The big development this week in the health care debate is that it looks like the senate will move ahead with a public option, i.e, a plan via which the federal government will offer medicaid or medicare like insurance to anyone willing to pay the premiums. Presumably, these premiums will be priced well below premiums of private insurers, since the government doesn't need to worry about running a profit or deficit spending. If a private insurance company ran a deficit of a trillion bucks, it would be shut down. If the government chooses to run such a deficit, there doesn't seem to be any realistic opposition to this. Both political parties are dominated by people willing to spend without raising revenue. Republicans didn't say a word about deficit spending as they voted to fund two wars. To hear them now profess concern for deficits feels a bit disingenuous. They seem stuck on the notion that tax cuts are the key to balancing the budget. Since Ronald Reagan first championed this idea, we've had three decades of deficits. Even the "surpluses" of the Clinton years were actually deficits, since we were only ahead if the social security "trust funds" were counted as revenues (which they are, obviously, but the theory is they are to be saved, not spent as quickly as they come in, which is what actually happens).
But, I'm getting sidetracked onto a deficit rant, when I really want to discuss health care. For a long time, the public option has run very high in the polls. It's been a very strange paradox in this health care debate: Polls show rather thin support for government reform of health care, but usually show very strong support, well over sixty percent, of a public option. Why? I think the answer is fairly obvious: most people who support a public option do so because it's a vaguely defined term that they are free to pour any meaning they wish into. It would be very interesting to see a poll that asked people what they believed their monthly premium would be under a public option. My suspicion is, most people equate a public option with "free." Again, I have no polling data to actually back this up. I just sense from talking to supporters that they imagine that the public option will work like health care in Canada or the UK. You'll just go to whatever doctor you want, get whatever services you need, and won't pay a dime for it (or maybe a small co-pay).
But what if the public option comes with a premium of $100 a month, per person in your family? Would support still be as high? This is certainly cheaper than almost any private insurance. Still, my gut instinct is that a lot of people who support a public option would change to opposing it if they found they would actually have to pay for it. And, I could be way wrong as to what a public option would cost. Maybe it would be set at a flat ten percent of income. Maybe five percent. Maybe you'll pay $9.99 once a year, and it comes with a free pony! Right now, there's no way of knowing. The bills creating a public option don't talk about actual premium costs; these will be figured out down the road. But, if people are willing to support it thinking it will be free, then I guess I'm free to oppose it thinking it's going to come with a non-trivial price tag.
The price tag is going to be important because the bills are also going to include a second element: a personal mandate to purchase health insurance. Right now, this is turning out to be a toothless mandate. Early versions of the bills were discussing sizable fines for people who didn't buy health insurance. Now, the fines have been reduced and loopholes are being added for millions of people who won't get fined at all. But, of course, these people will also be uninsured. The personal mandate is the only cost saving measure currently being proposed. Currently, a significant chunk of people who don't have health insurance are young, healthy people. If we force these people into the insurance pool, presumably that will help control costs, since you'll have a large population of people who are paying premiums but not using much in the way of services. Very few twenty-five-year-olds have heart attacks or cancer. (Obviously, yes, some do, but compared to people who are sixty-five who develop these problems, the numbers are tiny.)
But, I look back on my own life, and wonder about the different choices I might have made if I'd had a mandate to buy health insurance. I used to work for a company that I just hated. I really wanted to quit my job and make a living writing. This was about fifteen years ago; I was only thirty. I scrimped and saved for a few years in my late twenties to get debt free and build up a little buffer of savings. Then, I quit. I made it almost year without taking another job, even though my writing income that year turned out to be nothing. But, I had carefully designed my life to cost as little as possible. My car was paid for, I was renting a space not much larger than a shoe box, and I ate a steady diet of Sam's Club frozen chicken breasts, which were something like 30 cents a pound back then. I still look back fondly on that time. But, if I'd been forced to spend a few hundred buck a month on health insurance, I don't think I could have made it as long as I did. It's true, if I'd developed cancer or been in a car wreck during these months, I would have wound up saddled with far worse bills than the insurance would have cost. But, I knew this; I had the freedom to choose to take that gamble. I still have that freedom; I just think that, at 45 (and thirty pounds heavier), my odds have changed.
To me, it feels fundamentally unfair to impose a personal mandate to buy health insurance. Some people argue that it's no different than the personal mandate to have car insurance. But, if I wanted to skip car insurance, I could just not own a car. I don't have any realistic option to not have a body.
I also have to admit, I'm thinking about this from the perspective of a man who doesn't have children. If I had kids, I think that a mandate requiring that I insure them would be perfectly sensible, no different than a mandate that I make sure they get an education.
Still, right now, I'm nervous about both the public option and a personal mandate. This doesn't mean that I don't want to see health insurance reform. I'd love to see a "catastrophic option" at least discussed, where people are responsible for their own health care for most services, but the government would step to pay for medical bills that fall beyond a certain lifetime limit: Say, $200,000. In other words, the government wouldn't pay a dime for me to have my appendix removed or to mend my broken leg, but they would step in for a long term, chronic cancer or heart disease. I'd also love the very common sense reform of making privately purchased health insurance tax deductible, the way it is when businesses purchase it. And, of course, I'd love to see the government doing more to facilitate medical research. One way to reduce the breathtaking cost of cancer would be to cure it.
Since I opened this post complaining about deficit spending, I feel like a hypocrite to end it calling for more government spending. So, let me propose some ways to pay for them. First, there have been trial balloons from the Obama administration about taxing soft drinks. There seems to be very little support for this, but you can count me among the enthusiastic proponents of this. No one needs a Coke or a Pepsi. And few people bat an eye at paying $1 for a two liter in a grocery store, but paying $2 for a glass of soda in a restaurant. We could raise billions by charging a quarter a quart. If you want to avoid the tax, don't drink soda. It seems to me no more onerous than a tax on cigarettes or booze. I'd also be fine with taxes on most fat foods and snack items. A potato chip tax, maybe. And, finally, obesity is a real risk factor for all sorts of disease. I say this as someone who is, no big surprise, obese. So, though it goes against every libertarian instinct I may have, why not have a fat tax? Every year on tax day, you go get weighed. For every pound you are overweight, you pay a dollar. This offsets some of the additional cost and risk that carrying around an extra fifty pounds adds to society, but isn't going to bankrupt anyone. There may be one or two circus freaks who see their tax approach a thousand bucks, but most people would be paying under $100. And, maybe the thought of saving ten bucks a year would be the push some people would need to lose ten pounds. I'm not proposing this as a punishment for obese people, just as a way of some reflecting that, long term, all of society pays for me weighing more, so why not chip in a little now to offset the costs of my eventual health care expenses?
Of course, I should be careful what I wish for. Five years from now, when I'm shelling out $5 for a coke, I'll be the one grumbling loudest. But, people who are supporting the health care reform bills now before the house and senate should be careful too. Our current health care system is, no question, a real frying pan. I just worry that any government intervention is going to be a fire.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Early morning thoughts on money
I just got back from Washington, DC, where I stayed with my friend Mr. Cavin and his lovely bride Sunshine. They were courteous hosts for me and Cheryl, and we definitely saw parts of DC with them that we wouldn't have found on our own, like ass-kicking Ethiopian food, a trapeze school, and the Red Bull art exhibit at Union Station. (I think it was Union station... everything is a blur at this point.)
We came back from DC the long way, veering westward to drive down the Skyline Drive. It was amazing; I'll link to Cheryl's photos as soon as she posts them on Flickr. We were close enough to a large buck deer at one point that we could have reached out and touched it. We also nearly ran over a black bear. And, we finished the day by watching the sun set over the Shenandoah Valley. Absolutely brilliant.
Of course, after sun set, we still had a five hour drive back to Hillsborough. "Amazing" isn't the word to describe this part of the journey. "Death march" is closer, though not appropriate since we were sitting down, and both survived. I only made it the last 80 miles by drinking a monster-sized cup of convenience store coffee that is probably going to leave me awake until five in the morning. Cheryl also had the coffee... she still zonked out and slept her way back home after we crossed the North Carolina line, leaving me alone to think about monetary policy. It would have been nice to think about something interesting, perhaps, but what can I do? I blame the caffeine.
Anyway, there was a point in a discussion of the post-consumer economy last week at CapClave where one of the panelist was discussing the disparity of wealth, pointing out how vastly wealthier the rich are today in comparison with the poor. I had pointed out that I wasn't disturbed by Bill Gates or Warren Buffett being in possession of tens of billions of dollars, because it wasn't like they convert it all into gold bars and store it in their basement. In theory, money is seldom a static thing. When someone has a billion dollars, they don't actually have a billion dollars. They'll have bought stock, providing money for companies to expand. Maybe, like Bill Gates, they've built a hyperfuturistic mansion that cost eye-popping sums of money. But, this money has gone to architects and construction workers; it's gone to seamstresses who sew couches and curtains, to burly men who lay brick and mow yards, and to god knows how many electricians it takes to wire the house of tomorrow. I know this gets the bad name of "trickle-down economics," but any fair minded person has to admit that the money does indeed keep circulating in the economy.
There was once a Doonesbury cartoon that parodied this, with a rich person placed on the spot about what area of the economy he'd stimulated with his tax cut. The punchline was that the rich guy had spent the dough on antiques, as if this was a wasteful thing. But, why is it wasteful? Why shouldn't an antique dealer earn a living? And, again, it's not like he's putting the money into a vault. He's going to be buying new inventory. With the profits, he'll be shopping at Walmart and McDonald's next to the rest of us. The money circulates. Even if it gets put in a savings account in a bank, the bank circulates it by making investments of its own. Money in our modern economy is almost never stagnant (not counting the pennies in your couch).
But, here's the flip side of this argument: Money spent by the government is never really wasted either. I will hear conservative talk show hosts rail against wasteful spending for, say, a trolley museum in Wastebuck, Virginia. The folks at the trolley museum are going to get hundred grand; how on earth is this going to do the larger economy any good? Well, by the same principal that it's good for a wealthy man to pay $100,000 to an antique dealer. The government money is going to keep moving. If the trolley museum gives all ten of its employees a $10,000 bonus this year, they are all going to go out and spend it on pizza, blue jeans, or maybe a new car. As long as the money isn't gathered into a large pile and set on fire, any dollar spent, whether by government or private industry, is a dollar flowing from one person to another. A dollar spent is a dollar earned... by someone else.
The big, big difference between Bill Gates spending a billion dollars on a house, and the US government spending a billion dollars on the cash for clunkers program, is that Bill presumably has the dough, while the US is borrowing half the money it spends now. Thus, all stimulus spending we currently undertake is effectively borrowing from the potential prosperity of our children and grandchildren. A child born today is in hock for many tens of thousands of dollars before the doctor even slaps him. But, maybe his father kept a job at the trolley museum he would have lost otherwise. Anyone who tells you they know with absolute certainty where the greater good lies is probably able to arrive at this certainty only by ignoring all parts of the larger reality that don't fit into their vision of How Things Are.
I'm not sure I'm going anywhere with this. Just random, coffee driven thoughts after a week of overstimulation. If I do have a point, I guess it would be to be kind to children. With the help of our elected officials, we are mugging them daily, and they aren't even aware of it. The least they should get in return are some cool birthday presents.
We came back from DC the long way, veering westward to drive down the Skyline Drive. It was amazing; I'll link to Cheryl's photos as soon as she posts them on Flickr. We were close enough to a large buck deer at one point that we could have reached out and touched it. We also nearly ran over a black bear. And, we finished the day by watching the sun set over the Shenandoah Valley. Absolutely brilliant.
Of course, after sun set, we still had a five hour drive back to Hillsborough. "Amazing" isn't the word to describe this part of the journey. "Death march" is closer, though not appropriate since we were sitting down, and both survived. I only made it the last 80 miles by drinking a monster-sized cup of convenience store coffee that is probably going to leave me awake until five in the morning. Cheryl also had the coffee... she still zonked out and slept her way back home after we crossed the North Carolina line, leaving me alone to think about monetary policy. It would have been nice to think about something interesting, perhaps, but what can I do? I blame the caffeine.
