The Philosopher's Stone

The 2012 Pelosi GTxi SS/RT Sport Edition

Quite possibly the best video I've seen in ages:

Blackberry Storm

President Obama and I have one thing in common: we both love our Blackberrys.

I just got a new Blackberry Storm in today, and I completely love the thing already. A few of its nicer (for me) features:

In addition to the phone, it has a built in MP3 player and GPS that, while less than perfect, are both quite serviceable. No need to buy a separate GPS or iPod!

In addition to desktop synchronization with Outlook, Google has an app to synchronize my contacts list and calendar with the ones I have saved in Gmail and Google Calendar (which I use FAR more than Outlook). I'm completely in love with this part, as I FINALLY have one stop contact synchronization along with a "server" backup. Gmail is now my official contact list storage - and I can sync it to my Blackberry and from there sync it to Outlook. Hallelujah! Oh, and no more re-entering contact info with a new phone. I'm done with that crap.

While I'm on the subject, I would like to comment on Google and mobile devices: rock on, guys! Here's just one of the many nice touches: instead of having to go to "mobile.google.com", their web site for mobile devices is "m.google.com". That may seem like small potatoes - until you have to type it on a stupid mobile device's keyboard.

With that said, however, the "landscape" version of the Blackberry's keyboard is actually quite usable. It's the first mobile device I've ever said that about, too. It's not perfect, but I can live with it, and with "two thumb" typing I can actually achieve a decent typing speed even without much practice.

The device isn't perfect. Here are a few issues I have with it:

For power reasons, the GPS doesn't stay synched unless you're using a GPS app. It's not the end of the world, but it can be annoying at times.

Speaking of the GPS, the built in Navigation app (Verizon's VZ Navigator) requires a monthly service charge. Um, no thanks. Enter Google maps! Nowhere near as nice (it doesn't have a friendly voice to give you turn-by-turn directions), but it's FREE. One more score for Google.

The touch screen really needs some kind of calibration tool. I'm getting used to it, but I'd far rather make IT get used to ME.

Theoretically I should be able to set it up so that personal e-mail gets sent to the Blackberry even though I don't have a Blackberry Enterprise Server to connect to. I haven't yet figured out how to do this, and I'm kind of good at this sort of thing (to put it mildly). If this functionality actually exists, they've made it too hard. If it doesn't exist, it should

Despite these issues, I'm quite happy with it. Based on what I read, I hear the iPhone is perhaps a notch better... but it also A) costs a lot more, B) requires that I switch to AT&T, and C) would require me to purchase a Mac in order to do custom application development (something I fully intend to play with). Any one of those is a deal killer for me, and all three combined... yeah. This is working out quite nicely, however.

Time to go bust out the development kit and see what kind of trouble fun I can get into.

Update: I got my e-mail integrated with the Blackberry. It was quite simple, I just had to look a bit to find it.

Chrysler to file for Bankruptcy

All I can say is thank god they're going this route rather than becoming a branch of Uncle Sam Motors.

US Preparing Chrysler for Bankruptcy

And it could come as soon as next week.

About bloody time.

An Interesting Graph of Job Gains and Losses

Slate today has an animated chart showing job losses and gains over roughly the past 2 years. I clicked through out of a kind of perverse curiosity, but found it to be far more informative than I expected. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is no exception.

On the chart, blue areas represent net job growth and red areas represent net job losses. Watching those changes over time reveals (or to some, confirms) some very interesting patterns and trends.

The biggest thing is that this chart clearly shows a typical business cycle of gains and losses for most of 2007 and even the early part of 2008. Toward the end of 2008, however, jobs take a clear nosedive - and by November 2008, the job loss is clearly a nationwide problem.

I'm not sure it's meaningful, but I find it interesting that the worst job losses occurred after the government bailout programs were approved.

Medical Marijuana Requests Climb

Dispensers say that more people are requesting medical marijuana. I can't help but wonder if doctors are accepting "depression due to unemployment" as a medical conditioning warranting its prescription now. Maybe Greenspan could track this statistic instead of the men's underwear index.

Happy Tax Day

Yeah, right. ;)

To all the last minute procrastinators, good luck. Too all those who are already done, good job. I finished mine up on Sunday, so no last minute rush for me this year. :)

Another US Ship Evades Pirates

The Liberty Sun successfully avoided a Somali pirate attack today with a skillful use of evasive maneuvers. This marks the second failed attack against a US flagged ship this month. Once more, I'm extremely proud of how our fellow citizens fared during this attack.

The successful defense against these two attacks prove two things. First, defense training works. Speaking as a martial arts instructor who has taught self defense courses before (and likely will again), whether it's pirate defense or self defense for yourself, training can save your life. If you currently are or expect to be in a situation that might require it, please do yourself a favor and get some training. Even a brief session could be enough to make the difference. I am not qualified to teach anti-piracy tactics - but evidently the father of the Maersk Alabama's first mate teaches it, and that's a pretty ringing endorsemen to me.

Second, whether we arm them or not (a complicated discussion), training the crews of merchant vessels in anti-piracy tactics should be our first line of defense. As has been pointed out many times, the ocean is vast and patrolling it is difficult. But training merchant crews can stop these attacks, at least some of the time. This is obviously not the whole solution, but it needs to be a part of it.

We've been lucky so far. This is about to escalate, however, and we can't be lucky forever. Sooner or later, the pirates are going to have a successful attack against US citizens. We need to be prepared to deal with it.

Systems Designed for Posterity

In discussing the role of the an independent Federal Bank in relation to the current economic issues, Megan McArdle today hits on a topic that is very near and dear to my heart:

"I've been thinking a lot lately about the political theory of an independent central bank.  A lot of the libertarians I know have deep issues with the activities of the Fed, which have been largely unaccountable to elected officials.

