Perspective: tobacco manufacturers are now compensating states for smoking-related costs: how will this affect the economy?

Smoking out the social and economic benefits of the 1998 tobacco settlement for Massachusetts.Tobacco industry ; Medical care, Cost of

The Economic Impacts of the Tobacco Settlement

Recent litigation against major tobacco companies culminated in a Master Settlement Agreement' (MSA) under which the participating companies agreed to compensate most states for Medicaid expenses. We outline the terms of the settlement and analyze whether it was a move toward economic efficiency using data from Massachusetts. Medicaid spending will fall, but only a modest amount ($0.1 billion). The efficiency issue turns mainly on the treatment of health benefits from reduced smoking induced by the settlement. We conclude that the settlement was a move towards economic efficiency.

Bit Preservation: A Solved Problem?

For years, discussions of digital preservation have routinely featured comments such as “bit preservation is a solved problem; the real issues are ...”. Indeed, current digital storage technologies are not just astoundingly cheap and capacious, they are astonishingly reliable. Unfortunately, these attributes drive a kind of “Parkinson’s Law” of storage, in which demands continually push beyond the capabilities of systems implementable at an affordable price. This paper is in four parts:Claims, reviewing a typical claim of storage system reliability, showing that it provides no useful information for bit preservation purposes.Theory, proposing “bit half-life” as an initial, if inadequate, measure of bit preservation performance, expressing bit preservation requirements in terms of it, and showing that the requirements being placed on bit preservation systems are so onerous that the experiments required to prove that a solution exists are not feasible.Practice, reviewing recent research into how well actual storage systems preserve bits, showing that they fail to meet the requirements by many orders of magnitude.Policy, suggesting ways of dealing with this unfortunate situation