Month: May 2009

Trusting throughout my youth that my society was, well, a society, I saw corruption and crime, but near me was civility and cooperation. Could I have imagined doctors taking 15% of our payroll every month?

Reuters:
Healthcare costs, both payroll deductions and out-of-pocket medical expenses, now eat up 14 percent of the average household income of about $50,000 for these people.

Costs grew by an average of $1,162 per family this year from an average of $15,609 last year.

Cost-control measures include efforts to reduce medical procedures.

Yes. Reduce medical procedures. Effort. That’s it.

In the summer, air conditioning and refrigeration account for half the USA’s energy use.

Oh, don’t forget that before it makes a chill, 60-70% of fossil electricity is lost in transportation.

:-0 How many eco-autos can make up for this heavy demand for summer energy?

The rise in obesity since the 1970s – weight gain in the American population – seems to be virtually all explained by eating more calories. Changes in physical activity plays a minimal role.

Most doctor’s receive little education specifically for pain. Specialists are important and often view pain very differently.

Low-back pain is the fifth most common reason for doctor’s visits and accounts for more than $26 billion in direct health care costs.

The American Pain Society found that evidence for the use of many low back pain interventions was mixed, sparse or not available.

The APS new statement of guidelines:

1. For interdisciplinary rehabilitation.
2. For interdisciplinary discussion of risks and benefits before surgery.
3. For interdisciplinary discussion of risks and benefits before epidural steroid injections.
4. For interdisciplinary discussion of risks and benefits before spinal cord stimulation.
5. Cannot recommend disc replacement.
6. Against injecting fluid into the disc.
7. Against joint corticosteroid injection.

In otherwords, there’s too few proven fixes, too few experts and none should be solely relied upon.

Journalists at GQ are offering a scoop.

AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly.

But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty.

By Robert Draper

DO see the scans of the documents in GQ’s slideshow.

Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House.

“People devastated by poverty are not deficient, less than or subhuman. They are not broken; however, the system in which they are embroiled very well may be.”

Kay Ann Taylor at Kansas State University:

Far too many schools continue to endorse a curriculum of the absurd that encompasses ‘heroification’ of primarily white males, while the contributions of women and people of color appear in pop-out format in textbooks.

The No Child Left Behind Act also continues to be a problem, except for students who attend private schools, which are exempt from the act.

The No Child Left Behind Act’s scripted curriculum, relentless testing and oppressive mandates create a robotic-like setting for mindless regurgitation of irrelevant and contextually void facts that challenge our most creative, dedicated and culturally responsive teachers and run the remainder out of teaching all together.

But the truth is that we can fix Social Security for literally pennies a day per worker and don’t need to pay attention to hysterical Henny Penny’s.

Social Security is mostly not broken and the part that kinda is (Disability) is fixable. And we have (or will shortly) numbers to prove it.

Economic Populist says:

Bruce Webb is a social security watchdog and is promoting two plans to fix social security for pennies on the dollar.

He deserves a read for social security is continually under attack by privatization parties who want to turn yet another social safety net into some sort of gambling casino.

Arrrgh, Matey. Keep ’em off the ship:

Pest experts in parts of Britain have noticed an increase in the number of rats who appear to be immune to poisons.

Some had believed the resistance was caused by mother rats feeding the poison to their young and inadvertently increasing their immunity.

But researchers from the University of Huddersfield believe a new type of “super rat” with genetic mutations makes it resistant to commonly used poisons.

At Naked Capitalism:

There it is: the U.S. ruling class is not living up to its role in either efficiency or fairness.

We are getting poorer.

That is why people are so angry.

Question:
Why has it taken the citizens of the U.S. so long to figure all this out?

Answer:
Even though the gulf between rich and poor was widening and the rich were getting richer, we thought we too were getting richer as well.

We thought that we too were profiting.

In the 1980s, we came out of a steep double dip recession and stagflation and we won the cold war. This inflated our sense of well-being. In the 1990s, there was the tech bubble to inflate our assets. In this decade, there was the housing bubble. So, we thought we were getting rich too, we didn’t mind that the ruling class was benefiting disproportionately as long as we too appeared to be benefiting.

