Saturday: Banging

The siding guys arrived a little before 9am.  They’re banging on the house right now.  The walls are vibrating.  The side of the house that needs to be replaced is right outside Brooke’s bedroom so I warned her there would be some noise.  But teenagers are like chrysallises.  She’s sleeping right through it and will probably emerge at the crack of noon to go foraging.

In the meantime, I’m emptying my instapaper queue again this morning.  Let’s see, what do we have here:

1.) I LOVE apartmenttherapy.  If you’ve never visited the site you really need to.  Apartmenttherapy is inspiration for decorators on a budget, a place to check out new gadgets, a resource for greener living and growing kids, and kitchen/cooking site.  They also appear to have a social conscience.  I’ve seen more than one post hinting at sympathies to the Occupy movement.  Here’s another.  An apartmenttherapy editor, Sara Gillingham-Ryan, who lives close to Zuccotti park documents the kitchen and food of Occupy Wall Street.  Her piece reaffirms my own impression of Zuccotti during the fall.  It was a vibrant, welcoming place that attracted visitors off the street to come in, find community and talk about what was going on.  Therefore, it was radical, dangerous and had to end.  But don’t worry, Spring is Coming.

2.) I hear they have snow in Davos this year.  If you have the time and money, you might want to check out the “luxury” igloo hotel at Davos.  The concept is interesting.  I just don’t think I would refer to temperatures lower than 68° F as a luxury.  Your mileage may vary.  I think that Occupy has a remote outpost at Davos as well and that Jeff Jarvis was going to go visit.  Check his twitter stream to see if he made it.

3.) Or not.  Twitter just announced that it would abide by the laws in countries where there are proscriptions on certain kinds of twitters.  You mean the effective kind?  Just askin’.  Which is what Jeff Jarvis is getting at in his tweet this morning on Twitter’s announcement:

@jeffjarvisJeff Jarvis

My problem w/#Twitter’s new national capability is that it is a slippery slope of censorship. We need to know its principles.

It’s all part of a pattern.  SOPA, PIPA, Twitter.  Someone has it in for the internet and wants to stomp it dead, dead, dead.  Oh sure, it wouldn’t go away.  But it would devolve into a place where companies sell you stuff on every corner of every page.  You could use it as a reference tool, maybe.  Or as a media consumption device.  Sort of like a giant TV with a zillion channels, all carefully regulated for your protection.  God help you if you try to incite a little insurrection and accidentally reference a bit of copyrighted material.

I think the powers that be suddenly realized that the internet gave people the opportunity to communicate without a filter and circumvent billions of dollars of thought shaping ads and screed.  Well, we can’t have that.  Here comes the crackdown.  This could be the end of a brilliant 20 year experiment that many of us cut our grown up teeth on.  Or it could mean a new opportunity for creativity.  If all that copyrighted material is suddenly off limits, we may see a boom in new, creative content that is royalty free, er, except to anyone in the media.  I’d love to see that kind of intellectual property agreement.

But sooner or later, the bastards will get what they want by buying the right lawmakers.  It goes without saying that we need to get rid of them and it starts at the top with Obama.  No, no, don’t try to scare me with Newt Gingrich.  There are times when you have to stop being afraid that you will not succeed.  There are third party candidates out there.  Pick one, everyone get behind that person and pull.

4.) Jay Rosen says that Republican voters are living in a different reality:

So I’m not saying that the Democrats and progressives are the ones who are in touch with reality, while conservatives and Republicans are not. (But I guarantee you some will read it that way.) I’m saying that the tendency toward wish fulfillment, selective memory, ideological blindness, truth-busting demagoguery and denial of the inconvenient fact remains within normal trouble-making bounds for the Democratic coalition. But it has broken through the normal limits on the Republican side, an historical development that we don’t understand very well. That is, we don’t know the reasons for it, why it happened when it did, or what might reverse it. (We also need to know the degree to which it is a global phenomenon among conservative parties in mature democracies, or an American thing.) Political scientists: help!

I think wish fulfillment is at the core of the religious Republicans’ worldview.  If you are wishing soooooo hard that the Rapture is going to come and destroy all of your enemies and family members who wouldn’t listen to you, then what does it matter how crazy your politics get?  Any thought that leads you closer to that eventuality is permissible.

