Day: February 25, 2010

Procedural Difference

Ezra Klein toots:

There’s a difference between “we have the best health-care system in the world” and “I can buy the best health care in the world.”

Absolutely goddamned right there is. The sentence that usually comes out of the mouth of someone positing the “best healthcare” trope is one about some Sultan or Prime Minister coming here for a procedure. Nobody says that our capability to perform procedures isn’t among the best or the very best in the world. What we don’t do well, if at all, is fix somebody’s high blood pressure. Or monitor their diabetes. Or screen them for colon cancer while it’s fixable. You simply cannot do those things through the Emergency Room (where the “best healthcare” folks always point out you can receive free care).

It’s precisely these little things that markedly reduce life expectancy in this country, and concomitantly increase cost as the folks who haven’t been dealt with turn up and need incredibly costly end-of-life care. This is why we pay at least twice as much as the next nearest “Western” nation while getting remarkably worse outcomes across the board.

Bake and destroy

The dirty little secret behind Grape Nuts? Not grapes, not nuts:

Mixed with yeast (one cup per 2,000 pounds) and water, the flour turns to dough, gets chopped into 10-pound loaves and sent into a huge oven – 1,610 loaves at a time. “Now it gets interesting,” Mr. Vargas said at his workstation, watching the loaves emerge from the oven and catapult into the darkness. An instant later, they hit the fan – a whirling high-speed shredder that rips them to smithereens.

Did you say knives? Rotating knives, yes.

I think up until now I had inadequately divined Grape Nuts’ attitude towards its loaves.

Equivalency of Everything

Ashlee Vance is mystified by HP’s poor performance in the mobile phone market:

Hewlett-Packard is one of the world’s most successful makers of desktop computers, laptops, servers and printers. It owns a powerful consumer brand, and it is a growing provider of services for businesses. In the first quarter, the company’s sales rose 8 percent.

But in smartphones, H.P. has been on a steady slide into irrelevance.

[…]

Sales of HP’s hand-held products, including its iPaq smartphone, dropped to $25 million in the quarter, down from $57 million in the same period last year. Apple, by contrast, had sales of $5.6 billion for iPhones and related products during its most recent quarter.

HP’s anemic performance in the smartphone market has left analysts perplexed.

Indeed, most analysts tend to use this construction:

  1. Apple is a large computer company
  2. HP is a very large computer company
  3. Apple is making billions selling a mobile phone that doesn’t even have FM radio built in
  4. Q.E.D.: HP should be making even-more-billions selling a mobile phone with FM radio built right in; any other outcome is either an aberration or a mirage, but is clearly not the result of consumer opinion re: HP’s product offerings

The experience of the phones in question just doesn’t enter into it. Ever. That no customer has yet successfully activated that all-important FM radio without being directed step-by-step just isn’t even worth considering. Those are just user errors. Customers want a robust feature check-list at the expense of all other considerations, don’t they? Overall customer satisfaction isn’t something worth wondering after.
HP sells a bunch of commodity hardware running Windows, so they automatically should sell a bunch of commodity hardware running Windows Mobile. That that OS is a well documented train wreck of an operating system, again, just isn’t worth wondering after. It’s got “Windows” in the name, thus people will buy it just as they do the various desktop OSes with “Windows” in the name. Any other outcome is attributed to Apple’s marketing expertise. What else could be responsible? It must be those damned catchy ads. How else do you explain the largest purveyor of Windows Mobile phones, HTC, seeing that segment collapse as Android phone sales on their platforms grow? Again, just Apple and their catchy ads misleading the consumer. After all, it’s called Windows,

Remember, these are professional analysts we’re talking about here.

The article closes with this priceless quote from Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer in H.P.’s personal systems group:

“There is clearly a gap that has opened up for a device that has north of a 3.5-inch screen and less than a 9-inch screen.”

And, unfortunately for HP, that gap’s name is vastly more likely to be iPad than it is to be HP Commodity Doodad, now! with Windows Mobile Classic and a built in FM radio. You know: for kids!

Thus by my admittedly simple classification scheme, this would suggest that 14 of the 19 times reconciliation was used between FY1981 – FY2005, it was used to advance Republican interests. Or, to put this more precisely, it was used to advance bills that were signed by Republican presidents or vetoed by Democratic presidents.

Joshua Tucker