Art Diamond – Page 162 – artdiamondblog.com

Socialist Price Setting Causes Shortages of Corn Flour, Car Batteries and Toilet Paper

(p. B1) Venezuela’s prices on everything from butter to flat-screen TVs are set without warning by the government, which also caps corporate profits at 30%. Any profits evaporate quickly, however, because inflation is almost double that.
And expanded price controls imposed by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who succeeded late leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez in April 2013, have exacerbated shortages of basic items such as corn flour, car batteries and toilet paper, triggering violent street protests since early February.

For the full story, see:
MAXWELL MURPHY and KEJAL VYAS. “CFO JOURNAL; Currency Chaos in Venezuela Portends Write-Downs.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 27, 2014): B1 & B6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 26, 2014.)

Cancer Gains Have Not Come from “Centralized Direction”

(p. 180) The truth remains that over the course of the twentieth century, the greatest gains in the battle against cancer came from independent research that was not under any sort of centralized direction and that did not have vast resources at its disposal. As we have seen, such research led to momentous chance discoveries in cancer chemotherapy and a greater understanding of the mechanisms of the disease that have resulted in exciting new therapeutic approaches.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

Robert Morris Financed the Revolutionary War, and Private Ventures, But Ended in Debtors’ Prison

(p. C7) The Philadelphia merchant banker Robert Morris, reputedly the richest man in Revolutionary America, performed prodigies in financing the war and then staving off the new country’s insolvency. He was bullish on America’s future, and when he returned to private life in 1784, he initiated a variety of ventures–a fleet of ships trading with China and India, multiple manufacturing enterprises, and, not least, vast assemblages of unimproved interior land–that eventually landed him in debtors’ prison. Ryan K. Smith offers a readable and enlightening portrait of this busy and turbulent life in “Robert Morris’s Folly.”

For the full review, see:
CHARLES R. MORRIS. “Financing the Founders; Morris built a French-style palace out of Pennsylvania logs in the hope that Marie Antoinette would visit.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., AUG. 30, 2014): C7.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date AUG. 29, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘Robert Morris’s Folly’ by Ryan K. Smith; Robert Morris built a French-style palace out of Pennsylvania logs in the hope that Marie Antoinette would visit.”)

The book being reviewed is:
Smith, Ryan K. Robert Morris’s Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder, The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (C.C.D.) Is “Over”

(p. A27) In 2006, beekeepers in Pennsylvania’s apple country noticed the first sign of many bad things to come. Once thriving beehives were suddenly empty, devoid of nearly all worker bees, but with an apparently healthy, if lonely, queen remaining in place. Over a period of just three months, tens of thousands of honeybees were totally gone. Multiply this across millions of beehives in millions of apiaries in the more than 22 states that were soon affected, and suddenly we faced a huge, tragic mystery. Up to 24 percent of American apiaries were experiencing colony collapse disorder (C.C.D.).
. . .
We still don’t really know why C.C.D. was happening, but it looks as if we are turning the corner: Scientists I’ve spoken to in both academia and government have strong reason to believe that C.C.D. is essentially over. This finding is based on data from the past three years — or perhaps, more accurately, the lack thereof. There have been no conclusively documented cases of C.C.D. in the strict sense. Perhaps C.C.D. will one day seem like yet another blip on the millennium-plus timeline of unexplained bee die-offs. Luckily, the dauntless efforts of beekeepers have brought bee populations back each time.

For the full commentary, see:
NOAH WILSON-RICH. “Are Bees Back Up on Their Knees?” The New York Times (Thurs., SEPT. 25, 2014): A27.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 24, 2014.)

Japanese Try to Sell the iPhone of Toilets in United States

(p. B8) TOKYO–Yoshiaki Fujimori wants to be the Steve Jobs of toilets.
Like iPhones, app-packed commodes are objects of desire in Mr. Fujimori’s Japan. The lids lift automatically. The seats heat up. Built-in bidets make cleanup a breeze. Some of them even sync with users’ smartphones via Bluetooth so that they can program their preferences and play their favorite music through speakers built into the bowl.
Three-quarters of Japanese homes contain such toilets, most of them made by one of two companies: Toto Ltd., Japan’s largest maker of so-called sanitary ware, or Lixil Corp., where Mr. Fujimori is the chief executive.
Now Mr. Fujimori is leading a push to bring them to the great unwashed. In May, Lixil plans to add toilets with “integrated bidets” to the lineup of American Standard Brands, which Lixil acquired last year for $542 million, including debt.
. . .
Few people realized they needed smartphones until Apple’s iPhone came along. So it will be in the U.S. with American Standard’s new toilets, Mr. Fujimori said.
“Industry presents iPhone–industry presents shower toilet,” Mr. Fujimori said in an interview at Lixil’s headquarters in Tokyo. “We can create the same type of pattern.”
. . .
Mr. Fujimori maintained that once American consumers try such toilets, they won’t go back.
“This improves your standard of living,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt you. People like comfort, they like ease, they like automatic. And people like clean.”

For the full story, see:
ERIC PFANNER and ATSUKO FUKASE. “Smart Toilets Arrive in U.S.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 27, 2014): B8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 26, 2014.)