Anyway, there was a point in a discussion of the post-consumer economy last week at CapClave where one of the panelist was discussing the disparity of wealth, pointing out how vastly wealthier the rich are today in comparison with the poor. I had pointed out that I wasn't disturbed by Bill Gates or Warren Buffett being in possession of tens of billions of dollars, because it wasn't like they convert it all into gold bars and store it in their basement. In theory, money is seldom a static thing. When someone has a billion dollars, they don't actually have a billion dollars. They'll have bought stock, providing money for companies to expand. Maybe, like Bill Gates, they've built a hyperfuturistic mansion that cost eye-popping sums of money. But, this money has gone to architects and construction workers; it's gone to seamstresses who sew couches and curtains, to burly men who lay brick and mow yards, and to god knows how many electricians it takes to wire the house of tomorrow. I know this gets the bad name of "trickle-down economics," but any fair minded person has to admit that the money does indeed keep circulating in the economy.
There was once a Doonesbury cartoon that parodied this, with a rich person placed on the spot about what area of the economy he'd stimulated with his tax cut. The punchline was that the rich guy had spent the dough on antiques, as if this was a wasteful thing. But, why is it wasteful? Why shouldn't an antique dealer earn a living? And, again, it's not like he's putting the money into a vault. He's going to be buying new inventory. With the profits, he'll be shopping at Walmart and McDonald's next to the rest of us. The money circulates. Even if it gets put in a savings account in a bank, the bank circulates it by making investments of its own. Money in our modern economy is almost never stagnant (not counting the pennies in your couch).
But, here's the flip side of this argument: Money spent by the government is never really wasted either. I will hear conservative talk show hosts rail against wasteful spending for, say, a trolley museum in Wastebuck, Virginia. The folks at the trolley museum are going to get hundred grand; how on earth is this going to do the larger economy any good? Well, by the same principal that it's good for a wealthy man to pay $100,000 to an antique dealer. The government money is going to keep moving. If the trolley museum gives all ten of its employees a $10,000 bonus this year, they are all going to go out and spend it on pizza, blue jeans, or maybe a new car. As long as the money isn't gathered into a large pile and set on fire, any dollar spent, whether by government or private industry, is a dollar flowing from one person to another. A dollar spent is a dollar earned... by someone else.
The big, big difference between Bill Gates spending a billion dollars on a house, and the US government spending a billion dollars on the cash for clunkers program, is that Bill presumably has the dough, while the US is borrowing half the money it spends now. Thus, all stimulus spending we currently undertake is effectively borrowing from the potential prosperity of our children and grandchildren. A child born today is in hock for many tens of thousands of dollars before the doctor even slaps him. But, maybe his father kept a job at the trolley museum he would have lost otherwise. Anyone who tells you they know with absolute certainty where the greater good lies is probably able to arrive at this certainty only by ignoring all parts of the larger reality that don't fit into their vision of How Things Are.
I'm not sure I'm going anywhere with this. Just random, coffee driven thoughts after a week of overstimulation. If I do have a point, I guess it would be to be kind to children. With the help of our elected officials, we are mugging them daily, and they aren't even aware of it. The least they should get in return are some cool birthday presents.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Actually, this might increase the peace in the world...
After my anti-Obama peace prize rant of two weeks ago, this morning I wake up to discover that Obama is issuing a directive telling federal law officials not to pursue prosecutions of pot-smoking patients in states that have legalized medical marijuana. (Details are here.)
This isn't quite the first thing I've agreed on with Obama. I thought he was correct to raise the federal restrictions on funding of stem-cell research. (Though, I always was bothered that the Bush policy was misrepresented, since it was referred to as a ban, when, in fact, the research was still legal with private or state money.) I also think that pulling back on deploying a missile defense shield makes sense. We are out of money; the Soviet Union was, according to some interpretations of history, bankrupted by an arms race with the US. We are now being bankrupted by much smaller, weaker states, or even non-states. Osama bin Laden spent a few thousand dollars to engineer 9-11. The cost of us launching a war against terrorism in response is arguably over a trillion dollars by now, all of it funded by debt. Some pundits say that we need to build the missile shield to guard against Iranian missiles. But, again, it's asymmetric; we're spending tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars of borrowed money to defend against weapons that, like Saddam's mythical nukes and bio-weapons, may not even exist. (The missiles exist, yes, but a nuclear warhead is highly debatable.)
If we were a nation running a budget surplus, I might feel generous about spending ten billion here or ten billion there to defend Poland or Hungary. But we're a nation $10 trillion in the red. We are far more vulnerable to economic warfare at this point than we are to missile strikes.
Anyway back to pot: I will again be critical of Obama in saying that I wish he'd gone further. I would have liked to see him declare the 80 year old war against pot over entirely and just go ahead and legalize it all. It would save money, and maybe even earn some dough if we taxed it like cigarettes and booze. I have never smoked pot. Never even been interested. But, the pot smokers I've known have been pretty ordinary people, holding down full-time jobs, raising kids, even attending churches. The drug remains illegal only because no serious politician has the courage to come out and say what everyone knows: it's just not that dangerous. As for the argument that it's a gateway drug, I would argue that if it is a gateway, it's solely because it's illegal. Right now, if you want to buy pot, you have to do so on the black market, where other, more harmful drugs, are also going to be available. Make it legal, and you could buy it in grocery stores along with beer and cigarettes--it would mainly be a gateway drug to potato chips, which really are dangerous to your health, but that's a whole different blog post.
This isn't quite the first thing I've agreed on with Obama. I thought he was correct to raise the federal restrictions on funding of stem-cell research. (Though, I always was bothered that the Bush policy was misrepresented, since it was referred to as a ban, when, in fact, the research was still legal with private or state money.) I also think that pulling back on deploying a missile defense shield makes sense. We are out of money; the Soviet Union was, according to some interpretations of history, bankrupted by an arms race with the US. We are now being bankrupted by much smaller, weaker states, or even non-states. Osama bin Laden spent a few thousand dollars to engineer 9-11. The cost of us launching a war against terrorism in response is arguably over a trillion dollars by now, all of it funded by debt. Some pundits say that we need to build the missile shield to guard against Iranian missiles. But, again, it's asymmetric; we're spending tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars of borrowed money to defend against weapons that, like Saddam's mythical nukes and bio-weapons, may not even exist. (The missiles exist, yes, but a nuclear warhead is highly debatable.)
If we were a nation running a budget surplus, I might feel generous about spending ten billion here or ten billion there to defend Poland or Hungary. But we're a nation $10 trillion in the red. We are far more vulnerable to economic warfare at this point than we are to missile strikes.
Anyway back to pot: I will again be critical of Obama in saying that I wish he'd gone further. I would have liked to see him declare the 80 year old war against pot over entirely and just go ahead and legalize it all. It would save money, and maybe even earn some dough if we taxed it like cigarettes and booze. I have never smoked pot. Never even been interested. But, the pot smokers I've known have been pretty ordinary people, holding down full-time jobs, raising kids, even attending churches. The drug remains illegal only because no serious politician has the courage to come out and say what everyone knows: it's just not that dangerous. As for the argument that it's a gateway drug, I would argue that if it is a gateway, it's solely because it's illegal. Right now, if you want to buy pot, you have to do so on the black market, where other, more harmful drugs, are also going to be available. Make it legal, and you could buy it in grocery stores along with beer and cigarettes--it would mainly be a gateway drug to potato chips, which really are dangerous to your health, but that's a whole different blog post.
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Myth of Darwin as a Prophet
This weekend at Capclave, I'll be on a panel discussing Darwin. The panel description reads:
Darwin was born 200 years ago. Why are his ideas still controversial? Is the voyage of the Beagle the prototype for sf missions of scientific discovery? Why aren't there more books about Darwinism?
It's been a while since I've had a science post, so I'm going to do a little warm up for the panel with a gut reactions to these questions.
Working backwards, when I search Amazon for books mentioning Darwin, I come up with 100,000 hits. So, for the last question, I guess my reaction is, just how many books do you need? By comparison, Jesus has 400,000 hits on Amazon. Of course, this is also the same number of hits returned if you search for the word "diet." In any case, I hardly think that Darwin, natural selection, or evolution are suffering from a lack of exposure.
As for the Beagle being the prototype for SF missions, I think that, if there ever are going to be extra-solar explorations of other planets, they will almost certainly be carried out by the machines that eventually replace mankind. These machines will be able to claim that they were intelligently designed, and that their improvements are the result of deliberate actions. Perhaps they will regard evolution as a mere momentary blip in the natural order of things, the way it was once thought that capitalism was just a blip on the way to socialism. It's an interesting thought, but I'm not sure that I, personally, would be able to milk an entire book out of it.
Which brings us to the last question: Why are his ideas still controversial? And I suppose my answer is, what controversy? It's true that not everyone believes in evolution, and that a lot of people work hard to keep children from being exposed to these ideas. But, in the places where it really matters, I don't think that evolution or natural selection are controversial at all. Where does it really matter? How about hospitals, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and, of course, universities where the various aspects of biology are studied?
I'm not certain that it matters that half of all American's don't believe in evolution. It is, of course, the central narrative of biology; you can't really understand the natural world without understanding natural selection. But, relativity is a pillar of physics; I'm guessing maybe one person in a hundred has a firm grasp on relativity. Quantum mechanics is the other unreconciled pillar of physics, and I'd be shocked if one person in a thousand really understands the world on a quantum scale. Somehow, the world muddles through; people manage to become bankers and doctors and movie stars and rodeo clowns without understanding the difference between a photon and a proton. If you're an electrical engineer, you need to understand electrons. If you're a house painter... not so much.
I guess the major thing about Darwin, natural selection, and evolution, is that they aren't and shouldn't be and can't be major things in an average person's daily life. Natural selection has surprisingly little day to day impact on a person's behavior. Let's see... I suppose that understanding evolution can help you understand why it's important to finish off your full course of anti-biotics. But, it doesn't help you know how to invest your money. It doesn't guide you in how to deal with your friends and family. It won't tell you what to eat for dinner or what toothpaste will make your teeth their whitest.
Some people treat Darwin as a new prophet, pointing the way to a new religion. But if you really understand natural selection and evolution, you understand that it's actually a rather precise tool for understanding one specific aspect of biology. Some people attempt to misuse it, and say that Darwinism applies to economics. Other's will point to examples from the natural world and draw moral guidance from it. For instance, I've heard serious people argue that homosexuality either is or isn't moral based on things like whether or not there are gay penguins. If homosexuality evolved in flightless sea birds, it must not be a choice for humans. But, of course, if you promote this argument, what are you to make of bonobos, who are always promiscous? Or some insects, where the females devour the males? Turning to the guidance of animals for your moral choices is a dangerous slippery slope.
The one shocking aspect of Darwin--the thing that generates the most opposition--is that natural selection doesn't require a god to explain the existence of man. It doesn't rule out a god, but the theory doesn't have any major holes in it requiring divine intervention to explain our presence. But, I have to wonder how important the creation myth is to most religions. Is it really, really important, if you are a Christian, that the world was created in six days? How important is that fact to your day to day life? It seems far more likely that the parts of your religion that matter on a daily basis are the moral guidance to love your neighbors, treat the poor and the sick as if they might be Jesus himself, and to stop coveting your neighbor's ass? In all these matters, Darwin offers no guidance whatsoever. Carry on as you were before; science really just doesn't have a lot to tell you about whether or not it's moral to steal.
Darwin wasn't a prophet. He was a scientist. His theory is science, not religious philosophy. Any controversy that exists is built upon the myth of what he said, rather than his actual contributions to our understanding of the world. I don't really expect his opponents to grasp this, but I still hold out hope that, one day, his proponents might.
Darwin was born 200 years ago. Why are his ideas still controversial? Is the voyage of the Beagle the prototype for sf missions of scientific discovery? Why aren't there more books about Darwinism?
It's been a while since I've had a science post, so I'm going to do a little warm up for the panel with a gut reactions to these questions.
Working backwards, when I search Amazon for books mentioning Darwin, I come up with 100,000 hits. So, for the last question, I guess my reaction is, just how many books do you need? By comparison, Jesus has 400,000 hits on Amazon. Of course, this is also the same number of hits returned if you search for the word "diet." In any case, I hardly think that Darwin, natural selection, or evolution are suffering from a lack of exposure.
As for the Beagle being the prototype for SF missions, I think that, if there ever are going to be extra-solar explorations of other planets, they will almost certainly be carried out by the machines that eventually replace mankind. These machines will be able to claim that they were intelligently designed, and that their improvements are the result of deliberate actions. Perhaps they will regard evolution as a mere momentary blip in the natural order of things, the way it was once thought that capitalism was just a blip on the way to socialism. It's an interesting thought, but I'm not sure that I, personally, would be able to milk an entire book out of it.
