I Don’t Get It August 31, 2009March 15, 2017 THE WORD OF THE LORD Can one of the Christian senators reliably opposed to universal health care, the minimum wage, and Clinton-era tax rates help me understand this passage that I heard watching Saturday’s funeral? It’s really opaque. I just don’t get it: From the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25 32-33. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. 34-36. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37. Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? 38. And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? 39. And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ 40. And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ 41. Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42. for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44. Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ 45. Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ 46. And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” ☞ Huh? MOYERS Chris Edmunds: “Regarding Bill Moyers’ interview, I have seen it twice now and find it very illuminating. But Mel’s comment [that it could change the dialog] is wishful thinking. The ‘informed citizens’ who feel it necessary to bring their contrived anger, shouting and disruption to town hall meetings have no interest in watching Bill Moyers or listening to any factual discussions about the issues. They are there for only one reason (whether they know it or not): to advance the minority right-wing agenda to defeat health care reform and Obama along with it. . . . My real concern is that increasing concessions by the Democrats will lead to a watered down bill that will eventually be expensive and ineffective. It is obvious to me that the Republicans have no interest in bipartisan health care reform legislation so I just wish the Democrats would grow a pair, show some leadership and do what is right for this country.” ☞ It does sometimes seem as though the Republican Party is mainly interested in using the health care debate to win points rather than solve the problem. To wit: PROMPTING FEARS Our friends at the Republican National Committee sent out a fundraising “poll” that included this question: “It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person’s political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you? [ ] Yes [ ] No [ ] Undecided.” The “suggestion” presumably came from one of the guys writing the fundraising appeal. And the fourth and hoped-for option, unstated, presumably was . . . [ ] Well, it does now! How has the party of Goldwater, Eisenhower, Rockefeller, Teddy Roosevelt – even Reagan – turned into this?
Genuine Compassion And Something Less August 28, 2009March 15, 2017 I barely knew Ted Kennedy, though I had heard him tell the starfish story. My favorite memory goes back to the early Eighties when he came out to Fire Island for a fundraiser. It was unheard of – a sitting United States Senator coming to a community where many of the residents were still hiding from their co-workers and their families. “The Hamptons,” many of us would say when asked where we were going for the weekend; or, “Long Island.” Two enthusiastic young men donned high heels and aprons and walked backwards sweeping sand from the boardwalk as the great man approached. Today, of course, lots of folks swing by here. And we take it for granted that the Chairman of the House Financial Services (of recent “on what planet do you spend most of your time” fame) happens to be gay, as are the mayors of Paris and Berlin and Winnipeg and Providence and, soon, I hope, Houston. Back then, New York had a gay mayor (and not long before, Great Britain had had a gay prime minister), but only on the QT. So what possessed Ted Kennedy to come to Fire Island? Certainly he didn’t need the money – Kennedys have never had much trouble getting elected in Massachusetts. All I know for sure is that he did come; that he was hale and upbeat, filled with encouragement and determination for a better, more equitable future. Even so, a theory was advanced at dinner last night by a TV journalist who had profiled him and to whom he had shown a special kindness. “I think it’s because he was a fat child,” she said . . . who was constantly moving from school to school – he attended 10 different ones by the time he was 11 – and constantly having to deal with the taunting and bullying that fat children are subjected to (especially back then, when fewer children were fat). “He’d take the abuse and gradually win them over with his humor – but then have to start all over again at the next school.” The point? He knew what it as like to be the outcast. And it was from this personal experience, she suggested, that his empathy and compassion sprang. Yes? Or maybe it was just in the Kennedy blood. “To see wrong and try to right it; see suffering and try to heal it; see war, and try to stop it,” as Teddy so memorably eulogized his brother. From wherever it sprang, it was genuine. HEALTH INSURANCE How genuine are the opponents of health care reform, the cause Ted Kennedy was fighting for until the end? Mel: “If this Bill Moyers interview with a former top health insurance executive were played prior to town hall meetings, the entire tone of these events would change. It’s as revealing as the 60 Minutes program on 40 years of tobacco company lies. PLEASE watch it! Or read the transcript.” Executive summary: “The industry is resorting to the same tactics they’ve used over the years, and particularly back in the early ‘90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan.”
