The .Plan

…damned if you don’t.

Executives at Gilead Sciences Inc. thought they were doing a good deed in 2002 when they announced a plan to provide their AIDS drug Viread to developing nations at a sharply reduced price that would yield no profit to the company.

Since then, however, Gilead’s drug “access” program has been snarled in a string of bureaucratic snafus and miscalculations. Launched in April 2003, the program provided antiviral medication to only about 50,000 patients as of the first quarter of this year. Some AIDS activists have vilified Gilead over the slow start, accusing it of basking in good publicity while dragging its feet…

Few drug companies have launched an access program at such an early stage or with so little infrastructure in place as Gilead. In December 2002, the Foster City, Calif., company was still unprofitable, with Viread having won approval just a year earlier. Yet the company announced a sweeping plan to provide Viread to 68 poor nations at cost. (It was later extended to 97 countries.)
–David Hamilton, “A ‘Good Deed’ For AIDS Drug Hits Obstacles”, Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2006

Twelve year-old boy dies after riding on a Disney MGM rollercoaster. Spokesperson says?

“Our deepest concerns are with the family,” Disney spokesman Jacob DiPietre said.
–Travis Reed, “Young boy dies after riding Disney roller coaster”, Associated Press, June 29, 2006

That sentence sounded kind of strange. Isn’t it “our deepest ’sympathies’”?

Are more and more Americans ‘bowling alone’?

The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties — once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits — are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone.

“That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who helped conduct the study. “There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants.”

If close social relationships support people in the same way that beams hold up buildings, more and more Americans appear to be dependent on a single beam.
–Shankar Vedantam, “Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says”, Washington Post, June 23, 2006

The full text of the paper is available on the American Sociological Association Web site (click here for link).

A few weekends ago, I found it surprisingly easy to sell Seattle to Ben & Lydia.

Connie (monkey in the middle, below) was visiting from Cleveland. Not surprisingly, the sale wasn’t too hard

The Warren Buffett love fest continues:

Mr. Buffett was scathing yesterday in describing his feelings about estate taxes, which the Bush administration is trying to kill. The ability of rich men to pass on “dynastic wealth” to their grandchildren is offensive to the American tradition of meritocracy, he said.

He gets particularly upset at his country club, he said, hearing members complain about welfare mothers getting food stamps “while they are trying to leave their children a more-than-lifetime-supply of food stamps and are substituting a trust officer for a welfare officer.”

To widespread applause, he smiled and asked: “Is there anyone I forgot to insult?”
–Donald McNeil and Rick Lyman, “Buffett’s Billions Will Aid Fight Against Disease”, New York Times, June 27, 2006

I am Warren Buffett’s newest fan.

Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, which studies the future of philanthropy, said that by opting not to expand his own foundation, Buffett might be blazing a trail. Philanthropy is “fragmented and full of duplication. That someone would take that kind of money and double down on something that is already going on is an incredible thing,” she said.
–Charles Piller and Maggie Farley, “Buffett Pledges Billions to Gates”, Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2006

How do you spend money that quicky?

The money from Buffett comes with a significant catch. The letter says Buffett wants all his money to be distributed in the year it is donated, not added to the foundation’s assets for future giving. The foundation gave away $1.36 billion in 2005, so the Buffett commitment would effectively double its spending. He is giving the foundation a few years to get used to the idea of giving away a lot more money.

“I expect there will be a ramp-up period of two years during which this condition will not apply. But beginning in calendar 2009, BMG’s annual giving must be at least equal to the value of my previous year’s gift plus 5 percent of BMG’s net assets,” Buffett wrote.
–Donna Blankinship, “Gates Foundation to double its reach with gift from Warren Buffett”, Seattle Post Intelligencer, June 25, 2006 [emphasis added]

Too bad they’re moving from Eastlake… I had kind of enjoyed the thought of being able to walk 5 blocks to work.