Which brings us to the last question: Why are his ideas still controversial? And I suppose my answer is, what controversy? It's true that not everyone believes in evolution, and that a lot of people work hard to keep children from being exposed to these ideas. But, in the places where it really matters, I don't think that evolution or natural selection are controversial at all. Where does it really matter? How about hospitals, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and, of course, universities where the various aspects of biology are studied?
I'm not certain that it matters that half of all American's don't believe in evolution. It is, of course, the central narrative of biology; you can't really understand the natural world without understanding natural selection. But, relativity is a pillar of physics; I'm guessing maybe one person in a hundred has a firm grasp on relativity. Quantum mechanics is the other unreconciled pillar of physics, and I'd be shocked if one person in a thousand really understands the world on a quantum scale. Somehow, the world muddles through; people manage to become bankers and doctors and movie stars and rodeo clowns without understanding the difference between a photon and a proton. If you're an electrical engineer, you need to understand electrons. If you're a house painter... not so much.
I guess the major thing about Darwin, natural selection, and evolution, is that they aren't and shouldn't be and can't be major things in an average person's daily life. Natural selection has surprisingly little day to day impact on a person's behavior. Let's see... I suppose that understanding evolution can help you understand why it's important to finish off your full course of anti-biotics. But, it doesn't help you know how to invest your money. It doesn't guide you in how to deal with your friends and family. It won't tell you what to eat for dinner or what toothpaste will make your teeth their whitest.
Some people treat Darwin as a new prophet, pointing the way to a new religion. But if you really understand natural selection and evolution, you understand that it's actually a rather precise tool for understanding one specific aspect of biology. Some people attempt to misuse it, and say that Darwinism applies to economics. Other's will point to examples from the natural world and draw moral guidance from it. For instance, I've heard serious people argue that homosexuality either is or isn't moral based on things like whether or not there are gay penguins. If homosexuality evolved in flightless sea birds, it must not be a choice for humans. But, of course, if you promote this argument, what are you to make of bonobos, who are always promiscous? Or some insects, where the females devour the males? Turning to the guidance of animals for your moral choices is a dangerous slippery slope.
The one shocking aspect of Darwin--the thing that generates the most opposition--is that natural selection doesn't require a god to explain the existence of man. It doesn't rule out a god, but the theory doesn't have any major holes in it requiring divine intervention to explain our presence. But, I have to wonder how important the creation myth is to most religions. Is it really, really important, if you are a Christian, that the world was created in six days? How important is that fact to your day to day life? It seems far more likely that the parts of your religion that matter on a daily basis are the moral guidance to love your neighbors, treat the poor and the sick as if they might be Jesus himself, and to stop coveting your neighbor's ass? In all these matters, Darwin offers no guidance whatsoever. Carry on as you were before; science really just doesn't have a lot to tell you about whether or not it's moral to steal.
Darwin wasn't a prophet. He was a scientist. His theory is science, not religious philosophy. Any controversy that exists is built upon the myth of what he said, rather than his actual contributions to our understanding of the world. I don't really expect his opponents to grasp this, but I still hold out hope that, one day, his proponents might.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Jumping on the Obama bashing bandwagon
I hurt my hand at work yesterday, pulling one of my flexor tendons in my left hand. I was told to try to lay off using the hand until it heals, including no (or very little) typing. Obviously, I was worried about not being able to work on my latest novel, Greatshadow, and I also thought about not being able to blog. How is the world ever going to get by without my banal, scatter-brained ramblings about the issues of the day?
Then, I wake up this morning and find out the Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. It's enough to send me back to the keyboard despite feeling like I've got a knife stabbing my left palm. Because, what the hell? I mean, what the bleeping hell?
I really don't think I've engaged in much Obama-bashing here. I didn't do much Bush-bashing either. In general, I respect the fact that nobody with my libertarian leanings is ever going to be allowed near the White House, and that most of my political gripes aren't with my president, or even really with politicians. My most fundamental gripe is with my fellow citizens who have turned American politics into a giant superbowl game. Only two teams are allowed to play; it really doesn't much matter what goes on in the actual game. The republican roots for their team, the democrats root for their team, and the "independents" root for whoever seems popular at the moment. Issues get divided up arbitrarily. In a logical world, you might think that one party would be "pro-life," and oppose abortion, the death penalty, and war. Or maybe one party would be "pro-liberty" and support free markets, open immigration policies, reproductive rights for women, and fiercely defend freedom of speech. Instead, issues get chopped up by the parties in ways that seem to defy logic, because the American public defies logic. We have the government we deserve; the things I dislike about my government aren't Obama's fault or Bush's fault. They're the citizens' fault.
But, this morning, hearing that Obama had won the peace prize, I suddenly discovered that I hate him. I started trying to think of anything he'd done to earn this award, and the more I thought about his accomplishments, the more I started thinking he's pretty much on track toward being the worst president of my lifetime. Bush was frequently mocked for being an idiot, but he was at least a decisive idiot who knew how to accomplish his agenda, even if I loathed that agenda.
Obama has his party in control of both the house and the senate. You might think that, nine months into his first term, he might have seen a few laws he supported get passed. The only major bill I can think of that has actually been signed into law was the stimulus plan, and I really use the word "plan" in a very loose sense. I don't think there was any unifying narrative or goal to the $700 billion allocated in that bill. It was a collection of mostly random pork projects; I'm sorry, but asking congressmen to pass an all-pork bill doesn't earn him high marks for leadership. A dead gerbil could have lobbied for a bill like this and seen it passed. In everything else that has been debated over the last year, I've felt like Obama has been willing to talk about "principles" of things he might like to see passed by congress, but as far as drawing a line in the sand and saying, "You will pass a public option," or "You will pass cap and trade," or "You will pass financial regulations that prevent the creation of banks too big to fail," I haven't seen it. His governing style seems to be, "Hey, it would be nice if you guys passed some laws or something, but, you know, whatever." He seems willing to accept whatever is handed to him and claim it as a win, rather than fighting for something and possibly losing. I can respect someone who tries and fails. Obama seems to be so adverse to failure he's not even trying.
There was a headline in the paper this week that made my brain hurt. I don't have the paper in front of me, but the gist of the headline was, "Obama consults with advisors to form Afghanistan strategy." It makes my brain hurt. The war in Afghanistan isn't a surprise. He's known for a year now he'd be commander in chief. This war is his war. And he's just now getting around to figuring out a strategy? He sent twenty thousand troops in earlier this year... apparently without a strategy?
It makes me ill.
Suppose you believe that Bush sent 200,000 troops into Iraq solely to steal their oil. You look at the bodies piling up and ask, "What are they dying for?" and, while you hate the answer, at least, in your mind, you saw the flashing word, "OIL."
For the 20,000 troops Obama sent in earlier this year, sans strategy: What are they dying for? In my mind, I see the flashing words, "You know, whatever."
Giving Obama a peace prize is just a joke. Anyone who sends troops to die without some actual goal in mind deserves scorn, not awards.* If anyone can justify what he's done to earn this, please, please, please jump in and let me know.
*Note: Sending troops to die with an actual goal in mind may deserve scorn as well, depending on the goal. And, I'm NOT DEFENDING BUSH by bashing Obama, so don't jump in with posts about how bad a president Bush was. I feel like I can't hate both men equally. Now I'm going to shut up and go ice up my hand. Ow.
Then, I wake up this morning and find out the Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. It's enough to send me back to the keyboard despite feeling like I've got a knife stabbing my left palm. Because, what the hell? I mean, what the bleeping hell?
I really don't think I've engaged in much Obama-bashing here. I didn't do much Bush-bashing either. In general, I respect the fact that nobody with my libertarian leanings is ever going to be allowed near the White House, and that most of my political gripes aren't with my president, or even really with politicians. My most fundamental gripe is with my fellow citizens who have turned American politics into a giant superbowl game. Only two teams are allowed to play; it really doesn't much matter what goes on in the actual game. The republican roots for their team, the democrats root for their team, and the "independents" root for whoever seems popular at the moment. Issues get divided up arbitrarily. In a logical world, you might think that one party would be "pro-life," and oppose abortion, the death penalty, and war. Or maybe one party would be "pro-liberty" and support free markets, open immigration policies, reproductive rights for women, and fiercely defend freedom of speech. Instead, issues get chopped up by the parties in ways that seem to defy logic, because the American public defies logic. We have the government we deserve; the things I dislike about my government aren't Obama's fault or Bush's fault. They're the citizens' fault.
But, this morning, hearing that Obama had won the peace prize, I suddenly discovered that I hate him. I started trying to think of anything he'd done to earn this award, and the more I thought about his accomplishments, the more I started thinking he's pretty much on track toward being the worst president of my lifetime. Bush was frequently mocked for being an idiot, but he was at least a decisive idiot who knew how to accomplish his agenda, even if I loathed that agenda.
Obama has his party in control of both the house and the senate. You might think that, nine months into his first term, he might have seen a few laws he supported get passed. The only major bill I can think of that has actually been signed into law was the stimulus plan, and I really use the word "plan" in a very loose sense. I don't think there was any unifying narrative or goal to the $700 billion allocated in that bill. It was a collection of mostly random pork projects; I'm sorry, but asking congressmen to pass an all-pork bill doesn't earn him high marks for leadership. A dead gerbil could have lobbied for a bill like this and seen it passed. In everything else that has been debated over the last year, I've felt like Obama has been willing to talk about "principles" of things he might like to see passed by congress, but as far as drawing a line in the sand and saying, "You will pass a public option," or "You will pass cap and trade," or "You will pass financial regulations that prevent the creation of banks too big to fail," I haven't seen it. His governing style seems to be, "Hey, it would be nice if you guys passed some laws or something, but, you know, whatever." He seems willing to accept whatever is handed to him and claim it as a win, rather than fighting for something and possibly losing. I can respect someone who tries and fails. Obama seems to be so adverse to failure he's not even trying.
There was a headline in the paper this week that made my brain hurt. I don't have the paper in front of me, but the gist of the headline was, "Obama consults with advisors to form Afghanistan strategy." It makes my brain hurt. The war in Afghanistan isn't a surprise. He's known for a year now he'd be commander in chief. This war is his war. And he's just now getting around to figuring out a strategy? He sent twenty thousand troops in earlier this year... apparently without a strategy?
It makes me ill.
Suppose you believe that Bush sent 200,000 troops into Iraq solely to steal their oil. You look at the bodies piling up and ask, "What are they dying for?" and, while you hate the answer, at least, in your mind, you saw the flashing word, "OIL."
For the 20,000 troops Obama sent in earlier this year, sans strategy: What are they dying for? In my mind, I see the flashing words, "You know, whatever."
Giving Obama a peace prize is just a joke. Anyone who sends troops to die without some actual goal in mind deserves scorn, not awards.* If anyone can justify what he's done to earn this, please, please, please jump in and let me know.
*Note: Sending troops to die with an actual goal in mind may deserve scorn as well, depending on the goal. And, I'm NOT DEFENDING BUSH by bashing Obama, so don't jump in with posts about how bad a president Bush was. I feel like I can't hate both men equally. Now I'm going to shut up and go ice up my hand. Ow.
Monday, October 05, 2009
A grim vision of the future
Since the relaunch of Bitterwood.net, the boards have been plagued with adbots. Browsing the board this morning, I was struck this morning with a grim vision of the future. All technology eventually becomes a tool of advertising. My dragon age books assume that we will be able to genehack our way into creating dragons and unicorns and other fancifal beasts for our amusement. This morning, however, I realized that the most likely use of gene hacking will be advertising. The day will come when the butterflies that lights upon a flower will have have tiny billboards for wings, advertising Sherwin Williams brand paints. The flowers it lands on will be purple, blue, orange, and green--resembling the FedexOffice logo. Cows in the field will have hides with golden arches on the sides. Apples will grow that pefectly resemble the logo on an iPod. The birds outside your window in the morning will chirp out the jingle for Folger's crystals. And, all insurance salesmen in the world will lose their jobs, replaced by tiny talking geckos.
You have been warned.
