Birds Of Paradise July 31, 2014July 30, 2014 “Oh, look! An oriole!” That’s about as exotic as it gets in the beautiful place from which I’m working this month — and I love it. But treat yourself to these five minutes and you will be transported to Papua, New Guinea, through an enormous telephoto lens. Ten years of work and courage (I’d be scared of everything) and itching (I’m certain I’d be itching) distilled into five minutes for your morning coffee-sipping wonder and entertainment. ETRM People seem to be giving up on it and maybe they know something we don’t. But Guru still thinks its weight-loss device will get approved and that, as a result, it’s worth two or three or four times the $1.27 it closed at last night. I live in hope.
Andy Williams – Part 2: Must-CNN July 30, 2014July 29, 2014 Bob: “Don’t you see how that ‘cartoon‘ feeds into the anti-Israel, uber-liberal crowd that wants to equate throat slashing, decapitating thugs with a non-aggressive, peaceful country?” ☞ Bob is right. Not all Mideast violence is equivalent (to say the least). To me, the point of the cartoon is simply to emphasize the insanity and inhumanity that fighting over “sacred” ground continues, millennium after millennium, to engender. Bob offers this must-see CNN clip. Please watch it!
Andy Williams Sings About The Promised Land July 29, 2014 DO YOU KNOW ANY RICH PROGRESSIVE MUSLIMS? I need one to help finance a documentary film that a gay Muslim friend is making . . . because of things like this: a Saudi man sentenced to three years in prison and 450 lashes for being gay. ISRAEL This Washington Post editorial makes sense to me. You? God, what a tragedy it all is. Toward the illustration of which . . . ANDY WILLIAMS SINGS ABOUT THE HOLY LAND Here.
More Feet July 28, 2014July 28, 2014 Friday, I offered feet: FEET Are you coming to New York September 21 for the People’s Climate March? There’s a train coming from San Francisco, picking up activists along the way . . . and others are coming on foot from Los Angeles. My plan is to walk or call an Uber — but I’ll be there. Today, foot: FOOT The subject line was alarming: WheelTug’s Iron Foot Disclosed. Ugh. One thing you don’t want attached to your commercial jet — or to the speculative stock in which you own a gazillion shares — is an iron foot. We’re looking for words and phrases like “soar” or “fleet of foot” or “sure winner before the end of the year.” Not something even more dead weight than “feet of clay” or “cement shoes.” But it’s not that at all: WheelTug’s Iron Foot Disclosed Gibraltar, 24 July 2014. WheelTug plc has released footage of its Iron Foot, the mechanical test rig for testing the WheelTug across a range of aircraft and airport operating parameters. The video can be seen and downloaded at http://media.wheeltug.com. The WheelTug® system uses high-performance electric motors, installed in the nose gear wheels of an aircraft, to provide full mobility while on the ground without the use of the aircraft’s jet engines or tugs. There are currently 985 Airbus A320 family or Boeing 737 NG and MAX aircraft in the Order Book, over 23 different airlines. “The Iron Foot is a very important tool in the development and test of the WheelTug systems. It allows us to conduct full simulations of every ground operation of the WheelTug system in every possible operating environment,” said Isaiah Cox, WheelTug’s CEO. “Because of its versatility and instant configuration changes, this system unlocks far more testing capability than if we had several airplanes doing nothing but system testing around the clock.” To the company’s knowledge, this dynonometer is unique, perhaps larger than any other in the world. “Nobody else has a smart-drag on the load side to simulate the real world. The tire and wheel guys we have shown it to have been very excited.” I am, I know, a broken record, and I may still surely be proven wrong — which is why you should only own shares of WheelTug grandparent Borealis with money you can truly afford to lose. But how is “e-taxi” in some form by now not inevitable? Why would any airline not want to save a bundle of money each year? Why would any busy airport not want to increase its capacity without having to build new gates and terminals? (Because WheelTug allows faster turnaround times, the same gate can handle more flights each day.) And if it is in some form inevitable, why would WheelTug — with its smaller, lighter, less complex solution, and its patents, and its endorsement from industry legend Bob Crandall, and its 23 signed airlines (compared to zero signed by its competitors) — not have a chance to own a meaningful part of the business? And if in a few years it were bringing $50,000/plane in annual lease payments to the bottom line across thousands of planes for an annual profit of hundreds of millions of dollars, might it not then have the resources to commercialize some of its other potentially valuable technologies? (Or find a use for this one in, say, automobiles?) At which point, why couldn’t Borealis be worth a couple of billion dollars? I have friends worth a couple of billion dollars. Which would be about 40 times as much as it is selling for today. (And stupid as I feel saying this, one could even imagine a scenario in which it could be worth more than a couple of billion.) So enjoy the video. The music is too loud and I’d have preferred Dustin Hoffman and Marisa Tomei as the leads with Donald Sutherland doing the voice-over. But never mind that: it’s one more reason to think our patience may — conceivably — eventually –pay off. PS – I like to invest in things that could make the world more efficient, as e-taxi would. If you have $250K you can truly afford to lose in a private company with a patented way to build (small) bridges faster and cheaper — that will last longer and require less maintenance — me-mail me.
