1. Unreliable genetic information.
2. Elmendorf Unleashed, twelve videos.
3. I agree with this short, no plot spoilers review of the new Star Wars. And pre-order the Cass Sunstein Star Wars book.
4. Facts from books, good ones.
5. Facts about bananas, and banana ships. Good ones. Facts that is, not bananas. I prefer the bananas grown and eaten in Brazil.
6. Predictions for 2016 health care. And Atul Gawande on health care’s price conundrum.
4. “I can think of no better image for a failed city than all those intersections left to decline into two terrible conditions: chaos, standstill.”
That’s from an account of how 40 percent of Detroit’s stoplights didn’t work in 2013. But why are these the only two options? Does she really believe those are the only two options?
Oh wait, she writes for The New Yorker, so, yes.
For a few years in the 1980s I commuted through Chelmsford Mass, going through the infamous ‘chicken corner’ intersection twice a day. In those days there were no stop-lights to this 5-street intersection. Despite what the Wikipedia article says about the intersection, flow was good. Almost everyone knew the local, implicit rules and almost everyone followed them. For example, on my way home, the rule at entry into the intersection was ‘turns rotate counter-clockwise, one car at a time’. It was an example of spontaneous order.
Now, if you were a stranger to this intersection, you were going to have a very hard time, no knowing when others expected you to move and probably moving the wrong way when you did move. More than once I saw a car stuck in the middle of the intersection. The locals would just flow around it.
It’s therefore clear to me that if all the stoplights stop working or vanish, people would adjust and it would not be chaos.
1990s not 1980s. Sorry!
6. The right will be even louder in declaring Obamacare a total disaster and a total failure even as even more people take advantage of it and get life improving benefit.
People who get free stuff always declare it a success. I canceled my insurance for 2016.
Why did you cancel your free stuff?
Or was the free stuff costing you too much money?
Don’t worry, like Bush said, you can always go to the emergency room that will show Obama.
Reality kicks you in the ass and you call it bullshit. No wait! It’s GOP obstructionism and/or grid lock . . .
The idocracy wins.
yay
If we just take 6 a/b at face value, the country needs more Kaiser Permanentes. Certainly rather than one big KP.
6. Predictions: Not very nuanced. For example: “hospitals will begin unwinding the money-losing practices they have been acquiring over the last five years, similar to the 1990s when the physician practice management roll-ups failed”. Not exactly. It’s true that the PPM model of the 1990s failed, failed because, after paying the target physicians millions, the same physicians weren’t interested in spending nights and weekends at the hospital seeking out referrals. Duh! Hospitals learned: they don’t pay millions for physician practices. What they do is pay nothing for middling practices and employ middling physicians. What they do is “encourage” those same physicians to bring to the hospital diagnostics and procedures that can be performed much cheaper, and more efficiently, outside the hospital. Venture capitalists (the deciders in this prediction) are sad because the easy money in health care ain’t so easy anymore.
1) the solution to moving forward in a complex science isn’t publishing in a vast set of journals of differing quality levels, it is publishing in one journal (ahem, database) which is curated by ‘me’. Uhm, ok. Shocking that the Atlantic loved this idea.
3) it was strangely unsatisfying. Great effects, the lead (Rey) was competent, pacing was solid, good fan service, the dialogue was at a similar level to episode 4 (sparse, not a lot of depth, and without the exposition of a new universe that episode 4 had going for it). I think my only real issue was the lack of newness, the plot was so very similar to episode 4. Simply replacing Luke with a woman shouldn’t have this kind of impact on ratings. Ah well, such is the world we live in.
1) in an American way, we rushed to market
I actually worked in medical diagnostics before moving to startup culture. Anytime I tried to share knowledge from the first domain, cautioning on known difficulties, it was pretty much rejected as “stone age history doesn’t matter, we can do an app in a week.”
It is clear VCs and startups overran the science in a rush to market. Now, it looks like we will have a painful period with services in place, and knowledge needs to catch up.