You have been warned.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Acorn Videos and a Plea for More Muckraking
One thing has been bugging me in all this Acorn video frenzy. (If you don't know what the Acorn videos are, google them.) It's true that, if the workers caught on video should have immediately picked up the phone and called the police once they had the names of two self-confessed child-slavers. There's really no excuse; this is bad behavior.
Still, take out the child-sex ring angle, and what you really have on tape are people giving tax advice on how to work the tax code to hide or launder income. It make me wonder: if you're the CEO of a big corporation, and you go consult with your tax attorney about how to hide your income in foreign bank accounts to avoid taxes, how many of those attorneys do you think pick up the phone and call the police? When Bernie Madoff was meeting with his tax attorneys, did any of them ever think of reporting that something fishy was going on? Where are the hidden camera investigations into the boardrooms of the banks that swindled the general public out of a billion bucks? I'm all for undercover reporters exposing corruption and graft. I just hope that, next time, someone shoots for a larger target instead of going after such low-hanging fruit. A pimp and ho laundering money might ruin a neighborhood. A big bank messing with the books can cost millions of peoples their homes and their jobs. Aim higher, future muckrakers!
Still, take out the child-sex ring angle, and what you really have on tape are people giving tax advice on how to work the tax code to hide or launder income. It make me wonder: if you're the CEO of a big corporation, and you go consult with your tax attorney about how to hide your income in foreign bank accounts to avoid taxes, how many of those attorneys do you think pick up the phone and call the police? When Bernie Madoff was meeting with his tax attorneys, did any of them ever think of reporting that something fishy was going on? Where are the hidden camera investigations into the boardrooms of the banks that swindled the general public out of a billion bucks? I'm all for undercover reporters exposing corruption and graft. I just hope that, next time, someone shoots for a larger target instead of going after such low-hanging fruit. A pimp and ho laundering money might ruin a neighborhood. A big bank messing with the books can cost millions of peoples their homes and their jobs. Aim higher, future muckrakers!
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Why Must Laws Be Long?
I've discussed this topic before, but after Max Baucus announced his health care reform bill this week, I've found myself once more obsessed with an aspect of lawmaking I don't understand. Why is every bill that now emerges from congress a 1000 page plus monster?
The second the Baucus bill was arrived, critics from both the right and left took their knives to it. Everyone could find one provision that they couldn't abide. At the beginning of the year, I was certain that the president would get something out of congress he could call Health Care reform and sign it triumphantly. Now, I'm not so sure. The problem is, all the bills that are getting designed have a core of attractive items in them, but then glom on stuff that seems guaranteed to be opposed by a majority. I suppose the idea is, you use the popular items as leverage to pass the unpopular ones. But, in this case, I'm starting to think that the whole enterprise will crash and burn, and nothing at all is going to pass.
The big bills wind up being almost impossible to explain to the American public. The president can't go on TV and tell us everything that's in a 1000 page bill in a half hour. He might explain five or six popular provisions of a bill, but the second he stops talking critics will jump in to talk about the others and the general public will wind up with the feeling that they are getting sold a pig in a poke. The legislation is so complex, any sane person is going to be suspicious of it. No average citizen with a day job and a personal life is going to be able to sit down and read all the bills to form an opinion on them.
But if the president really wanted the five or six reforms that he most often talks about, couldn't each of these reforms be introduced as a seperate bill? This week, we vote on new rules for recission. Next week, we vote on a program to set up insurance co-ops. The week after, vote on a bill that standardizes insurance application forms. The following week, shoot for a bill that would allow for more portability of insurance between jobs.
Some bills would pass, some would fail. My gut instinct is, you might actually see a return of bipartisanship on the more popular measures. Small, tightly targetted bills would be easier to explain to constituents. The general public wouldn't live with the worry that their lawmakers were trying to hide the truth of what they were attempting to do from them.
If health care reform does eventually fail, it won't be the Republicans or the rabble rousing public that have doomed it. It will be the stupid, pointless complexity of trying to do a hundred things with a single vote.
The second the Baucus bill was arrived, critics from both the right and left took their knives to it. Everyone could find one provision that they couldn't abide. At the beginning of the year, I was certain that the president would get something out of congress he could call Health Care reform and sign it triumphantly. Now, I'm not so sure. The problem is, all the bills that are getting designed have a core of attractive items in them, but then glom on stuff that seems guaranteed to be opposed by a majority. I suppose the idea is, you use the popular items as leverage to pass the unpopular ones. But, in this case, I'm starting to think that the whole enterprise will crash and burn, and nothing at all is going to pass.
The big bills wind up being almost impossible to explain to the American public. The president can't go on TV and tell us everything that's in a 1000 page bill in a half hour. He might explain five or six popular provisions of a bill, but the second he stops talking critics will jump in to talk about the others and the general public will wind up with the feeling that they are getting sold a pig in a poke. The legislation is so complex, any sane person is going to be suspicious of it. No average citizen with a day job and a personal life is going to be able to sit down and read all the bills to form an opinion on them.
But if the president really wanted the five or six reforms that he most often talks about, couldn't each of these reforms be introduced as a seperate bill? This week, we vote on new rules for recission. Next week, we vote on a program to set up insurance co-ops. The week after, vote on a bill that standardizes insurance application forms. The following week, shoot for a bill that would allow for more portability of insurance between jobs.
Some bills would pass, some would fail. My gut instinct is, you might actually see a return of bipartisanship on the more popular measures. Small, tightly targetted bills would be easier to explain to constituents. The general public wouldn't live with the worry that their lawmakers were trying to hide the truth of what they were attempting to do from them.
If health care reform does eventually fail, it won't be the Republicans or the rabble rousing public that have doomed it. It will be the stupid, pointless complexity of trying to do a hundred things with a single vote.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Health Care is a Right. Feel Free to Use It.
In the context of the health care debate, I've been hearing a lot of people assert that access to health care is a fundamental human right. During my years of following politics, I've heard any number of things proposed as rights that aren't specifially spelled out in the US constitution. Among some of the more common ones:
A right to work.
A right to housing.
A right to nutrition.
A right to an education.
A right to privacy.
Now, I suppose I could play strict constructionist and argue that if it's not written down by the founding fathers, it's not a right. However the ninth amendment says, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It seems to me easy to accept that the founding fathers would acknowledge that people had some or all of the rights listed above. Even if the founding fathers wouldn't, we certainly can today come together and agree that everything on this list, including a right to health care, is important to living a good life in today's world.
So, I'm willing to agree that you have a right to health care, a house, food, education, and privacy. It's now up to you to go out and excercise them. A right is not the same thing as a guaranteed service. It doesn't mean that you are owed anything, or given anything. It merely means that, if you choose to excercise a right, no government can stop you from doing so.
For instance, at the top of the bill of rights, you are granted the right to free speech, and freedom of the press. Note that this right doesn't mean the government has to provide you with a printing press and free paper. It doesn't have to provide you with blogs or billboards or megaphones. If you want to use your right to free speech, you have to do the work of writing your blog, or publishing a newspaper, or plugging in your ham radio set, or going down to the town hall and shouting till your throat is raw.
Next on the bill of rights is the right to bear arms. After two centuries of fence straddling, the Supreme Court has finally said that, yes, this guarantees the right of an individual to own a firearm. It does not, by any legal theory or argument, mean that the government has to mail you a voucher to go out and buy a rifle. You have a right, but to take advantage of it, you'll have to spend your own money.
You have a right to housing. While at one time there were definitely discriminatory practices against blacks or jews or catholics or what have you, none of that is legal today. There is no governmental force standing in the way of you going out and getting all the housing you can handle. You can own five or six or seventy houses if you so choose, and take the neccessary financial steps to make it happen.
You want a right to work? Well... what's stopping you? People who don't speak english, who can't read our want ads, and who have no social security cards come across our borders in waves and mow our lawns and diaper our children; they pick our peaches and package our pork. There are no barriers to most people's ability to work beyond their dignity. I'm not knocking dignity! I work at a desk, not in a ditch. But, a right to work doesn't mean that the goverment is obligated to give you full employment in the trade of your choice. I want to make a living writing fiction, but I don't expect the government to guarantee me a living wage while attempting to do this.
You want an education? You're in luck! Every state in the union provides one for free. Most towns have libraries where you can study up on any subject you want. Again, it wasn't that long ago that armed men would line up around a school house to keep children of the wrong color from walking through the door. But today, if you aren't getting an education, you really just aren't trying. We have more information at our finger tips than ever. So why do I keep running into cashiers who can't count correct change?
Which brings us to health care: I think costs are insane. I think it's unfair that sick people should lose their houses and their livelihoods. But, again, the right to health care is a right that individuals have to excercise. The vast majority of American's get the treatment they need without losing everything they've earned because they've made life choices that saw that they would have insurance. It's not always easy, but it's not impossible. The statistic Obama quoted the other night was that 33 million Americans have no insurance. That means roughly 267 million Americans are excersizing their rights to obtain health insurance in some form or fashion. It's not impossible.
I'm not so naive to think that all men are created equal. There are people out there who have had the bad genetic luck to be born without the intelligence to function independently. There are others who are going to encounter really awful luck; young mothers get the phone call in the night and learn that their husband's plane has crashed, or heathy, twenty-year old college students who get diagnosed with bone cancer. A kind and caring society will band together to assist these people in difficult times.
Still, for those people who are arguing that health care is a right, I'd like to say that I agree with you. I certainly won't stand in the way of you going out and getting some. I won't stop you from getting a gun, a megaphone, or printing press, either. I'm just not completely clear, however, on why anyone else has a moral obligation to spend money to pay for you to use rights you already possess.
A right to work.
A right to housing.
A right to nutrition.
A right to an education.
A right to privacy.
Now, I suppose I could play strict constructionist and argue that if it's not written down by the founding fathers, it's not a right. However the ninth amendment says, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It seems to me easy to accept that the founding fathers would acknowledge that people had some or all of the rights listed above. Even if the founding fathers wouldn't, we certainly can today come together and agree that everything on this list, including a right to health care, is important to living a good life in today's world.
So, I'm willing to agree that you have a right to health care, a house, food, education, and privacy. It's now up to you to go out and excercise them. A right is not the same thing as a guaranteed service. It doesn't mean that you are owed anything, or given anything. It merely means that, if you choose to excercise a right, no government can stop you from doing so.
For instance, at the top of the bill of rights, you are granted the right to free speech, and freedom of the press. Note that this right doesn't mean the government has to provide you with a printing press and free paper. It doesn't have to provide you with blogs or billboards or megaphones. If you want to use your right to free speech, you have to do the work of writing your blog, or publishing a newspaper, or plugging in your ham radio set, or going down to the town hall and shouting till your throat is raw.
Next on the bill of rights is the right to bear arms. After two centuries of fence straddling, the Supreme Court has finally said that, yes, this guarantees the right of an individual to own a firearm. It does not, by any legal theory or argument, mean that the government has to mail you a voucher to go out and buy a rifle. You have a right, but to take advantage of it, you'll have to spend your own money.
You have a right to housing. While at one time there were definitely discriminatory practices against blacks or jews or catholics or what have you, none of that is legal today. There is no governmental force standing in the way of you going out and getting all the housing you can handle. You can own five or six or seventy houses if you so choose, and take the neccessary financial steps to make it happen.
You want a right to work? Well... what's stopping you? People who don't speak english, who can't read our want ads, and who have no social security cards come across our borders in waves and mow our lawns and diaper our children; they pick our peaches and package our pork. There are no barriers to most people's ability to work beyond their dignity. I'm not knocking dignity! I work at a desk, not in a ditch. But, a right to work doesn't mean that the goverment is obligated to give you full employment in the trade of your choice. I want to make a living writing fiction, but I don't expect the government to guarantee me a living wage while attempting to do this.
You want an education? You're in luck! Every state in the union provides one for free. Most towns have libraries where you can study up on any subject you want. Again, it wasn't that long ago that armed men would line up around a school house to keep children of the wrong color from walking through the door. But today, if you aren't getting an education, you really just aren't trying. We have more information at our finger tips than ever. So why do I keep running into cashiers who can't count correct change?
Which brings us to health care: I think costs are insane. I think it's unfair that sick people should lose their houses and their livelihoods. But, again, the right to health care is a right that individuals have to excercise. The vast majority of American's get the treatment they need without losing everything they've earned because they've made life choices that saw that they would have insurance. It's not always easy, but it's not impossible. The statistic Obama quoted the other night was that 33 million Americans have no insurance. That means roughly 267 million Americans are excersizing their rights to obtain health insurance in some form or fashion. It's not impossible.
