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Weekly Linkage: The Long Edition
At some point in the last 2 weeks, I had 0 unread items in Google Reader. It was a short-lived, joyous experience, but this is the result of my web branching: HCG Diet Dangers: Is Fast Weight Loss Worth the Risk? – MSN Health & Fitness – Healthy Living – "But the so-called hCG diet is either a weight-loss miracle or a dangerous fraud, depending on who's talking. The plan combines drops or injections of hCG, a pregnancy hormone, with just 500 calories a day." I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in…
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Weekly Linkage: All Over the Place
There’s no particular theme to this week’s surfing, but there are some pretty pictures and good reads here. The problem with waste – Note that the list of not-recommended screenings include things like screening for prostate cancer in men older than 75 or colon cancer in folks above 85. I glanced through the USPSTF's procedure manual, and it looks like they're taking into account a variety of factors (age, gender, race, etc.), but their information is only as good as the studies they're pulling from. How worried should we be about researchers' biases (ageism being the first that comes to mind)? "So we’re confronted with a set of screening recommendations…
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Weekly Linkage: Healthcare, Midnight Deployments, and Markov Chaining
I’ve been all over The Incidental Economist lately, and it’s really hard not to link to every one of their posts that I can make heads or tails of. They’re really prolific by my standards, though, which means it’s a struggle to keep their posts from falling off the 30-day cut-off in Google Reader. Simply put: Marginal cost/benefit – "You’ll consume as much health care as you think worth it for the transaction price (your copayment if you’re insured). The lower the price, the more you’ll consume. You’ll keep using health services until the marginal benefit falls below the price you pay." I'm not sure I agree that people will…
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Weekly Linkage: Stockholm Trolls
Um… it’ll make sense as you read. Amanda Hocking’s Blog: Some Things That Need to Be Said – From a successful self-published author: "This is literally years of work you're seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn't writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me." The Very Rich Indie Writer – Novelr – Making People Read – Looking at the example of Amanda Hocking's financial success, will authors of web fiction start to close…
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Weekly Linkage: Politics, Money, and Some Music
The original posting of this was horribly borked. I may be switching link-posting plugins. Warm and Fuzzy Budgeting – "You have things that matter to you. Hopes, and goals, and dreams. This is going to sound cheesy, but I think it’s true: Your budget is simply your hopes, and goals, and dreams … on paper." Maybe those tax incentives for creating new jobs should be for hiring a currently unemployed person | Prometheus 6 – What? How are you only going to hire people who already have jobs? "Members of Congress had urged the commission to explore the issue, after reading press reports of numerous instances in which employers and…