Time to say farewell to steak and chips (fries)

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Soon, most of us will stop eating beef,  and it won’t be because we’ll all agree with vegans that meat is murder. It’ll be due to the logic of advanced capitalism. The alternatives to meat now being developed – plant-based substitutes and vat-grown meat produced from cultured animal cells – will taste the same as beef but, unlike cow meat, they’ll be subject to the “transformative power of the modern production line”.

It’s not just a matter of the sheer volume of goods produced; it’s the speed of manufacture from raw material to finished article, and the ability to vary supply with fluctuating demand, to dispense with low-value by-products like offal and excrement, and to develop variations in flavour. “Factory farming”, despite its name, has no such advantages. As for those who think a global industry that rears billions of animals can’t vanish overnight, I give you one word: “horses”. In the early 20th century, our cities and country lanes teemed with them. Then along came the internal combustion engine, and they were gone. As the horse went, so shall the cow. (Peter Franklin, The Week, 7 September 2019)

I must declare my position on this – I haven’t eaten beef for…..I’ve forgotten.  This was because it didn’t agree with me, not for environmental reasons.  But now, as the public view on the global climate is changing, and, as everyone must know by now, cattle rearing puts mega-tonnes of methane into the atmosphere worldwide. It is also rather a poor use of land.  It would be better, and more Epicurean, to plant (or restore) forests and slowly phase out beef production.  So, if plant-based substitutes, are edible and nutritious, and can be marketed cleverly, what objection can there be?  Just a simple request – you try them first and report back!

Is Oxbridge entrenching privilege? Or is inverse snobbery as big a problem?

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From The Times, London

“How can we improve Britain’s “stagnant” levels of social mobility? Labour activists would like to abolish private schools, and that would surely help. But a better way to disrupt “elite self-perpetuation” would be to target Oxford and Cambridge. If we stopped those bastions of “inherited prestige and wealth” from teaching undergraduates, they would no longer be seen as incubators of the next ruling class. Canada, Australia and Sweden all have private schools, yet also have above-average social mobility. That’s partly because they don’t have highly prestigious universities that confer “a life-changing advantage” on the lucky few; just lots of good universities where students can get a decent education before proving themselves in the job market. Binning undergraduates might benefit Oxford and Cambridge, too, as they currently lose money on these students. The universities could concentrate on research and teaching postgrads, and expand their summer schools for disadvantaged students. It would retain what’s best about Oxbridge, but reduce the status-symbol aspect of these institutions that so distorts British life”.  (Simon Kuper, Financial Times, 10 August 2019)

I must declare a sinister fact – I am a product of this much-attacked educational duo.  I happen to have graduated with a a respectable degree, and wanted to get a marketing job with a manufacturer of consumer products, starting as a trainee, obviously, at the bottom.  Dozens of fruitless job applications later I at last got an interview.  “You are over-qualified”, I was told.  I thought I had no qualifications whatsoever, except a desire to learn, a frantic work ethic, and two years in the army.

Commentators such as Mr. Kuper don’t attend to inverse snobbery.  Maybe the interviewer thought I would be trying to run his international business by the end of the first year.  The reality is that you are almost forced into the professions, government or similar by what looked like prejudice.  The author talks about “proving yourself in the job market”.  Tell me about it!

I am all in favour of democratising intake at Oxbridge (from being all male, my old college is now 60% female), but we have to deal with the prejudice of hirers who employ people exactly like themselves.  The dire British class system was alive and well in my young day, and class resentment is hard to deal with for a young fellow with democratic leanings but the wrong education for a commercial job.  The other side of the coin!

Don’t find yourself in an American emergency health facility!

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Two days before his wedding this past April, a man called Cameron Fischer got very drunk at his bachelor party, felt very ill, and had to go to an emergency room. His medical bill that was initially $12,460, all told, just to be re-hydrated .That was more than twice the cost of his wedding.

There are few constraints on how emergency rooms set prices. Hospitals have jacked up rates and are coding patient visits as more complex than they used to be, which increases the payments they receive from insurance plans. The result: ER services have some of the fastest-growing prices in the health care system.

Many health economists think free-standing ER facilities, like the one Fischer visited — which are banned in many states but thriving in Colorado — are particularly culpable. While such ERs maintain that they can’t survive on rates paid by Medicare and Medicaid, data suggest they are profit-seeking engines built primarily in high-income ZIP codes.  Why?  Because they can get away with it.

In Fischer’s case he was given an IV, two bags of saline and a dose of Zofran, an anti-nausea medication.  Then she drew blood (why he didn’t know, but it cost $500 for a complete blood count; $20 in a doctor’s office). He left only 45 minutes later.  Later he received the bill, including  a $7,644 “facility fee”, an expense that hospital systems charge to cover their overhead costs of keeping an ER open 24 hours a day and ready for any emergency. There are no limitations on the facility fees that they can charge, and the charges nearly doubled from 2009 to 2016, outpacing overall health spending four times over. In Colorado, the average facility fee charged for a Level 4 visit grew from $1,064 to $2,336.  Insurance companies apparently paid out an average of $1,754 for a Level 4 facility fee in 2018.