I'm not so naive to think that all men are created equal. There are people out there who have had the bad genetic luck to be born without the intelligence to function independently. There are others who are going to encounter really awful luck; young mothers get the phone call in the night and learn that their husband's plane has crashed, or heathy, twenty-year old college students who get diagnosed with bone cancer. A kind and caring society will band together to assist these people in difficult times.
Still, for those people who are arguing that health care is a right, I'd like to say that I agree with you. I certainly won't stand in the way of you going out and getting some. I won't stop you from getting a gun, a megaphone, or printing press, either. I'm just not completely clear, however, on why anyone else has a moral obligation to spend money to pay for you to use rights you already possess.
Friday, September 04, 2009
I Saw Lightning Fall
Frequent visitors to this blog have probably noticed the name Loren Eaton in the comments section. Loren recently invited me to write a guest post at his blog, the poetically named "I Saw Lightning Fall." Apparently, he and his wife were having a new baby, and some how this event was more important to him that writing on his blog! Tsk, tsk.
Anyway, I was just informed that the newest Eaton has arrived, a little boy. So, congrats, Loren! Woohoo!
It's moment like this that make life so swell. Which is a rather clumsy segue into the subject of my guest blog, on the literary technique of slowing and freezing time.
Forgive me if that's the clunkiest, least clever segue ever. Today was day 1 of Dragoncon; I gave blood within an hour of arriving at the con. They apparently liked my blood so much they talked me into giving a platelet only donation, which I'm told is used to treat cancer patients. How could I say no? They gave me a sheet that said I should 1: avoid lifting anything heavy for a few hours: 2: drink lots of fluids, and 3: generally avoid over exerting myself. So, of course, I spent the whole day wandering around the con, probably logging at least five miles, sweating like a fool, drinking only one small bottle of water, and lugging at least twenty pounds of books.
Anyway, more Dragoncon stuff is going to be posted at my dragon blog in, like, ten minutes.
Anyway, I was just informed that the newest Eaton has arrived, a little boy. So, congrats, Loren! Woohoo!
It's moment like this that make life so swell. Which is a rather clumsy segue into the subject of my guest blog, on the literary technique of slowing and freezing time.
Forgive me if that's the clunkiest, least clever segue ever. Today was day 1 of Dragoncon; I gave blood within an hour of arriving at the con. They apparently liked my blood so much they talked me into giving a platelet only donation, which I'm told is used to treat cancer patients. How could I say no? They gave me a sheet that said I should 1: avoid lifting anything heavy for a few hours: 2: drink lots of fluids, and 3: generally avoid over exerting myself. So, of course, I spent the whole day wandering around the con, probably logging at least five miles, sweating like a fool, drinking only one small bottle of water, and lugging at least twenty pounds of books.
Anyway, more Dragoncon stuff is going to be posted at my dragon blog in, like, ten minutes.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Unsung Heroes
I'll admit it: Most of my posts focus on gripes and frustrations. Readers of my blog might come away with the impression that I'm kind of a jerk who wanders around looking for things to argue about, complaining ceaselessly about government and corporate stupidity to anyone in earshot. That impression is mostly correct.
Today, I'd like to shift gears. There are some human behaviors I take note of, small, almost invisible acts of kindness, or mere politeness, that make this old world a better place to live. Here then, are ten of my unsung heroes:
Today, I'd like to shift gears. There are some human behaviors I take note of, small, almost invisible acts of kindness, or mere politeness, that make this old world a better place to live. Here then, are ten of my unsung heroes:
- People who return their shopping carts to the cart return bins in parking lots, even if they aren't coveniently placed.
- People who have concise messages on their voicemail, so you can start leaving them a message in under thirty seconds.
- People who spay and neuter stray cats.
- People who give blood.
- Parents of children who are deeply tanned when they return to school in the fall. (I mean the children are tan. I could care less about whether the parents have spent their summers outside.)
- Waiters and waitresses who magically appear with a pitcher of iced tea the second my glass is 2/3rds empty.
- People who populate wikipedia with accurate information.
- Retail outlets that don't require me to fill out a card collecting my personal information in order to get their best prices.
- People who can talk about religion and politics without the main thrust of their argument being that people who disagree with them are evil or idiots.
- People who call in sick to work when they wake up coughing/sneezing/feverish.
I suppose that even pointing out the heroes among us can be interpretted as a form of griping. By saying I admire people with concise voice mail, I suppose I'm admitting annoyance with those who have long ones. But, that wasn't my intention when I launched into this list. If you're one of the people on this list, seriously, thank you for being you.
So... any one else have any nominees? Who are your unsung heroes?
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
We've dropped!
For the last couple of months, the stock market has climbed almost as fast as it fell around the end of last year. A lot of people were wondering if this was a sign that the recession was over. I've read some predictions that the stock market could get back to its former highs before the end of Obama's first term. I'm not an economist; the fact that I've tried to make money writing fiction should reveal a lot about my lack of wisdom in all things financial. But, in my own admittedly limited corner of the world, I just don't see the recession ending soon. In fact, I think there's still a lot of gloom and doom ahead, and wonder if the current stock market rise isn't just a bubble following a bubble, filling up more with hope and hot air than with any actual money.
My main argument lies in the familiar phrase, "Shop til you drop!" As near as I can figure out, we, the American consumer, have dropped. And, we aren't going to be able to get back up until we shed all the debt that's weighing us down. A lot of people I know, myself included, made liberal use of the easy, inexpensive credit that was available for much of the last ten years. It was easy to borrow money when you felt confident that the day would come when you'd just blast away all your debt in one big lump. After all, incomes kept rising, the economy was good, and the money in your 401k completely dwarfed your total credit card debt. Also, there was all that home equity to draw on. And, if you did get into trouble with one credit card, no big deal. You had a dozen other offers waiting in your mailbox, waiting to carry your balance at 0% interest for a year.
Now, all these assumptions have been shattered. Credit cards I've carried have arbitrarily bumped my rates even though I've never missed a payment. The offers I get for new credit cards still have intriguing teaser rates, but the rates that follow look worse and worse. I can't count on my income rising; I can name a dozen employers who've frozen salaries, including my own. I also can't look at my 401k as this magical pile of money that only gets bigger; I had a year to watch it bubble down to almost half its high. And, while I have a comfortable margin of equity on my house, I do worry that, if I had to sell it, I couldn't get what I think it's worth.
After a year like this, any sane, rational person has to think twice about borrowing more money. Rather than carrying debt cheaply until the day when you can blast it all away, I think many people have made the same choice I have: Stop buying stuff on credit, double up on payments, and develop a multi-year plan to wipe out debt. Maybe once all my current debt is paid off, I'll consider taking on some new debt, but I doubt it. I think it's going to be five years, maybe ten, before I forget the lessons I've learned this year.
Maybe I'm a rare individual to feel this way. Maybe only, say, 10% of people have been scared enough by this recession to swear off credit. For our consumer driven economy to suddenly lose 10% of its shoppers is a scenario that has to keep economists awake at night, sweating feverishly. If retail stores see sales drop by 10%, then they'll wind up cutting employees. Factories will get 10% fewer orders, so they'll cut employees. And, as unemployment keeps rising, more and more people who still have jobs are going to cut back on expenses as the possibility that they might lose a job becomes ever more real. Or, if they feel secure in their job, perhaps they'll worry about stagnant wages. Or, if they have money in 401ks, perhaps they'll be saving extra to make up for employers cutting matching funds, or just to build a buffer in case the stock market plunges again. All these things argue for subdued sales for months and years to come.
Again, I don't have hard data to back this up. I mainly have conversations with friends and coworkers; the number of people I know who are underwater on their mortgages is pretty amazing. And, the number of people I know who are going to make less money this year than last year is also pretty high.
So, after this little economic bump from cash for clunkers and the reliable retail boost of back to school sales, I think we're going to be in for a really tough fall and an absolutely Scroogish Christmas.
Of course, there are few counter arguments, ones I don't lightly dismiss. The most obvious one is that retailers are really good at figuring out how to pry cash out of our pockets. I used to never eat at McDonald's, but this summer they've been pricing all soft drinks at $1, and now I can barely drive past a golden arch without feeling thirsty. A lot of the restaurants I used to eat lunch at charge $1.95 for a soda these days. McDonald's has figured out a way to make me give them money I wouldn't have a year ago, and make me feel like I'm getting a bargain out of it, even though their actual cost on a large soda is probably mere pennies.
And, it wasn't long ago I bought a new pair of jeans at Walmart. The price was $8. It caught my attention; I'm not someone who ever went to the mall and paid $80 for a pair of jeans, but $8 looked like a typo. Instead, it was real, and the jeans were good ones. Honestly, you just can't mess up denim too badly. And, now, when I go to walmart, I find myself wandering into the clothing section to see if there are any other bargains.
Also, I can't help but notice all the $300 laptops these days. I don't need a laptop. My current one is barely two years old. But, gee whiz, $300 is, like, a tenth of what I paid for my first computer. I can't help but look.
Admittedly, I'm not going into debt buying my dollar sodas and eight dollar jeans. But, every time I go into a store and come out satisfied I've gotten a good deal, I find myself happy to go back into that store at a later time. So, perhaps the retailers of America have my number, and my five year plans toward fiscal independence from debt are going to be cracked by offers too good to refuse. Maybe a year from now, I'll be looking at a $200 laptop and thinking, "You know, that's really a steal," and I'll have the cash in the bank to buy it... then whip out a credit card to buy another couple of hundred bucks of new software to get the most out of the new machine. I mean, I don't play a lot of video games, but it seems like a waste not to test out a new computer with a really graphic heavy game. And, in this slow, step by step way, irrationality will again seep into my personal economics, and the economy will roar again.
But by December? I just wouldn't bet on it.
My main argument lies in the familiar phrase, "Shop til you drop!" As near as I can figure out, we, the American consumer, have dropped. And, we aren't going to be able to get back up until we shed all the debt that's weighing us down. A lot of people I know, myself included, made liberal use of the easy, inexpensive credit that was available for much of the last ten years. It was easy to borrow money when you felt confident that the day would come when you'd just blast away all your debt in one big lump. After all, incomes kept rising, the economy was good, and the money in your 401k completely dwarfed your total credit card debt. Also, there was all that home equity to draw on. And, if you did get into trouble with one credit card, no big deal. You had a dozen other offers waiting in your mailbox, waiting to carry your balance at 0% interest for a year.
Now, all these assumptions have been shattered. Credit cards I've carried have arbitrarily bumped my rates even though I've never missed a payment. The offers I get for new credit cards still have intriguing teaser rates, but the rates that follow look worse and worse. I can't count on my income rising; I can name a dozen employers who've frozen salaries, including my own. I also can't look at my 401k as this magical pile of money that only gets bigger; I had a year to watch it bubble down to almost half its high. And, while I have a comfortable margin of equity on my house, I do worry that, if I had to sell it, I couldn't get what I think it's worth.
After a year like this, any sane, rational person has to think twice about borrowing more money. Rather than carrying debt cheaply until the day when you can blast it all away, I think many people have made the same choice I have: Stop buying stuff on credit, double up on payments, and develop a multi-year plan to wipe out debt. Maybe once all my current debt is paid off, I'll consider taking on some new debt, but I doubt it. I think it's going to be five years, maybe ten, before I forget the lessons I've learned this year.
Maybe I'm a rare individual to feel this way. Maybe only, say, 10% of people have been scared enough by this recession to swear off credit. For our consumer driven economy to suddenly lose 10% of its shoppers is a scenario that has to keep economists awake at night, sweating feverishly. If retail stores see sales drop by 10%, then they'll wind up cutting employees. Factories will get 10% fewer orders, so they'll cut employees. And, as unemployment keeps rising, more and more people who still have jobs are going to cut back on expenses as the possibility that they might lose a job becomes ever more real. Or, if they feel secure in their job, perhaps they'll worry about stagnant wages. Or, if they have money in 401ks, perhaps they'll be saving extra to make up for employers cutting matching funds, or just to build a buffer in case the stock market plunges again. All these things argue for subdued sales for months and years to come.