Mr. Gates’s new involvement comes as other key posts at the foundation are in transition. Helene Gayle, former chief of AIDS, TB and STDS, left this spring to become president and CEO of CARE, the Atlanta-based global humanitarian organization. Dr. Yamada’s predecessor, Rick Klausner, who left last fall by mutual agreement with foundation chiefs and now is a health consultant to the Indian government, says having the Gateses on site more often could streamline decision-making and draw more creative intellectuals to work at the foundation. “The challenge is for Bill’s personality not to overwhelm the foundation,” he adds, but to fuel “creative tension.”

With its staff of 275 expected to grow to 500 over the next several years, the foundation envisions a move from its rental space. Plans call for an expansive glass campus by 2010 reflecting its founder’s ambitious mission. The foundation paid $50 million for a 12-acre site in Seattle Center — site of the 1962 World’s Fair near the city’s iconic Space Needle — where it plans an education center to sell global health philanthropy as boldly as Mr. Gates marketed Microsoft Word. Some neighbors gave the current headquarters, an earth-tone, low-rise building without logos or signage, the nickname “the undisclosed location.”
–Marilyn Chase, “Bill Gates’s New Role Promises More Questions, Faster Answers And More Access to World Leaders”, Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2006 [emphasis added]

More from Warren Buffett…

Bill reads many thousands of pages annually keeping up with medical advances and means of delivering help. Melinda, often with Bill along, travels the world looking at how well good intentions are being converted into good results. Life has dealt a terrible hand to literally billions of people around the world, and Bill and Melinda are bent on reducing that inequity to the extent they possibly can.

If you think about it - if your goal is to return the money to society by attacking truly major problems that don’t have a commensurate funding base - what could you find that’s better than turning to a couple of people who are young, who are ungodly bright, whose ideas have been proven, who already have shown an ability to scale it up and do it right?

You don’t get an opportunity like that ordinarily. I’m getting two people enormously successful at something, where I’ve had a chance to see what they’ve done, where I know they will keep doing it - where they’ve done it with their own money, so they’re not living in some fantasy world - and where in general I agree with their reasoning. If I’ve found the right vehicle for my goal, there’s no reason to wait.
–Warren Buffett, interviewed by Carol Loomis, Fortune, June 25, 2006

Looks like J.F. will have a busy day at work tomorrow…

Warren E. Buffett, considered the world’s second richest person, is to start in July giving away 85 percent of his stock in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, to five foundations, with most of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to transcripts and an article published on Fortune magazine’s Web site today.

…Asked if it had occurred to him of the irony that he, the second richest person in the world, was giving billions of dollars to the first richest, Mr. Buffett said, according to the Fortune report: “When you put it that way, it sounds pretty funny. But in truth, I am giving it through him, and importantly, Melinda as well, not to him.”
–Christine Hauser, “Buffett to Give Billions to Gates Charity and Others”, New York Times, June 25, 2006

Should I jump ship?

I guess meeting people on match.com is much like meeting medical students…

The first time I used Match.com, I was struck by the jampacked schedules professed by online daters. Judging by the profiles, we are all single-handedly building biotech companies, hiking Everest, and curing bird flu; naturally, we all want partners with similarly full lives. It seems our greatest collective fear isn’t that we’ll meet ax murderers or bigamists in cyberspace. It’s that we’ll meet, and be taken for, exactly what we are: people who use the Internet to find dates.

But this desire to seem busy, and to be busy, can have unintended consequences. In Patrick’s and my case, it meant we never saw each other again. I like to think that if I had been really interested, I would have postponed dinner with my mother or skipped that first-time-homebuyer’s seminar. And, yes, part of me knew that if Patrick had been really interested, he would have found a way to see me again. Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for the other person to show a strong interest first, to say, “Yes, yes, I’m dying to see you, and here’s how I’ll prove it.”

After all, for anyone who has been disappointed on a blind date, a busy schedule is a socially acceptable way to avoid future disappointment. It’s a way of saying no to risk without actually saying no, of telling ourselves we’ll make time when the right person comes along (in a shower of fireworks), but not until then.
–Alison Lobron, “Disappearing Act”, Boston Globe Magazine, June 25, 2006