Contrasting the Affordable Care Act with Medicare and Social Security

From The Next New Deal ("The blog of the Roosevelt Institute"):

What we often refer to as Category A can be viewed as a “neoliberal” approach to social insurance, heavy on private provisioning and means-testing. This term often obscures more than it helps, but think of it as a plan for reworking the entire logic of government to simply act as an enabler to market activities, with perhaps some coordinated charity to individuals most in need.

This contrasts with the Category B grouping, which we associate with the New Deal and the Great Society. This approach creates a universal floor so that individuals don’t experience basic welfare goods as commodities to buy and sell themselves. This is a continuum rather than a hard line, of course, but readers will note that Social Security and Medicare are more in Category B category rather than Category A. My man Franklin Delano Roosevelt may not have known about JavaScript and agile programming, but he knew a few things about the public provisioning of social insurance, and he realized the second category, while conceptually more work for the government, can eliminate a lot of unnecessary administrative problems.

Via The Dish (more discussion at both links).  Cartoon from The New Yorker.

DNA testing reveals fake "herbal supplements"

As reported in the New York Times:

Using a test called DNA barcoding, a kind of genetic fingerprinting that has also been used to help uncover labeling fraud in the commercial seafood industry, Canadian researchers tested 44 bottles of popular supplements sold by 12 companies. They found that many were not what they claimed to be, and that pills labeled as popular herbs were often diluted — or replaced entirely — by cheap fillers like soybean, wheat and rice.

Consumer advocates and scientists say the research provides more evidence that the herbal supplement industry is riddled with questionable practices. Industry representatives argue that any problems are not widespread. 

For the study, the researchers selected popular medicinal herbs, and then randomly bought different brands of those products from stores and outlets in Canada and the United States. To avoid singling out any company, they did not disclose any product names. 

Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence. 

Two bottles labeled as St. John’s wort, which studies have shown may treat mild depression, contained none of the medicinal herb. Instead, the pills in one bottle were made of nothing but rice, and another bottle contained only Alexandrian senna, an Egyptian yellow shrub that is a powerful laxative. Gingko biloba supplements, promoted as memory enhancers, were mixed with fillers and black walnut, a potentially deadly hazard for people with nut allergies...

Of 44 herbal supplements tested, one-third showed outright substitution, meaning there was no trace of the plant advertised on the bottle — only another plant in its place. 

More at the link.

In a paperless society, trees become clothing

Last year the StarTribune reported that the paper mill industry in the Upper Midwest was undergoing severe shrinkage:

The North American paper industry is in rapid decline. Historically a bulwark in the forests of Minnesota, mills have cut thousands of workers and are competing for a shrinking market...

River towns in the forest from eastern Washington to the coast of Maine have lost more than a hundred paper mills in a wave of consolidation in little more than a decade -- a trend most people in the industry expect to continue...

North American demand for three types of coated and supercalendared paper -- the shiny magazine and advertising paper made at three of Minnesota's four big paper mills -- has fallen 21 percent in the past decade, according to the Pulp and Paper Products Council. Kindles and iPads, e-mail, PDFs, the decline of first-class mail and waning newspaper and magazine circulations are all to blame. Analysts predict demand will fall at least another 18 percent by 2024.

The shift is forcing paper mills and mill towns to rethink their future. To survive, they will need to find new products to make out of wood.

Several forestry companies have been selling parts of their vast holdings of timberland.   Some has been purchased by state and local governments or by conservation groups, and some has been sold to frac sand developers. 

Yesterday a story reported that one way to repurpose wood products is for the manufacture of clothing:

The largest paper mill in Minnesota is now churning out a type of pulp used to make textiles... The pulp, which is the hottest forest industry product on the market, is generally sold to textile mills in Asia, blended with other materials and made into thread...

Worldwide demand for chemical cellulose is projected to increase 50 percent by 2017, according to RBC Capital Markets, and plants around the world are adding capacity as demand for paper continues to sink...

Commodity dissolving pulp can be used to make rayon and yields a fabric used in dresses, for example, or the lining of suit jackets... The shrinking amount of land available for agriculture has capped the amount of cotton that can be produced worldwide.

Optical illusions in a Honda advertisement

YouTube link.

Clever use of forced perspective, trompe-l'œil, and other devices in this advertisement apparently filmed in Lake Wobegon.

