A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine, has two recent articles that should depress publishers everywhere:
Don’t let your kids grow up to work in the publishing industry!
Full post, including commentshttp://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/19/olympic-games-g4s-bill is sort of a fun article if you do some arithmetic on what the British are spending on one facet of security at the London Olympics. There were supposed to be 10,000 guards and the cost of their uniforms was 65 million pounds or roughly $10,200 per guard. In the best tradition of an ossified bureaucratic moribund society, more money is allocated to management (125 million pounds) than labor (83 million pounds). Overall, had things worked out as planned/hoped, the British would have spent $446 million (enough to have financed 15 Googles) to have 10,000 minimally trained security guards work for the 17-day event. That works out to $44,600 per guard or $2,623 per guard per day. As it happens, though, the contractor wasn’t able to supply the 10,000 guards, many of them could not speak English, and many were unable to stay awake during their minimal training. So the cost per actual guard may be closer to $100,000.
[The guards themselves don’t receive this $100,000, of course. They receive roughly $13.30 per hour, according to this article.]
Full post, including commentsA friend of a friend runs a small HMO for a university (students, faculty, staff). Part of his job is negotiating with vendors for procedures and hospital care. “[A local academic-affiliated hospital] charges $2800 for a colonoscopy. I got a deal with a colonoscopy center, though, for $900. Same doctors. Same procedure. Same anesthesia.” Was there anything else that affects the price? “On top of these charges, the centers encourage patients to ask for Propofol as an anesthetic. That’s the Michael Jackson drug. It doesn’t work any better, but it has to be administered by an anesthesiologist and the centers and hospitals are able to tack on another $1000 in charges. Insurance companies will pay for it so the providers try to convince patients that it is better so they will ask for it. We tell them that we won’t pay for it!”
Full post, including commentsThe Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government can try to coerce Americans into buying health insurance. What I haven’t seen in the news articles covering this event is a comparison to other things that the government tries to get Americans to do. The government tries to get teenagers to graduate from high school, but about 20 percent fail to do so. The government tries to get Americans to stop smoking marijuana, but about 20 percent light up periodically, despite the criminal penalties that attach to this activity. The government tries to get Americans to drive more fuel-efficient cars, and has various tax penalties associated with gas guzzlers, but SUVs and pickups clog our highways (I parked next to a monster one yesterday that had an “Eco Boost” badge on the side!).
The penalty for those who don’t buy health insurance is an extra tax, but http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/04/taxes_schmaxes.html notes that roughly 7 million Americans (out of about 150 million civilians in the labor force) don’t bother to file tax returns.
Was it really worth two years of drama to turn America from a country in which millions of people lack health insurance into a country in which millions of people lack health insurance?
I’m still a fan of my own health care reform plan, which provides universal coverage, not just a nagging scolding nanny state that has proven itself to be incapable in the past of nagging and scolding with sufficient effect.
What will happen in 5-10 years when we discover that America still has a huge population of uninsured folks? The currently approved law does not seem to be a great stepping stone to universal coverage.
[Separately, if I were not a taxpayer, I would have been amused to see that each state got $8 million to do planning, but not actual programming, for a Web site to serve as a health insurance exchange. In other words, the federal government spent $400 million (50 states times $8 million) to do planning for the kind of Web service that a private start-up would build with five young people sharing an apartment and coding for three months.]
Full post, including commentsA friend of a friend just got a new job at a hospital run by Duke University. He is a medical doctor. Here’s a phone camera snapshot of the part of the new job/OSHA paperwork that asks “Can you read?”
Folks:
How does one remove photos from an iPhone 4S? My “camera roll” folder is full of photos and videos (about 1500). Apple is saying that I need to buy more iCloud storage, which I don’t want to do. I plugged the device into a Windows 7 computer and the phone shows up as a drive. I was able to copy all of the photos onto a local disk for backup, but not able to delete any (an easy operation on an Android phone, which functions like a legitimate USB drive when plugged in).
I’ve Googled around a bit and there does not seem to be a straightforward way to delete all of the photos on the phone without selecting each one (1500!) with a touch. There was a hint that someone who purchased a Macintosh ($1000+?) would be able to delete photos by regarding the phone as a disk drive, but I can’t find anything for the Windows crowd.
Thanks in advance.
Full post, including commentsOne of the instructors at our flight school found an interesting way to mount a GoPro camera and make a video of a helicopter flying lesson. Comments would be appreciated because we could edit it. And yes I know that there is no sound! It would be nice to pipe in the radio transmissions at least but they’d have to be recorded with a separate device. The drone of the engines and blades would not be interesting. We don’t have a license for any inspiring music.
