bidness
mikethemadbiologist | May 29, 2008Even using conservative measures, the Bush economy has underperformed. Mind you, I prefer measures like the real unemployment rates, various measures of economic equality, the median wage, and other Dirty Fucking Hippie statistics. But if you're the kind of person who thinks the economy is best described by the rise and fall of stock indices, well, it sucks to be you too. The Dark Wraith summarizes the markets' from January 22, 2001 through March 2, 2007:
The striking results were that real (that is, inflation-adjusted) returns on investment in standard, well-balanced index portfolios had…
mikethemadbiologist | May 25, 2008This week, when McCain fired some lobbyists from his campaign, other lobbyists have been complaining how much this hurt them (italics mine):
More than a few Republican lobbyists in Washington are scratching their heads these days, asking: So this is the thanks we get?
It was a small band of loyal lobbyists who stood by presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain last August when his campaign went broke and his White House aspirations seemed doomed.
They raised money for him under impossible odds and kept him company in budget hotels during his darkest days.
Now they are under…
mikethemadbiologist | May 23, 2008The New York Times has a disturbing article today about secret funds given to researchers by Big Tobacco with lots of strings attached. The whole article is worth a read, but this little paragraph makes it absolutely clear why tenure and academic freedom are not trivial things:
A tenured scientist at Virginia Commonwealth, who would not be interviewed for attribution because he said he feared retribution against his junior colleagues, called the contract's restrictions, especially the limitations on publication, "completely unacceptable in the research world."
I guarantee junior, untenured…
mikethemadbiologist | April 16, 2008The NY Times has a story about the welcome trend of doctors who refuse to accept industry pay such as consulting fees for sitting on advisory boards. In one case, at least, bloggers played a role (italics mine):
Dr. Peter Libby, chief of cardiovascular medicine at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital, said that when he first began receiving offers from drug companies, in the early 1980s, they seemed like a natural reflection of his burgeoning reputation.
"When you start emerging as an opinion leader or as a researcher who has knowledge and expertise, the pharmaceutical industry takes an…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2008A few days ago, Timothy Egan wrote an op-ed for the NY Times about how universities should spend more on tuition relief:
Last year a record 76 American colleges passed the $1 billion mark in total endowments.
For all of that, you would think there would be some relief from tuition costs that have tripled in 20 years. Or that wealthy universities would be giving back, say, half as much as they are making every year. Or that they would not be charging $21,000 for an American student to live in a mud hut in Africa during a semester abroad. Or that they would give up their taxpayer-financed…
mikethemadbiologist | March 14, 2008In keeping with the Broken Pipeline theme (see ScienceBloglings Greg, Coturnix, and Drug Monkey), this letter to Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) from the Coalition for the Life Sciences about his efforts to shift more funding to the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs seems timely (italics mine):
I am writing on behalf of the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy (JSC) to express our concerns regarding S. 1932 and its intent to double the percentage of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget earmarked for the Small Business…
mikethemadbiologist | March 4, 2008I've written before about how the Collapse of the Jenga of Shit (aka the 'subprime' loan crisis) has raised the price of borrowing money--which is paid for with higher state and local taxes--due to the collapse of bond insurers and a liquidity crisis in municipal bonds. Now your property and sales taxes can take another hike courtesy of ratings agency like Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service, and Fitch Ratings. From the New York Times (italics mine):
If they are right, billions of taxpayers' dollars -- money that could be used to build schools, pave roads and repair bridges --…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2008Rogue Columnist describes how newspaper consolidation--a result of increasing laxity of anti-trust decisions--has damaged newspapers:
-The creation of monopoly markets and, through consolidation, cartels of newspaper ownership. Economic history shows us that monopolies and cartels always commit suicide. Divorced from the imperatives of real competition, monopolies easily slip into a self-centered world of bureaucratic conformity and a desire to protect the status quo. They became slow and rigid, in other words, road kill for competitors.
-Consolidation of newspapers into large, publicly held…
mikethemadbiologist | January 30, 2008New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is doing just fine. From The Boston Courant (Jan. 26, 2008):
Tom Brady, the New England Patriots star quarterback, is a winner on and off the field.
Brady has sold his 314 Commonwealth Avenue condominium for $5.3 million, as reported last week by Banker & Tradesman, turning an approximately $1.2 million profit on the sale to a surburban couple.
Brady purchased the three-bedroom condo in the Burrage House, located at the corner of Comm Ave. and Hereford Street, for $4.1 million in 2004. The 10-room, 3,422-square-foot home comes with three-and-a-…
mikethemadbiologist | January 21, 2008If you're in the U.S., unless you've been living in a cave, you're aware that major banks and investment firms have taken huge financial hits. As a result, they are laying off thousands of workers. This puzzles me.