Again, I don't have hard data to back this up. I mainly have conversations with friends and coworkers; the number of people I know who are underwater on their mortgages is pretty amazing. And, the number of people I know who are going to make less money this year than last year is also pretty high.
So, after this little economic bump from cash for clunkers and the reliable retail boost of back to school sales, I think we're going to be in for a really tough fall and an absolutely Scroogish Christmas.
Of course, there are few counter arguments, ones I don't lightly dismiss. The most obvious one is that retailers are really good at figuring out how to pry cash out of our pockets. I used to never eat at McDonald's, but this summer they've been pricing all soft drinks at $1, and now I can barely drive past a golden arch without feeling thirsty. A lot of the restaurants I used to eat lunch at charge $1.95 for a soda these days. McDonald's has figured out a way to make me give them money I wouldn't have a year ago, and make me feel like I'm getting a bargain out of it, even though their actual cost on a large soda is probably mere pennies.
And, it wasn't long ago I bought a new pair of jeans at Walmart. The price was $8. It caught my attention; I'm not someone who ever went to the mall and paid $80 for a pair of jeans, but $8 looked like a typo. Instead, it was real, and the jeans were good ones. Honestly, you just can't mess up denim too badly. And, now, when I go to walmart, I find myself wandering into the clothing section to see if there are any other bargains.
Also, I can't help but notice all the $300 laptops these days. I don't need a laptop. My current one is barely two years old. But, gee whiz, $300 is, like, a tenth of what I paid for my first computer. I can't help but look.
Admittedly, I'm not going into debt buying my dollar sodas and eight dollar jeans. But, every time I go into a store and come out satisfied I've gotten a good deal, I find myself happy to go back into that store at a later time. So, perhaps the retailers of America have my number, and my five year plans toward fiscal independence from debt are going to be cracked by offers too good to refuse. Maybe a year from now, I'll be looking at a $200 laptop and thinking, "You know, that's really a steal," and I'll have the cash in the bank to buy it... then whip out a credit card to buy another couple of hundred bucks of new software to get the most out of the new machine. I mean, I don't play a lot of video games, but it seems like a waste not to test out a new computer with a really graphic heavy game. And, in this slow, step by step way, irrationality will again seep into my personal economics, and the economy will roar again.
But by December? I just wouldn't bet on it.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Health Care Reform
I'm more than a little conflicted on the issue of health care reform. Seldom has an issue presented such a contradiction between my philosophical principles and my actual practical needs.
Philosophically, I'm a free-market kind of guy. I view most government intervention with a fair amount of skepticism. On my purely libertarian principles, I'm rooting for the failure of the health care bills now winding their way through congress. I can't help but think that the bills are going to increase costs for everyone by slapping on new layers of regulations, beaurocracy, and taxes, and actually decrease the amount of health care that gets delivered by creating new paperwork. I don't even need to know that actual details of the bills (since, right now, no one knows the actual details of the bills) to have a gut level instinct that this is going to be a disaster.
Practically, however, I'm keenly aware of how badly the status quo sucks. I would love to quit my job and make a go at living off writing alone. That might seem insane to some; after all, right now, I don't have any future books under contract. But, I have confidence that, when I write books, I can sell them. And, I also think I'd write a LOT more books if I didn't have my current job. And, I've lived my life with at least a modest amount of financial responsibility. When I add up my assets of savings and property, they exceed my debts by a respectable margin. If I add in all future moneys contractually owed from writing (at least seven more checks still owed from foreign sales, plus an open-ended amount from earning out on Bitterwood) I think I could manage most normal expenses, keeping a roof over my head, food in my belly, and clothes on my back.
And then there's health insurance. This is where the dream smacks into a brick wall of reality. I was very, very happy two weeks ago to discover I don't have diabetes. I hadn't had blood work done in a couple of years, and I was worried; both grandfathers were diabetic, my father is diabetic, a younger sister is diabetic, and it just felt certain that the blood work was going to come back with bad news, even though I don't have any symptoms.
Now, as bad as actually having the disease might be, I'm pretty sure I'd have the discipline to manage it. My real fear comes not from the disease, but from the financial consequences: I have friends with diabetes, and those who can get health insurance privately pay dearly for it: $2000 on month for one guy I know. $2000 a month is more than I currently pay for all my bills combined, including my mortgage. If this amount were tax deductible, it would still probably wreck my dream of leaving my job, but at least I'd have a shot. But, of course, private insurance isn't tax deductible--but if your employer provides insurance, they do get a tax deduction, and you pay no taxes on the benefit itself. The system is weighted to provide a strong incentive for people to remain employed by corporations, and a disincentive to work for yourself.
Of course, I do have the choice of not buying health insurance. In an ordinary year, I doubt my health expenses total $1000. My lifetime total medical expenses probably don't exceed $20,000. But, I'm 45. Every year that passes brings the looming promise that one day I will develop something that blows this figure out of the water. Cancer, heart disease, or some severe traumatic accident could wipe out everything I own and then some in a matter of weeks.
It feels fundamentally unfair that an essentially random event like cancer or getting t-boned in my car would would incur a debt greater than the value of my house. It feels equally unfair that the system is rigged so that, if I stay at a job I don't enjoy, I'm protected from this danger for only a few hundred dollars a month, tax free, but if I go it alone, the cost is suddenly ten times greater.
One could argue, accurately, that government regulation has helped create this unfairness. They've designed the tax incentives for employers to provide health care, and have imposed regulations that prevent insurance companies from charging different rates for employer based health care based on risk. If you're a 25 year old vegetarian marathon runner who works for Fedex, you pay the same rates as a 55 year old chain smoking couch potato in the same job. Since they can't legally charge the chain smoking couch potato more under current law regulating employer health care, they wind up charging their customers who aren't protected by regulations; i.e., me, should I choose to live off writing alone.
The reality is, as much as I dread government meddling in the free market, they've already meddled, and the current existing system is a Kafkaesque nightmare. It works for some people; for others its nothing but a drain of finances and energy. It's bad enough to get cancer. But to expect someone on chemo to try to understand the labyrinthine hospital bills that arrive side by side with insurance statements is just cruel.
How do we fix this? Those who tell you there is no problem with our current system are living in a different reality than I am. Those who tell you that the phone book sized bills floating around in various government committees right now are the fix are dreaming.
I think I could reform health care with a series of laws that could be written on 3x5 cards. Vote on each individually, rather than lumping everything together to pass or fall in unison. Target specific problems rather than trying to grab 1/7th of the US economy and attempt to rework it from the ground up.
1. Make private insurance tax deductable. If my employer gets a tax break for providing me coverage, I can't figure out what the argument is that justifies that I shouldn't get the same tax break if I'm self employed.
2. End the practice of rescission of health insurance for unrelated conditions. If you saw the Micheal Moore film "Sicko," you'll know what I'm talking about. It's probably the single most loathesome practice of the insurance industry. You go along for years, believing you have insurance, paying your premiums, and then one day you get cancer. The bills roll in. And, suddenly, your insurance company drops you. It seems they recently reviewed your application and discovered that you didn't report acne treatments you recieved when you were 19 in your medical history, so, sorry, but we're revoking your policy. The insurance company recently pointed out that only about 1% of their customers experience rescission. This is still tens of thousands of people each year, I'm betting that there are no healthy customers among this 1%. Now, I don't think that insurance companies should be open to fraud; there are people who will hide actual expensive conditions, and they should have the right to somehow penalize people who fraudulently apply for care. But, the simple solution here would be that all rescission decisions would have to be made within 90 days of applying for a policy. Let them check you out when you first apply. What's unfair is to keep you as a customer for years, even decades, then drop you the first time you get sick.
3. End the billing disparities between the insured and the uninsured for medical care. I once had a blood test for allergies. I got the bill afterward and discover the test cost SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS! It seems like something a doctor might mention when he orders the test. "We might be able to figure out the source of your sniffles with this simple test," says the doctor. "Great!" says the patient. "Oh, and the test cost six thousand dollars." "You know, my sniffles aren't all that bad," says the patient. However, the test didn't really cost $6000. Since I had insurance, there was a "negotiate rate," and the test actually only cost $1200. Insurance would pay 900, I'd pay 300. I did so, but couldn't help but wonder why a poor guy without insurance was going to be charged 5 times as much. But, this isn't some wierd anomoly: Look at your own bills. There's one rate for the uninsured, and a different one for the insured, and the insured rate is less. The logic baffles me. Why should the same service cost different people different prices? If the test can be provided for $1200 to the insured, it should be provided for $1200 to the uninsured. Am I crazy in thinking this? What am I missing?
Okay, I could probably go on to list at least ten more things that are unfair in our current system, but it's time for me to do some work on an actual novel now. But I know that at least some of my readers consider themselves libertarians, while others are conservatives. Can anyone tell me why the government should do absolutely nothing to reform our current system? Can you explain why these things I'm griping about aren't unfair?
Philosophically, I'm a free-market kind of guy. I view most government intervention with a fair amount of skepticism. On my purely libertarian principles, I'm rooting for the failure of the health care bills now winding their way through congress. I can't help but think that the bills are going to increase costs for everyone by slapping on new layers of regulations, beaurocracy, and taxes, and actually decrease the amount of health care that gets delivered by creating new paperwork. I don't even need to know that actual details of the bills (since, right now, no one knows the actual details of the bills) to have a gut level instinct that this is going to be a disaster.
Practically, however, I'm keenly aware of how badly the status quo sucks. I would love to quit my job and make a go at living off writing alone. That might seem insane to some; after all, right now, I don't have any future books under contract. But, I have confidence that, when I write books, I can sell them. And, I also think I'd write a LOT more books if I didn't have my current job. And, I've lived my life with at least a modest amount of financial responsibility. When I add up my assets of savings and property, they exceed my debts by a respectable margin. If I add in all future moneys contractually owed from writing (at least seven more checks still owed from foreign sales, plus an open-ended amount from earning out on Bitterwood) I think I could manage most normal expenses, keeping a roof over my head, food in my belly, and clothes on my back.
And then there's health insurance. This is where the dream smacks into a brick wall of reality. I was very, very happy two weeks ago to discover I don't have diabetes. I hadn't had blood work done in a couple of years, and I was worried; both grandfathers were diabetic, my father is diabetic, a younger sister is diabetic, and it just felt certain that the blood work was going to come back with bad news, even though I don't have any symptoms.
Now, as bad as actually having the disease might be, I'm pretty sure I'd have the discipline to manage it. My real fear comes not from the disease, but from the financial consequences: I have friends with diabetes, and those who can get health insurance privately pay dearly for it: $2000 on month for one guy I know. $2000 a month is more than I currently pay for all my bills combined, including my mortgage. If this amount were tax deductible, it would still probably wreck my dream of leaving my job, but at least I'd have a shot. But, of course, private insurance isn't tax deductible--but if your employer provides insurance, they do get a tax deduction, and you pay no taxes on the benefit itself. The system is weighted to provide a strong incentive for people to remain employed by corporations, and a disincentive to work for yourself.
Of course, I do have the choice of not buying health insurance. In an ordinary year, I doubt my health expenses total $1000. My lifetime total medical expenses probably don't exceed $20,000. But, I'm 45. Every year that passes brings the looming promise that one day I will develop something that blows this figure out of the water. Cancer, heart disease, or some severe traumatic accident could wipe out everything I own and then some in a matter of weeks.
It feels fundamentally unfair that an essentially random event like cancer or getting t-boned in my car would would incur a debt greater than the value of my house. It feels equally unfair that the system is rigged so that, if I stay at a job I don't enjoy, I'm protected from this danger for only a few hundred dollars a month, tax free, but if I go it alone, the cost is suddenly ten times greater.
One could argue, accurately, that government regulation has helped create this unfairness. They've designed the tax incentives for employers to provide health care, and have imposed regulations that prevent insurance companies from charging different rates for employer based health care based on risk. If you're a 25 year old vegetarian marathon runner who works for Fedex, you pay the same rates as a 55 year old chain smoking couch potato in the same job. Since they can't legally charge the chain smoking couch potato more under current law regulating employer health care, they wind up charging their customers who aren't protected by regulations; i.e., me, should I choose to live off writing alone.
The reality is, as much as I dread government meddling in the free market, they've already meddled, and the current existing system is a Kafkaesque nightmare. It works for some people; for others its nothing but a drain of finances and energy. It's bad enough to get cancer. But to expect someone on chemo to try to understand the labyrinthine hospital bills that arrive side by side with insurance statements is just cruel.
