Bill Moyers interviews Wendell Potter on Healthcare

Had your rage quotient for today?

Enjoy this interview of a former Cigna executive by Bill Moyers. In case you’re wondering, the debate on public healthcare has been deeply corrupted by the healthcare industry who have been manipulating the debate for a while now and using political donations and lobbyists to bully politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Extra credit for republicans who don’t want public healthcare simply because it will make the democratic party look like they know how to actually run a government that serves its people.

Video

Transcript

On Palin

Just to start out…. good riddance.

In case you’ve been in a cave since the 4th of July, Sarah Palin has resigned as Alaska’s governor. She’s also been incoherently ranting and whining about why. None of which is even remotely believable.

While I have exactly zero information about the actual reasons for her resignation, I do know this:

No one with political aspirations gives up power, especially governor level power without a very good reason. And make no mistake, it would have been MUCH more advantageous to a potential 2012 presidential run for her to have served her full term and built her political credibility in the interim through extensive prep-work with political advisors.

There was some speculation that she might start pursuing a pundit position, making speeches and appearing on fox news. The Palins have taken on significant expense defending themselves from numerous state ethics complaints, and they may just genuinely need the money. That may be the case, but it will significantly damage her ability to secure a party nomination come 2012.

It could be that Palin is just getting awful political advice, or is ignoring advice from those who know. It’s now relatively well documented that she ignored the advice of McCain’s advisors on multiple occasions during the last campaign, and ended up looking foolish as a result. We might be simply witnessing another act of incompetence on Palin’s part.

But I have a strong suspicion that there’s something more at work here. Something bad happened, and Palin resigned rather than facing it.

As Andrew Halcro (another alaskan gubernatorial candidate in 2006) puts it:

The bottom line is that there has to be something major that forced Palin to bail out with sixteen months left in her term.

Something so big or so damaging that she feared dealing with it in the public arena.

Safari 4 loading spinner

Okay, Safari 4 is now released, and thank god they abandoned top tabs. Whew.

But for some reason, they kept the stop/reload madness.

In the past, the Safari combined the stop and reload buttons and pinned this new button directly to the left of the address bar. This made great sense, because the address bar served also as a progress bar. You could see how much of the page had loaded, and if it had stalled. You could then stop the loading, or reload. It was a tight little bit of browser user experience.

In Safari 4, Apple thought it would be fun to fuck all that up.

Now instead of a progress bar, we have a spinner which yields no information other than that safari has requested a page. The stop/reload button is now no longer a button, but a set of glyphs that live pinned to the right-inside of the address bar. In its place now lives the bookmark button.

There will be a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth any time you mess with people’s muscle memory. So there is bound to be complaining, including mine, from the legions of people who want to reload a page and instead see a bookmark dropdown. Mmmm rage.

But once we’ve all settled into the new groove, we’re back to happy productivity right? Well unfortunately not. See, the problem with this new scheme is that the address bar is an expandable element. While the old stop/reload button could dependably always be found very close to the upper right hand corner of the window, now it drifts somewhere in the middle depending on how wide your browser window is. That means that whenever you want to use it, you have to find it in its new location every time. It might be in the same place as last time, it might not. In case you’re unclear, that’s fucking awful user interface design.

Just to kick you in the nuts, Apple has also removed the option of switching it back, which was in the beta. So you’re stuck with it.

Apparently this monstrosity of user design is to bring safari on the mac into line with how safari on the iphone acts. Which makes no sense at all. The iphone has very limited screen space, and browser windows are all the same size. You at least always know where the button is going to be on the iphone because there’s only ever 2 places it can be, one in landscape mode, one in portrait.

I’m not sure this is a big enough issue to make me move back to using Camino as my full time browser, but it’s certainly a big enough issue that Apple should fix it. There’s just no sense in sacrificing the usability of the desktop app for the sake of consistency between it and the iPhone.

A short bit on the Palm Pre

The new Palm phone is coming, and it’s another in a long line of “iPhone Killers”.

It goes without saying that Palm has a tremendous amount of work to do to try and unseat the iPhone as king of smart phones. They are not only launching a new hardware platform, but a new OS as well. Ambitious.

After reading a few articles about it, I was thinking back to my recent vacation to DC and New York. Of course I used the normal Google maps to get around and check the web. Something that pretty much any phone can do nowadays. But while in DC, someone was talking about finding a restaurant on Yelp. I pulled out my phone and immediately downloaded Yelp, and we used it for the rest of the trip to find where to eat.

