London Olympics spends $10,000 on each security guard’s uniform

by philg

http://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.]

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Efficiency in the health care market

by philg

A 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!”

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Health Insurance Mandate is not the same as Health Care Mandate

by philg

The 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.]

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How does one remove photos from an iPhone 4S?

by philg

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.

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Interesting point-of-view video of helicopter lesson

by philg

One 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.

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You can’t engineer around tax rates

by philg

The 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.]

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Boomerang, by Michael Lewis

by philg

I’m halfway through Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World as a book on tape. It is far more entertaining and enlightening than I’d thought and it sheds a clear light on a lot of supposedly complex and confusing current events.

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.

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