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| The alleged grifter who duped corporate giants | |||
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| Dina Wein Reis certainly lived like gentry. She has luxurious homes in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., Bal Harbor, Fla., and Jerusalem. Her Manhattan townhouse was featured in Architectural Digest. On a loan application she estimated her own net worth at $200 million, according to the government, although that figure is probably exaggerated. She cultivated friendships in New York society, hosting lavish parties for the Whitney Museum of American Art. With her polish, bling, and porcelain skin, she made a striking first impression. Said one former employee: "She looked like she stepped out of a Beyoncé video." For sheer dollar damages, her alleged thievery cannot come close to matching that of Bernard Madoff or R. Allen Stanford. She didn't steal outright, fudge the books, run a Ponzi scheme, or leave investors destitute. She didn't rob charities. But what she is accused of doing was fabulously brazen; she had the temerity to sting some of the world's biggest corporations -- not just once, but again and again. Her targets were middle- and upper-level marketing executives, including division heads and presidents. It was a simple scheme, though brilliantly choreographed, according to court records and people familiar with the investigations. Here's how it worked: Wein Reis persuaded the executives to sell her merchandise at huge discounts, promising to include the products in knapsacks or boxes of free samples to be handed out at schools, senior centers, Native American reservations, or military bases. She promised the sellers that if the sampling program were successful, the companies would gain exclusive access to these hard-to-reach markets through her "National Distribution Program." But there was no National Distribution Program, according to the deposition of a senior Wein Reis lieutenant. It was a fantasy. Instead, Wein Reis and her team sold nearly all of the goods to middlemen, who sold them to big retail chains, grocery stores, and wholesalers. |
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| Why We Must Ration Health Care | |||
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| You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed. |
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| AJ says: Singer's lucid prose hits home again. I like it when he appeals to a mainstream audience like this. (I still think Animal Liberation is a classic, but most people are afraid to read it.) Minor complaint: he suggests that QALY be modified to account for disabilities by asking able people to value their lives in a disabled condition. But many studies have shown that people consistently undervalue disabled lives. (In other words, it's not as bad as you think. People are more resilient than they predict.) A simple fix would be to discount for this factor. |
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| Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears | |||
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| Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane. He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth’s bedrock. All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine. |
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| AJ says: Pretty remarkable stuff. The story is about a similar project in California. Check out the great accompanying interactive feature. | |||
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| Escapee gives glimpse of North prison camps | |||
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| Shin Dong Hyuk had just turned 14 when he was forced to watch the executions of his mother and older brother for trying to escape from North Korea's "total control" prison camp No. 14, a Stalinist gulag for political prisoners. His mother was hanged; his brother was shot nine times. At the time, Shin, who was born and raised in the camp, felt no pity for them. Total control meant the political prisoners were in until they died. |
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| The Cost Conundrum | |||
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| What a Texas town can teach us about health care. | |||
| Local executives for hospitals and clinics and home-health agencies understand their growth rate and their market share; they know whether they are losing money or making money. They know that if their doctors bring in enough business—surgery, imaging, home-nursing referrals—they make money; and if they get the doctors to bring in more, they make more. But they have only the vaguest notion of whether the doctors are making their communities as healthy as they can, or whether they are more or less efficient than their counterparts elsewhere. A doctor sees a patient in clinic, and has her check into a McAllen hospital for a CT scan, an ultrasound, three rounds of blood tests, another ultrasound, and then surgery to have her gallbladder removed. How [do they know] whether all that is essential, let alone the best possible treatment for the patient? It isn’t what they are responsible or accountable for. | |||
| mmc says: Disturbing and insightful view into the perverse incentives that shape our health care system. | |||
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| African tribe populated rest of the world | |||
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| The entire human race outside Africa owes its existence to the survival of a single tribe of around 200 people who crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago, scientists have discovered. | |||
| Archaeologists in China, for example, believe they have strong evidence that the Chinese evolved directly from a lineage of Homo erectus that arrived in China 2 million years ago and not from African Homo sapiens. But recent genetic work at Fudan University in Shanghai tested the Y chromosomes of more than 12,000 men currently living in different parts of China and found that they all descended from the original African humans. |
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| AJ says: More data putting other theories to rest. Africans still remain incredibly diverse. | |||
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| Where's the remotest place on Earth? | |||
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| The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province. |
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| AJ says: The article is accompanied by a really neat image, and a slideshow with more maps. | |||
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| Pulp Nonfiction | |||
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| Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies. And get this: even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry--handsomely--to use more fossil fuel. "Which is," as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the "opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established." | |||
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| How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke | |||
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| This story is basically just one big, heaping portion of schadenfreude. Enjoy. | |||
| Ismail squandered a fortune funding not only [a religious movie] but also the music label COZ Records ("The guy was a real good talker," says Rocket); a cosmetics procedure whereby oxygen was absorbed into the skin ("We were not prepared for the sharks in the beauty industry"); a plan to create nationwide phone-card dispensers ("When I was in college, phone cards were a big deal"); and, recently, three shops dubbed It's in the Name, where tourists could buy framed calligraphy of names or proverbs of their choice ("The main store opened up in New Orleans, but doggone Hurricane Katrina came two months later"). The shops no longer exist. | |||
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| The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution | |||
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| AJ says: Replete with Taibbi's usual invective, but nevertheless the best explanation of the financial crisis I've read. I actually understand CDOs and credit-default swaps now. | |||
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| The Secret To Chimp Strength | |||
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| February's brutal chimpanzee attack, during which a pet chimp inflicted devastating injuries on a Connecticut woman, was a stark reminder that chimps are much stronger than humans—as much as four-times stronger, some researchers believe. But what is it that makes our closest primate cousins so much stronger than we are? | |||
| AJ says: I've always wondered about this. A 95-pound female chimp can outlift the strongest male humans. Some interesting theories in here about why. | |||
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| Annals of Human Rights: Hellhole | |||
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| The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? | |||
| A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered. | |||
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The bad news is that, of course, he doesn't get any interest or penalty from the county for them holding a substantial chunk of money from him for an entire year. I also don't know if he's actually gotten the money back yet or not.
(off-topic, but vaguely related) There was a guy many years ago who won a suit against the state of New Hampshire, which the state refused to pay; a judge eventually ended up issuing a warrant for the sheriff to escort him to the nearest state office (the state liquor store, as it turned out) and seize for him the amount of the settlement in "cash or liquid assets".
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