the house. I should know where it is. Um, but, uh, like I don't carry it around, but this is definitely has made a big difference in terms of, you know, a people carrying it around, but B just having it, available quickly in certain places as well. This is the, it's the nasal spray, right?
|
Ed:
[49:51]
| Yeah. That's the one you can, it can be injectable or nasal spray.
|
Sam:
[49:54]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[49:55]
| A lot of people don't like give shots. So they have the nasal spray.
|
Sam:
[49:58]
| Right. And so this is, and basically, you know, Hey, if somebody is having an overdose and you got this stuff, you can take it from being, you know, an acute situation to a better situation quickly. Like, uh, I, I'm not sure if it completely solves everything. Like you don't even have to follow up, but I, you, you probably do. Right. Ed, like it, it helps.
|
Ed:
[50:19]
| Uh, some people will need two or three doses because it wears off fairly quickly. So yeah, no, you can't just give it and say, okay, you're cured and go away. Uh, it doesn't obviously change the addiction, but it keeps people alive so they can get treated for addiction, which is kind of neat. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's very few, the dangers from it are pretty minimal. So, I mean, there, there are people out there who say, if you come across anybody from any obvious reason, you should give them Naloxone. It's not going to hurt them. It might save their life.
|
Sam:
[50:53]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[50:54]
| But anyway, it's kind of nice to see that we're winning that game even without tariffs.
|
Sam:
[51:02]
| Yeah. Well, the stupid tariffs. Yes. The cross-border stuff of this, especially on the Canada side, but even on the Mexico side, from what I hear, is not like the big problem. No.
|
Ed:
[51:17]
| Actually, I understand that the majority of the fentanyl coming in is carried by U.S. Citizens with their passports coming through and not getting. And in all honesty, when we came back from India and I went through what used to be a fairly intensive, you know, inspection by the border patrol or whatever, we walked up and I showed them my passport and they said goodbye.
|
Sam:
[51:41]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[51:41]
| I was, I was through that line in the, because I'm an old fart, they, they grabbed me and put me at the front of the line. I went into the room and was on my way to the baggage in less than two minutes.
|
Sam:
[51:54]
| Nice. Okay. The, the, the other health thing that since, since we have this segment on health stuff, uh, what's the latest with bird flu, Ed?
|
Ed:
[52:03]
| Oh, God. It's still primarily a bird flu, and it's still hitting our chickens. There is a vaccine for it, for chickens. Our farmers apparently are resisting, the Farmers Association resisting using that vaccine because they say that would hurt exports. We've wiped out half of our crops now, so there's no exporting of eggs right now. We're importing them.
|
Sam:
[52:29]
| Apparently, there are a bunch of countries that will not let you import birds that have been vaccinated.
|
Ed:
[52:38]
| Well, do they want the eggs, though? I think it's because they won't even take the eggs.
|
Sam:
[52:42]
| They probably won't take anything. And, you know, you could probably have a whole debate on that and, like, whether that's an appropriate restriction or not.
|
Ed:
[52:53]
| We've got a shortage of eggs. Who wants to export them? We'll buy any they can make. But anyway, at this point, what they do is if your flock gets the bird poo, you kill your whole flock. It's killing farmers.
|
Sam:
[53:06]
| That's one of the things the Trump administration is saying. They're actively looking at how to change. The protocol was exactly what you said for years and years and years. This wasn't just a Joe Biden thing. But for years and years, the protocol was if you get any infection whatsoever, you kill them all to avoid spread. And so what they're looking into now is whether you can look at physical isolation stuff as well. Now, the notion was once you have one of your like commercial flock infected, the way people.
|
Sam:
[53:45]
| You know, and this gets to how inhumane American animal processes go anyway. They're often extremely overcrowded in spaces that aren't well ventilated. You know, and so basically it's a reasonable assumption that if you got one sick bird, they're probably all infected. But the notion of the physical barriers and such, A, is that most of these flocks, the initial infection comes from the wild, where they have a duck or a goose or something that's wild lands in with the chickens, infects the chickens, and then takes off again. So if you introduce physical barriers that basically make it so, hey, the wild animals have no ability to contact the domestic flocks at all.
|
Ed:
[54:39]
| I think they still poop, though.
