tigertoy

So, after months, no, years of increasingly vitriolic rhetoric and weeks of a feeling of impending doom, the Supreme Court finally ruled on the Affordable Care Act. I've never been very enthusiastic about the ACA; instead of really fixing the health care problem by really breaking the health insurance money machine in favor of a public system, the Democrats adopted a pure Republican plan, apparently assuming that they would get Republican support. The Republicans, of course, being far more concerned with opposing anything Democrats try to accomplish, immediately decided that their basic concept of health care reform was horrible, un-American, and evil. But as poor as the ACA is, it is the biggest improvement in the mess we call a health care system in my lifetime.

I find that the main points of the ruling -- that the Commerce Clause does not give Congress the power to mandate that individuals purchase a product, but that the power to tax does give them the authority to impose a tax on people who don't -- to be about the best solution that could be found in this mess. I do think the individual mandate is quite a stretch of the Commerce Clause, but I do think it passes muster under the taxing authority. I would be happier about it if the politicians had just called it a tax from the beginning -- but then, I believe that we do have to have taxes, and that it is not only allowable, but fundamentally absolutely essential, for taxes to be used with intent to encourage behavior that benefits society as a whole.

I have to praise Chief Justice Roberts for a decision that I actually think is right, in spite of the expectations of the right wing. I'm concerned about the commentary that says that he did it to protect the integrity of the Court, rather than to make the right decision in this case -- if the Court does not make right decisions, it has no integrity to protect.

A mailing list I'm on linked to a story on the power of corporate data mining that anyone who isn't already worried about privacy issues really ought to pay attention to. It seems that through statistical analysis of the stuff we buy, Target can identify when women are pregnant with a pretty high rate of success. And, it seems, identifying pregnant women is very commercially important, because mothers spend a whole lot of money and they will often keep spending it at one particular store once they start. So, having sniffed out that they're probably pregnant, they bombard them with ads for maternity related stuff. In this particular case, they mailed ads to a teenage girl for maternity clothes and such. Her father thought this was highly inappropriate and complained -- only to learn that her daughter was, in fact, pregnant. This behavior seems to exceed many people's creepy threshold. Target recognizes this, they say if people recognize they're being profiled for something like this, it turns them off -- so they have made the program more stealthy: they combine the ads for cribs and maternity clothes with other unrelated ads, so it doesn't look so specific. I find deliberately trying to disguise the privacy invasion even creepier than the invasion itself.

If you are one of the many complacent people out there who think that data mining to target ads is OK, you really should think about what else could be done with that information, because once it's out there, corporations WILL sell it to whoever will pay for it. (Just to be clear, I am not accusing Target specifically of selling this information. But if Target can do it, any big company can, and if any big company can, one will, and pretty soon they all will.) People could do all sorts of things with a list of women who are pregnant. Just think how much fun an unethical information broker could have selling the list to people on both sides of the abortion debate. (Even scarier: correlate the list of women who were pregnant a year ago with the list of those who don't have infants today to form a list of women who got abortions. If I need to explain how that could go badly, I think I'm wasting my time.) But maybe you're not in the demographic likely to become pregnant. It's worth considering that if they can figure out that women are pregnant by analyzing their purchases, they could probably figure out a lot of other things. Like if they're having an affair, or they're gay, or what political party they favor. And people you would rather not know whatever it is you'd rather not know about you can go buy a list with your name on it.

The real point that I want to make in this post is that we face a fundamental societal problem. Given that this computer technology exists, the records are going to be there, and if there is a way to make money from it, the records will be mined and people will be identified. I'm not trying to say computers are evil and we should stop using them; to begin with, I don't believe it, but much more importantly, it isn't going to happen, and trying to say that it should is a stupid waste of energy. What I'm trying to get at is that we need to place fundamental limits, not on what information is stored, but on how it can be used. Personal information -- where we go, how we spend their money, and the like -- fundamentally belongs to us, not to the corporation that happens to collect it. We need to collectively assert that corporations don't have a right to make money off of our information without our explicit permission, and that if they do, the money they make from it is fundamentally stolen and we have a right to collect it.

