Sunday, February 6, 2011
Why everyone in America will receive health insurance from the exchanges in 10-15 years
Tyler Cowen, writing in the New York Times, outlines some of the potential problems that the healthcare industry will soon face.
Charts
Surnames
US Energy Production and Consumption
Interpreting your Credit Card and Social Security Numbers
From Bull to Bear and Back Again
What Causes Gun Deaths?
How the Recession Changed Us
Cross-Country Risks: Financial and Trade
The Life and Death of Modern Gadgets
Map: Factory Farms
Volunteering in 2010
Top Movies of 2010
Economist: Top 20 Charts of 2010
Bloodwork Results Re-Visualized
Baltimore Trash Migration
Retail Sales by Business
Relationship Death
China update
Here's What Was Weird About That Global Unemployment Chart
Absolute Return Partners On The Dramatic Chinese Slowdown That Everyone Is Ignoring
From Citigroup, a look at the unemployment rates in some major countries. Notice anything weird from the land of made-up economic statistics? (See answer below).
Update: A few commenters got it. Chinese unemployment doesn't fluctuate!Is India Or China The Next Economic Superpower?
In China, alpha males carry designer purses
Chinese investment brings hope, anxiety to industrial heartland
Chinese investment brings hope, anxiety to industrial heartland
For many in this proud but depressed industrial town, Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to an Illinois exhibit showcasing products made in the U.S. by Chinese-owned companies was a bittersweet reflection of new realities they were already living with.
Just over a month ago, Saginaw's largest private employer — car steering systems maker Nexteer Automotive — rolled out its own red carpet: The company's new owners had come to town, all the way from China.
For a century, Nexteer had been a symbol of America's industry, employing thousands of workers. But the Chinese purchase of the company in November from General Motorsfor about $450 million in cash was one of the latest and largest Chinese investments in U.S. companies. It's a growing trend that has stirred both hope and anxiety here and across the country.Mega-City semantics in China's pearl river delta
Yet the intention of the integration becomes clear when Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute, articulates that:
“The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas.“
This is the key. The Chinese government still enforces the hukou household registration system for its citizens, making it difficult for people who move from one city to another to use the services offered by their new city. Restrictions for migrants to new cities are not only limited to healthcare and educational services, but to investment opportunities as well such as starting a business or purchasing a new home.
By amalgamating the cities of the Pearl River Delta into one ‘mega-city’, this gets rid of the bureaucratic restrictions of the hukou registration. Now, the migrants who have left their native homes and settled in the Pearl River Delta can move more freely around the region. This is much more than semantics, it is a huge step forward in the liberalization of movement and opportunity for its citizens. It is unbelievable that The Guardian piece makes no mention of the significance of this development.
Why would a company with a competitive edge want to provide privileged information to gain business? What is there to prevent that “partnering” business to break off relationships once they drain the knowledge base? Certainly they do not hire us because we have a larger workforce.
American progress has been fostered by questioning why. Why is something being done this way? How can we make it better? This leads to innovation. Innovation was a major reason our country progressed more aggressively compared to countries that teach their students to think in only one way. China could see us as a knowledge base to farm information from our corporations wanting China’s riches.
China seems to present an image of more progress. By forcing partnerships to do business in China we may have taught their corporations our best secrets. “We” being not just the United States, but every other country with their top designers, scientists, and technologies sharing knowledge.
Once they have this knowledge and know-how, why would they need us? That is the foundational problem, and one reason I have not pursued work in China.Interactive graphic: China forex
Politics and government links
Why do America’s police need an armored tank?
Census estimates show big gains for US minorities
Are Teachers "Special"? Please. Of Course Teachers Should Have Their Pensions Cut
Farm insurance fraud is cheating taxpayers out of millions
Koch brothers now at heart of GOP power
Details On The Magic Black Box The BLS Uses To Produce Employment Data
Sarah Palin's Problem in One Paragraph
Reagan's Record
Reagan's Record II
Census estimates show big gains for US minorities
Are Teachers "Special"? Please. Of Course Teachers Should Have Their Pensions Cut
Reagan's Record
Climate change and energy update
Gas Drilling Technique Is Labeled Violation
Oil and gas service companies injected tens of millions of gallons of diesel fuel into onshore wells in more than a dozen states from 2005 to 2009, Congressional investigators have charged. Those injections appear to have violated the Safe Water Drinking Act, the investigators said in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday.