|
Sam:
[54:42]
| Well, you have to have roofs. You have to have physical barrier all the way around, right? It's not just a wall. And that's part of what they're thinking about this, but this is also very expensive. And also even within the flocks, you know, I mentioned, you know, big overcrowded, blah, blah, blah. You could also introduce more robust physical barriers between parts of your flock. So it's not just like, you know, a million birds in one big space or whatever you use, you separate them out and isolate them from each other. So if you do get an infection, you don't have to kill all of them. You kill a smaller group of them. And then, you know, And of course, like you mentioned, there's the vaccine.
|
Sam:
[55:26]
| One thing, you know, people, people don't seriously consider treatment because it doesn't scale as well. Right. You know, it's like if you've, if you've got a flock of hundreds of thousands of birds, you know, that only live a few weeks anyway, typically before you slaughter them or longer for egg birds, but for meat birds, you know.
|
Sam:
[55:51]
| You're not going to go individually treating each chicken as if it was your family daughter. With, you know, individual vet attention. And I don't know, maybe we should, but that just isn't like what that industry would consider. One thing that was brought up in terms of the egg shortage as well is one of the reasons is it's like we're talking about egg shortages, but we're not talking about chicken meat shortage is just how quick the turnaround is on meat birds. Like literally they slaughter these birds after like a month to a month and a half. Really uh in in often often and so basically they're like look you know we we lose an entire flock of meat birds we can replenish that supply in six six to eight weeks and be back where we were but for laying hens we need to wait until they're sexually mature and laying eggs and that takes more like six months and so you know if we you know if we slaughter a bunch of egg laying hens then it's a lot longer before production capacity is back to where it was yeah no you know so i don't see.
|
Ed:
[57:08]
| It ending very soon.
|
Sam:
[57:09]
| Now are we still there have been a handful of human cases apparently in people who had contact with birds, there have been a handful, I believe some cats have died as well. And I believe in cases, again, the cat was in contact with wild birds, you know, that kind of thing.
|
Ed:
[57:31]
| I don't think there's any documented human to human cases yet. Right. Animal to human.
|
Sam:
[57:37]
| Is that still a worry or do we feel sort of at this point, we know what this is and it's, it's, you know, it causes a problem to our, to our egg supply.
|
Sam:
[57:46]
| But it's not really a human concern directly.
|
Ed:
[57:49]
| I, I, I'm not enough of a biologist to answer, but I, I have heard at least one person who was supposedly an expert say that it would take only one mutation for it to become infectious to humans. So yeah, I, it's probably a question of when does the time bomb go off? If she was right. And I had no reason to question her. She knows a lot more about it than I do.
|
Sam:
[58:13]
| Well, and to keep in mind, yeah, it may only need one mutation, but it needs the right mutation, right?
|
Ed:
[58:19]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[58:20]
| Mutations are happening all the time in viruses, but like most of them won't have this effect. But if you get unlucky the one time.
|
Ed:
[58:28]
| Yeah. They apparently know which gene it is that would be affected.
|
Sam:
[58:34]
| And also, you have to add, not only does this mutation have to happen, it has to happen in a bird that ends up infecting a human. Or other birds.
|
Ed:
[58:46]
| If it infects another birds, they'll get to the humans.
|
Sam:
[58:49]
| Yeah. Or I suppose you could have one of the small handful of infected humans could have the mutation there. There are a number of mechanisms, but it hasn't happened yet. So cross your fingers.
|
Ed:
[59:00]
| Well, remember that COVID probably came from bats and it didn't infect any humans until somewhere around 2019.
|
Sam:
[59:10]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[59:11]
| And then it took off after that.
|
Sam:
[59:14]
| Okay. Well, let's take a break. Okay. And when we get back, Ed, have your next topic prepared.
|
Ed:
[59:22]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[59:24]
| Back after this. Okay, we are back.
|
Ed:
[1:00:10]
| I timed that perfectly. I went out and got a glass of water.
|
Sam:
[1:00:16]
| Okay, so Ed, next topic.
|
Ed:
[1:00:20]
| Have we talked at all about the private prison solutions to our crime problems?
|
Sam:
[1:00:27]
| We have not talked about private prisons. I'm not sure if we've ever talked about it, to be honest. Certainly not recently.
|
Ed:
[1:00:33]
| Okay, well, just briefly. From something I read today, I think it was in the Times, New York Times, the private prisons, as we all know, have become a much popular issue in the United States. Rather than building new prisons, we hire it out to the private sector on contract. Mr. Biden apparently started to cut back on that, but he never finished off, really. I mean, he said, well, we want to get rid of all these private prisons. And he decreased the number of people in them, but never got rid of it.
