Monday Night Links

• A municipality has a duty to allow the municipal law enforcement agency to respond appropriately to protect persons and property during a riot or an unlawful assembly based on the availability of adequate equipment to its municipal law enforcement officers and relevant state and federal laws. If the governing body of a municipality or a person authorized by the governing body of the municipality breaches that duty, the municipality is civilly liable for any damages including damages arising from personal injury, wrongful death, or property damages proximately caused by the municipality's breach of duty. The sovereign immunity recovery limits in paragraph (a) do not apply to an action under this paragraph. [HB 1]
• Please explain to readers and tell us how your assumed workstation utilization rate of 100% is realistic. Describe for us your actual workstation utilization rates for mature locations and explain to us your consideration of providing illustrative metrics prepared on a historical or a budgeted basis. Similarly, tell us why you believe that your metrics for Average Revenue per WeWork Membership and Implied Annual Revenue are realistic and not misleading estimates in light of your ongoing expansion into international markets in which you are likely to earn lower membership fees per member than has been your historical experience. [SEC]
• Now scores of oil producers are “dying on the vine”, said Ben Dell, managing partner at rival Kimmeridge, as they are left without the regular cash infusions to bankroll the capital spending needed to keep on drilling. The private flight comes despite oil’s recovery to $60 a barrel. [FT]
• And finally, there are the Teslas. Almost every local I spoke to talked about the number of Teslas, though a couple did point out that the company had opened a new factory in nearby Storey, Nevada. Nonetheless, there they are: The Teslas blowing through intersections. The Teslas stuck in the snowy ditch. The Teslas spun out on steep Northwoods Boulevard. Again. [Outside]
• Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable. This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition.Nuclear can‘t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job. [link]
• Reed died from a heart attack during a break from filming Gladiator in Valletta, Malta, on the afternoon of 2 May 1999. According to witnesses, he drank eight pints of German lager, a dozen shots of rum, half a bottle of whiskey and a few shots of Hennessy cognac, in a drinking match against a group of sailors on shore leave from HMS Cumberland at a local pub. His bar bill totaled a little over 270 Maltese lira (almost 450 GBP; about 590 USD). After beating five much younger Royal Navy sailors at arm-wrestling, Reed suddenly collapsed, dying while en route to hospital in an ambulance. He was 61 years old. [Oliver Reed]
• While opinions vary on Bitcoin, we have seen particularly enthusiastic endorsement emanating from the technology/software industry, including many high-profile industry figures. Some Silicon Valley companies like Square and Tesla have purchased Bitcoin at the corporate level, and Paul Graham even went as far as likening Turkey's recent crypto ban to banning the microprocessor in 1976. To these folk, Bitcoin is obviously the way of the future. This zeitgeist recently prompted someone to ask on Twitter, why are so many intelligent & capable software people so quick to embrace Bitcoin and the "future of money" with little in the way of critical thinking and only a cursory understanding of the issues? The answer, I believe, is that these folk have - based on many decades of experience - a strong predisposition to believe that anything that is both *new* and *digital* must be superior to prior "old world" solutions. And that is understandable, because that's usually been the case with most areas software has touched. However, there is no inevitability that will always be the case in all situations. In addition, these folk understand software, but often their understanding of economics, monetary systems, and markets is much more lacking, which creates blindspots. [LT3000]
• Twenty five years ago kids didn’t tear their ACL, they broke the tibial spine.  Orthopaedics textbooks from the nineties warned doctors to look for tibial spine fractures because children don’t tear their ACLs.  In essence, they thought they were immune to ACL tears by virtue of being children. This was because in growing children the bones are not at full strength, but the ligaments are.  In a stressed situation, where the ACL is yanking on the tibial spine, the bone gave way before the ligament, hence the fracture. Fortunately, there is good science that tells us why our ACLs are suddenly failing. Sugar. The massive increase in our consumption of sugar is responsible for us producing substandard ligaments and cartilage.  If we make knees out of rubbish material its little wonder that they are suddenly not up to the job. A byproduct of human metabolism is that sugars can become randomly attached to proteins in a process called glycation. Glycation results in the formation of all sorts of unpredictable (and haphazard) molecules called AGE’s (Advanced Glycation End-products). [link]
• The effects of the Maillard reaction on the physical properties and cell interactions of collagen. The non-enzymic glycation of collagen occurs as its turnover decreases during maturation, with complex carbohydrates accumulating slowly and the end-products of these reactions being permanent. The nature of these advanced glycation end-reaction products (AGEs) can be categorised as: 1) cross-linking: intermolecular cross-linking may occur between two adjacent molecules and involve lysine to lysine or lysine to arginine residues. Several compounds have been characterised. They are believed to be located between the triple helical domains of adjacent molecules in the fibre resulting in major changes of the physical properties, primarily, fibre stiffness, thermal denaturation temperature and enzyme resistance, all of which increase slowly with age but the rate is accelerated in diabetes mellitus due to high glucose levels. [link]
• Baja has three main attractions: beaches, hot springs, and off-roading. A weekend’s not much time on an 800-mile long peninsula, but plan your trip right, and you’ll be able to spend time enjoying all three. [Outside]
• Want to camp somewhere in Mexico? Go camp there. Want to stroll through a small town with a big knife on your hip, a cowboy hat on your head, and your dog off-leash? No one’s going to stop you. Want to catch a fish? Hope you brought bait. In Mexico, at least in the rural places, no one’s trying to tell you what to do. Your ability to conduct an activity safely and without damaging the environment is up to your skill and intelligence, not a sign, a cop, or a social justice warrior. The only thing you can’t do in Mexico is bring a gun along. [Outside]
• Weight gain tips for HARD GAINERS. A recent post from @stateofpIay caught my attention, “They see the physique, but they don’t see the force feeding until you almost throw up all day every day.” This is a common struggle for lots of guys trying to get big. You know the general rule: you gotta gain some weight to gain muscle. For some guys, the hardest part to getting bigger is lifting or staying consistent. For hard gainers, EATING is the biggest challenge by a mile. [swolefuture]
• In 2018, President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers prepared a report on opioid prices and their contribution to the crisis, but the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services attempted to suppress it. According to Trump CEA chief economist Casey Mulligan, then-HHS secretary Alex Azar, who was among Medicare Part D’s architects during the Bush era, did not want anyone connecting that great Republican policy success with the opioid epidemic. Clearly the Sacklers are not the only ones trying to bury their role in the crisis. The point is that the opioid epidemic was something that was done to Middle America. They “trusted the science,” as we are now constantly exhorted to do. OxyContin was marketed to them and subsidized for them as a safe alternative to morphine by people who knew that it was not. Far more than the tobacco plaintiffs who claimed to have been duped by the cigarette companies, the people who became addicted to OxyContin really were duped. [TAC]