Senator Kennedy August 27, 2009March 15, 2017 This past April, President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, expanding AmeriCorps. But, he said, you don’t have to join AmeriCorps to be of service . . . All that’s required on your part is a willingness to make a difference. And that is, after all, the beauty of service. Anybody can do it. You don’t need to be a community organizer, or a senator, or a Kennedy — (laughter) — or even a President to bring change to people’s lives. When Ted Kennedy makes this point, he also tells a story as elegantly simple as it is profound. An old man walking along a beach at dawn saw a young man picking up starfish and throwing them out to sea. “Why are you doing that?” the old man inquired. The young man explained that the starfish had been stranded on the beach by a receding tide, and would soon die in the daytime sun. “But the beach goes on for miles,” the old man said. “And there are so many. How can your effort make any difference?” The young man looked at the starfish in his hand, and without hesitating, threw it to safety in the sea. He looked up at the old man, smiled, and said: “It will make a difference to that one.” To Ted, that’s more than just a story. For even in the midst of his epic fights on the floor of the Senate to enact sweeping change, he’s made a quiet trek to a school not far from the Capitol, week after week, year after year, without cameras or fanfare, to sit down and read with one solitary child. Ted Kennedy is that young man who will not rest until we’ve made a difference in the life of every American. He walks down that beach and he keeps on picking up starfish, tossing them into the sea. And as I sign this legislation, I want all Americans to take up that spirit of the man for whom this bill is named; of a President who sent us to the moon; of a dreamer who always asked “Why not?” — of a younger generation that carries the torch of a single family that has made an immeasurable difference in the lives of countless families. We need your service right now, at this moment in history. I’m not going to tell you what your role should be; that’s for you to discover. But I’m asking you to stand up and play your part. I’m asking you to help change history’s course, put your shoulder up against the wheel. And if you do, I promise you your life will be richer, our country will be stronger, and someday, years from now, you may remember it as the moment when your own story and the American story converged, when they came together, and we met the challenges of our new century. ☞ Looking to volunteer? Here’s one place to help you look. Or you could just take up the cause most dear to him. Come back tomorrow.
The Perfect Summary August 26, 2009March 15, 2017 CHICKEN OR BEEF? Peter Kaczowka: “Please stop lumping chicken in with beef and pork, when comparing the environmental impact. Read the research; chicken is far better than beef or pork (or cheese) for the environment. And unlike beef, chicken does not damage your heart and is not carcinogenic.” ☞ Peter links to this overview by James Coan in the Daily Princetonian. (“One kg of beef is responsible for roughly 14.8 kg of greenhouse gasses, compared with 3.8 kg for pork and 1.1 kg for chicken, according to Nathan Fiala of UC Irvine in a 2008 article. In other words, eating beef is about 10 times as bad for the climate as eating chicken!”) By coincidence, near the end, Coan even mentions recycled Boise Paper. A PERFECT SUMMARY Pete Costello: “For those seeking a more moderate dietary approach, Michael Pollan reviews the various sides of the debate (including both Dr. Campbell and Gary Taube, mentioned in Friday’s column) and does a masterful job of cutting through the “dense cloud of confusion” in this excellent NY Times Magazine piece, “Unhappy Meals.” Summary: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” BOATS Kirk Elliott: “There you go dishing boat ownership again! I don’t believe it! You say owning some little spec stock provides ‘fun and excitement instead of throwing your money away on . . . speedboats.’ Don’t you know that boats also provide fun and excitement? Don’t you know that the boating industry employs many thousands of people? Don’t you know that South Florida is the boating capital of the world? Just look at all the things you can do with a boat: fish, swim, water ski, pull up to a remote sandy beach and have sex, scuba dive, snorkle, pull up to a sand bar and have a picnic lunch, cruise to the Bahamas (Mexico, Nantucket), play on the lake, sleep overnight, even live on a boat somewhere. Can you do any of that with your little pharma stock? Hell no!! Please stop discouraging boat ownership!! It’s a great hobby for millions of people and it’s not that expensive!! Please go to boatus.com and consider even joining!” MYM-DOS – FULL SCREEN If you still use MYM and wish you could run it full-screen, try this: Just press Alt-Enter. (And again to go back.) Apparently, it doesn’t work in every configuration but I just tried it and it sure works for me.
