Science & Society

In recent times, artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous. Besides powering our cellphones, directing what advertisements we get when we browse internet or read our emails, and creating content in the media, AI-powered hardware is more and more widespread, including self-driving vehicles, home appliances, and a host of other systems for industrial use. Perhaps the last straw is constituted by the release of large language models such as ChatGPT, with the consequent wave of derived applications. But in a steep slope of new technological developments, we have to get accustomed to constant…

Government forces automobile companies to sell electric cars - and then forces all taxpayers to subsidize the purchases. With mandates and subsidies, there is no free market and that means companies primarily want to make the cars that will generate the most profit, which means the most expensive. The opposite of capitalism. It is why, like with solar panels, the market is moribund where no corporate welfare exists. If you aren't already rich, you can't get one, and if you are rich you also own regular cars - and a new study shows that you end up driving those more and the electric cars less…

The 8th Congress of the USERN Organization took place during the past three days (November 8-10, 2023) at the RAU University in Yerevan, Armenia, and it was a complete success, which has left me overwhelmed by the amount of great interdisciplinary science, fantastic art in multiple forms, and the intensity and rate of positive feelings I received throughout the event. I offer below a short report of the event and my impressions, which may of course be biased by being the President of this fantastic network, but does feel a rather trustworthy report now that I read it again. As a short…

The biggest shopping day of the year is not Amazon Prime Day, nor is it Black Friday, it is instead on November 11th - Singles Day. China has so many unmarried people they turned it into a shopping celebration. In Sweet Lemons Rationalization, if you are unable to find someone worth marrying, you can declare you don't want to get married anyway.  If I say I don't want to date Heidi Klum, it is empowering and therefore not an insult that she does not date me. That is the case with a growing number of Americans. Data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National…

When science finally settled the debate between genetics and lifestyle regarding oral health, the world began to set new benchmarks for improved health overall. After World War II it was discovered that bacteria in our mouths create acid from carbohydrates, and that acid erodes the enamel on teeth, which will mean more decay and cavities. Once that was known, changes were made and the results were seen within a generation, but different countries took different approaches. America switched to a lot of sugar-free alternatives in daily products like chewing gum, while Sweden created…

Health care in America is broken and the chief reason is the government. In 2009, when Obamacare became part of the President's agenda, I said we should just write out the check for trillions of dollars and nationalize the industry. My reasoning was that anything else would mean we have worse access and much higher cost. Instead of doing that, or extending Medicaid to the 700,000 who could not get insurance, we went straight to worse access and high cost. In California, the scenario is even more dire because the state mandates you must have health insurance, while refusing to engage in any…

The Victorian government, like many governments around the world, has announced new regulations on short-stay accommodation. The government says Victoria has more than 36,000 short-stay places, which are reducing the number of homes available for long-term rental. Other states have capped the number of nights a dwelling can be used for short-stay accommodation. The Victorian response has been to introduce a levy set at 7.5% of the short-stay platform’s revenue. The rationale appears simple – adding a charge to discourage landlords from converting properties from long-term rentals to tourist…

What if nearly everything that’s been written about this month’s Intergenerational Report is wrong? I’ll explain. But first, here’s a sample of the headlines: “Young Australians at risk of a poorer future”, “Fewer workers to shoulder soaring income tax”, “Ageing population driving $140 billion blowout in spending”, and so on. On radio it was worse. One ABC presenter referred to a “ticking tax bomb”. The picture painted is one of a future in which (old) dependants have far fewer people of working age to care for them, in which tax climbs dramatically to pay for the care of the elderly, and in…

Half a decade ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) tried to fight for its credibility in the face of a scientific onslaught against their latest epidemiology findings by actually lowering the "risk" of something. Like everyone else, when it was announced they were 'studying' it - in IARC, that only means mouse models that support claims of cancer and surveys that can be linked to cancer - I assumed they would finally do what they had wanted to do since the early 2000s; declare coffee a carcinogen. And get $15,000 an hour expert witness contracts from lawyers who…

In the field of gender-affirming care for the LBGTQ+ community, there are drastic solutions - controversial if it involves those unable to grant real informed consent - but there are also therapeutic benefits to minimally invasive procedures, write a group in Canadian Medical Association Journal, and taxpayers should fund those. The paper discusses three domains of transition: legal (e.g., changing name), social (e.g. changing style) and medical  (e.g gender reconstruction) and they note a survey finding that 59 percent reported being misgendered daily. They say the 2022 World…