When Hollywood collaborated with the Nazis

You read the title correctly.  The reason for the logical disconnect is that the time period in question is the 1930s, before the war and the most overt atrocities, as explained in a Harvard Magazine review of a new book:

Based on nearly nine years of archival research in Germany and the United States, the book reveals a surprisingly cooperative relationship between studio executives and German officials throughout the 1930s... MGM head Louis B. Mayer made changes to films at the request of the German consul in Los Angeles in the 1930s...

In 1932, six months before Hitler came to power, Germany adopted a law stipulating that any film company caught making anti-German (or later, anti-Nazi) films would be prohibited from doing business in the country. For studio executives who feared losing access to German audiences, it was a powerful threat. Before World War I, Germany had been the second-largest market for U.S. films. By the 1930s, the studios were no longer making money there, but they hoped business would improve in time. Urwand says Hollywood executives also worried that if they left Germany and Hitler started a war, they would be expelled from any countries he invaded. So studio heads, many of whom were Jewish, collectively boycotted a proposed film, The Mad Dog of Europe, about the mistreatment of European Jews, and agreed to fire most of their Jewish salesmen in Germany...

Commentators have drawn parallels between the Nazi collaboration that Urwand describes and Hollywood’s current relationship with China, a burgeoning market for American films. Urwand stresses that “China isn’t Nazi Germany,” but he acknowledges some potential parallels. “Hollywood is not going to make a strongly anti-Chinese film at this point, just as it didn’t make anti-German films when it was trying to preserve its business with Germany.”

More at the link.

Photo: ©Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis Images

Airplane seats are shrinking. Are you?

From a story in the Wall Street Journal:

Airlines' push to lure high-paying fliers with flatbed business seats and premium economy loungers is leaving economy-class passengers with less space. A push over the past decade by carriers to expand higher-fare sections has shrunk the area devoted to coach on many big jetliners. But airlines don't want to drop passengers. So first airlines slimmed seats to add more rows.

Now, big carriers... are cutting shoulder space by wedging an extra seat into each coach row. That shift is bringing the short-haul standard to long-haul flying. 

For almost 20 years, the standard setup in the back of a Boeing BA -0.48% 777 was nine seats per row. But last year, nearly 70% of its biggest version of the plane were delivered with 10-abreast seating, up from just 15% in 2010...

The new trend in economy seating reverses a half century of seat growth in economy class. Early jet planes like Boeing's 707 had 17-inch seats, a dimension based on the width of a U.S. Air Force pilot's hips...

The solution, said Mr. Clark at Emirates, is to offer distractions like big meals, frequent snacks and lots of electronic entertainment...

"With food and TV," said Mr. Clark at Emirates, "people are mesmerized."

"Panem et circenses" is what they used to call it.  (Many more details at the link).

The disappearing "middle class"

Excerpts from an essay at Salon:

When I was growing up, it was assumed that America’s shared prosperity was the natural endpoint of our economy’s development, that capitalism had produced the workers paradise to which Communism unsuccessfully aspired. Now, with the perspective of 40 years, it’s obvious that the nonstop economic expansion that lasted from the end of World War II to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was a historical fluke, made possible by the fact that the United States was the only country to emerge from that war with its industrial

capacity intact. Unfortunately, the middle class – especially the blue-collar middle class – is also starting to look like a fluke, an interlude between Gilded Ages that more closely reflects the way most societies structure themselves economically. For the majority of human history – and in the majority of countries today – there have been only two classes: aristocracy and peasantry. It’s an order in which the many toil for subsistence wages to provide luxuries for the few. Twentieth century America temporarily escaped this stratification, but now, as statistics on economic inequality demonstrate, we’re slipping back in that direction. Between 1970 and today, the share of the nation’s income that went to the middle class – households earning two-thirds to double the national median – fell from 62 percent to 45 percent. Last year, the wealthiest 1 percent took in 19 percent of America’s income – their highest share since 1928.

Capitalism has been doing exactly what it was designed to do: concentrating wealth in the ownership class, while providing the mass of workers with just enough wages to feed, house and clothe themselves.

The United States will never again be as wealthy as it was in the 1950s and ’60s. Never again will 18-year-olds graduate directly from high school to jobs that pay well enough to buy a house and support a family.

More at the link.

Rental car companies use "electronic fuel metering"

Excerpts from an interesting column in the Travel section of the Washington Post:

Karen Freeman thought that she’d returned her Chrysler 200 Sedan to the Richmond airport with a full tank. She thought wrong. “An agent noted that the tank was full,” says Freeman, an architect from Atlanta. The gauge also registered that the tank was at capacity, she says.  But a few days later, when she reviewed her credit card bill, she discovered that Avis had charged her an extra $7.43 for 0.8 gallons of gas, or about $9.29 per gallon.

