A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Here’s a photo from a Gulfstream (re)paint shop….
After the interior goes back in, so will this fine-quality VHS VCR (with flying erase head!) and DVD player, unless the owners want to invest $100,000 in $1,000 of modern electronics and $99,000 of paperwork.
Full post, including commentsFolks:
The trackpad on the four-year-old Acer Chromebook seems to be dying. I may have gotten my $199 worth out of this machine. What’s the best choice right now for a Chromebook that can be used by a 7-year-old to edit Google Docs, surf the web, and send the occasional email? It could also be something that I can take on trips (I’ve been trying to travel with an iPad and keyboard case, but find that the keyboard is tough to type on and the Bluetooth connection is intermittent).
Thanks in advance for any ideas!
Full post, including commentsThe dismal scientists at Gallup came up with “No Recovery: An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline.” Here are some excerpts:
Conventional wisdom — as reported in many major newspapers and media — tells us the U.S. economy is “recovering.” Well-meaning economists, academics and government officials use the term “recovery” when discussing the economy, implying that growth is getting stronger.
The study finds there is no recovery. Since 2007, U.S. GDP per capita growth has been 1%.
Think of our country as a company, America Inc., which has more than 100 million full-time employees, with about $18 trillion in sales and $20 trillion of debt. The most serious problem facing it is no growth. In addition, America Inc. has three soaring expenses threatening to bankrupt the company and its shareholder-citizens: healthcare, housing and education.
As this report notes, in 1980, these three sectors accounted for 25% of total national spending — today, they account for more than 36%. They also account for most of the total measured inflation over this period. And without inflation in these sectors, real annual productivity — defined as GDP per capita growth — would have been an estimated 3.9% instead of 1.7%.
Why does it matter if we’re spending all of our money on pimped-out houses, gold-plated health care, and Club Med-style universities? Isn’t that what rich people would do? The economists say no, it is just that we are inefficient and stupid:
Why don’t Americans want to leave a secure government or big company job to start something new? The economists blame the decline in entrepreneurial activity on health care inflation: “There is always an element of risk in creating a new business, but the rising costs of healthcare magnify that risk. In previous decades, an employed worker could quit his or her job and pay for healthcare expenses out-of-pocket if necessary. Now, out-of-pocket expenses for the non-insured are extremely high, so an employed worker who quits to start a business likely gives up a valuable healthcare plan and may have to impose those costs on his or her own fledgling business at a time when revenue is dangerously low.” How steep is the decline? “The number of new firms with at least one worker per capita has fallen by about half since the late 1970s.” (Unlike journalists and politicians, these folks at least seem to adjust for population size appropriately throughout this report.)
A chart on page 84 shows that the U.S. legal landscape for employers changed enormously during the early 1980s. Employment at will was thrown out in favor of “implied contract” such that it became expensive to get rid of an unwanted or no-longer-affordable employee.
Although it is not central to the report’s arguments, page 85 contains a seemingly false statement: “Sugar is also heavily subsidized in the United States.” I thought that it was the opposite. We have sugar import quotas to keep prices high in the U.S., no?
We are crazy inefficient: “It costs the average U.S. physician $83,000 per year to process claims or otherwise interact with healthcare payers.” These are pre-tax dollars, presumably, but it is still a huge number, exceeding what a young primary care doc would have to pay in child support after a one-night sexual encounter in Massachusetts.
The economists say that teacher pay is low but don’t explain how this squares with the hundreds of applicants for every open position and the low quit rate of teachers.
Out of 100 pages just 2 are devoted to suggestions for how to get out of this stagnation. The purported suggestions are in fact mostly “well, we tried all of this stuff before and it didn’t work.” The idea of lower tax rates is dismissed on the ground that it has already been tried. They don’t grapple with the greater-than-90-percent rates faced by some of America’s potentially most productive workers. Singapore has a top tax rate of just over 20 percent and no estate tax. So the older highly productive worker in Singapore looking to improve his or her children’s wealth would have a vastly greater incentive to work than a similarly situated American. Ireland certainly has prospered after cutting tax rates (higher per-capita GDP than the U.S. or the U.K.; this from a country that was formerly notable for its poverty).
Readers: What do you think of the doom and gloom in this report? Would it really be that hard to get Americans to put down their Xbox controllers, stub out their legal marijuana, turn off the football game, and get to work?
