Loose $8.4 Billion and be eligible for $160 mil severance Package.

Stan O’Neil, the CEO of Merrill Lynch got canned today for loosing $8.4 billion last quarter speculating in sub prime mortgages. His severance package includes vested stock options worth $36.8 mil, yet to vest stock options $86 mil, 24.8 mil in retirement benefits and 4.8 mil of “defered compensation” (a tax dodge). Not bad for a guy who racked up the biggest loss in Merrill Lynch history. I shudder to think what the retirement bennies are for a CEO who actually makes money.

Plastic Panic

The News Hour with Jim Lehrer reported that a chemical used to make polycarbonate plastic (the clear hard stuff used for Nalgenes and plastic baby bottles, among many other things), is suspected of being harmful to humans. Scene shift to a comfortable living room full of mothers and small babies. The babies are all sucking on plastic bottles. The mothers are all upset that the plastic might be doing bad things to their babies. Some of them announced plans to convert back to glass bottles. None of them mentioned going back to breast feeding. Scene shift, a scientific conference issuing a report using the phrase “great concern”. Then a lady scientist in her lab, white lab coat and all, expressing “grave concern”. Then another conference issuing another report saying “no cause for alarm”, and a male scientist (sport coat and tie, no white lab coat) saying “no problem”.

I know little to nothing about organic chemistry, so I have no idea which side is right on this one. But I’m glad my ex-wife breast fed our three children and I will recommend my daughter do the same when the time comes. And I think I’ll start buying my whiskey in glass bottles. None of this

The price of Greenness.

Some real numbers on hybrid cars.

Car Cost,new MPG (City&Hwy)
Toyota Corolla $14926 32
Toyota Prius $22110 46
Cadillac Deville $42790 25
Lexus GS450h $52065 24

Sorry that the columns don't line up, blogger has it's own ideas about justifying text.

Prius costs so much more than the Corolla that you won't recover the costs thru savings on gas anytime soon. The car will be sold before the owner breaks even. Caddy costs less and gets better gas mileage than the Lexus. Plus the Caddy Northstar engine has enough power to beat the Lexus off the stoplights.

The mark of an advanced economy

I'm getting my exercise, walking down a rural back road the other day. Along the way a bright yellow backhoe is putting in a new septic system for a small ski lodge. Despite the fresh yellow paint on the backhoe, it isn't a Caterpillar, it's a Hyundai, come all the way from South Korea. That's a long way from northern New Hampshire. Obviously the Hyundai people have created a machine good enough to compete successfully with the best (Caterpillar) .
I tried to think how many other countries are good enough to export manufactured goods to the North American market. Japan, South Korea, China, Germany, England, Sweden and probably a few others that don't come readily to mind. But compared to the 192 nations that are UN members, it's a short list. Maybe we should rank nations as first world, second world, third world and so on by looking at who can export manufactured goods to who. First world would be limited to those nations that can export the the US. Third world would be the countries that don't manufature or don't export. Second world might be all the in-betweens.

Big new hanger at Groom Lake (aka Area 51)

The new hanger is recently closed in. Siding and roof are up, which is most of the work, there is little finish carpentry to do in an aircraft hanger. It's 185 by 350 feet, large enough to accept most large aircraft such as B1, B2, c17. The interesting part of the Aviation Week article is how little they really know about what's going on inside the Groom lake fence. They describe earthworks and towers, all "purpose unknown". The best photos come from commercial satellites, available to anyone. Aviation Week has a well earned and longstanding reputation for knowing nearly everything. In this case it looks like Groom Lake security has been tight enough to foil even Aviation Week.

What kind of war are we fighting? And can we win it?

Title of the lead article in this month’s Commentary magazine. Fifteen notable foreign policy experts agree that we are fighting World War IV against Islamic extremists, and that it can be won, but it is going to be hard. The experts:

Fouad Ajami Johns Hopkins University

John Bolton US ambassador to the UN 2005-2006

Max Boot Council on Foreign Relations. Author

Reuel Marc Gerecht American Enterprise Institute, Author

Victor Davis Hanson Hoover Institute, Author

Daniel Henninger Deputy editor, Wall St. Journal

Martin Kramer Institute for Near East Policy

William Kristol Editor, Weekly Standard

Andrew C. McCarthy Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

David Pryce-Jones Author of “Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews

Claudia Rosett Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

Amir Taheri Former editor of Khayan, an Iranian newspaper

Ruth Wedgewood Hoover Institution

James Q. Wilson Pepperdine University

R. James Woolsey Former Director of Central Intelligence

For Malpractice suits try a fetal heart rate monitor

Long WSJ article about obstetricians, fetal heart rate monitors, rates of Cesarean section, and malpractice suits. It brought back memories. Twenty years ago I designed a fetal heart rate monitor. It is an electronic instrument that is now mandatory during birth and delivery. It creates a paper graph displaying the fetal heart rate in beats per minute. Normal fetal heart rate is around 140 beats per minute, and it varies up and down during birth. A prolonged drop in fetal heart rate is a bad sign (“fetal distress”). If the fetal heart rate remains low, most obstetricians will opt for a Cesarean section. As you might expect rates of Cesarean section have jumped from 7% in the 1970’s (before the instrument was in widespread use) to 25% today (where every birth and delivery room has one).

It would be nice to conclude that high technology and skillful surgery have improved the quality of life. Unfortunately that happens not to be the case. No one can point to an improvement in the infant mortality rate. The same percentage of babies die today as they did before the fetal heart rate monitor was invented. Thousands of monitors at $10,000 each and a million more Cesarean sections a year have not improved a baby’s chances of survival to age one. The obvious conclusion is that many of the Cesarean sections are unnecessary.

Malpractice suits are driving this trend. Of all the medical specialists, obstetricians are the most likely to be sued. If they don’t use the fetal heart rate monitor, that’s grounds for a suit. If they don’t call for a Cesarean section after the monitor shows fetal distress, they get sued. In fact, whenever anything goes wrong, they get sued, in which case the fetal heart monitor paper chart goes to court and experts interpret the traces for the jury. The defendant’s lawyer will summon experts to testify that the obstetrician did every thing right; the plaintiff’s lawyer will summon experts to show the opposite.

In short, a technological advance has managed to raise costs without improving anything.