Blessed by the Potato

I have just three things to say:

1. This place clears out by 4:30 pm most evenings, and the caretaker doesn’t clean the men’s room until after 5. There are only so many people who stay here late on a regular basis, so it’s not going to take us very long to figure out who the disgusting pig is that’s making such an unholy mess of the washroom every single night. We’ll find you, and when we do, well, let’s just say things aren’t going to be pretty. Yes, even less pretty than your bathroom habits that have gone so far beyond “sloppy” that the only explanation is that you are actively vandalizing the washroom.

2. If you’re having that much trouble with your aim, just sit down. The seat was clean before you got there (really nice & freshly disinfected since you seem to wait until after the caretaker has gone through to strike).

3. You’ve got really cloudy urine. As almost-a-kind-of-doctor, I can tell you that means you certainly have kidney cancer and will die a horrible agonizing death soon. I probably shouldn’t mock a guy with no friends who’s on death’s doorstep with kidney cancer and can barely stand up from the pain, let alone aim, but dude… karma’s a bitch.

TD announced today a “green mortgage” for installing solar panels (or other projects). There’s no rate discount for going variable (and I’m pretty sure you can get more than 1% off the posted 5-year fixed just by asking), and if you’re just installing solar panels, the 1.5% rebate is not huge, but it’s nothing to sneeze at, either…

The Ontario incentives for putting solar panels on your home/cottage are quite lucrative — they’ll buy your power at 80.2 cents/kWh, about 10 times higher than what you pay to buy power from Ontario Hydro. Even with the fairly high cost of buying and installing panels at retail prices (and without squeezing some of the extra efficiency from having setups like sun trackers) you can probably expect to make money by installing panels, and those prices are contracted for 20 years out.

It’s hard to find solid information on what exactly the costs are — the installers I Googled wanted my address and contact information to get back to me with a quote, rather than having a ballpark figure. I started with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, figuring that the solar panel manufacturers are close to $1/W for their costs, so the panels probably retail around $2/W, plus installation is probably the same as panel costs (i.e., $2/W), so that would put a 2 kW roof system at around $8k. More Google searching indicates I hit the order of magnitude, but am a little too optimistic: one site said ~$15k (Arise says anywhere$12-32k), several others said the payback would be ~8-10 years. So, working backwards: southern Ontario gets ~13 MJ/m² averagedthrough the year, with a 2 kW system taking up something like 7 m² — so that would be 13 MJ/m² * 7 m² * 0.15 efficiency *365 days = 4982 MJ generated in a year, or roughly 1384 kWh. At 80 cents per, that’s a yearly revenue of $1110, so if the talking head on TV is right and it pays back in 9 years we’re talking a ballpark cost of $10k.

So the gross yield is somewhere between 4 and 12% — a pretty big range of uncertainty, but without having a roof of my own to get an estimate on, it’s tough to be more accurate. 10% with next to no risk sounds fantastic, but remember that it’s not like a bond: you don’t get your capital back at the end of the panel’s life. Taking a straight-line depreciation of the 10% case (out 20 years), we still get a 5% net yield — little low to make a good case with 100% financing, but not too shabby for a home improvement.

Since the revenue is guaranteed for 20 years, the only real risks are weather (amount of sunlight you actually receive), trees (could your neighbour’s shrub grow to shadow your roof in 20 year’s time), and financing (you can lock in your interest rate for 5-years, but after that…). There’s also the issue of selling your house: if you move, the contract transfers to the new owner of the house. In that case there’s the risk of not realizing good value for the panels when you sell before the end of their lifetime. After the 20 years, even if the panels die, you’ll probably be happy with the investment; if they don’t (and their lifetime should be more like 30+ years) then even without the subsidy you’ll probably enjoy reduced electricity costs or even self-sufficiency (important as you’ll likely be in retirement by then!).

Considering that the risk is low, it’s a fairly attractive investment, actually. There are also some other factors to consider, such as improving the cooling of your home in the summer (this is hard to quantify, but a few days ago someone on TV said that Wal-mart found nearly as much benefit from reduced cooling loads after putting solar cells on the roofs of some of its stores as from the electricity the panels generated in the first place — sorry, can’t find the source). And, of course, that warm green feeling of being all sustainable and helping promote the technology of the future.

