Category Archives: Articles of Interest

Someone just got a bonus

Abercrombie and Fitch is to pay its Chief Executive $4m to limit reimbursed use of private jet to $200k/year till Feb. 2014, when the CEO’s contract expires [BBC].

CEO’s typical expenditure/year ~ 850k/year
Expected cost ~ $4.25m
Or
Max(previous years) = $1.1m
Expected cost ~ $5.5m

CEO’s reimbursed expenditure/year ~ 200k/year = .8m
Total cash ~ $4m* + .8m = $4.8m
* CEO makes money on the interest by getting the money upfront. Total income at about 5%/year compounded annually ~ $1.1m

Profits ~ 4.8 + 1 – 4.25 = 1.55m
(or)
5.8 – 5.5 = .3m*

*Very likely a low estimate as CEO now has the incentive to fly the plane less.

Science about the opinions towards climate science
Some plausible explanations (not exculpations) for forces shaping public opinion about climate science –

• “When it comes to climate, academic scientists are jigsaw types, dissenters from their view house-of-cards-ists.”(The Economist). Same article -“People often assume that data are simple, graspable and trustworthy, whereas the theory is complex, recondite and slippery, and so give the former priority. In the case of climate change, as in much of science, the reverse is at least as fair a picture. Data are vexatious; the theory is quite straightforward.”
• “Weather is not climate” (NY Times)

• Kate Michelman, in a poignant article, narrates her family’s descent into near bankruptcy due to healthcare costs.
• NY Times reports on how multiple congressmen with ‘one voice’ – the voice of the lobbyists.
• Earl Blumenauer, the congressman behind the end-of-life provisions in the healthcare bill, gives a brief history of how the innocuous provisions came to be known as ‘death panels’.
• The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model
• Ahmed Rashid: Pakistan conspiracy theories stifle debate
• Asheville, North Carolina: 4 months for shooting cyclist in the head
• Pankaj Mishra: India’s Eternal Crisis
• Is the “Era of Ashok” a new era for “news”?

Rambo- Dead and Deader By John Mueller, Los Angeles Times

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites by Mark Danner, NYRB

The trouble with Frida Kahlo by Stephanie Mencimer, Washington Monthly

Percentage Increases, Increases in percentages (BBC)

Slow death of handwriting (BBC)

Shall we get rid of the lawyers? Anthony Lewis, NYRB. Lewis, a celebrated journalist, is the author of a superb book, Gideon’s Trumpet, that documents the history, and particulars of the seminal sixth amendment case, Gideon Vs. Wainwright.

Israel-Palestine

‘Tasteless’ T-shirts worn by Israeli army soldiers (BBC)

Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques – IDF fashion 2009 by Uri Blau, Haaretz

Right’s leftist appeals

Jawed Naqvi astutely points out how many of the right-wing appeals of Mullahs are basically plagiarized left-wing appeals. He points out how cries for ‘anti-imperialism’ etc. have been usurped. “The mullahs have motivated their rank and file in Pakistan with verses from leftist poetry, often to attack left politics.” He further argues (rightly)-

“Just because religious extremists or terrorists have usurped a secular critique of imperialism and harnessed it to their bigoted worldview doesn’t mean that Zionism becomes kosher [my comments – interesting choice of words] or imperialism becomes acceptable or right-wing Hindu revivalism deserves legitimacy.”

Iran’s essentially communist revolution came to an Islamist end. Hopefully anti-imperialist voices in South Asia and Middle-east won’t suffer a similar fate.

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Tintin

Economist has a superb story on Tintin.

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Paul Krugman comments on the Ponzi Economy.

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Make love, not war

US Military gives Viagra to Afghan warlords. (Naipaul would be feeling vindicated.)