While in DC, I downloaded a map of the metro. When we got to New York, I downloaded a $5 app that would ask where you wanted to go and route out your whole subway trip including arrival times and transfers.

As all this was going on, my friend Dayne (who is a hardcore linux guy) mentioned that he really needed to get an iPhone. It’s not because it’s an awesome phone. It’s because the iPhone is a mature mobile computing platform with a solid distribution channel, and a ton of apps.

That’s an overwhelming amount of momentum for Palm to try and catch up with, but I wish them a lot of luck.

Quick update

At some point I will take the time to start detailing my disappointments with the Obama administration. Don’t get me wrong, Obama has done a lot right in his first couple of months, but his missteps are large enough to be disconcerting.

The big one is really his handling of the warrant-less wire tapping suits, and his assertion of executive privilege. The DOJs current position is expressly against Obama’s campaign promises of transparency. This is a major constitutional issue, and the only reason I can see for the administration to take this stand is that there are extremely serious and far-reaching legal implications that would put large sections of the government into lockdown as they defend themselves from the suit.

But a very close second is Tim Geitner’s handling of the financial crisis. I’m trying to stay away from the populist craziness around this, but it’s getting very hard to see any of this as anything other than handouts to wallstreet. I’m starting to lean heavily toward nationalizing and breaking up all the majors.

Eric Holder is also heading down a path that looks short sighted and stupid concerning drug policy.

There’s a lot to reasearch around these topics, and a lot to write, and I just haven’t had the time and energy lately, and honestly it’s just too fucking depressing.

Mini Review: Halo Wars

I downloaded and played the Demo of Halo Wars, the new RTS game placed in the Halo universe. I really liked what I saw, and enjoyed playing Skirmishes with the computer opponents.

So I rented the full game when it came out, and I couldn’t even finish the campaign. There are a couple of outstanding issues that made the game not fun to play. All of them come down to the stupid AI of your units.

1. No patrolling. There’s one map where you must defend 2 ships while civilians escape a city. You only really need one ship to survive for a specified time to finish the level. Most of the damaging attacks come from air units. So I spawned about 20 pelicans and placed them right on top of the ship. I then started tooling around with my base and helping civilians. Then I hear squawking about how the ship is almost dead. I flip over to that part of the screen to discover one of my pelicans shooting at 3 enemy ships while the other 19 simply float in place watching. The enemy ships are completely visible to my pelicans, but since they weren’t being directly attacked, they weren’t responding. You have to constantly babysit all of your units because they are too stupid to defend a target.

2. Stupid navigation. I had camped out a unit out of sight and away from attackers. This unit needs to not die, so I placed some protection around it and moved on. Well the protection got killed so I went to the other side of the map and told a Vulture to go and help out. Vultures are the big bad boy air units, and I figured it would be no problem. So I swing back over to the unit being attacked and wait. After about 20 seconds or so, the unit is close to dead and there’s no Vulture. So I scroll over to where it’s at, and watch it repeatedly running into a mountain trying to flip itself over. I had to take command of it and manually steer it to the other location. Ugh.

3. Stupid tactics. On one map I had built up about 7 tanks, and went to attack the enemy base. Unfortunately there was a narrow row to take them through, and lots of baddies on the other side. Only one tank could get through at a time. Mmmm bottleneck. No biggie I think to myself, I’ll just steer them all through and I’ll take minimal damage. Nope. Once the first tank engaged, it wouldn’t move forward at all even when I specifically told it to. So it, along with all my ground units got chewed up while I cursed at the screen wondering why my tank wasn’t moving. I had to pull everyone back and take them around another way.

There’s a lot of other little annoyances, but these were the big things that made the game not fun for me. Unfortunately, many of the campaign levels seem designed to focus on these shortcomings. Some people may really like constantly jumping from unit to unit and having to micromanage every single thing they do, but that drives me completely batty.

Running

In junior high and high school I had a gym teacher who demanded that we run for miles with essentially no guidance on form, how to train properly for running distance, or how to stay hydrated. She was constantly annoyed with me because I couldn’t breath well while running and because my knees started hurting really badly after even short runs. She was always convinced I was faking it. She never coached me on how to run without hurting my knees, or offered a plan to build up my cardio to the point were I could run long distances.

She made me hate running.

Until recently I never really focused much on cardio because I just didn’t see the benefit. Now that I’m getting into my 30s my doctor is starting to badger me about heart health. So I figured it was time to try out running again.

The first few weeks were pretty brutal and my right knee immediately went into major pain mode for around 3 weeks. For some reason, my stride was really agitating my MCL. I backed down to just putting the treadmill on a 7 incline and walking at 3.3 miles an hour. I did this for about a month.

