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What’s in a name? Tesco Lotus in Thailand rebrands to “Lotus’s” (no, really)
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webfact
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121
Trump Calls for Return of Panama Canal Over "Unfair" Transit Rates
No just put a 25% export duty on it. -
38
Woman Dies After Being Set on Fire in New York Subway
Tell that bit of wisdom to the lady on fire -
121
Trump Calls for Return of Panama Canal Over "Unfair" Transit Rates
No, he's moved on from buying Greenland. Now he simply thinks the US should control it (capture it). Apparently annexing Canada was a joke. There are hints about taking over Mexico. He's not even in office year. Apparently he's no Nazi, but already embarking on Lebensraum. Invading Ukraine is apparently bad, but MAGAts are now cheering on invation of Panama. As a young student in Tennessee, I attended a speech given by the then Present Bush in January 1990. The US had just invaded Panama, to capture Noreiga. Probably a morally justifiable action. But this President was comparing it to a recent basketball match. Pretty flippant. Trump has given the impression that he wanted to end all this flippancy, and no more wars, pull out of NATO etc etc. But John Bolton reminded us to day that Trump is an idiot. He was an idiot 20 years go. With age, his widom didn't increase. Instead the idiocy gene started expressing more and more.- 1
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1
A Christmas Story
Update. Bill Ackman Steps Up, Joins Dave Portnoy in Christmas Miracle for Struggling Small Business [. . .] After hearing about the story, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman joined the moving efforts to help the small businessman. Ackman encouraged government officials to stop dragging their feet on a liquor license and fast-track the process to keep Tiny Brick Oven open and allow it to thrive. [. . .] Ackman also donated $10,000 to Fagg’s online Pay it Forward fundraiser which, at the time of writing, has already reached over $70,000. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/12/bill-ackman-steps-up-joins-dave-pornoy-christmas/ https://assets.aseannow.com/forum/uploads/monthly_2024_12/image.thumb.jpeg.b32462b9278882d2e39380c01d31824c.jpeg -
125
Britain’s Sharia Courts and the Challenge of Religious Freedom
The problem of Sharia courts has little if anything to do with refugees or asylum seekers - fake or real. Shariah courts are operated by the Islamic society in the UK who mostly arrived by legal means. The beginnings of that was initially to help rebuild Britain after WW2 and then to fulfill a severe labour shortage in the mill towns of Northern England. The problem was that not only did we allow the workers to come, they were allowed to bring their families too. That was also abused by claims that 'dependent' relatives needed to come. As far as I know, the families and dependent relatives thing has now bee stopped but it is way, way too late. We now have a Muslim community large enough for politicians to court them for votes during elections. -
286
Was Ex police officer Derek Chauvin wrongly convicted !
If a white guy had died this would be a non story -
2
Belgian 80, Attacked and Robbed by Teenage Gang on Christmas Day in Pattaya
This seems to answer the question put on here earlier this week.."Do Thai's attack foreigners for no reason"?, An 80 year old Foreign man against 6 Thai's, I think the answer in this case is , Yes they do- 1
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7
Concerns Mount Over Chinese Medical Tech in the NHS and Potential Data Harvesting Risks
None of the data Mindray are capturing on their devices can be used for designing "bioweapons". Its the wrong sort of data. I work in the field. Currently the UK government promotes to the world the NHS, because its the world's largest single system patient database. This is an important consideration if you are looking to set up clinical trials, and want to recruit patients with a certain profile, such as age, gender, weight, ethnicity. Canda is the UK's number 1 competitor in that regard, because it also has access to a large patient database, that like the UK, is ethnically diverse. Japan has been a difficult country to launch new drugs and medical devices, because the country requires clinical data related to a Japanese population. One outcome of that was for years, Japanese women had no access to BRCA mutation testing in Japan, vital in detecting the most common familial breast and ovarian cancers. Instead, samples were taken in Japan and sent to the US for testing by Myriad Genetics. Recently, Japan has started to accept trials data that includes ethnically Japanese people, opening up Canada as a place a company could set up trials. Clinical trials are complicated things, with recruitment and retention rates varying greatly by country. The UK and Canada have very good records in this respect. In recent years, China has begun to tighten up its regulation. By 2030, the Chinese government wants 90% of its healthcare needs to be provided by Chinese companies. China has a 4 tier healthcare system, if you include Traditional Medicine Hospitals (which aren't quite what you think)/ Top tier hospitals are utterly dominated by Western and Japanese brands. Bottom tier hospitals use frankly substandard Chinese products that aren't seen beyond the 3rd World. Companies like Mindray are considered top tier. Lower tier hospitals want better products, and Doctors there want the same products as Doctors in top tier hospitals. Russia has found out that you can't force doctors to buy Russian devices and medicines simply out of patriotic pride (Trump will find out this, when he discovers 70% of US medtech iis made overseas, and cannot be smply reshored). China will come up with better designs, I have no doubt. They have some very capable biomedical engineers and scientists. But they won't hit their 2030 target. Where China is really good is at AI/ AI is transforming drug discovery, shaving decades off biomarker discovery. But, in medtec, its really good for gaining a competitive