Cynic Root

How private health expenditure promotes obesity. The “gym-fees” factor and obesity.

What do you do about physical fitness? You probably pay for gym membership. I suspect that gyms’ business models are based largely on the fact that most customers will make virtually no use of their membership.

The consumer psychology behind this: “I already pay a fortune for membership in a trendy gym, why would I want to invest more by waking-up early and going to the gym, when I really should wake-up early and go to work so I can pay for that gym?”

Indeed, people hate “losing” money by not consuming the services they paid for, but at 6am this logic eludes them. They hate waking up at 6am even more, so the extra sleep is more than worth the membership fee. (To sum this point: One pays for gym membership to be fit. One forfeits gym fees for extra sleep).

This logic applies to the more general subject of health insurance.

Let us look at 3 groups of people:

a) Those who cannot afford health insurance.

b) Those who pay a considerable part of their available income for health insurance.

c) Those who receive health insurance, or pay a small part of their available income for health insurance.

People in group (b) are subject to the the “gym-fees” factor: why would they pay more for healthier food when they just spent a fortune on their health. Indeed both health insurance and a healthy life style together are required to preserve one’s health, but isn’t paying for the gym almost as good as going to the gym?

People in group (a) are subject to this factor in a different way: They can’t pay for health anyway, buying more expensive, worse tasting food will not change this.

People in group (c) have more money or are more educated (thus, I suspect, are more likely to get good health insurance where they work, even if the salary is not very good). They’re perceived relative investment in life insurance isn’t as high, thus they can afford investing some more in healthier food (and gym membership).

This is another reason why the rich and educated are also less likely to be obese.

This argument is related to the arguments made by Becker and Posner in their recent blog posts (see more information about the Becker-Posner blog below). But, it leads to a somewhat different conclusion:

Reducing the private expenditure on health could be a good way to fight obesity.

Analysis of the relationship between private expenditure on health and obesity in different countries and populations could be a very interesting research subject. I have yet to find a good analysis of this. Please drop a note if you know of one.

A note about the Becker-Posner Blog

Gary Becker (an American economist and a Nobel laureate) and Richard Posner (A judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School) run a very interesting blog which I could describe as an economics blog, but it really deals with a variety of subjects from economic, legal and social points of view. Every week one of them writes a post about a subject and the other writes another post with comments and other perspectives.

In their recent pair of posts, Posner and Becker discuss health reform and obesity, mentioning a variety of causes for obesity and ways in which obesity could be reduced. Prices of fatty food, ignorance and discrimination in prices of health insurance are among these factors.

Posner’s post: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/08/health_reform_a.html

Becker’s view: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/08/the_growth_in_o.html

Oil and food used to be separate parts of the economy (to the extent which oil was used to drive food around).

Biodiesel seems to have coupled these two parts of the economy: as the price of oil sours, it becomes economical to take food and make gas out of it (though I don’t know how much of our food can be directly produced from oil. Other than licorice, which I always thought tasted like crude oil).

It turns out that we aren’t that flexible with our oil consumption so we are willing to pay just about any price oil producers think of. But it also turns out that some people would rather starve than pay this much for oil. Or rather, couldn’t pay this much for oil. Or rather couldn’t pay that much for the equivalent of oil, which is food that has become more expensive.

So, the price of oil raises, and we all prevent people from affording food.

Is biodiesel meant to reduce oil consumption by reducing the world’s population (by means of starvation)?

I hope that public transportation and electrical powered cars (using regenerative / nuclear-produced electricity) come back in fashion.

TechCrunch writes about compensating for your site’s CO2 emissions: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/14/co2stats-compensates-for-your-sites-pollution/

Other ways to look at the service:

Put an ad for CO2 Stat on your website, get negative CPM for it.

Web analytics service where you pay based on the traffic you get.

The obvious service to expect next is a Twitter CO2 compensation service for your Twitter traffic. And save the whales compensation for viewing failwhales.

I’m thinking of starting the CynicBadge: You can place it on your website and pay on a per view basis. I will check in from time to time to make sure that you don’t take anything too seriously. You pay a penalty for being too serious.

