Eideard

Jeffrey Brenner and William Bratton

If Camden, New Jersey, becomes the first American community to lower its medical costs, it will have a murder to thank. At nine-fifty on a February night in 2001, a twenty-two-year-old black man was shot while driving his Ford Taurus station wagon through a neighborhood on the edge of the Rutgers University campus. The victim lay motionless in the street beside the open door on the driver’s side, as if the car had ejected him. A neighborhood couple, a physical therapist and a volunteer firefighter, approached to see if they could help, but police waved them back.

“He’s not going to make it,” an officer reportedly told the physical therapist. “He’s pretty much dead.” She called a physician, Jeffrey Brenner, who lived a few doors up the street, and he ran to the scene with a stethoscope and a pocket ventilation mask. After some discussion, the police let him enter the crime scene and attend to the victim. Witnesses told the local newspaper that he was the first person to lay hands on the man.

“He was slightly overweight, turned on his side,” Brenner recalls. There was glass everywhere. Although the victim had been shot several times and many minutes had passed, his body felt warm. Brenner checked his neck for a carotid pulse. The man was alive. Brenner began the chest compressions and rescue breathing that should have been started long before. But the young man, who turned out to be a Rutgers student, died soon afterward.

The incident became a local scandal. The student’s injuries may not have been survivable, but the police couldn’t have known that. After the ambulance came, Brenner confronted one of the officers to ask why they hadn’t tried to rescue him.

“We didn’t want to dislodge the bullet,” he recalls the policeman saying. It was a ridiculous answer, a brushoff, and Brenner couldn’t let it go…

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Ilene and Arnold Bangerter

He hit the mother lode, but not once did Josh Ferrin even think of laying claim on the more than $45,000 cash that he found in his garage. In fact, he gave it all back. “You can’t make plans for money like this that’s found in a situation like this,” Ferrin said. “It just doesn’t feel right to do anything but give it back.”

Within an hour of closing on his first home, Josh Ferrin, an artist for the Deseret News, used the keys to take his first official look inside.

While taking it all in, he noticed a tiny scrap of carpet peeking out of a small door in the ceiling of a workshop at the back of the garage. He got a ladder and climbed up to explore the unseen space. It was dark and musty, but Ferrin could see a black metal box sitting there.

It was a heavy metal box — the kind used to haul ammunition during World War II — and it was filled with cash, old stamps, bond certificates and other random memorabilia.

“I immediately closed it, locked it in my truck and called my wife. ‘You won’t believe what I just found,’” he said. Tara Ferrin immediately knew the couple had to return the money to its rightful owners.

However, Arnold Bangerter, the former homeowner, passed away in November 2010 and his youngest son, Dennis Bangerter, the executor of Bangerter’s estate, had just signed the 1950s red-brick rambler away…

“Going through those boxes, I felt like I had a peek into his life,” Josh Ferrin said about the man who left the surprising find. “This is a beautiful outcome and it feels good to be a part of it. It’s a rare opportunity to be able to do something extraordinarily honest.”

Arnold Bangerter, an fisheries biologist for the former Utah Department of Fish and Game, had purchased the home in 1966 and lived there with his wife, who died in 2005…

The money is being divided among Mr. Bengerter’s six children. From honest folks in Bountiful, Utah.

GM, Ford and Chrysler showed much faster sales growth rates in April than Toyota and most other Japanese brands, in a sign that supply disruptions as a result of Japan’s March 11 earthquake are hitting Japanese manufacturers hardest.

Detroit automakers were also helped by the spike in gasoline prices to near $4 a gallon which fed consumer hunger for more fuel-efficient cars… And trucks.

GM sales were driven by its fuel-efficient Chevrolet compact cars and compact crossovers: the Cruze, Equinox and Terrain.

In March, for only the second time since 1998, Ford Motor Co outsold the larger General Motors Co. But in April GM sold 18 percent more vehicles than Ford. Ford came in No. 2 after it showed a U.S. 16 percent sales gain compared with GM’s 26 percent rise…

It was the third straight month that U.S. auto sales topped 13 million on an annualized basis — which had not happened since mid-2008…

Gary Bradshaw, portfolio manager with Hodges Capital Management in Dallas, said that a general U.S. economic recovery will allow consumers to continue buying cars at a rate that will also mean a gradual recovery in the auto industry…

Another beneficiary of the desire for cars that can go far on a gallon of gas was Hyundai Motor Co, which posted a 40 percent sales gain for its best showing ever for April. The cars it sold in April carried an average fuel efficiency of 36.2 miles per gallon, the company said.

In another sign of strength of the Detroit manufacturers, Chrysler Group LLC, managed by Italy’s Fiat SpA, increased April sales 22 percent, its 13th straight month of year-on-year U.S. sales growth…

Sales in Canada reported on Tuesday also showed gains linked to sales of fuel-efficient vehicles.

