09.28.07
bongo bong
Yeah… I’m blogging from a coffee house. I’m a real post modern beatnik. Any minute now, Cory Doctorow will descend from the sky and issue me my official decoder ring.
09.27.07
grr
Some asshole hit my car today. There’s a big ass fist-sized dent in the driver side door and body panel. This is why I can’t have nice things. Someone fucked up my epic!
Also – I was following another bike home while splitting lanes on the freeway today. Turns out that when a bike goes over a pile of shattered glass, it throws fragments up in a big rooster tail. I barely avoided a faceful of shards by ducking behind my windshield. Fun times.
A traffic bubble has started appearing behind the SJ airport in the mornings. No construction, no accidents, no new mergers or potholes or amusing billboards. Just a standing wave of stopped cars every morning for no reason.
I think I now know why people move out to the country.
Corny Plastic Junk
OK, this one started with a link to this image.
Cheeky, sure. But then someone linked to this article about corn based plastics, which can biodegrade in a landfill in about a month.
Neat, sure, but it’s a little more expensive than oil based plastics. Here’s a choice quote:
PLA is slightly more expensive than petroleum-based plastic, but that may soon change. Last year, the demand for Cargill Dow’s plastic products rose 60 percent over nine months, the Farm Industry News reported, attributing the rise to the jump in oil prices to near $55 a barrel. Fields said the higher price for corn-based plastic has all but disappeared. “As oil prices continue to rise, it makes technology that had been dismissed more feasible,” Fields said.
But wait… this article is from 2005. Oil costs a lot more now. What happened to this stuff, and why isn’t it all over store shelves?
09.24.07
Plastic Junk
A couple of links floated by (heh) on metafilter today; here’s one of them. Plastic trash is dumped into the ocean, or is blown from land. Plastic generally floats, and most plastic isn’t biodegradable, so it just breaks into smaller and smaller chunks and smothers wildlife. Why should we care? Well, from a brute economic perspective, if you kill off lots of ocean wildlife, your fisheries fail in the short run, and maybe your environment starts to change in the long run.
I remember cutting up plastic 6-pack rings as a kid (still do), since sea birds were getting caught in them. Dead baby animals = lots of new Sunday environmentalists. Lately, I just try not to buy stuff that has lots of extra packaging. It’s just depressing to do that after watching a stream of minivans leaving Costco, stuffed to the roof with single serving snacks and canned drinks and bottled water.
Is there a pure market solution for this? Plastics are extremely cheap compared to more environmentally responsible materials. Companies have a strong incentive to reduce costs and undercut their competitors by using cheap materials, especially when they don’t bear the disposal costs. Right now, you can’t beat plastics. US consumers love the convenience of single serving containers and plastic bags (like the love between a man and his goat), retailers love tamper resistant clamshell packaging, and few municipalities are willing to risk voter ire by banning these things.
Classic free market theory says that regulation = bad, so bans are off the table. Taxes are also bad, since you might be preventing a factory worker from putting food on his family when you tax a plastic factory out of business. Raise the disposal fees to cover the cost of recycling, and you just increase illegal dumping.
I guess you sit around hoping that some bright chemist will come up with a competitively cheap substitute that covers most of your environmental problems. That still doesn’t do anything about the stuff that’s already out there.
09.16.07
Cultural Map pt. 2
I checked out this place last week, after I randomly stumbled across a bunch of glowing reviews and saw that it’s just a few miles from where I work. It’s tucked into a little strip mall, a few doors down from a Bed Bath & Beyond. The place was pretty crowded at 2:00 on a Tuesday. The whole place seems like it was hijacked off Shattuck by roving bandits and smuggled south past the county border, then rudely grafted into the anonymous strip mall sprawl that constitutes so much of the San Jose area.
I ordered an Americano. Took a little while to get it. Managed to score a table by the window. Took a sip.
“…that’s complicated.” That was my very first thought. Delicious, but full of little subtleties and nuances. This sort of stuff could turn me into a snob.
Oh – bonus – someone behind the counter started up the Little Mermaid soundtrack. A couple of the girls back there burst into choir during “What is a fire and why does it… what’s the word… burrrrrrrrrrn?”
Went into a Starbucks later that week. It just wasn’t the same. I don’t think it will ever be the same.