But I do appreciate the concern for the environment. Really. (I’d have to pay a cynic penalty for this line…)

Hypothesis:
“Sex, and now that I’ve got your attention…”, in the blogging community, has it become “Twitter, and now that I have you attention…”?
Evidence:
Did you read this post because it said SEX, or because it said TWITTER? (Help my research: answer in the comments). Which makes me wonder whether there’s cybersex going on in twitter? (Please, don’t comment on this one. Really, don’t)

BTW: If I’m right, I think Twitter was under valuated. Though I understand why people are reluctant to pay for the service.

The Web is Falling (Or whales are falling out of the sky)

Twitter got a huge boost in terms of exposure and users by throwing whales at innocent users (http://cynicroot.com/blog/2008/07/30/the-twitter-conspiracy-downtime-a-publicity-stunt/).

Other companies are now doing the same. It seems that some downtime provides good exposure to companies with many users which don’t get too much spotlight.

The best example is probably Amazon S3/EC2. There are a lot of well known web services using Amazon’s clouds, BUT you don’t hear about it UNTIL Amazon’s cloud goes offline. Then you discover that all of your favorite services are down. And you blog about it. And you read about it. And if you haven’t heard that Amazon is powering half the internet, now you know it. And despite the relatively small downtimes, you will use it.

And if you didn’t know that already, you now know that virtually everyone is using gmail (even if on a separate domain) thanks to the face that gmail was down. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rammikins/2755076836/)

Facebook’s website practically going down for a day when facebook made changes to profiles didn’t have the same effect. Everybody already knows facebook. The new profile might have an interesting effect, especially if many people DON’T like it.

Seems to me that this is a good strategy if you are a successful infrastructure company that doesn’t get enough coverage.

Your votes: which infrastructure service is next.

Is any other company getting this much community strategic consulting?
Or that much coverage?

In the past NASA is said to have fabricated the moon landing, serving national interests against the Soviet Union.

Now, the US administration has different problems, and again NASA might be cooperating with the administration in an even more outrageous way.

1) the Bush administration’s Water Projects proposals gets vetoed . Only months later NASA finds water on Mars, initiating the greatest water project ever.

2) the American economy suffers from increased prices of Oil. Suddenly, NASA finds oil on Titan, an oil lake, no less.

I wonder what NASA is going to find about Obama in the coming months.

Nasa has gone as far as Titan (Saturn’s moon) to find oil.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080730.html

I’m opening the inter-planetary commodities business: we’re going to import oil from Titan and make a stop-over in mars to pick up water as well.

I’m now analyzing the business plan for this. What is the price of oil that makes this worth while?

Water has been found on Mars http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080731.html, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4275923.html

It is believed that these water could be soon bottled and sent back to earth, creating the most exclusive brand of mineral water yet.

It is now hoped that no local life form is found to claim this new source.

What happens when the ice caps melt? Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Run for the hills, the icecaps are melting.
Humanity makes another giant step into the realms which were once reserved only for science fiction. Technology has just enabled us to see what happens when the ice caps melt.
Experts say that the northern pole’s ice cap will completely melt this summer.
I guess the ice wasn’t holding the sky up, because the sky still isn’t falling.

What will probably happen?

• Polar bears will drown for a lack of ice to stand on. They had their 15 minutes with Knut (http://www.knut.net/), but since it has grown they are just not as popular. I never did like them anyway.
• We get more oil. There are tons of it under the ice cap, and finally we used up enough oil to get the world hot enough for us to be able to drill some more in the arctic.
• Ships now have a very short route between Asia and Europe. No need for Panama Canal or Suez Canal. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/16/climatechange). Europeans get cheaper Japanese cars!
  Well, some environmentalists argue that ships might harm the environment in the melted areas. So, we’ve just got rid of those damn polar bears, but environmentalist still worry if bears drown in clean water or in oily water. I don’t see any bear complaining.

• Canada and Russia will go to war over arctic territories.

Antarctica, fear not, we’re coming to get you too. We got the oil to do it and Japanese cars just got cheaper.
Never did like those damn penguins. They had their 15 minutes of fame in the movie “Happy Feet”, but now that it’s over we can get rid of them too.