Six Years Ago, Greenspan Admitted a Mistake
In a story on October 23, 2008, the New York Times online described Alan Greenspan’s appearance before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The story can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html
Greenspan was 82 years old and had retired as Chairman of the Federal Reserve three years before that. He admitted that a part of the crash had been caused by inadequate regulations of derivatives called credit default swaps, even though he had successfully argued against regulation as early as 1994.
Representative Henry Waxman of California asked Mr. Greenspan, “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”
Mr. Greenspan answered, “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
The article continues, “Mr. Greenspan, along with most other banking regulators in Washington, also resisted calls for tighter regulation of subprime mortgages and other high-risk exotic mortgages that allowed people to borrow far more than they could afford.”
The reason I bring this up now is that a link to the original article about Mr. Greenspan’s admission appeared today out of the blue. It’s ancient history now, except that Republicans are still trying to claim that markets don’t need regulation and rich people don’t need to be taxed.
Yesterday, Henry Paulson wrote an op-ed arguing for a carbon tax to restore balance in the markets and enhance our efforts to reduce global warming. So far, there has been complete silence from the conservative wing– no response to the defection of a conservative icon.
Another Rock Wall
Looking Up at a Big Rock
Red Cliff Face
Rock Spire with Moss
Rock Needle
The NYT published an editorial about the results of a Commonwealth Fund survey of the health care systems of 11 advanced countries, which you can find here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/opinion/how-health-care-systems-stack-up.html
As expected, the United States finished last overall on a series of measures of health care quality and expense. Our health care costs $8,508 per person per year, yet our life expectancy and infant mortality rates are worse than countries that spend half as much as we do. We rate last in cost of care, efficiency, and fairness, as well as infant mortality, healthy life expectancy at age 60, and medically avoidable deaths.
We have repeatedly written about the corruption and unfairness of America’s medical system in these pages, and there has been no improvement in the last five years. This is despite the passage of the “Affordable Care Act”, whose implementation has been uneven and held back by administrative bottlenecks. For instance, California has a backlog of a million applicants to join its expanded Medicaid program (known as Medi-Cal here) apparently because administrators did not allow for an enormous increase in applications. Despite the promises of generous coverage, many people are simply in limbo and unable to obtain needed medical care because they do not yet have coverage. What is worse, once they do have coverage, they will have difficulty finding primary care physicians to attend them because of low reimbursement rates. Most of the available primary care sources are simply Medi-Cal mills that take their cards and provide three minutes with a physician assistant.
The Affordable Care Act could have been an ideal vehicle for the institution of truly universal single payer health care but it was so laden with compromises forced by Congressmen with selfish agendas that it is almost useless. Furthermore, the institution of voluntary buy-ins to expanded Medicaid programs has allowed 27 red states to turn down free expanded Medicaid, leaving eight million people falling through the cracks between paid insurance and subsidized Medicaid.
The medical system is a prime example of a serious societal problem in this country which has not been addressed because of conflicts of interest and lobbying by powerful profit making “free enterprise”, from drug companies to device manufacturers to “not for profit” hospitals. If this is how we address our serious problems, you can expect more disruption and pain in the future.
Closeup of Seamed Monolithic Mountain
Seamed Monolithic Mountains
A New Development in Synthetic Biology
Over the past few years, it has become more and more clear that all organisms that have nervous systems share the same neurotransmitters for many actions.
For example, a researcher recently reported that administration of serotonin to crayfish induces behavior that can easily be interpreted as anxiety-related: they spend less time exploring lighted areas and preferred to stay in the dark. On the other hand, administration of a benzodiazepine (a family of human tranquilizers) calms the crayfish. The original source of anxiety in the crayfish was administration of a mild electric shock, which also makes people a little nervous.
The finding that crayfish and humans (as well as many animals in between) share the same neurotransmitters is a truly profound one and indicates that basic neural mechanisms have been preserved throughout all of evolution.
This has implications that transcend those of shared drug effects. Consider the fact that the popular research worm, C. elegans, can be cut up into many pieces and will survive. The pieces will each grow into another complete worm. What is more, each new worm will remember things that the original single worm had been taught. This implies that memory is stored in a fixed chemical form in the brain.
The apparent form of this fixed memory is methylation of specific locations in an individual cell’s DNA. It is unknown how many individual ‘bits’ of information can be stored in an individual cell, or which particular cell (possibly the astrocyte) is responsible for storage.
The ability to retain memory in such a compact form suggests that the brain is capable of remembering an astronomical variety of things in the same way that a computer starts with bits and bytes, and eventually constructs any needed form of memory, from a photograph to the computer instructions to run a program.
It is straightforward now to state that all organisms are related by common descent, and as research continues, more and more areas of commonality will appear.
On a lighter note, another researcher reports that rats can be shown to feel regret.