The fact is that Emergency rooms tend to lose money on critically ill patients, as well as on Medicare, Medicaid and uninsured patients, and try to make up the difference with less sick, privately insured patients, like Fischer.

For Fischer, the negotiated rates under his health plan knocked the $12,460 bill down to $4,694. The plan paid $2,102. That left Fischer with a bill of $2,593, an amount he says he cannot afford to pay. “That’s quite the expensive bachelor party,” Fischer is quoted as saying.

(An edited version of an article from Kaiser Health News, a non-profit with no links to Kaiser Permanente.  22 Sept 2019)

My comment:  A few years ago, concerned that my (American) GP would stay in business-as-usual, I asked him ‘if he was making enough money out of my wife and I myself as patients (Epicurean question). If not, let us talk about it.’ Slightly surprised, he told me he didn’t go into the medical profession to get rich – he did it to help sick people and make them better.  Phew!

This is the sort of person needed in medicine. The healthcare companies are run by single-minded capitalists, totally profit-oriented, particularly the pharmaceutical companies.  The whole “industry” (as it has become) needs a big re-think: what is it there for?  In theory, a single payer system (e.g like the NHS) would greatly improve outcomes, but it has little chance of happening – too much money is at stake, and the politicians are just fine with that, thank you.

An essential aspect of Epicureanism is setting aside selfish instincts and thinking of the interests of others.  In this way you get the very best out of them and have good relationships. But good relationships, working together, thanking doctors etc. count for little in the ultra capitalist atmosphere of some branches of the US health industry.

 

The ultra-costly, underwhelming F-35 Fighter

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From Tomgram, the site that comments on the  defence industry:

“Lockheed Martin Remains Top Gun in the Pentagon’s Cockpit

“How are you with numbers? I can deal with $1.5 million. I think I can even imagine $1.5 billion, a sum a thousand times greater. But how about a million times greater: $1.5 trillion? That happens to be the estimated cost of the Pentagon’s program to build, deploy, and maintain the no-longer-so-new F-35 jet fighter over its lifetime. How can any people invest so much in a technology whose fundamental purpose is dominance through destruction — and which, according to reports, doesn’t even work particularly well?

“The Egyptians had pyramids. The Romans had roads, aqueducts, and coliseums. The medieval Europeans had castles and cathedrals. These days, America’s pyramids, aqueducts, and cathedrals are those warplanes, among other deadly weapons programs, including a $1.7 trillion one to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Unlike the massive projects of ancient history, which still endure and in some fashion represent the triumph of the human spirit, America’s massive spending on military weaponry has been for totems of power that will prove either ephemeral or make our very existence ephemeral, while casting a long shadow over our moment, thanks to the sheer extravagance and colossal waste they embody.  

“As ephemeral as the F-35 stealth fighter may prove in historical terms, it’s already a classic symbol of America’s ever more fruitless forever wars. Like them, the F-35 program has proven staggeringly expensive, incredibly wasteful, and impossible to stop, no matter the woeful results.  It has come to symbolize the too-big-to-fail, too-sacrosanct-to-reject part of America’s militarized culture of technological violence.   (William J. Astore,  16 Sep 2019 in Tomgram)

Meanwhile, the cost of these weapons falls increasingly upon those least able to afford the taxes, while the really rich now have considerably more pocket money to spend.  There is something very wrong with this whole story.  One reason  for the fall of the Roman Empire was the huge cost of guarding the over-extended frontiers and the “bases” needed to do so   Over the course of centuries other empires have met similar fates.  But in the modern world the study of history doesn’t get you a job, does it?  (pathetic, but there you are!)

Emigration a greater concern than immigration

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We hear a lot about immigration and the difficulties it presents from politicians seeking votes. But of greater concern in some countries is the flight of citizens abroad from countries like Romania, Italy, Bulgaria and Spain, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Romania:  An estimated 3.4 million Romanians left the country in the decade after EU accession.  Among these are 43,000 (!) doctors . The Romanian population is slated to fall by 22% by 2050.  High mortality and a low birthrate are both contributing.

Italy:  Facing an unprecedented drop in population to 55 million.  From 2014 to 2018 the number of Italians fell by 677,000.  Nearly 157,000 left the country in 2018 alone. The population is forecast to drop further in the next five years.  After Japan it has the greatest proportion of old people in the world (168.7 people over 65 for every 100 young people).  The fewer the number of people the worse the services become, not encouraging for foreigners thinking of buying a romantic Italian vacation home. 

Spain :  The bulk of the population, 42 million, is crammed into cities and towns accounting for 30% of the land, the population density of the rest of the country being only 14 inhabitants per square kilometer.  80% of the municipalities have falling populations.  This figure rises to 90% for towns and villages with populations less than 1000. ( From The Guardian, 6 Sept 2019)

My comment: The only country with which I am a bit familiar is beautiful Italy.  Beautiful  it might be, but it is notoriously badly governed and, in part, corrupt.  I was once advised, when chatting about owning property there not on any account to do so, owing to the cost, the bureaucracy and “other” problems.  Sad. Romania, of course, is  maybe even worse, given its history.