Category: Big Business

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Wish your cancer away!

Good thing the British National Health Service has been trying to reduce its reimbursement for Herceptin, a very focusedly effective breast cancer treatment*. That way, they can spend money on dowsers, flower therapists, and crystal healers! Yay!

(thanks to Cato-at-Liberty for pointing this one out)

* By which I mean, Herceptin works really well against around 25% of breast cancers, but is not effective against the other types. That said, it’s a major advance in treatment. Pity that, since it doesn’t work for every case, the NHS tried to keep it off the reimbursement list.

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China Syndrome

This massive article on China purports to have been written by only two reporters, but its portrayal of China’s economy and social condition is so fragmented and contradictory that I have to assume at least six different writers contributed pieces to it, and that their editor was on vacation.

This piece on China’s first-strike capacity is much more internally coherent. Unfortunately, it seems to propose we return to a cold war-style arms race.

Oh, and Yao Ming is the slowest guy in the league.

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Making Music

Michael Bierut at DesignObserver feels that Dreamgirls misses the soul of the music that it’s trying to capture, and he has some neat remarks about the “production line” of Holland, Dozier and Holland at Motown records. It puts me in mind of Jack Kirby’s most prolific and productive era, in the 1960s, in which he was drawing tons of pages but also inventing (or co-inventing) mind-bending character after character.

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Tesco Genocide

Neil Davenport’s take over at Spiked! on why British liberals hate Tesco seems markedly similar to why American liberals hate Wal-Mart:

Tesco does not impose a blue-and-red homogeneity (blimey, it’s only a shop, not a police state). Instead it sells a fairly staggering array of quality goods at very reasonable prices. By expanding on the ‘one stop shop’ ethos, it actually helps people save on a very precious commodity: time. Would Tesco’s critics prefer us to go back to the days when we had to trudge around different shops for hours on end? It’s hard to see how being chained to the shopping-basket could enable anybody’s individuality to flourish.

Many critics appear aghast at Tesco’s motivation to be the biggest and best. It is interesting to see how the company turned around its ailing fortunes and shook up the retail trade in the process. There was nothing sinister or malign about this development. In fact, you could argue that in an age where know-your-limits modesty and demands to rein in our potential are all-pervasive, Tesco’s ‘bigger, better, stronger’ drive makes a refreshing change. Far from shouting this down, we could do with a lot more of this guile and gumption across society as a whole – including in areas that have a greater capacity to revolutionise our lives than shops which sell food, clothes and cheap televisions.

Okay, I posted this mainly because I wanted to use that Sneaker Pimps reference in the title. Sue me.

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Decade dance

This morning’s dumb lede comes to us from the New York Times. Reporting on Chrysler’s announcement of 13,000 job cuts, Micheline Maynard writes:

Every decade provides a new lesson for the American automobile industry.

In the 1980s, automakers underestimated their Japanese competitors, thinking they would never build anything but small cars. In the 1990s, the Americans focused too heavily on sport utility vehicles, only to see profits wiped out when buyers’ tastes shifted back to cars.

Now, this implies that SUV sales collapsed at the end of the 1990s, forcing domestic car companies to retrench going into the new decade. However, the SUV market collapsed around 2004-2005.

It’s a minor point, but when it’s the peg of the article you’re writing, maybe you should be a little more accurate.

(Note: now that Chrysler has helped drag down the Germany company that bought it, I have fewer issues about buying one.)

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Bizspeak

I read a lot of financial earnings statements at my job. I learned early on that “pro forma” and “adjusted” numbers, intended to give a true reflection of a company’s performance, are usually crap, and that when a company takes a different “extraordinary charge” each quarter, then they’re not so extraordinary, and the company is just fudging its accounting.

So it’s in that vein that I present to you this morning’s earnings statement by Sanofi-Aventis, “In a Difficult Environment, Another Year of Growth in Adjusted EPS Excluding Selected Items”

In order to give a better representation of its underlying economic performance, the group has decided to present and explain an adjusted consolidated income statement for 2006 and the fourth quarter of 2006, and to compare them with an adjusted consolidated income statement for 2005 and the fourth quarter of 2005 respectively.

Which is a bit like saying, “Excluding sectarian violence, our nation-building mission in Iraq is doing well.”