Trailing Stops, Whiplash, and the Best College Professor You Ever Had August 25, 2009March 15, 2017 GETTING ANGRY WITH SOME SENATORS If yours is one of the Senators standing in the way of health insurance reform – as all the Republicans are but a few Democrats are, too – watch Rachel Maddow and consider giving that senator the benefit of your views. HOW MUCH TO BET – II Yesterday, in discussing BZ and some other stuff you might have bet on “with money you can truly afford to lose” (hereafter, MYCTATL, or “play money”) – stuff that I hope at least partly made up for money you truly did lose on FMD and other idiot suggestions I’ve made here over the years – I realized that I’d not yet posted your further feedback on this general topic. (Remember our discussion of “The Kelly Formula?” That math wonks use to determine how much of their stash to bet on any particular horse?) So here goes: Sarah Johnson: “I’m one of those with nothing to ‘play’ with. And, when I someday do get something to ‘play’ with, I think I’m far more likely to gamble on art or on helping to finance a movie…at least that way I’ll get something interesting to look at or live with. That Kelly theory only would work if we had bookies who gave us real odds for stock picks. Wow. I’m no slouch at math (I’m a civil engineer), but I have a hard time applying that theory to the stock market. I’m not surprised you needed an Advil. Maybe it should be swallowed with a stiff drink, too.” Charlie Mac: “How to define ‘money you can afford to lose’? I recall from my absolute favorite finance book over the last 25-plus years, these guidelines (some from the author, some from me). Invest/Gamble only AFTER: All credit cards are paid in full, AND no plans for using credit in the near future (that vacation to Hawaii coming up will be paid in full by cash on hand, right?) IRA/401k’s maxed out, and a general plan for retirement in place and funded Long-term disability insurance in place (you are 3x more likely to be disabled than die during your working life, so yeah, it costs more than term life insurance) Health Insurance coverage (kind of a hot topic these days) Adequate term life insurance in place (only if there are people you care about dependent on your continued income) Homeowners/Renters/Flood insurance: I think my parents were the only people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with Federal Flood Insurance. Cost them $50 a month, and they were made ‘whole’ after Katrina. They were not in a ‘named’ flood plain, but I would deem the entire Gulf/East Coasts as flood plains. Emergency fund in FDIC insured savings account – 6-12 months worth (or more), depending on how difficult you think it would be to get a new job in your particular skill set. Also covers unanticipated auto/home repairs. Emergency food/water supply: Depends on how paranoid you are. FEMA says everyone should be able to get along on their own for 3-7 days. What if Swine flu hits your town hard, would you like to be able to ‘hole up’ in your house for 30 days? Just throwing it out there. Did I miss anything? Doesn’t leave a lot for crap shoot investments, as you have always warned.” ☞ Close enough. But I do hope you have 100 shares of Borealis like everybody else. (Misery loves company?) Geo Hamlett: “You write, ‘But if I were 60 and had built a $250,000 kitty of play money, I certainly wouldn’t put more than a fifth of it into any one thing – and generally nowhere near even that much.’ Buffett is reputed to have said the first rule of investing is not to lose money. And the second rule is, see Rule Number One. A simple yet effective way to attempt that is to use position sizing and trailing stops. An example of that would be to use a 4% position in each buy, which would allow for 25 positions. Combined with a 25% trailing stop, the maximum loss in any one position is 1% of the total portfolio (25% of 4%). The same could be accomplished with any combination of positions and position sizes. Fifty positions, 2% size, 50% trailing stop. Ten positions, 10% size, 10% trailing stop. If you’re willing to take an overall 2% loss in any position, you can adjust the trailing stop. It’s not a bad rule of thumb to trigger a sell of a losing position, which seems to be a difficult thing for most people to do. And to me at least, it