Make Your Own Damn Paper

I’ve been a paper-industry and paper-related industry chemist now for about 7 years. Before that I worked on carbon and coal. It took me 12 years of college and 5 years of postdoctoral work to get here. I’ve got a somewhat narrow specialization despite a broad background in the physical sciences.

Since I joined Corporate America I’ve had the supreme joy of being in charge of my own retirement. By the time I came along the age of the “pension plan” was fading fast in the rearview mirror of history. Suddenly we were all given the keys to the machine of our destiny and told “Here, take it and drive it around!”

Unfortunately some of us, myself especially, are intent on driving it off a cliff. I have been given near total control over a 401k retirement investment portfolio that will determine if I live like a pauper or a prince after I am forced out of work at age 65.

I’ve seen enough of the television commercials to know that it really is just a matter of what tropical island I want to live on after I retire, assuming I choose the right investments. Or more importantly, if I choose the best investment advisor. Of course the first doesn’t cost anything the second costs a goodly amount.

The brutal reality is that I am going to live in poverty upon retirement. No question about it. I will be eating the cheapest canned dog food I can force down my throat for sustenance. If I have a permanent home it will be in the most deplorable conditions imaginable. Which will fit well with the limited health care I’ll have access to. Hopefully it will be mercifully short.

Oh, yeah, and I’ll go from PhD research chemist to WalMart greeter. After I am decreed too old to be of use in technology I can be the slow-moving happy voice of welcome to a cheaper America!

I can’t wait!

But how did it come to this? Well, because I spent my 12 years learning science rather than business. If I had wanted a business degree I would have gotten one. When I started with one job after getting my PhD and finishing my postdocs I was informed that now I might want to consider getting an MBA. I had passed the first hurdle in being able to get a doctorate in the physical sciences, but now the real work was to begin and if I wanted to amount to something I’d have to get a Masters degree. Somehow that seemed backwards. But it was coming out of the mouth of a seasoned science professional.

Suddenly I realized I had been wasting my limited mental skills. I was trying to learn about DG, DS, z, and countless other physical measurements when I was supposed to be learning about P/E ratios and SEC 8K filings!

I was confused. I thought that learning science was important. It certainly took a long time! Take a look at the following pictures.















A scientific Calculator















A Financial Calculator

Notice anything different? Well there’s a lot fewer things on a “Financial” calculator. There’s less to do, right? Well sorta-kinda. The point I’d like to make here is that the functions are DIFFERENT. Just because I can do a bunch of the things on the “Scientific” calculator doesn’t mean I can do the stuff on the “Financial” calculator! But more importantly the people who can do stuff on the Financial Calculator can’t necessarily do the stuff on the Scientific Calculator.

Why is that? Is it because one is smarter than the other? NO. A thousand times NO. It means we are DIFFERENT PEOPLE. I don’t want to be the one calculating Depreciation on Capital. I want to be the one calculating the natural log of a function.

So why is it that now I’m tossed out into the big world to fend for my own financial future? Suddenly I am meaningless and what I do is meaningless.
At some point it became more important to be a business person than a scientist in an absolute sense.

“But Thredkil! You degenerate fool! If you don’t want to starve when you are old, I suggest you get off your duff and learn how to manage your investments!” you will say. To which I respond: “So, are you willing to go out and make your own paper? Are you aware of the various polymers and inorganic additives that make paper paper? Are you willing to find your own coal to run the powerplant so you aren’t cold at night?”

Why is it, in this country you can be “proud” of not understanding thermodynamics but considered a complete idiot if you don’t know where to invest your 401k funds?

Bush's Health Plan 2007

The Bush Health Plan and other “Market-based Plans”
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"One of the goals of this policy is really to rationalize our health care spending so that we're getting higher value, more efficient care, and we hope in the long run that that substantially brings down the trajectory of growth in national health spending, because [people will] be allocating their health care dollars more efficiently," -Katherine Baicker, Council of Economic Advisers
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The Bush Plan and all other "Market-Based Plans" exist to get Americans involved as "informed health care consumers". In order for health care to be a "normal market good" that can be "comparison shopped" and made more "efficient" by the invisible hand of the free market means all the consumers are equally informed about the quality and necessity of various medical procedures and medicines. Remember, as the old saying goes, the consumer should have “skin in the game”…and it really applies when real skin is involved!