From a practical standpoint, you also need to have a suitable roof space: facing south ideally, without trees (or recently-built condo towers) blocking your sun. There are some negatives: some people don’t like the look of the panels (who looks at their roof, anyway?), and there is some effort on your part needed to get permits, quotes from builders, etc., that you don’t get from a hands-off investment like a bond or stock with similar yields. And there’s the question of how good your inverters are. Solar cells output DC power, which has to be converted to 60 Hz A/C to join the grid or be used in your house. Those inverters (especially the cheap ones) produce “dirty” 60 Hz, which you may-or-may not care about.

This week was better for the working out.

I started off by hitting all my basic exercises on saturday, then went shopping, then went in to work, then briefly went out for a friend’s birthday party, then went for a long walk afterwards. It was probably 8-10 km of walking all day, but just over 6 km at the end all in one go. I was even on such a walking roll that I walked right by my house :)

Unfortunately part of that shopping trip involved discovering roasted soy bean snacks, which are good in the sense that they have good stuff in them like lots of protein and some fibre, but are bad because they still have a fair bit of fat (less than peanuts, but that’s not saying too much) and are very calorie dense. Plus, you know, creme eggs. So diet not so good this week, either.

Sunday I was at work so I did next to nothing.

Monday I got the bike out for a nice 7 km ride. I stopped in the park by the river and saw some ducks fighting, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I always thought ducks were nice and hilarious (hehehe, they wiggle their bums when they’re happy and go quackwackwackwackwack), so I thought Marshall was out of line when he said “Have you ever been in a fight with a duck? Ducks are jerks.” And yes, they were jerks. This one duck jumped up and stood on the other duck’s back, and got a ducky head-lock on by biting her on the back of the head.

Tuesday I got my bike ride in early, but my butt is still not used to the seat so I packed it in early and instead spent 12 hours in front of my computer at work snacking. Excellent alternative.

By Wednesday I realized that I’m already starting to get that “I don’t feel so fat and slow” feeling, where all that hard work of exercise starts to actually have benefits. So I biked all the way up to the mall… and got candy at Bulk Barn. Hey, it’s 10% off for students on Wednesdays, I’m weak!

Thursday I was moderately good as well, and the weather was great for a bike ride. However, I didn’t sleep well and was busy with work, so Friday didn’t see any exercise, and now I’m taking the weekend off as well (taxes, weather).

However, after spending a lot of late nights in the lab working on analysis in front of the computer (and all night Thursday), my back started spasming, and hasn’t stopped for 3 days now. So that’s going to limit any upper-body work for the next little while, but hopefully the biking will continue if the weather gets better (and there was snow on Saturday morning, so there’s lots of room to improve!).

The Globe and Mail has an article today on Ontario’s Bitter Pill to Swallow, the recent changes to generic drug pricing that has pharmacies up in arms.

Once again, I think I’ve got to side with the public good on this: it’s a kick in the nards for pharmacies, but the government isn’t exactly bankrupting or socializing them. From the article:

At Lovell, Ms. Winn estimates each of her stores gets about $300-million [sic] annually from generic drug makers, in exchange for exclusively stocking their products. Like it or not, she says, without that money there are no funds to keep operating, since the margin on the drugs is minuscule; dispensing fees – the $10 to $12 that she collects on each prescription of which $7 is covered by Ontario for its public plan – have not been increased in years.

[…]

Before the day is done, they will fill 300 prescriptions, about one every two and a half minutes. There are three pharmacists on duty, along with three pharmacy technicians to help fill bottles and blister packs with drugs, and a cashier to ring through the purchases.

[…]

The province requires that the allowances are used for activities that directly benefit patients, and pharmacies must submit their spending to be audited each year. But the Ontario government figures that almost 70 per cent gets used for salaries, bonuses and fringe benefits.

Yes, the new rules are definitely going to pinch profits — but this article neglected to point out the offsets that the government is bringing in. Those kick-backs were supposed to be used to improve patient care, but many were simply used for salaries/profits. So now there is a direct payment for counselling and some other new services (flu shots). Those pharmacies that fully serve their patients should come out pretty close to how they did before according to the government*; those that are just bottle-filling robots will see a profit cut.

