Aug 5, 2013 | Politics
From Job seeker Vicky Harrison commits suicide after she was rejected for 200 jobs | Mail Online:A bright 21-year-old killed herself after more than 200 unsuccessful job applications.Vicky Harrison had dreamed of a career as a teacher or a television producer, but gave up hope for the future, her family said yesterday. A day after her latest rejection, and on the eve of her fortnightly trip to sign on, she wrote heartbreaking notes to her parents and boyfriend saying 'I don't want to be me any more' and took a huge drug overdose.
[...] Mr Harrison added: 'I think she was upset that she had no money and she felt she was losing touch with her friends because she couldn't go
out. She never wanted any charity and that is why she was so desperate for work.
'What upsets us so much is that there are obviously so many other people in a similar position.'
[...] Critics say Labour policies are creating a 'lost generation' of school leavers unable to find employment.
Comments Carl Svanberg:This tragic story really breaks my heart. Unfortunately, the case of Vicky Harrison is far from unique.
Unemployment tends to make people anxious and depressed. I would, therefore, argue that Vicky Harrison is, in this respect, yet another... casualty of the welfare state.
Why? Because the welfare state is the *primary* cause of unemployment. In part, because of all the high taxes required to finance the welfare state. In part, because of minimum wage laws, pushing out the least productive, and laws granting the unions the power to enforce *de facto* minimum wages, pushing out the more productive.
Since these, and other welfare state policies, create unemployment, they also drive desperate, anxious and depressed people into suicide.
If we want a more humane society, a society where people are free to pursue their own lives and happiness, where the government doesn't stop people from offering and taking jobs, then the welfare state has got to go.
Aug 5, 2013 | Business, Politics
India's Walmart of Heart Surgery Cuts the Cost by 98% - Businessweek
Devi Shetty keeps photographs of Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi on his desk, and he’s obsessed with making cardiac surgery affordable for millions of Indians. But these two facts are not connected. Shetty’s a heart surgeon-turned-businessman who founded a chain of 21 medical centers around India. Every bit the capitalist, he has trimmed costs by buying cheaper scrubs and spurning air-conditioning and other efficiencies. That’s helped cut the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,555)—half of what it was 20 years ago. He wants to get it down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, according to data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.“It shows that costs can be substantially contained,” says Srinath Reddy, president of the Geneva-based World Heart Federation. “It’s possible to deliver very high-quality cardiac care at a relatively low cost.”Medical experts like Reddy are watching closely to see if Shetty’s severe cost-cutting can serve as a model for making life-saving heart operations more profitable and more accessible to patients in India and other emerging nations. “The current price of everything that you see in health care is predominantly opportunistic pricing and the outcome of inefficiency,” says Shetty, who opened his flagship hospital, Narayana Hrudayalaya Health City, in Bangalore in 2001.
Aug 4, 2013 | Business, Politics, Sci-Tech
Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) has published flow charts (also referred to as “Sankey Diagrams”) of energy use. This allows energy to be "visualized as it flows from resources (Coal, Oil, Natural Gas, etc.), through transformations (electricity generation) to end uses (Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Transportation)."
Walter Hickey over at Business Insider makes a few poignant observations:- Renewables — Hydro, geothermal, wind and solar — are still absurdly tiny in the grand scheme of things, despite significant investment and recent growth.
- The amount of rejected energy — that's energy lost in transportation — should make every American wince. It's just shocking how much energy is lost due to grid inefficiencies, heat waste, and exhaust.
- Petroleum runs cars and industry, but nowhere near as much electrical generation as one might expect.
- Natural Gas use has grown, driven almost entirely by use in electrical generation. Coal use has demonstrably shrunk.
- Nuclear power declined since 2011, which is disappointing due to how inexpensive it is.
Also of interest are "Carbon Flows":
Aug 3, 2013 | Politics
Sound advice from Heike Larson at LePort Schools:
Does a parent have to choose between learning and fun?We don’t think so. In our view, the learning vs. fun trade-off is a false alternative, and in practice the most profoundly joyous childhood environment is precisely the one which best satisfies a child’s cognitive needs.Children by nature are curious about the world. They are capable of an astounding amount of early learning when given the freedom to explore to their heart’s content, particularly in an environment of carefully prepared engaging, meaningful explorative activities. In such a setting, learning so-called academic skills, such as handwriting or arithmetic, is experienced as a playful, enjoyable activity. The pleasure and deep satisfaction of such concentrated engagement is natural and to-be-expected because it is consistent with the actual needs of the child. Psychologically, the satisfaction derived is exactly the satisfaction that comes from play. As Maria Montessori put it, “play is the child’s work.” [Play vs. Work: A Wrong Alternative]
Aug 3, 2013 | Politics
Writes Walter Williams at Capitalism Magazine on Black Self-Sabotage:
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94 percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it’s 22 times that of whites. I’d like for the president, the civil rights establishment, white liberals and the news media, who spent massive resources protesting the George Zimmerman trial’s verdict, to tell the nation whether they believe that the major murder problem blacks face is murder by whites. There are no such protests against the thousands of black murders.
Aug 2, 2013 | Politics
Attorney Thomas Bowden draws some interesting parallels between the Apple antitrust persecution and the persecution of Rearden Metal in Ayn Rand's epic best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged:
In Rand’s novel, the particular law that necessitated a Washington-installed monitor was designed to control sales of a brand-new metal, demand for which far outstripped supply. The law mandated that each customer receive a “fair share” of the popular metal. What’s a “fair share?” The law didn’t say—and so a monitor (nicknamed the “Wet Nurse”) was sent to the factory, to substitute his dictates for the owners’ decisions. Here’s a passage from the novel:
Nobody had known how to determine what constituted a fair share of what amount. Then a bright young boy just out of college had been sent to him from Washington, as Deputy Director of Distribution. After many telephone conferences with the capital, the boy announced that customers would get five hundred tons of the Metal each, in the order of the dates of their applications. Nobody had argued against his figure. There was no way to form an argument; the figure could have been one pound or one million tons, with the same validity. The boy had established an office at the Rearden mills, where four girls took applications for shares of Rearden Metal. At the present rate of the mills’ production, the applications extended well into the next century.
Read the rest of In Apple antitrust case, life imitates Atlas Shrugged.
Walter Hickey over at 