How do we fix this? Those who tell you there is no problem with our current system are living in a different reality than I am. Those who tell you that the phone book sized bills floating around in various government committees right now are the fix are dreaming.
I think I could reform health care with a series of laws that could be written on 3x5 cards. Vote on each individually, rather than lumping everything together to pass or fall in unison. Target specific problems rather than trying to grab 1/7th of the US economy and attempt to rework it from the ground up.
1. Make private insurance tax deductable. If my employer gets a tax break for providing me coverage, I can't figure out what the argument is that justifies that I shouldn't get the same tax break if I'm self employed.
2. End the practice of rescission of health insurance for unrelated conditions. If you saw the Micheal Moore film "Sicko," you'll know what I'm talking about. It's probably the single most loathesome practice of the insurance industry. You go along for years, believing you have insurance, paying your premiums, and then one day you get cancer. The bills roll in. And, suddenly, your insurance company drops you. It seems they recently reviewed your application and discovered that you didn't report acne treatments you recieved when you were 19 in your medical history, so, sorry, but we're revoking your policy. The insurance company recently pointed out that only about 1% of their customers experience rescission. This is still tens of thousands of people each year, I'm betting that there are no healthy customers among this 1%. Now, I don't think that insurance companies should be open to fraud; there are people who will hide actual expensive conditions, and they should have the right to somehow penalize people who fraudulently apply for care. But, the simple solution here would be that all rescission decisions would have to be made within 90 days of applying for a policy. Let them check you out when you first apply. What's unfair is to keep you as a customer for years, even decades, then drop you the first time you get sick.
3. End the billing disparities between the insured and the uninsured for medical care. I once had a blood test for allergies. I got the bill afterward and discover the test cost SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS! It seems like something a doctor might mention when he orders the test. "We might be able to figure out the source of your sniffles with this simple test," says the doctor. "Great!" says the patient. "Oh, and the test cost six thousand dollars." "You know, my sniffles aren't all that bad," says the patient. However, the test didn't really cost $6000. Since I had insurance, there was a "negotiate rate," and the test actually only cost $1200. Insurance would pay 900, I'd pay 300. I did so, but couldn't help but wonder why a poor guy without insurance was going to be charged 5 times as much. But, this isn't some wierd anomoly: Look at your own bills. There's one rate for the uninsured, and a different one for the insured, and the insured rate is less. The logic baffles me. Why should the same service cost different people different prices? If the test can be provided for $1200 to the insured, it should be provided for $1200 to the uninsured. Am I crazy in thinking this? What am I missing?
Okay, I could probably go on to list at least ten more things that are unfair in our current system, but it's time for me to do some work on an actual novel now. But I know that at least some of my readers consider themselves libertarians, while others are conservatives. Can anyone tell me why the government should do absolutely nothing to reform our current system? Can you explain why these things I'm griping about aren't unfair?
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Birthers
One reason it hasn't been too dificult to cut back on my news consumption (see my previous post), is that some of my once favorite right-wing news sites have stopped running any news stories at all other than articles calling into question Obama's status as a natural born citizen. Some of my favorite left wing sites are also having problems; sites like "buzzflash" are still running non-stop articles blaming all the world's problems on republicans, seemingly unaware that republicans have absolutely no governing power any more.
I enjoy a press that's confrontational in its relationship to government. I suppose it's not a shock that liberal sites have lost their edge. But it's the right wing sites that I feel most betrayed by. Barely a month ago, the house passed a sweeping climate bill, perhaps the most consequential legislation to come out of Washington in this year. At the time, the right wing sites made a big deal about the speed with which the legislation was passed; they complained that no one had time to read the bill and debate the details. But, there's now been a long pause between the passage of the bill in the house and the debate of the bill in the senate. It would seem like the right wing press would use this gap to go through the bill page by page and run an article each day discussing the details and talking about the ramifications. They complained about not getting to study the bill in advance, but apparently they really had no intent to talk about the specifics of the bill, ever.
Let's look at World Net Daily, a news source whose perspective on the world is usually in opposition to mine, but who I used to respect because they would, from time to time, actually report on an issue. For close to a year now, this site has been stuck on the "issue" of Obama's birth certificate. On the site today, the first twelve headlines deal with the issue in some degree. There are no articles about climate change, health care, Sotomayor, the Gates arrest, or any of our various wars. They've surrendered the field of debate entirely to focus on the "mystery" of why Obama won't release his long form birth certificate.
I honestly can't see how this matters in the least. The constitution doesn't require a candidate produce a birth certificate, only that the president be "naturally born" in the US. I don't know why Obama hasn't released his long form birth certificate. It may be that it no longer exists, or never existed. Paper records can have gaps; they can be lost or destroyed over the course of five decades. Hawaii has released a "certificate of live birth," it's a legally binding document good enough to issue Obama a passport. And, there are are birth announcements in Hawaii newspapers announcing Obama's birth. This seems to me to be the most devestating blow to the birthers. It just seems unlikely that Obama's parents were thinking ahead to his presidential eligibility when they announced his birth in Hawaiian newspapers even though they were actually living abroad at the time, as WND contends. The birth announcements list a physical address where the parents live; World Net Daily actually sent reporters to this address to interview the neighbors. None of them remember Obama from almost fifty years ago! Further proof of the conspiracy!
The greatest mystery to me is what, exactly, the birthers are hoping to accomplish. The absense of a birth certificate won't disqualify Obama as president. What they need to produce is hard proof that Obama was born overseas. In the absense of this evidence, they really don't have a case. But, suppose they found a Kenyan birth certificate. Then what? Presumably, just as the right wingers denounce evidence of Obama's American birth as smoke and mirrors planted by Obama supporters, a real, solid, Kenyan birth certificate would almost certainly be attacked as a forgery. Paper documents just aren't that hard to fake. I don't think a single Obama supporter would change their mind if WND posted photos tomorrow of a Kenyan birth certificate. I'm certain that the house wouldn't draft articles of impeachment. The republican's will roll into the next election squawking "birth certificate... birth certificate!" Democrats will laugh at them and say that they are afraid to talk about the issues of the day. Rather than triggering some great constitutional crisis, the republican will just look increasingly crazy and conspiracy minded, lumped in the same camp as flat-earthers, gold-standard proponents, and deniers of evolution (oh, wait, they already have these last two among their ranks).
Here's my advice to right wing news sites: Stop focusing on an issue that only appeals to the most xenophobic members of your base, and start focusing on the actual problems this country faces, such as our national debt, our foreign entanglements, and some of the structural problems built into our economy, some of them government inflicted, some inflicted by plain old greed. Absent the creation of a time machine, Obama's Hawaiian birth will never be established to the satisfaction of the hard core right, and will never be disproven to the satisfaction of democrats, and will never be of any interest at all to most independents. You're obsession with this non-issue, and utter neglect of everything else happening in the world, has contributed to your loss of me as even an occasional reader.
I enjoy a press that's confrontational in its relationship to government. I suppose it's not a shock that liberal sites have lost their edge. But it's the right wing sites that I feel most betrayed by. Barely a month ago, the house passed a sweeping climate bill, perhaps the most consequential legislation to come out of Washington in this year. At the time, the right wing sites made a big deal about the speed with which the legislation was passed; they complained that no one had time to read the bill and debate the details. But, there's now been a long pause between the passage of the bill in the house and the debate of the bill in the senate. It would seem like the right wing press would use this gap to go through the bill page by page and run an article each day discussing the details and talking about the ramifications. They complained about not getting to study the bill in advance, but apparently they really had no intent to talk about the specifics of the bill, ever.
Let's look at World Net Daily, a news source whose perspective on the world is usually in opposition to mine, but who I used to respect because they would, from time to time, actually report on an issue. For close to a year now, this site has been stuck on the "issue" of Obama's birth certificate. On the site today, the first twelve headlines deal with the issue in some degree. There are no articles about climate change, health care, Sotomayor, the Gates arrest, or any of our various wars. They've surrendered the field of debate entirely to focus on the "mystery" of why Obama won't release his long form birth certificate.
I honestly can't see how this matters in the least. The constitution doesn't require a candidate produce a birth certificate, only that the president be "naturally born" in the US. I don't know why Obama hasn't released his long form birth certificate. It may be that it no longer exists, or never existed. Paper records can have gaps; they can be lost or destroyed over the course of five decades. Hawaii has released a "certificate of live birth," it's a legally binding document good enough to issue Obama a passport. And, there are are birth announcements in Hawaii newspapers announcing Obama's birth. This seems to me to be the most devestating blow to the birthers. It just seems unlikely that Obama's parents were thinking ahead to his presidential eligibility when they announced his birth in Hawaiian newspapers even though they were actually living abroad at the time, as WND contends. The birth announcements list a physical address where the parents live; World Net Daily actually sent reporters to this address to interview the neighbors. None of them remember Obama from almost fifty years ago! Further proof of the conspiracy!
The greatest mystery to me is what, exactly, the birthers are hoping to accomplish. The absense of a birth certificate won't disqualify Obama as president. What they need to produce is hard proof that Obama was born overseas. In the absense of this evidence, they really don't have a case. But, suppose they found a Kenyan birth certificate. Then what? Presumably, just as the right wingers denounce evidence of Obama's American birth as smoke and mirrors planted by Obama supporters, a real, solid, Kenyan birth certificate would almost certainly be attacked as a forgery. Paper documents just aren't that hard to fake. I don't think a single Obama supporter would change their mind if WND posted photos tomorrow of a Kenyan birth certificate. I'm certain that the house wouldn't draft articles of impeachment. The republican's will roll into the next election squawking "birth certificate... birth certificate!" Democrats will laugh at them and say that they are afraid to talk about the issues of the day. Rather than triggering some great constitutional crisis, the republican will just look increasingly crazy and conspiracy minded, lumped in the same camp as flat-earthers, gold-standard proponents, and deniers of evolution (oh, wait, they already have these last two among their ranks).
Here's my advice to right wing news sites: Stop focusing on an issue that only appeals to the most xenophobic members of your base, and start focusing on the actual problems this country faces, such as our national debt, our foreign entanglements, and some of the structural problems built into our economy, some of them government inflicted, some inflicted by plain old greed. Absent the creation of a time machine, Obama's Hawaiian birth will never be established to the satisfaction of the hard core right, and will never be disproven to the satisfaction of democrats, and will never be of any interest at all to most independents. You're obsession with this non-issue, and utter neglect of everything else happening in the world, has contributed to your loss of me as even an occasional reader.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Race, Rogue Cops, and Stupidity
So, I spent most of the week steering clear of the news, but broke down yesterday and read a newspaper at lunch. I'd been hearing chatter over the arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home, but yesterday was the first day I'd really stopped to absorb the details. I googled and read the police report to get the facts as clear as possible.
Conservatives have predictably come down on the side of the cop. Gates is calling the cop a "rogue officer" and blaming his arrest on racial profiling. But, having read the details of the case, it looks like Gates threw a temper tantrum over being asked for ID. He got himself arrested not because he was black, but because he was being a jerk. The officer plainly didn't mistake him for a suspect. He understood that Gates lived at the house, as indicated by his police report. He wasn't using racial profiling to single Gates out as a robber. He was teaching a jerk who was hurling insults at him why you shouldn't be nasty with a cop.
And, I fully, 100%, think the cop was completely wrong to arrest Gates. It's one thing to stand in the middle of a city street and curse a cop until you're blue in the face. It truly is disorderly conduct to make an ass of yourself in public. But, this confrontation didn't unfold on a city street. It unfolded in Gates' living room, and later on his own lawn. And, honestly, if you don't have a right to shout insults at a government official in your own living room, what exactly do you have the right to do? If at any point after it was established that Gates was the rightful occupant of the place, Gates told the cop to get out of his house, the cop should have left, no further questions asked. There was obviously no crime in progress. It seems like the 4th ammendment would be on Gates' side, as well as the first ammendment, which would seem to grant the freedom to shout out, "This is what happens to black men in America!" That's not a threat. It's a statement of a political opinion. If you're in the middle of a movie theatre shouting it out, I guess there's an argument that you're disturbing the peace. But if you're shouting it out in your own living room?
Conservatives are supposed to revere the constitution, but I haven't heard a single one jump to the defense of Gates based on the first or fourth ammendment. Instead, conservatives are revealing their most cherished value here, a love of authority, and a tendency to always side with the cop over the accused.
