Doing well by doing good

Kiwi enviropreneurs make the Property & Environment Research Center's spring newsletter. Here's Linda Platt on the market for possum fur:

The possums, marsupials unrelated to the American opossum, have no natural enemies in New Zealand. Even the trees are at their mercy as they munch them to death, while in their native Australia many trees have spines, prickles, and poisonous leaves that keep the possums on the ground. Serendipitously, several businesses are profiting from possum products and at the same time reducing the possum population.

The pelts have always been used in a range of garments for cooler climates, but more recently the fur has been combined with merino wool and silk to make an ultra-soft, lightweight material that has attracted the attention of top fashion outlets. Untouched World, a New Zealand company and the first fashion business to be recognized by the United Nations for sustainability, is selling sweaters, hats, gloves, and socks at their stores and online.

The supple skin of the possum also has been discovered by sports enthusiasts for both golf and rugby. Fila, one of the world’s largest sportswear manufacturing companies, is selling gloves made from possum skin and rave reviews have come from Singapore, Korea, and the United States, among others. As the demand goes up, the number of possums goes down; trappers are back in the forests because providing possum pelts can also provide a good living.

Exterminating possums is usually done with traps or poison. Although considered pests and a danger to the environment, many people, including potential customers, are uncomfortable with these methods. To solve that problem, the company Goodnature, founded by three industrial design graduates, has developed a humane and non-toxic method of killing possums. Their device delivers a fatal blow to the head by a CO² powered piston.

One of my first fun surprises on moving to New Zealand was finding all of the possum fur products in the tourist shops with great big stickers promoting the environmental benefits of buying possum fur. You can even get possum fur belly-button warmers.

The fur trade is unlikely to knock possums back to the very low populations DoC would like; use of 1080 poison in possum control remains fairly controversial. But it is nice to see folks doing well by doing good - in this case, killing possums.

You can take it with you [updated]

Life insurance policies, at least in New Zealand, will pay out subsequent to diagnosis of terminal illness. But if you can't quite wait that long, well...

Prominent unionist and left-wing agitator Matt McCarten is taking offers on his life insurance policy in an attempt to settle a $150,000 tax debt.

The cancer-striken Unite union boss said the policy had a face value of $230,000 and prompt payout was highly likely following a terminal diagnosis.

“I was given odds last year, in September, of a 0.8% chance of survival,” he told the National Business Review of the cancer that has spread to his liver.

“If anyone wants to buy the policy I’m open to offers. They can invest in my death, bet on it, and give the tax department the money that I owe them,” he said.

Mr McCarten said he was happy to provide potential bidders with access to his medical records “if they want to make it a calculated gamble”.

...

Parties interested in purchasing the policy should contact Mr McCarten who is seeking a quick sale. “I’m aware that I’m running against the clock and I’m determined not to die in debt,” he said.

I don't know that there's any rule barring sale of beneficiary rights in a life insurance policy, nor do I think there should be any such rule, but I'm still a bit surprised that this is allowed.

Update: A former student and current solicitor tells me [this doesn't constitute legal advice, should not be interpreted as legal advice, etc] Section 43 of the Life Insurance Act 1908 allows such transfers; here's the form for assigning policy benefits to someone else. Again, this provision makes a ton of sense. But given that life insurance was illegal for a really long time because folks viewed it as betting on someone's death, that the 1908 legislation let somebody buy out your policy is a bit surprising. I'd have thought we'd have had policy failure due to voters viewing such markets as repugnant.

Queueing

The opportunity costs of doctors' time is higher than that of most of their patients, so it makes sense that there's typically a small backlog of patients in the waiting room. If somebody finishes early, the next in line jumps in and the doctor isn't left waiting around. Because of our willingness to wait around a bit, we all wind up paying a bit less for the doctoring services.

That's enough to explain short queues in the waiting room. But it isn't enough to explain half-hour waits. I'd wondered why the appointment scheduling software doctors use doesn't automatically send out update notifications to patients via SMS or email when backlogs hit the 20-minute mark; @GraemeEdgeler figured the cost of the system could never be recouped by most doctors.

That might be true in New Zealand, and especially for services provided under contract to the public health system. But the system is up and running in the States: MedWaitTime charges doctors $50/month, or $300/month for a full medical facility, for patient updating services. There's an iPhone app for patients. The doctor's secretary spends 30 seconds updating the doctor's status from Green to Yellow (moderate wait) or Red (long wait). Patients check the iPhone app before heading in. It's apparently not yet integrated directly into the doctors' appointment scheduling software, but I really can't see how that's all that hard; it's surprising that the folks who make the appointment and patient management software haven't already integrated in this kind of feature. The gains to patients avoiding long queues has to exceed $300/month for even a single doctor, never mind a practice.

It'll likely come to New Zealand. Eventually. After it's pervasive in the American system and enough ex-pats complain about not having it here.

