Wasting your time
choofnagle | November 18, 2008Earlier today, we learned that when faced with a regulatory deadline to test your products for lead, a good course of action is to lobby to delay or reverse the requirement. This afternoon, we learn the best course of action when your highly-profitable drug is about to lose patent protection. We're all familiar with the tactic of simply making little changes to a drug and declaring the new version marginally better. Jonathan Rockoff explains that the minor improvement strategy can be combined with pricing tactic to steer consumers and insurers away from generics:
Twice this year, Cephalon…
choofnagle | November 16, 2008On Nov. 16th at 9:50 Pacific, the answer remains no, but this site will help us keep track of this important issue after Jan. 20.
choofnagle | November 8, 2008I have a love-hate relationship with credit and charge cards. They're incredibly convenient, but my few puritan instincts tell me that they're the spawn of satan.
And the fees! The fees! No, not the ones for paying your bill late, or for paying your bill on time over the phone, balance transfer fees, application fees, balance transfer fees, overlimit fees, or even annual fees. (Did you know that banks make more money from fees now than from investments?) I'm talking about the fees that the card networks charge to merchants. Jane Birnbaum explains in Thursday's Times:
A typical merchant…
choofnagle | November 3, 2008The Journal reports the obvious under the headlines "Tainting of Milk Is Open Secret in China" and "Milk Routinely Spiked in China:"
Before melamine-laced milk killed and sickened Chinese babies and led to recalls around the world, the routine spiking of milk with illicit substances was an open secret in China's dairy regions, according to the accounts of farmers and others with knowledge of the industry.
Farmers here in Hebei province say in interviews that "protein powder" of often-uncertain origin has been employed for years as a cheap way to help the milk of undernourished cows fool…
choofnagle | October 22, 2008Libertarians hold dear the idea of the uberman consumer, the hyperrational, fully formed autonomous being that springs from the womb to take good decisions in the marketplace. But when one reads marketing literature, a different consumer is encountered. Often this consumer is an object to be manipulated; one who holds totally irrational ideas that must be shaped or corrected; one that has to be acclimated to changes, and managed to prevent revolt.
One also encounters shockingly frank discussions of consumers' lack of sophistication in the literature. This brings me to an article in Monday'…
denialism | October 18, 2008This will be Orac's new favorite show, perhaps the best reality show ever made.
Meet Shirley Ghostman. The UK's premier psychic who is mounting a search for the UK's next psychic superstar.
Watch his students cry as he channels Lady Di!
Watch as he brings forth a evil serial killer in the presence of his students:
Shirley even takes on the skeptics!
This guy is a genius, I just about plotzed, and the narration by Patrick Stewart is awesome. I also love it in terms of what denialism blog has always talked about. The problem with the people who believe this stuff is that they simply have…
choofnagle | October 17, 2008So, here it is. Titled "Berkeley's Big People," it is installed along I-80, so those of you driving north of San Francisco will probably see it, as it is 30 feet tall and visible from a mile away.
Given the landscape of "free speech," it would have been much more appropriate to have erected a large Don Quixote, fending off autism-causing vaccines, and tilting at a windmill atop a stolen shopping basket full of junk but missing it because he was high. And then declaring victory.
Updates: my Berkeley friends respond! All of these responses are incredibly valuable, so you are to be subjected…
choofnagle | October 11, 2008It seems as though officials have been arguing forever about whether to erect an anti-suicide net along the Golden Gate Bridge. On Friday, the bridge directors voted 14-1 in favor of creating such a net:
...the stainless-steel net system, which would be placed 20 feet below the deck, and would collapse around anyone who jumped into it, making it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to leap to their death...
This has been a fairly divisive issue in San Francisco. Anti-netters argue that that the net will just cause people to kill themselves elsewhere (perhaps by jumping from a building…
choofnagle | September 27, 2008Why? Well, among other things, for hating billboards. Max Colchester of the Wall Street Journal reports:
On Friday, Alex Baret plans to board a train to central Paris, pull out a can of spray paint and deface a billboard, as he has done every last Friday of the month for more than two years. The slogan he prefers to leave scrawled on his targets: Harcèlement Publicitaire, or Harassment by Advertising.
How did this hate for billboards come about, you ask?
Mr. Baret says the seeds for his campaign were sewn in the spring of 1997, when he was riding the Paris subway and he looked up at an ad…
choofnagle | September 17, 2008The Journal reports this morning that:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned imports of more than 30 generic drugs made by India's Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd., citing concerns about the safety of the company's production practices.
