On The Shoulders Of Giants

Did you know that hubbly-bubbly is a pidgin word?

I know this is politics, but that’s how I want my politics:

I think it is purely childish when you would criticize America and people call you unpatriotic, or when you criticize Israel and they call you anti-Semitic and everywhere such as. Have they not heard of tough love? Who says that to show love for something you have to approve of it at all times? I personally think my best friends happen to be my harshest critics. I think this comes with a humility that you, yourself don’t have all the answers and you need critics. By understanding that, you will become more comfortable with others criticizing you or those that you love.

In my professional ethics class we were talking about medical ethics and the doctor’s responsibility regarding telling the truth. The issue of Matrix came up and the teacher asked us “Would you take the blue pill or red pill?” As a reminder, in the movie, Matrix, Morpheus, asks the same question. The implication is that if you take the red pill, you would go back to reality and if you take the blue pill, you would enter a state of virtual bliss. I raised my hand for the blue pill. Which one would you take and why? Please respond bellow.

As Obama and McCain are warming up for the general election campaign, I see a sharp contrast in the economic theory of the two camps. As the old adage says, follow the money. As a background note, let me mention that I am talking within the capitalist paradigm and I am no Karl Marx.

I believe this is what this battle comes down to: more wealth (money, power and opportunity) concentrated in the hands of a minority on one side, and more wealth shared by more people on the other side. I call it the exclusivist and the inclusivist philosophies. As of now, the exclusivists are mostly the Republicans lead by George Bush and McCain and the inclusivists are mostly the Democrats led by Obama. The best defense that exclusivists have is that overall, it is better for everyone meaning that if we have richer billionaires and bigger corporations, the average Joe would be better off. This is the old battle between liberty versus fairness, and please don’t think Ayn Rand versus Lenin. Evidence shows that in a free-market capitalist system people are better off (think South Korea versus North Korea) but the question is where do we draw the line? Are we better off because Haliburton, Exxon Mobile, Blackwater and lobbyists are better off with George Bush in office? Or would we be better off living in a society where veterans would get a chance to go to college and more people would have access to health insurance? I don’t think we are any better off because of Republicans’ exclusiveness and I think the election in November will show that most Americans don’t think so either.

Proof video

Here is an excerpt from BusinessWeek’s article titled “Meet Your New Recruits: They Want to Eat Your Lunch”:

…”We are followers of Warren Buffett,” explains Greene, who says he studies the famed Omaha investor’s letters to shareholders as if they were sacred texts.

High-revving students scoff at advice they sometimes hear about intellectually browsing before settling on a narrow employment path. “Many of my fellow classmates have been planning out their college choices since middle school, so to tell them not to plan for a future career during freshman year is illogical,” says Janet Xu, 22, a senior at Yale and editor of the undergraduate magazine Yale Entrepreneur. She is heading off soon to be an analyst for Sears Holdings (SHLD) in Chicago….

The article talks about a new group of elite college graduates emerging from top American universities who are aiming for the top jobs. At first, I got excited about this phenomenon. After reading the article, I have to tell you that I’m not as optimistic as I was about this new group. It seems like they all want to go to finance and consulting. In my opinion, for a healthy economy, we do need financiers and consultants, but they are one piece of the big picture and they are not the ones creating “value”. I believe “economic value” is created mostly by entrepreneurs, innovators, designers and manufacturers. Let me define what I mean by value (and this is my definition): true economic value is something for which people would pay voluntarily and with adequate relevant information. For example, when you pay $300 to buy a digital camera and you have done research on it before, you have read customer and analyst reviews and you know all the functions of the camera, that must have some true value to you. Value is not equivalent to cash. A pyramid scheme may generate cash for some people but doesn’t create any real value. A hedge fund may make some people richer, but it doesn’t necessarily create economic value. What an economy needs is a lot of value creators and some financiers.

From Wall Street Journal:

Last month, while the American people were becoming the personal ATMs of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Saudi Arabia signing away an even more valuable gift: nuclear technology. In a ceremony little-noticed in this country, Ms. Rice volunteered the U.S. to assist Saudi Arabia in developing nuclear reactors, training nuclear engineers, and constructing nuclear infrastructure. While oil breaks records at $130 per barrel or more, the American consumer is footing the bill for Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions.

A couple of days ago, I was talking to a friend and he recommended Youtube. He said there are a lot of good stuff on it. Honestly, I had written off this website as a place to watch college pranks. After that conversation, I took a second look at the website and started searching for videos of things I was reading or hearing about. I watched a lot of cool Bill Maher videos. And today, after hearing about it, I found this video. Bill Moyer of PBS is ambushed by a Fox News “reporter” at the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform. Bill Moyer destroys this guy without a flinch and the guy absconds into the wilderness. Watch it if you have an extra 9 minutes.

What does not commit itself to documentation, is perhaps the thing.

I’m going to do something crazy and venture way out of my field, to say something that I have no business saying something about. Here it goes:

A disease is not necessarily identifiable by its symptoms. Several causes can lead to very similar symptoms and the treatment options could be completely different. In some cases, medicine (in the US, the FDA) understands that. That is why we have so many different anti-depressants because there are different kinds of depression. Depression is too broad of a term to uniquely identify the condition.

In some cases, medical authorities do not understand this very well. One example is most cancers. Many cancer drugs get developed that work very well on one group of patients and don’t harm the other patients who tried them but get voted down because they are not “effective enough” for the statistical sample.

The baskets we are using are too large to handle all possible treatments. We need to use smaller baskets and have a more utilitarian approach to medicine.