Once the knee calmed down I changed some things. I got some real running shoes, and light clothes. I figured out that long strides where you land with your heel are out. Have to land almost flat footed. Also, you have to try and pick up your feet as little as possible (without dragging them) to reduce impact to the knee. You also want your foot to contact the ground with your knee directly above.

3 days ago I finally reached a goal of running for 1 mile without slowing down. This is sort of a big deal for me as it’s something that I don’t think I’ve ever done. I repeated it yesterday as well and it was actually a little bit easier despite running it faster.

Ultimately my goal is to run 3 miles a day in 30 minutes, and I’m currently doing a little over 2 miles a day with a combination of walking and running.

I’ve actually gotten to the point where I really look forward to working out, which is a little freaky for me. Though I must say that watching episodes of the wire while I’m working out has helped a lot. Not sure I could have gotten this far in the gym.

The Housing Crisis

The more I read about the housing crisis and the eventual collapse of the financial markets, the less faith I have in our masters of the universe.

The newest bits of my reading are around the failure of the credit rating agencies like Moodys and S&P to assess risk because of market pressures. First read this.

Then read the documents from the recent hearing on credit agencies from the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but I’d encourage you to read the Moody’s town hall transcript somewhere near the end to see how they passed the buck and tried to minimize their role in the market collapse. Read up in Frank Raiter’s testimony about how S&P had better models for rating that simply weren’t used because they wouldn’t make them more money. Read up on how Moody’s CEO explains that models aren’t everything, and really it’s a bunch of smart people making guesses. Also consider the testimony of Jerome Fons who talks about how Moody’s was rating subprime financial instruments on basically no information.

As Jerome points out, current rating agencies have a huge conflict of interest and consider debt issuers rather than investors as their customers.

I don’t know why I keep reading about this stuff. It’s just going to make my blood pressure go up.

Bobby Jindal’s Exorcism

Recently Bobby Jindal got thrust into the national spotlight to offer the republican rebuttal to the president’s state of the union.

Jindal caught a lot of crap for his just outright awful public speaking skills, and as the days crept on, lots of people wanted to get an idea of who this Jindal character is.

Well, turns out that he’s at the very least a religious nutbag.

Jindal attended what some would consider an exorcism and wrote about it in the New Oxford Review. You have to pay to read the whole thing, but a big excerpt can be found here.

It’s a pretty remarkable story, and I’d encourage you to read through it to get a clearer picture on the worldview of the people the republican party is turning to for leadership.

The whole tale reminded me of the TV show Paranormal State in which a bunch of college kids investigate supposed hauntings and perform rituals to clear them out.

I’ve long been fascinated by the mythology surrounding exorcisms. The idea of demonic possession is pretty interesting in and of itself because of the questions it raises in the cosmology of god’s creation. In order for exorcism to function as an idea within christian mythology, some creations (demons) are given dominion over others (human) which only the power of christ as channeled through a human vessel (a priest) can overcome and remove. It leads to questions about what demons are supposed to be. Are they fallen angels? Are they some other kind of spiritual entity created by Satan? Are they damned souls? And exorcism takes on a whole new dimension when it’s proposed that the possession is by satan himself.

There are also questions of agency that come to play. Why would satan or any of his agents possess someone? For what purpose and to what outcome. What does satan gain from taking possession of a girl in her early 20s? What kinds of things can satan not do that requires physical possession in order to accomplish.

Catholic mythology recognizes what a sticky issue this really is given the complex and sprawling web of canon law and accepted dogma. It’s hard to paint a picture of the menace of satan when he has little better to do than possess fat, illiterate housewives. The Catholic church is very reticent to take claims of possession seriously these days, and for good reason. Even the church grants that it’s far more likely that someone is intellectually or emotionally disturbed than possessed by a demon.

Jindal’s story, as well a Paranormal State, if taken at face value, give rise to relatively serious questions in religion. If a group of teenagers or young adults in their early 20’s can successfully exorcise demons with no specific training other than what they’ve seen in movies, one begins to wonder about the power of these demons. As a catholic you would also have to wonder why one would need priests at all if one can competently conduct spiritual warfare with essentially none of the rigorous schooling of the priests. If lay people can serve as a conduit for christ well enough to cast out demons, why do we need priests for the eucharist or confession? It sort of undermines the whole purpose of the priesthood doesn’t it?