I understand in the short term why these firms would slash payrolls (I'm not an idiot), but this implies one of three things about these firms' workforces:
These workers weren't needed, and should have never been hired in the first place.
These firms are firing more experienced workers with higher salaries, and replacing them with newer, lower paid workers (and hoping the lack…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2008Ian Welsh makes a very important connection between personal economic incentives and corporate behavior:
What would you do, or rather, what wouldn't you do, if you knew that by working hard for five years you'd have enough money that you need never, ever, work again for the rest of your life? Not just that, but for most executives, you would be rich. Want a house on the Riviera? Want to spend the rest of you[r] life travelling? Have a hobby? Whatever it is, you'll be able to indulge it, because you'll be rich and money is freedom.
So even if, in the end, Merrill Lynch was going to be stuck…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2008The sound you're hearing is the heads of everyone who cares about civil liberties going BOOM! According to the AP, the telephone companies cut off the FISA wiretap programs when they weren't paid on time:
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.
A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.
In at…
mikethemadbiologist | August 3, 2007Last week, Joe Nocera had an excellent piece in the NY Times about how college loans became so exorbitant. Nocera first relates his own college loan experience--in 1974:
...I was constantly falling behind on my payments. The bank that administered my federally guaranteed loans would send a stern notice whenever I got too far behind, which would prompt me to cobble together a few payments by skipping some other bill. Then I would start falling behind again.
Though I found the situation onerous at the time, what strikes me now is how benign it actually was. My bank probably didn't make a dime…
mikethemadbiologist | July 11, 2007Something very interesting in the news about the news--the Chicago Sun has publicly announced its decision to make its op-ed page more liberal. From Editor and Publisher:
The tabloid that shifted toward political conservatism under the brief ownership of Rupert Murdoch more than two decades ago now says that it is "rethinking our stance on several issues, including the most pressing issue facing Americans today: Bush's war in Iraq."
Under marching orders from Publisher John Cruickshank and Editor in Chief Michael Cooke, new Editorial Page Editor Cheryl L. Reed introduced a new Commentary…
mikethemadbiologist | July 5, 2007It's sad that the only way oversight can occur in our Excellent Iraqi Adventure is when one sleazebag contractor rats out another sleazebag contractor (italics mine):
A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards' base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world.
The main builder of the sprawling, 21-building embassy is First Kuwaiti…
mikethemadbiologist | June 23, 2007Anything that lowers the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture is a good way to prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance. Fromt he NY Times:
Tyson Foods, one of the nation's largest poultry producers, said yesterday that it would no longer use antibiotics to raise chicken sold fresh in stores and would start a $70 million advertising campaign to promote the shift.
The company said that fresh chicken raised without antibiotics was shipped to stores Monday and would be sold beginning later this week in packaging that emphasizes there are no artificial ingredients.
"We're…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2007While this particular program on behalf of a religious organization is not nearly as bad as the government-sanctioned anti-Semitism run out of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives*, it still is yet another example of why government and religion require a strict separation:
While all earmarks are troublesome to critics like Mr. Ellis, who called the Canvasback gift an "utter indictment of earmarks," those made for faith-based groups involve special questions about the constitutional borders between church and state.
The Coast Guard ships were given to Canvasback for a secular…
mikethemadbiologist | May 8, 2007Senator Obama earned a lot of points in my book today because he took the leadership of the U.S. auto companies to task for being such retrograde, anti-progress morons. From the NY Times (italics mine):
In a speech that hit hard at the failings of Detroit automakers, Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Japanese companies had done far better than their Detroit counterparts to develop energy efficient vehicles....
"For years, while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in…
mikethemadbiologist | April 6, 2007The AFL-CIO has a very interesting website site that calculates how much CEOs are paid relative to the average U.S. worker. While useful, for many economic conservatives, it won't matter at all, since, well, that's why they're conservatives. But I've devised my own comparison that will matter to even the most doctrinaire conservative:
The annual salary of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve ($186,000).
Since the average CEO of a Standard & Poor 500 company makes $14.78 million, that means that the average CEO makes 79 times more than the Fed Chairman.
I would argue that most…
mikethemadbiologist | March 23, 2007The subprime loan disaster is starting to hit suburbia. And as you might guess, the taxpayer is left to pick up the externalized costs of lenders. From the NY Times (italics mine):
In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation's hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.
In suburbs like this one, officials are installing alarms, fixing broken windows and mowing lawns at the vacant houses in hopes of preventing a snowball effect, in…