Full post, including commentsThe theme of this year’s Technology Day at MIT was advanced manufacturing in the U.S. Kresge Auditorium was close to capacity with alumni from all reunion years (I’m celebrating my 100th!). Marcie Black, founder of Bandgap Engineering, and Nathan Ball, founder of Atlas Devices, gave inspiring talks about advanced solar cells and an innovative climbing machine. Learned MIT faculty weighed in on the importance of proximity between engineers and factories. The Atlas Device story was initially an inspiring tale of can-do New England spirit, with engineers in Somerville and a machine shop in Woburn working together to make improvements on a weekly basis. But then we found out that the main customer was the U.S. military and they really didn’t care how much it cost or how efficiently it was produced. Similarly, the solar cell talk was great until we learned that there are about 12 good reasons why solar cells must be manufactured in Asia.
In a panel discussion afterwards, the speakers were asked what it would take to make the U.S. more competitive for manufacturing. The answer was that it was pretty much hopeless at current tax rates. Big companies make a lot of money in foreign countries, but if they bring the profits back home they get hit with the world’s highest corporate tax rate. So they leave the money in China, for example, and then invest it there in research and development or a new factory. I.e., our own multinational companies are financing the new facilities around the world that are rendering the U.S. uncompetitive. A new enterprise, meanwhile, would be facing a choice between China, with a 15 percent corporate tax rate, proximity to all kinds of suppliers, and low costs, and the U.S., with a 35 percent tax rate (plus any state corporate income tax) and an ocean separating it from most component vendors.
Other than for defense contracting, nobody seemed optimistic about the U.S. becoming comparatively more attractive. (Can we still call it “defense” when we keep starting the wars?)
[I was a bit skeptical of the message that high costs and taxes explain the U.S. decline. After all, Germany has high costs for everything and Europeans are famous for high tax rates. Yet Germany is wonderfully successful in manufacturing. Then I looked up the corporate tax rate in Germany and it turns out to be 15%, the same as China’s.]
Full post, including commentsI’m halfway through Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
For example, the Greek/Euro crisis has always confused me. A 65-year-old California private sector worker does not mind paying high taxes so that a 50-year-old former fire chief can enjoy a $241,000/year public employee pension. Why then do working Germans get so angry that they have to work harder and pay more taxes so that 50-year-old Greeks can enjoy retirement? Is it simply because Germans and Greeks have less in common than the American taxpayer and the American public employee pension collector? News articles have not been helpful in answering this question.
Lewis explains that Greece wanted to join the Eurozone so that it could cut its borrowing costs, borrow a lot of money, and then distribute it among government workers and other citizens. It wouldn’t have been possible to join the Eurozone without meeting some requirements for budget deficit as a percentage of GDP and inflation, so the Greek government falsified its numbers and thereby gained entry into the Eurozone. Once in, the Greeks, sometimes aided by Goldman Sachs, continued to put out absurdly fraudulent numbers, e.g., that their budget deficit was 3% of GDP when in fact it was 15%. The fraud was sort of obvious in that the new debt being issued by the Greek government was at least double the stated budget deficit, but hardly anybody bothered to add up the numbers until 2008 and 2009. Greek banks were relatively conservative. It was the citizens who brought down the banks, not vice versa as in other nations.
So it is not a simple matter of some Europeans working until they drop while others retire comfortably at 50 but rather that there was fraud in how the Greeks presented what they were doing.
Full post, including commentsI purchased an HP 17″ laptop with some software preinstalled in order to save myself some time. Normally I would prefer to buy from Dell, but this was the only 17″ machine that I could find with the latest generation (3rd; “Ivy Bridge”) of Intel CPUs.
The computer arrived in good shape, but once opened the purchased software was nowhere to be found, except for Microsoft Office, which was on the hard drive but demanding a product key. HP has invested heavily in a support application that enables their technicians to see everything on the hard drive. I opened a chat session and authorized HP to look at everything on the hard drive. Unfortunately the folks on the other end of this have no way to look up orders, apparently, and the hapless fellow had no clue as to whether or not purchased software should be preinstalled or not. He gave me a phone number to call.
I called the 888 number and waited for my turn. The woman who answered said that the purchased software should be on the hard drive. In fact, it was on the hard drive, she asserted (though she did not have access to the fancy support app that would have enabled her to see the hard drive). I pointed out that was nothing in the Adobe folder under “Program Files” other than Reader. If Photoshop Elements was on here, where was it hiding on the disk? She continued to assert that all of the software paid for was there and when I asked to be transferred to someone more familiar with Microsoft Windows she dumped me into HP’s tech support queue.
I called the same 888 number again and got someone different on the phone. He also had no access to my hard drive, but believed me when I said that the software was not there and that Office was demanding an activation key. He said that this case was being escalated to the highest priority available and that I would be called back by someone from HP within two business days (i.e., on Wednesday of next week, given that Monday is a holiday). I said “Given that I need an activation key, wouldn’t it be simpler for you to have someone email it to me?” That, apparently, is not an option.
My attempt to save myself some time delayed my usage of the software by at least a week (I could have purchased all of these things for download and activated immediately) and will cost me at least two hours of phone and online chat with HP.
More interestingly, I think this shows one reason why economic growth isn’t hugely accelerated by clever technology such as the latest Intel chips or HP’s fancy “look at the customer’s hard disk” support application. The fancy technology is eventually put into the hands of the same workers who made a mess of the old stuff.
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