bidness
mikethemadbiologist | July 23, 2010Imagine someone had designed a device that would essentially eliminate bloodstream infections (sepsis) caused by contamination of needleless injection ports. Great news right? Well, guess what happens next:
Unlike some of the solutions floated by big medical device makers, such as coating the ports with silver, Shaw's innovation added only a few pennies to the cost of production. And it seemed to be remarkably effective: a 2007 clinical study funded by Shaw's company and conducted by the independent SGS Laboratories found the device prevented germs from being transferred to catheters…
mikethemadbiologist | July 19, 2010Last week, I wrote about a column by biologist Marc Lipsitch, who described a conflict of interest for scientists that has not been discussed: gag agreements for scientists who accept industry funding. In other words, if the corporate funder doesn't like the results, nobody will hear about them. These agreements also present other problems, such as reviewing grant proposals or receiving federal funding, as the scientist will have access to information that is unknown and undiscussed*.
Well (pun intended), BP appears to have tried this strategy too (italics mine):
BP has been trying to hire…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2010Over the weekend, I discussed how the wealthy are far more likely to walk away from an underwater mortgage (when the mortgage payments will cost more than the value of the property) than the non-wealthy. Yves Smith makes a good observation (italics mine):
Another message here is that high income borrowers aren't taking the Freddie/Fannie/bank bluster about strategic defaults seriously. Recall that the latest threat was that they would pursue deficiency judgments, as in sue borrowers who defaulted where the proceeds from the sale of the home, net of expenses, did not cover the mortgage debt…
mikethemadbiologist | July 10, 2010I've mentioned before how the decision to walk away from a mortgage that costs more than your house is worth ('strategic default') should be based on how that decision affects you financially (and, of course, if you want to stay in the house anyway). In an environment where loans were approved such that there could be a strong incentive to walk away, there's no ethical issue--caveat mutuor. So I find this NY Times report very interesting:
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds…
mikethemadbiologist | July 8, 2010Update: Shortly, after writing this, ScienceBlogs pulled the Pepsi Blog
Thinking about it overnight, I'm back for now. The short version is that I think the changes are sufficient, although I'm still very disappointed in Seed. Basically, the changes in presentation seem to make it clear that the blog is advertising, not Sb content--and I realize others might disagree. This isn't a final decision on my part by a long shot. Frankly, I would much rather not have Food Frontiers at ScienceBlogs at all.
There has been a lot of verbiage flying around the intertubez about Pepsigeddon so below…
mikethemadbiologist | July 6, 2010BP: not only trashing our oceans, but the First Amendment too! From Raw Story:
Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.
It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure."
The Coast Guard order states that "vessels must not come within 20 meters [65 feet] of booming…
mikethemadbiologist | June 20, 2010One of the problems with the rise of behavioral economics is that too often behavior is defined as irrational, the result of cognitive screwups. I've dealt with this issue before, but James Kwak convincingly argues that the BP oil disaster is not due to a cognitive failure to assess risk:
I have no doubt that it is true that people have problems estimating the chances of certain rare events.* But to stop there is to whitewash the sins of the companies and the executives who created these crises.
First, it doesn't do to say that ordinary people are irrational in making ordinary everyday…
mikethemadbiologist | June 19, 2010The reason your dividends were (past tense) higher than U.S. Treasury yields is because there was risk involved in this investment, even if you pretended otherwise. That's why you get more money back--because you're holding more risk. Privately held companies are not back by the full faith and credit of sovereign states. Welcome to the Downside.
And you are in a risky investment: poking holes in the earth. There's good stuff in the earth, but sometimes the earth pokes back. That confers risk.
If this prospect seems less attractive, might I suggest U.S., U.K., and Japanese securities?…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2010Related to this morning's post about the find of $1 trillion dollars worth of minerals in Afghanistan, even if we were to capture (if the verb fits....) ten percent of the total worth of those resources, it still wouldn't come close to the break-even point for the occupation of Afghanistan (which is somewhere between $200-$300 billion). If this will be the justification for staying even more Friedman units in Afghanistan, we're so stupid we can't even figure out how to make money off the deal.
(This venal argument ignores the "what do you say to the last man to die for a mistake" principle…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2010By now, you might have heard about the kerfuffle between Nature publishing and the University of California (also here, here, here, and here). Basically, the University of California has accused Nature of raising its prices for institutional journal subscriptions by 400%; the university system, which has significant purchasing power, has threatened a boycott that would not only forbid purchasing their journals, but would also forbid publishing and reviewing for Nature.
