Guns and Sunscreen

Summer is coming.  Traditionally this is a time for vacation and for visiting the beach.  But even these activities require a little thought, a little critical thinking to avoid the consequences of poor behavioral choices.

Critical thinking about vacation means more than just planning the itinerary.  A recent news headline read:  “TSA Hits New Record After Confiscating 73 Guns In One Week From Carry-on Bags.”  Wow, guns are not allowed on an airplane?  These are not terrorists, just travelers.  Apparently people either forgot or were distracted or didn’t check their bags themselves before leaving for the airport.  Not only were they confiscated but the TSA carry-on screeners found that 68 of them were loaded and more than two dozen had a round in the chamber.  People inadvertently trying to take loaded weapons onto an airplane is crazy, but not in a funny way.  If they were surprised to find out there was a gun in their luggage, they were probably more surprised to be facing a citation of up to $11,000 or in some cases even being arrested, regardless of their intent or degree of inattention.  All that lack of thinking can put a really damper on that highly anticipated and well deserved vacation.

Besides flying, another activity associated with summer (but often throughout the year) is getting a nice, healthy-looking tan.  To those who are so inclined this news will come as an unpleasant surprise.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has permanently banned an Illinois company from marketing or selling indoor tanning systems.  These systems, the term tanning systems sounds more modern and scientific than tanning beds, were intended for home use and ranged in price from $1200 to $4000.  The FTC objection is that the marketers “ran ads claiming that their indoor tanning systems are safe, that research proves indoor tanning does not increase the risk of melanoma skin cancer, and that their systems which deliver both ultraviolet (UV) light and red light can ‘reverse the appearance of aging.’” The FTC labeled these claims as “false, misleading, or unsubstantiated.”  The company “also falsely stated that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has endorsed the use of indoor tanning systems as safe.”

It takes about 30 seconds of Internet research to find the facts.  American Academy of Dermatology website states, “Evidence from multiple studies has shown that exposure to UV radiation from indoor tanning devices is associated with an increased risk of melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer, including squamous cell carcinoma and basal cell carcinoma." [They include 9 citations in footnotes to back up this statement].

Several other sources tell us the following: 

• ·      Researchers estimate that indoor tanning may cause upwards of 400,000 cases of skin cancer in the U.S. each year.  That’s more than smoking.
• ·      There is no such thing as a safe tan and the beds may be more dangerous than the sun. 
• ·      Tanning can cause permanent structural damage to the skin, including wrinkling, age spots, and loss of elasticity, not make the skin younger.
• ·      A base tan does not protect skin from damage. In fact, people who base tan are more likely to report getting sunburned, perhaps from overconfidence.
• ·      Some who become addicted to tanning also are more likely to suffer from anxiety or mood problems.
• ·      Indoor tanning has been banned by a number of countries.

Surprise, surprise!  Even a simple thing like a summer vacation requires a modicum of critical thinking.  One of these errors will have immediate consequences and the other will have a delayed effect.  In any case, check the carry-on.  Pack the sunscreen and unpack the revolver. 

I Already Knew That!

When a young child feels he is being nagged about cleaning his room or getting ready for school on time, his reaction may be to stomp his foot, stick out his lip and yell, “I already knew that!”  I’m surprised I don’t hear this same reaction from the American people when they are reminded over and over about the same things.

This sense of incessant repetition came up again when I saw a story on the PBS NewsHour about personal finance.  The thrust of the piece was that everything you need to know about the subject could fit on a single notecard.  After reviewing financial advice from a number of different sources, the individual featured in the story spoke to a financial advisor, who challenged him to do just that.  He assembled his notes and boiled all the advice down to ten items that did fit on a notecard.  Then he and the financial advisor got back together and wrote a book about it.

Anyone who has paid the least bit of attention over the years would have looked at the card, possibly slapped himself on the forehead, and said, “Duh, there’s nothing new here.”  Of course anyone who has been paying attention over the years would have been doing this stuff already and wouldn’t need the notecard or the book.  The advice included:  don’t spend more than you make – actually worded as saving 10-20% of your income, but really the same idea; invest up to the maximum company match in a 401(k) plan; pay off debt beginning with the highest interest rate; etc.  This was not rocket science or any other complicated program.  And it's not presented as such, just a condensed summary of what we already should know.

The next day we were presented some health news about controlling your weight while grocery shopping.  Again we’ve heard most, if not all of it before.  Shop with a list and stick to it.  Don’t go shopping when you are hungry.  How do they get away with calling it news?

