Lifestyle topics
Letter to Prospect magazine, January 2014, from Mr. Gene Schulman “Surely, what we call art today is little more than hype promoted by the hucksters of art in the same way the banks have created housing bubbles. As a matter of fact, it is the bankers working hand in hand with the art hucksters who …
The idea of the nation state only emerged around the 15th or 16th Centuries and came of age in Elizabethan times owing to the ability of governments to keep effective standing armies. There is nothing magical about them, and, indeed, they caused a host of useless wars. Italy still seems like a collection of city …
Accounting firm Grant Thornton estimates that fraud in the construction industry worldwide costs $1.5 trillion dollars. Corruption is endemic because many big projects are financed by governments and are one-offs, like Sochi’s ice arenas and ski jumps. It is hard to estimate the cost of a unique building, but the more expensive it is the …
The inventor of the popular AK-47 gun was secretly tormented by “unbearable spiritual agony”. Mikhail Kalashnikov, whose automatic rifle first went into production in 1947, became a Soviet hero and died recently at 94. Publicly, he never accepted any responsibility for those killed by the gun. But last year, in a letter to the Russian …
A report by Jenny Gold in the Washington Post (February 4th) states that the average amount of time you have to wait to see a GP in Washington DC is 14 days, and if you need to see a cardiologist you wait 32 days. In Boston it is even worse: 66 days to see a …
Continue reading ‘Long waits to see American doctors? CVS, part 2’ »
