Three pieces from last week about the long-gone, the recently deceased, and the actively dying:
What a great year for the Internet!
(ᔥWaxy.org)
This morning’s Axios DC newsletter has a few words to say about the city’s political dysfunction:
Last Tuesday, after racing to Capital One Arena to counteroffer Ted Leonsis with Mayor Bowser, Council chair Phil Mendelson gaveled a hearing about school truancy two hours late. Truancy!
But of course, you already knew the place was a mess. It’s almost as if ineptitude had consequences.
The best newspaper article I’ve read in ages is also about government dysfunction. The Washington Post lays out in great detail all the ways in which much of D.C. is vulnerable to flooding, and some of the ways to overcome it, yet:
It is the quintessential story of how Washington works that none of these proposals has reached senior decision-makers. That’s because more than a dozen federal agencies own land and buildings there, each with its own congressional appropriation committee to please.
But that is just a wrinkle in a dissertation about climate change, urbanism and governance. Highly recommended.
🏀 Living two blocks down from the Capital One Arena, I am completely biased in thinking that the plan to move the Wizards and the Caps to Potomac Yard is bonkers. The slightly less biased Tyler Cowen shares my opinion, and for the same reasons. For what it’s worth, the summer spike in crime was just that — a spike — and with the winter months came the Downtown Holiday Market and 2+ patrol units per block, so the neighborhood is as safe as could be.
Side note: Tyler’s commenters underestimate how many visitors to DC go to a Wizards game just to have their selfie taken with the court as a backdrop. The Capitols may be another matter — they are actually good — but it always seemed to me that passers by account for a large chunk of the Wizards’ audience.
📺 Scavengers Reign (2023) was hands down the best six hours of streaming I saw this year. It’s Adventure Time for adults; Saga for television; Fantastic Planet for the 2020s; and, yes, all in the Moebius style that influenced Miyazaki’s Nausicaä… so much that it’s probably the first thing that will come to mind after seeing the first few scenes.
But Scavengers Reign is not a mishmash of those, but a new and distinct work all of its own, with a better soundtrack and better voice acting than anything that’s come before. Highly recommended.
🍿 The Family Plan (2023) features a milquetoast father of 3 who takes his family on a road trip to Vegas in a Honda Odyssey, so of course we had to see it as soon as it came out. It was… OK, for a dressed up 1990s action comedy. At least Wahlberg is slightly more believable as a boring white-collar schmuck than Schwarzenegger was in his day.
Still, kudos to Apple for embracing brainless entertainment and extending The Mitchells… sphere of influence to live action.
You know the one about theory and practice? That in theory there is no difference between the two, but in practice there is. Yesterday’s post from the economist Alex Tabarrok about better drugs costing more is a great example. Per Tabarrok:
Consider two lightbulbs, one lasts for 2 years the other lasts for 1 year. Which lightbulb is more profitable to sell? Any sensible analysis must begin with the following simple point: A lightbulb that lasts for 2 years is worth about twice as much as a lightbulb that lasts one year. Thus, assuming for the moment that costs of production are negligible, there is no secret profit to be had from selling two 1-year lightbulbs compared to selling one 2-year lightbulb. The firm that sells 1-year lightbulbs hasn’t hit on a secret profit-sauce because its customers must come back for more. If it did it could sell really profitable 1-month bulbs!
The same thing is true for pharmaceuticals. A treatment that lasts for 10 years is worth about ten times as much as an annual treatment. Or, to put it the other way, a treatment that lasts for 10 years is worth about the same as 10 annual treatments producing the same result. (n.b. yes, discounting, but discounting by both consumers and firms means that nothing fundamental changes.)
Too bad that drugs aren’t lightbulbs, hospitals aren’t hardware stores, and that treating people isn’t the same as selling tchotchkes. Well, maybe they are the same in theory, but we looked at actual cancer drugs, and their actual cost, and how much the cost per year correlates with actual improvements in survival, and the answer was: not at all. Novelty of the mechanism of action doesn’t have much to do with the cost either. We didn’t go into what affected the cost, but as I’ve written before, President Biden made a good guess.
So yes, lightbulbs. Cute story, professor Tabarrok, but true only in theory.
I wish there was a way to see what a post would look like in the micro.blog timeline when posting from MarsEdit. The Title field popping up is a hint that the post may or may not be truncated, but it’s not fool-proof. My first post for today was an example of a fool messing it up!
And while we are at it: being able to see the word count ± choose categories in the MarsEdit micropost window would be wonderful. This very post, which started in the micropost window, is the case study for why.