BBC provides a guide to the Joes in American politics:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/us_elections_2008/7679987.stm

Chaste shares a link to an excellent NYRB article on Georgia by USC professor, Robert English:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22011

NY Times has a story about international monitors calling into question Georgian claims:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/world/europe/07georgia.html?em

Barack Obama will be the 44th president of United States:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05campaign.html

Article on housing, a heavily subsidized and none-too-productive asset:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a5LoEiJ0IyAo

Sukhdev Sandhu, a literature professor at NYU, has a superb article in the London Review of Books on Hanif Kureishi. Sandhu expertly weaves in a realist matter-of-fact account of British Asian immigrants in his tribute to Kureishi.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n10/sand01_.html

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Nicholas Carr explores whether Google is making us stupid. He finds that it is.

“Chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished” male models

“People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult,” Ms. Cutrone, “founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion branding and production company”. [ The vanishing point, NY Times]

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Pakistan: Middle class, Islam, and Army

Griff Witte reports on the three major political forces that will largely shape the future of Pakistan, in this multimedia production for the Washington Post.

Moral Hazard and Health Insurance

A 2005 New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, convincingly debunks the moral hazard argument that informs the thinking of private health insurance plan advocates. Link: The Moral-Hazard Myth: The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.

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Bhutto’s assassination

Tariq Ali and Manan Ahmed provide incisive analysis on Bhutto’s assassination. PAKISTAN: The Three Faces of Benazir and The Bhutto Dynasty

An excruciatingly long yet largely pointless 1993 New Yorker profile of Benazir Bhutto by Mary Anne Weaver, author of the middling ‘Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan’. New Yorker authors are famous for waxing verbose and this article is no exception. Link: Bhutto’s Fateful moment by Mary Anne Weaver

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The $2500 car is finally here. The unveiling of Nano was covered extensively by the media. Read the brief yet elegantly written Economist report about it.

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Knowledge@Wharton reports on convergence in corporate governance structures due to pressures from globalization and contends that not all is for the good.

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Amy Waldman, a former correspondent for The New York Times and now a writer for The Atlantic, writes about the (ab)use of religion in buffeting cases against alleged would be terror plotters.

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Steven Pinker, psychologist at Harvard, wrote an essay on The Moral Instinct for the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Pinker has written an erudite account that highlights some of the key psychological biases that prevent choices that do the most good from emerging as the most moral ones. Morality, as our contributor to the blog – Vinay- has pointed out, should be tractable empirically and based on some conception of its ability to provide the most good for society. The associated corollary is that morals, which offer little or no good to the society, aren’t particularly moral.

“Crack is whack” (and so is the punishment for using it)
Whitney Houston in a Prime time interview with Diane Sawyer famously said, “Crack is cheap. I make too much for me to ever smoke crack,” she said. “Let’s get that straight, OK? I don’t do crack. I don’t do that. Crack is whack.”

Yes, crack is whack. And so has the punishment for using it for the past twenty years. Under the sentencing guidelines enacted in 1986 and 1988, possession 1 gm of crack cocaine-induced the same minimum sentence as possession of 100gms of its powdered form. Finally, though half measures in reducing some of the absurdity in sentencing have succeeded. United States Sentencing Commission recently ruled to reduce the prison sentences for using crack cocaine to bring them closer to that of powdered cocaine.

Back in 1994, the USSC was asked to study the differential penalties. The commission in 1995 recommended equalizing the quantity that triggered minimum sentences for both forms of cocaine but the recommendation sank in a Republican controlled congress, and the election year calculations meant that President Clinton quietly signed the bill into law.

Supplementary Reading:

Levitt and Dubner talk about changing pattern of cocaine use in their NY Times op-ed.

Time article on “Crack” in 1986.

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China: a shrinking violet

Keidel at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports that an updated PPP measure – the prior measure was based on a 1980 survey (!) – means that estimates of the size of the Chinese economy have been revised downwards from $10 trillion to $6 trillion. Meanwhile, the estimate of the number of poor people has been revised upwards to 300 million.

Citation: The Limits of a Smaller, Poorer China by Albert Keidel, published in the Financial Times, 11/14/2007

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Taxing thoughts

Cornell professor presents experimental corroboration for the long-held common-sense belief that telling citizens upfront about the costs of reducing tax burden will reduce support for a reduction in taxation.

