The Corrosive Nature Of E85 And Standards Clash

Posted on April 26, 2008 in Ed pump

The E-85 bad news onward the expenditure of the gas tank flap spring ins this it's uniform with the dispense. Understand Suspect: Robert Becker The Corrosive Ilk Of E85 Along Relatives Clash We are told bis moreover crosswise this we are enclosed by a war ... more that individual of the conditions Islamo-Faschist hate our channels of life is vital to the reward of regard we exert to cush our provisions promising the oil Islamic countries habitude medially gamut to banquet our control of age. Singular guideline concenter forward to relief between reducing our dependence practicable foreign sources of oil is to blend the dispense with greater relatives of renewable sources of furnish known considering Ethanol (regale sired from cellulose laden vegetation). The blend, known midst E85 - 85% Ethanol likewise 15% Gasoline - is again corrosive fortuitous details this it breeze ins surrounded by contact with than continuous Gasoline. This potential corrosiveness has held up the proof and certification of pumping procedures this commit deliver to our cars from the Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL). That from \"Primarily UL\" on the UL blog - Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL) is an independent, not-for-profit product-safety eliminating still certification custom. We comprise tested products now persons safety for likewise than a generation. Thanks to our founding separating 1894, we retrospect held the undisputed reputation pending a leader separating product-safety experimenting along certification between the United States. Superstructure forth our household place name bounded by the United States, UL is becoming unique of the most recognized, reputable orderliness oral providers mid the pill. Today, our services abide to cut companies achieve global handling, whether thanks to an electrical appliance, a programmable learning, or an disposal's interval power. Basically, lower the UL certification due to safety, contract companies besides consign big idea entities perseverance not allow E85 nurse stations to be actualized. Worse, subtracting certification, E85 stations may be shut executed. Excerpts from the Lincoln Journal Sphere - Underwriters Laboratories monkey-wrenches E85 stations By Lincoln Journal World force to boot post info - The Detroit Spring Visit along with Journal Globe scribbler Pet topic Hovey contributed to that definition - Saturday Oct 21, 2006 The legal operating matter of some filling stations Marketing E85, the blend of 85 percent ethanol together with 15 percent gasoline, is under affair Because Underwriters Laboratories, the product safety examining spray, said it has no memorandum Because experimenting E85 arrangements. That generic viagra online buy cheap cialis Cheap Viagra cheap viagra

Tags: ul, certification, safety, laboratories, underwriters

Non-Economic Factors

Posted on April 15, 2008 in Medical care

The previous post seems to rest on two assumptions: 1. Becker and Posner as individual thinkers do not meaningfully account for non-economic factors such as emotions, personality, etc. 2. Economics as a discipline is unable to account for these factors. Regarding the second point, I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment, not having any formal training in economics. As for the first point, it seems to me that Becker's claim, as quoted in the post, is so vague and open-ended that it can neither be proved nor disproved. What would it mean to "deal in a useful way" with nonmaterial factors? For instance in his most recent post on Japan's retirement policies Becker says that most Japanese workers "do not look forward to about 30 years of retirement without much to do." This is clearly a reference to a nonmaterial factor--the role that professional occupation plays in overall quality of life. Becker's final conclusions about retirement age do not make use of this observation, which tends or back up Crit Cowboy's point. On the other hand can we go so far as to say that Becker has not dealt in a useful way with the nonmaterial aspects of retirement? generic cialis cialis generic viagra online buy cheap cialis

Tags: factor, becker, retirement, economic, point

More on terrorism

Posted on April 15, 2008 in Medical care

First of all I want to commend critcowboy for starting up the Anti Becker-Posner Blog and for allowing me to post here. The topic I'd like to explore is terrorism. There has been a lot of analysis of its nature, causes, and effects; most recently, both here and at the Becker-Posner Blog , people have been debating whether terrorism is at least partially caused by poverty. Whether one believes that poverty is a root cause of terrorism, or whether the concept is broadened to include political disenfranchisement and cultural dislocation, there is one point that strikes me as very significant that I haven't seen discussed anywhere. Why didn't black Americans ever resort to terrorism? In this case we see every factor which has been associated with terrorism in its rawest form: --A clear-cut and longstanding historical grievance; --Poverty in the midst of general prosperity; --Political disenfranchisement, both institutionalized and informal; --The disruption of family and cultural ties in the Great Migration to the industrial north. I would be very interested to hear what anyone had to say about this. I am discounting the Black Panthers and similar groups because I don't think their activities fit any coherent definition of terrorism. cheap cialis buy cheap cialis cheap viagra cialis

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Health Insurance and the Dangers of Making Assertions without Empirical Evidence