Why do people keep presenting this information on television, writing books about it and treating it like some revelation – nagging us about stuff we already know?  Just like there is no magic money tree in economics, there are no secrets in the areas of finance or diet.  In fact we can never get away with ignoring poor behavior in the discipline dimension.  Eventually the consequences catch up.

Suing Starbucks, Seriously?

Apparently the reward for success in America is that everyone lines up to sue you for the most minor slights.  Case in point:  “a Starbucks customer in Chicago has filed a new class-action suit saying that the coffee company underfills its cold drinks by adding too much ice to them.”  Starbucks’ defense is that “ice is an essential component of any 'iced' beverage."  The class-action suit asks for five million dollars.

This news comes less than a month after Starbucks was sued for under-filling its lattes by 25%.  Their probable defense is that foam is part of the experience, but that isn’t really the point.  Suing big companies seems to be the new national pastime.

Remember, this is the same Starbucks that recently ranked 5th in Fortune’s most admired companies with high marks for social responsibility and quality of products and services.  In the same year Starbucks was described by another website as the “epitome of a company guided by its values, with the character, conviction and reputation equity.”  With over 22,000 stores, their biggest problem lately is that they are too popular to be considered upscale or hip, as they were in the early days.

It is also the same Starbucks that served as an example for every financial advisor in the country.  The standard answer to how someone can save money was to not spend $5 a day on fancy coffee.  I don’t hear this much any more.  Maybe the financial advisors have decided it was a losing battle.  People are not going to give up their fancy coffee even if it means paying off college loans sooner or having enough money set aside for a comfortable retirement.

Personally, I have never been in a Starbucks store.  When they went public in 1992, in a gross overestimation of the intelligence and consumer savvy of the American people, I assumed the business model was not sustainable.  How many people are going to spend that much on fancy coffee (plus the inconvenience of getting there and waiting in line), when most coffee drinkers already were set up to make their own coffee at home for far less?  I guess the answer was a lot!  I could have paid the equivalent of $0.27 per share, (adjusted for our six subsequent stock splits) and sold it today for nearly $60.

Well, that’s my loss.  I guessed wrong.  Little did I realize that the answer to the financial problems was to spend money on high-priced coffee all these years and then, when they got to be big and successful, sue them for adding too much ice.  It’s the new American way – have your cake (or coffee) and eat it, too!

Enough with the sarcasm…  The real problem here is economic understanding and perspective.  People assume that awards or settlements from these lawsuits come from some magical insurance fund.  It really comes from you and me as customers of these companies, and, where insurance is involved, from you and me as customers of insurance companies whose rates must go up every time their risks increase, regardless of our individual behavior. 

This person was not harmed by getting less beverage and more ice.  This was likely not a one-time encounter where they felt they got cheated out of maybe a dollar.  It was likely a pattern where they got cheated out of 10 or 20 dollars.  But if money was the issue, they shouldn’t have been patronizing Starbucks in the first place.  Fancy coffee is a luxury!  It’s a choice; we can live without it and did so for hundreds of years.  Anyone who is not satisfied with a product can easily take their business elsewhere.  A lawsuit for too much ice seems vindictive and much more trouble than it’s worth.

The problem is that lawyers know and most consumers are learning that big, successful companies will grudgingly part with a few million dollars to settle even a ridiculous grievance to avoid the expense and disruption of a trial with the very real risk of a sympathetic jury taking the opportunity to redistribute a little of the wealth.  The system is broken, and Americans both as consumers and jurors continue to exacerbate the problem.

Life is Like a Crossword Puzzle

Yes, life is like a crossword puzzle, and here’s why. 

This thought came to me when I was finishing up a Sunday NY Times puzzle left on my clipboard since March.  The clue was 5 letters long “Not be able to sleep.”  At first I put in SITUP.  That seemed to fit as I filled in the down letters.  The UP was definitely right, but I later found I needed an L at the beginning instead of an S.  So my answer now read LITUP.  That made as much sense as the NYT answers often do so I left it and worked on the rest.  When I came back no letter I tried at the beginning of the down answer that cut right through the middle of this LITUP made any sense.  Then it struck me.  It was LIEUP, and everything else fit! 

“So what?” you say.  How is that like life?  Well, I committed to one answer, and then got more evidence and had to change it.  Then I had to change that second answer to finally succeed.  the final answer made more sense, but the point is I wrote in the letters (in pencil), but I couldn’t get too attached to those answers, even though they were “my” answers and I thought they were right at the time.  Being flexible is a healthier way to live.