Full post, including comments“Mass. lawmakers pass bill delaying sale of recreational pot” says that our legislature is working hard during this holiday week. They’ve passed a law to delay retail marijuana sales, but you can still grow your own (unless you have to work, especially in a job with drug-screening, which means growers will be mostly in taxpayer-funded public housing with taxpayer-funded electricity? in a free house after a child support lawsuit victory? in the backyard to feed the deer rather than themselves?).
Related:
Some helpful rules to make family bowling during the holidays safer and more civil…
(From the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno.)
Full post, including commentsSam Quinones, the author of Dreamland, isn’t content to write about the inherent drama of opiate addiction and its consequences. He tries to sell readers on the idea that opiate use and American culture intersect in unique ways. Opium has a long history:
Opium was likely our first drug as agricultural civilizations formed near rivers. Mesopotamians grew the poppy at the Tigris and Euphrates. The Assyrians invented the method, still widely used today, of slicing and draining the poppy’s pod of the goo containing opium. “The Sumerians, the world’s first civilization and agriculturists, used the ideograms hul and gil for the poppy, translating it as the ‘joy plant,’” wrote Martin Booth, in his classic Opium: A History.
The ancient Egyptians first produced opium as a drug. Thebaine, an opium derivative, is named for Thebes, the Egyptian city that was the first great center of opium-poppy production. Indians also grew the poppy and used opium. So did the Greeks. Homer and Virgil mention opium, and potions derived from it. The expanding Arab empire and later the Venetians, both inveterate traders, helped spread the drug.
In the early 1800s, a German pharmacist’s apprentice named Friedrich Sertürner isolated the sleep-inducing element in opium and named it morphine for Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams. Morphine was more potent than simple opium and killed more pain.
War spread the morphine molecule through the nineteenth century. More than 330 wars broke out, forcing countries to learn to produce morphine. The U.S. Civil War prompted the planting of opium poppies in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina for the first time, and bequeathed the country thousands of morphine-addicted soldiers. Two nineteenth-century wars were over the morphine molecule itself, and whether China could prevent the sale on her own soil of India-grown opium.
In 1853, meanwhile, an Edinburgh doctor named Alexander Wood invented the hypodermic needle, a delivery system superior to both eating the pills and the then-popular anal suppositories. Needles allowed more accurate dosing. Wood and other doctors also believed needles would literally remove the patient’s appetite for the drug, which no longer had to be eaten. This proved incorrect. Wood’s wife became the first recorded overdose death from an injected opiate.
In London in 1874, Dr. Alder Wright was attempting to find a nonaddictive form of morphine when he synthesized a drug that he called diacetylmorphine—a terrific painkiller. In 1898, a Bayer Laboratory chemist in Germany, Heinrich Dreser, reproduced Wright’s diacetylmorphine and called it heroin—for heroisch, German for “heroic,” the word that Bayer workers used to describe how it made them feel when Dreser tested it on them.
What makes Americans particularly susceptible to opiate addiction? The author describes how Americans who want to be drug addicts can get monthly cash and free pills via Medicaid. He doesn’t mention that any legal U.S. resident who refrains from work can also get a free house (possibly after a long wait) and taxpayer-funded food (food stamps or SNAP), plus an Obamaphone to call the drug retailers, licit or illicit (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession). Ancient Egyptians and Greeks could have spent all day every day using opium, but there was no welfare state to sustain them. Isn’t that sufficient to explain why addiction is more common in today’s U.S.? Quinones doesn’t think so:
In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior. In fact, the United States achieved something like this state of affairs in the period this book is about: the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. When I returned home from Mexico during those years, I noticed a scary obesity emerging. It wasn’t just the people. Everything seemed obese and excessive. Massive Hummers and SUVs were cars on steroids. In some of the Southern California suburbs near where I grew up, on plots laid out with three-bedroom houses in the 1950s, seven-thousand-square-foot mansions barely squeezed between the lot lines, leaving no place for yards in which to enjoy the California sun. In Northern California’s Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, 1960s hippies became the last great American pioneers by escaping their parents’ artificial world. They lived in tepees without electricity and funded the venture by growing pot. Now their children and grandchildren, like mad scientists, were using chemicals and thousand-watt bulbs, in railroad cars buried to avoid detection, to forge hyperpotent strains of pot. Their weed rippled like the muscles of bodybuilders, and growing this stuff helped destroy the natural world that their parents once sought. Excess contaminated the best of America. Caltech churned out brilliant students, yet too many of them now went not to science but to Wall Street to create financial gimmicks that paid off handsomely and produced nothing. Exorbitant salaries, meanwhile, were paid to Wall Street and corporate executives, no matter how poorly they did. Banks packaged rolls of bad mortgages and we believed Standard & Poor’s when they called them AAA. Well-off parents no longer asked their children to work when they became teenagers.