I realize sites aren’t entirely responsible for their comments section, but do you really want to link to a “Force Awakens” review that has a comments section which includes one commenter saying, “All I want to know is does the butt-kicking white babe get it on with the white-kicking black dude. I don’t care if you spoil it for me and everyone else” and an entirely different commenter saying “If you yourself are a white male you should be writing hero stories with white men as the leads unless you have a special reason not to (e.g. you are writing a story about a slave rebellion or something.) Man up and embrace your race!”? Something deeply wrong there.
shame on YOU, tyler
Tyler hasn’t cared that similar ilk have infested the MR comments, so why would he care about the comments on some other website?
It’s about ethics in commenting, undoubtedly.
“If you yourself are a white male you should be writing hero stories with white men as the leads unless you have a special reason not to (e.g. you are writing a story about a slave rebellion or something.) Man up and embrace your race!”
Actually until the end there I thought this was some sort of Oberlin/Yale style undergraduate politically correct complaint. If he had rephrased this as a matter of cultural appropriation would you find it so offensive? If someone had said that pallid males cannot appropriate the cultural representations of people of color and so they should stick to the boring suburbanites they know, would you be as offended?
Cultural appropriation it is, after all.
#5) I came across this Drunk History episode on TV a few months ago about Chiquita, and also the origin of the term Banana Republic: [http://www.cc.com/video-clips/bgoxo5/drunk-history-the-scarface-of-bananas].
Depending on your cable provider and willingness to turn on facebook “Platform Apps”, whatever that means, you may be able to watch the full episode from the link.
One of the best shows on TV, the history is the real deal. High schools should screen these.
We got spoiled by the amazing new Mad Max so the dull pain of another J J Abrams’ weak, derivative, missing-the-raison d etre- of-the-original, creatively bereft rehash has been tempered by the warm memories of that and already low expectations.
5. Facts about bananas, and banana ships. Good ones. Facts that is, not bananas. I prefer the bananas grown and eaten in Brazil.
It is interesting but from what I can see does not answer the main question – why does Dole operate its own ships? I can see why they would paint their own containers with their logo. It is some cheap advertising. And no one would want to steal bananas. Walmart would have to be careful because a casual hijacker might be tempted to hijack one of theirs. You don’t know what you would get but it is bound to be good. I bet Jack Daniels doesn’t paint theirs.
As for eating bananas in Brazil, well that is a long way to go for a banana. It is a very impressive example of terroir. As all Cavendish bananas are genetically the same (and hence will soon be extinct) there is little to distinguish them but terroir.
To keep control of losses? If a banana on the shelf in a grocery store is not perfect it is worth nothing. To have it there on peak shopping days takes very careful and specialized handling. That careful and specialized handling is the value that dole provides.
It sounds like the main reason is the location of the Central American ports: they are not in the busiest shipping lanes and do not have the best technology. In the middle of the article:
“Next, nearly all bananas come from plantations in Central America. Ecuador to San Diego isn’t a very active tradelane: it’s nothing close to Shenzhen—Rotterdam, the world’s most important lane for containerized cargo. Dole would find it nearly impossible to get the service required to meet the needs of complex coordination of importing produce. In addition, the countries that export the most bananas don’t have the world’s best-developed ports, in part because they don’t produce enough goods to return the investment in high-tech ports.
Take a look at the picture of the ships themselves. If you’re expert on container ships, you may pick out a particularly interesting feature: Dole ships have their own cranes on board. This is again an indication that the ports that Dole frequents aren’t as well developed as it would like. Instead of having to rely on stick cranes in not-so-sophisticated ports, it has customized ships with on-board gantry cranes to lift its own reefers. That significantly increases efficiency by reducing time spent in port.”
As I said to someone else who got deleted:
No, it just pushes the question back one step more. Presumably Chiquita’s bananas come from the same under-developed parts of the world. They too have to be shipped from under-developed ports requiring ships that carry their own cranes.
But Chiquita sold their ships off. They prefer leasing or general shipping. So why does one company insist on keeping its banana boats and the other does not?
Chiquita is not getting their bananas from Shenzhen. Their ports can’t be more developed.
Chiquita sold off their ships, but they’re not using ‘general shipping’ — they’re using the same Chiquita ships that are still run exclusively for Chiquita. A distinction without much actual difference.
Chiquita sold their ships off “to reduce debt.” Now, they lease them bsck. One must assume that Dole did that calculation and felt that owning their ships was a more cost effective optiin.