|
Sam:
[1:01:09]
| And just to be clear, this is something that's happening at all levels, right? Like federal, state, local.
|
Ed:
[1:01:15]
| Yeah. And where it came up as an issue to me this time is that apparently, because the private prisons have a fair number of empty beds right now, our government has decided, well, there's where we can put these immigrants. And so they are letting out new contracts. Several new contracts have been given and they're about to build some new prisons. And it's a growth industry. Again, the stock market, apparently, if you look for those contractors, they're making big money and going to town. I don't know if there's an answer to that, but I do know that that's a hell of a way to run a ship.
|
Sam:
[1:01:55]
| Yeah. I mean, there are so many problems with this. One is you create a natural incentive for a whole industry who's based on they do better the more prisoners there are. So like the notion of, hey, let's figure out the right way to deal with crime in a way that, you know, rehabilitates people, avoids future crime, et cetera, et cetera, you know, just easily turns into let's just jail as many people as possible because that's how we make money.
|
Sam:
[1:02:29]
| And most of these are set up as well that they're not the yeah there may be some exceptions but for the most part they're not incentivized on quote-unquote good outcomes you know where you do get the the rehabilitation and the person coming out better for it and and not being you know not being recidivist etc so it really does become warehousing as well and conditions aren't always great. And, you know, and I know some people come in straight with a mindset, well, they're prisoners, the condition shouldn't be great. But at the same time, there's, you know, there's a basic level of humanity that should exist, like even for our worst prisoners.
|
Sam:
[1:03:13]
| And I mean, occasionally you see like memes of like, you know, is this a Scandinavian prison or like a British dorm room, college dorm room. And like the British college dorm rooms are worse than the Scandinavian prisons in terms of amenities for the prisoner and how they look and blah, blah, blah. And I think, you know, fundamentally, a lot of this comes down to like, what is our philosophy of dealing with crime in the first place? And, you know, is it simply punishment. And I think for the most part in the U.S., it's punishment and revenge sort of lead the day in terms of what we're trying to do, rather than sort of an outcome-based.
|
Sam:
[1:04:04]
| Do we make the world better in the end after this sort of view of things? And I, I think that's a problem, but like back to private prisons specifically, I think the adding everything I just mentioned applies to public prisons too. Uh, cause they're a reflection of like our societal societal attitudes, but I think the problems are amped up to 11 on private prisons because then you also add the profit motive and just like people trying to maximize the dollars no matter what. And I think it's exactly the wrong incentive to have in this sort of situation. There are a whole bunch of places where I think the profit motive helps in a lot of areas. I mean, there's a reason why capitalism has been successful and has driven all kinds of innovation. But there are certain areas where the profit motive provides really bad incentives that produce bad outcomes. We don't have to talk about all the others. I think there are plenty of others, but I think this is definitely one of them.
|
Ed:
[1:05:10]
| Yeah. Oh, no question. I add to that that, Many, maybe not most, but many public prisons have a fairly stringent policy on how guards are hired, monitored, and checked out before they get the job. The private prisons do not do a very good job of that.
|
Sam:
[1:05:31]
| Which means that the rate of— This is one of those things, at the very least, if you're going to have a private prison, you would expect that the scenario would be that they'd have to meet or exceed the standards of the public prisons. But no!
|
Ed:
[1:05:46]
| No, no, no, no. Because prison abuse has apparently become a real issue in a lot of these private prisons because who is attracted to being a cop? All too frequently, bad guys are attracted to that because I get to beat people up and carry a gun.
|
Sam:
[1:06:01]
| And probably even more so for prison guards.
|
Ed:
[1:06:04]
| Well, yeah, absolutely. A good system screens those people out. And when they identify them, they kick them out. But I don't know that the private prisons aren't doing that. They don't give a damn. They get paid 500 bucks a prisoner a week or a month or whatever. And it's just the wrong way to do things. Plus, an awful lot of these people who are being picked up and kicked out of the country have not really committed crimes. They committed the crime of coming here illegally. Okay, that's a crime. They have not robbed people.
|
Sam:
[1:06:37]
| Which, by the way, although there are people looking to adjust this, is at worst a misdemeanor and in many cases is actually just a civil issue entirely. It's not even criminal.
