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Re: Knowledge is Power: Getting Over Your Hangover - Science and Tech - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:47:22 -0000

There's a lot of doctors telling me I ought to slow it down, but there's more old drunks then there are old doctors...so I guess I'd better have another round."

Re: Building a Wall Around Inflation - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:23:14 -0000

Maybe I'm misremembering the Kinsley argument, but I didn't think he was arguing that the government would deliberately target higher inflation to inflate the debt away. I thought the argument was more that they might accidentally do it? I mean once you have all this liquidity in the system, getting the timing exactly right on when to pull away the punch bowel is extremely hard, and the odds are that if they error it is going to be in leaving it there too long. Inflation can sneek up on you like that and then as Meagan points out inflation expectations get built in...and then you have a hard time getting rid of them without "pulling a Volcker."

I just don't understand all this talk like it would be some conspiracy to inflate the debt a way when simple incompetence seems much more believable (I mean this as the incompetence of humans in general, not any particular Fed chairman)

Re: Financial Planning - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:28:12 -0000

No renters insurance for me, but I don't have any assets to speak of and always rent under an assumed name, so I'm not sure I see the problem. The place we live in isn't zoned residential anyway, so we've lived the last couple of years expecting to be kicked out at anytime and keep a bag packed for when that day comes.

Re: Budget Games - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:50:47 -0000

The costs in the article weren't all medical costs, they were costs to Medicare. Do you really think that McAllen, TX has a huge portion of illegal aliens taking Medicare benefits, and that this would be substantially different than say El Paso?

Re: A Subsidy By Any Other Name - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:02:41 -0000

If you cut taxes AND spending, you're *reducing* the overall financial burden.

Not necessarily, depending on the nature of the spending cuts it is entirely possible you are just shifting the financial burden, not actually reducing it. Sure, moving from government spending to individual spending might improve efficiency and it might be more "fair", but if we completely scrapped Medicare tomorrow it isn't like the demand for health services for seniors would vanish. Demand for other goods would certainly fall as individuals reprioritized, and I'm sure demand for some health care would fall as well, but not on a 1- 1 basis.

Re: Are Companies Taking Advantage of Unpaid Interns? - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:18:30 -0000

My girlfriend is an artist and has seen this first hand over the last couple of years. Work that used to be paid work seemed to increasingly go to unpaid interns, and the qualifications were pretty ridiculous. When she was looking for work she would see ads for interns with "minimum 5 years experience in arc welding and solid contacts in the art world" this to work as an assistant for an unestablished company. When she met or came close to meeting the qualifications she'd sometimes contact these people in case they didn't have any luck getting free labor and might want to pay (minimum wage even), but generally they didn't seem to have any problems finding people willing and able to work for free.

Re: The Horror, The Horror - National - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:55:12 -0000

I'm not normally nitpicky on this type of thing, but the title for this post seems a bit too mocking for my taste. Sure tragedies of this nature are sure to happen in war, and there are certainly good points on why this isn't necessarily a warcrime...but to trivialize* it by saying "the horror, the horror" seems in poor taste.

*This phrase used pretty much exclusively in recent times to make light of something that a person is taking way too seriously. I realize this almost certainly wasn't your intent, but that is how it came across to me at least.

Re: The Horror, The Horror - National - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:14:14 -0000

I did mention recent times, did I not? I actually just finished rereading Heart of Darkness a couple of weeks ago, so I am familiar with the source...and still I stand by my original assertion.

But I came from the RSS feed, and am probably just crabby because I was expecting lighthearted snark and what I got was anything but.

Re: Will Multitasking Be a Game Changer for the iPad? - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:38:47 -0000

The iPhone has always had limited multitasking: It is, for instance, the only smartphone that allowed one to browse the internet while making a voice call.

While not technically a "smartphone" my Nokia N800 allows one to make calls via Skype while simultaneously doing other tasks including browsing. I've used it pretty regularly if I'm going to be on hold for a long time. And this is on hardware as old as the original iPhone. I don't know much about the new n900, but I'd be surprised if it didn't offer the same capability, and this on an honest to goodness smartphone.

Re: Who Wins in the Latest Netflix Deal? - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:05:24 -0000

Daniel, everything you write makes perfect logical sense, and this is how I tend to think and behave as well, but from working for a couple of years in a video store I can tell you that the MUST HAVE NOW mentality was not that uncommon. New videos came out Tuesday and we always had a few people who would come in and buy almost every movie that was new for $20, having never seen the movie before, even though they could rent it for $4. Then, we would inevitably run out of rental copies for the movies released on Friday or Saturday, but we always kept a number of new copies up by the register, and every week we'd get a lot of people planning on renting the movie, but when it was out of stock they would buy instead. Never made sense to me, but I saw it over and over again.