In my neck of the prairie, significant to the process of good sense overcoming habit, Ford’s best-selling F-150 pickup matched national numbers in that half of the sales were with the smaller Turbo V6 rather than the less efficient V8. Good news all-round, though I’d still prefer the small turbo-diesel they offer outside the US. RTFA for details on each manufacturer.

Long range, we’re still waiting and hoping for the Ford Focus EV to get its electric butt to New Mexico before my wife’s ancient Volvo gives up the ghost.

DISCLAIMER: I own enough shares in Ford to buy a breakfast burrito for each of us.

Saskatchewan’s 18 cabinet ministers and five senior government officials are being issued iPad tablet computers in an effort to reduce paper consumption.

In Canada, the 3G models with 64 GB of memory cost $879 each, plus recycling fees and taxes.

While the initial outlay for the province is about $23,000, an official said double that amount will be saved in the cost of printing and courier costs after just one year.

“In my office alone, as this gets rolled out, I will save 68 boxes of paper in my office a year,” Rick Mantey, a senior official in the premier’s office, told CBC News. “We’re [also] saving on courier costs. That’s going to go down, from my office, by $8,000, $9,000 a year.”

Mantey said that in a typical week, a single cabinet minister could be loaded down with six to 10 kilograms of documents.

I’ll have to ask a couple of my geek mates in the GWN how well they think their government does on computer security?

Pretty interesting about how much paper they expect to replace + couriers.

Flying Pork

The Pentagon is out to save $100 billion over the next five years in a major push to cut overhead costs, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates officially unveiled his plan at a Pentagon news conference announcing he is putting department acquisition chief Ashton Carter in charge of finding where the $100 billion will come from in the budgets beginning in 2012.

“The department’s leadership has already taken strong action in this area, and needs to do more,” Gates said. “Other savings can be found within programs and activities we do need, by conducting them more efficiently. … I’m confident we’ll succeed,” he said…

He has urged President Barack Obama to veto the 2011 defense budget if lawmakers keep programs he considers a waste of money, such as additional C-17 cargo planes or an alternate engine design for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Gates also recently ordered the restructuring of the F-35 programs because of massive delays and cost overruns.

He has said he would put the savings back into personnel, military units and future war-fighting capabilities…

He said it will also encourage more competition between companies.

“In the rest of the economy, we expect this [competition],” Ashton Carter said. “You get a better computer every year, and cheaper. But we haven’t seen productivity growth in the defense economy, more has been costing more, and we need to reverse that trend and restore affordability to our programs,” he said.

Democrats and Republicans alike consider this blasphemy.

But, take a minute or two and go back 60 years and reflect on where we have come – even after President Eisenhower’s warning about distorting power in Congress and our economy.

Results of the first study evaluating the use of human urine mixed with wood ash as a fertilizer for food crops has found that the combination can be substituted for costly synthetic fertilizers to produce bumper crops of tomatoes without introducing any risk of disease for consumers.

In the study, Surendra Pradhan and colleagues point out that urine, a good source of nitrogen, has been successfully used to fertilize cucumber, corn, cabbage, and other crops. Only a few studies, however, have investigated the use of wood ash, which is rich in minerals and also reduces the acidity of certain soils. Scientists have not reported on the combinaton of urine and wood ash, they say.

The new study found that plants fertilized with urine produced four times more tomatoes than nonfertilized plants and as much as plants given synthetic fertilizer. Urine plus wood ash produced almost as great a yield, with the added benefit of reducing the acidity of acid soils. “The results suggest that urine with or without wood ash can be used as a substitute for mineral fertilizer to increase the yields of tomato without posing any microbial or chemical risks,” the report says.

I was all set to start peeing next to our tomato plants when my wife pointed out we already have alkaline soil.

The federal government has announced new rules for increased fuel economy. It’s not Clark’s first choice for getting the job done; that would be a sky-high gas tax to create a marketplace incentive for more efficient cars. Of course, no one seems to agree with him on that one! So that necessitates the government imposed fuel-efficiency requirements.

Over the next several years, vehicles will have to get an average of 34 miles per gallon (combined city/highway). Very few cars on our roads get this today. So how are we going to get there? Well, it won’t be through the mass production of econoboxes — even though Clark loves cheap, tiny rides…!

People often wonder what the payback on fuel-efficient vehicles is like. A few years ago, it would have been hard to find a true payback. But that math has changed significantly. More often than not, a hybrid or diesel will save you — even though you spend more upfront.

And the upfront has dropped. Dealers/manufacturers of fuel efficient cars no longer get away with bumping sticker price because of high gasoline prices.

