There’s a great deal of hype right now about the newest drug to treat depression: esketamine. Psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex isn’t convinced. Regular ketamine, at $10 a dose, seems to work great. But a pharmaceutical company can’t make money on that, so nobody’s paid the big bucks to run it through official clinical trials, so it’s never even been approved for depression. What do? Develop an isometric ketamine derivative you can patent and sell for $590-$885 a dose, of course!
Also it doesn’t seem to actually, you know, work. Not like the cheaper, off-patent, original. But hey, at least it’s profitable and comes in a convenient nasal spray!
Check Your Priors
Hey, remember the concept of the tragedy of the commons? Turns out it’s all a lie. BoingBoing pointed me to the Twitter thread about it, but it seemed so appalling that I had to check to make sure it wasn’t an exaggeration. So, here’s a couple paragraphs from the classic influential 1968 paper from Science:
Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable
The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle of “dog eat dog”— if indeed there ever was such a world — how many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children. David Lack and others have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the fecundity of birds (11). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least.
If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own “punishment” to the germ line — then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state (12), and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement (13)? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.
Yes, that’s his argument that food aid and a welfare state are bad because they inhibit the natural order of those people starving to death when they breed too much.
And also, for crying out loud, the plural of millennium is millennia.
Papers, Please
A man is badly injured on the job, but employer’s worker’s compensation insurance has lapsed. Rather than comply with its obligations, the firm tries to have the injured man deported.
Mainstream Conservatives
Steve King (R-IA) gets an awful lot of support from the white nationalist hate group Identity Evropa.
New Hampshire has quite a large state legislature, so you can always find a handful of out-there examples, like the founder of the popular misogynist messageboard /r/TheRedPill. But this one is pretty impressive, because several Granite State Republican legislators decided that wearing pearl necklaces (as in “you’re clutching your pearls”) was a great way to mock people testifying in favor of a gun safety bill.
Misc
NPR: White suburbanites cause an awful lot of the air pollution in minority urban neighborhoods.
MassLive: Robot bartenders are coming for our jobs.
Paris Review: The tragic tale of the Phantom Gambler… and how it’s been co-opted to advertise casinos.
BoingBoing: Pentagon’s new robot tank “adheres to all legal and ethical standards” for automated death robots.
Twitter: This is a rather callous series of jokes about the “Fake Melania” conspiracy theory but also I laughed, so… I guess, to me, the real Melania is the friends we ate along the way.
Cultivating Joy
Timelapse of cat napping all day. Watch to the end.
Baby albatross!
Vincent D’Onofrio does not like monkeys.
These puppies trying to howl.
Secretly Ironic 