That being said, I think things might have changed since then. This was when DVDs were just starting to really take off, and people seemed to be really hit with the collecting bug. I think because with VHS the new tapes were often very expensive (ironically to protect the rental market), plus bulky and just didn't look as good on a shelf as a DVD, so people were excited when they could buy movies for reasonable prices and really watch at anytime. But I think the general idea of entertainment on demand at anytime has started to move people away from the urge to collect, and Netflix has conditioned (some) people to not really need the latest new release right that day.

The psychological impact of the entire wall of a single title for one new movie, all in shiny new boxes can be hard to resist. When I worked in the video store it was amazing, we'd all know some new movie was bad, we'd have no desire to watch it, and then 100 copies would show up and stare at you, and somehow you'd find yourself wanting to take it home nad give it a try. A few weeks later, the boxes would be grimed up, and the movie would be condensed to take up only 1/4 of the original space and the desire to watch had completely vanished. With Netflix all movies take up just one slot on the screen, and I have so many movies in my queue that I won't get to new releases until they have been out for months, and this doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Movie studios are trying to get back to the model of getting people excited about buying again, but I just don't see it happening. The evolution is inevitably to a fully digital distribution, and I just don't think people will get really excited about "owning" something that isn't tangible, not if they know they can watch it anytime they want without owning it.

Re: The Mystery of Future Health Care Costs - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:56:32 -0000

Secular changes in the health care environment are random That is, in this case, Medicaid undershot projections. But that's not because the CBO was "too conservative"; the savings came from broader shifts in the healthcare market, not something that the legislation did. Broader shifts in the healthcare market can move either way; there's no special reason to think that they are more likely to be downside surprises.

While I agree with your overall point, there are some compelling reasons to think that drug prices on aggregate should continue to drop over the near to mid-term (say 5-10 years). First on the near-term front you have a patent cliff with the majority of major drug blockbusters going off patent over the next couple of years, and this is more significant than what we have seen in previous years. This fact is pretty widely known though, and isn't going to maintain anykind of long-term trend.

What I find more interesting is that we now have a pathway (or at least a pathway to a pathway) to biosimilars thanks to HC reform. Biologics typically are a lot more expensive than small molecule pharmaceuticals. Biosimilars will have significantly cheaper trial costs to recoup, but also a number of companies have really focused on the manufacturing side of things to bring costs down on that level as well. Even longer term there are always innovations on the horizon that promise to make drug discovery more hit and less miss, which would translate into significantly lower R&D costs. So far these technologies haven't really delivered as everyone hoped they would, but it is still too early to count them out completely.

But all of this is just on the drug side (and on some degree to med-tech). Your point about a large portion of HC costs going towards expensive labor is well taken, and I'm unsure what (if anything) can be done to really bend that cost curve.

Re: The Mystery of Future Health Care Costs - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:38:05 -0000

I know, but I really wish we could.

Re: Apple Gets a Harder Look on Antitrust - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:05:58 -0000

To my mind it is a simple ROI decision by developers. I can develop an App for the iPhone, which currently has something like 99% of all app sales, or I can develop for the other platforms and try to get a part of the other 1%. Developing the same product natively for multiple platforms is too expensive for many smaller developers, so they are forced to choose and a lot of them will probably choose AAPL. This will reinforce Apple's dominance in the app market which could theoretically be used to gain dominance in the smart phone market. They certainly haven't gotten there yet, but it does seem like the direction they are going, and this seems like more of an attempt to head them off at the pass. I know pretty much nothing about monopoly law, so I don't really know if it can be used proactively like that or not.

Re: The Tyranny of New York City - The Future of the City - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Thu, 13 May 2010 13:13:36 -0000

A couple of years after moving to NYC with my girlfriend I spotted a girl selling t-shirts that summed up pretty perfectly our feelings on the city. It was a nice neutral grey, and the slogan was "I Kinda 'Heart' NY"

Re: - Politics - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:42:38 -0000

I'm probably missing something here, but renewable energy mandates seem kind of against the spirit of what cap and trade legislation is supposed to be about. The idea I thought was supposed to be to correctly price the externality (green house gasses) and then the renewable energy part takes care of itself. If cap and trade is designed well then there should be no need for any RES, and if it isn't designed well then an RES isn't going to save it.

Re: Why Nobody Uses Their Phone as a Phone, Anymore - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Fri, 14 May 2010 14:00:13 -0000

Showing that I'm an old fogey already, but for me this:

(The irony here is that sometimes text-conversation threads continue for song long that it winds up taking longer than an old-fashioned "voice" conversation.)

isn't just a sometimes occurrence. Text messages are in almost every instance going to take me much longer to type and cost me a lot more, than a quick phone call would. Unless you have the aforementioned smartphones (and if you do then you should email) text messaging seems like such a step back in communications.

