See this documentary for more details. :-P

If everyone paid out of pocket, I can assure you it would be way cheaper.

Like pet veterinary care.

There's a much simpler, basic reason: most people believe the $1000+ hearing aids are better. They aren't really, but that is the value seniors and other place on them, and no manufacturer wants to leave money on the table. Even seniors without insurance would want to pay that price because they believe quality has to cost that much. If they bought a $300 model, seniors would be lobbying their kids for the $2000 model.

So much of health care spending is 'irrational', and as long as our comfort and longevity are on the table, we'll spend what ever it takes even if it is out of our own pockets.

Wow. You manage to bring in one thing to explain this thing and get it spectacularly wrong. As someone else pointed out, the Columbus Day weekend is the traditional ramp down time for refineries in the U.S. as they rejigger their formulation for fall (You didn't know refineries changed formulas for the season?). Also, several major supply routes got messed up:

From California gasoline prices soar amid refinery and pipeline shutdowns By The Associated Press:

"Among the recent disruptions, an Aug. 6 fire at a Chevron Corp. refinery in Richmond left one of the region's largest refineries producing at a reduced capacity, and a Chevron pipeline that moves crude to northern California also was shut down. There also was a power failure that affected an Exxon Mobil Corp. refinery in Torrance, but the refinery has resumed normal operations."

As for Krugman and this being all the fault of QEx: there's a reason gas is not part of the core measure of inflation. Last I checked, we aren't in an inflation cycle yet. Gas is a volatile price (no-pun intended) that jumps way up and down responding to things like, you know, refineries having fires and pipeline shut downs. It's left out of most inflation conversations among economists.

Anyway, thanks for playing! Here's a home version of the game "The Eeeevil Fed Is Coming For Your Savings!!"

That is correct, AC. "Excellence" indeed. For most Japanese, they associate the word with the ninja from legend.

Read RealClimate's coverage.

Basically, there was some growing problem (no pun intended) with tree-ring based temperature studies, and this study helps figure out how to take into account those problems, and a probably cause.

Exactly. Japanese Parliamentary reports are usually cover-ups or whitewashes of political and industry screw ups. This is probably a first in Japanese post-war history!

I tried to read it, but couldn't get past the first 100 pages. It was trying soooooo hard to be cool & edgy it turned me off. It was a like an Ritalin-addicts pastiche of William Gibson.

I think everything he wrote from from Cryptonomicon on are his best works. The Baroque Cycle was fantastic! It's kind of sad that it's Snow Crash that gets all the attention.

Yeah! Just leave that to the birds! :-)

He scares the left because he's basically about leaving the states to their own resources, and most states (especially the Red States), don't generate enough GDP to do anything on their own. Also, state politics are notoriously corrupt and prone to special interest groups (see California). The U.S. Federal government is the easiest institution to create a social safety net, control big corporations, etc. The things Ron Paul wants to let go of.

Yes, this Daniel Pearl.

I can understand your point of view, but it doesn't change the fact the Japanese government had begun the process of feeling for surrender. What ground soldiers did is separate from what the politicians wanted to do. Did LBJ want American soldiers massacring civillians at Mai Lai? No, but insane shit happens in war. The soldiers that tortured and murdered your grandfather were war criminals, and one can only hope that those Japanese soldiers either committed sepiku or were brutally beaten & killed by American marines.

I find Stanislaw a little hard to read at times (i.e., boring), but after reading a couple of his books from the library and ready to give up on him, I finally read Solaris. And wow, Solaris is different from the movies. It's not really about the planet, or what happens to George Clooney on the planet. It's a question about "Can science ever really know the unknowable?" The book is more like a future history of research into the planet Solaris and the failure of humanity to understand the how or why of the planet. Humanity meets an intelligence (Solaris), and neither side can understand or communicate with each other. Very haunting for me.