What was really happening is we were loading up on debt.

We were not benefiting at all

And now that there are no more cold wars we can win quickly, no more tech stocks, no more double digit house price increases, and no more asset bubbles to hide the naked truth — now we realize that we were getting poorer all the time.

All the while, the rich were milking the system for all they could.

A short interview with Charlie Munger, partner with Warren Buffett:

• I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting. They are way too liberal in providing the kind of accounting the financial promoters want. They’ve sold out, and they do not even realize that they’ve sold out.
• The economy hasn’t contracted as much as during the Great Depression, but the malfeasance and silliness, the triggering events for today’s crisis, were much greater and more widespread. In the ’20s, a tiny class of people were financial promoters and a tiny class of people were buying securities. Today, it’s deep in the whole culture, and it is way more extreme.
• I would argue that the economists have not been all that good at working concepts of good and evil into their profession. Nor do they understand, at all well, the economic consequences of bad accounting.

Full Stanford .pdf

As if doctors, TIME suggests it’s time MBAs also take an Oath:

I will strive to act with honesty and integrity.

I will respect the rights and dignity of all people.

I will strive to create sustainable prosperity worldwide.

I will oppose all forms of corruption and exploitation.

And I will take responsibility for my actions.

As I hold true to these principles, it is my hope that I may enjoy an honorable reputation and peace of conscience.

Peeking around the bend. Obama:

I have always believed that it is better to talk than not to talk; that it is far more productive to reach over a divide than to shake your fist across it. This has been an alien notion in Washington for far too long, but we are seeing that the ways of Washington are beginning to change. For the calling of this moment is too loud and too urgent to ignore. Our success as a nation – the future of our children and grandchildren – depends upon our willingness to cast aside old arguments, overcome stubborn divisions, and march forward as one people and one nation.

This is how progress has always been made. This is how a new foundation will be built. We cannot assume that interests will always align, or that fragile partnerships will not fray. There will be setbacks. There will be difficult days. But we are off to a good start. And I am confident that we will – in the weeks, months, and years ahead – build on what we have already achieved and lay this foundation which will not only bring about prosperity for this generation, but for generations to come.

Thanks so much.

Putting the Brakes on Fast Money

We need to build a culture that stands as a radiant counterpoint to our dominant hurry-up culture. We need to bring our culture down to earth—and I mean this literally.

We need to replenish the soil; we need to remember our connection to the soil; we need to support our local food system; we need to participate in and celebrate the authentic local culture that emerges from these many connections and awarenesses; and we also need to build the financial infrastructure that will enable all this to thrive.

The core wound we’re trying to heal is the bifurcation of finance and social purpose.

For a century or more, the two have been totally separated.

Why not invent a new kind of municipal bond that would let people invest locally and regionally?

“Entrepreneurs and farmers are the poets of the economy. They are holders of ambiguity and risk. They cultivate interstitial spaces, where demand and need and aspiration coexist in a mildly turbulent state of chaotic possibility. They continuously test the boundaries of quality and quantity, as a poet tests the boundaries of denotation and connotation. Ideas in a business plan; seeds in potting soil; rhymes in search of new reasons.”

As it circulates the globe with ever-accelerating speed, money is sucking oxygen out of the air, fertility out of the soil and culture out of local communities.

Radiant Counterpoint: Our America.

Asia Times, Brian McCartan (May 15,’09):

The State Protection Law, which the regime has used to detain Suu Kyi since 2003, stipulates that a person can only be held under house arrest for a maximum of five years, although the regime manipulated the exact date of her detention to add another year to her sentence.

Under the law, her term was due to expire on May 27.

The fool and The Lady of the lake

She is an imprisoned opposition Nobel Prize winner and the hope of a nation. He is a Morman from Missouri on some quixotic spiritual mission.

When he swam ashore at her guarded home last week in Yangon, their fates were bound together forever. Now pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Vietnam vet John Yettaw are in prison and the future of Myanmar may be on the line.

–

The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.

Threatened with a federal shutdown, the pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. …

So ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step.