Purchasing health care is like buying a television, you don’t really have to understand how it works, to do it, but unlike buying a television, the consequences of getting a “bad one” may be death or permanent disability. But still, it’s a “normal market good”, isn’t it?

A good comparison shopper is an informed comparison shopper. If the doctor insists on you getting a triple-bypass, surely there’s a way to cut some costs on things. How much anesthesia do you really need, after all. And when you’re in the emergency room after a grisly lawn-mower accident, you can always haggle about how many stitches are absolutely necessary. Remember, every penny counts.

But first, let's take a look at the American Consumer. The American health care consumer is going to be intimately familiar with medical procedures. How hard can it be to do that "doctorin'" stuff? Well, it usually only takes 8 years of college followed by a 3 year residency, so anyone with 11 years to spare can get an MD. So it can't be TOO hard can it? Remember, in order to be the best comparison shopper you can be you need to be fully aware of all the details about the medical field.

But what do we know about America's health "shopping" habits? Well, according to the National Center for Homeopathy, 7.3 Million American have tried homeopathy. Last year American’s Spent $425 Million on Homeopathic Remedies! And in the last decade the relative number of American who have used homeopathy has increased 500%. All this despite the fact that The National Center for Homeopathy itself says: “Homeopaths acknowledge that most remedies are so diluted that laboratory tests cannot locate a single molecule of the original substance.”

And the National Center Against Health Fraud had this to say about Homeopathy: "The marketing of homeopathic products and services fits the definition of quackery established by a United States House of Representatives committee which investigated the problem (i.e., the promotion of ‘medical schemes or remedies known to be false, or which are unproven, for a profit’).”

The American health care consumer is also going to have to be generally technically savvy as well! Positron emission tomography scans, functional MRI’s, nuclear medicine, it's going to require a highly skilled, highly technically educated consumer to drive this market-plan forward. If health care is a "normal market good" then Americans will be able to step up to the plate and choose the best care for the least price! But who are these technically savvy consumers"?

Well, according to a 2005 Harris Poll: 25% of Americans believe in astrology (better hope you were born under a “healthy sign”), and about 28% of Americans believe in witches. So if you find that the so-called doctors in your town haven’t found the cure for your disease, perhaps the person selling eye-of-newt will be better able to serve. But finally a whopping 73% of Americans believe in miracles. Which is good if you want to survive a market-based healthcare plan.

But the other half of the Bush plan involves number-crunching and tax incentives. All Americans are expert at tax arcana, right? We all have to do it every year, so we must be good at it! That’s probably why about 60% of Americans have a tax preparer do their taxes for them.

The U.S. Tax Code is 17,000 pages long and since 1986 Congress has made 15,000 changes to it, so it’s probably pretty easy to keep up with it all. According to a U.S. Census report, in 2005 only 35% of Americans read a book for leisure. Maybe all the rest were reading the Tax Code.

Under the current Bush proposal the White House estimates that only about 20% of Americans currently getting health care coverage through work will see an increase in taxes because their plans will exceed the $15,000 family/$7,500 single “caps”, and while these caps will be adjusted for inflation, health care costs rise a lot faster! A preliminary analysis by the Tax Policy Center suggests that within 10 years of the Bush Plan’s implementation, 40% of all plans will exceed the cap, et viola, 40% of people covered under employer-purchased plans will get to pay more in taxes.

So overall we have a populace that is going to have to get out there and get do the heavy lifting and make this market plan work. Convoluted tax breaks coupled with extremely advanced technology and a complex discipline such as medicine all in the hands of regular people like you and me who believe in witches and pay other people to compute our taxes for us.

Yeah, this is gonna work out real well.