Half Past Noon

So, you can make all the jokes you want about Canada being the Great White North or whatever. Truth is, it’s beautiful up here and you’re just jealous. But I did want to give you a couple examples of stuff that is frozen around here. Just to make you feel better.

Perogies - a Canadian delicacy!

The Remdal office freezer.

The National Post reports that a 60-year-old love triangle is over:

For more than 60 years, hardhearted heiress Veronica Lodge and sunny girl-next-door Betty Cooper — in all their ageless comic glory — have fought for the affections of the bumbling Archie, seemingly unfazed by his endless indecision.

But, possibly thanks to Archie’s growing uncertainty in the face of the global economic meltdown, the wealthy, raven-haired Veronica has finally secured her place in the form of a marriage proposal from her long-time beau, publisher Archie Comics revealed on Wednesday.

My only question is: who cares? Does anyone still read Archie?

On second thought, perhaps this is a turning point. Now Archie can stop wishing it was a sit-com and become a soap opera: I’m betting this is all a setup for Archie: The Betrayal.

Somehow some Wordpress plugin added spam links to the bottom of the site. Irritating! I can’t isolate which plugin it was, too.

Krugman has an interesting post refuting the commonly held belief that Canadians spill over the border into the US for health care, much like how the Niagara Falls spill from Ontario over into New York State.

In my current job, I’m often surprised by how often warring anecdotes are the cause of some sort of cooperative stagnation. People are inductively gathering data and forming opinions constantly, and over time these opinions become assumptions. This is problematic for many reasons, but notable among them is that fact that any of these assumptions can be challenged by a single anecdote. In any conversation where opposing anecdotes have been shared, the participants believe they have summarily refuted the other side, and antics ensue shortly thereafter.

I peddle data for a living, and while data itself can be misinterpreted or skewed or exaggerated, some sort of common ground like this is almost always necessary where conflicting viewpoints will be present. This opens the door for anecdotes to serve as interpretive tools for analyzing data, rather than the data itself.

For instance, F knows some folks who drive across the border to America for treatment because Canadian medicine apparently sucks. I, however, have been to the doctor once since I was 15, mostly because doctors and medicine cost money and I don’t really have much of that.

Canadians have high taxes, it’s true. I, on the other hand, will spend (before taxes) just over 16% of my salary on healthcare in the coming year. After income taxes (15% marginal for my bracket) and payroll taxes (my share is roughly 7.5%, depending on which economist you ask), we’re roughly in the neighborhood of 37% of my income, more than the average tax rates of Sweden, Italy, France, the U.K., and even Canada. However, that 16% for healthcare isn’t a constant percentage rate, because the costs of healthcare are fixed (roughly) and the percentage is a function of my salary. For the rich, the percentage cost is much lower. For the poor, the percentage cost is much higher. In our current progressive system, or even in a flat tax system, my healthcare cost would go down as a result of aggregate averaging.

I’ve taken care to average my taxes by computing marginal rates, and I’ve included healthcare benefits as well as payroll taxes paid by my employer. Of course there are complexities (Canada has stunningly high sales taxes, for instance), but they work both ways – one might argue that, given the current recession, labor supply is now inelastic and absorbing more of the payroll tax. All in all, even given a pretty steep margin of error, the point is the same: in America, the rich can afford healthcare easily. The poor have a much more difficult time, and could be better off in a socialist state.

So while some may say that people in Canada come to the US for healthcare, others say that 40 million Americans are already here and aren’t using it. The warring anecdotes – quality vs. quantity – flatline the conversation completely.

I haven’t been able to look at this report in detail yet, but I’m interested in data that may challenge the conventional wisdom. Frank, if you have time, I’d appreciate your input. If the methodology looks even reasonably solid, it may be an opportunity to interpret our anecdotes differently and rethink our assumptions.

Another fact to be considered is that the only currently known cure for Frankophilia resides in Canada. The healthcare therefore can’t be all that bad. Perhaps we can try importing.

This chart will illustrate:

Today I was shambling about Canon (before the morning Americano) and I looked at Frank’s office and wondered why he wasn’t in it because I forgot momentarily that he didn’t work here anymore. I thought that warranted this:

All I needed was a write-up of this movie (Outlander) to know that

a) I needed to see this.
b) No one else I know would enjoy it.
c) This is a movie I could totally watch with Austin and love.

Friend, please tell me you haven’t grown so much as to leave such a movie as this behind!

It’s a miracle that I didn’t notice this earlier, but apparently my mind was utterly blown to smithereens at about 10:00 pm on Tuesday night, May 19th. It is a scientific fact that this clip and my wholly intact brain cannot coexist in the same universe; the fact that I just watched the pilot a few minutes ago is immaterial. Clearly, I’ve been dead for about a week now, and it’s a miracle that I’ve been able to dress myself for the last several days.

FOOM.

A, we owe Fox a debt that we will likely never repay. And apparently they owe me some serious reconstructive surgery and a new area rug.

Please, can we keep it?