The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”

BUT … attempts by The New York Times to follow the directions on several brands of frozen meals, including ConAgra’s Banquet pot pies, failed to achieve the required 165-degree temperature. Some spots in the pies heated to only 140 degrees even as parts of the crust were burnt.

Whoa baby… Can’t you just see an odd new twist in real estate if firms and sales agents sat down with buyers to discuss this!

1. Parents ought to consider the personalities and physiques of their kids when deciding where to live.
2. Genes trump environment as the primary reason that some adolescents are more likely than others to be victimized by crime…

Check it out!

Bruce Schneier never fails to cut the butter.

An Expectation of Online Privacy

If your data is online, it is not private. Oh, maybe it seems private.

Certainly, only you have access to your e-mail. Well, you and your ISP. And the sender’s ISP. And any backbone provider who happens to route that mail from the sender to you. And, if you read your personal mail from work, your company. And, if they have taps at the correct points, the NSA and any other sufficiently well-funded government intelligence organization — domestic and international.

You could encrypt your mail, of course, but few of us do that. Most of us now use webmail. The general problem is that, for the most part, your online data is not under your control. Cloud computing and software as a service exacerbate this problem even more.

Your webmail is less under your control than it would be if you downloaded your mail to your computer. If you use Salesforce.com, you’re relying on that company to keep your data private. If you use Google Docs, you’re relying on Google. This is why the Electronic Privacy Information Center recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission: many of us are relying on Google’s security, but we don’t know what it is.

This is new.

Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to look through your correspondence, he had to break into your house. Now, he can just break into your ISP. Ten years ago, your voicemail was on an answering machine in your office; now it’s on a computer owned by a telephone company. Your financial accounts are on remote websites protected only by passwords; your credit history is collected, stored, and sold by companies you don’t even know exist.

And more data is being generated. Lists of books you buy, as well as the books you look at, are stored in the computers of online booksellers. Your affinity card tells your supermarket what foods you like. What were cash transactions are now credit card transactions. What used to be an anonymous coin tossed into a toll booth is now an EZ Pass record of which highway you were on, and when. What used to be a face-to-face chat is now an e-mail, IM, or SMS conversation — or maybe a conversation inside Facebook.

Remember when Facebook recently changed its terms of service to take further control over your data? They can do that whenever they want, you know.

We have no choice but to trust these companies with our security and privacy, even though they have little incentive to protect them. Neither ChoicePoint, Lexis Nexis, Bank of America, nor T-Mobile bears the costs of privacy violations or any resultant identity theft.

This loss of control over our data has other effects, too.

Our protections against police abuse have been severely watered down. The courts have ruled that the police can search your data without a warrant, as long as others hold that data. If the police want to read the e-mail on your computer, they need a warrant; but they don’t need one to read it from the backup tapes at your ISP.

This isn’t a technological problem; it’s a legal problem.

The courts need to recognize that in the information age, virtual privacy and physical privacy don’t have the same boundaries. We should be able to control our own data, regardless of where it is stored. We should be able to make decisions about the security and privacy of that data, and have legal recourse should companies fail to honor those decisions. And just as the Supreme Court eventually ruled that tapping a telephone was a Fourth Amendment search, requiring a warrant — even though it occurred at the phone company switching office and not in the target’s home or office — the Supreme Court must recognize that reading personal e-mail at an ISP is no different.

This essay was originally published on the SearchSecurity.com website, as the second half of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum.

For years I’ve called this issue “Information Sovereignty”. We have it for property and things, but fail to see we need it for our data too.

The Science of Fear should be required reading for…well, for everyone.

The paperback will be published in June. “It’s the book I wish I had written.“

What’s also not known about where we spend?

Most Medicare dollars are spent in the last 6 years of life.
Ten percent is spent in the last year of life.

Five percent of all Medicare patients die per year and spend almost 30 percent ($143 billion in 2009) of the Medicare budget.

Medicare patients who die spend about six times more in their last year of life than those who do not, which comes to about $25,000 for each person who dies, compared with the almost $4,000 spent per year for those Medicare patients who do not die.

China nuclear plants under construction.