certainly seems better that trying to ‘feel’ your way. Not GPS maybe, but at least a roadmap.” ☞ There’s a lot of good sense in that comment. Let me add a few thoughts. First, on position size, I think holding 25 or 50 positions in your play money account is more than is practical for most people. Remember, we’re not talking about prudence or capital preservation here – as we would be with money you can’t truly afford to lose. We’re talking about a smallish carve-out some people may be able to set aside, with perhaps three goals: first, a shot at a big score (hey, it can happen); second, a little fun and excitement that likely beats the same money blown on a trip to Las Vegas or lottery tickets (let alone cigarettes or a speedboat); third, the chance for tax control – this notion I keep mentioning of “coming out ahead” even if you only breakeven by using your losses to knock $3,000 off your taxable income in some years, but using your long-term gains, if any, to fund your charitable giving (and/or just take advantage of the lower capital gains tax rate). So having four or five such bets working at any given time – wildly imprudent with your “real” money – could be just fine with MYCTATL. Second, on trailing stops, the first thing to say is that, yes, they can provide a good discipline. And they’re certainly more convenient than trying to remember to check the market constantly to sell a position that’s going against you. At Ameritrade, for example, you just select “Trailing Stop %” from the Order Type menu when you place your buy order and enter the % by which you want it to trail behind. It’s like a ratchet – the stop loss price rises if and as the stock rises; but it never falls, if and as the stock falls. So maybe you bought the stock at $22 with a 10% trailing stop but it rises to $30, so the stop is now $27 – 10% below $30 – and if the stock does fall to $27, out it goes. But be aware there’s no guarantee you’ll be protected just because you set a 25% trailing stop (say). Perhaps you bet on a drug stock because you think the FDA will approve its one and only product-in-development but – oh, no! – the FDA rules the other way. That stock could drop from $22 to $6 in a single trade (as there would be no buyers on this news and a zillion sellers, not least those who had placed trailing stops). An extreme example, but still. A more typical problem is “whiplash.” Sometimes, a stock’s drifting lower is the market, in its wisdom, telling you something valuable: the smart money (or at least smarter than you) is getting out. Don’t fight it; get out, too. That’s the upside of this discipline. It can save you a lot of money. But what if the stock drifts lower simply because the market as a whole is drifting lower? Or because a rumor that proves false tanks the stock? Or because someone who owns 400,000 shares of a relatively illiquid stock finds he has to sell it in a hurry because he needs to rescue his brother from narco-trafficking kidnappers? In that case, the stock dips to your trigger and you’re out – but might bounce right back up even the next day. You could buy it back of course, but if you keep buying it when it bounces higher and selling it when it dips lower – well, with hindsight, at least, you would know you “set your stops too tight.” Let me stop this part of the discussion here, because we are at risk of getting interested in trading strategies, and – like that first line of cocaine, or that first game of pool in River City – that is the first step on the road to day trading and almost sure ruin. (I exaggerate; but not entirely. A pool table! And the next thing you know . . .) Chris Brown: “Re the Kelly formula . . . William Poundstone’s Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System that Beat the Casinos and Wall Street is a GREAT read which touches upon the Kelly formula, although it is largely about Edward Thorp. I can’t do this book justice, but David Pogue writes in his review for the NYT Book Review: “Fortune’s Formula may be the world’s first history book, gambling primer, mathematics text, economics manual, personal finance guide, and joke book in a single volume. Poundstone comes across like the best college professor you ever had, someone who can turn almost any technical topic into an entertaining and zesty lecture.”