One of my Dad’s favorite sayings was “Wishing doesn’t make it so.” He must have driven social conservatives nuts with that kind of clear thinking. {{snicker}}

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Argghhhh!  It’s always something.  The siding looks like a perfect match, even though it’s vinyl and the rest of the house is aluminum.  But the trim was ordered in the wrong color.  They delivered white, I need Navajo White.  It’s in the covenant.  And even if it were the right color, we’re a box short.  So, it’s not going to get finished today.  It’s on the side of the house that is not visible to the street but *is* visible to my neighbor, the cul-de-sac busy body and general itch with a B.  She’s got me fined before when I left cabinets on the sidewalk from my kitchen demo.  Most of them got taken by Craigslist foragers but there were two that were not and I pulled my back last summer so I couldn’t lift them to the dumpster, which I am not allowed to leave them in anyway.  $25.00/day until I could get someone to help me get rid of them.  You would think that someone so obsessed with the condition of the neighborhood would lend a helping hand.  No, not this one.  It’s much more fun to leave nasty anonymous notes on your neighbors door and sic the association on them.   I can just picture the fine that will be in my mailbox if the siding is left unfinished one second longer than Mrs. NebbyNose can tolerate. I can not *WAIT* to get out of NJ and the damn townhouse association strike force.

OccupyPharma and other cures

We are also the 99% Meeeeneeeemeeep!

Reader bemused_leftist pointed me to a defense of the control network that I posted about yesterday from a guy who works in one of those companies on the network.  Here are the money quotes from the defense from Andrew Drucker at Made from Truth and Lies: I’m annoyed at the sensationalist financial reporting:

I happen to work for one of those 50 companies, which gives me a little bit of perspective (even if I am very far down its hierarchy). And I can tell you that most of those companies aren’t in that position because of a conspiracy of control – but because you have a pension. AXA, Legal and General, Aviva, Sun Life, and many many more of the companies on there are there because ordinary people put their cash into life insurance or pensions, and that cash is then invested in the stock market so that it can make payouts in the event of either problems (for the insurance) or retirement (for the pensions). And because many of these companies provide pensions either for millions of people, thousands of large companies, or both, they are managing massive piles of cash.

Which doesn’t mean that they’re actually running the companies they own lots of shares in. Most pensions/insurance/life companies are terrified of telling the companies they own shares in how to behave – they want to own shares in something successful so that they make profits, but they don’t have the time to micro-manage them, and they really don’t want to get involved in anything that smells even slightly political.

This actually leads, sometimes, to insufficient control over the directors of large corporations – because if you’re in the FTSE 100, you’re going to find your shares are owned by a lot of investment companies, who just want you to churn out profits, without paying too much attention to, say, board-level renumeration. So you can get away with paying your high level people a lot without a share-holder rebellion. If they were owned by a few ordinary people then they’d find themselves subjected to a lot more scrutiny, and a lot more control.

Well, Andrew, speaking as a former employee of one of those companies that the network node companies are terrified to micro manage, I call bullshit.  The pharma industry has been micromanaged to death by the node network guys.  When they’re not totally onboard some gutwrenching merger or acquisition, they’re telling the CEO to cut more from research.  Yeah, that’s the ticket to a successful, money making pharmaceutical company!  Dismantle the research apparatus.  Do it quickly, like before the next quarter.  Andrew, please do not tell anyone in the pharma industry who has either lost their job or about to lose their job (those are the only two categories at the present time), that the pension fund managers and big banks and other financial sector players have not had a profound effect on the way pharmaceuticals run their businesses.  We have been at the Town Hall meetings when the head honchos have told us directly and to our faces that you guys have been leaning on them- heavily.  It’s not bad enough that pharma has been shooting it’s own image in the foot with lobbyists and high drug prices, that you financial types skim from, or that it is constantly under attack from the left for being less than perfect (as if there is such a thing as a perfect drug, there isn’t).  No, what really pisses the labrats off is yet another boneheaded restructuring plan brought on by some nitwit Wharton School graduate who just has to take the latest management trend out for a spin to teach those damn researchers that research costs money, by golly!  How dare they consume so many pipettes, order so many tests and break so many instruments.  Don’t they know that those costs go into the debit column??  Well, they’re going to have to learn a thing or two or we’re not going to make our quarterly estimate.

It’s been done to every one of the companies I’ve ever heard of.  If the companies aren’t shedding research jobs to hire cheap contractors, they’re shedding research jobs to just get out of unprofitable therapeutic areas.  Well, who needs antibiotics anyway?  The latest news is that Abbott is spinning off the pharma unit altogether.  Oh sure, they’ve got a blockbuster that will keep them afloat for awhile but most likely, they’ll get swallowed up by a bigger shark and where will the cost savings come from?  That’s right, the research unit.  These days, companies buy products, not the group that actually discovered the product.

