Tag: random

Delusions

A friend of mine sited the The Economist/YouGov Poll December 17 – 20, 2016 – 1376 US Adults that says 58% of Trump voters agree that what is good for Donald Trump’s business is good for the country. Charles Wilson said much the same thing about General Motors back when he was the CEO/president/whatever they called him. I understand the sentiment (a rising tide and all that), but where I disagreed with the statement about GM is half of what I fear from Trump.

What’s good for the country *may* benefit GM/Trump/Whomever, but it could also harm them. And what’s good for them may or may not benefit the country. Relaxing safety regulations on construction would be good for Trump’s business and bottom line, but *really* suck for the people buried under a collapsed tower.

My other fear is that Trump made an amazing amount of money screwing over other people. He may make another amazing amount of money screwing over the country. My father-in-law says Trump is going to be a boon for the country because he screws over other countries to “our benefit” … which, viewed in a short-term and one-sided fashion could be considered awesome (to me a bit like stealing food from a homeless dude ’cause you get a little hungry on the way home from work, but I acknowledge that some people would like to benefit our country to the detriment of others). I just don’t see it as a sustainable policy, and I think history backs me up. The sun never set on the British Empire … until it did. Even if you’re not trying outright colonialism, I’ve seen enough of South and Central America to know how welcome American exploitation was — “yankees go home”, “fuera yanquis de America Latina”, etc. I remember seeing Michael Franti not long after Spearhead was touring Iraq and he said the message he got from speaking to Iraqis was “thank you for getting rid of a really horrible guy, now get the fuck out of my country!”. I don’t see countries being screwed over as particularly happy with the situation, nor do I expect them to express their discontent with sternly worded letters to the editor. And that’s REALLY bad for the country.

About as messy as a bean can be …

She managed the full Glastonbury experience without leaving home — shoes stuck in the adobe-eque mud, clay mud coating everything. We’re going to turn the geothermal dig site into Anya construction play land next year — take the toy excavator & dump truck out, make some roads, and generally get filthy.

Unity

Trump’s election-night speech (and several of his subsequent prepared addresses) call for unity – working together, finding a common ground, restoring trust … but what I realize I am not hearing (apart from his unscripted interviews where he seems to say all of his campaign promises are bull and he’s actually willing to listen to facts) is that coming together doesn’t mean embracing his position. I’ve had friends whose idea of compromise was that YOU compromise and do what they want. Not fun people to be around, but a terrible position for government. Basically I don’t care that there were 3 million more of you … I won, so fuck off. Try to get Congress back and stop me in a few years. That’d not unity, it’s repression. Works for a while, but not sustainable. But that’s bringing business acumen to governance – short term gains that make me look good, what happens in four or eight years is the next guy’s problem. I’ll be retired, rich, and well-renown.

Health Care Cost Comparisons

I recently happened across a cost comparison tool on my health insurance company’s web site. It isn’t something they advertise or promote … and I’m not sure why. You answer a bunch of questions (I really wish I could enter the diagnostic code for the procedure instead of navigating through questions), then you pick what service you need. It provides a list of covered providers in an area and the estimated cost of service. The difference in the cost of an MRI is HUNDREDS of dollars. I expected there to be some variance – real estate costs more in some areas than others if nothing else. But I was seeing some services – physical therapy for one – where the low price was a third of the high price.

Why isn’t this information available to everyone? Would our health care costs be reduced if people were somewhat cognizant of costs at different facilities? (Either because they’d select cheaper facilities or because the more expensive facilities would have to lower their prices or justify their exorbitant cost). I see the same kind of cost inflation in other insurance-covered verticals — car repair, dentistry, eye care. As soon as the price becomes hidden … there’s a fairly logical assumption that it’s not that much different from provider to provider. I don’t know how much a service is going to cost until it’s already been completed, the provider bills insurance, and insurance provides the explanation of benefits. Not exactly conducive to comparing costs!

There are other “not my money” situations that don’t lead to out of control costs. SNAP comes to mind – although the percentage of people buying food with SNAP may be low enough to not impact prices … I can look at grocery store fliers, decide if it’s worth the extra time and travel to hit multiple shops, and plan my meals for a week or two around what’s on sale. There might be a special price for a loyalty card holder (i.e. someone willing to trade some privacy for savings), but there aren’t a dozen different prices for different customers. And you know the price BEFORE you eat the food. Could you even imagine shopping if you only knew the price as you checked out?! And even then … you could still put it back.