BZ Up Eightfold But I Lost All the Money You Could Have Bought It With August 24, 2009March 15, 2017 HATS OFF (YET AGAIN) TO HOWARD DEAN Do you remember when Bill O’Reilly and others lambasted Governor Dean for accusing Tom Ridge of raising the terror alert just before the 2004 election – for political purposes? O’Reilly: ‘Howard Dean came out, and said, oh, the terror alert’s a phony thing, like he knows anything. Like where did you get your intelligence, Howard, Ben & Jerry? Like Dean knows anything. What an irresponsible jerk.’ Well, of course, it now turns out – according to Ridge himself – Howard was right. Read about it here. PRIVATE EQUITY Emerson Schwartzkopf (et al): “The tirade you’ve been linking to is actually from a movie called ‘Der Untergang’ (‘Downfall’), based partly on the book Until The Final Hour by Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s private secretaries. It’s also a segment that spawned seemingly endless subtitle parodies, with Hitler ranting on subjects as wide ranging as the Dallas Cowboys missing the Super Bowl to the failure of his government to procure a Ford Maverick for his use.” ☞ Which is perhaps a discordant lead-in to what follows, but I had to set the record straight. And now: DON’T MISS THIS . . . From a blog called The Mudflats. I tried to excerpt the whole thing for you here – it’s that good – but something buried deep in the cobwebs of Microsoft prevented it from displaying properly, so I’d just urge you to take the time to read it. BZ I am hardly bragging, having lost tons of your money in all kinds of dreadful ways (FMD and WM most egregiously) – but last October I admitted to having bought some Boise Paper warrants at 2 cents each and I gather from your emails that at least a couple of you followed suit, or else bought the underlying stock. ‘If the stock hit $5 five years from now,’ I wrote, ‘you’d have made nearly 10 times yesterday’s 53-cent closing price.’ Well, the stock hit $4.79 briefly yesterday before closing at $4.53, so it’s up better than eightfold in under one year, let alone five. The warrants, meanwhile, closed at 32 cents, up sixteen fold. Now what? Well, at the very least, I’d sell enough so that you have realized a nice gain and are, from here on in, ‘playing with the house’s money.’ The warrants give you the right to buy the stock at $7.50 anytime between now (when you wouldn’t want to, because it’s selling for $4.53) and June 18, 2011 (when you would, if it were selling above $7.50). Were the stock to recover to $10 by then – a ‘were’ so subjunctive it gives new depth to the mood – the warrants would be worth $2.50 each, up a further eightfold from here. So I’m holding almost all of mine, even knowing that the stock might well never approach $7.50 between now and June 18, 2011. In that same column I suggested ALTU at 50 cents, which did not work out nearly as well. We switched out of that at 68 cents and into INCY at $3.40 which closed last night at $6.47 (and which my guru says to hang on to). The problem of course is that, having lost all the money you could truly afford to lose betting on FMD, et al, you were not able to buy any BZ warrants at 2 cents or INCY at $3.40. And that brings us back to the discussion we were having a couple of weeks ago: How much, if anything, to bet with ‘money you can truly afford to lose.’ Come back tomorrow for more thoughts.
Goats, Sheep, and Medicare August 21, 2009March 15, 2017 AN EDUCATED CITIZENRY . . . James Musters: “New poll finds that 39% of Americans want government to ‘stay out of Medicare.’” ☞ A further 15% weren’t sure. (On the remote chance anyone here falls into either group, please note that Medicare is a government program.) PRIVATE EQUITY – ADDENDUM JWS: “Just in case you’re not already aware of it – the segment you linked to is from a movie, the title of which I think is: Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary. It is about a young woman Hitler hired as his secretary near the end of the war. Based on truth, I believe. And, of course, the translation subtitles are put-ons.” ☞ Still, I don’t think he would have reacted well to a buy-out at 4.5 times EBITDA. FREEZING YOUR OWN STEM CELLS Tamara Hendrickson: “I am aware of a couple of reasons for why freezing stem cells while you are young [yesterday’s item] might be better than later on in life. One is that our DNA terminates with repeat sequences called telomeres. Every time our DNA replicates, these telomeres get shorter until ultimately the cell dies. Telomere length is an indicator of how old a cell is and correlates to cell health. Dolly, the cloned sheep, and all cloned animals have telomeres that are shorter than those of a natural newborn because the cloned animals have the telomere length of the source of their original DNA – in Dolly’s case it was from an adult sheep. Dolly died at age 6 when sheep normally live to be 10-12. It has been speculated