More joy is on the horizon for 380 Amgen employees who learned just last week that they are going to lose their jobs.  (pharmas are either tricklers or gushers when it comes to cutting jobs.  Amgen is a trickler; Pfizer is a gusher.  But it’s all the same in the end)  Really, guys, do the rest of us unemployed labrats need more competition?  And Merck, the beacon of stability, that has been holding off the financial analysts bravely for the past couple of years while the rest of the pharmas have done what their masters ordered, seems to have finally thrown in the towel.  They are going to be making an announcement next week about reorganizing. Derek Lowe’s blog, In the Pipeline, has some of the details and this complaint from Derek:

And on a similar topic, here’s a post from John LaMattina asking what many people have at one point or another: how come Wall Street analysts get so much influence over how much a drug organization spends on R&D? His examples are Merck, Lilly, and Amgen, and his take is:

“Now, I am all for monitoring R&D budgets to maximize the returns from these investments. And I am all for accountability – asking the R&D organization to deliver new candidates to the pipeline, having formal goals with rigorous deadlines, and for running clinical trials as expeditiously as possible while keeping a close eye on costs. But for Wall Street to reward a company for lowering R&D spending and attack those that want to commit to R&D is absurd. Like it or not, R&D IS the engine that powers a pharmaceutical company. It is also a high-risk endeavor. Furthermore, given all of the hurdles that now exist especially with regard to ensuring safety and having sufficient novelty to justify pricing, R&D is more expensive than ever. But, if you want to succeed, you have to invest – substantially. There are no short cuts.”

Wall Street’s answer, which may be hard to refute, is that if you want the access to capital that the stock market provides, then you have to accept the backseat driving as part of the deal. But do we get the same degree of it as other industries, or more?

That is the rule, Andrew, not the exception.

Now, I know that a lot of people at OccupyWallStreet don’t much care for pharma.   I know it takes a lot of milk of human kindness to love us but try, people, try.  It’s really important that you try to understand this problem.  Because if there was ever an industry that needed to be liberated from Wall Street it would have to be pharmaceutical research.  Wall Street and pharmaceutical research are about as incompatible as two entities can get.  Wall Street is all about short term profits and paying the shareholder.  Pharma research “used” to be about developing cures through science and long term committments.  The Wall Street crew does not care if there is a research industry left in this country.  It is not interested in your excuses that research takes time and human organisms and their cells are very complex.  They are deaf to the pleas that we are being squeezed by the FDA to make our imperfect drugs perfect and need to carry out more and more expensive clinical trials that will cause some drugs to fail to advance.  All Wall Street cares about is whether the quarterly estimate will be hit or not.  And the MBAs who populate pharma’s corporate office suites are there to see that it is done.  That’s why they make the big bucks.

This is an opportunity, occupywallst, to take pharma back and make it work for the public.  Don’t pass this one up.

Moving on to cures of a different kind:

The people at ApartmentTherapy are starting the 20/20 Home Cure on Monday.  It’s 20 minutes a day for 20 days.  Each day features a different project to get your house back in shape.  You can sign up at ApartmentTherapy on Monday.  Here’s Maxwell’s introduction video to explain what it’s about.  If you are a bit more ambitious and need more structure in your home clean up routine, check out the 20 minutes for 30 days plan.  You can add these tasks to your favorite productivity tool (I’m testing out Home Routines for the iPad) and they can come up on a regular basis.  I have heard that if you do something for 21 days, you’re more likely to make it a lasting habit.  So, if you’re like me and you spend  a bit too much time hunched behind your computer, join ApartmentTherapy on Monday for the Home Cure.

Apartmenttherapy is just a great site to add to your daily routine anyway.  If you’re looking for a way to change your home environment in some way, they have the answers, ideas, DIY projects and plenty of design inspirations from people on budgets, updated frequently throughout the day.  They have several sibling sites too that cover everything from renesting, food, and parenting to planning your next high tech gadgets.  Another blog of visual relief for the home is Design*Sponge by Grace Bonney and her crew.  Highly recommended.

On the menu for a cool fall evening, Roast Pumpkin with Cheese Fondue.  I made this last year.  Dead simple to assemble, delicious.  Should be served in front of a toasty fire with salad and a crisp white wine.  Yummm.