[the Mexican immigrant dealers’] greatest innovations was figuring out that a mother lode of heroin demand was now waiting to be mined in these neighborhoods if they’d only offer convenience. The Happy Meal of dope, he called it. Marketed like fast food—to young people. “‘We want what we want when we want it and thus we are entitled to get it,’” he said. “This drug is following the same marketing [strategy] of every other product out there. ‘I’ll give you good heroin at a great price. You don’t have to go to the bad neighborhoods. I’ll deliver it for you.’” In a culture that demanded comfort, he thought, heroin was the final convenience.
[at running a university hospital pain center] Tauben took over for Cahana in 2013. Cahana’s five years at the center immersed him in America’s pain culture wars. The experience had made him something of a philosopher of pain and happiness. Cahana believed that what insurance companies reimbursed for distilled many unfortunate values of the country. “We overtest, perform surgery, stick needles; these people are worse off,” he said. “If we work on their nutrition, diet, sleep habits, smoke habits, helping [them] find work—then they improve. You have to be accountable. If you give a treatment that kills people or makes people worse, you gotta stop. You can’t continue making money on stuff that doesn’t work.
“All of a sudden, we can’t go to college without Adderall; you can’t do athletics without testosterone; you can’t have intimacy without Viagra. We’re all the time focused on the stuff and not on the people. I tell pain patients, ‘Forget all that; the treatment is you. Take charge of your life and be healthy and do what you love and love what you do.’” And he ignored that very advice. Cahana came to Seattle at 260 pounds, and gained forty-five more over the next five years as, stressed and overworked, he battled to rebuild the historic clinic. The clinic won numerous awards, was highlighted as a model. He was on CNN and in People magazine, gave a TED talk, and testified before the U.S. Senate on overprescribing in medicine. He grew fatter all the while. He was taking medications for hypertension, cholesterol, and then more for the side effects from the medication—nine pills a day, fifteen hundred dollars a month in co-pays. “I couldn’t walk two flights of stairs without huffing and puffing,” he said
Readers: What do you think? Are Americans addicts because we don’t need to work or is it something deeper?
More: read Dreamland.
Full post, including commentsWe have a studio office/apartment here in the boring suburbs that we make available on AirBnB. A young woman wearing sunglasses named “Renata” sent us the following email: “I would like to book your house to invite some friends over and celebrate the New Year’s Eve. Is that possible?” The booking request is for just one night, Dec 31.
Given that our entire suburb (85 percent voted for Hillary) will be in mourning this New Year’s Eve and that this space is only big enough for friends who want to share a desk or a bed, I have to assume that this is a scam. But how can an AirBnB customer scam a host?
Full post, including comments“Columbia Challenges Vote by Graduate Students to Unionize” (nytimes) is about how the faculty and administration at Columbia aren’t sure that a unionized grad student workforce is right for them.
[“Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology” found that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans at Columbia by 30:1 across a range of five departments.]
Full post, including commentsAt a suburban ballet school’s performance of the Nutcracker, I noticed that transgenderism was common. About 15 percent of the dancers who had been given a traditionally female first name, presumably corresponding to their birth certificate sex, were identifying as male (i.e., long hair pinned up under caps, traditionally male costume, etc.).
Full post, including commentsMerry Christmas!
Helicopter nerds may appreciate this video of Mrs. Claus flying an AStar.
[Scrooge might note that the helicopter is registered in Argentina (“R-“), closer to the South Pole than to the North. A Trump-inspired sexist would also note that the purported female pilot was sitting right seat in an aircraft typically flown from the left seat (unlike most U.S.-designed helicopters, which are flown from the right seat).]
Related:
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