Hopefully UMR’s price comparison tool becomes a common thing within the insurance industry — emergency situations may mean uninformed decisions … but if I’m going in next week for some tests, the order can be written a day or two later whilst I research the options and decide on the best value for me.

Poor People Rights

Decades ago, someone rather hostility questioned … well, what they assumed to be my stance on abortion since it wasn’t like we’d ever had a conversation even tangentially related to abortion. They demanded to know why I, as a women, wouldn’t support women’s rights. Women’s rights?!? I asked. You’re talking about *poor people’s* rights.

You don’t need to discuss a controversial procedure like abortion or euthanasia. Consider a hypothetical scenario where LASIK eye surgery is outlawed in the United States. Medical tourism is already a thing in SouthEast Asia – so anyone who wants their vision surgically corrected now needs a week off from work, a couple grand to cover the flight and hotel, and a couple more grand to cover the surgery. It isn’t like the immigration officer is going to be issuing eye exams to determine if your vision when you left matches your arrival (or you fake the exam). Which means outlawing LASIK has only prevented people without significant disposable income from undergoing the procedure.

Removing a federal regulation allowing something and leaving each individual state maintain its own policy just lowers the cash/time requirements. It’s cheaper and quicker to pop over to California than Thailand.

Trump’s 20/20 interview brought this discussion to mind — while he says same-sex marriage has been decided by the supreme court and is unlikely to be overturned (it’s hard to find someone who has sustained ‘personal and individual’ injury by someone else’s marriage and therefore has standing to initiate a suit, so I’ll give him that) he also thinks Row should be overturned (I suspect the male parent could argue standing) and each state should have the power to decide for themselves . To decide what the poorer people who live in their state can or cannot do is the part that gets omitted from the debate.

I wonder, too, if there’s not some even subconscious belief that people are poor because of bad decisions. It’s OK that affluent people can avail themselves to the procedure — they can be trusted to make good decisions. It’s really just the poor people, whose poor decision making is evidenced by their economic situation, about whom we need to concern ourselves.

A friend of mine once observed that people who are out there LOUDLY proclaiming what God wants … odd how God’s will always follows that individual’s ideas too. The God Hates Fags folks who are sure the whole Luke 6:37 (“Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven”) thing doesn’t apply too condemning others based on their sexual preferences. Wasn’t the whole manifest destiny God’s will that the USA spread out to the Pacific?

I is for … huh?

There’s political correctness and then there’s silliness. Anya’s preschool newsletter said they would be introducing the letters “H” for harvest and “I” for Native Americans in the first half of November. Wait, “I” for Native Americans? Took me a second to realize that they mean Indians. To some extent, I get removing controversial terms – especially at a young age where you just don’t want to get into the discussion around why some people find whatever-it-is to be offensive. But why wouldn’t they pick another word for the letter?! Ice, Ink, Inside, Incredible, Imagine, Infinite, Island … thousands of words that start with ‘i’.

Introvert, Extrovert, And Somewhere Inbetween

I’ve found myself researching how introverts deal with raising an extroverted child. I have no idea how that combination manages. I am not a introvert. I abhorred quiet – my office space was silent most of the day, and I would blast music so I could concentrate. Living alone, my house was quiet — I’d go out with friends after work, come home and turn on music or ring someone up to chat. I got enough quiet in half an hour before bed and a dozen quick walks (outside for the mail, across the car park at the office, etc) to be happy.

Living with another adult reduced some of the quiet times, but not enough that I minded. Having a young child, however, has almost completely eliminated quiet from my life. Relatives purchase loud toys — and laugh about it, knowing exactly how much the kid is going to adore creating cacophony. I feel bad about taking away a beloved toy (or ripping the batteries out of the damn thing), but seriously the ONLY time Anya isn’t talking … she’s got some toy blaring, or the TV is on, or there is some other assault on my ears.

She’s had a few experiences with boys at the playground who were a few years older than her, and VERY rough in their play. She hates it – to the point she’s happy to leave the playground. I’ve tried explaining to her that those boys were putting out a lot more energy than she wanted to deal with. And I feel the same way about her sometimes — I see that you are having fun, but it’s just TOO MUCH. She gets it, and then turns on one of the singing race cars.