|
Ed:
[1:06:48]
| Yeah, but very few of these people have committed violent crimes, robberies, and other horseshit like that. I mean, they've come here to try and make a living and they're willing to take jobs that don't pay very much and are hard jobs. But what we do is we arrest them and throw them in prison because we have a quota that you got to arrest 700 people a day and they're not achieving it. So there's all sorts of crap coming because they can't arrest enough people.
|
Sam:
[1:07:17]
| Yeah. And, uh, and look, everything they're doing with that, you know, and is we're, you know, first of all, like they're not achieving the numbers of the deportations that Donald Trump wanted. And he's apparently getting madder and madder about that as the weeks go on. Like, why aren't you getting rid of these people? You're supposed to get rid of these people. And their deportation numbers are actually less than they were under Biden. um the biden.
|
Ed:
[1:07:46]
| Got rid of a bunch.
|
Sam:
[1:07:47]
| Now they have pointed out that intercepted border crossings are way down so the the thought is is donald trump just being so hostile that he's actually discouraging people from trying maybe apparently what happened last time donald was here was that there was a drop like this at the very beginning of his administration while people sort of sussed out the situation and understood what was going on. And then it popped right back up again, uh, afterwards. So we'll see if we're in that kind of a situation because you could see them declaring victory. Some of them are already starting to like, Oh, look, the crossings are down so much. Uh, that means this is all a success. We're doing great now. You know, I, I, I would argue that even so, gaining the success by being inhumane and brutal is not the right way to do it. But yeah, we're certainly not achieving all of Trump's goals on this. But if we are doing things by shipping people to inhumane situations in all kinds of different ways, whether it be the private prisons or hell, Guantanamo, we were doing for a little while. Apparently, we're backing off from that because it turns out that was hard and had all kinds of issues and was expensive. We're shipping people to.
|
Sam:
[1:09:14]
| Foreign prisons, like I think El Salvador and Panama maybe both agreed.
|
Ed:
[1:09:21]
| El Salvador, which...
|
Sam:
[1:09:22]
| It was El Salvador.
|
Ed:
[1:09:23]
| Yeah, their prisons are not a place you want to be.
|
Sam:
[1:09:26]
| So they've apparently agreed to accept a whole bunch of people that we're expelling and then figure out what to do with them separately. But, you know, if we ship somebody to somewhere that treats them inhumanely, it's still on us. You know i i think that the the take that the administration has to be is like we're just getting out of the country what happens after that is none of our business we don't care you know but it it is our business and frankly even if we even if we end up ship if someone's here looking for asylum and we ship them back to some place that the reason they were looking for asylum was they were in danger in that place and we ship them back and something happens to them yeah, that's on us. I, you know, and of course there's a whole portion of the population that just doesn't care, but we should care. You know, I don't know. We're sort of pivoting from private prisons to, to the immigration issue, but like, yeah.
|
Ed:
[1:10:25]
| Well, it's the reasons because the private prisons are now getting all these immigrants because they can't, they can't put them in regular prisons. I don't think. So they've, they're contracting with those private prisons to take on the immigrants and hold them.
|
Sam:
[1:10:41]
| Yeah. And like you said, they're building new facilities. They're doing all kinds of things. There are some public facilities being built too, apparently, and some things just being repurposed. But all in all, it's not great. And Donald Trump, if anything, is getting increasingly mad that they're not being inhumane enough.
|
Ed:
[1:11:08]
| Yeah. Oh, yeah. How many times did he say in the previous administration, when you're arresting these guys, don't protect their head. Just show them in the car. I don't want to talk about him. The guy makes me sick to my stomach. It's hard to talk about anything without him.
|
Sam:
[1:11:31]
| Any more on the private prisons or anything else? Before we start wrapping things up.
|
Ed:
[1:11:36]
| Well, the only other thing along in the medical stuff that I thought is kind of a good news story is the incidence of cancer of the cervix has been dropping a lot.
|
Sam:
[1:11:46]
| Hey, would this have anything to do with a vaccine?
|
Ed:
[1:11:49]
| It would indeed, because it began dropping when the vaccine was introduced. That's the good news.
|
Sam:
[1:11:58]
| That's the HPV vaccine.
|
Ed:
[1:11:59]
| Yeah, HPV. Actually, there's two strains, HPV-16, which is the really bad one. And I forget the number of the other one, but there's two strains that are covered. And the good news is that those people who get that are not getting cancer of the cervix and presumably probably not going to get cancer of the mouth and throat, although only about 50, 60 percent of cancer of the mouth and throat are from HPV. But that's half of the cases of cancer of the mouth and throat, which is a devastating cancer.