that her shorter telomeres were responsible for her shorter life span. By freezing stem cells when you are young, these cells will have longer telomeres and therefore offer the best bet for a robust cure/ treatment. Also, we don’t really understand how cells reprogram for things like cancer (although telomeres are involved). Another nice thing about stem cells frozen when young is that they were frozen before disease states developed. This isn’t my field of expertise and so I’m not advocating for or against freezing adult stem cells but it certainly holds promise. If we get to where we can use our own stem cells for cures/ treatments, then this technology has the added advantage of a perfect immune system match. I love it too because it is so much less controversial than the use of embryonic stem cells.” COOKING, LIKE, UH, GOAT Kirk Elliott: “Per Wednesday . . . BBQ goat (cabrito) is very good. I have attended this cookoff in Brady, TX.” DON’T EAT MEAT Mike Rutkaus: “I ordered a dozen copies of The China Study and gave them out last Xmas – including one to the doctor who cured the post office anthrax patient in Virginia circa 2001. He agrees, but still loves cheese.” EAT MEAT Bill Schwartz: “If you’re going to continue to promote books that purport to show the harmfulness of fat (or meat, dairy, etc.), you really should also let your readers know that many very serious people reach different conclusions. For example, here’s a brief critique of The China Study by Dr. Michael Eades. And don’t miss Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health. Taubes explains that it may be the Western refined sugar, white rice, and white bread the urban Chinese have recently begun to eat – not meat – that have caused the appearance of obesity and Western chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers. I urge you to check out his extraordinary book. But only if you’re prepared for the possibility of having your assumptions shaken up big-time. Mine were. (I’ve been a vegetarian for 25 years.)” ☞ There are three issues with meat. One is health; one is treatment and slaughter of the animals; but even assuming neither of those is a valid concern, which I think is a lot to assume, the third is the environment. As, for example, here. (“It’s not simply that meat is a contributor to global warming; it’s that it is a huge contributor. Larger, by a significant margin, than the global transportation sector.”) HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM A White House resource to help set the record straight.
Bio-Insurance August 20, 2009March 15, 2017 WARREN BUFFETT’S VIEW ON MONEY In case you missed it in yesterday’s New York Times . . . we’re doing what we need to do, Warren Buffett says, referring to all this gargantuan deficit-spending and money-printing. But we’d better get ready to do something different as soon as we are able. TED OLSON’S VIEW ON MARRIAGE And also in yesterday’s Times . . . famed conservative Ted Olson, who persuaded the Supreme Court to install George W. Bush as President, now hopes to persuade the Court to allow marriage equality. A NEW KIND OF INSURANCE You sit for three or four hours having your own stem cells painlessly extracted . . . then watch as they’re freeze-dried, like coffee, and stored, like furs for the summer . . . and then, years later, in case you should need to grow a new limb or something, voilá! Watch the video here. It’s “bio-insurance.” Thoughts? (Full disclosure: a friend who’s advising the company sent me the link; being boyish if not rakish in my unstudied enthusiasm for such things, I bought a few shares just for the thrill.) (Further disclosure: apparently it’s less about growing new limbs than repairing bum knees – at least for now.) (Final disclosure: the procedure is priced at $7,500 up front plus $750 a year to stay frozen.) One big question I had after watching the video – what advantage is there to going through this procedure before you NEED to do? How would that 52-year-old in the video have been helped if he had done this at age 30 and paid for 22 years of storage – versus just harvesting his stem cells this year, once he knew he needed them, waiting a few weeks for them to replicate? But assuming it does make sense to bank them early, as argued in the video . . . How about a steep family discount? Four for the price of two? And how about an “endowment” option – say, a one-time $5,000 add-on for lifetime storage? Which might be accompanied by some kind of insurance policy from Berkshire Hathaway guaranteeing a $50,000 pay-out if your deposit should ever be lost by virtue of a meltdown. And of course the most obvious suggestion of all (drum roll please): while we’re freezing things and providing genetic insurance – shouldn’t we toss in free spermcryogenics? Give our customers something fun to do during those 3-4 hours? Which reminds me: WORKING YOUR WAY THROUGH COLLEGE Oh, my.
