📈 first Derivative [87]
📈 first Derivative [87]
Thursday | May 25, 2023
🧬🧪 If you’ve ever been interested in getting a DNA test, I got one recently after reading this post on whole genome sequencing. Razib Khan writes a lot of fun, well-researched posts about genetics and human history like this one about the Vikings.
🌿📺 I haven’t read much Ross Douthat lately but doubled up this week with two of his columns, one on how legalizing marijuana is a mistake and another [*spoilers*] critiquing the parochial worldview [*spoilers*] of Succession.
🔌⚡️🚗 If you enjoy the stuff below about electric vehicles, I read another interesting article this week about how Hyundai has taken advantage of the EV wave to become a rising industry leader.
🇵🇱🔗 Also, if that Poland link didn’t work for you in the last issue, here it is.
Happy reading,
-TK
fDback
Re: the Harper’s essay on work in fD85:
“Been thinking about the “fulfillment at work” thing as I manage brand-new folks. Been trying to reframe my conversations as ‘figuring out if this is mutually valuable’ rather than orientating around happiness/fulfillment. I think it’s an important idea.” -anon
📩 Have thoughts on an issue? Just send me a reply to this email.
💉🧠💔 Ozempic, or diabetes and the death of desire (Atlantic | Sarah Zhang | May 2023)
Couldn’t resist the alliteration there but what’s really interesting to me about these anecdotes is that users are discovering that the drug helps them tame their desires, particularly harmful addictions and compulsion, not lose all desire completely. If that’s the case, the downstream second-order effects of this class of drugs go far beyond simply reducing obesity and the immediate public health benefits.
As semaglutide has skyrocketed in popularity, patients have been sharing curious effects that go beyond just appetite suppression. They have reported losing interest in a whole range of addictive and compulsive behaviors: drinking, smoking, shopping, biting nails, picking at skin. Not everyone on the drug experiences these positive effects, to be clear, but enough that addiction researchers are paying attention. And the spate of anecdotes might really be onto something. For years now, scientists have been testing whether drugs similar to semaglutide can curb the use of alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and opioids in lab animals—to promising results.
How it might work:
In particular, GLP-1 analogs affect dopamine pathways in the brain, a.k.a the reward circuitry. This pathway evolved to help us survive; simplistically, food and sex trigger a dopamine hit in the brain… In people with addiction, this process in the brain shifts as a consequence or cause of their addiction, or perhaps even both. They have, for example, fewer dopamine receptors in part of the brain’s reward pathway, so the same reward may bring less pleasure.
In lab animals, addiction researchers have amassed a body of evidence that GLP-1 analogs alter the reward pathway: mice on a version of exenatide get less of a dopamine hit from alcohol; rats on the same GLP-1 drug sought out less cocaine; same for rats and oxycodone. African vervet monkeys predisposed to drinking alcohol drank less on liraglutide and exenatide. Most of the published research has been conducted with these two first-generation GLP-1 drugs, but researchers told me to expect many studies with semaglutide, with positive results, to be published soon.
What the reported effects are:
Semaglutide does not dull all pleasure, people taking the drug for weight loss told me. They could still enjoy a few bites of food or revel in finding the perfect dress; they just no longer went overboard. Anhedonia, or a general diminished ability to experience pleasure, also hasn’t shown up in cohorts of people who take the drug for diabetes…
The types of behaviors in which patients have reported unexpected changes include both the addictive, such as smoking or drinking, and the compulsive, such as skin picking or nail biting. (Unlike addiction, compulsion concerns behaviors that aren’t meant to be pleasurable.)
🇨🇦💀💉 Canada euthanized over 10,000 people in 2021, accounting for 3% of all deaths, after the recent legalization in 2016 of “medical assistance in dying” or MAID. (New Atlantis | Alexander Raikin | Dec 2022)
Canadians who, driven by poverty and a lack of access to adequate health care, housing, and social services, have turned to the country’s euthanasia system.
I feel like this hasn’t gotten much attention in the US even as it takes hold in our neighbor to the north, which is odd because it’s something that if tried here would definitely cause a huge uproar. The whole system seems a bit too much like the government euthanasia program in Children of Men.
California provides a useful point of comparison: It legalized medically assisted death the same year as Canada, 2016, and it has about the same population, just under forty million. In 2021 in California, 486 people died using the state’s assisted suicide program. In Canada in the same year, 10,064 people used MAID to die.
Advocates of MAID promise that the system has proper safeguards to ensure that only those suffering helplessly are granted a dignified death and it doesn’t become a convenient mechanism for society to dispose of those seeking escape from poverty or other conditions we choose not to address.
Justin Trudeau made a clear promise to the public: that nobody would receive MAID “because you’re not getting the supports and cares that you actually need.” But the CAMAP recordings plainly suggest that exactly this is happening, that euthanasia workers know it, and that they are acting with no urgency to stop it…
On top of the permissive and subjective criteria for a MAID diagnosis, there’s not much to stop patients seeking MAID from shopping for doctors. Doctors themselves, who need a second corroborating assessment, can simply ask as many clinicians until they find one who agrees.