The Frog Comes On Little Cat Feet* July 25, 2014July 24, 2014 CATS “All cats are libertarians: Completely dependent on others but fully convinced of their own independence.” — Internet Wisdom FEET Are you coming to New York September 21 for the People’s Climate March? There’s a train coming from San Francisco, picking up activists along the way . . . and others are coming on foot from Los Angeles. My plan is to walk or call an Uber — but I’ll be there. GENES In the Brave New World Department, from PBS’s Nova comes this report: . . . In the last few years, our ability to edit genomes has improved at a shockingly rapid clip. So rapid, in fact, that one of the easiest and most popular tools, known as CRISPR-Cas9, is just two years old. Researchers once spent months, even years, attempting to rewrite an organism’s DNA. Now they spend days. Soon, though, scientists will begin combining gene editing with gene drives, so-called selfish genes that appear more frequently in offspring than normal genes, which have about a 50-50 chance of being passed on. With gene drives—so named because they drive a gene through a population—researchers just have to slip a new gene into a drive system and let nature take care of the rest. Subsequent generations of whatever species we choose to modify—frogs, weeds, mosquitoes—will have more and more individuals with that gene until, eventually, it’s everywhere. Cas9-based gene drives could be one of the most powerful technologies ever discovered by humankind. “This is one of the most exciting confluences of different theoretical approaches in science I’ve ever seen,” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University. “It merges population genetics, genetic engineering, molecular genetics, into an unbelievably powerful tool.” We’re not there yet, but we’re extraordinarily close. “Essentially, we have done all of the pieces, sometimes in the same relevant species.” says Kevin Esvelt, a postdoc at Harvard University and the wunderkind behind the new technology. “It’s just no one has put it all together.” It’s only a matter of time, though. The field is progressing rapidly. “We could easily have laboratory tests within the next few months and then field tests not long after that,” says George Church, a professor at Harvard University and Esvelt’s advisor. “That’s if everybody thinks it’s a good idea.” It’s likely not everyone will think this is a good idea. “There are clearly people who will object,” Caplan says. “I think the technique will be incredibly controversial.” Which is why Esvelt, Church, and their collaborators are publishing papers now, before the different parts of the puzzle have been assembled into a working whole. “If we’re going to talk about it at all in advance, rather than in the past tense,” Church says, “now is the time.” . . . *If we alter its genome. “And, having come, moves on.” — Carl Sandberg’s bio-engineering alter ego.
Prisons July 24, 2014December 27, 2016 This is so funny, so poignant, so awful, so important — you simply have to find 17 minutes to watch. It has everything from the cast of Sesame Street to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons being questioned by Al Franken. And of course it has Florida. The governor there, Republican Rick Scott, who’s refused the Medicaid expansion money and (as noted yesterday) blocked the insurance commissioner from negotiating lower premiums, is all about privatizing the prisons and cutting back their budgets. You have to watch. Especially now that we have more people in prison than any nation on earth — including China. (Yes! We’re number one! USA! U! S! A!) Half are in for drug-related offenses, and yet an earlier Republican governor — Jeb Bush — actually cut Florida’s prison drug treatment budget by 85% to help pay for what he really cared about: a tax cut exclusively for rich people (who in Florida already paid no state income tax or estate tax, so it was quite a feat to find a way to advantage them even further). And he did this at the same time as he was paying privately for his own daughter’s drug treatment. Republican values. Republican priorities. Help not the poor and the desperate, the damaged and most needy; find yet more ways to help the best off. But I digress. The Jeb Bush piece is ancient history. Watch Jon Oliver.
If Corporations Are People, Why Don’t They Have To Pay Tax? July 23, 2014July 22, 2014 Brandon Fradd: “It’s interesting that corporations want the right to have freedom of speech as citizens (Citizens United) and to have freedom of religion as citizens (Hobby Lobby), but not to pay taxes as citizens. Somehow they are extraordinary entities that we, the American public, must ‘persuade’ to support the country. Is this why America was founded — to cater to corporations?” Brandon references this New York Times discussion: “How Can the U.S. Stop Corporate Tax Flight?” . . . The latest round of planned inversions tells us that some corporations will do anything legal to profit from American markets without sharing the burdens of sustaining the United States. . . . BONUS FEATURE A completely safe way for you to climb Mt. Everest. This is amazing. And when you reach the summit, take as long as you want to marvel at the view Sir Edmund Hillary had.
