Archive for September, 2008
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
U.S. Cars: Now Devouring $1.5 Trillion a Year
I’ve been busy trying to finish my book about corporate capitalism’s addiction to perpetuating cars-first transportation in the United States, no matter the cost.
As part of this work, I just updated my estimate of the annual expenditures we Americans are compelled to make on this arrangement. The number is now at $1.5 trillion dollars a year.
Here are a few thoughts on that staggering figure:
Only 7 countries on Earth have a Gross Domestic Product (i.e., an entire national economy) that exceeds $1.5 trillion per year.
The gargantuan U.S. expenditure on autos-über-alles is actually substantially lower than it properly should be, if the maintainence and construction of automotive roads and bridges were keeping pace with the technical requirements for non-worsening operation. How extreme the shortfall in road-building might be is something to contemplate in your next traffic jam.
Note that the $1.5 billion figure excludes the indirect costs imposed by autos-über-alles: increased medical and legal expenses caused by car crashes, for example.
Overall, the vast economic wastefulness of the whole arrangement is matched by equally huge missed opportunities. As the great Jared Diamond says:
Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.
Or as I myself argue in my the forthcoming book:
As our schools crumble, our library close, and tens of millions of us go without health insurance, we Americans in 2008 spent 1.5 trillion dollars buying, equipping, fixing, fueling, parking, insuring, and road-building for our cars.i What kind of Charlie-and-the-Chocolate-Factory transportation system would we now have, had we spent on railroads, bike paths, and pedestrians-first cities even half what we’ve spent on automobiles over the last century? How nice would our towns, schools, hospitals, and insurance programs be if we could stop squandering so many resources on automotive goods and services?
$1.5 trillion, by the way, is more than 60 times the annual expenditure of SNCF, the French national railroad system, which is widely regarded as the most comprehensive and luxurious in the world.
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Truth in Advertising: Bill Gates is a Clown
Bill Gates and Microsoft have always been poster boys for the connection between being first (a.k.a. lucky timing) and having power. Those who accumulate advantages before others tend to keep them, not least because they also tend to divert some of their advantages to pre-empting and crushing those who come along later.
I can also swear as a heavy word processor that Microsoft Word is sharply inferior for the purpose of writing a social science book manuscript to both of its main rivals, Word Perfect and Open Office Writer. The latter, in fact, is distinctly superior to both WP and MS Word, neither of which possess OO Writer’s power and flexibility in the vital tasks surrounding footnote and endnote management.
Open Office Writer, by the way, is open-source and absolutely free. As such, its superiority is a powerful refutation of Bill Gates’ infamous claim that excellent open-source software [and, by extension, all public-spirited, not-for-profit industry] is an impossibility.
I mention all this as background for observing that Microsoft and Gates are now attempting to rescue their horrendously bloated, hiccup-riddled Windows Vista operating system software by means of what has to be one of the worst advertisements in modern television history.
As the business and techie presses have been reporting, the core idea behind this unfunny, irrelevant, woefully leaden effort is distraction from the product in question:
Worse yet, the main distraction strategy seems to be heaping massively counter-factual “genius” praise on Bill Gates.
The ad attempts its odious misdirection by means of this long-in-coming exchange between Gates and the epically over-rated and unfunny Jerry Seinfeld:
Jerry: “You now, I imagine over the years you’ve mind-melded your magnum Jupiter brain to those other Saturn-ringed brains at Microsoft.”
Bill: “I have.”
The viewer, of course, is supposed to “know” that Gates is the mega-brain who invented personal computer software.
The truth, of course, is that, to the small extent he’s noteworthy at all for anything other than his Satanic “personal” fortune, Gates has always been much more a shrewd deal-maker than a computer innovator. Chasing cash and wielding monopoly power is his game. Mundane business maneuvers, however, are hardly the stuff of genius.
And, besides, what genius would ever have authorized release of this D.O.A. turd of a marketing campaign?
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
Murderous Fraud
As we Americans haplessly continue to search for a way to bring human decency — a.k.a. public non-profit “single-payer” universal coverage, a.k.a. actual insurance — to health insurance, we remain miles from raising the next obvious topic: the extreme underlying conflict between money-making and medical practice.
The latest evidence of this un-discussed elephant-in-the-room lies in today’s New York Times, and involves our old friend, Vytorin:
When the Food and Drug Administration approved a new type of cholesterol-lowering medicine in 2002, it did so on the basis of a handful of clinical trials covering a total of 3,900 patients. None of the patients took the medicine for more than 12 weeks, and the trials offered no evidence that it had reduced heart attacks or cardiovascular disease, the goal of any cholesterol drug.
The lack of evidence has not stopped doctors from heavily prescribing that drug, whether in a stand-alone form sold as Zetia or as a combination medicine called Vytorin. Aided by extensive consumer advertising, sales of the medicines reached $5.2 billion last year, making them among the best-selling drugs in the world. More than three million people worldwide take either drug every day.
But there is still no proof that the drugs help patients live longer or avoid heart attacks. This year Vytorin has failed two clinical trials meant to show its benefits. Worse, scientists are debating whether there is a link between the drugs and cancer.
Researchers reported last month that patients in three clinical trials had a 40 percent higher chance of dying from cancer if they took Vytorin instead of a sugar pill or another medicine, although the leader of that study says the finding might be due to chance.
Now some prominent cardiologists say that the evidence has swung so decisively against the drugs that they should not be sold. “The only place people should be taking it is in a clinical trial,” Dr. Allen J. Taylor of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center said of Zetia. (Vytorin is a single pill that combines Zetia with a statin, an older form of cholesterol-lowering medicine whose effectiveness and safety are not in question.)
Merck and Schering-Plough, which jointly make Vytorin and Zetia, strongly defend their medicines. The companies say that ezetimibe, the generic name for Zetia, showed no cancer risk in animal trials and argue that the cancer finding is probably a result of chance.
Just a few issues there, no?
The response? None. The market simply cannot be interfered with. The people need their only-possibly cancer-causing worse-than-placebos. Clearly, public enterprise could never achieve such superb results!
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
Information Control
Apologists for corporate capitalism love to equate it with freedom. Big Brother would be proud of this claim, and jealous of its success.
The truth is that corporate capitalism/market totalitarianism is as dependent on information control as state totalitarianism was.
If you doubt this, inquire.
You might start by watching the first 2 minutes of this video, which shows “Mythbusters” host Adam Savage explaining how the credit-card corporations squashed his show’s expose of the extreme ease of hacking/stealing RFID codes, which are now widely used (and heavily advertised as a great breakthrough) to speed up credit-card purchases.
This story is the tiniest tip of a humongous, virtually un-discussed iceberg.