Avis isn’t the only car rental company measuring fuel down to a tenth of a gallon. Hertz is installing this technology, which is referred to by the industry term electronic fuel metering, in its fleet over the next few months in an effort to ensure that every drop of fuel is accounted and paid for...

If you’re renting a high-end, low-mileage car, your chances of having a vehicle with electronic fuel metering are good. You can either prepay for a full tank of gas through a rental company’s fuel-purchase option and time the return of your rental to the moment the tank reaches the “E” mark, or you can fill the tank to the top just before you return it and hope for the best.

Mark Frissora, Hertz’s chief executive, says that his company loses $50 million a year in fuel. Its new system, called Zibox, is capable of shutting off a car engine remotely and operating car locks from afar. It relays location data, tire air pressure and fuel-level information back to Hertz, too. In other words, it will know exactly how much fuel you have in the car at any given time.

“This is going to be good for customers,” Frissora says. 

Yes, we believe that.

And the part about being able to shut off a car engine and operating its locks remotely is a bit scary.

These aren't your father's farming techniques

Excerpts from an interesting article at Pacific Standard:

Technically, Hunter Fincher is driving a 10-ton tractor as it rumbles over a bare patch of western-Tennessee farmland. You wouldn’t know that from looking at him though. Fincher is sitting in a well-padded chair inside a glass-enclosed, air-conditioned, XM-radio-equipped cabin atop the machine, enjoying the view of the lush green hill country around us. No hands on the wheel, no foot on the gas. Occasionally he glances at an iPad-size touch-screen that’s charting our progress...

Fincher’s tractor is equipped with the latest technology from John Deere, the world’s biggest farm-equipment manufacturer. Guided by satellite and emitting the occasional R2-D2 beep, the 10-foot-high behemoth automatically grinds its way up one furrow and down the next. The tractor is towing an array of seed dispensers mounted on boom arms, each poised over furrows precisely 30 inches apart. The machine’s on-board computer system adjusts the rate at which the dispensers drop corn seeds to match the productivity of the specific patch of dirt we’re passing over...

Increasingly, America’s millions of acres of farmland are being mapped, analyzed, planted, and harvested by computer-controlled machines that are directed much more by vast quantities of information than a plowman’s steady hand...

Today, combines equipped with sensors and accurate-to-the-inch GPS systems track the quantity and moisture content of crops as they’re harvested. Sophisticated soil analysis and aerial photography give detailed insights into field conditions. Computer-equipped tractors and spraying machines use “yield maps” based on all this data to micromanage fields, varying the application rate of seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides yard by yard. Growers—especially of the row crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat that make up the bulk of America’s agricultural output—are adopting these technologies fast. Two-thirds of the farmers surveyed last year by the American Soybean Association reported using auto-steering tractors or yield maps, or both...

The goal of all this is efficiency. Seeds matched to specific soils should yield bigger harvests. Tracking precisely where seeds are dropped or fertilizer is sprayed cuts down on wasteful overlapping of areas that have already been treated. The gear required for all this isn’t cheap. An autosteering system alone costs several thousand dollars, and a full suite of precision tech can run $50,000 or more. But that investment can pay for itself within a few years. Taken together, precision techniques can boost a farmer’s bottom line by as much as 15 percent...

Digitally driven farming has its downsides, however. It increases the pressure on farmers to get big or get out. And there’s another issue: While fields have always been vulnerable to pests and blight, they are now subject to the vulnerabilities of the digital world. “We haven’t had any problems with data leaking out yet,” says Marbury. “But when it does, it’s gonna be a mess.” 

All this change within the lifespan of one generation.  My mother (age 95) remembers driving a team of two horses when she was 8 years old.  She wore a huge bonnet in the summer sun, so that neighbors said it looked "like a big hat was driving the rig," cultivating and cross-cultivating (!) the corn fields.

Via The Dish.

Setting guidelines for medical diagnosis and practice

The majority of health professionals in the United States who sit on guideline panels deciding the definitions or diagnostic criteria for common conditions have financial ties to pharmaceutical and medical device companies, a study has found.

The researchers identified 16 publications by national and international guideline panels that had been published between 2000 and 2013 on the diagnosis of 14 common conditions. Of these, 10 proposed changes widening diagnostic definitions, one narrowing definitions, and the impact of the other five was unclear.

