A doctor in NYC has come up with a barebones way to reduce health costs:
Hi, America, is it too late to propose a new health care plan? Because Dr. John Muney has an idea. The AMG Medical Group, which he founded last year, offers a $79-a-month buffet of unlimited office visits. [...] For $79 a person, it’s almost unheard of in New York, though AMG’s plan should not be confused with insurance, and it does not cover hospitalization or specialists.
But of course the whole arrangement was a little too convenient for the government:
Such service is unusual enough to have attracted the attention of the New York State Insurance Department, which last year informed AMG that it could not continue to offer the $79 plan. It amounted to unlicensed insurance, the department said, but AMG’s profit margin was too narrow to prepare for unexpected situations (like 500 people showing up at once with the flu). As a compromise, Dr. Muney agreed to charge $33 extra for sick visits.
Foreign Policy has an excellent article about the ubiquitous smuggling tunnels sustaining the Gazan economy. Apparently the smuggling market has become incredibly saturated:
One smuggler, who used to ply his business in the days of the Israeli occupation when a single shipment of weapons could earn him $5,000, bemoaned the fact that there were so many tunnels these days that he barely earned $50 per load. Indeed, some commodities are now actually cheaper than when they were imported from Israel, with the lower cost of goods originating from Egypt offsetting the cost of smuggling them in. On the days when the [Palestinian Authority] pays salaries and Gazans go shopping, some tunnel operators find it more profitable to drive a taxi.
Apparently the banalization of the tunnels has been pretty complete:
This set the stage for a number of fraudulent schemes that came to light last summer, with Gazans of modest means investing in tunnels that turned out not to exist. Tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen in this way, and some suggested senior members of Hamas might somehow be implicated. The Hamas government arranged partial compensation of the victims.
For all previous posts on the Gazan smuggling tunnels, check the archive.
The German weekly Der Spiegel has a report about the unintended consequences of child labor laws in one Pakistani city known for producing soccer balls. Apparently children were frequently employed in the factories, until child labor "advocates" in the West forced companies like Nike and Adidas to ensure that their suppliers weren't employing children. But what happened to the kids? Surely after they were freed from their toiling in the factories they went to school and now have well-paying office jobs, right?
Parents now send their children to the brickworks and into metalworking companies where no one is worried about corporate image. The families need the money to survive. The local sports companies are aware of what's happened but they want to fulfil the wishes of their Western customers. After all, the people who spend a lot of money on footballs want to do so with a clear conscience. The customer in a sports retail outlet doesn't realize that young girls are now hauling bricks right next door to Danayal, the stitching factory.
"Ten or 12-year-olds were well off here," says one manager who asked not to be named. "They learned a trade here that secured them an income for life. Now we're having trouble finding new stitchers."
Something tells me that making bricks is considerably more difficult and hazardous than sewing soccer balls, and probably pays less. Let's just hope they don't shut down the brick factory, too, or prostitution might be their next job.
Whoa, this is a pretty damning indictment of a sitting pope:
In 1980, the future pope reviewed the case of Father Hullermann, who was accused of sexually abusing boys in the Diocese of Essen, including forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The future pope approved his transfer to Munich.
It would be one thing if the then Archbishop Ratzinger had totally ignored the allegations – at least then he could say that he didn't believe them. But the fact that he moved to Munich "for therapy" indicates that Ratzinger had at least some inclination that something was amiss.
...and passes with flying colors:
What’s Wikileaks, the net’s foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list of email addresses belonging to the site’s confidential donors as a leaked document? [...]
Wikileaks, which has been criticized for lacking discretion in deciding whether to release documents or not, published the email and the donors’ email addresses on Wednesday. The entry noted that the email was submitted "possibly to test the project’s principles of complete impartiality when dealing with whistleblowers."
One notable email address belongs to convicted former hacker Adrian Lamo, who now runs his own security company. In a Twitter post on Saturday, Lamo noted the screw-up, writing "Thanks WikiLeaks, for leaking your donor list.[...] That’s dedication." See more in his comment to this story.
Yet another way in which Obama's high-speed rail plans are derailing actual progress in getting Americans out of their cars:
BUENA PARK, Calif. — Mayor Art Brown spent years pushing for a commuter train station combined with nearby housing in his community. But as townhouses are being finished around the $14 million Metrolink station, he's facing the prospect that California's high-speed rail line may plow right through his beloved project.
"The only option they presented to us was either losing the condo units or losing our train station," Brown said of an engineering presentation to city leaders last year.
That a successful effort to get car-dependent Californians to embrace mass transit could be derailed by another transportation project may strike some as ironic. But it's also one of the hidden costs — and a potential harbinger of delay — in the ambitious plan that would enable passengers to speed the 430 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 2 1/2 hours.
By the way, the projected cost of a one-way ticket on the high-speed rail line from LA to SF has risen from $55 to $105. Despite the fact that intraurban trips account for the vast majority of transportation use in America, the Obama administration and other politicians prefer to focus on expensive boondoggles like high-speed rail, often at the expense of more mundane, but much more important local projects like these.
I've heard a lot of nasty things about the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, where NJ Nets owner Bill Ratner wants to use a combinatino of eminent domain and state giveaways to build a heavily subsidized basketball stadium and 16 mixed use high-rises, but I didn't realize that ACORN was also in on it:
New York, in short, would give Ratner an unfair advantage, and he would return some of the profits reaped from that advantage by creating the “economic benefits” favored by the planning classes. Architecture critics loved Frank Gehry’s design for the arena. Race activist Al Sharpton loved the promise of thousands of minority jobs. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) loved the prospect of administering the more than 2,000 units of “affordable” housing planned for the development, as well as the $1.5 million in loans and grants that Ratner gave it outright. When the state held public hearings in 2006 to decide whether to approve Atlantic Yards, hundreds of supplicants, hoping for a good job or a cheap apartment, easily drowned out the voices of people like Goldstein, who wanted nothing from the government except the right to keep their homes.
Quoteth New Geography (albeit uncited):
As the mainland has given rise to rapidly-growing and increasingly prosperous 1st tier metropolises, there are now almost 110 cities with more than 1 million people in China.
Apparently half of Russia's cell phones are smuggled into the country:
Counterfeit phones currently make up 2 percent to 3 percent of the Russian market, according to estimates by Mobiset.ru, a telecoms portal. Total contraband phones, a category that includes both counterfeit and authentic phones that have been smuggled into the country, account for about half of all mobile phones currently sold in Russia.
It sounds shocking at first, but I wonder if the rate isn't much different from that of other ordinary products like cigarettes and computers.
And by the way, the English-language Moscow Times is a surprisingly good paper.