Financial Engineers July 22, 2014 FLORIDA Here are Florida’s big utility companies asking their regulator for permission to gut energy-conservation goals: Florida’s big public utilities spend very little on energy conservation. On Monday, they will ask state regulators for permission to spend even less . . . Given their gerrymandered control of the state (which actually has more registered Democrats), the Republican-backed utilities may well get their way. Never mind that half of Florida will be under water if we don’t arrest climate change; or that energy efficiency enriches us all. And here is how Republicans stripped Florida’s insurance commissioner of the power to negotiate with health insurers for lower rates. Meanwhile . . . HEALTH CARE Guru: “America’s decline is because it is being dominated by financial engineers (like the ones who run who run VRX) and hedge fund managers (like William Ackman) who are interested in short term personal profits over long-term innovation. We’ll see if they succeed in killing and milking AGN. We all will be worse if they do. Here’s the story.” ☞ Its essence: a drug company called Valeant that grows by buying others, is trying to buy Allergan, a drug company that grows by developing new drugs. It’s plan is to boost short-term earnings by slashing chopping two-thirds out of R&D. Guru goes on to say: “The CEO of VRX is an ex McKinsey consultant who buys out companies in the pharma space in order to cut R&D and milk the earnings. He is very driven by ROE calculations. It has worked. His shareholders have benefited tremendously by a rise in stock. Is this what made America great? No. America was the place for innovation, not financial engineering. The great family-owned drug companies: Pfizer, Merck, and, in Switzerland, Roche, Ciba, and Sandoz, were all started by chemists 150 years ago or so. Chemists. Not financial engineers. These companies have continued to expand into novel chemistry and biology over the last 150 years, looking for new therapies. They did not succeed by cutting R&D. They were very interested in ‘shareholder value’ — they were private companies — the chemists were the shareholders! Karen Ho (Princeton anthropologist who first worked on Wall Street) wrote a book that traced the current focus on financial ‘shareholder value’ as the only basis for corporate behavior to the Reagan administration. Her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street might be worth citing on your website.”
Two Minutes of Beer Bottle Music July 20, 2014 CORN As noted last year, the easiest way to cook corn — if it’s really sweet and fresh — is not to. Just shuck and eat. No cooking at all! But here’s a no-shuck method that involves a microwave — 22 seconds to watch. BEER While it’s cooking, listen to this. CORN AND BEER Is there anything better than summer? HAPPINESS To me, it’s a matter of (a) genetics (I inherited the happy gene); (b) having love in your life (obviously) and (c) direction — not amount. I’ve long argued that if you had two families — one earning $25,000 a year but somehow knowing it was headed up to $75,000, the other earning $400,000 a year but somehow knowing it was heading down to $175,000 — the family earning $25,000 would likely be happier than the one earning $400,000 . . . even though it will never be nearly as affluent. Why? Because things are looking up! So much to look forward to! Corollary: A luxury once sampled becomes a necessity. Pace yourself. If you find yourself at a young age with a windfall that would allow you to live large — don’t. Live small, saving the rest, so you always have something to look forward to; always have a cushion of financial security; and never have to worry about having to move from the condo with a great view a smaller one in the back on the first floor. That’s everything I know about happiness (a really good locally grown tomato with salt and pepper will also do the trick this time of year) and it comes to mind after reading Arthur Brooks’ more nuanced analysis in the New York Times — Love People, Not Pleasure.
How The Big Tobacco Companies Are Still After Your Kids July 17, 2014July 17, 2014 News of the $25 billion being paid for cigarette maker Lorillard reminds us that, for all the progress of the past half century, smoking is still alive and well in America, even if an additional 480,000 of us each year — who continue to die from it — are not. Here’s the latest: “How the Tobacco Industry Has Made Cigarettes More Addictive, More Attractive to Kids and Even More Deadly.” Yankee ingenuity at its worst. In small part: The adult smoking rate has been cut by more than half – from 42.4 percent in 1965 to 18.1 percent in 2012. After climbing to 36.4 percent in 1997, the high school smoking rate has been cut by 57 percent, to 15.7 percent in 2013. . . . [Yet] the new Surgeon General’s report released in January 2014, The Health Consequences of Smoking – 50 Years of Progress, found that cigarette smoking . . . currently kills 480,000 Americans each year, sickens millions more and costs the nation at least $289 billion annually in health care bills and economic losses. Specifically, the report found that “today’s cigarette smokers . . . have a much higher risk for lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) than smokers in 1964, despite smoking fewer cigarettes.” The report finds that “changes in the design and composition of cigarettes since the 1950s” are responsible for smokers’ increased risk of developing lung cancer. Kids: Don’t become slaves to the tobacco industry like your parents. Think of the money you’ll save!