Re: Maybe There is No Fixing the Academic Job Market - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:25:03 -0000

At the undergraduate level, departments have to abandon the model that revolves obsessively around training students to do research. The idea that all of our undergrads are going to go to grad school in that subject, and that all of those grad students are going to become professors of that subject, is absurd -- it's one of the main diseases of academia. As schools try to improve their rankings, this only gets worse.

I definitely noticed this in my undergraduate classes once they got into the 300 and 400 levels. Each department paid a small amount of lip service to the "what can I do with this major?" question usually in the form of some printed materials in the department office, but the actual teaching certainly wasn't geared to that. And it was almost a given that the most intelligent people in the class expected to go to grad school and eventually get tenure.

Professors in the business majors seemed to one of the few exceptions to this rule, indeed the few business classes I took seemed to be basically vocational training. Interestingly very few of the people I meet in my area (finance) have a business or finance undergraduate degree. Many have an MBA or something like it, but most people I come across seem to either have a hard science background, and then moved to finance because it was a lot more lucrative, or they majored in something like history (but from a top-tier school).

Re: Massachusetts Insurers Post Big Losses - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:35:37 -0000

"Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick Two."

I've said it before but I think the world has been spoiled by computers. I fully expect just about everything I buy to be better, faster, and cheaper next year than it was last year. Obviously I know this isn't and can't be true for everything...but yet I still kind of run my life as if it was...and am extremely disappointed every time I'm proven wrong.

Re: How to Save for Retirement in One Easy Step - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:11:50 -0000

I do live in a low-income area and I'm fairly well paid, yet I still spend ~65% of my net income on housing. It seems that most the people around me are unemployed, under-employed, or work in low wage industries, and quite frankly I don't know how many of them manage. The people I know seem to fall into similar groups as Anirprof, they either have lived here long enough that their rent is about 50% of mine, or they are young enough to be OK with 6 people in a 600 sqft loft, or they have parents helping them out with expenses. Unfortunately living in a low income area isn't better for a lot of other expenses either. A local paper recently did a survey of grocery stores in our area and found that for a basket of staple goods our prices were ~30% higher than those of Whole Foods. And most people in the neighborhood don't have cars, so it isn't an easy thing to just go to another location to buy groceries.

Re: How to Save for Retirement in One Easy Step - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:21:27 -0000

I know very few people under 30 who have any income to save.

Re: How to Save for Retirement in One Easy Step - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:30:23 -0000

Chemical Engineers with just a Bachelor's? Last person I knew who went to work in that field started with an income of $40K, and quite a bit of student loans. Difficult to save even 10% of your income and live on your own at the same time with that salary and $800 a month of loans. Most the people I know who went to college are in similar situations. The people who seem to have done the best financially so far are the ones that skipped college and started work during a good economy.

Re: Performance Reviews Get an "Unsatisfactory" From Experts - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:51:42 -0000

Sounds like a difficult employee who isn't being a team player. I'll be sure to bring this up at your next performance review.

Re: How I Stabilized the U.S. Debt - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:02:47 -0000

(counting tax expenditure elimination as a tax increase)

So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.

Re: Kenneth Starr Charged With Running $30 Million Ponzi Scheme - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:34:55 -0000

Geesh...has that guy not seen Kill Bill? Uma Thurman is not a lady I'd like to piss off.

Re: Drug Patents: Prescription for Problems - Business - The Atlantic

dmcgregor — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:48:24 -0000

I've got a question on the Hatch-Waxman 5 year exclusivity provision maybe you can answer. I was always under the impression that it was an either/or type of situation with regards to the patent. That is, if your NME comes to market with 4 years left on the patent you would get 5 years of protection (ignoring potential generic challenge for now). Conversely, if the NME comes to market with 6 years of patent protection left than Hatch-Waxman basically gives you nothing (assuming not an orphan drug or pediatric exclusivity).

The other day though a colleague who I expect knows this area much better than I do said that the Hatch-Waxman gets added on to the end of the patent term. So if you come to market with 5 years of patent left, than Hatch-Waxman will give you an additional 5 years at the end, for a total of 10. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, so I was hoping someone could confirm one way or the other?

In general it seems that data exclusivity, separate and apart from patents, is the best way to address these types of issues, rather than trying to reform the entire patent process (which probably needs to be done anyway, but is a bigger can of worms if you still want patents to be applicable to all types of inventions from widgets, to software, to drugs).