Too often people think they have the right answer, but instead of being flexible when faced with contradictory evidence or opinions, they try to ignore them or block them out.  When a controversial speaker comes to a campus, students and faculty may put pressure on the administration to withdraw the invitation.  We hear examples of this at each graduation cycle.  If that tactic fails, agitators may show up at the venue with the intention of shouting down the presentation.  This deprives everyone else of information they might want to hear - even if it’s wrong, it gives them something to think about.

It’s not just college students.  This story from The Guardian shows that scientists, those who are supposed to be objective and open to new evidence, act in the same way.  Around 1960 a scientist proposed that sugar was the culprit in the modern diet.  Those in the camp that proposed fat as the problem, did not want to hear it.  Using the power of personality and political influence, “prominent nutritionists combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his career never recovered.”  They didn’t want to debate, they wanted to bury any opposition.  The government issued dietary guidelines based on those (fat) theories and no one ever looked back.

Last September, even though ideas about the harmfulness of sugar have become mainstream, the author of a book pointing out problems with the development of current dietary guidelines found an article she wrote for a medical journal attacked.  “The response of the nutrition establishment was ferocious: 173 scientists…signed a letter demanding [the journal] retract the piece.”  They offered no counter arguments and some who signed the letter had not even read the article.  They just didn’t want to hear it!  (This is a great article but rather long.)

This kind of refusal to consider alternatives is everywhere, even among those who call on everyone else to be open-minded.  (They often want us to be open-minded only about what they believe in, feeling no discomfort over the apparent inconsistency of silencing those who don’t agree with them.)  People only want to hear more evidence no matter how scanty to support their concept of the truth.  Recently House Speaker Paul Ryan referred to this phenomenon as “an echo chamber.”  Stephen Prothero, whom I judge from reading his most recent book to be in the opposite camp politically from Ryan, also criticizes it as “a hall of mirrors.”  I wrote about it in December under the  title “Confirmation Bias.”

Whether the subject is dietary guidelines, farming practices, climate change, health advice, economic policy, or a host of other topics, no one wants to hear the other side of the story.  They would rather shut down the opposition than reconsider the subject or be forced to defend a position they hold so dearly.  In their minds it’s settled!  Whatever happens, no one wants to take out their eraser, even if it means possibly being successful.

Challenging Some Preconceptions About Cooking and Eating

People who don’t understand science and make decisions on feelings, first impressions or advice from others often get it wrong.  Here is some information on cooking and eating that may seem surprising.

I’ve heard in conversations people condemn the use of microwave ovens for the preparation of any food.  “I just can’t bring myself to nuke it,” they say.  “It just can’t be as healthy, and I know it doesn’t taste the same.”  Then they go on and on about how careful they are and how they want only the best for their family.  Everyone just sits around the table and nods.  Among some, this is an in-vogue subject.

Now we hear from the scientists.  According to the health.harvard website: “The cooking method that best retains nutrients is one that cooks quickly, heats food for the shortest amount of time, and uses as little liquid as possible. Microwaving meets those criteria. Using the microwave with a small amount of water essentially steams food from the inside out. That keeps more vitamins and minerals than almost any other cooking method.”  The truth is the exact opposite of what these people profess to believe.  The food may taste different, but that’s not because it is less healthy.

Some of these same people are violently opposed to genetically modified food products (GMOs).  I have written about this before (most recently in February and originally in January 2013), noting how the science on GMOs is clear and how political opposition to GMOs only leads to unnecessary suffering in the world.  In the words of Patrick Moore, who has a PhD in Ecology, became one of the first members of Greenpeace and is former president of the Greenpeace Foundation:  “I believe that the campaign of fear now waged against genetic modification is based largely on fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic.”  (From “Environmentalism for the 21st Century” p. 9)

The scientists are firm on the safety of GMOs and now this interview with a Purdue professor of Agricultural Science expands upon the issue.  “All of the scientific evidence, so far is that it’s not a problem.”  But what would happen if GMOs were banned?  “We’d have higher food costs around the world. We’d have more poverty. We’d have more pesticide use, and more harmful pesticides. And we’d have higher greenhouse gas emission so more contribution to global warming.”

What puzzles me is that the same ones who use a majority of scientists to support their convictions about man-made climate change will take exactly the opposite stance on GMOs.  Unfortunately, in a democracy protests and public opinion carry more weight than science.  People who don’t understand science and make decisions on feelings, first impressions or advice from others often feel the need to influence policy, driving decisions that have the potential to inconvenience or even harm the rest of us.