That's a valid critique.  But here's the problem:  the Fed has performed vastly better on any metric except "being elected" than the Congress.  There's little doubt in my mind that if we had not had an independent central bank, unemployment would be many percentage points higher, GDP would have contracted much more strongly, and we wouldn't now be making optimistic noises about the thing bottoming out."

I highly recommend reading the whole thing, as my small excerpts don't really do it justice at all.

The dilemma that Ms. McArdle is getting at, although she doesn't phrase it in these terms, is that the system that gives us better results now might, in fact, give us poor results over the long term.

The framers of the US Constitution were well aware of this fact, and debated about it at great length. They had lived under a constitutional monarchy in its early days when the monarch still held quite a bit of actual power. Many of them were also quite well educated and had studied quite a bit of history, especially of the classics. They were familiar with the history of monarchs, tyrants, oligarchies and republics all - and knew the shortcomings of each.

In engineering a system is considered stable if it will return to a functional state after a great disturbance in the system. In effect, our founding fathers were attempting to engineer a stable government in the engineering sense, not in the political sense. This is the basis for the checks and balances we see in our government.

Universal democratic rule was deliberately not the goal of our founding fathers. They knew, from their history, that over time a pure democracy would devolve into a chaotic mob rule. Or, as Ms. McArdle phrased it:

"Still, the longer I think about it, the longer my thoughts linger on Mencken's famous quote about democracy:  'the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.' "

Exactly so, which is why the US Government isn't a democracy. Instead, our government was deliberatey designed to foster elements of each of the systems outlined above: democracy (the House of Representatives), oligarchy (the Senate), tyrants, emporers or monarchs (a strong President). As part of this system, certain parts of government were deliberately chosen to remain as appointed positions rather than pushing them for popular election - or even election by the legislature.

The Federal Reserve is in a somewhat extra-constitutional role. The constitution does not explicitly provide for a national bank, and the debate over whether we should have one or not was quite intense in the early decades of our nation. As we see in Ms. McArdle's post, some of those debates continue today.

As we see in many of the examples she brings, however, many of the solutions we propose to deal with current problems have serious long term concerns. To quote her once again:

"Of course, libertarians and liberals and conservatives all mostly abandon this committment to Democracy when there's a principle they care about at stake; democracy is, of course, good and wonderful, but that shouldn't let the majority dictate their opinion on the position of homosexuality in the public sphere . . "

Exactly. Ms. McArdle ends by extolling the necessity of Democratic oversight of these ideals. My own opinion is less specific: I'm fond of democracy, but I don't think it holds any special status as being the best way to solve every problem. However, in the case of government, every powerful group should have some form of check upon its power - even if that check reduces its effectiveness or efficiency. A 90% solution that is stable and can last for 100 years is better than a 100% solution that will degenerate in a generation - and I don't believe it's possible to have both.

This, again, gets to the heart of my recent arguments regarding the balance of power between our three branches of government. Our system was founded with a strong eye toward posterity and the long term stability of these systems. Since then, however, all parts of the system have been operating with a strong eye toward solving immediate problems. The fact that the system is still so stable is a strong testament to its genius.

But when we make changes, even small changes, to the system it is well worth considering how these changes will work once the people in control are no longer from our favored political party - because inevitably this will happen. Systemic changes must be made with an eye toward the long term and how they will work a generation from now if we are to preserve this great nation for another 200 years.

Why Does Health Care Cost So Damn Much?

Over on The Atlantic, Megan McArdle takes a stab at answering that question.

The post is particularly timely for me, as I was just discussing this very problem with my wife last night. As I see it, the problem with health care in this country isn't that people are uninsured or underinsured: it's that health care costs so much that you need insurance or you can't get the care you need - and the costs are going up at an insane rate.

Ms. McArdle takes a valiant stab at the problem, and I think she accounts for some of the extra costs. But I also think there's more to the story, because I just can't make the numbers add up in my head. Specifically, her article covers a lot of points about aggregate costs. But I still wonder why individual procedures often cost so much.

For example, why does getting an MRI cost so much? My wife recently had to have one done, and Blue Cross was kind enough to supply us with a "before insurance" cost of the procedure (read: they wanted us to know just how much money we'd cost them). The MRI examination was $17,000!

I understand that an MRI machine is an expensive piece of equipment. After looking it up, I understand that it's an even more expensive piece of equipment than I appreciated. Still, even at the 2 million dollar pricetag that Wikipedia gives as an upper end, this doesn't justify the price. Assume an MRI facility operating at full capacity: say, 4 MRI's a day to be generous (the one for my knee took approximately one hour). Allow 5 days a week of operation, and 4 weeks a year of vacation time and holidays (again, being generous: individual employee vacations could be scheduled in such a way to keep the facility operating regardless). By my estimates, that's $16.3 million per year in revenue.

Even when you include the cost of specialists (radiologists to study the results aren't cheap: their salaries are very high, as is the cost of their schooling), staff, overhead, etc, malpractice insurance, and even the fact that this MRI facility in particular was probably on the extreme end of costs for various reasons... somebody's making out like a bandit here.

And MRI's aren't alone. I've seen a lot of medical procedures done where I just can't figure out why they're so expensive. Like college tuition, it's just plain getting out of hand. All the while, of course, doctors and their staffs are griping that insurance companies won't cover their overly expensive bills.

I would love to spend an afternoon studying the books of a typical medical specialty partnership. Maybe these costs are justified and I'm just blind to it. Or maybe they really are outrageous, if we only knew. But the reality is that right now, I just can't make the numbers add up in any way that makes sense.