Recalcitrant Egg 3

  K and I watched the first episode of the new Disney series, Obi-Wan Kenobi  last night. I enjoyed it. It started with a fun recap of the prequels (which I am not really a fan of, but my kids are). We have been watching The Mandalorian which I think is OK-ish. We have also been watching The Book of Boba Fett , which I think is less than OK-ish. Like, they could have done so much more with that. That said, I will probably continue to watch it, but I'm just not impressed. OBK seems to have more promise than either of the other spin-offs at this point. We'll see!

  With school out, I am back to working most days at the LHH. However, Daughter #2 and her roommates are still living with us, and one of the roommates is currently living in the bedroom I had converted to a home office, so I now have a makeshift office in my own bedroom. It's functional. K and I have enjoyed having the kids living with us, but we are all looking forward to them getting their own space (which will be June 6th). So I'm making do.

Top Traders Unplugged: GM12: WW3 is just the beginning ft. Peter Zeihan (79 min) https://www.toptradersunplugged.com/podcast/peter-zeihan-global-macro-series-april-27th-2022/ This is an amazing tour through current events and trends - politics, crypto, the war in Ukraine, and more - through the lens of finance and investment. This podcast reminded me of why I pursued my first masters in finance. Unlike people who write opinion pieces in newspapers, magazines, or on the internet, investors actually have real money at stake. They don’t just talk, and so they have to try to get past their own ideologies and prejudices so that they don’t lose money. Politicians, public intellectuals, and journalists can go on and on because ultimately they don’t have to be right.  This conversation with Zeihan will blow you away. He has a lot of heterodox ideas that are both exciting and scary about the future.

I flew through The State Boys Rebellion this week - I could not put it down. I found this book because I was doing some research for my Health Systems class, specifically for the chapter on policy. One of the topics that our textbook talked about was the horrible Tuskegee Syphilis Study , originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”. If you haven’t read about it, do click on the link above. It was a horror show run by the US Public Health Service. The USPHS allowed 399 Black men with syphilis to remain untreated from 1932 until 1973 when the Associated Press blew the whistle on the USPHS and forced them to stop withholding treatment. Because I didn’t want my students to write off such government abuse as simply something that happened in the South, I decided to do some research on something I was vaguely aware of from growing up in the Boston area. I remember driving by an abandoned school building with my mother in Waltham and asking her what the bu

 According to this new report from the CDC, we had 47,523 reported drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2014 and 103,598 during 2021, with a steady rise between those years, so the jump was not just the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but more secular in nature.  (Click on the graph to be taken to the report.) The graphic in the report allows you to select a state and see how it has done over this period. I clicked through a few just to see how they matched against the national average. Places like New York, Virginia, Florida, California, and Texas have seen large increases especially during the pandemic, but if you look back, they had seen a doubling of deaths leading up to the pandemic, so it was not just the pandemic that caused these. New Hampshire, of course, is of particular concern to me. Interestingly, New Hampshire is relatively flat. This would be a good-news story except for the fact that New Hampshire has stayed flat at one of the highest per-capita rates of drug o

  I just finished reading Robert Greene's Mastery last night, and the book's broad theme was that mastery of anything - that is, achieving a very high level of performance - takes a mix of finding the right fit for your talents and then years of hard work and experimentation. Greene is at his best when he is relating examples of masters from history such as Da Vinci. The book concludes that mastery of this type is not a miracle, and ends with this Nietzsche quote that I liked: Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a 'miracle.' I would give the book 3.5 stars out of 5. I feel like it was a longish essay that got stretched into a book. Easy read, but not a terrific amount of substance.  

  I am on the board of the Northern New England chapter of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and am currently the education coordinator for the chapter. I was asked to prepare some options for a possible event in June. I had a bunch of thoughts in my head and felt like I knew the direction I wanted to push the board to go in until I actually sat down and wrote out the options with expected costs and risks. In the process of writing everything down, I changed my mind. I realized I hadn't really thought through the option I thought I wanted to push for. Once I actually went through the act of writing it down and clarifying it, I realized there were two better options. We wound up choosing not to have the event after all, but it was a good process.  The process of writing is a fabulous way of knowing discovering what you actually think. I often sit down with a vague idea about a topic that I want to write about, and it is only in the process of writing that I actual

OK - I improvised this corn bread recipe a bit. I'm writing it down mostly for my own purposes, but hopefully you might try it as well.  (this is not a pic of this recipe - it's from a previous version) Ingredients: 1 cup corn meal 1 cup all-purpose flour 1/3 cup sugar 3 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 1 cup heavy cream 1 egg (beaten) 1/4 cup oil 1 small tin of diced chili peppers 1 cup whole kernel corn 1/2 cup shredder cheddar Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Blend corn meal to salt in a large bowl. Whisk together the egg, cream, and oil in a separate bowl, then blend into the dry ingredients, and add the peppers, corn, and 1/4 cup of the cheddar.  On the stove, melt 2 tbsp of butter in a 10-inch cast iron skillet, just until the butter melts. Swirl it around to coat the bottom of the pan. Then pour in the mix. Top with the remaining 1/4 cup of cheddar. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until top is golden.  Slice and serve.