|
Sam:
[1:12:30]
| And just to be clear as well, like originally they were pushing this like for girls and women because they have cervix.
|
Ed:
[1:12:39]
| It's for everybody now.
|
Sam:
[1:12:39]
| But it's for everybody now because males can be, can pass it along. And, and so the recommendation is that, you know, you, kids should get the HPV vaccine is what, right around puberty, right? Like.
|
Ed:
[1:12:56]
| 14 to 15, they're recommending before they become sexually active.
|
Sam:
[1:13:00]
| Before they become sexually active, which, you know, frankly can be before that. So, so like, you know, get basically as soon as you're eligible, you should get that. Now, there was a lot of pushback on that initially from people being like, well, my kid's not sexually active. They're not going to be sexually active anytime soon.
|
Ed:
[1:13:22]
| Well, then there were the others who said, if you give it, then the kid will think that they can go out and be sexually active.
|
Sam:
[1:13:28]
| Yes. And yeah. And of course you got the usual people who are like concerned about side effects that aren't really a concern as well, but like you had this whole thing with people saying that, yeah, this was, this was being permissive. And of course my kid's going to be like a good chaste Christian wait till marriage. So there's no reason to have anything to do with this for years and years and years, if ever. And, and even, even then they're only going to be with their wife or husband. So, you know, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, come on people, come on, you know, let, let's, let's talk. Hey, let's talk about the real world. You know, but even like, okay, fine. Your kid's not going to be doing that stuff. What harm is it? Like it's, it's, it's only going to help. You never know what situation is, how your kid could get raped, you know, like get, get the protection in place. And like, you know, And it's proved highly effective at preventing a very serious cancer, you know.
|
Ed:
[1:14:36]
| There used to be a little meme that said, you are not having sex with your sex partner. You're having sex with everybody that person's ever been with.
|
Sam:
[1:14:47]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[1:14:47]
| And that's kind of covered. So anyway, the good news is that the incidence is dropping. I think in a few more years, we'll probably see that the oropharyngeal cancer is also dropping. The bad news on that is that the incidence of women getting pap smears and checks for cancer is going down. Now, let's say we used to do a pap smear every damn year, and we wouldn't give women their birth control until they came in and got it because we could make sure they got it done. You only need a pap smear about every four or five years now. It's just not an imposition. And I understand. I can't swear to this.
|
Sam:
[1:15:28]
| Well, just to be clear, any procedure like that is somewhat of an imposition, whether it's a pap smear or whatever. But it's not that it's not an imposition. It's that there are significant benefits associated with it that you want to balance off against that. It's preventative health care. You would much rather have good preventative health care than have to deal with the problem of a cancer or anything else after it's there.
|
Ed:
[1:16:00]
| Yeah. Well, the other thing I was going to say is that there is a test now that you can do yourself at home for the HPV-16 strain, which is the most serious one. So if your objection is having a doctor look at your private parts, you can take care of that yourself. But God damn it, do it. Don't just say, well, I don't need to do that because I've always been careful.
|
Sam:
[1:16:25]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[1:16:25]
| It just doesn't work. It's like I'll never get measles because I never get around with anyone who's sick with measles.
|
Sam:
[1:16:31]
| Well, and like I said, more generally preventive care in general, get your colonoscopies, take whatever tests they say you need to take, if you do your vaccinations, et cetera, et cetera. If they're maintenance medications that your doctor recommends for chronic conditions, actually take them, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know.
|
Ed:
[1:16:56]
| Can I tell you one advantage of being over 80 now? I don't have to get colonoscopies anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:17:04]
| They're like, if something happens, screw it. It's too late, basically.
|
Ed:
[1:17:07]
| Well, that's it. Because from the earliest detection, which is what you find with colonoscopy, the dying of it is 15 to 20 years. So, you know, if you're 80, you're going to die before you die. Anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:17:20]
| Oh, come on. You're going to make it to 120, 125, aren't you?
|
Ed:
[1:17:24]
| I doubt it. Not the way I feel this one. I, just to add to the fun, you know, last year I did a, a year long walk, run exercise program that was to have 2025 miles in the course of the year. And I made it, I made, I think actually I made a little over 2,100 miles. So I was quite good. However, in October I started to run and my knees started to hurt all of a sudden. And I have what's basically a stress fracture in the tibial plateau. And I think I'm through running forever. So I had to walk the rest of the year. And now since the first of the year, I'm, I'm getting very, I'm not even going to get a thousand miles this year. I don't think I'm really slowing down this year, getting too old.