Government make-work

One way America can work to solve its unemployment crisis: Hire one group to hand out free condoms for sex workers; hire another to consider those condoms as evidence that the bearer is a prostitute, arrest the bearer, and confiscate the condoms. It's win-win. Jobs for public health workers, police, judges, lawyers, condom-makers, the prison-industrial complex; hard to see any fault with it, really.

With the prostitution-free zones, prostitution is understood to be a crime of intent. No one is actually arrested in the act of having or agreeing to have sex for compensation; only for appearing as if they might do so. In the same vein, arresting officers in DC and throughout the US routinely search people suspected of prostitution for condoms, confiscating them as evidence of a crime. For some cops, condoms serve the function that marijuana does in a stop-and-frisk encounter (only there's no actual law against possessing or using condoms), unless a cop thinks you might be a sex worker or otherwise wants to move you along and into custody. 

Sex workers and health and human rights advocates have pointed out that it makes absolutely no sense for publicly funded police departments to confiscate condoms that publicly funded health departments make so widely available.

Washington DC confiscates condoms from sex workers; LA tries to make them mandatory for actors in pornographic videos (previous critique). I'd thought that optimal policy was "Condoms for some, miniature American flags for others!" Or combine the two (markets in everything, egads).

HT: @dr_alexpadilla

Bits of heating

I love this idea, but wonder about its practicability.

Two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper presented this year at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”

They acknowledge that it is more likely that data furnaces, if adopted, would be placed first in basements of office and apartment buildings, not in individual homes. But as a “thought-provoking exercise,” the authors give homes the bulk of their attention.

If a home has a broadband Internet connection, it can serve as a micro data center. One, two or three cabinets filled with servers could be installed where the furnace sits and connected with the existing circulation fan and ductwork. Each cabinet could have slots for, say, 40 motherboards — each one counting as a server. In the coldest climate, about 110 motherboards could keep a home as toasty as a conventional furnace does.

I had thought that data centres required pretty strict climate control; achieving that over massively distributed systems would require more than a few techies who could be dispatched from the NOC in case of temperature fluctuation or other circuit faults. It would be a bit surprising if those costs didn't outweigh the cooling plant cost reduction; on the other hand, they have started moving data centres to the Arctic circle.

Gresham's Seed

There are lots of ways to clear a market. Specify two countries, D and N. In D, quality differentiation within a product category is allowed to generate price dispersion. Even still, some product grades face so little demand that wholesalers refuse suppliers offering it; the processing costs faced by the wholesaler would swamp potential returns. In N, not only can wholesalers not pay suppliers, suppliers are also faced with potential liability for the use of their product even when the product is exactly as was promised and performs exactly to expectation.

And so we get these fun bits of news. In Denmark:

Ole Schou, Cryos's director, said that there had been a surge in donations in recent years, allowing the facility to become much more picky about its donors. [They're turning down red-headed donors.] ...Cryos pays donors up to $500 (£316), and sends its semen to over 65 countries worldwide.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand:

While one of the world's largest sperm banks has reportedly rejected sperm from red haired men because of little demand, New Zealand sperm banks welcomed swimmers from most men, and were definitely not putting a ban on redheads, Dr Richard Fisher said. Fisher, who works for the country's largest fertility clinic Fertility Associates, said there had always been a shortage of sperm donors in New Zealand.

...But when it came to sperm donors in New Zealand, Fisher said recipients had "very little choice". He said fertility clinics in New Zealand found it particularly difficult to recruit sperm donors who were willing for their sperm to go to a lesbian couple or a single woman. It was easier to get men to donate sperm to heterosexual couples, but there still wasn't enough to meet demand. New Zealand sperm banks did not offer money to donors, which is one of the reasons why supply did not meet demand, Fisher said.

He said it wasn't a case of turning down donors in New Zealand that was an issue, but recruiting them in the first place. "It's almost as easy to get egg donors as it is to get sperm donors," he said. "And egg donors have to go through an in vitro fertilisation cycle, whereas men just have to donate their sperm."

... Sperm donors were required by law to be identifiable. Children who have been conceived via sperm donation could access their donor's details when they reached 18 years.

When you force donation price to zero and saddle donors with potential for resource extraction eighteen years down the line, donors are going to be less likely to provide samples to riskier bets; things clear by recipient queuing. Who might then donate? Maybe foreign tourists who are less likely to be hit up eighteen years later for college money. Maybe ginger donors who felt rejected in their home country and want to feel loved. Alas, Google tells me Denmark hasn't a team in the Rugby World Cup (and yes, I did have to check).

In the absence of red-headed Danish tourists, folks here in need would be stuck with local supply where a version of Gresham's Law will apply.

Previously:

• Price dispersion in gamete market surprisingly low, but still too high for some ethicists.
• Veil arguments and anonymous donation.