Apropos of yesterday’s post on computer prices, it seems that back in 1982, James Fallows paid $4,000 for his computer featuring 64k of RAM plus another $800 for a floppy disk drive. According to the handy CPI calculator on the BLS website, $4,800 in 1982 is equivalent to a bit over $10,000 in today’s money.

Naturally, I had no choice but to scroll over to the Apple Store and see how much computer I could get for $10,000. Well, I got myself a Mac Pro with two 3.0 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors, 8 gigs of RAM, four 750 gig hard drives, two Super Drives capable of reading and writing CDs and DVDs, a 30 inch Apple HD Cinema Display, a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. That comes to $9,449. I believe that’s a 128,000-fold in RAM. The improvement in storage capacity is, in some ways, even more impressive.

Photo by Flickr user Rudolf Schuba used under a Creative Commons license

Via Brad DeLong, Marc Thoma finds a winner. The culprits, naturally, are at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, specifically Kevin Hassett.

That doesn’t even remotely resemble a best fit curve. They’ve drawn the line straight-through an outlier. And look how steep it is at the right hand side. They’re asking us to believe that the marginal impact of increasing corporate income tax rates above the Norwegian level is not only negative, but massively negative in a way that none of the non-Norway data bears out. It’s an insult to everyone’s intelligence. At this point, one needs to think that letting Rupert Murdoch destroy the WSJ news pages might be better for the world than letting the WSJ news pages’ credibility continue to provide a “halo effect” to the editorial page.

This seems like a pretty effective ad to me:

It’s worth saying that the sort of cost estimates you see in this ad, while accurate, are substantial under-estimates of the real monetary cost of the war. Soldiers injured during wartime will, for example, continue to receive medical treatment for their wounds for years if not decades. Somewhat similarly, a lot of the equipment that gets damaged or destroyed in Iraq is either being replaced with money that doesn’t come out of the Iraq-designed funds or else hasn’t actually been replaced yet but will need to be replaced down the road.

The fiscal cost of the war isn’t the most important aspect by any means, but it is a good shorthand way of understanding why it is that we can’t just keep doing this out of a vague hope of rolling snake eyes thirty times in a row.

Mark Kleiman has a totally non-funny story about how, yes, you need to wait to get health care in America and, consequently, he almost died. The punchline is here:

It was only later that I discovered why the insurance company was stalling; I had an option, which I didn’t know I had, to avoid all the approvals by going to “Tier II,” which would have meant higher co-payments. The procedure is designed to get very sick or prosperous patients to pay to jump the queue.

The insurance company almost killed a man in order to try to persuade him to buy more expensive services.