|
Sam:
[1:18:10]
| Well, I hear that happens.
|
Ed:
[1:18:12]
| It does. Yep. You know, I can still crack off. I mean, I can still crack. I did four miles yesterday with a workout in the gym in the middle. So I, I can still get four or five miles a day, which is enough.
|
Sam:
[1:18:24]
| You're getting more exercise than I get. And I know I'm bad for that, but more power to you and I need to do better.
|
Ed:
[1:18:35]
| Anyway, I think that's pretty much, I mean, you got some other things, but I think that's probably enough for this year.
|
Sam:
[1:18:41]
| Okay. For this year. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Well, yeah, let's wrap it up then. Hey, everybody, as you know, go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You can find all our archive of shows. You can find transcript of recent shows. You can find all the ways to contact us. And if you want to get in contact with Ed, you can send it to us and we will relay appropriately. You can find, I still have not linked to TikTok. I am still posting highlights on TikTok every week. I am waiting for, At this point, to see if TikTok continues to survive after the 90-day extension that they were given earlier. And okay, look, I'm just procrastinating. That's the real answer. I'm procrastinating. I don't want to do the extra work. But I will eventually add a link to TikTok as well. But you can search for Curmudgeons Corner on TikTok and find us. The website has links to our YouTube, our Facebook, et cetera. We don't do much on Facebook.
|
Sam:
[1:19:39]
| It's just post-announcement of the episodes. There's a link to our Mastodon. We don't do much on Maston. It just posts links to the episodes and to the live streams when they come out. YouTube has our live streams live when they come out, or you can watch video of the whole unedited shows there. It's a lot. It's fun. The podcast experience with audio is different than the video experience. Take a dip at both. Like, yeah, typically I do more like the video takes more commitment is the bottom line. Like audio podcasts you put on in the car while you're driving you put on on your headphones while you're doing household chores stuff like that does not require your full attention if you're going to put something on on video and and actually watch it then you have to actually sit there and watch it like which like i i admit i i i am not a fan of video podcasts but it's there if anybody wants, you can do that. Lots of people do like the video podcast. You can, of course, tune them out the same way as an audio podcast and do stuff anyway. The video is just on in the background. But anyway, all that stuff is there. Also, a link to our Patreon where you can give us cash money. As I mentioned earlier in the show, if you would like to give me enough money, that I don't have to go to a corporate job, I would really appreciate that. That'd be fun. I would enjoy that I would appreciate it I would I would.
|
Sam:
[1:21:09]
| Consider doing stuff for you in return. I don't know what, but like, you know, I would accept that, you know, maybe I had to do something in exchange for that money other than just put out the show. But although, you know, the show is worth tons, obviously. Anyway, you can go to our Patreon at various levels of the Patreon. I will send, send you a postcard, send you a mug, mention you on the show. At this very moment, I owe Pete and Greg cards and I owe Ed a new mug.
|
Sam:
[1:21:44]
| And I have not done those things. Like I said, I'm kind of swamped right now. I will get to them eventually, I promise. But at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, where Yvonne and others are chatting, sharing links throughout the week. And so let me, let me find something, you know, I will pick the article and I will pick the most recently shared thing on the Slack, which was shared while we were recording. Um, Yvonne, who was apparently too sick to join us to record the show, but not too sick to be posting on the Slack, posted an article from The Register, developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he let go, when he was let go. And so.
|
Sam:
[1:22:41]
| Basically, let's see, a federal jury in Cleveland has found a senior software developer guilty of sabotaging his employer systems, and he's now facing a potential 10 years behind bars. Davis Liu, 55, of Houston, Texas, was a seasoned coder employed by Power Management Biz Eaton Corporation from 2007 to 2019. In his last year, there was a corporate restructuring and he was demoted, both in terms of job responsibilities and server access. So he began introducing home-designed malware onto at least one of the employer's production systems. He wrote a program that would, in an infinite loop, create more and more non-terminating threads that would consume more and more resources until the computer running the code crashed and prevented people from logging in and using the machine. And basically, the account had been used to execute the malware, and he was the only member of the team who had access privilege. He set it up with a dead man switch that basically would lock every employee out of their accounts if his credentials were revoked. So basically, it checked periodically to see if he was still with the company. And if he was no longer with the company, would start wreaking havoc.