The diesel fuel was used by drillers as part of a contentious process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives — including diesel fuel — into rock formations deep underground. The process, which has opened up vast new deposits of natural gas to drilling, creates and props open fissures in the rock to ease the release of oil and gas.
But concerns have been growing over the potential for fracking chemicals — particularly those found in diesel fuel — to contaminate underground sources of drinking water.
“We learned that no oil and gas service companies have sought — and no state and federal regulators have issued — permits for diesel fuel use in hydraulic fracturing,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California and two other Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, in the letter. “This appears to be a violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
Government Backs $1 Billion Plan to Make Gasoline from Wood
Bizarre Weather, Destroyed Crops, And No More Right Whales
Bizarre Weather, Destroyed Crops, And No More Right Whales
If indeed the cause were accelerated run-off, then this would be completely compatible with another long-established hypothesis: that extra cold fresh water from Greenland might cool the Gulf Stream, the great conveyor of heat to Great Britain and Northern Europe. If this were in fact the case, then London would wake up and find itself feeling a lot more like Montreal – on about the same latitude – than it is used to, producing, for example, the winter there that all travelers are reading about today.
You read it here first, and conservative scientists will perhaps be writing it up in a learned journal in two or more years. It is, though, a wonderfully simple example of how a warm winter in the Northern ice might have destabilized systems, ultimately resulting in a frigid Northern Europe.Chilling Tales Of Weird Weather
Education update
It May Be a Sputnik Moment, but Science Fairs Are Lagging
Rarely have school science fairs, a source of pride and panic for generations of American students, achieved such prominence on the national stage. President Obama held one at the White House last fall. And last week he said that America should celebrate its science fair winners like Sunday’s Super Bowl champions, or risk losing the nation’s competitive edge.
Yet as science fair season kicks into high gear, participation among high school students appears to be declining. And many science teachers say the problem is not a lack of celebration, but the Obama administration’s own education policy, which holds schools accountable for math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require.
“To say that we need engineers and ‘this is our Sputnik moment’ is meaningless if we have no time to teach students how to do science,” said Dean Gilbert, the president of the Los Angeles County Science Fair, referring to a line in President Obama’s State of the Union address last week. The Los Angeles fair, though still one of the nation’s largest, now has 185 schools participating, down from 244 a decade ago.Default rate for repayment of for-profit college loans hits 25 percent
Economics and finance links
10 Companies Running Out Of American Customers
How An Arkansas Five-And-Dime "Walton's" Became The $200 Billion Global Behemoth "Walmart"
On Street, Pay Vaults to Record Altitude
Credit card companies figure out how to spin straw into gold
Economy's new test: Spending vs. saving
AIG, a symbol of financial crisis, repays bailout loan and finds new foothold
Stock-Hedging Lets Bankers Skirt Efforts to Overhaul Pay
Paul Krugman Nails The Cause Of Higher Food Prices
Food Prices Worldwide Hit Record Levels, Fueled by Uncertainty, U.N. Says
Housing Crisis in Australia
America’s FIRE Economy
How An Arkansas Five-And-Dime "Walton's" Became The $200 Billion Global Behemoth "Walmart"
On Street, Pay Vaults to Record Altitude
Credit card companies figure out how to spin straw into gold
Economy's new test: Spending vs. saving
Housing Crisis in Australia
America’s FIRE Economy
Have Humans Evolved to Believe in God?
Link
Is God a singular, independent being? Or just an evolved projection of human's theory of what God should be? Slate's Jesse Bering finds himself asking these heady questions after an analysis of how humans, as a species, have developed to analyze and rationalize the mental states of others--human or not.
Random Links
The truth about Kobe Bryant in crunch time
This Planet Is Not In Another Solar System
"Bohemian Rhapsody" as you've never heard it before
L.A. should follow the cheeseheads
Are criminals just stupid?
