Gongol.com Archives: July 2025
July 27, 2025
A huge step forward against HIV
The FDA has approved a twice-a-year treatment to prevent HIV -- a shot that showed spectacular results in preventing HIV among test populations. The European Medicine Agency has seconded the approval, which should lead to full EU approval by the end of the year. That it works is scientifically wonderful. That it only requires two injections a year is really a bonanza for public health: As with any infectious disease, the fewer the obstacles to prevention compliance, the better. And drug-maker Gilead is promising efforts to make it widely affordable.
There's an old adage that if there's a gold rush underway, you don't want to be a prospector -- you want to be the one selling shovels. There's a modern-day angle to that perspective: In the midst of yet another technology boom (this time, concentrated on spending related to artificial intelligence), you don't want to be chasing the tech prize: It's far smarter to get in on the real estate game. ■ Geographically, the San Francisco Bay Area starts out with some tough constraints: Mountains, water, and a tightly-bound traffic system, just to name a few. But there are also some serious artificial constraints on real estate, like San Francisco's notoriously restrictive rules on zoning and housing codes. ■ Things are slow to change, even if the problems are widely evident. A report from San Jose State University claims that "the amount a household needs to make to buy a house in the San Jose metro area is $468,252". Median rent is only "affordable" for a household making $136,532 a year (assuming that a maximum of 30% of income should be spent on housing). It becomes clear from figures like those that big Silicon Valley salaries are being funneled in no small part to those who own real estate in the area -- either for rent or for sale. ■ It should be no wonder that working from home appeals so much to people facing costs of such a magnitude. What good is a high income if it's just a pass-through to a mortgage banker or landlord? And circumstances like high real-estate costs spill over to everyone else in a community, which can instigate an upward spiral of costs as everyone tries simply to keep up -- and those who benefit from the peculiarities of the market work hard to entrench the conditions that inflate their wealth. Anytime concentrated benefits conflict with diffuse costs, the safe bet is on the side with the concentrated benefits.
