A sad paragraph of a Rolling Stone piece on the massive failure called War on Drugs:

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 — and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels — doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

This makes much more sense if you consider that the drug czar and other Washington politicians are much more interested in signaling that they are fighting drugs in America than actually doing something about the problem. Until signaling theory hits the mainstream, let's keep throwing money into a giant hole.

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Dean Kamen, defending innovation in healthcare:

The reason 100 years ago everyone could afford their healthcare is because healthcare was a doctor giving you some elixir and telling you you'll be fine. And if it was a cold you would be fine. And if it turns out it was consumption; it was tuberculosis; it was lung cancer—you could still sit there. He'd give you some sympathy, and you'd die. Either way, it's pretty cheap. We now live in a world where technology has triumphed, in many ways, over death. The problem with that is that it's enormously expensive. And big pharmaceutical giants and big medical products companies have stopped working on stuff that could be extraordinary because they know they won't be reimbursed, according to the common standards. We're not only rationing today; we're rationing our future.

I agree with him but add the following points. 1. Healthcare is expensive for two reasons: new treatments and machines are expensive and also doctors are ordering many tests and wasteful care because it's in their incentive to do so. 2. Insurance companies also have tremendous bargaining power, which means they only pay a fraction of what hospitals actually bill them. The result is hospitals bill more and more so the fraction rises. The uninsured actually have to pay the full amounts. I don't regard this as a good thing; see the discussion here. 3. We could keep the incentive for private companies, without patents, by offering large government prizes for innovation in healthcare, say, a $1 trillion prize for a cure for diabetes. Of course, that cure could be massively expensive to implement, but over time things become cheaper. General comments on healthcare: 4. Navarchos summarizes the problems with the current healthcare system very well, in about three paragraphs. If you are confused about what everyone is yelling about, and what Congress wants to fix start there. H/t Matt Steinglass. 5. I agree that our healthcare system has serious flaws but I have serious misgivings about the ability of the Congress to pass a bill that would make things better. There are too many people with a vested interest: insurers, hospitals, the elderly, the unemployed, businesses, etc. Furthermore any bill must address a number of different issues: it must address adverse selection, problems with an employer-based system, more coverage for the uninsured, and cutting expensive and rising costs at hospitals (for the waste reasons above), and we need some way to pay for it. 6. How do you tell a loved one "The treatment to save your life (or, more often, extend it by a few months) exists, but is too expensive?" If you haven't read Peter Singer's New York Times article on rationing yet, you should. I am worried that this problem may bankrupt the country.

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Want to design the book cover for Tim Ferriss's new book? If you win, hope you're happy with a mere $250 first prize:

Best case scenario, you get $250, your cover on a huge international bestseller (awesome for a major portfolio jump), full cover credit, and all the perks that come with massive recognition. Worst case scenario, you give it a shot, have something new for your portfolio, but don’t get recognition or money.

Needless to say, this sparked a huge amount of protest in the comments. Ferriss responds:

For those who think I’m a jerk for offering the above, please feel free to protest by not submitting. Feel free to call me names, too. I find “sweetcakes” particularly offensive.

And again:

To the commenters who insist I’m exploiting the entire design community, I’d like to point out that, if you don’t participate by submitting, it is impossible for me to exploit you.

If a buyer makes a scandalously low offer, there's nothing unfair or exploitative about it: respond by declining the offer. In this case, lots of people want to submit bids, and there isn't that much to differentiate between entrants. If you can't find a higher offer, the odds are that the service you're providing isn't that valuable. It's not so much mean as it is a recognition of what services are worth. The argument is similar for high prices: if a gas station has unfairly high prices, go to a different gas station, or decline to buy gas. If every gas station has the same price, odds are that the price reflects the cost of extracting the gas from the ground and transporting it thousands of miles to its suburban destination. Very quickly, this principle works well for about 999 of 1000 prices, transactions, and contract offers. Some markets have fundamental problems, or take a while to find equilibrium prices, like the healthcare market. Unfortunately these market failures are the ones that get publicized

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I've been making some changes to the blog's design - what do you think? I wanted to make it readable, with a consistent style. Most Athenian grads will recognize the image in the header.

