Month: June 2010

Despite having the most expensive health care system, the United States ranks last overall compared to six other industrialized countries—Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—on measures of health system performance in five areas: quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and the ability to lead long, healthy, productive lives, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report.

While there is room for improvement in every country, the U.S. stands out for not getting good value for its health care dollars, ranking last despite spending $7,290 per capita on health care in 2007 compared to the $3,837 spent per capita in the Netherlands, which ranked first.

With the fixation on shrinking the budget deficit, why is over $700 billion in annual defense spending almost always off-limits for discussion?

To inject some emotion into an emotionless corporation, interact directly with customers, show us a sense of humor, make grammatical mistakes in tweets, or even apologize for a mishap, we suddenly see the corporation as more than just a monolithic organization.

Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz wanted to understand which psychological concepts people were willing to apply to corporations.

“Acme Corporation believes that its profit margin will soon increase,” or “Acme Corporation intends to release a new product this January.”

However, the vast majority of people refused to allow companies to have feelings or subjective experiences, so that sentences like this were deemed ridiculous:

“Acme Corporation is now experiencing great joy,” or “Acme Corporation is getting depressed.”

The very last line is worth it I promise.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-june-16-2010/an-energy-independent-future

Go placidly amid the noise and haste.

In the wake of the Great Depression, it took more than a decade of experimentation to construct a new architecture.

Among its tenets was the recognition that successful markets depended on tough policing, and the importance of the prosperity of the middle class, which in turn meant workers should reap their fair share of productivity gains. But the amorphous and often contradictory “free markets” ideology has conditioned policymakers and the public to view unregulated commerce as virtuous, when unconstrained markets are, in fact, a brawl.

Naked Capitalism:

In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. In it, he argued that self-interested action sometimes produced, as if by “an invisible hand”, results that were beneficial to broader society. Smith also pointed out that self-interest could just as readily do harm. He fiercely criticized both how employers colluded to keep wages low, as well as the “savage injustice” that European mercantilist interests had “commit(ted) with impunity” in colonies in Asia and the Americas.

Smith’s ideas were cherry-picked and turned into a simplistic ideology that dominates university economics departments and policymaking. This theory proclaims that the “invisible hand” ensures that economic self-interest will always lead to the best outcomes imaginable. It follows that any restrictions on the profit-seeking activities of individuals and corporations are inefficient and nonsensical.

Uncritical allegiance to these precepts over the last 30 years has produced a world in which corporations, especially in finance, are far less restricted in their pursuit of profit. In my book Econned, I describe how this lawless environment allowed the financial services industry to pursue its own unenlightened self-interest.

The industry has become systematically predatory. Its employees did not confine their predation to outsiders; their efforts to loot their own firms nearly destroyed the industry and the entire global economy. Similar destructive behaviour by other players, often viewed through a distorted lens that saw all unconstrained commercial behaviour as virtuous, added more fuel to the conflagration.

Patterns in the sea breaking on an Alabama beach more than 90 miles from the BP oil spill. The mess is four to six inches deep on parts of the shore.

Media pundits tooth reactions to Obama’s oil spill speech. What do CEO think?

Jack Baron, CEO of Sweetwater:

If we can resolve the energy problem then clean water isn’t far behind. And if you’ve got  inexpensive renewable energy worldwide, and if you have clean water, once you take those major problems away for the planet there’s a lot less to fight about.

… from an impact standpoint I’d much rather be able to play on a world stage with literally thousands or tens of thousands of locations and impact energy production in those locations, and make energy production local.

It’s going to happen with renewable energy in general.  Historically energy has not been local.  It’s been produced by large utilities and piped to places.

Big Oil at Congress:

They highlighted the breakdown of the public’s trust in the industry to extract these resources safely.

Despite the statistical evidence of 14,000 deepwater wells drilled, the Macondo well stands as an anomaly of a single company.

The industry representatives also made it very clear that the primary defense against the effects of uncontrolled blow-outs lies in prevention rather than clean-up which the industry was not adequately prepared to handle. That’s a situation that can’t be rectified within six months, and possibly not six years.

The BP spill could have powered 40,000 cars for a year. [link]
Whale poop removes the carbon emissions of 40,000 cars each year. [link]

For every single person in a city you need 2 lbs of grains a day.

You can go to the historical record, you can research in China, in India, in the Near East, and you will still be talking about 2 lbs of grain-based food for every person in the city every day.

Always the largest customer:

All cities require fuel: oil, gas, electricity, and so on. What I want to talk about today is the energy that fuels the people in the cities—food. Without food energy, a city is nothing. A city is nothing without the people who work and play and enjoy or suffer through the city, and they require food.

What do cities need in terms of food?

There’s only one way to feed a city, at least historically, and that’s to feed it with grains—rice, wheat, maize, barley, sorghum, etc.. You can go round the world, and there just aren’t cities that aren’t fed on grains, except for possibly in the high Andes.

Basically, to maintain a city, you’ve got to get grains into it. Be it Bangkok, be it Guangzhou, be it London, or be it Rome—throughout history, grains and cities are two sides of the coin.

And what do you need in terms of grains? For most of history—really, until about 150 years ago—most people in most cities, except for the very wealthy, lived almost exclusively on grains. They got about ninety percent of their calories from grains.

63.4 million Americans volunteered last year, giving more than 8.1 billion hours of volunteer service worth an estimated $169 billion.