War on Cancer Was “Profoundly Misconceived”

(p. 179) Following the testing of nearly half a million drugs, the number of useful anticancer agents remains disappointingly small. Expressions of discontent with the methodology of research and of research and the appalling paucity of results were, over the years, largely restricted to the professional literature. However, in 2001 they broke through to the popular media. In an impassioned article in the New Yorker magazine entitled “The Thirty Years’ War: Have We Been Fighting Cancer the Wrong Way?” Jerome Groopman, a respected clinical oncologist and cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, fired a devastating broadside. “The war on cancer,” he wrote, “turned out to be profoundly misconceived–both in its rhetoric and in its execution. The high expectations of the early seventies seem almost willfully naïve.” Regarding many of the three-phased clinical trials, with their toxic effects, he marveled at “how little scientific basis there was and how much sensationalism surrounded them.” Groopman concluded that hope for progress resided in the “uncertainty inherent in scientific discovery.”

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)

Steelcase Designs Quiet Space for Introverts to Think

(p. D2) Introverts’ nervous systems are more sensitive to stimulation than extroverts’ are, according to Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.”
“When introverts get too much stimulation, they feel overwhelmed and jangled,” she said.
With no privacy or way to shield themselves from the commotion, introverts, estimated to make up one-third to one-half of the population, can feel exposed in the modern workplace. Being on display is imposing and distracting to them, Cain said.
Office furniture maker Steelcase Inc. is trying to give the left-behind introverts some love. Its new set of “quiet spaces,” designed in collaboration with Cain, aims to help introverts relax and focus away from the eyes of their coworkers.
. . .
Part of Steelcase’s pitch to potential customers: this is a talent issue. Why spend so much time and money recruiting employees if they can’t focus and work well in your space?

For the full story, see:
RACHEL FEINTZEIG. “How to Avoid that Sinking Feeling When in the Fish Bowl.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 3, 2014): D2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 2, 2014, and has the title “For Office Introverts, a Room of One’s Own.”)

The book mentioned in the passage quoted is:
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012.

“Rebel” Russian Thugs Kill Plans and Entrepreneurship in Donetsk

(p. A13) “We do not go out at night,” said Irina, a journalist who lost her job when the rebels closed her newspaper in May. “We have stopped planning.”
Her boyfriend, Evgeny, lost his job, too, when his security firm folded. He said the business collapsed after the rebels seized money from the central bank and armored vehicles from other banks, leading them to close. He turned to his secondary business, fixing motorbikes, only to be ordered at gunpoint to fix some stolen motorbikes for the rebels.
“I came to the conclusion there is no sense,” he said. “You start a business and get a bit successful, and two weeks later men with guns come and say, ‘Good boy, get lost.’ “

For the full story, see:
CARLOTTA GALL. “Lured Back by a Cease-Fire in Ukraine, but Not Feeling at Home Yet.” The New York Times (Thurs., SEPT. 11, 2014): A6 & A13.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 10, 2014.)

High Skill Foreign Workers Raise Wages for Native Workers

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A6) “A lot of people have the idea there is a fixed number of jobs,” said . . . , Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis. “It’s completely turned around.”

Immigrants can boost the productivity of the overall economy, he said, “because then the pie grows and there are more jobs for other people as well and there’s not a zero-sum trade-off between natives and immigrants.”
Mr. Peri, along with co-authors Kevin Shih at UC Davis, and Chad Sparber at Colgate University, studied how wages for college- and noncollege-educated native workers shifted along with immigration. They found that a one-percentage-point increase in the share of workers in STEM fields raised wages for college-educated natives by seven to eight percentage points and wages of the noncollege-educated natives by three to four percentage points.
Mr. Peri said the research bolsters the case for raising, or even removing, the caps on H-1B visas, the program that regulates how many high-skilled foreign workers employers can bring into the country.

For the full story, see:
JOSH ZUMBRUN and MATT STILES. “Study: Skilled Foreign Workers a Boon to Pay.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 23, 2014): A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 22, 2014, and has the title “Skilled Foreign Workers a Boon to Pay, Study Finds.”)

The paper discussed in the passage quoted above, is:
Peri, Giovanni, Kevin Shih, and Chad Sparber. “Foreign Stem Workers and Native Wages and Employment in U.S. Cities.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Paper Number 20093, May 2014.

In 1971 Nixon “Launched an All-Out War on Cancer”

(p. 173) In 1971 the U.S. government finally launched an all-out “war on cancer.” In his State of the Union address in January 1971, President Richard Nixon declared: “The time has come in America when the same kind of concerted effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.”
As the country debated a bill known as the National Cancer Act, the air was filled with feverish excitement and heady optimism. Popular magazines again trumpeted the imminent conquest of cancer. However, some members of the committee of the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, which was asked by the NCI to review the cancer plan envisioned by the act, expressed concern regarding the centralization of planning of research and that “the lines of research… could turn out to be the wrong leads.” The plan fails, the reviewers said in their confidential report, because

It leaves the impression that all shots can be called from a national headquarters; that all, or nearly all, of the really important ideas are already in hand, and that given the right kind of administration and organization, the hard problems can be solved. It fails to allow for the surprises which must surely lie ahead if we are really going to gain an understanding of cancer.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)