I found a lot of articles / blogs / etc from the standpoint of an extroverted parent trying to raise an introverted child — but an adult has the capacity for abstract thought. You can be quiet for someone else. An almost four year old … not so much. My mom used to have enforced quiet – turn off the lights, fire up a few candles, and just relax. Hated it to the point that I, twenty-five years later, cannot imagine forcing such horror on our child … no matter how practical the solution might be. Unfortunately the only other solution I can see is being somewhere else for a few hours each week.

Change

There are a lot of areas where the trend oscillates between two states. “Cloud computing” is somewhat new and somewhat trendy, but the “computers are expensive, bandwidth is cheap … centralize everything” and “computers are cheap, bandwidth is expensive … distribute everything” states haven’t changed. A VAX with its terminals or a Citrix farm with its thin clients. Better graphics today, but conceptually the same thing. The difference is marketing — I don’t believe they pushed VT100’s for the home market. SaaS has personal targets as well as commercial.

With these changes, there were winners and losers. Mainframes lost market-share as companies deployed desktop PCs. And now desktop PC vendors are losing market-share as “cloud” services become prevalent. Sucks on an individual level — for, say, the people IBM laid off as their mainframe business contracted — but it wasn’t the driving force behind a political movement.

Manufacturing moved overseas. Energy production moved overseas. Some manufacturing (electronics, for instance) are harder to bring back — we simply lack the knowledge and equipment to pick up manufacturing electronics. Beyond that, though, it is hard to compete with someone who can continually undercut you on cost. You can slap import tariffs on everything you see, but the Chinese government can force employees to work for less. And who wants to start paying MORE for the same stuff? That’s the other side of import duties that people fail to talk about — sure we can jack up the price of ‘stuff’ that comes in from overseas so domestically produced items are competitive … but unless you’re getting a serious raise to go with it, that means items become less affordable. Apart from political change, some manufacturing is apt to move back to personal production (i.e. I’ll 3D print any cheap plastic junk we used to ship in from overseas). And that will negatively impact some of the BRIC economies. The move to personal production may benefit American companies — they design the products, license out the print file, and you make it (or use the 3D printer at your public library to print it, or go to the 3D document centre at Staples).

Until about 3AM today, I thought we’d be seeing a similar apolitical shift in energy markets. The renewable energy tax credits got extended in a Congress where even the trivial faced unimaginable opposition. Personal energy production makes electric vehicles a lot more enticing — paying 20$ a week to the petrol station or 20$ a week to the electric company … not much immediate, tangible benefit. But using the electricity that I’m producing v/s paying 20$ a week to the petrol station – that’s a whole different story.

That shift had worrying geo-political implications — the Middle East isn’t stable, but the area is useful and there’s incentive on both sides to maintain some semblance of order. As demand for oil shifts, incentives change. Odd, to me, that someone who wants to levy tariffs to make American products competitive doesn’t agree with leaving tax incentives in place to promote domestically manufactured clean energy solutions. “Clean” coal, sure … but don’t give ’em a tax incentive to buy solar panels manufactured out on the West coast.

 

 

Bad Deal

A friend of mine posted a graphic that basically said ten years and six trillion dollars later, we’ve got ISIS in Iraq instead of Hussein and we’ve got the Taliban in Afghanistan instead of … oh, wait, the Taliban. I understand the six trillion dollar figure looks at long term costs for veteran care *and* direct costs of the occupation. Still, the graphic got me to wondering — could we have simply purchased the country for the amount of money we will eventually spend? Iraq is 108,000,000 acres. That’s an average of 33,333$ per acre — now there are some fertile areas, some developed areas … which may well go for more than 30k per acre. But there’s a lot of desert too – not in an oil rich area – which wouldn’t go for anything like 30k an acre.

Population is something like 33,420,000 people. We could have saved near a trillion dollars ( 987,000,000,000) by giving each person in Iraq 150,000$ to do whatever we asked of them. Sure, a few would have held out … but if the alternative clearly was a foreign invasion and no 150k, I’m thinking we could have literally overthrown a government by just bribing the citizens to revolt.

Toddler Closet

I used a tension rod to create a toddler-accessible closet. I plan on raising the bar as she gets taller.

I got hangers that have clips for slacks/skirts, and each hanger holds an outfit. Her pajamas, daily clothes, and gymnastics outfits are all available. Anya *LOVES* having her clothes in her closet.

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