Speaking of bottle-filling robots, look at the numbers given in the article: 300 prescriptions a day, at $11 per just for the filling fee (i.e., on top of the markup on the drugs themselves – and that’s assuming just one fee per script; I know Wayfare generally has four or more dispensing fees every time she hits the pharmacy). $3300 per day, $16500 per (5-day) week, over $800k per year. I don’t know how much overhead the store has, but there is some mark-up on the drugs (even under the new rules), so let’s assume that covers the overhead**. That $800k split between 3 pharmacists and 3 technicians looks pretty healthy to me — and those dispensing fees will be going up a bit under the new rules (~14+%), despite their lament that they haven’t gone up in the past few years.

All this gnashing of teeth and fighting and threats to cut services or go out of business coming from the pharmacies rings false with me. I know it sucks to have this great profit orgy and have the government come in and smash it up, but I don’t think any pharmacists are going to go hungry under the new rules (except perhaps the students Shoppers and Pharma Plus decided not to hire this summer as part of their temper tantrum with the government). If any pharmacies do have to close, it’s probably because there were too many pharmacies to begin with. Near my old house in London there were three pharmacies within 500 m of each other on one street, and it wasn’t even all that densely populated an area (with people or doctors’ offices). Within the ~4 km² area of downtown London, there are nine pharmacies that I know about, and quite possibly more.

* – sorry, lost the source where I read that one. If anyone finds the article where that was mentioned, I’d appreciate being able to reference it!
** – again, using the reported numbers of $0.50 per script for mark-up under the new stricter rules, that’s $3.3k/mo — I don’t know what the lease and other overhead is on a store that “could fit inside the cosmetics department of a Shoppers Drug Mart” but that sounds like it’s in the ballpark to me.

This week, Ms. Winn and her staff began drawing up a list of services they now provide free, which they may need to charge for in the future. Everything from faxing prescriptions to calling doctors offices comes at a cost, and may need to carry a fee at some point in the future.

It’s a model similar to a law office, where every hour of the day is accounted for, with a value attached to it. Ms. Winn says she isn’t sure what services to charge for though, but feels the pressure to cover costs without the allowances.

Last week, a teenager came in to get a prescription filled and, as Ms. Winn puts it, “was overmedicated.”

The 19-year-old was on six other prescriptions.

“When he came to the counter, I could just tell by looking at him, he didn’t understand a word I was saying.”

The pharmacy spent about 20 minutes to a half hour on the phone with the doctor and talking to the man about how to manage his medications properly. Ms. Winn admits she’s not sure what that time is worth.

In that case, I’ll tell you exactly what that time is worth: $50 (damn, another case for capital numbers). Yes, that is pretty much exactly the definition of a 30-minute consult under the MedsCheck program. A pharmacist reviews a patient’s medications, and bills OHIP for providing the service (and of course, they have to actually account and bill for those services, instead of just handwave and rake in the cash like under the old system).

I’m going to conclude by stealing the thunder from another article I’ve been working on: health care costs are going to be perhaps the defining issue of the coming decades, due to population demographics as much as anything else. I completely support the government’s effort to start getting prescription costs under control now, even if it pisses off a few druggists.

To break down what it is I’ve been doing for the last few hours, I take recordings of the electrical activity of someone’s brain, it looks something like this:

Lots of squigglies. Too many, in fact — some of those squigglies are the influence of the electrical activity of the heart and of outside sources (like the MRI we stick them in), and they don’t represent the brain activity that we’re looking for. So, you spend a few hours playing with various computerized filtering techniques to get rid of those influences and get something like this:

Presto-boom-o, you’ve got some more-or-less pure brain activity to look at. Repeat it about 50-60 times for all your subjects (PS: still need subjects, enquire within), throw them all together for some groupwise stats, shake it up, have a cookie, and go write it up to share with the world.

Unfortunately, tonight has not been my night for analysis. The stupid program keeps crashing randomly, and now I’ve gone back to look at some of the saved data from earlier in the night:

No squigglies.

WHERE ARE MY SQUIGGLIES??!!

Anger and frustration do not even begin to cover it.