Back in ’69 and ’70 my unit operated in an area of the VN Highlands where there was a plateau covered with banana trees as far as the eye could see. A few but not many locals appeared to make their living harvesting them and loaded the stems atop truckloads of bagged tea headed south on the lone road, for sale in Saigon I presume.
Through an interpreter, actually a scout we called The Traitor because he’d changed sides [no one likes or trusts a traitor but that’s a story for another day], I found out a strong man could make as much as $80 per year. I doubt that was an attractive wage but options in the middle of a war can be limited.
The bananas were an acquired taste. Small, they ripened from green to a flat copper or rusty brown color and were filled with annoying hard black seeds. Most guys spit out their first taste but before long we ate them daily.
#3
Yeah, I gotta agree with the harsh review, although I did thoroughly enjoy the movie when I was watching it. The point about how “The Force Awakens doesn’t have ideas” is right on the mark; this movie’s moral and political battles was utterly superficial and basically boiled down to “the bad guys are bad because they do bad things and wanna be bad”, and “the good guys are good because they don’t do bad things and wanna be good”. The struggle between the two factions is devoid of any political and social context; and you don’t get any sense whatsoever as to the implications and consequences for the galaxy in general. Nor do you get a sense of how strong each faction is, what the stakes are for particular battles, what the consequences are after battles, and so on.
I do think the characters were pretty good though, and especially disagree with describing Rey as a superficial “Girl Power!” caricature, considering that there are many moments where she shows weakness and vulnerability. I actually thought she was one of the strongest parts of the film.
I’ll still hold out hope that now that the “2 hour long commercial for the new Disney Star Wars brand” is over and done with, we’ll actually see more attention and thought put into the plot and the structure of the larger universe; if they can get that right, and maintain/develop the characters and chemistry that was in The Force Awakens, then the next two movies should be fantastic.
I’ll still hold out hope that now that the “2 hour long commercial for the new Disney Star Wars brand” is over and done with, we’ll actually see more attention and thought put into the plot and the structure of the larger universe
I know it is not fair but I have a sudden vision of Arjun’s version of the next film. Imagine, if you will, a dusty room somewhere in Tunisia. Keanu Reaves is playing the re-imagined Obi Wan role – but as a Californian stoner.
“The Empire is inevitably driven by the need to exploit markets and by the pitiless logic of monopoly capitalism to commodify all human relations. There is no way out but to, like, totally smash the system and liberate all intelligent beings’ potential through the creation of a completely galaxy-wide system of worker control over the means of production. You can start by not cleaning the droid, dude”
Meh. At least it would be better than Jar Jar Binks.
I’m sympathetic to the criticism that there aren’t any ideas in the new Star Wars. I made the same point to someone else that is was lacking some of the interesting themes of the first movie.
Wrt characters, I thought the girl was developed well. I find it hard to explain some of Finn’s behavior. He first begins to turn against the First Order when his squadmate is killed. But he later helps the guy who killed his squadmate escape. Also, he further turns against the First Order when they order him to kill civilians. But does this make him a pacifist against war? No, he doesn’t have any problem killing fellow Stormtroopers (when he had just 15 minutes previously been so upset when one of his squadmates died).
“The bigger the hospital, the more it can adopt systems that deliver better-organized, higher-quality, less-wasteful care. But the bigger the hospital, the more power it has to raise prices. We have a few ways out of the conundrum. We can regulate the prices hospitals charge insurers—this is what Maryland does. We can break up big hospitals. We can encourage hospitals to become the insurers. (That’s what Kaiser Permanente in California has done. It provides members with prepaid care at its hospitals and clinics.) Or we can expand Medicare to more and more people until we’re single payer.”
I wouldn’t start with any of those things. I’d start by making prices transparent. Once everyone can see what things cost, we have the beginning of a functioning market.
3. A little heuristic that people might find useful: It is not possible for a movie with a budget of $200 million to be good. To expect movies with budgets in the hundreds of millions to be good is nuts, except in the unlikely case that your tastes happen to lie around the middle of what film makers hope will result in the maximum possible world box office take. And that is extemely unlikely. Big budget movies are made for an audience that does not exist with a set of tastes that are weighted between the monetary value of different movie markets.
Movies with budgets of $40 million or less have a chance to be good. But they probably won’t be. Even if they are made for an audience that exists in reality, there is a good chance that you won’t be part of it.