|
Ed:
[1:24:10]
| Oh, dear.
|
Sam:
[1:24:12]
| So, yeah. So, folks, it may sound fun. It may sound like a nice way to get petty revenge on your ex-employer. But, no. They will take it seriously for good reason. This guy's going to jail.
|
Ed:
[1:24:34]
| Good.
|
Sam:
[1:24:34]
| So, don't do stuff like that. That's in the same case. This should be obvious. This should be obvious. Don't do stuff like this.
|
Ed:
[1:24:42]
| That's in the same category as these people who are firebombing Teslas and one actually fired a rifle into a Tesla because a guy was driving a Tesla, right? Those people need to have free room and board for years and years, not just a month or two.
|
Sam:
[1:24:58]
| Yeah, look, I am not a fan of Elon either, but yes, there have been incidents of setting fire to Tesla chargers. There have been many incidents of vandalism and property destruction to Tesla vehicles. There have been cases of harassing the drivers of these vehicles. The least obnoxious one I saw was pictures of somebody who's leaving essentially pamphlets on the windshields of people driving Teslas basically saying, hey, we know when you bought this, it was cool. It was helping environmental causes. You thought it was great. but now it's not anymore so you really should consider getting rid of this car here's some places go go list it on car max go list it on whatever it listed like three or four different sites that you can sell vehicles on but they're like look it's changed everybody you know get out now before the only people left driving these things are maga nazi wannabes and people are justified in thinking badly for you for driving this car.
|
Sam:
[1:26:18]
| And that's still kind of obnoxious, but it's the least obnoxious I've seen. The people who are actually like spray painting graffiti on these things or breaking windows or setting fires. No, no, no, no, no. It's not helpful. You know, and that note is actually right. I mean, a lot of the people who bought Tesla as several years ago, are absolutely appalled by what Elon Musk has been doing more recently. You know, I saw something today about someone talking about how they desperately want to get rid of their cyber truck, you know, but they can't get rid of it. Like they just can't find somebody to take it off their hands, even at a significant discount to what they paid. They like are failing to... Have any way to get it off their hands. I mean, I guess absent abandoning it on the street somewhere and somebody is eventually going to find them for if they do that and because there are issues with that too, right?
|
Ed:
[1:27:22]
| Well, you know, you don't need to get violent and destructive to hurt them badly. I see that in Germany, the Tesla sales are down 70 some percent, but at the same time, EV vehicles, total sales are up 30 percent. So they're saying, And screw it. We're not going to buy his stuff. You don't have to go out and destroy him. Just quit buying his stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:27:44]
| Yeah. Well, and people are. I mean, because it's not about, I mean, it's not about the cars. It's not about like the company even that in what they're doing. It's about Elon and the fact that he's become toxic. And specifically, he has become toxic to what was the target audience for his company. Like the people who are buying Teslas were not mega conservatives who are buying big gas guzzler trucks. You know, it was people who were concerned about the environment, people who wanted to be like on the cutting edge of tech people. It was a lot of liberals. It was a lot of rich left, left coast liberals, you know, and other people too, but it was a lot of that and he has alienated those people completely. So yeah, his, his sales are, are, are dropping, but you know, you also, I saw one, one person made a post on Mastodon just a little bit ago, uh, Kasim Rashid, who I forget what exactly he does, but I, I followed him. He's a, he's a human rights lawyer and a, and some other stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:28:59]
| But he posted, look, the fact that Musk has lost about $100 billion over the last month with how the stock market has been doing and Tesla in specific has been doing, but he's still the wealthiest person in the world after losing $100 billion in nominal income. And not only that, but in terms of his day-to-day life, it doesn't even make a difference. No like lost lost 100 billion dollars like he's and i'm no longer quoting the tweet but he's making the point it's like because he goes on and talks about there shouldn't be billionaires and all that kind of stuff and i don't necessarily i'm not necessarily one that says we need to tax all billionaires out of existence completely or anything like that like me i'm not like all billionaires are evil but at the same time the the notion that he can lose 100 billion dollars, essentially have it not impact his day-to-day life at all and still be the richest person in the world by a decent margin is indicative of something.
|
Ed:
[1:30:07]
| On the other hand, if his market keeps going down like it is right now, some of his margin loans are going to get called at some point. And then he may not be the richest person.