And one wonders why when demons supposedly do possess people, they do little, other than act out cliched, ham handed vignettes to demonstrate their evilness. This largely involves cursing and saying bad things about Jesus, religion and the people around them. Is the chief purpose of possession to make humans believe the person you’ve possessed has tourette’s?

Ultimately I don’t see anything here that doesn’t strike me as dumb college kids play acting like their world is more meaningful and more important than it actually is. They created a fantasy in which for some reason, demonic forces actually care about the lives of college kids enough to intercede. Perhaps if Jindal had taken more classes in abnormal psych and neuroscience, he would have been able to understand what was happening to him and the group.

This sort of stuff strikes me a christian LARPing and I think it should be viewed with the same degree of seriousness. The fact that this sort of event is one of the bedrocks of Jindal’s faith should be disconcerting to not only non-believers, but christians as well. Casting the protective umbrella over whackadoodle christianity like this fundamentally discredits some of the core beliefs of the religion.

99 cent app kerfuffle

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in iPhone app developer circles around how successful 99 cent apps are, how biased apple’s distribution system is toward cheap apps, and how hard it is to sell finely crafted complex applications for which developers have to ask for more money.

My initial reaction to almost all of this is: Waaaaaah.

And I hate to be that way. I genuinely love small mac indie developers and the software they create. But watching them squeeze into the iPhone market is just painful. I’m not going to link to every breakdown or complaint-fest here but I’ve got some general observations that I think will help put things in perspective.

1. The iPhone market is not the Mac market. It’s not even the PC market. It’s not even the smartphone market. It’s the cellphone market. The cellphone market is a fucking sludgepit full of shitty vendors who abuse their customers, lazy OS and software vendors who write crappy software and customers ranging the gamut from advanced computer users to people who can barely tie their shoes.

2. You’re accordingly dealing with customer expectations that are set and maintained by the cellphone market. Those expectations are roughly: My reception will suck, my phone will break or be replaced by a new one in 6 months – 1 year, physical accessories should cost less than $20, preferably less than $10, any stuff I download to my phone is $.99. The accessories are cheap and will probably break, but I don’t care because I’ll just get a new phone soon anyway. The apps or games or ringtones or whatever will probably suck or crash or not transfer to whatever phone I move to in 6 months so I’m not getting invested in anything. Vendors want to lock me in, so even moving my fucking contacts from one phone to another is a pain in the ass, so I’m not thinking about any horizon longer than 6 months.

3. It’s a fucking phone. I know we all feel like the iPhone is the first real step toward a small mobile computer that will change our lives in every conceivable way for the better. In many ways I agree. But it’s early, and apple is selling this thing as a phone, to phone consumers. Apple is doing this for a variety of reasons, once of which is to create a insurmountable market share, but probably the chief reason is that it makes them a shit ton of money. The message here is that while Apple will use the functionality you provide all day long to market it’s product, it isn’t motivated in the same way you are. And the vast majority of customers of the iphone see it as a phone. People have only so much attention available in any given day and you can image how much they are willing to dedicate to the excellence of their phone software.

4. Who’s your customer? For the indie mac developer, working with the indie mac developer mindset, you’re probably going to find an audience slightly larger than the mac market, but probably not all that much larger. Mac users are qualified by some pretty particular traits that you target with your apps. You probably share those traits. Unfortunately the vast majority of people on earth do not share those traits and don’t see the value you provide by targeting them. For the majority of people, they want cheap and marginally functional. It’s great that you’re writing software with a passion for excellence and want to provide an unparalleled user experience. Unfortunately you’re trying to sell fine china to the mongol horde.

5. Welcome to the dark side. Surprise, you can make a lot of money by writing shitty software and selling it cheap to chumps who will use it once or twice until the novelty wears off. It’s true. Your principles may preclude you from such activities, but lets not blame apple for biasing the system, lame developers for writing it, or consumers for not seeking better quality. Remember, it’s a fucking phone. Want to fund your world-changing iPhone app that will be a revelation to the 300 people who will ever use it and for which you will never recoup your costs? Spend 4 hours writing the next iFart, sell it for $.99, make $30k in a few days and get on with it. I know you became an indie mac developer to avoid having to do stupid, meaningless, soul-killing, trivial bullshit work just to make money, but I think the trade off here is acceptable. There is a word used to describe those who won’t sacrifice their principles in the face of adversity. That word is: Poor.

6. You’re a pioneer. It’s a new market, and there will be significant chaos until things settle down. You’re out there breaking trails for the rest of us, and we all admire you for it. But a significant portion of pioneers have this habit of starving to death. If you don’t want to be a pioneer, stay at home. Your neighbors won’t hate you. No one is making you go.