#2 – He could have made a very small webpage instead of these videos. It would have said “I love the Democratic Party. They are awesome. The deficit is a problem, to fix it we need to tax the ‘rich’ more, we also need a carbon tax, we need to put more money into teachers unions, the reason we don’t have all of these things is the greedy republicans, and Obamacare is awesome.”
Wow.
If you combine 1 and 6, I think they say institutional knowledge is becoming ever more important to healthcare, and database driven, rule based medicine is the only way forward.
Our ideal of a physician who has it all in his head is a great mythology, but perhaps by now quite counterproductive.
(As I say though, competing database/rule based organizations rather than one big one.)
From 4: ‘Ian Fleming wrote “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” ‘
How could she have been unaware that he wrote Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang? That’s like not knowing that E.B. White wrote “Charlotte’s Web” or that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Treasure Island”.
Her second item, about eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama not wanting to join the Confederacy, is much better. It makes sense to realize that much of Appalachia was against it, because we have the well-known example of West Virginia. But I think most Americans don’t realize that that attitude extended all the way to Alabama — but unlike West Virginia (which was militarily pried away from Virginia by of all people George McClellan defeating Robert E. Lee very early in the war), TN and AL were too far from the North to be rescued by Union troops until late in the war.
There’ve been several books which mention or focus on this division within the southern states. Freehling’s _The South Vs. the South_ focuses on this, but a more interesting read which mentions it in passing is Baumgartner’s _Blue Lightning: Wilder’s Mounted Infantry Brigade in the Battle for Chickamauga_. Colonel Wilder was a fantastic innovator who made ingenious use of two military innovations (Spencer repeating rifles and horses as infantry transport) and one economic one (funding the private purchase of those rifles from his own capital, and getting repaid via deductions from his soldiers’ paychecks — but he had each regiment vote on whether they wanted to participate or not; three did and one did not, so that regiment continued to use their old muzzle loading rifles). His brigade as a result had maybe twice the mobility and five times the firepower of a similar-sized infantry unit.
As a sign of how sympathetic the local Tennesseans were to the Union cause rather than the Confederate one: if you visit the Chickamauga Battlefield near Chattanooga, the tallest battlefield monument is to Col. Wilder. And after the war, the town of Chattanooga elected him mayor.
P.S. His brigade included another innovator: his artillery officer was a young man named Eli Lilly.
No, it just pushes the question back one step more. Presumably Chiquita’s bananas come from the same under-developed parts of the world. They too have to be shipped from under-developed ports requiring ships that carry their own cranes.
But Chiquita sold their ships off. They prefer leasing or general shipping. So why does one company insist on keeping its banana boats and the other does not?
While I welcome him deleting your ‘poor comments’, it seems to be hit and miss. It’s very entertaining to come across a string of commenters yelling into the ether after you’ve been carried away kicking and (no longer in front of us at least) screaming, but what still gets left up leaves me scratching my head (though perhaps he leaves the links to your ‘counter-blog’ up as an answer for anyone who might be wondering why he has spared us from the rest of what you post).
As for the ilk Urstoff is referring to, I wonder as well. I have yet to find somewhere online not infested with racists; at least these ones remind me that even dressed up and articulate, armed with facts and figures, their arguments do not hold water. That would be reason enough to keep them around, but I’m guessing the experience of playing whack a mole with one idiot can show howdifficult this sort of undertaking would be.