|
Sam:
[1:30:17]
| Yeah, Yvonne has pointed that out a couple of times on the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack. I don't know if you mentioned it on the podcast. But yeah, apparently Musk is significantly leveraged in certain areas and using his stock as collateral and stuff like that. So there are certain circumstances that could cause a rapid deterioration in his situation. However, I think you can safely say that even in the worst possible case for Elon Musk, he's going to be doing pretty well.
|
Ed:
[1:30:51]
| I i'm not so sure anymore there.
|
Sam:
[1:30:54]
| Are there.
|
Ed:
[1:30:54]
| Are more than a few billionaires who ended up on the in the world.
|
Sam:
[1:30:59]
| I don't know i yeah i just do i have trouble envisioning a situation where you end up passing elon on a street corner holding up the sign asking for five bucks for dinner. I'm sorry. Like he will avoid that fate.
|
Ed:
[1:31:18]
| Yeah. You know, he's, he's got basically three companies. He's got Tesla, he's got the rocket company and he's got X. X is worthless. It's, it's still losing. It has paper value, but nothing else. His Tesla stock is what he leveraged to buy X. And the rocket company has now got two spectacular failures in a row. I'm not sure that people are anxious to buy that stock.
|
Sam:
[1:31:45]
| Well, that one's private. There, you can't find it.
|
Ed:
[1:31:48]
| Is that privately owned? Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:31:49]
| SpaceX is private. But it does, and normally you'd say, well, does this put his government contracts at risk? Yep. But in the world we have now, Elon's hanging out in Novel Office every day.
|
Ed:
[1:32:04]
| Yep, that's true.
|
Sam:
[1:32:05]
| You know, and has a significant part in the decisions that will influence his company in SpaceX and Tesla too. Yep. So like, so I don't know that you can say, well, clearly NASA is going to cancel the contracts they have, or at least put a hold on it or put something, you know, maybe, maybe not like a pair, apparently even this time, like you kind of would have expected that maybe the FAA would have put more restrictions on after that first rocket blew up a month ago that would have prevented the same thing from happening in the second. And from what I've seen so far, they're still investigating. It was essentially the same failure that happened a month ago, you know, in terms of what physically happened to the rocket. So they clearly did not take the amount of time necessary to fully address the situation. Now, maybe I'm sure the situation is a little bit different. They probably, you know, but, but nevertheless, yeah, who, who knows? Like, yeah. It's probably still full speed ahead in terms of that. Now, the Tesla stuff, on the other hand, you know, unlike SpaceX, where the primary customer is going to be, I mean, there are corporate customers too, but government makes a huge part of SpaceX's plans.
|
Sam:
[1:33:35]
| Tesla, you have to get people to buy the damn cars. And if less and less people want the cars, that's a problem for you. Now can, can Musk at some point sort of make up the people he's losing by getting new people excited about the product? Maybe. I don't know. We'll see. Okay. I think that's it, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:33:57]
| Yep.
|
Sam:
[1:33:58]
| Sounds good. Thank you for joining us yet again, Ed. And we hope to see you again. You know, when I invite people, when I need a co-host and I invite people, I always exclude the last few people. Like Bruce did not get an invite here because he did because he did it last time you know he did it only a few weeks ago Ed now will not get an invite the next couple of times that we have an opening but you know he'll eventually come back around I do that to try to enforce some variety because for a while it was just like Ed and Bruce and Ed and Bruce and Ed and Bruce and Ed and Bruce they're the only ones we ever got on but and it still kind of is that you two are my my two most common co-hosts by a long margin, but, uh, but I, I, you know, some variety is good too.
|
Ed:
[1:34:46]
| Maybe the next time I do it, I'll draft my son-in-law to come and join. We can have a three-way again.
|
Sam:
[1:34:50]
| There, there you go. But yeah, no, it's a, it's a lot of fun to have you and, uh, we really appreciate it when you do it. So thank you for coming, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:34:58]
| My pleasure.
|
Sam:
[1:35:00]
| For everyone listening, have a great week. Stay safe, have fun, but not too much fun. And, uh, and we'll see you next time. Goodbye.
|
Ed:
[1:35:12]
| Goodbye. Ha ha ha ha.
|
Sam:
[1:35:45]
| Thanks again, Ed, and stay healthy, and we'll talk to you next time.
|
Ed:
[1:35:51]
| Okay. Always a pleasure.
|
Sam:
[1:35:54]
| Yep. Bye.
| |
|
