Rotundus.com

"Death panels" is a terrible, politically motivated terms for it but, as I recently linked healthcare rationing seems to be necessary and seems to generally be done in public healthcare systems.

Whether healthcare rationing needs to be done was the subject of the latest Intelligence Squared US debate.

The results show the closest to a unanimous vote that I recall having ever seen in one of these debates (the video of which is online, but which I haven't yet gotten around to viewing). What were the results (figures are percentages)?:

Shockingly, a system with finite resources can't spend infinite amounts of money. Of course there's also the need to apply many of the same measures to other types of data. Consider Table 1 on p. 58 of this Cato report on the subject of spending on life saving initiatives (I'd link to a journal paper, but the relevant ones seem all gated).

What the Cato report notes is that some measures adopted seem quite affordable (less than $100,000/life in 1995 dollars) whereas at the other extreme there's a case involving an estimated ~$17 trillion in spending per life saved (1995 dollars) - more than the entire US GDP for the most recent year.

Beyond a certain point, you're better off investing in alternative measures - that same Cato report plots in Table 2 a few different estimates of the point beyond which spending that much to save a life actually statistically will increase mortality.

Green lights for wet cyclists in Groningen

"Groningen city council is to install sensors in some traffic lights which will reduce waiting times for cyclists in the rain and snow, Nos television reports." In Canada we'd need to start by first installing bike traffic lights - or perhaps here you could at least operate crosswalks more often in the rain or snow.

Is Applying for Jobs Online Not an Effective Way to Find Work?

The problems of resume keyword screening software: "Somebody told me that they had 29,000 people apply for a reasonably standard engineering position, and nobody made it through the screening process. The software told them nobody was qualified."

Same-Day Delivery Test at Wal-Mart

Unlike Amazon, who as I mentioned said this would be uneconomical, WalMart has enough stores kicking around already to actually do this.

Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School

The kind of addictive drugs that society doesn't wage war on though not usually taken to these extremes: "Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance."

(As I've mentioned a multitude of times, per the US Department of Labor: "differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and ... the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct." Of course, if your version of feminism is opposed to women having the freedom to make choices other than with regard to abortion ...)

HT: 22 Words

The Economics of All-You-Can-Eat Buffets

"What do health insurance and all-you-can-eat buffets have in common? The economic theory of adverse selection tells us that neither should exist." Typically full of mediocre food - I'm not a fan.

A complete solution for oil-spill cleanup

"Scientists are describing what may be a "complete solution" to cleaning up oil spills -- a superabsorbent material that sops up 40 times its own weight in oil and then can be shipped to an oil refinery and processed to recover the oil. "

Self-portrait of a tree as a young sapling

I kind of like it.

Inside the Mind of Worry

"Work on the neural roots of fear by the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux of New York University, and others, has found that in the complex interplay of slower, conscious reason and quicker, subconscious emotion and instinct, the basic architecture of the brain ensures that we feel first and think second. ... just as we are too afraid of some things, this same “feelings and facts” system works the other way too, sometimes leaving us inadequately concerned about bigger risks."