In multiple cases, veterans requesting help from Veterans Affairs Canada — at least one asked for PTSD treatment, another for a ramp for her wheelchair — were asked by case workers if they would like to apply for euthanasia.
MAID seems hugely problematic for both the right and the left.
Amy Hasbrouck, a disability advocate, told me that MAID is a way to “get rid of disabled people.” It’s an extreme view. Yet it is possible to imagine a euthanasia system that is set up without that intention, even one that is nominally set up to protect the vulnerable — and yet that, step by step, becomes indistinguishable from a system deliberately designed to usher them to their deaths.
And Canada’s MAID program is also relatively lax compared to others around the world:
Eligibility criteria began loose and are rapidly getting looser. You do not need to be terminally ill, only to have a “grievous and irremediable” condition, a standard that is open to significant differences in interpretation. In March 2023, mental illness alone will qualify as an acceptable medical reason to die. And the Quebec College of Physicians now suggests that Parliament expand euthanasia eligibility to minors and even newborns.
As happens too often in our modern world, we’re seeing political and economic choices — to not act, to not reorganize parts of our society to help the worst-off — social failures, reframed as purely individual decisions: to go on or to die. There’s something sinister to selling as the supreme act of agency to someone who’s really left with no choice at all:
In December, an ad video by the Canadian fashion company La Maison Simons, titled “All Is Beauty,” went viral online. It told the story of Jennyfer Hatch, a 37-year-old-woman with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome who had chosen euthanasia. Slickly produced, the video showed slow-motion images of people gathered on beaches. At one point it describes “the most beautiful exit,” apparently referring to MAID. Hatch was euthanized the day before the campaign launched. She had told friends and interviewers that she wanted to live, but couldn’t afford it.
🇳🇴⚡️🚗 80% of new-car sales in Norway were electric last year. As the country aims to end the sale of internal combustion engine cars by 2025, people are looking to Norway as an early glimpse of our EV future. (NYT | Jack Ewing | May 2023)
the air in Oslo, Norway’s capital, is measurably cleaner. The city is also quieter as noisier gasoline and diesel vehicles are scrapped. Oslo’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen 30 percent since 2009, yet there has not been mass unemployment among gas station workers and the electrical grid has not collapsed.
🇨🇳🔋⛏ Meanwhile, China will continue to dominate the lithium battery industry that is crucial to electric vehicle production. “Even by 2030, China will make more than twice as many batteries as every other country combined”. China’s control over the battery supply chain is spurring the US and other countries to coordinate the security of their mineral supply chains. (NYT | Jack Ewing, Agnes Chang, Keith Bradsher, Ana Swanson | May 2023)
I have a weird interest in this topic because the one summer I spent interning at a hedge fund all I did was research the lithium industry, which is why I can name you all sorts of random facts about lithium and the players involved. Chile, Argentina, Australia, and China are the major suppliers of raw lithium which can be found in rock but also large salt flats, or salars, mostly in South America. Chile, actually recently announced plans to nationalize its lithium industry, further evidence of these minerals’ importance not only to private companies but to nation states.
While China controls much of the mining, refining, and manufacturing involved in the production of EVs and their batteries, the chokehold seems especially pronounced at the refining stage.
Supported by the government with cheap land and energy, Chinese companies have been able to refine minerals at larger volume and lower cost than everyone else. This has caused refineries elsewhere to close.
Refining also often causes pollution, and Chinese refineries benefit from less stringent environmental regulations. Grinding graphite causes air pollution. Processing nickel generates toxic waste, which must be disposed of in special structures in the ocean or underground.
China also invested in and now monopolizes the production of LFP cathode batteries, which have quickly grown to half the cathode market.
The most important component is the cathode, which is the battery’s positive terminal. Of all battery materials, cathodes are the most difficult and energy intensive to make. Until the last several months, the most common cathode used a combination of nickel, cobalt and manganese, also known as NMC cathodes. This formula allows a battery to store a lot of electricity in a small space, providing an electric car with longer range.
China has invested in a cheaper alternative that has now taken half the cathode market. Known as LFP, for lithium iron phosphate, these cathodes use widely available iron and phosphate instead of nickel, manganese and cobalt.
For western countries, LFP is an opportunity to bypass bottlenecks in the mineral supply. But China produces almost all the world’s LFP.
These bottlenecks are huge economic and security concerns and the US is coordinating with allies such as Japan, the EU, and Indonesia to secure mineral supply without undercutting both domestic production capacity and key domestic values such as labor and environmental standards.
Biden officials agree that obtaining a secure supply of the minerals needed to power electric vehicle batteries is one of their most pressing challenges. U.S. officials say that the global supply of lithium alone needs to increase by 42 times by 2050 to meet the rising demand for electric vehicles. Projections by the International Energy Agency suggest that global demand for lithium will grow by 42 times by 2040.
To highlight some of the numbers from the well-designed NYT piece, globally China accounts for:
Mining
41% of cobalt
28% of lithium
78% of graphite
Refining
95% of manganese
73% of cobalt
70% of graphite
67% of lithium
63% of nickel
Manufacturing & Assembly
77% of cathodes
92% of anodes
99% of cheaper LFP cathodes
66% of battery cells
54% of EVs
Good Twitter thread here on China’s EV/auto dominance too.