American doctors are rich and miserable

Doctors are particularly aggrieved by the rise of electronic health records. Studies show that family doctors spend, on average, just under an hour every day answering patient messages alone. The use of remote-contact and communication apps spiked during the covid pandemic, reports Tait Shanafelt, a doctor at Stanford who studies burnout, “leading to a tsunami of inbox messages for physicians”. Although he emphasises their potential for improved treatment, “it’s all just extra work.”

The problem is of course much wider. Within clinic electronic records have reversed the ratio of clinic time talking to the patient to admin supporting the clinical encounter, from 2:1 to 1:2. Nobody yet has invented the clinical equivalent of the artist’s Photoshop or engineers CAD. Eventually, talking to patients will be deprecated, or limited to a few hundred characters in a textbox field.

From the obituary of Tom Stoppard in the Economist

Writing plays, in the end, was not a public service but a private neurosis.

I will rephrase:

Writing plays books, in the end, was not a public service but a private neurosis.

Excellent [review](Capitalism: A Global History — the accumulation machine) of Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert in the FT by John Kay who is wise & profound rather than merely smart).

So, he asks, “How did the capitalist revolution begin? How did a form of economic life that was such a breakaway from previous history spread around the world and into ever more spheres of life?” But that question demands a definition of “the capitalist revolution”. First and foremost, Beckert explains, it is an organisation of economic life “defined by the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital”. In capitalism, capital is “productively invested, wealth is principally deployed to generate more — wealth — it is invested in undertakings that combine labor, machines, technical knowledge, and raw materials to generate further investable capital”.

Beckert continues “its core impetus is therefore the reproduction of conditions that allow such accumulation to continue; the ‘power of generation,’ as Marx puts a common insight most memorably, is not just a feature of capitalism but its very essence.” Beckert expands “Capitalism is a form of economic life in which owners of capital organize the production of commodities not because they need or want them but because they hope to produce more capital.” [emphasis added]

Capitalism: A Global History — the accumulation machine

12 police officers would have faced gross misconduct cases over Hillsborough, says watchdog | Hillsborough disaster | The Guardian

The IOPC has explained its view that in the absence of a duty of candour to positively assist an investigation, in 1989 the South Yorkshire force and its officers were not breaking the law or conduct rules by “presenting their best case” about the causes of the disaster, even though it involved withholding crucial information and amending hundreds of officers’ statements.

These are painful times in Welsh rugby in the wake of their 73-0 home defeat by South Africa but it is worth remembering that the national team has endured similarly dark days before. In 1998, Wales lost 96-13 against the Springboks in South Africa, only to rebound and defeat England at Wembley less than a year later. And what happened next? In the dozen years after that Pretoria mauling they went on to collect three Six Nations grand slams. Something to cling to there, perhaps, in these most difficult of days.

Memories are a fine thing (Robert Kitson writing in the Guardian).

The most profitable companies all do the same thing: They tap into our flaws and monetize them, then pretend it’s innovation rather than exploitation. 

No mercy/ NO malice

‘The ward felt like a prison. What had I let them do?’: how my daughter was crushed by a health service meant to help her | Mental health | The Guardian

The numbers tell a stark story – the average admission to a mental health unit for a child in Sweden is less than 11 days. In Australia, it is less than nine days. For a child, in the UK it is 74 days

Pace the Jed Mercurio line: They used to call it the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) until they realised nobody did.

“Comrade Khrushchev goes to visit a pig farm, along with a photographer from Pravda. Later, in the newsroom, the layout team is trying to decide how to word the caption. Should it be ‘Comrade Khrushchev next to pigs,’ or ‘Comrade Khrushchev surrounded by pigs,’ or maybe ‘Pigs gather around Comrade Khrushchev’? The suggestions are rejected one after another. Finally, the editor steps in. ‘OK, here it is,’ he says. ‘Comrade Khrushchev, third from right.’”

The Wizard of the Kremlin, Giuliano da Empoli.

A slimy scheme to avoid property tax

Unlike their French neighbours, Britons tend to be sniffy about eating snails. But there is a new fad involving the delectable gastropods that Brits do have a taste for: tax avoidance.

The scheme is both slimy and simple. When a commercial property is vacated a landlord becomes liable for its taxes, known as business rates. To avoid them (a 5,000-square-foot office in central London might owe £12,000, or $16,000, a month), some landlords turn their offices into “farms”. Boxes of live snails are purchased at £14 each and the property is claimed to be an agricultural unit—exempt from business rates.

Urban snail farms are seen by local authorities and the courts as a sham. One venture in Liverpool had 15 boxes with as few as two snails each. Adam Hug of Westminster City Council says it is hard to stop such behaviour because the schemes are run by agents hiding behind shell companies. After a court finds the “farm” illegitimate, the business simply declares itself insolvent and the tax liability must be written off.

The Economist. Annoying, isn’t it?

Peter Gurney, a bomb-disposal mastermind died (peacefully) on September 19th, aged 93. The Economist

Many people wondered how the dickens he kept his cool. But he had learned to suppress his emotions—all except fear. That was absolutely necessary. Any bomb-disposal officer who said he was not afraid was a bloody fool and was going to die. For the rest, he just got on with the job.