Citation: Reshaping the Debate on Raising Taxes, Robert Frank, New York Times, 12/9/2007

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i-Identity: Apple of society’s eye

Apple, the once niche club of all-consuming hipness, may yet bequeath its hard-earned ‘Cool-Aid’ to mass popularity.

Citation: The Elite Apple Corps: A Hundred Million Strong, Every One of Them Cool, Hank, Stuever, 12/9/2007, Washington Post.

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Gawande: checklists help reduce medical errors

Atul Gawande writes about how checklists can help reduce errors in the medical profession. He quotes Dr. Pronovost, the man behind the idea, as saying, “The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is ensuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer’s perspective, it’s outrageous.”

Citation: The Checklist, Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, 12/10/2007 (forthcoming issue)

I have too much to do…
“American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two….

And, with due respect to Mr. Gilbreth, all the energy that’s been poured into trying to force everyone to work at the same pace and in the same way — it seems that’s the real waste of time.” [ NY Times ]

*The first paragraph only applies to most well paid white collar jobs.

‘Flexible relationship with reality’
Leonhardt on Dobbs’ claim about leprosy and immigration NY Times column –

“And the official leprosy statistics do show about 7,000 diagnosed cases — but that’s over the last 30 years, not the last three.

The peak year was 1983, when there were 456 cases. After that, reported cases dropped steadily, falling to just 76 in 2000. Last year, there were 137. …

…What about the increase over the last six years, to 137 cases from 76? Is that significant?

“No,” Mr. Krahenbuhl said. It could be a statistical fluctuation, or it could be a result of better data collection in recent years. In any event, the 137 reported cases last year were fewer than in any year from 1975 to 1996.”

Politicization and mediocrity
Monica Goodling, who recently resigned as the Public Affairs Director at the Justice Department had the following education –

“Goodling received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1995 from Messiah College, a Christian institution. She received her J.D. in 1999 from Regent University Law School, a Christian institution founded by Pat Robertson.” [ Wikipedia ]

*Regent University Law School is a Tier 4 law school.
A NY Times article discussing politicization of Justice Department using another case – “Rachel L. Brand, [who] by her own admission, has never prosecuted so much as a traffic case. But in January 2006, when Justice Department officials began to discuss removing some United States attorneys, Ms. Brand was proposed as the top federal prosecutor in the Western District of Michigan, an e-mail message released on Friday shows.”

Foxy Facts
Fox news commentators were discussing global warming recently and during the course of the discussion, a commentator casually stated that like every ‘story’, global warming had two sides to it and that only one side was being highlighted.

Lush Green Hedges

NY Times article on the out of control incomes of top hedge fund managers quoted Brad Delong, UC Berkeley Economist, as saying –

“There is some question as to what the hell they are doing that is worth” that kind of money …. “The answer is damned mysterious.”

Corruption
Britain canceled a criminal inquiry into bribery allegations linked to a multi-billion-dollar arms deal between BAE and Saudi Arabia citing economic and national security concerns. Jubilee Research (pdf) from Dec. 2006 when the news was first broken.

The arch-conservative
Fred Thompson has emerged as a conservative champion having exceeded or met all the requirements – he is an actor, a divorcee, has a deserved reputation for being lazy, and married to a woman who is four years younger than his daughter who died in 2002 of an accidental prescription drug overdose.

Goodbye Lenin!
A Polish man woke up from a 19-year long coma to find communism has given way. Facts follow fiction – Wolfgang Becker movie, Goodbye Lenin! has about the same story.

Andrew Young, respected civil rights leader, was hired expressly to improve Walmart’s public image.

“In the Sentinel interview, Young was asked about whether he was concerned Walmart causes smaller, mom-and-pop stores to close.

“Well, I think they should; they ran the `mom and pop’ stores out of my neighborhood,” the paper quoted Young as saying. “But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First, it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.”

Washington Post