advantage in those areas that have become nearly commoditized, eg diagnostic imaging, blood tests, endoscopy. AI needs access to big, high quality data sets. The bigger the dataset, the more accurate the result. German companies are complaining that their government has hamstrung them by banning the movement of German patient data to outside of Germany, even to other EU states, to combine with with data sets. The EU has strict restrictions. So Germany is uncompetitive in this respect. China in this area. Arguably the UK is stronger, and thats due to a combination of the business environment, but also the role of the NHS taking a lead on AI; the NHS has an arm, NHS-X (its been renamed), responsible for development of in house AI solutions (the online 111 service is AI powered), but also commercialising those solutions (eg its now selling an Ambulance logistics App and CKD patient tracker to the Gulf States, Singapore and Australia). Training the tech using the NHS dataset is a real competitive advantage. But innovation is overcoming challenges even when that data set is not big enough. for instance, I have been talking to a company which is seeking to improve mammography outcomes. 50% of mammogram results are wrong. Either a cancer is missed, or, more commonly, cancer is mistakingly diagnosed, leading to unecessary surgery. Mammograms are typically analysed by a human. Image analysis can help, but its pretty subjective, and there have been scandals in recent years. AI can improve image analysis. But the system needs to be trained to recognise cancerous tissue. So it needs images of healthy and diseased breased. A lot of them, of exceptional quality produced by the latest 3D Tomography machines. 200 million images. There aren't enough of these images in the world. So they used AI to create the images to create a training data set. Accuracy is now 75%. Post COVID, data is the big transformation in medicine. Every pandemic has resulted in a step change in medicine. Spanish flu helped create rules for infection control. Polio, besides the Iron Lung that was literally created over night, caused the invention of Intensive Care Medicine. The 1957 Mao flu pandemic heralded the role of the path lab in fighting outbreaks. These things we take for granted now, but only came about than tkso Plato's famous maxim (often quoted, slightly wrongly, as Necessity is the Mother of Invention). Most people are aware of Fleming discovering penicillin, but not many know it was WW2 and Operation Overlord that really made it practical (and which invented the Pharmaceutical Industry, which didn't really exist before WW2). I suspect the events that lead to the COVID1-9 Pandemic will eventually be traced back to events surrounding the US mortgage crisit of 2008, that caused the Global crash, and which had a profound effect on how global trade was conducted. And really because of those events, most countries are more cash strapped post Pandemic than they needed have been. All healthcare systems have struggled to catch up. Frankly, some of the problem will go away as patient die. There isn't any more money to pump into healthcare. AI and telehealth is part of the response to deal with that (do more, with less). And that will far reaching implications and benefits. China might be a big country, but it has a disperate and badly organised healthcare system, with varying quality datasets. Mining UK patient data isn't a threat to the safety of the British state itself; such notions are fanciful. But it is a competitive threat, if China was able to design AI that is more accurate for European populations. And the prize, as always, is the US. The medical industry in the US has really pushed up the cost of healthcare. The Insurance industry get a lot of stick, but companies like United are only making 6-7% margins. Thats not excessive profits. The Insurers push back against claims, because there is a lot of uncessary medical care. The loon who shot the United CEO, had previously undergone very expensive spinal fusion surgery, which has dubious efficacy (rates have increased 10x in the US), probably left him in pain, with no further options except increasingly risky and ineffective further surgery. The US doesn't have anything like the UK's NICE as the gatekeeper to tell doctors what treatments and medicines are most effective (follow NICE guidelines, and you will not lose a Law Suit. Don't follow the Guidelines, it might not be wrong, but you are on your own). The Federal government hasn't done enough; the FDA for instance, gave up regulating genetic tests 40 years ago, and are now left with a monster load of tests no one knows actually work. Partly to protect their shareholders, the insurance companies step in. Their one weapon is to refuse claims. US hospitals have the worst readmission rates in the West; you're more likely to go to hospital, get treated, go home, and end up back in hospital, usually dying. This is because hospitals are quick to discharge, but inadquate in following up. The Insurers are on to this, and have told hospitals don't improve readmission rates, they will cut reimbursements by 50%. As a result, hospitals are scrambling to beef up community nursing; nurses going to patients; homes to see how they are. This is where AI comes in, and the sort of data that is collected on Mindray devices (Mindray will mostly be seen in Snart Beds, bedside monitors, ventilators with built in controls). The more measurements the nurse can collect, recorded on a handheld device, and fed into the Cloud, he better AI can predict outcome, and the more likely the hospital will intervene to prevent the patient going back to hospital in a worse way that before. Datawise, the US is a bit like China; there is a lot of data, but its not collected very well, and is not in one place. HCUP produces a national patient procedure dataset. They present data on how many procedures are undertaken and what sort. All of that is used in strategic planning to forecast demand. Only its not real data. HCUP can only collect data from 16 States, not 50, so the number is eztrapolated.
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