The KHIT Blog: Welcome to October. The federal shutdown has been postponed for 4.09 Scaramuccis.*

Sunday, October 1, 2023

Welcome to October. The federal shutdown has been postponed for 4.09 Scaramuccis.*

OK: Next up, the Sam Bankman-Fried FTX crypto scam trial and Michael Lewis' new book.

Michael's new book on Mr. Bankman-Fried ("SBF") and the collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange launches Tuesday, October 3rd, the same day SBF goes on trial in NewYork.

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Michael Lewis’ Sam Bankman-Fried book nets $5 million from Apple, as Hollywood cashes in on mogul’s story
Apple’s deal with Lewis to turn his book on Bankman-Fried into a film or TV series is just one of at least eight known Hollywood projects in the works on the rise and fall of the cryptocurrency mogul

From his Brooklyn prison cell, Palo Alto’s disgraced cryptocurrency mogul, Sam Bankman-Fried, has described a harrowing existence of surviving on bread, water and peanut butter and denied adequate internet access to prepare for his trial in October.

But the entrepreneur’s spectacular rise and fall has made for an amazing story, and Berkeley author Michael Lewis and other figures in the entertainment industry are finding ways to cash in, according to a report in The Ankler.

“The Blind Side” author has scored a massive payday for “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” his upcoming book about the schlubby-chic son of Stanford Law school professors. Apple paid Lewis $5 million for the rights to his book, presumably to turn it into a film or limited TV series, several sources told the entertainment-news outlet. Given that Lewis spent a year embedded with Bankman-Fried, known as SBF, his book and subsequent Apple project promise a fly-on-the-wall account of Bankman-Fried and his collapsed FTX empire, “a symbol of crypto hubris gone awry,” as the New York Times said.

Lewis’ book, which marks the author’s latest coup, is scheduled to publish Oct. 3, around the time that Bankman-Fried is expected to head to U.S. District Court in Manhattan to stand trial for alleged wired fraud, commodities fraud, money laundering and related conspiracy charges…

I own and have read everything by Michael Lewis. Huge fanboy going back decades, particularly given my stint in subprime finance. I'm on the Amazon pre-order list for this new one. Stay tuned...

OCT 1 PM QUICK NOTE

Michael Lewis will be a guest on CBS 60 Minutes tonight to talk about this case. Also, prior posts on this SBF & family's self-serving "Effective Altruism" schitck here, and here.

UPDATE

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OTHER NEWS

A DYSKINESIAC'S DIGRESSION

Saw this in the Washington Post the other day. Given my ongoing, increasingly irksome affliction with Parkinson's Disease, I've been reading everything I could find flowing from this piece.

“No one really knows what causes Parkinson’s disease, other than about 10 to 20 percent is genetic,” said Ted M. Dawson, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Right now, the only therapies we have are symptomatic. We don’t have anything that slows the progression.”

Researchers such as Dawson have been searching for clues, and in the last two decades, a growing body of evidence points to an unexpected origin for Parkinson’s disease: the gut.

Dr. Dawson is here in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

"Dyskinesia?"

“Dyskinesia is most commonly caused by medications, such as long term use of levodopa in Parkinson's disease and use of antipsychotic medications. Dyskinesia caused by brain injury such as vascular event ( stroke) or other brain damage is less common. Movement symptoms typically start as minor shakes, tics, or tremors.”—University of Google School of Medicine

Yeah. Sinemet—it still SUX.

Dr. Dawson, MD, PhD (internal Med, Pharmacology), msjor league underachiever (as is his colleague spouse Valina L. Dawson, PhD). Lordy Mercy! The talent here in BMore is something else.

Interesting to me is that they both trained clinically at the University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City. I spent a lot of time in SLC across my three tenures at HealthInsight, the Utah/Nevada Medicare QIO. I wouldn't be surprised if we had mutual acquaintances. For one, Brent James, MD, M.Stat of Intermountain Healthcare (and a Baldrige Examiner) was a key mentor of mine.

Dr. Dawson heads up The Dawson Lab. Check out their "Parkinson's & the Gut" video under "recent topics" on their "Resarch" page. Very nicely done (unfortunately no embed code available).

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*BTW, random note: 4.09 Scaramuccis = 0.246 Friedman Units.

More to come. Gotta go watch the Ravens.

MONDAY OCT 2 UPDATE

Back briefly to the lead-in story, follow-up. Michael Lewia talks to CBS Mornings.

MOVING ALONG:

REVISITING "THE COMING WAVE"

If you lack the time, money, or patience to carefully study the Mustafa Suleyman book, I can attest to the succinct accurate animated A/V summary provided here.

BTW, they've now put up a book-focused website, www.the-coming-wave.com.

More to come...

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
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"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
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"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
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"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
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"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
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"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
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"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
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"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Sunday, October 1, 2023

Welcome to October. The federal shutdown has been postponed for 4.09 Scaramuccis.*

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