09.12.07
Health Insurance Prices
I sent Will a link to this article, and here’s his response:
11:37 PM Will: prices increase because:
a. demand increases
b. supply decreases
11:38 PM c. the industry has become more concentrated (i.e. the firms in it got more monopoly power)
i don’t think b is the case
11:39 PM accept maybe firms don’t want to insure older people (or they require higher premiums to do so)
c. could be it except this is a pretty secular increase in prices and i don’t think thhe insurance industry is very concentrated
11:40 PM that said, the high level of regulation in the industry can be thought of as grants of monopoly power… its very hard/expensive to comply with all the regulations (but I guess that can be seen as a supply thing)
11:41 PM anyway, a monopoly explaination would have to come to grips with the steady increase in prices. If firms got more market power, you’d expect that to happen more suddenly.
so that leaves b
i mean a
and i think that’s right… health care prices are increasing because the demand for that care is increasing
see this symposium for example: http://www.cato-unbound.org
/issues/is-more-medicine -better/ 11:44 PM “Car inspections and repairs take a small fraction of our total spending on cars, gas, roads, and parking. But imagine that we were so terrified of accidents due to faulty cars that we spent most of our automotive budget having our cars inspected and adjusted every week by Ph.D. car experts. Obsessed by the fear of not finding a defect that might cause an accident, imagine we made sure inspections were heavily regulated and subsidized by government. To feed this obsession, imagine we skimped on spending to make safer roads, cars, and driving patterns, and our constant disassembling and reassembling of cars introduced nearly as many defects as it eliminated.
This is something like our relation to medicine today.”
also, its a bit silly to talk about some monolethic health care market
by saying things like “health care is unaffordable”
the more important question is “what health care is unaffordable?”
11:45 PM are we talking stiches and vaccines
or are we talking precautionary mri’s and pre-natal care
erm
i mean neo-natal care
Fair response. Some questions remain:
Are health care consumption rates rising in correlation with insurance prices? The first linked article claims premium increases of 10-20% a year. Are consumption rates (in dollar amounts) increasing at similar rates? It’s probably still a valid question if the insured population is merely getting older, but I don’t quite think that this is the case, at least in this country. Is it that more people are hypochondriacs? Is there data on this?
My only major criticism of the linked Cato article is that he only talks about mortality rates and not about quality of life. A sick worker works less and produces less output. It makes economic sense to invest in treatment for a treatable chronic disease if that worker’s improved output will exceed the cost of diagnosis and treatment. If a $5000 course of painkillers and a few months of physical therapy can get an extra few hours of work every month out of an injured worker for the next couple of years, it’s probably worth it. I’m sure there’s some nifty calculus and statistics involved in determining the optimal level of care.
It also seems as though insurers should be motivated to provide a certain level of preventative care to reduce the number and severity of future claims. I was only with Kaiser for a couple of months, but they were really pushing an “Eat right, exercise, and quit smoking” message.
Oh – and for future reference, the “healthcare is like buying an extended warranty” argument only works when the population is made of genetically engineered clones. I don’t think the hospital will honor my receipt anyway.
09.09.07
Cough Syrup
Fun: I just got carded for buying a bottle of cough syrup. A manager was even called to verify the purchase.
Yeah, yeah, I know it’s all related to clamping down on methamphetamine manufacturers. But somehow, I doubt that a meth dealer is going to bother buying one 4oz bottle of cough syrup. Somehow, I think that a meth manufacturer will be buying cases of the stuff, or ripping it off of delivery trucks. My business education is kind of shaky, but there’s a concept called volume that I remember reading about once.
More Fun: the laws requiring merchants to card people are aimed at restricting the flow of pseudoephedrine, which is used in making meth. Pseudoephedrine is a decongestant. The cough syrup I bought doesn’t have any in it. It’s like being carded for apple juice because it’s kind of the same color as beer. I don’t hold it against the girl running the register – she’s just doing her job, and can’t be bothered to read the ingredient list on every item that flies at her off the belt.
Even More Fun: I’ve probably gone through half a gallon of the stuff in the past week, picking it up at different stores as needed. This is the first time I’ve been carded, and now my license information is in a handy state database listing the date and location of purchase. I feel safer already.
09.01.07
Did you know…
That when a car jams on its brakes, you see the smoke well before you hear the sound of screeching tires?
I know this from personal experience.