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Some games are better than others; here are some criteria for evaluating a game's strength. How easy would it be for computers to beat humans? I would rank basketball as the toughest game for a team of robots to win, followed by soccer. Baseball would be fairly easy for a team of robots to win. Computers can beat us at chess and checkers. This criteria was suggested by Andy McKenzie. What do you have to do to become really good? I prefer games that involve mastery of strategy over games that involve constant repetition of one activity to become better. In chess, for example, good players have to memorize thousands of opening book combinations. Good tennis players have to practice returning millions of serves so they can return a serve coming at them at 120 mph. Golf players have to hit millions of drives, baseball players have to hit millions of balls in the cage. How susceptible is the game to arbitrary refereeing decisions? This is soccer's main shortcoming; the referees have way too much influence. Same for figure skating. Tennis and baseball have largely solved these problems through technology. How hard is it to explain the game to a newcomer? Basketball, baseball, football, rugby etc are tough to explain to foreigners, and similarly it takes an amount of coordination and practice to become a passable player. Golf is immensely difficult for newcomers. How easy would it be for a newcomer to beat a pro? There is too much luck involved in a game of poker; it's nearly impossible for the best players to survive a field of 10,000 because the game demands they win multiple confrontations where the lower player has a 5%-20% chance of winning. Luck should be involved but not too much. Basketball is a good example - any shot has a chance of going in, and over the long run the team with a higher percentage will win. Soccer games are too dependent on luck; it's rare for teams to score 3 goals, and it's harder to distinguish between teams. How many different ways are there to achieve the target objective? In basketball, you can beat a team by playing tough defense, by getting every rebound, by shooting well, or by not turning the ball over. Every team has its strengths and weaknesses. Settlers of Catan is such a good board game because there are several different winning strategies. Does professional play discriminate among the population? The NBA has one player below six feet. Most players in the NFL and MLB are huge (and can move well). Golf and soccer tilt much more in the favor of people who have played for a long amount of time. Are the games the pros play just extensions of games kids play, where the participants are bigger and better? This is an extension of the robot question. In golf, baseball, and most board games the players do the same things over and over again, regardless of the level of play. Great soccer and basketball require advanced strategy and great teamwork. There are not that many great team games. Every position in football is boring, except for head coach and quarterback. Lacrosse involves too much standing around off the ball and too much emphasis on one-on-one play. I think that we can design better games than the ones we currently play, although it's hard to knock off favorites. Look at Monopoly, a game that takes 2-3 hours and has no real strategy, yet is one of the most popular around the world. Flirting and mating, the game men and women play when they grow up, may be one of the best games on the planet. The players are sorted ruthlessly. "The Game" also requires coordination.

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I'd like to learn more about writing/telling/speaking excellent stories. Besides holding readings at my local library, any suggestions about where to start? On a related note why aren't there more classes for this at school? Perhaps the Bible counts.

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As a kid, I loved building sets. I loved pouring out all the pieces, following the instructions and watching a giant machine evolve out of small parts. I still have a giant Rube Goldberg ball machine in the attic, with three different towers involved. I used to dream about making a pinball machine out of Knex but only made the flippers. KNEX controls the entire product; they manufacture the pieces, create the designs and box the kits, resulting in a pretty limited product line. In today's day that's not logical - if you sell a product where half the fun is in customization, and the other half is building the sets, why are they only selling designs they themselves created? Let users propose new designs and work with them to release manuals and custom kits. Give them a cut of the profits and you make the product much more interesting. Imagine surfing designs on the website , all in pictures and videos: four different ball factory designs, a car, a spider that moves, a working printing press, a working arm, a Turing machine, etc. Anything you want to build, you order with one click. Knex puts the necessary pieces in a bag, runs off the instructions and mails it - there should be close to constant returns to scale. They should be taking advantage of their most creative users' creations.

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