Plant             Province MWe gross Type    Agency Start const. Operation
Lingao-2 (#3 & 4) Guangdong 2x1080 CPR-1000  CGNPC 8/11
Qinshan 4(#6 & 7) Zhejiang 2x650 CNP-600     CNNC 4/06, 1/07     2011, 2012
Hongyanhe 1(#1-4) Liaoning 4x1080 CPR-1000   CGNPC 8/07, 4/08
Yangjiang 1(#1-2) Guangdong 2x1080 CPR-1000  CGNPC 12/08, 15/6/09 5/13, 2015
Fuqing 1(# 1-2)   Fujian 2 x 1080 CPR-1000   CNNC 11/08, 2009   10/13, 8/14
Fangjiashan (Qinshan 5) Zhejiang 2 x 1080    CNNC 12/08, 6/09 12/13, 10/14
Sanmen 1(units 1 & 2) Zhejiang 2x1100 AP1000 CNNC 3/09, 2010     10/13, 2014
Haiyang (units 1 & 2) Shandong 2x1100 AP1000 CPI 9/2009, ?      2014-15
Taishan 1 (units 1 & 2) Guangdong 2x1700 EPR CGNPC  9/09, 1/10   11/13, 2015
Shidaowan Shandong 200 HTR-PM      China Huaneng     9/09       2013 or 2014
Fangchengang  Guangxi 2x1080  CPR-1000       CGNPC 12/09, ?     2014, ?
Yangjiang 2 (units 3 & 4) Guangdong 2x1080   CGNPC 9/09, 7/10    2015, 15
Ningde 2  (units 3 & 4) Fujian 2x1080        CGNPC 7/09. 3/10   2014, 15
Tianwan 2 (units 3&4) Jiangsu 2x1060 AES-91  CNNC  2009? 
Hongshiding 1(Rushan) Shandong 2x1080 CPR-1000 CNEC/CNNC 2009    2015
Hainan 2x650 CNP-600 CNNC 2/2009 2014, 2015
Dafan, Xianning Hubei 2x1080 CPR-1000        CGNPC 2009, 2010
Xiaomoshan 1 Hunan 2x1100 AP1000             CPI 2010 
Pengze 1 Jiangxi 2x1100 AP1000               CPI 2010          2015
Haiyang 2 (units 3 & 4) Shandong 2x1100 AP1000 CPI 2010? 
Wuhu Anhui 2x1080 CPR-1000                   CGNPC   late 2011        2015
TOTAL 45         47,420 MWe

China has about 100 more proposed nuclear reactors.

The waste water treatment process is fertile ground for the creation of superbugs.

The problem isn’t that treatment plants don’t do a good job of cleaning the water—it’s that they simply aren’t equipped to remove antibiotics and pharmaceuticals.

Looking just 100 yards from sewage plant discharge, the University of Michigan School of Public Health has found new strains of antibiotic-resistant superbugs eventually on the way to our streams and lakes.

What my web survey clearly demonstrates is our woefully weak education about growing food in an urban environment.

A broad new analysis at RealEconomy:

The Economic Crisis Was Caused by Reduced Labor Income

This article argues that the bursting credit bubble is not the core reason for the advanced economies’ sudden reduction in spending. The credit bubble delayed that reduction, but can no longer prevent it.

Rather, we assert that

1. the advanced economies are experiencing labor shock as they fail to adequately adjust to the changes in labor supply and demand,
2. that this shock is causing a severe wage income reduction in the developed economies, and
3. that the result of reduced income has been reduced demand from the West that is not being taken up in emerging markets, and therefore
4. that the reduction in developed economy labor income precipitated the credit collapse and is the fundamental cause of the current severe recession.

As Labor Incomes Fall, Advanced Economies Contract

So the bottom line rules today’s global markets, and as the biggest expense for most companies is labor, the labor pool bears the brunt of cost cutting.

National Atlas of the United States:

• About 52 percent of fresh-water and about 96 percent of saline-water are used by power plant cooling towers.
• Irrigation accounts for about a third of water use and is currently the largest use of fresh water.
• Homes and business use 11 percent.
• Water for smelting, refineries, chemical, food and paper uses 5 percent.
• Livestock, aquaculture, and mining activities require about 3 percent of total water.