Tiny water flea has longest genome
Never Before Seen Amazon Tribe Photographed for the First Time. More here.
What Happens When You Give an Artist 2,200 Pounds of Salt and Five Days?
NASA finds dozens of planets that might support life
What Happens When You Give an Artist 2,200 Pounds of Salt and Five Days?
NASA finds dozens of planets that might support life
A Perfect Definition of Facebook
Check Out These Unbelievable Photos Of Human Chameleon Liu Bolin
The World's Fastest Handsfree Typist Is a Quadriplegic
18 Buildings Worthy of '70's Sci-Fi
Check Out These Unbelievable Photos Of Human Chameleon Liu Bolin
The World's Fastest Handsfree Typist Is a Quadriplegic
18 Buildings Worthy of '70's Sci-Fi
Healthcare update
Constitutional showdown: A Florida judge distorted the law in striking down healthcare reform.
Why A Large-Scale Solution To Healthcare Is Practically Impossible
How tiny Nauru became world's fattest nation
Why A Large-Scale Solution To Healthcare Is Practically Impossible
Large-scale healthcare solutions are essentially impossible for a number of reasons. The healthcare status quo has reached a political critical mass: it now controls so much of the national income (16% of GDP and rising) and so many jobs that its constituencies cannot be overcome by political means.
Available solutions find no equivalent political support. What we have is a Statist/private-cartel partnership, with the worst excesses and inefficiencies of both the Central State and corporate cartels.
As noted yesterday, one goal of this site is to seek large-scale (policy) and small-scale (individual/household) alternatives and solutions. While it may well be the equivalent of tilting at wndmills to propose policy solutions, the exercise is nonetheless useful, as it delineates how far the status quo is from dealing with reality.Study Finds Way To Predict When Cancer Will Spread
Researchers have found a compound that tumors make when they are likely to spread, and said they hope to use to it predict which patients are most at risk of dying from their cancers.
And experiments in mice show there may be a way to block the protein, preventing cancer from spreading and becoming deadly.
The findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, are at a very early stage. But a team at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Hong Kong and elsewhere said on Tuesday they will work to develop both a test and, perhaps, a treatment.
The protein is called CPE-delta N and ordinarily plays a role in processing insulin and other hormones.Spray-on Skin Is a Reality
How tiny Nauru became world's fattest nation
World Income Inequality
From Marginal Revolution
Here, courtesy of Catherine Rampell of Economix, is a remarkable chart from Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and Have Nots. Along the horizontal axis are within-country income percentiles running from the bottom 5% (1st ventile) to the top 5% (20th ventile). Along the vertical axis are world income percentiles.
The graph shows that the bottom 5% of Brazilians are among the poorest people in the world but the top 5% are among the richest. Thus the vertical range of the curve tells us about within-country inequality.
Comparing between countries we see that the poorest 5% of Americans are among the richest people in the world (richer than nearly 70% of other people in the world). The poorest 5% of Americans, for example, are richer than the richest 5% of Indians.
The Employment Gap Between The Educated And The Uneducated Is Incredible
From Business Insider
A remarkable stat from the BLS report:
- The unemployment rate for those with less than a high-school diploma is 14.2%.
- The unemployment rate for those with a college degree is 4.2%.
We're not going to waste our times rehashing old questions about whether this means college self-selects for employable people, or whether it means that more people should go to college. We couldn't care less. It is a remarkable divergence, however.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
California politics and education update
Special Report: California or bust
How not to manage a budget crisis
California Law to Curb Greenhouse Gases Faces a Legal Hurdle
California prison guards union called main obstacle to keeping cellphones away from inmates
Los Angeles County government does plenty of things wrong: It has struggled with overcrowded jails, dithered over how to protect the young people in its foster care system and made a mess of running Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. But one thing it's done right, at least compared to city government, is to manage its budget.
