Author: Seth Roberts

Miso Shopping in Beijing

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In Beijing I have no kitchen, just a microwave oven. Which is enough to make miso soup. Which I can eat happily day after day.

But I need miso. In Tokyo I bought miso far better than what I used in Berkeley and now cheap miso isn’t good enough for me. Finding high-quality miso in Beijing is turning out to be hard, even though there are many Japanese students in my neighborhood. Today I went to a Japanese-owned department store with a food market. They had hundreds of Japanese foods, including plum wine, natto, Japanese pickles, sushi ingredients, seaweed crackers, and black milk (whatever that is). But they didn’t have miso. I have no explanation; the local hypermarket (Carrefour) had low-quality miso.

If you know where to get good miso in Beijing, please let me know.

Gatekeeper Drugs: Drugs that Require Gatekeepers

Seth Roberts8 Comments

A friend of mine suffered from depression. Like so many depressed persons, he went to sleep very late — maybe 3 am. I told him that was a very bad sign, no one should go to sleep that late. He starting going to sleep earlier and waking up earlier and felt better. He wondered why none of the many psychologists and psychiatrists he’d seen about his problem had told him what I said. The first time he asked I think my answer was that I cared more than they did about the relation of depression and sleep.

Recently he asked again: Why didn’t they tell him something so simple and helpful? Maybe I learned something in the intervening years because my answer was different. I said all health care professionals — not just doctors, all therapists/healers, mainstream, alternative, Western, non-Western — have no interest in treatments that they are not needed to administer. If all you need to do is to get up earlier in the morning, you don’t need a psychiatrist. Therefore a psychiatrist won’t tell you to do that. The only advice they are likely to give is advice they are needed to administer.

I could give dozens of examples. Does the Chinese herbalist tell my friend with an infection to eat fermented foods to boost his immune system? No, because that wouldn’t involve the herbalist. Instead he prescribes herbs that probably do the same thing. Does a dermatologist tell a teenager that his acne is caused by diet? No, dermatologists make the absurd claim that diet isn’t involved. Because if it were you wouldn’t need them. You’d just figure out what foods are causing your acne, and avoid those foods. Why do medical schools fail to teach nutrition? Because you don’t need a doctor to eat better. Why is prevention almost completely ignored? Because prevention doesn’t require any gatekeepers.

The economic term is rent seeking: health care professionals act in ways that require you to pay them. The usual economic examples of rent-seeking cause a kind of overhead you have to pay but the rent-seeking engaged in by the entire health care industry shortens our lives. Simple cheap safe solutions are ignored in favor of expensive and dangerous ones that don’t work as well. Our entire health system centers on gatekeeper drugs: drugs that require gatekeepers. The usual name is prescription drugs; their danger is part of their appeal to the doctors that prescribe them. Because it makes the doctor necessary.

Rent Seeking and Our Health-Care System

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Does our health-care system (including researchers) engage in rent-seeking when they ignore simple cheap remedies, including prevention?

Here’s a simple example of rent-seeking. Some friends and I went to visit the Great Wall. On the path up to the wall was a man sitting in a chair. He demanded 30 cents to let us pass. There was no gate. He wasn’t a government official — just a man and a chair. There was a path to a goal. It was blocked unless we paid.

In the case of health there are many paths to the goal. Many ways to become healthier — many ways to relieve depression, for example. Prevention is one way, cure another. There are cheap cures and expensive cures. By ignoring prevention and cheap cures, the profession of psychiatry is blocking those paths (by failing to clear them) and thereby forcing us to take their expensive path (dangerous drugs), usage of which they control. It’s more subtle than the man with the chair but it amounts to the same thing.

Rent-seeking is annoying. I was annoyed by the man in the chair. The rent-seeking of our health-care system is disguised, not easy to make out. This makes it less of problem for health-care professionals, such as doctors; I think few people are aware of it. (For example, most people with acne don’t realize it is probably caused by their food.) But my friend with depression was annoyed, deeply annoyed, when he learned of a simple cheap (partial) solution to his problem.

Beijing Subway Security in Action

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A comment on BoingBoing:

I cannot believe that I am still being asked to take my goddamn shoes off every time I want to go on an airplane, but I am able to board mass transit trains without anyone checking me for explosives at all.

Have I told you about the time I took a cleaver on the Beijing Subway? The Beijing Subway has security: They screen all bags. It started before the Olympics and, after the Olympics ended, kept going. At Wal-Mart, I bought a cleaver/cutting board/chopstick set (enclosed in plastic), put it in my laptop bag, and entered the subway. I was stopped. The cleaver had shown up on the scanner screen. The guard was pleasant and after I showed her what it was I was quickly sent on my way.

Chinese Yogurt Maker

Seth Roberts17 Comments

I got a Chinese yogurt-making machine. Here is an example of what it looks like. I got the ACA VSN-15B but the 15A is almost the same and far more available (in Beijing). It cost about $20; the simpler VSN-15A costs about $10. You put 1000 ml of milk plus 50 ml yogurt starter (e.g., commercial yogurt) into a container and just start it. You can ferment it as long as you want. The instructions recommend 8-12 hours.

