An Abundance of Housing and TV that Promotes this

We know how to build lots of things cheaply. Things like clothes, toys, TV/computers and food have all gotten relatively much cheaper over my lifetime. These are mass produced, at a pretty high quality in factories with very specialised labour.

Housing however has not. The numbers who own by age 30 (when you want some stability if you are going to have kids) keeps dropping. One thing that could encourage cheaper housing is more programs that promote non unique one off builds. Instead of Ireland's most exclusive homes we should show the most inclusive ones.

Just Grand Designs where the house is fine and loads of them are made. “I can’t see the justification for gross spending on what are essentially basic requirements.” Kevin McCloud

Room to Improve where we build enough houses to give adults room to improve their lives by not having to silently ride in their parents house

RTE Home of The Year should be for a design of house that's had 1000 delivered this year and people can afford. Then have a decorating competition show between people who live in this same type of house. Thats fairer in terms of a competition and more practical help to people in how to decorate their own house.

There isn't a build your own car program. Grow your own food. Make your own pencil. As a hobby these are all worthwhile but the home building programs are not about a hobby. 

The reason things are cheap is the specialisation of labor and mechanized production. Why are houses different? And why does TV encourage this expensive way of building houses?

Meta analysis of Vitamins Open Dataset

Vitamins and Mineral supplements are a huge industry worth billions or euros per year. The evidence that they have benefits is a lot more controversial though. I first learned about this controversy around supplements from this overcomingbias post. 

This 2007 meta analysis Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary Prevention concluded "Treatment with beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E may increase mortality. The potential roles of vitamin C and selenium on mortality need further study."

There have been meta analysis since including newer studies with slightly different conclusions. But this one is pretty well laid out and we can add newer studies later.

With any statistical analysis it is possible to find issues with what data was included or not. One way around some of these issues is to make a public dataset of the trials used in a meta analysis and allow a quick reanalysis with some trials removed (or added).

I have been reading this book Doing Meta-Analysis with R: A Hands-On Guide and by combining an open notebook of how the meta analysis was calculated and a dataset that everyone has access to I believe arguments over the effects of inclusions of some trials and methods used in a meta analysis could be made much more explicit and worked out faster.

There is an open collaboration platform for working together on datasets https://datastack.net/ I have no connection with it. But it seems a good place to work together to make supplement meta analysis easier.

If you want to help track down papers used in this meta analysis and put them in a format others can use please message me. I have started putting up a dataset https://datastack.net/cavedave/vitaminRCTs/

The Pandemic. Fathers spend more time with their children

 A good thing that came out of the pandemic is how much time fathers got to spend with their children.

According to this research in 2014 time focused on their children was 35 minutes a day for working fathers. Up from 5 minutes in 1974.

This means I've spent more extra time over the usual amount properly with my kids in the last 2 years than 1970s dads got to spend with their kids over their entire childhood. And that is just extra time due to the lack of commute or work trips.

I am not counting time off school here. As that was just so difficult for so many. Particularly for mothers whom the balance of minding kids during the lockdown hit disproportionately

How are mothers and fathers balancing work and family under lockdown?

And plenty of fathers still had to be physically in their jobs just to keep society running.

But on that one measure of focused time spent with kids my generations relationship with our kids will be much closer than that of fifty years ago or even ten years ago just from the extra time we got to spend together.