Conditions that had their definitions expanded included high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. Panels widened definitions by creating pre-disease conditions, lowering diagnostic thresholds, or proposing earlier or different diagnostic methods. The rationale they gave for the changes included standardising diagnostic criteria and new evidence about the risks to people previously not considered to have the disease.

On average 75% of members of 14 guideline panels with disclosure sections admitted to ties to industry, commonly working as consultants, advisers, and speakers, as well as receiving research support. Twelve of the 14 panels were chaired by health professionals with ties. Health professionals with industry ties had links to a median of seven companies. Companies with the highest proportions of ties manufactured drugs used to treat the disease in question.

Text from the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.   The full report is published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ 2013;347:f4998).

Skip the résumé...

eDelivery

This message was on an envelope I received from TIAA/CREF:

eDelivery will save trees, conserve paper and reduce mailbox clutter.

I encounter messages like this several times a year.  And they are absolutely true.  And I do have the vast majority of my financial and business data transmitted to me electronically; there are just a few items for which I prefer to receive paper documents.

But... I wish just once that just one of these companies would say this:

eDelivery will reduce our company's costs, increase our profits, and maybe we will then return a portion of that to you in the form of lower fees or higher returns.

Just once.  Say that.  Especially when you're sending me documents I didn't request or need. Say that instead of pretending that the financial services industry is one of the bastions of environmental conservation.

Sorry for the mini-rant.  I'm in a grumpy mood this morning.

Claims of lax oversight of agricultural biotechnology

YouTube link.

A video report from Motley Fool comments on recent accusations that the USDA's current monitoring activities are basically a "rubberstamp" approach to the genetic engineering of crops.

A coalition of farmers and food companies is mounting a challenge to that arrangement.

Wall Street's bid-rigging conspiracy

Excerpts from a lengthy article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.
 
The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.

In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business...

More recently, a major international investigation has been launched into the manipulation of Libor, the interbank lending index that is used to calculate global interest rates for products worth more than $3 trillion a year. If and when that case is presented to the public at trial – there are several major civil suits in the works here in the States – we may yet find out that the world's most powerful banks have, for years, been fixing the prices of almost every adjustable-rate vehicle on earth, from mortgages and credit cards to interest-rate swaps and even currencies.

But USA v. Carollo marks the first time we actually got incontrovertible evidence that Wall Street has moved into this cartel-type brand of criminality. It also offered a disgusting glimpse into the enabling and grossly cynical role played by politicians, who took Super Bowl tickets and bribe-stuffed envelopes to look the other way while gangsters raided the public kitty. And though the punishments that were ultimately handed down in the trial – minor convictions of three bit players – felt deeply unsatisfying, it was still a watershed moment in the ongoing story of America's gradual awakening to the realities of financial corruption.

Lots more detail at the link.

How Big Pharma "repackages" existing pills

Excerpts from a column at Salon:

The pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly makes Sarafem. Its name is a rework of “seraphim,” a Hebrew word meaning “angel,” a word with obvious female overtones. Its packaging also conjures up stereotypical female associations. The pill is encased in a pretty pink-and-lavender shell, and is heralded by Lilly as a wonder cure for this distinctly female premenstrual disorder. So far so good.

Now here comes the interesting bit. What Eli Lilly initially concealed from the millions of women taking the pill is that the pill is actually Prozac. Chemically,  Sarafem and Prozac are exactly the same. The only difference between them is that their names and packaging are different. Sarah, like thousands of other women up and down the country, was taking Prozac and didn’t know it.

There are a lot of possible interpretations for why Eli Lilly engaged in what you or I may be tempted to see as corporate deception. The first is that it obviously saved the company a great deal of money. It is cheaper to repackage existing pills than it is to develop new ones. In addition, Eli Lilly’s patent protections on Prozac were running out a year after Sarafem would be released, so marketing Prozac under the new trade name would effectively extend patent protections for many more years. Money matters...

By rebranding Prozac as Sarafem, Eli Lilly divided the one chemical into two separate pills for two different disorders. One pill continued to be marketed as an antidepressant. The other they marketed as a so-called premenstrual corrective. A new pill was born not because a new chemical had been found, but because a popular brand had been changed...

More at the link.

Agricultural robots are coming

"The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can "thin" a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.

The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization — fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they're sensitive to bruising.

Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms, as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. Most ag robots won't be commercially available for at least a few years."

This is clever:

"After a lettuce field is planted, growers typically hire a crew of farmworkers who use hoes to remove excess plants to give space for others to grow into full lettuce heads. The Lettuce Bot uses video cameras and visual-recognition software to identify which lettuce plants to eliminate with a squirt of concentrated fertilizer that kills the unwanted buds while enriching the soil."

More details at the StarTribune.

Udderly despicable

Some farmers in England are suspected of using superglue to seal cows' udders closed:

The results of the dairy cattle competitions have been suspended after vets carrying out ultrasound scans on two cows’ udders found anomalies which must be analysed to verify whether cheating has taken place. 

Size and shape, it seems, are everything when it comes to a prize dairy cow’s udder, and farmers are suspected of either using superglue to block up teats, making the udders fill up, or inflating them with air...

...it is in the lucrative world of breeding that owners stand to make serious gains if they can boast a prize-winning dairy cow.  Farmers can sometimes double the amount they charge for ampoules of semen from the bull which fathered the winning cow. With each bull producing more than a thousand shots of semen at up to £50 each, a farmer could gain as much as £25,000.

Notes about the BRCA gene mutation and breast cancer

From links bookmarked during the publicity surrounding Angelina Jolie's elective double mastectomy.  First, from a Reddit AskScience thread re the gene:

Everyone has two copies of the BRCA1 gene, which is often pronounced as "bracka 1". This gene encodes a protein that repairs damaged DNA, which is extremely important for preventing cancer. Many alleles (versions) of in BRCA1, as well as the functionally related BRCA2 gene, have harmful mutations that reduce the proteins' effectiveness and greatly increase the risk of cancer, especially in breasts and ovaries, but also in other specific body parts. That's why Ms. Jolie, 37, had her breasts removed even though it was ovarian cancer that killed her mother at 56.

So it's not accurate to say Ms. Jolie's concern was that she "had the BRCA1 gene". Everyone does. What she has is an allele of the BRCA1 gene that is associated with high risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

Next, from a different Reddit thread re the patent:

It's because the patent isnt for the gene sequence, or the genomic DNA, or even the mRNA that is translated in the body. The patent is actually for cDNA, which is not naturally occurring and can only be generated in the lab. Now, this cDNA is made from extracting the mRNA from a person and doing RT PCR... but "modifications" of naturally occurring stuff have huge precedent as being patentable (see all natural product derived small molecule drugs i.e. pharmaceuticals). The current supreme court case is deciding whether or not cDNA should be patentable. But as someone who works in the field of cancer research, and having read the transcripts from the supreme court case, Myriad (the company who owns the patent) has made a pretty strong case, and the justices are SO amazingly out of their element, that I could see the decision going either way.

Details about the Supreme Court case (Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics) challenging the validity of gene patents.

From a Salon article on the cost of testing:

According to the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit heard recently by the Supreme Court, Myriad actually recently raised the price to over $4,000, despite the fact that “genetic testing technologies have advanced to the point where all 23,000 human genes can be sequenced for $1000.” The test is often covered by insurance, but policies vary, and of course, not everyone is insured... Myriad’s patent on the genes expires in two years, but the Supreme Court’s ruling will set the broader principle going forward. 

And finally, from the Wikipedia page on the BRCA mutation:

Testing is commonly covered by health insurance and public healthcare programs for people at high risk for having a mutation, and not covered for people at low risk. The purpose of limiting the testing to high-risk people is to increase the likelihood that the person will receive a meaningful, actionable result from the test, rather than identifying a variant of unknown significance (VUS). In Canada, people who demonstrate their high-risk status by meeting specified guidelines are referred initially to a specialized program for hereditary cancers, and, if they choose to be tested, the cost of the test is fully covered. In the USA in 2010, single-site testing had a retail cost of US$400 to $500, and full-length analysis cost about $3,000 per gene, and the costs were commonly covered by private health insurance for people deemed to be at high risk.

TYWKIWDBI supports Wikipedia

And encourages readers of this blog to do the same:

Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 450 million different people every month – with billions of page views.

Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn't belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple forthe mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.

When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission efficiently.

If everyone reading this donated $5, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. But not everyone can or will donate. And that's fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.

This year, please consider making a donation of $5, $20, $50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.

Thanks,

Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder 

You can contribute via this link.

M is for metastases

Map from the McDonald's app, via The New Aesthetic and Fuck Yeah Cartography.