What interests me is (a) how easy it is and (b) the high quality of the result. I’ve made yogurt dozens of times without a special machine. It’s not hard, exactly, but it isn’t easy, either. You need to preheat the milk to denature the proteins, then let it cool before adding the starter. The denaturing phase takes a few hours and a different heating system (microwave oven) than the fermentation phase (ordinary oven). The final result isn’t as thick as I like unless I add milk powder — another not-quite-easy step. (Given problems with Chinese milk, I would never use Chinese milk powder.) Using the yogurt machine the texture is excellent (thick and creamy) without adding any milk powder. I suspect the final product is so much better because the proteins are more completely denatured. Maybe 2 hours at 150 degrees denatures a much larger fraction of the protein than 180 degrees for 5 minutes, for example. Another possibility is that I was using too much starter and that less starter produces better results. (How could that be? Perhaps with less starter you get more genetic diversity as it grows, which allows it to becomes better adapted to the particular milk and temperature you are using.) Perhaps a steadier temperature allows better adaptation to the temperature. You add hot water around the container to help steady the temperature.

I still need to experiment to get it as sour as I like but I can get it as thick as I want just by draining it. It’s not exactly the universal condiment but it’s close; tonight I had it on leftover dumplings.

All in all, a ten-fold improvement over what I’d done before. The big improvements: 1. So easy I can do smaller more frequent batches (in Berkeley I did at least 2 quarts at once), thus need less storage space. I also suspect the bacteria are more active soon after fermentation, so more frequent is better. 2. Requires much less attention. The mental cost of each batch is less. 3. Produces much better yogurt. 4. No more milk powder. 5. More energy efficient. (Using the microwave, I nearly boiled the milk, then heated an entire oven just to keep the yogurt warm while fermenting.)

Myshoppingsun.com Scam (continued)

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A curious comment was left on a previous post of mine about an internet shopping scam:

Hi Guys I really thank you for this blog

I am going to buy from the Web-Site name www.myshoppingsun.com
But I am not convince about it so I went to PayPal Verified and this is all they said, I just copy from the window they put a domain name but they used all paypal scammers account,

By the way I was scammer with some phone from UK, I Hate to said these but I am affright to do business with chinese people they always try to scamme me

And Please read what paypal said about these myshoppingsun.com website

Light in the box Limited. is PayPal Verified

PayPal’s Verification System allows you to learn more about users before you pay them through PayPal. Verify that the information below is consistent with the business, organization or person you wish to pay.

Email: order@litb-inc.com
Status: Verified
Account Creation Date: Aug. 18, 2006

To ensure that this is a legitimate PayPal Verified user, make sure that the URL of this page begins with https://www.paypal.com/.

What it Means to be Verified

To become Verified, a PayPal member in the United States must enroll in our Expanded Use Program. When a member completes Expanded Use enrollment, he undergoes additional checks that increase security for all PayPal users. Please note that PayPal’s verification system does not constitute an endorsement of a member, nor a guarantee of a member’s business practices. You should always consider other indicators when evaluating members, including length of PayPal membership and reputation scores (on eBay or other auction sites, if applicable)

The commenter’s URI: www.myshoppingsun.com. Their IP: 98.203.87.228.

In Academia, High Status = Useless

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In a good article about what caused the financial crisis, John Cassidy quotes an economist:

During the past few decades, much economic research has “tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and esthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works—let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability,” notes Willem Buiter, a professor at the London School of Economics who has also served on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.

It isn’t just “the past few decades” and it isn’t just “much economic research,” it’s all academia. Thorstein Veblen made this point a hundred years ago in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Academics show their high status by doing useless research. Useful research is low status. When, as a professor, you see this in your own department — the uselessness of what people do — you think surely other departments are different. They aren’t. As a Berkeley grad student in engineering said to me, “95% of what goes on in Cory [Hall — where her department is] will never be used.”

What the Government — Any Government — Isn’t Telling You About Swine Flu

Seth Roberts13 Comments

How weak it is:

By any measure A/H1N1 is a benign flu virus. According to official statements, New Zealand, for example, usually has 400 deaths from flu each year. This year there were 17, so it could be argued that the pandemic has resulted in 383 lives being saved, which makes it more effective than any flu vaccine.

It is always good politics to scare people. Create a danger from which you protect them. It’s such an old and common ploy it’s curious how well it still works. Maybe the gullibility is hard-wired.

Bad Review of the Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts6 Comments

A professor in the Berkeley nutrition department recently told a friend of mine he knew about the Shangri-La Diet. He advised:

Don’t try it. He’s a psychologist, not a nutritionist.

As if weight control didn’t involve the brain. Perhaps my friend was talking to Marc Hellerstein, who told a student reporter that the theory behind the diet makes “no sense.” The theory says we stock up on energy when it’s cheap.