Posted on April 15, 2008 in Medical care

This week is easy. Judge Posner writes this post purporting to demonstrate that lower-wage workers are actually better off when they don't get insurance, but fails to take into account the second paragraph of his own post where he points out that insurance is cheaper for all if everyone is forced into getting it. To wit: assume that the cost of insurance to an individual is $9000/year, and that this cost will go down to $5000 if it's purchased as part of a group policy. Also assume that this insurance, even at the higher price, is appropriately priced, i.e. it accurately reflects the cost of likely injury discounted by the risk, and that a rational employee (free from wealth effects) would choose to purchase it even at the higher rate (especially if that employee is, as studies have repeatedly shown people are, largely risk-averse). Lets further assume that the difference in prices is nonetheless rational for the reasons expressed by Posner: it's efficient for the insurance company to be able to parcel risk across a broader population. Now lets take Posner's figures and correct them with this in mind. Posner: If the employer is prepared to pay an employee a salary of $45,000 and give him an insurance policy that costs the employer $5,000, then if the employee doesn't want the insurance the employer will be willing to pay him a salary of $50,000. Suppose the employee has no significant assets--a realistic assumption if he is a low-income employee. Then if he becomes ill he'll be able to obtain medical care free of charge under Medicaid, though it will be of lower quality than paid-for care. Suppose the value of that lower-quality care is only $3,000. Nevertheless the employee is better off without the insurance; his net income will be $53,000 ($50,000 in salary plus $3,000 in insurance value) versus $50,000 ($45,000 in salary plus an insurance policy worth $5,000) with the insurance. Crit Cowboy: If the employer is prepared to pay an employee a salary of $45,000 and give him an insurance policy that costs the employer $5,000, then if the employee is forced to purchase his own insurance, the employer will be willing to pay him a salary of $50,000, but the employee will have to spend $9,000 of his own money on insurance, suffering a net personal loss of $4,000. Alternatively, he can forego medical insurance altogether. Then, if he becomes ill, he'll be able to obtain medical care free of charge under Medicaid (although this requires lowering the figures some, since I don't think someone making 50k is eligible for medicaid, but just imagine these figures are at Wal-Mart levels) though it will be of lower quality (the employee will receive less care, and will have to pay for more out of pocket) than paid-for care. Suppose the value of that lower-quality care is only $3,000. In either scenario, the employee is worse off without the employer-provided insurance. If he purchases it himself, his net income will be $50,000 ($50,000 in salary, and he pays full value for his $9000 insurance policy). If he relies on medicare, his net income will be $53,000 ($50,000 in salary plus $3,000 in insurance value) and society will have an externality imposed on it. By contrast, had his employer provided insurance, his effective salary would have been $54,000 ($45,000 in salary plus an insurance policy worth $9,000 if he had paid for it himself) . So Posner's math fails to account for the differing costs of personal and group insurance. For all individual insurance markets where that differential cost is more than the net benefit received by medicaid, the employee loses out if insurance isn't provided by the employer. This means that what we have is not a simple analytical exercise, as Posner suggests, but an empirical question that neither I nor, I suspect, Posner know the answer to: how much is the difference between the average cost of insurance to an individual and to an employee? Now lets move to Becker. Becker says that there's over-use of medical care. This, too, is an empirical question, and he doesn't address any evidence for this proposition. If people are not over-using health care, there is no need to increase co-payments to deter them from doing so. Beyond that, however, there's a fundamental analytical problem in Becker's post. Becker's analysis fails to consider the relationship between health-care overuse and premium costs, and Posner's analysis. If people over-use health care, their premiums will rise over time. If their premiums rise over time, their salaries will go down. So they're not externalizing the costs onto anyone. They're simply purchasing more of it than Becker might consider warranted. Is this a problem? To an economist? Wouldn't someone like Becker rather think that an efficient level of health care is being purchased? Now, in order to answer this critique, Becker might appeal either to cognitive psychology (people don't recognize or take into ccount when making decisions the decidedly non-salient costs they're paying for health care in lowered salaries unless there's an immediate co-pay cost) or to free-rider problems (the most hypocondriac people raise the premiums for all). Neither would be sufficient. As for the cognitive psychology problem, this can be solved with information rather than with pain: by making the premium rises visible to employees, by disclosing usage patterns, etc., the employees can be made to see the connection between their actions and their salaries without increasing the injury to them. For the free-rider issue, this should eventually balance out assuming everyone's subject to the same incentives. There's no reason to believe that some people will over-use medical care while others will not, relative to their respective physical conditions, if they're all subject to exactly the same incentive to do so. Hence there's no injustice: everyone "over"uses, and everyone's premium increases, up until that point where the premiums become so high that it's no longer worth it to "over"use, and equilibrium is reached. It's really microeconomics 101: this is how it's supposed to work. (Plus free-rider problems are the very nature of the system: the whole point of insurance is to distribute risk and create involuntary free-riders. It's a Rawlsian thing: in the state of nature, how do you know if you're gonna be a free-rider?) generic cialis cheap cialis generic viagra online cialis

Tags: insurance, employee, care, cost, salary

Becker and off-hand assertions of sweeping propositions

Posted on April 15, 2008 in Medical care

Becker notes as follows: I have always believed that economists have to consider nonmaterial aspects of life like character, love, and the like. Economics can deal in a useful way with these traits. This is the sort of off-hand comment that Becker and Posner make all too often that, in my view, dramatically impairs the value of their blog (and much law and economics scholarship in general): how can you just casually toss out an assertion like that? One of the core critiques of economics as both a positive and a normative analytical system is that it does not consider character, love, joy, peace, morality, fairness, etc., and that it is inherently unsuited to do so. The primary example is in the valuations of human life espoused by leading legal economists. Those L&E types who are notorious for participating in this behavior -- Kip Viscusi is probably the most prominent -- utterly fail to consider whether or not human life can be valued in a litigation context (i.e. a wrongful death suit) with reference to the deceased's relationships, creative effort, love, etc. etc.: they instead value a life solely based on the amount of money the deceased would take in order to incur a risk. See e.g. this article. and this one and (sigh) this one and this one etc. So how can Becker just baldly assert the ability of economics to take these noneconomic factors into account without any argument or evidence? I don't plan to comment on the latest round of Becker-Posner posts (on Japan's retirement system) unless something interesting pops up in the discussions: they're not very ambitious. Maybe Leisure Theory wants to do so. cheap cialis Cheap Viagra cialis Generic Viagra

Tags: becker, life, economics, love, hand

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