A new IntelliChoice report finds that the most economically efficient vehicle is a clean diesel — the VW Jetta TDI. Over a 5-year cycle, it’s more than $6,000 cheaper to own this than a gas engine — even though the diesel costs $2,000 more upfront.

Other top vehicles include the GMC Sierra 1500 crew cab hybrid 2WD, the Prius and other vehicles like Chevy Silverado 1500 crew cab hybrid 2WD.

I admit it. I skipped past Clark Howard every time I bumped into his show on CNN – until I stayed around long enough to catch a couple of his advice pieces on CNN-HLN. I realized this dude not only knows what he’s talking about, his advice is reasonable, based on sound information – completely unlike some of the space cadets at CNBC or Fox Noise.

This is a recent example. He gave this advice about buying an econo-car – assuming that you will keep a vehicle long enough to get your money’s worth out of it.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

This is one of those times when my native cynicism approaches levels of superstition. I really hope the conclusions being reached are appropriate and accurate. But, I would never risk my life on believing Americans can learn from experience.

US consumers slashed their borrowing by a record amount in July as rising job losses and uncertainty about an economic recovery hit home.

Consumer credit fell by $21.6bn (£13.1bn) compared with June, figures from the Federal Reserve showed, massively more than analysts expected. June’s figure was also revised downwards, to $15.5bn from $10.3bn.

Economists say that US households are focusing on cutting back debt levels during the recession.

Meanwhile, there have been signs that the US economy is recovering.

Last week, figures showed that US manufacturing grew in August for the first time in 19 months and that home sales hit a two-year high in July.

That’s it. Short and sweet. Not a lot of analyzing and no psychologizing.

I continue to bump into ancillary articles claiming Americans are learning to save, discovering moderation and good sense. I’ll believe when I see it for a decade or so.

The prepaid cell phone market has finally hit the U.S. in a big way as economically strapped consumers flock to inexpensive pay-as-you-go services. The result will likely mean that big cell phone providers may be forced to slash prices on contract service plans to keep consumers from defecting.

This is good news for consumers, who could see lower prices on both prepaid and post-paid service plans. But it is very bad news for cell phone operators, which make more money from their post paid customers than they do from prepaid customers.

They losing money, folks. So, don’t feel too sorry for them.

For years, the post-paid business model has dominated the U.S. cell phone market, providing strong growth for U.S. wireless operators. Meanwhile, the prepaid market in the U.S. has been largely left to consumers who are young, price-sensitive, or considered credit risks…

Now, it looks like the tide is turning. First-quarter earnings from all of the major cell phone operators indicate that consumers are flocking to new all-you-can-eat prepaid plans instead of the contract-bound post-paid plans.

Post-paid subscriber growth came to a “virtual halt” in the first quarter of 2009, Moffett noted. He estimates that net additions of post-paid customers across all major carriers fell 58 percent from the first quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009.

Meanwhile, prepaid customers are on the rise. A year ago about 50 percent of new cell phone users signed up for prepaid cell phone service, Moffett said in his note. But in the first quarter of 2009, about 80 percent of cell phone subscriber growth came from prepaid plans…

But with more than 80 percent of the U.S. population already using a cell phone service, it’s getting harder to sell wireless service to people who don’t already own a cell phone. That means that wireless operators are already trying to steal each other’s existing customers.

Stealing from robber barons doesn’t feel too bad. No guilt in this household.

We dropped our landline for Skype and cell coverage years ago. We dropped post-paid contracts for no contract and prepaid a couple years ago with T-Mobile. No looking back.

Photo courtesy of Uptime Institute

U.S. President Barack Obama returns his focus to the domestic agenda after returning to Washington from the Summit of the Americas, aides said. Obama scheduled his first Cabinet meeting Monday, issuing a challenge to his department and agency leaders to cut a total of $100 million during the next 90 days, administration officials told CNN…

Obama is expected to provide examples of how several agencies already have instituted cost-cutting measures, including:

– The Homeland Security Department’s plan to trim an estimated $52 million over five years by buying office supplies in bulk.

– The Agriculture Department’s effort to move 1,500 employees from seven locations into one facility in 2011, an estimated cost-savings of $62 million over a 15-year lease.

– The Veterans Affairs Department’s decision to either cancel or delay conferences, estimated to save $17.8 million, and to use video-conferencing.

So much sensible stuff going on here you have to wonder if we’ve ever had a fiscal conservative in the office of president before Obama.

Video-conferencing is a pet technology of mine. Though I don’t get to participate in any [which is probably just as well] at any of the blogs I edit, I get to witness a number of IT associates in the process of moving their regular get-togethers over to this technology – and getting to payback the first year. Pretty impressive.