I was just listening to the BBC while driving back from an appointment, and I was profoundly struck by the irony of the juxtaposition of stories.

The first story was in response to BP's report that came out today of their own internal investigation, which is trying to put a good spin on the oil spill and to say how they're not the only ones to blame. The story went into some depth about how it was a complicated chain of failures, not just one single mistake.

The second story was about how the head of Ryan Air wants to make air travel even cheaper by getting rid of copilots, because it's such a great way to save money.

I wonder if it's really a coincidence, or if some smart guy at the BBC was actually intentionally making a point of making Mr. Ryan Air look like a sleaze.

If you don't want to have major accidents like oil well blowouts or airliner crashes, you have to pay extra money as you go along for redundant systems and safety procedures. Most of the time, those redundant systems will just be sitting there, and those safety procedures will make the job take longer. But if you, running the company, decide to make this quarter's profits look better, you, your own personal self, are creating the disaster when it happens. Are you, Mr. Ryan Air, going to walk out in front of the firing squad, refuse the blindfold, and yell a demand to the soldiers to aim carefully, after one of your copilotless planes goes down because the pilot had a stroke? No? Then shut the fuck up about how copilots are an unnecessary expense.

Several weeks ago, just as we were learning that a major oil spill was happening in the Gulf, I distinctly recall hearing a news story that explained that the reason that the now infamous blowout preventer failed to work was that it was built with two redundant control systems, but one of them had been disconnected and they let the batteries go dead in the other. In more recent weeks, we've heard lots of finger pointing and grandstanding and promises to get to the bottom of what happened, but I haven't heard any repeat mention of the specific, extreme negligence described in the earlier report. Was I hallucinating? Was that report discredited, or was it quietly forgotten because it's in some people's interest to have a big ongoing controversy about what went wrong?

According to the news, or at least the small slice that I've looked at, the only important thing that's been going on for the last 24 hours is that two guys that nobody had heard of last week played tennis for a really long time.

I guess I should be comforted that there's nothing important happening in the world, that they have so much time to fill.

Wait. We just fired the general running the most important war. The Supreme Court just decided that the main law against corruption is unconstitutional, just a couple of days after they decided that it *is* constitutional to put people in jail for giving people the government doesn't like advice about how to achieve their goals peacefully, and probably just for expressing sympathy with people the government doesn't like. The duct tape patches on the world economy are fraying fast. Elections are getting closer, and the people who listen to Sarah Palin are continuing to gather momentum. More positively, Australia has just selected a woman prime minister, and the district court declined to declare YouTube illegal (but Viacom promises to appeal; the Supreme Court mentioned above will presumably get the case in a few years).

Tennis anyone?

We just got word, on the local newscast during All Things Considered, that due to state budget cuts, our local public radio station is eliminating its weather department. I suspect this will not sound like a big deal to most people, because as I understand things, most people aren't used to having detailed, in-depth local weather coverage on the radio. You're probably not used to actually hearing the dew point, or to regularly being updated on the seasonal total of heating or cooling degree days compared to the average. You're probably used to either getting your weather forecast from a local TV station, where the weather person is chosen for their position mainly for how good they look on camera, or off of a website from weather.com. You don't feel deprived because you never had really good weather coverage. But I've lived in C-U all of my life, and WILL has defined my standards of being informed about what nature is going to be doing to me in the next few days.

Closing Guantanamo might make us less safe, but keeping it open definitely makes us less American.

I wrote this comment over on

filkertom's journal, but I'm saving a copy of it for myself here.

Let me preface this by saying that the current financial mess, like any problem big enough to be worth talking about, is complicated; there isn't just one thing that caused it or one thing we can change to fix it. There are as many suggestions for what caused the mess as there are people talking about it, and every cause I've seen suggested probably contributed a little to the mess.

For the most part, we're missing the point if we think we should just blame the top executives. ( Read more... )

They just broke into the radio broadcast with the news that Rod Blagojevich has been arrested. They'll have more details as they develop.