The ban affects low-cost versions of popular medicines such as the anticholesterol drug Zocor; Acyclovir, which treats herpes; the heartburn pill Zantac; and AIDS drugs. Consumers shouldn't be affected by a medicine shortage because the drugs can be supplied by other generics makers, the agency said.
The agency said it acted because of concerns about the "…
choofnagle | September 16, 2008[Update: The WSJ reports that you're now bailing out AIG.]
For years working in Washington, I listened to libertarian tripe about how privacy law would prevent free markets from operating, and how banks should be able to freely trade personal information to assign risk and create new credit products. The "Miracle of Instant Credit" was invoked as a positive force that would allow banks to move smartly into the subprime market and make more Americans homeowners. They won that battle with the 2003 passage of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act, which largely superseded state law…
choofnagle | September 9, 2008It's been an exciting day here at UC Berkeley. Four helicopters have been buzzing the office since about 8 AM, because the UC decided to erect a scaffold around the lone tree left in order to extricate the tree sitters. I got to watch about 12:00 today. There were probably 400 observers for the final hour, where workers assembled the scaffold and started to pick apart the encampment near the peak of the tree.
Apparently the remaining four tree sitters negotiated with UC officials, and came down voluntarily, which is good, because the risk to personal safety was very high. If the tree…
choofnagle | September 8, 2008The nerve! Carolyn Jones of the Chronicle reports:
In their most recent demand, the tree-sitters said they would come down if the university gives $6 million to environmental and Native American groups, creates a public committee on campus land use and allows protesters to use the stump from the oldest tree in the grove, which protesters dubbed "Grandma," for a Native American drum.
The university offered to give protesters the stump and allowed them three two-hour meetings with high-ranking campus officials to discuss mitigating the loss of the oak grove, long-term plans for the southeast…
sb admin | September 8, 2008So, due to circumstances beyond his control, Ed over at Dispatches won't be able to plan our Michigan party, so we're going to do it in the Detroit metro area on Saturday, Sept. 20th. I don't have the place yet, but I'm getting the idea that there are a few definite maybes. Let me know (again if necessary).
choofnagle | September 6, 2008Berkeley's latest political battle may be coming to an end: the UC has won a series of decisions in cases brought by local activist groups seeking to prevent the destruction of grove of trees right next to the law school. UC wants to build a sports facility there for our athletes.
The battle over this grove of trees has created a real circus on campus. At one point, perhaps two dozen people were living in the trees. Some came down voluntarily, and when the UC started plucking them from the trees, one protester known as Dumpster Muffin climbed to the highest tree and shook the platform.…
sb admin | September 4, 2008We're still working on a Michigan meetup to celebrate our millionth comment. Ed Brayton, who has to trek over from the west side of the state, has suggested a more central location (not unlike early Michiganders). Rather than SE Mich, there is some interest in Lansing or East Lansing. If forced to trek up there, I'd certainly vote for El Azteco, but if Ed's willing to plan it, I'm fine with it. If there is considerably more interest for SE Mich rather than EL, please let me or Ed know.
I'm also going to see if I can round up any bloggers who have michigan roots or may be in the area---…
sb admin | September 3, 2008So the alties hate real medicine. They come over here and bemoan modern medicine's failure to address behavioral changes that affect health, such as diet and exercise.
Then I write a long post about internists' duties viz public health and health behaviors, and the gun nuts think I want to disarm them and PRY TEH WEAPON OF GUNZ OUT OF OUR COLD DED HANDZ!!111!222!!!11!
I think of my writing as "reality-based". I have opinions, and where my opinions intersect with real-world activities, I try to back up my opinions with facts. I don't (usually) resort to wishful thinking, religion,…
choofnagle | August 28, 2008Today's Journal reports on the delicate task of creating a monument to Galileo Galilei at the Vatican. But there's still some opposition. Check this out from the very end of the article:
On the other side of the barricades, meanwhile, some Roman Catholics think the church has already done more than enough to make up with Galileo.
Atila Sinke Guimarães, a conservative Catholic writer, dismisses the church's mistreatment of Galileo as a "black legend."
The scientist, he says, got what he deserved. "The Inquisition was very moderate with him. He wasn't tortured."
choofnagle | August 27, 2008The new students have arrived at UC-Berkeley, closely pursued by hordes of credit card marketers. Right by my office is a bank that literally has 12 employees out front hawking credit cards and new accounts.
Freshman friends, don't get your first credit card from the guy on the street offering you a t-shirt or worthless, plastic (likely lead filled) bauble. Be smart about credit. Credit is an incredibly powerful consumer tool, but you must wield it carefully. If you ruin your credit, you will have difficulty in life getting a job (people with bad credit look like embezzlement risks to…