A quick rundown: First, in the middle of the month, news broke that Superpedestrian was shutting down just 18 months after raising $125 million in fresh funding. A few days later, Micromobility.com, formerly known as Helbiz, was delisted from Nasdaq for failing to maintain a share price above $1. Then came the biggest shockwave of all: Bird, the largest e-scooter company in the U.S. with a one-time valuation of $2.5 billion, filed for bankruptcy.
TBH I never understood this e-scooter thing from the very beginning.
Maybe I’m too risk adverse.
UCLA-led research finds that scooter injuries nearly tripled across the U.S. from 2016 to 2020, with a concurrent increase in severe injuries requiring orthopedic and plastic surgery over the same period.
The study, which compared national trends in scooter and bicycle injuries during the period, also found that costs to treat those injuries rose five-fold, highlighting the financial strain these injuries pose to the healthcare system — a finding that “underscores a critical juncture for discerning the underlying causes of injuries and informing policies for injury prevention,” the researchers note.
University of California – Los Angeles Health Sciences. “Hospitalizations for scooter injuries nearly tripled in the US between 2016 and 2020, UCLA-led research finds.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 January 2024 — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/01/240109121215.htm
Turkey’s Koc Holding said it revoked an agreement with Ford Motor and South Korean battery maker LG Energy Solution for a joint venture to produce battery cells for commercial electric vehicles…LGES said the three companies had mutually agreed to scrap the plan due to the current pace of consumer electrification adoption.
At the end of Q3 2023, Hertz told investors that significant price cutting during the year had “resulted in lower EV residual values, increasing vehicle depreciation expense and negatively impacting salvage cost.” Additionally, its rental EVs were damaged or crashed more often, and the much higher cost of repairs for Tesla vehicles—on average about 20 percent higher than other EVs—has meant that Hertz’s Teslas earn it less money per vehicle than its other rentals.
Consequently, it’s selling off 20,000 EVs over the course of this year. Currently, the company has over 700 EVs for sale, including 35 Chevrolet Bolts, four Kia EV6s, a single BMW i3 and Nissan Leaf, and then 673 Teslas—552 Model 3s and another 121 Model Ys.
There is a reason for such unusually rapid depreciation. It is precisely because the device is in need of a new battery – and the cost of that battery is (in this case) in the range of $13,000-plus. Not counting the cost of the installation.
Over the past few years, as Tesla built out its gigafactory near Berlin, it cut down around half a million trees.Kayrros, a company that analyzes satellite images using AI, made the calculation. Tesla cleared around 813 acres of forest between March 2020 and May 2023, according to the analysis. Tesla cut down 500,000 trees to build its German gigafactory
In a randomized control trial over a five-year period, investigators divided the cohort of 153 patients with hypertension into three groups:
Study participants adding 2-4 cups of base-producing fruits and vegetables in addition to their usual daily food intake
Study participants prescribed NaHCO3 (acid-reducing sodium bicarbonate, which is common baking soda) tablets in two daily doses of 4-5 650 mg tablets
Study participants receiving standard medical care from primary care clinicians
The results of the study show that both fruits and vegetables and NaHCO3 improved kidney health, but only fruits and vegetables, and not NaHCO3, reduced blood pressure and improved indices of cardiovascular disease risk.
The trial supports fruits and vegetables as foundational hypertension treatment to reduce chronic kidney disease progression and cardiovascular disease risk.
Elsevier. “Eating more fruits and vegetables to reduce dietary acid lowers blood pressure and improves kidney and heart health in patients with hypertension.” ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240806131316.htm (accessed August 11, 2024).
Journal Reference:
Nimrit Goraya, Nicolaos E. Madias, Jan Simoni, Maninder Kahlon, Nazan Aksan, Donald E. Wesson. Kidney and Cardiovascular Protection Using Dietary Acid Reduction in Primary Hypertension: A Five-Year, Interventional, Randomized, Control Trial. The American Journal of Medicine, 2024; DOI: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2024.06.006
I had two cups of fruit in my breakfast bowl this morning.
Ben Carlson is a smart man. His short list of unexciting, non-sexy and generally boring bits of investment advice inspired me to add my own generally boring bits of non solicited quasi-investment advice. And in no particular order of importance here they are.
Live beneath your means.
Pay yourself first (save, save, save some more).
Invest in your health (diet, exercise, etc).
Invest in your brain, be a lifelong learner.
Connect with family and friends (social media doesn’t count).
