I will be blogging every day from now until Oct. 31. If I don't blog one day, then email me anytime before then and I'll give you a dollar next time I see you.

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Top chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bottom chart from Gallup. Hope they enjoyed the auto bailouts.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

I like The Daily Show. It's probably the closest thing on my TV to actual coverage. I've laughed at the jokes they tell and the hypocrisy they point out in cable news. I'm glad Stewart is willing to take people like Jim Cramer on, even though his show is on Comedy Central. One of their classic bits - which runs pretty much every day - is to run some commentary from cable news, or point out hypocrisy between something Republican commentators say and what they were saying when Bush was in office. Here's an example:

www.thedailyshow.com

This was funny, until I realized that cable news anchors aren't being paid to make sense, have consistent worldviews, tell the truth, or any other things we'd expect from experts. The only reason I thought it was funny is because we expect talking heads to be rational people. Sadly, American cable news viewers don't care for the truth; I think they're more interested in confirming their own worldview and disdaining/getting outraged at whatever the other side's doing. I'm surprised that people are amused by clips that point out hypocrisies in cable news. These bits are funny in the same limited way that Happiest People Ever, Shit My Dad Says and the DC Interns blog are funny; in a very specific way, that's good for about five seconds of laughs. I know this recipe works well for Comedy Central but I'm wondering if Stewart can't evolve his show a little bit. Perhaps I'm demanding too much of someone whose show runs on a comedy channel. I'll part with the video of Stewart ending Tucker Carlson's career on Crossfire.

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I was pretty disappointed by this show. The idea has promise - a divorced, broke, washed up high school football star resorts to prostitution to make ends meet and curry favor with the kids. His pimp is a wannabe poet, an artsy woman who is ill-suited for the smooth talking and innuendo that the job requires. In the hands of semi-competent writers this would lead to comedy gold. Unfortunately, Hung is not very funny. The two main characters keep screwing up the prostitution gig - but in ways that aren't really too funny, like Ray (the main character) falling for a client or Tanya getting suckered into providing free service. His kids are the complete rejection of Ray - out of shape, gothic, unpopular - but I can't really believe them being the dad's children. Furthermore you could tell from the second episode on that the show is setting up for Ray's ex-wife to order his services, there's no real way around it. The show's billed as a comedy, but I fail to see the humor. I should have stopped watching way earlier than I did.

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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

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

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.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.