Day: February 7, 2001

When Stephen King pulled the plug on his online novel venture, “The Plant,” a lot of critics of both web commerce and electronic books jumped and down screaming “I told you so — this stuff will never sell.”

King recently released financial information on “The Plant,” however, and based on those figures the experiment was are sounding success. Using an honor system whereby people were supposed to pay for downloading installments of the serial novel, CNET reported that King “netted” $463,832.27. I’m assuming that is a total revenue figure rather than a net profit.

If it’s profit, the result is incredible. Even if it’s just total revenues, however, that’s a resounding success considering that the typical novel made out of old fashioned paper might earn its author $5,000 or so (only a handful of people make the big bucks like King).

Clearly if you or I write a novel and sell it online we’re not going to get anywhere close to that, but it does show that people are willing to go a lot farther than many people thought down the road of buying novels and other intellectual property in electronic form.

The big loser in King’s release of the financial data for “The Plant” are the big publishers. It turns out that people might not need them after all (I suspect that if e-books ever become widely used, author-owned cooperatives will replace traditional publishers.)

As usual, Democrats are whining about George W. Bush’s proposed tax cut. The tax cut will disproportionately benefit the wealth, the Democrats complain. So here’s an easy test to tell whether you are not you are a Democrat:

A man walks up to you and says he has some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the man is going to double whatever your current income. The bad news, the man says, is that he’s also going to double Bill Gates’ current income.

If you’re like me and wonder why that’s bad news, you’re not a Democrat. If you go on about how such a scheme is designed to benefit the wealthiest on percent at the expense of social justice, then you’re a Democrat.

The reason that the wealthy benefit disproportionately from tax cuts is, of course, because they have more taxable income. Lets look at a couple hypothetical taxpayers in a hypothetical country who get a hypothetical tax cut.

Taxpayer A earns $1 million a year in income and pays 30% of that in taxes. Taxpayer B earns $20,000 a year and pays 15% of that in taxes. Along comes George W. Bush who says, “Lets cut everyone’s taxes in half.” The result? Ted Kennedy gets on the floor of the Senate and complains that 99 percent of the tax cut goes to the rich, while a mere 1 percent of the tax cut goes to the poor. And he’s right.

Our $1 million earner gets and additional $150,000 while our person making $20,000 gets back a mere $1,500. Now personally if I’m making $20,000 a year (which happens to be close to my actual salary), what the rich person making $1 million gets back from Bush’s tax plan is completely irrelevant to what I get back. Both of us have had our tax burden cut in half and to that extent are better off. It’s only if you want to start using income distribution as a marker (i.e. there’s just too damn many rich guys) that this sort the Democrats criticism begins to make any sense.

The rate of type II diabetes is rising fast in India — so fast that Dr. Vikram Seshaiah, who specializes in diabetes, estimates that by 2005, there will be 30 to 35 million diabetics in the country meaning that one out of every five diabetics will live in India. Why the explosion in diabetes? Largely because of the explosion in food.

India is light years removed from the early 1970s when doomsters such as Paul Ehrlich predicted it would never be able to grow or buy enough food to feed its people. Now India faces the opposite problem. Its level of malnutrition hasn’t been lower at any point in the last century and as a result it faces the problem of dealing with obesity. Obesity, not by coincidence, just happens to be a major risk factor for type II diabetes.

The incidence of type II diabetes is rising in urban areas where food is now relatively cheap by historical standards. As Indian dietician Dr. Rekha Sharma told the BBC, “Before people at less fattening food and got more exercise. Now it’s the reverse and Indians are getting fat.”

On the one hand, the rise of diabetes will strain the Indian health system, but on the other hand getting diabetes late in life sure beats dying of malnutrition before the age of 5.

Source:

India predicts diabetes explosion. The BBC, February 6, 2001.