In recent years, the city — which has an annual budget of $6.75 billion and about 34,000 employees — has faced mounting shortfalls. It has responded by giving raises to some workers while laying off others, and adopting a revenue strategy that combines nibbling at the margins and praying for help. The county — which employs roughly 100,000 people and oversees a budget of $23 billion — has trimmed vacancies and held the line on raises. It has not furloughed or laid off a single worker. Not many organizations, public or private, can say that.
Much of the county's relative success is attributable to fiscal discipline not shared by the city. While the county was holding down salary hikes during the mid-2000s, the city gave its workers healthy increases — many got annual bumps of 3% or 4% year after year. And given that every 1% of salary increase for city workers costs taxpayers about $15 million, those raises add up. Today, Los Angeles city government faces a projected shortfall of more than $300 million for the coming fiscal year. It is a crisis of epic proportions, and one that is largely self-inflicted.Republican stonewalling won't close the state budget gap
The role that Republicans in the Legislature play in the great scheme of California government is becoming harder and harder to discern.
They do not legislate; neither do they allow the people of California to legislate at the ballot box. The Republicans are giving negation a bad name.
Faced with a $25-billion budget shortfall over the next 18 months, Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed spending cuts for about half that amount, which will take a major toll on the state's universities and colleges, parks and healthcare coverage. He has proposed making up the other half of the shortfall by extending for the next five years the $12 billion in tax hikes that the Legislature enacted in 2009.
California’s landmark law on curbing greenhouse gases, which is well on its way to taking effect, has hit a legal snag in the form of a tentative judicial ruling that state environmental regulators failed to follow legally required procedures.
Judge Ernest H. Goldsmith of San Francisco Superior Court issued a tentative opinion — a rarely used procedure that gives the prospective loser in the case a chance to make new arguments or take new actions before a final decision — saying that the rules creating a cap-and-trade system were adopted without proper analysis of alternatives.
It is unclear whether the decision, if made final, represents a major obstacle or just a speed bump as the regulations carrying out the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act go into effect. Judge Goldsmith’s ruling was made on Jan. 24, but not publicized until Thursday.GOP lawmakers and Jerry Brown have faulty logic
California prison guards union called main obstacle to keeping cellphones away from inmates
Lawmakers struggling to keep cellphones away from California's most dangerous inmates say a main obstacle is the politically powerful prison guards union, whose members would have to be paid millions of dollars extra to be searched on their way into work.
Prison employees, roughly half of whom are unionized guards, are the main source of smuggled phones that inmates use to run drugs and other crimes, according to legislative analysts who examined the problem last year. Unlike visitors, staff can enter the facilities without passing through metal detectors.
While union officials' stated position is that they do not necessarily oppose searches, they cite a work requirement that corrections officers be paid for "walk time" — the minutes it takes them to get from the front gate to their posts behind prison walls.
EPA to regulate toxic chemicals in drinking water
Link
The Environmental Protection Agency took steps Wednesday to curb toxic substances in drinking water, including perchlorate, a chemical thought to threaten the thyroid gland that has contaminated hundreds of public water wells, mostly in California.
The agency also moved to set standards for 16 other substances that can invade water supplies and impair human health.
Perchlorate, a remnant of California's manufacturing, aerospace and military bases, can inhibit thyroid hormoneproduction, especially in fetuses and infants. That can lead to lower IQs and developmental delays, studies have shown.
Research by the Food and Drug Administration, among others, found perchlorate contamination in food and water in 45 states, and a small study in the Boston area found perchlorate in the breast milk of nursing mothers.
Do we need more guns?
Guns tracked by firearms bureau found at firefight scene
Two AK-47s bought in Arizona were used in a firefight that left a Border Patrol agent dead last month. The discovery comes amid a growing congressional investigation into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
...
In a sign of the cost of widespread U.S. weapons smuggling into Mexico, federal law enforcement sources have confirmed that two guns, part of a series of purchases that were being monitored by authorities, were found at the scene of the firefight that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona.
Sources said U.S. authorities did not have the ability to adequately monitor the movement of the guns toward the southern border, in part because current laws and low levels of staffing.
As a result, "the next time they became aware of those weapons was when they turned up at the crime scene," said one source, who, like others connected to the case, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing criminal investigation.
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