zack greinke, wolverine

Just for fun, here's a pretty cool article on Zack Greinke, a baseball phenom who struggled early in his career, and it turns out he had social anxiety disorder. Now that's under control, and he's basically ridiculously amazing this year.

Also, the Wolverine movie comes out this Friday. One guess on whether or not I'm excited. Although I'll NEVER forgive...well, whomever for not making Fatal Attractions into an X-Men movie. It still remains the coolest trade paperback I've ever read, and yes, that includes Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns.

doctors

a couple of interesting articles, courtesy of the new york times, both on doctors:

1. stop pharmaceutical companies from bribing doctors with gifts - the conflict of interest here is obvious, and therefore unsurprising. what is interesting to me is this:

Among the most controversial of the institute’s recommendations is a plan to end industry influence over medical refresher courses. Presently, drug and device makers provide about half of the funding for such courses so that doctors can often take them for free. Even as they have acknowledged the need for other limits, many medical societies and schools have defended subsidies for education as necessary. The institute acknowledged that many doctors depend on industry funding for refresher medical courses but said that “the current system of funding is unacceptable and should not continue.” The report recommended that a different funding system be created within two years.

I do actually think this is a legitimate concern. I mean...a new different funding system is fine and good, but from where exactly does that new funding system propose to, you know, get funding? Although, how much evidence is there that refresher courses actually work? (As opposed to individual study?) Anyone?

2. on the other hand, more doctors, please:
Well, thank god Annie went into primary care, because we need more of these, and soon. More people need medical care than ever (about to get even worse as the baby boomers enter old age) and as you can see above, fewer and fewer medical students pursue primary care as an option. The government is considering re-aligning the incentives by having Medicare compensate general practitioners more and specialists less (sounds good to me), but medical lobbyists hate the idea of taking money away from anyone. They simply suggest more doctors, but more doctors means higher costs. So.

watch out, arlen specter

glenn beck may try to kill you for this.

immediate thoughts on "vicky cristina barcelona"

reductionist, completely contrived, and eye-roll inducing. made by the typical elitist artist that compartmentalizes the world into the american troglodyte-as-businessman who knows nothing about actually living (and is a little bit racist to boot) and the artist-as-rennaisance man who is the only person who can truly understand and appreciate life - so much so that that he/she is in fact destructive, because oh my god they're exploding with vitality. vomit. i'll give props to woody allen for engineering a scene where scarlet johansson and penelope cruz make out with each other, but, dude. you're a movie director, you're not 13. i love how the only choices for the conflicted woman are the incredibly good looking artist who inexplicably can afford a highly affluent lifestyle (but would never be defined by money) and the bad haircut husband who says "oriental rugs", thinks art looks like "rorschach blots", plays bridge, golfs, and loves "japanese high definition setups." seriously. you can't make this stuff up. or, actually, you, and anyone with 8 functioning brain cells, can.

EDIT: To be fair, most of the actors (Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall) are excellent (the incredibly wooden Scarlett Johansson, not so much), the dialouge is pretty witty, and the cinematography brings out the bohemian/free-spirited nature of Barcelona, but the one-dimentionality of the setup is just too much to overlook.

ha!

family guy has gotten annoying recently, but this is pretty funny.

who are the real victims of the financial crisis?

I'm a little busy, but I figured I'd post 2 interesting articles providing interesting perspectives on the role of populism and merit in the financial crisis.

New York Magazine has an interesting human interest piece wondering if modern bankers are being victimized by the financial crisis:

A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. To her mind, extreme compensation is a fair trade for the compromises of such a career. “People just don’t get it,” she says. “I’m attached to my BlackBerry. I was at my doctor the other day, and my doctor said to me, ‘You know, I like that when I leave the office, I leave.’ I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money.”

Now, a lot of people in New York have BlackBerrys, and few of them expect to be paid $2 million to check their e-mail in the middle of the night. But embedded in her comment is the belief shared on Wall Street but which few have dared to articulate until now: Those who select careers in finance play an exceptional role in our society. They distribute capital to where it’s most effective, and by some Ayn Rand–ian logic, the virtue of efficient markets distributing capital to where it is most needed justifies extreme salaries—these are the wages of the meritocracy. They see themselves as the fighter pilots of capitalism.

My tendency here is to say, "Horsefeathers." (and not just because its fun to say.) If the elevated wages are justified because the efficient distribution of capital resulted in economic growth (and in the 80s and 90s it certainly did), why are the same employees not subject to paycuts when their companies' investments result in enormous economic contraction, so much so that many of these companies are, in fact, insolvent and dependent on government assistance?

On the flip side, Jeffrey Golberg in the Atlantic has a unique piece on the road ahead for the individual investor. Ignored in the grand scheme of the crisis is how a normal person making an average, or even above average salary should modify their investment plan. I'll just include a few salient quotes from the famous value investor Seth Klarman, whom Goldberg asks for personal investing advice:

“Everybody these days is a just-in-time investor. People say, ‘I’m going to leave my money in the market as long as possible, and then pull it out of the market just before I have to write the tuition check.’ But I think we’re seeing that the day you need to pull it out of the market, the market might be down 50 percent. It’s critical not to be greedy. Avoid leverage and don’t invest money that you can’t stand to lose. In the aftermath of this financial crisis, I think everyone needs to look deep within themselves and ask how they want to live their lives. Do they want to live close to the edge, or do they want stability?

Klarman went on, “Here’s how to know if you have the makeup to be an investor. How would you handle the following situation? Let’s say you own a Procter & Gamble in your portfolio and the stock price goes down by half. Do you like it better? If it falls in half, do you reinvest dividends? Do you take cash out of savings to buy more? If you have the confidence to do that, then you’re an investor. If you don’t, you’re not an investor, you’re a speculator, and you shouldn’t be in the stock market in the first place.”

I think its a pretty interesting perspective, if only because the common sense advice: don't invest money in the market that you need to keep yourself afloat on a short-term basis would have been extremely sound advice for the banks to take.

It's very interesting to me that populist anger is sort of pouring out from all political parties and economic classes, and everyone is trying to marshall populist anger for their own purposes (tea parties and lower taxes, government regulation and universal health care). But, can populist anger even be marshalled? And is stirring the pot necessarily a good idea? I'll let way, way smarter minds duke this one out: Suzanne Garment vs. Susan Lee! (Enjoy the 'comments' section in Susan Lee's article for the duel, pt. 2)

shane murphy is awesome.

I'll just quote from the Huffington Post story:

Shane Murphy, second-in-command aboard the ship seized by Somali pirates this month, is happy to be home. But he's not happy to be sharing turf with land-lubber Rush Limbaugh, who politicized the pirate affair by referring to the pirates as "black teenagers."

"It feels great to be home," said Murphy in an interview with WCBV in Boston. "It feels like everyone around here has my back, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, who is trying to make this into a race issue...that's disgusting."

Limbaugh made the remark to suggest why President obama might have appeared preoccupied at church on the day of the operation to rescue the ship's captain, who was taken hostage by the pirates until Navy SEAL snipers shot them in a daring rescue effort.

"He was worried about the order he had given to wipe out three teenagers on the high seas," Limbaugh said. "Black Muslim teenagers."

"You gotta get with us or against us here, Rush," Murphy said. "The president did the right thing...It's a war.... It's about good versus evil. And what you said is evil. It's hate speech. I won't tolerate it."

Yeah. You're awesome, Shane Murphy. And you're a tool and a racist, Rush.