@E. Harding – he deleted your obscene posts. TC’s even deleted some of my posts. It doesn’t mean he hates you, nor is it reason to go start your own blog site, unless that’s what you want to do. Calm down, you’re worrying about a First World problem (censored on some social media site). Here in the Philippines we have a water shortage –it’s common–and it’s the rainy season. The water company is turning off all the water for the first 18 hours a day starting a midnight (they say it’s due to El Nino causing a water shortage, but in fact, though global warming is a cause, it’s due to the PH not building enough dams to store water–I’ve read this in some World Bank report). We do store water in giant trash cans, but still you must do all your washing from 6 PM to midnight, which is terribly inconvenient. And btw this is a “luxury” section of town in a remote-ish part of eastern PH (it has internet, though sometimes only dial-up modem speed). Trash pickup is a local guy who gets a Xmas gift for payment. I seriously do not know how he makes money. I sometimes speculate he goes through your trash looking for something valuable, or maybe information he can sell? Food? Overpriced. I make money selling chickens from our farm. Imagine doing that in the USA (impossible, as Tysons/Perdue are efficient). Food prices are 50% to 100% more expensive than the USA. Apples, oranges are imported, expensive, and ‘trash fruit’ that’s generic: no Red Delicious apples from Washington state–they don’t ship well–but Fuji apples, developed by the clever Japanese as they are sweet and ship well. Green Granny Smith apples on occasion as they ship well. The Red Delicious are mushy and awful by the time they get here, I avoid them. Lemons don’t hardly exist–but calamansi limes do and it’s OK. Due to inconsistent refrigeration in transport, food in this tropical climate is often spoiled. When they shrink wrap (which actually is good as it keeps the fruit from drying out), the grocery boys routinely put a rotten apple with the good ones (a hidden cost). No lettuce (except from Baguio city, and it’s wilted by the time it gets here) though I prefer cabbage or the local spinach anyway, though even it is often wilted. Filipinos don’t eat veggies much anyway, as it does not have high calories and they are eating to survive here; chicken or pork meat (small portions for flavoring), sugar, rice of course (10 gr protein / cup) are the stables. Rains constantly this time of year (and year round) with lots of mosquitoes, leaches (which will crawl into your kitchen and lodge under a spoon–yummy!), frogs, snakes (not seen a cobra yet, unlike Thailand) and weird but wonderful lizards (we have a Tokai that’s a foot long living in our kitchen. I’m not even thinking of dislodging it, as he would fight back, and it’s good luck anyway, he eats the giant cockroaches that always find there way into your house no matter how clean you are). Also they don’t label stuff at grocery stores consistently, so if you forget, as is common, to have it priced, there’s a lengthy wait as the clerk’s helper goes–slowly–to get it priced. Manana culture (‘do it tomorrow’), like Mexico. My gf’s family had no running water at their farmhouse so I installed an impeller pump. They do know how to party here however, and are not ashamed–unlike in the USA–to dance while on the job. The girls are brown (though they try and turn white with poisonous whitening creams) and cute. We own a monkey–it’s some sort of local monkey, I thought it was rhesus but it’s more cute–imagine doing that in the USA. He’s clever like a child but I worry if we leave the kids will kill him with junk food that they like to feed him, though I’ve told them otherwise. Neighbors in this luxury sub-division are dirt poor and resentful (the local crazy routinely shouts anti-rich slogans at us), but so far no serious crime except stealing (we installed CCTV which cut down on it). Electricity prices are about double the USA’s but not out of line for non-US countries (US electricity prices are, like their food prices, some of the lowest in the world). They burn cheap coal for power, not geothermal which would make sense (go figure).
And you think you have problems? LOL, though if TC deletes this post I’ll be pissed, haha.
I wonder what your definition of racist is because I haven’t read any racist comments in the few years I have read this blog.
Usually I think the comments are as good as and sometimes better than the original blog post that spawned them.
‘I have yet to find somewhere online not infested with racists’
http://www.metafilter.com comes instantly to mind as not having that problem. Of course, a lot more women comment there than probably all major American econ web sites together, which might just suggest a connection.
As for Steve Sailer, he is pretty much banned from commenting anywhere that is not already supporting his style of world view. Of course, he is more than occasionally spotlighted by Prof. Cowen, generally in approving fashion.
This comment is in response to NP’s comment above.
You’re just skipping Steve Sailer’s comments, aren’t you? Though yes, some of his more revealing comments get deleted too.
Sailer is usually careful to just post facts. If you interpret those facts as racist that becomes your issue. Stating that Muslim immigrants commit most of the rapes in Scandinavia, for example, is a factual statement. Even saying that African-Americans on average have lower IQs than European Americans is a factual statement.
But those are hurtful facts and people should be safe from them.
Peter – neither of those are factual statements.
You say Muslims commit “most of the rapes in Scandinavia”, which is completely false, whereas a non-racist making this point might have said they “are more likely than the average among the population to have committed a rape.”
You say “African-Americans on average have lower IQs than European Americans”, which has never been established as a fact, whereas a non-racist would have said that they “score lower on IQ tests”, not that they “have” lower iQs.