Find your purpose.
Work hard. Hard work is no guarantee of success but the lack of hard work guarantees failure.
A happy fulfilling life is more than just the money or your net worth.
The Boss once again is outside in the yard doing her thing. I’m inside doing my thing, drinking coffee, reading, writing. One of my addictions is staying current with the news and this post popped up in my RSS feed. At my age it doesn’t take much prompting for me to reflect on retirement. The Road to 70 is nearly complete. Soon I’ll be writing the next chapter of life The Road to 75. Dear Reader, if this sounds “old”, it is.
Critical thinking and understanding risk are the cornerstones of what I do. So when I have an opportunity to validate or repudiate the key assumptions in my plans I am in my Happy Place. When I decided not to retire several years ago my personal mantra focused on the following two critical variables in my retirement planning:
Stay healthy.
Find a willing employer.
Number One. I just had my annual wellness checkup. Bloodwork normal. Tendency towards obesity curtailed. Blood pressure elevated on two readings. Per Doctor’s orders I bought a BP machine and started keeping a log. All of my readings at home have been normal. A little white coat effect and the excitement of seeing my physician (Redhead Effect)…all good.
Number Two. Don’t underestimate how essential having or finding an employer who will pay you to work as you get older. Too many of us know the feeling of being cast out to the street for becoming too “old”.
As I prepare to write the next chapter it’s time to revisit and revise the two most important goals that got me to where I am. After some considerable time and effort here are my revised goals for the next five years.
Group-based trajectory modeling identified four groups of distinct occupational cognitive demands according to the degree of routine tasks in the participants occupations during their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. The researchers analyzed the link between these trajectory groups and clinically diagnosed MCI and dementia in participants in the HUNT4 70+ Study (2017-19). Additionally, the researchers accounted for important dementia risk factors such as age, gender, educational level, income, overall health, and lifestyle habits from assessments made in 1984-86 and 1995-97. Within age groupings the researchers looked at such occupations as primary school teacher, salesperson, nurse and caregiver, office cleaner, civil engineer, and mechanic, among others.
In a randomized-controlled trial, people who followed a time-restricted diet lost about the same amount of weight as people who ate the same diet without the time restriction, according to a study published Friday in Annals of Internal Medicine…nutrition experts Krista Varady and Vanessa Oddo of the University of Illinois wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. “Using a controlled feeding design, Maruthur and colleagues show that TRE is effective for weight loss, simply because it helps people eat less.” It’s cutting calories—not intermittent fasting—that drops weight — https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/its-cutting-calories-not-intermittent-fasting-that-drops-weight-study-suggests/
In the pursuit of “fine” to “great,” we chase products. Through no fault of our own, we fall prey to messaging from social media users, algorithms, and expert marketers, urging us that this shampoo or this rug will shift the scales toward enoughness. “This is how the marketplace continues to work,” says Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University, “which is by amplifying our inadequacies and insecurities.”
Baked into these social platforms is a natural ecosystem for comparison. In the past, people weighed themselves against celebrities in the media and those within their immediate social circles, Duffy says. Now, we can compare ourselves to the idealized version of millions of strangers online — who may be perpetuating an aesthetic trend inspiring us to buy in order to participate.
Let’s be honest, some people in academia are horrible, arrogant, selfish and narcissistic. And no matter how much the people at the top say they deal with bad behaviour, the nasty folk do have an annoying habit of getting promoted. The way in which academia selects and rewards particular skill sets produces an over-concentration of people who are low on empathy. I’ve met a lot of those ‘special’ colleagues over the years (no names mentioned obviously). I will not miss them one jot. They create a toxic working environment , dominate the discourse, ride roughshod over the rules, and cause a great deal of harm to others and get away scot-free. They’ve done me significant mental damage, but I can now happily forget them and move on with life.
My recommendation to anyone starting out in academia is stand your ground, challenge these energy vampires and politely make it clear that you don’t want to play their stupid toxic games. They really don’t have the power that they want you to believe they have, even though the system tends to promote them to roles that are beyond their emotional competence to fulfill. Pity them for the lack of other things to do with their lives. And, remember that 98% of what we do as academics is of no importance at all out there in the real world, so when a self-entitled colleague insists that their work on their favourite gene is earth-shattering; more important than anything you could ever do; and a good reason for their career to be advanced faster than yours; just smile and ignore them. Do your own thing, at your own pace. Have a life outside the university and remember that it’s just a job.
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