1 Volumes
George IV and Computers(1)
I got him into computers around 1960. He soon far surpassed me.
Book Proposal: Investing
Sold Out
Internet, Websites, and related Programming
This concludes the general topic of computers, computing and digital devices. The more specific topic area of the Internet, websites and website programming can be reached by clicking on the title below. It's large, so wait a moment for it to come up:
» Click here for WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT «
Data Sources for Health Care
OTHER REVENUE PROVIDERS WITH POTENTIALLY USEFUL MEDICAL DATA, MOSTLY UNUSED
Although some research discoveries are stumbled on by accident, most of the important ones derive from asking the right questions. If you don't ask the right question, you can wander around in a laboratory white coat for a lifetime without discovering much that is worth knowing. We already have huge stores of data, much of it in electronic form, about the health system. It mostly comes from people paying bills:
Health Insurance
Health Savings Accounts
Payroll deductions for Medicare
Medicare premiums
Military Medical Systems
Veterans Administration
Government subsidies to Hospitals
Medicaid (50-70% Federal)
Social Security
Life Insurance
Premium Investment Income
Cash payments (weak source)
Unclassified Remainder
To summarize the data sources already in existence raises questions of privacy and overwhelming government intrusion into the lives of citizens. That might well be a threat in forty or fifty years, but the disaster of the Health Insurance Exchanges trying to use a small particle of this data is reassuring, in a discouraging sort of way. These systems were originally devised to ask questions of no great relevance to national health costs, so they pose no great temptation to a wandering medical snooper. But they almost always have to meet some sort of an annual budget, so the answer to the question we are now asking is mostly available to everybody, on the Internet. It should be comparatively easy to learn, with adequate accuracy, how much is being spent on what kind of person, right now. If the total comes anywhere near 18% of GDP, we have as much detail as we need for this book to defend the conclusions it draws. We can tell the gross amounts, and by dividing by 350 million, get the average per person costs. Apportionment by age is somewhat less precise, but the numbers are so large, age stratification can be fairly accurately estimated. Let's start with a question we think we know the answer to.
CNBC Exposed
This series of videos is the best insight into America's financial reporting you will ever find.
Here's the weasel talking to another weasel
Macroeconomics of The 2007 Collapse
Sudden wealth creation, whether from the discovery of gold or oil, the conversion of poverty into useful cheap labor, or the sudden abundance of cheap credit, is of course a good thing. Sudden wealth creation can be compared with a stone thrown into a pond, causing a splash, and ripples, but leaving a somewhat higher water level after things calm down. The globalization of trade and finance in the past fifty years has caused 150 such disturbances, mostly confined to a primitive developing country and its neighbors. Only the 2007 disruption has been large enough to upset the biggest economies. It remains to be seen whether a disorder to the whole world will result in a revised world monetary arrangement. One hopes so, but national currencies, tightly controlled by local governments, have been successful in the past in confining the damage. This time, the challenge is to breach the dikes somewhat, without letting destructive tidal waves sweep past them. Many will resist this idea, claiming instead it would be better to have higher dikes.
It is the suddenness of new wealth creation in a particular region which upsets existing currency arrangements. Large economies "float" their currencies in response to the fluxes of trade, smaller economies can be permitted to "peg" their currencies to larger ones, with only infrequent readjustments. Even the floating nations "cheat" a little, in response to the political needs of the governing party, or, to stimulate and depress their economies as locally thought best. All politicians in all countries, therefore, fear a strictly honest floating system, and their negotiations about revising the present system will surely be guilty of finding loopholes for each other; the search for flexible floating will, therefore, claim to seek an arrangement which is "workable".
In thousands of years of governments, they have invariably sought ways to substitute inflated currency for unpopular taxes. The heart of any international payment system is to find ways to resist local inflation strategies. Aside from using gunboats, only two methods have proven successful. The most time-honored is to link currencies to gold or other precious substances, which has the main handicap of inflexibility in response to economic fluctuations. After breaking the link to gold in 1971, central banks regulated the supply of national currency in response to national inflation, so-called "inflation targeting". It worked far better than many feared, apparently allowing twenty years without a recession. It remains to be investigated whether the substitution of foreign currency defeated the system, and therefore whether the system can be repaired by improving the precision of universal floating, or tightening the obedience to targets, or both. These mildest of measures involve a certain surrender of national sovereignty; stronger methods would require even more draconian external force. The worse it gets, the more likely it could be enforced only by military threat. Even the Roman Empire required gold and precious metals to enforce a world currency. The use of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) implies attempts to dominate the politics of the IMF. So it comes to the same thing: this crisis will have to get a lot worse, maybe with some rioting and revolutions, before we can expect anything more satisfactory than a rickety negotiated international arrangement, riddled with embarrassing "earmarks". Economic recovery will be slow and gradual unless this arrangement is better, or social upheavals worse, that would presently appear likely.