Zucchini August 19, 2009March 15, 2017 BRAVE NEW WORLD Kathryn Lance: ‘I liked your comment Monday: ‘Brighter days do lie ahead, disruptive as getting from here to there may be.’ I believe we are in a period of transition as great as any civilization has seen, and that is one reason there is so much craziness going on everywhere. As an example, in the last five to ten years my ENTIRE INDUSTRY (book publishing) has collapsed, although not everyone yet recognizes that fact. All the models of writing, publishing, and distributing will be completely different within five years. Newspapers, magazines, physical books, the post office as we know it, all will be gone. As a writer, I could be in despair. But instead, I’m mostly excited and happy to have the privilege of witnessing such an awesome turn of the historical wheel. It’s scary, yes, but also exhilarating!’ EAT MOUNTAIN GOATS Marge Wright: ‘I disagree that ‘It’s actually better to eat a salad in a Hummer than a cheeseburger in a Prius,’ as Bill Maher said. Meat, especially lamb and goat, can provide high-quality protein on land that is too steep/rocky/poor to grow vegetables. The problem is grouping cattle together in a filthy pen and then transporting hay and grain long distances to them. If we could get back to eating grass-fed beef, or eating more lamb, it would be sustainable. Of course, as a nation we eat far too much meat and not enough fresh vegetables.’ ☞ And more jobs for shepherds and flute-makers. Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow; and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. So one cold day Bo followed her, a trudgin’ through the snow; and killed and ate that little lamb. Dam! Ewe didn’t know? Zucchini, anyone? LIVE LONGER, BETTER Peter J. Costello: ‘The China Study by T. Colin Campbell is eye-opening, credible, well-articulated and full of common sense. It ‘lifts the veil’ on the health care and diet industries and empowers you to take control of your health (as personally powerful and important a concept as it gets).’ The [China Study] research project culminated in a 20-year partnership of Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, a survey of diseases and lifestyle factors in rural China and Taiwan. More commonly known as the China Study, ‘this project eventually produced more than 8000 statistically significant associations between various dietary factors and disease.’ The findings? ‘People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease . . . People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored,” said Dr. Campbell.
A Workable Health Care Compromise? August 18, 2009March 15, 2017 AN EDUCATED CITIZENRY DISCUSSES HEALTH CARE James Musters: “Dana Gould reports for Bill Maher . . .” ☞ Oy. THE BRITISH SYSTEM If poor old wheelchair-bound Nobel Laureate and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Stephen Hawking, the physicist, had been subject to the British health care system, well – as Investors Business Daily noted recently – he’d probably have died long ago. IBD later retracted this opinion when it was brought to their attention that Hawking is British, and rather likes the care he has received. But, as reported here, that episode and others have got the Brits so steamed, it may even affect the results of their election. The thing is, their system is less expensive than ours and produces better results – but they like it anyway! Go figure. THE COMPROMISE Many of us would like to see some improved version of the British or French or Canadian system (with our spending vastly more than they do, there would be room for improvement, even as our costs came way down) – but a “single-payer” system is not in the cards. Failing that, we hope “the public option” will be part of the compromise. Yet even that is now in trouble. Well, here’s my suggestion: a “public option” for those states that want it. (And not forced on any that don’t.) Couldn’t that pass? And if even just 10 or 15 progressive states embraced it at first, wouldn’t that be enough – if it worked well – to get most others to jump on later? PRIVATE EQUITY This is off topic, off-color, and in German. But if you have three minutes and even the vaguest curiosity about how “private equity” firms are perceived by some – oh, heck, even if you don’t – you may find this very funny. PE is “private equity.” LOI stands for “letter of intent.” And EBITDA is “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.” I don’t want to spoil it, so just trust me. (Again, warning: harsh language.)