Our disintegrating health care system is second only to energy as the most important issue in the current election. Almost everyone is worried about the economy in a personal way right now, and if the biggest reason you're worried about your own personal financial situation right now isn't whether you'll continue to have health care you can pay for, you're either very wealthy or you have your head in the sand. Both candidates are campaigning on this issue; they both say it's important and they say they have a plan for dealing with it. I actually gave McCain some credit for what he said about his health plan. The McCain plan, as I understood it, was this: health benefits from a job would become taxable. Everyone, with employer provided insurance, insurance they got on their own, or no insurance, gets a $5000 refundable tax credit. And all health plans are opened up to everyone, and we all shop for the best deal. The centerpiece of this plan, without which it is worthless, is a guarantee that insurance companies would have to take everybody with no pre-existing condition limits.

Well, this morning I heard the McCain plan explained a little more completely. There IS no guarantee that real health plans would actually have to cover anyone who actually needs medical services. Instead, there's an explicit arrangement where "high risk" patients get to be in a special pool, where it's as certain as the sun coming up tomorrow that the coverage will stink, the premiums will be astronomical, and the bureaucratic hurdles will be high. All the healthy people get to have lower health care costs because all the sick people have to get together and take care of themselves.

If that sounds like a good idea to you, you must not know anybody with actual health problems.

An economist on the radio as I'm half listening just said something about markets being self-regulating.

Self-regulating markets are just like self-documenting code.

To expand that beyond a cute quip -- as a programmer with 30 years of experience, I have learned that there is no such thing as self-documenting code. There are plenty of people who think code is self-documenting, but code without documentation is always less well understood, less correct, and causes more problems than the people who claimed it was self-documenting tell us we can expect. I say that as, I believe I can legitimately say, a qualified expert. I can't claim to be an expert on finance or economics, but I think that markets without regulation will always prove to be less well understood, less functional, and in the long run more trouble-prone than the proponents espouse. To continue the analogy, it is possible (even common) for documentation to be wrong, and when it is, it can definitely cause trouble, but the solution is to document correctly, not to stop documenting at all. Regulation can also be wrong, and I think a lot of the regulation we have today is, but it is foolish to expect good results if we remove all the regulation.

From a release on NVidia's web site, that I clicked through from a news page:
"The Tesla GPU features 128 parallel processors, and delivers up to 518 gigaflops of parallel computation."

Unless I'm misreading something, that's half a teraflop on a single chip.

I'm in the middle of Charles Stross' Accelerando. The things he projects about the amount of computing power available seem less far fetched today than they did yesterday somehow.

If you've known me for a while, you know that in April 2005 I spent a week in the lowland jungle in Ecuador at a village called Playa de Oro. Although my lack of initiative has kept me from putting pictures online, you've probably seen my pictures from the trip.

Last week, the river that is the only connection between Playa de Oro and the outside world, Rio Santiago, flooded and pretty much wiped out the village.

( news report and other information )

Tracy says that donation checks can be sent to Earthways, indicating that it is for Playa de Oro flood relief. Her email to me did not provide an address, but www.earthways.org lists this as their address:
EarthWays Foundation
20178 Rockport Way
Malibu, CA 90265

Telephone: 310.456.8300

Alternatively, Tracy says that she can collect donations by PayPal:

My paypal address to send donations to is tracy (AT) touchthejungle.org Please
mark the subject as PDO FLOOD RELIEF. The paypal account name will say "Wild
Trax" which is my business.

For your general interest, www.touchthejungle.org is the web site for the conservation project, a joint effort of the village of Playa de Oro and Earthways, which created the opportunity for me to visit this remote and wonderful place last year.

This story was posted on a mailing list I'm on. All I know is the local newspaper report -- I assume it's accurate but if you want corroboration or more details, you now have the information I do. I figure it's probably not really good form for me to complain to a local government official in another country, but I know people who live in Ontario and thus have standing to complain that might share my concern.

The Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) recently forced the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary to kill five animals in its care with more orders to kill others by the end of the year, according to sanctuary staff.
For more than 20 years the sanctuary, located just north of Rosseau, has cared for wild animals found ill or injured throughout the province in a effort to rehabilitate them until they can return to the wild. Some animals with severe injuries who wouldn’t survive in the wild have lived long lives at the sanctuary.
On October 3, two raccoons, two great blue herons and a great horned owl were euthanized at the sanctuary after ministry officials determined, during a recent inspection, that they couldn’t be returned to the wild due to physical ailments.

There's more, but I don't need to violate copyright by copying the text here. Here's a link to the full story.

Current Mood: upset

On my way home from work today, WILL's local newscast mentioned the recent story of the guy in Indianapolis who was illegally keeping a collection of poisonous snakes, and then essentially read a press release from the so-called Humane Society of the United States which was a propaganda piece saying that nobody should be allowed to have exotic animals. I was sufficiently honked off at this (I expect better of WILL than to just quote from a propaganda press release, because they have a good news organization and usually do a much better job of journalism) that I emailed a comment to WILL, which I'm posting here. Perhaps you will be interested.

Writing this was somewhat challenging; if I wrote a full-length exposition of my position, it would have been longer than they would have read, and if I'd expressed my real opinion of HSUS*, I would have come across as a radical partisan with an axe to grind (which I'll admit that I am, but I want to seem like a voice of reason).

( my email to WILL )

( * about HSUS )

Current Mood: determined

I notice that gas prices are down nearly a third, just as we're heading into an election where anger and worry over the price of gas was poised to be a significant vote-loser for the Republican party.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

Marriott announces that all of its hotels in North America will be completely smoke free.

Speaking as someone who would really appreciate not having to pass through clouds of smoke when I have to pass the hotel bar -- who would appreciate actually being able to enter the bar without having to be sick -- I'd like to see this take hold. But I wonder how it will affect their convention business? How many people would actually skip a professional conference if they weren't allowed to smoke in the bar or in their room? How many convention planners will take their business elsewhere rather than risk people not attending? On the other hand, would this policy actually mean some people would be willing to attend conventions they'd currently skip?

... comes great power bills.

Electric rates have supposedly been frozen in Illinois since 1997, but somehow my power bill keeps going up.

Now the rate freeze law is due to expire. A reverse auction is now in the news, where power generators compete to offer the lowest price to the company we buy power from. I shudder to anticipate what my power bill will be like in the coming years.

Is anyone selling technology that would let me generate my own power without being mechanically inclined enough to build it myself? If not, why not?

Note to self: now that we have an income again, start thinking again about getting a propane powered emergency generator. We expect that the reliability of electric service will be dropping even as the prices go up. A propane generator won't (or at least I fervently hope it won't) be cheaper than grid power, but I expect a backup supply will be necessary in a few years. I don't have a good relationship with small gasoline engines, so I don't want to mess with a portable even though they're cheaper.

When you live in (or near) a really small town, hearing it mentioned on the news can be scary.

Today they're saying that our state government is trying to land a new Honda plant. For a site described as "near Fithian"; I haven't figured out more specifically where it is, but it would certainly be close enough to change things around here, and not the way I want.

It probably won't amount to anything -- Honda will probably locate the new plant closer to their existing plants in Ohio.

If God is punishing America for something that's happening today, it's much more likely that he's punishing us for continuing to allow you to waste precious oxygen than for our tolerance of gays. I don't think I've ever seen, even in a hypothetical example, a better argument for the notion that free speech isn't such a great idea after all than your behavior. I considered comparing you to excrement, pond scum, and cancer, but all of these natural phenomena are much more desirable than your kind of hate.

(Phelps is the guy behind the protestors at military funerals who say that God kills our soldiers because of our tolerance for homosexuality.)

Current Mood: pissed off

Thoughts on the health care ruling

Targeting your privacy

Corporate cost cutting strategies

Blowout Preventer

Current Events

Shellshocked

Gitmo

The financial mess

Let there be jubiliation!

McCain's "health care plan" is a scam

"Self-regulating"

Scary fast computers

Flood emergency in Playa de Oro, Ecuador

For my friends in Ontario

HSUS propaganda and my response

Gas prices

Marriott to go smoke free

With lousy power

Interesting times

A message to Fred Phelps

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January 2026

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