What's weird about this is that Nature doesn't seem to realize how precarious its business model is--I think if it takes on…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2010Or something. Look at what we found in Afghanistan:
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits -- including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium -- are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one…
mikethemadbiologist | June 9, 2010The NY Times, on Monday, had an article about the effects of extensive computer use and interconnection on human cognition. The usual concerns are raised about attention deficits, lack of concentration, obsessive activity, and the like. The story focuses on a family that is, well, flying through The Intertubes, often to the detriment of what needs to get done:
When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.
Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company…
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2010Yet another sorry chapter in the banking crisis. Remember: we need banks and bankers, but why we kept these banks and these bankers in business still perplexes me. Now, in an attempt to retain faux integrity of their balance sheets, banks are refusing their contractual obligations to buy back certain loans they sold to Fannie and Freddie Mac (and with Fannie and Freddie essentially owned by you and me, guess who will get stuck with the bill?):
Among the more glaring bookkeeping fictions on big banks' balance sheets today are the values they assign to all of the bounteous second mortgage…
mikethemadbiologist | June 2, 2010Despite what Tyler Brûlé writes at The Financial Times. Brûlé writes:
When an e-mail bounces back with: "I'm travelling on business in New York (or Rome, Taipei, São Paulo ...) and will have limited access to e-mail," such messages usually pose the following questions: is this individual employed by a company that can't afford BlackBerrys or iPhones? Can this person not manage their time away from the office? Or are they simply away having a laugh at my company's expense? Unless they work in the public utility business and are 200ft below the streets of New York repairing the sewers…
mikethemadbiologist | May 21, 2010Contrary to what some might think, I'm not opposed to investment bank and bankers, I'm just opposed to the current crop of banks and bankers. But even more than usurious middle men, the guys who really make my head explode are the flat-out speculators--they serve, even on their best days, no useful purpose whatsoever. And thanks to the recent stock market computer glitch that caused the Dow to temporarily dive ten percent, speculators known as high-frequency traders are finally getting noticed (italics mine):
Depending on whose estimates you believe, high-frequency traders account for 40 to…
mikethemadbiologist | May 12, 2010While I think many supporters of the charter school and privatization movements are well-intentioned, albeit terribly misguided, they have attracted, as all bad ideas do, the bottom feeders--in this case, banks that lend charter schools money for building facilities (italics mine):
There's a lot of money to be made in charter schools, and I'm not talking just about the for-profit management companies that run a lot of these charter schools. It turns out that at the tail end of the Clinton administration in 2000, Congress passed a new kind of tax credit called a New Markets tax credit. What…
mikethemadbiologist | May 7, 2010(from here)
A while ago, Ezra Klein posted an interview with an anonymous Harvard graduate who works for Goldman Sachs ("Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street?"). Before I get to the interview, I'll answer the question--and it might not be what you think it is.
Ultimately, students from elite colleges have been trained (and, yes, I'm using the same word one uses for a dog) to jump through hoops that authority figures set for them. These are not "the road less travelled" types. Their entire lives, from kindergarten on, are focused on getting to the next round, the next level. Throughout…
mikethemadbiologist | May 6, 2010By way of Digby, we come across Atrios' excellent summary of the TARP program:
It's a little weird that reporters are hesitant to clearly spell out what happened. Basically the Fed printed a huge amount of money. Some of that money they used to do what TARP was originally supposed to do, buy up Big Shitpile at inflated prices. Some of that money they lent to banks at basically 0 interest. Of course there were plenty of other things they could have done with 2 trillion bucks, if preserving the executive compensation at megabanks wasn't thought to be crucial for the survival of the economy.…
mikethemadbiologist | April 23, 2010By way of Echidne, I came across this article about WellPoint's cancellation of insurance policies belonging to women with breast cancer (italics mine):
Shortly after they were diagnosed with breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. There was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. And there was Patricia Reilling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky....
The women paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, neither had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies…
mikethemadbiologist | April 22, 2010I came across this post by Digby about the narcissism of CEOs, which is worth a read. One of the things I think a lot of academics have a hard time understanding is how common antisocial personality disorders can be in positions of power outside of academia. In my experience, sociopaths and narcissists--and I use those terms in their clinical sense, not as synonyms for asshole--are really infrequent in academia. This isn't because scientists are better people (Intelligent Designer knows that's not the case). Instead, academia has a lot of objective (relatively speaking) criteria for…