Existing Websites Which Offer Higher Education
Immense: Here are a few of my favorites--
https://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
https://mitworld.mit.edu/browse
https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
https://numericalmethods.eng.usf.edu/
https://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/whats-on.html
WRTI, Classical Music and Jazz
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| Susan Lewis |
Susan Lewis recently entertained the Right Angle Club with a description of her life as the scriptwriter for WRTI, the local classical music station. WRTI could be described as one of three local affiliates of National Public Radio, the network content provider headquartered in Washington DC. The other two are WHYY, a talk station, and WXPN, the University of Pennsylvania station devoted to folk, rock, blues and root music. Another way of describing WRTI is that it took over the role formerly served by WFLN before it was sold, incorporating it into Temple University's jazz station. It plays classical music from 6AM to 6PM, and then plays jazz in the evening. Philadelphia thus really only has half a classical music station, when most cities who are home to a major orchestra have at least two. It is not clear whether this anomaly is a comment on the local radio climate or the future of its musical one.
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| Philadelphia Opera House |
The question came up as to just what is classical music since there are turf boundaries for the affiliates of National Public Radio. Susan Lewis, who has the surprising background of being a former corporate lawyer has apparently given this some thought. She offers the opinion that classical music overwhelmingly consists of music with multiple performers. Orchestras, opera, chorales, and chamber music characterize the topic more than pre-contemporary origins. A brand new symphony would naturally fall into the classical music category, while songs by Frank Sinatra would not, even though excited announcers might call his songs classics. Following this theme, classical music seems to fit with jazz, which consists of several soloists working on variants of a common theme. The sad question thus comes up whether Philadelphia's declining interest in classical music might in some way reflect social fragmentation within a metropolitan community which historically has highly valued cooperation and consensus. One hopes that's not the case.
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| WRTI RADIO |
Playing a succession of recorded musical selections sounds as though it would be a low-budget operation, but WRTI costs $3.6 million to run, annually. The scriptwriter gets up early, reads the day's artistic news and events, and some auto traffic reports, and records one-minute vocal interludes between the pieces of music. About once a week, a special seven-minute segment is assembled from excerpts from interviews or interludes relating to a theme in the artistic world. One taped recording of carillon music and commentary proved to be quite charming and entertaining, including the news that the carillon in Holy Trinity Church is the oldest in America. Since a bell is a variant of a tuning fork, the bells of a carillon chime with a very long period of decay, creating a problem for both composer and performer to avoid successive notes which conflict unless there is a long pause. These magazine-like pieces of hers are always organized around a main emotional "hook" of some sort, and Susan finds they are very time-consuming to assemble. That leads to a constant succession of inflexible deadlines, just like lawyers' briefs before a legal deadline, generating an excitement strangely exhilarating to the participant, and highly mystifying to outsiders.
As the central focus for dozens of emails and text messages about the goings-on of the local artistic world, the job of town gossip for the art world is an ego trip only suitable for a person who revels, with affection, in the endless wealth of art and anecdote in Philadelphia. As bloggers also know, this job constantly surfaces interesting news tidbits that surprise and please many people. Like the fact that William Penn's hat on top of City Hall is filled with graffiti. Or that a secret colony of Lenni Lenape Indians still exists in town. Or that the forthcoming HP radio standard produces outstandingly high quality.
Ms. Lewis is an asset to our town.
www.Philadelphia-Reflections.com/blog/1521.htm
Unemployment 2008/09
Real Estate Investment Calculator
Click here for the calculator link
10 Blogs
Book Proposal: Investing
Investing for Cash Flow
Individual and institutional investors must change their investment style to survive financial crises
Sold Out
How Wall Street bought Washington ... How Washington sold out to Wall Street.
Internet, Websites, and related Programming
Technical Comments related to programming this and other websites require a special topic section of their own.
Data Sources for Health Care
REVENUE PROVIDERS WITH POTENTIALLY USEFUL MEDICAL DATA, MOSTLY UNUSED
CNBC Exposed
Finally some straight talk about the preeminent business news channel. From the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Macroeconomics of The 2007 Collapse
Existing Websites Which Offer Higher Education
The number of Internet websites which currently offer free education on the college level is immense and growing rapidly. Just as terabyte is the next step after gigabyte, we need a new word to denominate "much larger than merely immense".
WRTI, Classical Music and Jazz
For a city with such a strong musical presence, it is surprising that Philadelphia has only one classical music radio station.
Unemployment 2008/09
The average national unemployment rate of 10.6% does not convey the same impact as seeing the spread of it over time. Tune in for a 30-second display of a graphics display.
Real Estate Investment Calculator
The price you should pay for an income-producing property is a function of the cash flow. Too many investors look at criteria other than cash flow and end up making bad investment decisions.