A very significant U. S. Army study on suicides in the ranks [1] came and went past most public notice in 2013. On some military bases, “successful” suicides are nearly zero. Suicides on U.S. bases in South Korea have been very rare. But the rates are disturbingly high at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and Fort Hood, Texas, for example. The one… Read more »
An earlier post explored the “tax welfare” characteristics in much private equity (PE) investment in the U.S. This post explores the second key characteristic of PE, which is the preying on “cash cow” companies. One of the greater misstatements common in the business press is that private equity firms like Bain Capital target “troubled companies” for takeover and rescue. A… Read more »
In my earlier post on “The gun violence lottery” I presented the math behind my contention that the rise of American gun violence is mostly correlated simply with the accelerating rise in the availability of guns in America. The short version of the proof is found in the “should be obvious” fact that other “first world” countries have all of… Read more »
Note: An update regarding the misplaced use of Benford’s Law in 2020 election conspiracies has been posted here. The record-breaking Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, which collapsed in 2008, is in news again. The trustee trying to recover assets has clawed back $76.5 million from a Bermuda/Austrian investment fund that had profited from the scheme. [1] Most people don’t know that… Read more »
With Mitt Romney back in politics, running for senator from Utah, as well as the recent death of his business mentor, Bill Bain, [1] I thought I should revisit the legacy of the “private equity” (PE) model of corporate governance. Romney’s Bain & Co. spin-off, Bain Capital, was one of the first, and has long been one of the most… Read more »
Call it “choice” or call it “free will,” we struggle daily when trying to figure out why people do bad things. Most of us go through our day thinking we are in control of our own choices, and we assume that others are as well. We can’t even entertain the thought that perhaps some other force if affecting how we… Read more »
A recent New York Times story reported the frustration in trying to determine a “cause” for Stephen Paddock’s October 2017 murder of 58 concertgoers in Las Vegas, and the wounding of hundreds more, all shot using a modified semi-automatic weapon, fired high up from an adjacent hotel. [1] No strong personal motives have emerged, at least significant enough to commit… Read more »
In the very early 1970s, I had passed the FCC test for what was commonly called a “First Phone” radio operators license, which allowed me to work briefly as an engineer for two Upper Peninsula Michigan radio stations. Warner Brothers Music and their Reprise label would supply stations with regular demonstration LP records, which would contain sample tracks from upcoming… Read more »
Vox.com’s Sarah Kliff has been mounting an excellent campaign to make hospital emergency room charges more transparent. One example making the rounds is several accounts of short ambulance rides being billed in the vicinity of $2000. I have yet to see a good discussion of this rate level presented as the very basic math problem that is the “Fixed-cost Dilemma.”… Read more »
If you were a horse soldier in the Prussian Army in the late 1800s, you were obviously not at any risk of dying in an automobile accident, but there was a persistent, yet low-risk, problem with soldiers dying from being kicked by their horses. Polish/Russian statistician Ladislaus Bortkiewicz famously found that these “random” deaths did indeed form a pattern, in this… Read more »