Now, with all this said, I have to admit that I think Gates was an idiot. According to the facts I can find, he and his driver did, in fact, break into his front door. I don't think it should have been a huge suprise to him when a cop showed up to investigate. In fact, I think a smart man would have said, "No problem officer, I live here, but I do appreciate you're dropping by so quickly to investigate. Good to know that you're watching out for me." If the cop was sceptical that Gates lived there, it seems like Gates could have proved it in half a minute even if he didn't have a photo ID on him. It's his own house--isn't there at least one picture of him hanging on a wall somewhere? So, Gates could have been smarter.
But, the cop certainly could have been smarter as well. In his own police report, he acknowledges that Gates produced an ID, and when he radioed in, he said that it appeared that Gates was the legal resident to the house. Gates may have been standing there hurling insults at him, calling him a racist, a redneck, and a son-of-a-bitch, but so what? He stuck around on Gates property long after he'd established that it was, in fact, Gates property. He knew that the break in he'd come to investigate hadn't happened. He should have said "And a good day to you too, Sir," to Gates insults, tipped his hat respectfully, and marched out. He couldn't seriously believe Gates was committing any actual crime. Certainly somewhere in the city, there were matters more deserving his time and attention?
Obama was stupid to say the cop acted stupidly. The cop was stupid to arrest a man who hadn't committed any actual crime. Gates was stupid to throw a temper tantrum at a cop who had a legitimate reason to stop by.
One last thought: I hope that Gates has installed some really, really good locks on his house. Because I imagine that if his house is ever actually burglarized now, it's going to be a very, very long time before the police actually get there.
Conservatives have predictably come down on the side of the cop. Gates is calling the cop a "rogue officer" and blaming his arrest on racial profiling. But, having read the details of the case, it looks like Gates threw a temper tantrum over being asked for ID. He got himself arrested not because he was black, but because he was being a jerk. The officer plainly didn't mistake him for a suspect. He understood that Gates lived at the house, as indicated by his police report. He wasn't using racial profiling to single Gates out as a robber. He was teaching a jerk who was hurling insults at him why you shouldn't be nasty with a cop.
And, I fully, 100%, think the cop was completely wrong to arrest Gates. It's one thing to stand in the middle of a city street and curse a cop until you're blue in the face. It truly is disorderly conduct to make an ass of yourself in public. But, this confrontation didn't unfold on a city street. It unfolded in Gates' living room, and later on his own lawn. And, honestly, if you don't have a right to shout insults at a government official in your own living room, what exactly do you have the right to do? If at any point after it was established that Gates was the rightful occupant of the place, Gates told the cop to get out of his house, the cop should have left, no further questions asked. There was obviously no crime in progress. It seems like the 4th ammendment would be on Gates' side, as well as the first ammendment, which would seem to grant the freedom to shout out, "This is what happens to black men in America!" That's not a threat. It's a statement of a political opinion. If you're in the middle of a movie theatre shouting it out, I guess there's an argument that you're disturbing the peace. But if you're shouting it out in your own living room?
Conservatives are supposed to revere the constitution, but I haven't heard a single one jump to the defense of Gates based on the first or fourth ammendment. Instead, conservatives are revealing their most cherished value here, a love of authority, and a tendency to always side with the cop over the accused.
Now, with all this said, I have to admit that I think Gates was an idiot. According to the facts I can find, he and his driver did, in fact, break into his front door. I don't think it should have been a huge suprise to him when a cop showed up to investigate. In fact, I think a smart man would have said, "No problem officer, I live here, but I do appreciate you're dropping by so quickly to investigate. Good to know that you're watching out for me." If the cop was sceptical that Gates lived there, it seems like Gates could have proved it in half a minute even if he didn't have a photo ID on him. It's his own house--isn't there at least one picture of him hanging on a wall somewhere? So, Gates could have been smarter.
But, the cop certainly could have been smarter as well. In his own police report, he acknowledges that Gates produced an ID, and when he radioed in, he said that it appeared that Gates was the legal resident to the house. Gates may have been standing there hurling insults at him, calling him a racist, a redneck, and a son-of-a-bitch, but so what? He stuck around on Gates property long after he'd established that it was, in fact, Gates property. He knew that the break in he'd come to investigate hadn't happened. He should have said "And a good day to you too, Sir," to Gates insults, tipped his hat respectfully, and marched out. He couldn't seriously believe Gates was committing any actual crime. Certainly somewhere in the city, there were matters more deserving his time and attention?
Obama was stupid to say the cop acted stupidly. The cop was stupid to arrest a man who hadn't committed any actual crime. Gates was stupid to throw a temper tantrum at a cop who had a legitimate reason to stop by.
One last thought: I hope that Gates has installed some really, really good locks on his house. Because I imagine that if his house is ever actually burglarized now, it's going to be a very, very long time before the police actually get there.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
No news is no problem
Sorry for the lack of updates the last two weeks. I took a vacation and went down to Myrtle Beach and avoided the internet as much as possible. While there, I read a book called "The Black Swan" that deals with what is in some ways an really obvious premise: we can't know the future. However common sense this is, businesses and governments are often blind to it. They make forecasts, because it's obviously a good thing to plan and have goals. But, the problem often comes from the fact that they treat these forecasts as hard and fast reality instead of mere guess work. People seem built by evolution to take the present and project it out into the future. As a result, you wind up with people believing that housing prices and the stock market only go up, or that health care costs will only spiral out of control until everyone is bankrupted, or that a warming trend of a few decades is proof that the world is going to turn into a Venus-like hell where our cities vanish beneath oceans and what land is left is desert.
One of the counter-intuitive bits of advice the author gives is that people should stop reading newspapers and watching the news on a daily basis. He's making his argument mostly from a financial sense, since there is evidence that people who check the price of a stock frequently are less able to judge it's performance accurately than someone who only looks at it once a month or so. There's a tendency for people to confuse information with knowledge.
I've decided to follow this advice. I'm a news junky. I listen to NPR any time my radio is on in my car or my house. I frequently read two newspapers a day, one at lunch and a different one at dinner. Then, I spend hours in the evening cruising political sites like realclearpolitics and drudgereport. I think I can safely say that my typical day includes at least 4 hours devoted to consuming news. I don't think, however, that I wind up with 4 hours of knowledge for my efforts. So, I'm switching off NPR when I drive in favor of books on CD. I'm going to skip newspapers in favor of books when I eat alone. Instead of cruising realclearpolitics, I'll spend more time writing.
At least, that's the goal... who knows what the future will actually hold.
One reason I'm not that concerned that my knowledge of world events is going to suffer is that I really feel as if newspapers, NPR, and most news outlets have stopped reporting on world events in any meaningful way. Rather than spending a week reporting on the details of a climate change bill, NPR and cable news will instead bring on pundits to make claims and counterclaims and focus on what is likely to happen in upcoming votes. During political campaigns, there is almost no coverage at all of any issue with any substance or depth, and instead the news cycles are mainly dominated by reading the entrails of the polls and the airing the bloviations of spin doctors from the various campaigns.
The bias in our news system isn't one of liberal or conservative. It's one of punditry and prophecy over facts and history. Our news is forward focused, and recent history seems to vanish. The talking heads making inaccurate predictions six months prior are still on the air making predictions of what will happen next week. Actual reporting would, by neccessity, have to report on what has happened in the past. It would take time to gather actual data. But, time is no longer on the side of facts. The news cycle demands that something go out on the air every minute of the day. Reporters are to produce stories mere hours, or even minutes, before they hit the air. If a thing happened yesterday, it's old news, already forgotten. No one is going to spend weeks or months digging down to establish truth. I'm not certain that reporters or politicians or the citizens recognize truth any more. Everything is now just spin and position. Indeed, the more an "issue" is discussed by the media, the less sure I become of any actual facts underlying the debate.
So, I'm jumping off the wheel. I've been spun enough.
One of the counter-intuitive bits of advice the author gives is that people should stop reading newspapers and watching the news on a daily basis. He's making his argument mostly from a financial sense, since there is evidence that people who check the price of a stock frequently are less able to judge it's performance accurately than someone who only looks at it once a month or so. There's a tendency for people to confuse information with knowledge.
I've decided to follow this advice. I'm a news junky. I listen to NPR any time my radio is on in my car or my house. I frequently read two newspapers a day, one at lunch and a different one at dinner. Then, I spend hours in the evening cruising political sites like realclearpolitics and drudgereport. I think I can safely say that my typical day includes at least 4 hours devoted to consuming news. I don't think, however, that I wind up with 4 hours of knowledge for my efforts. So, I'm switching off NPR when I drive in favor of books on CD. I'm going to skip newspapers in favor of books when I eat alone. Instead of cruising realclearpolitics, I'll spend more time writing.
At least, that's the goal... who knows what the future will actually hold.
One reason I'm not that concerned that my knowledge of world events is going to suffer is that I really feel as if newspapers, NPR, and most news outlets have stopped reporting on world events in any meaningful way. Rather than spending a week reporting on the details of a climate change bill, NPR and cable news will instead bring on pundits to make claims and counterclaims and focus on what is likely to happen in upcoming votes. During political campaigns, there is almost no coverage at all of any issue with any substance or depth, and instead the news cycles are mainly dominated by reading the entrails of the polls and the airing the bloviations of spin doctors from the various campaigns.
The bias in our news system isn't one of liberal or conservative. It's one of punditry and prophecy over facts and history. Our news is forward focused, and recent history seems to vanish. The talking heads making inaccurate predictions six months prior are still on the air making predictions of what will happen next week. Actual reporting would, by neccessity, have to report on what has happened in the past. It would take time to gather actual data. But, time is no longer on the side of facts. The news cycle demands that something go out on the air every minute of the day. Reporters are to produce stories mere hours, or even minutes, before they hit the air. If a thing happened yesterday, it's old news, already forgotten. No one is going to spend weeks or months digging down to establish truth. I'm not certain that reporters or politicians or the citizens recognize truth any more. Everything is now just spin and position. Indeed, the more an "issue" is discussed by the media, the less sure I become of any actual facts underlying the debate.
So, I'm jumping off the wheel. I've been spun enough.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Books for Breast Update
As of July 1, Team Dragon met its fundraising goal of $1000 for the Susan G. Koman Foundation. I've had 33 contributors, a couple of whom already had copies of Dragonseed, so I still have 20 copies left to give away. But, on the fundraising page, it showed my goal had been met 100%, and donations have pretty much stopped since I hit $1000.
I just raised the goal to $1500. I have mixed feelings about raising the goal. On the plus, it's for a good cause, and I hope the higher limit will encourage people who still learn about this cause to contribute. The only downside is that I dislike moving the goalpost, so to speak. I told my friends and fans I wanted to raise $1000, and you did an amazing job of making that happen in only a week. I don't want to diminish your hard work and dedication by taking away that 100% filled-in goal thermometer. But, in the end, I think the greater good falls toward raising the goal and trying to collect a little more if I can. It may be that the news of this drive has spread as far as it's going to, but if there is someone out there who hears about this in the coming weeks, I don't want them to be confused into thinking the Books for Breasts drive is over. If I can raise even another hundred bucks toward fighting breast cancer, I intend to do so.
Thanks again to everyone who helped meet the initial push toward $1000. I cannot begin to sum up my enormous gratitude for this. As readers of my dragon novels may surmise, I'm not someone who always sees mankind in the sunniest light. The fact that so many people jumped in for this cause so quickly has reminded me that the greatest thing about humans is their humanity. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I just raised the goal to $1500. I have mixed feelings about raising the goal. On the plus, it's for a good cause, and I hope the higher limit will encourage people who still learn about this cause to contribute. The only downside is that I dislike moving the goalpost, so to speak. I told my friends and fans I wanted to raise $1000, and you did an amazing job of making that happen in only a week. I don't want to diminish your hard work and dedication by taking away that 100% filled-in goal thermometer. But, in the end, I think the greater good falls toward raising the goal and trying to collect a little more if I can. It may be that the news of this drive has spread as far as it's going to, but if there is someone out there who hears about this in the coming weeks, I don't want them to be confused into thinking the Books for Breasts drive is over. If I can raise even another hundred bucks toward fighting breast cancer, I intend to do so.
Thanks again to everyone who helped meet the initial push toward $1000. I cannot begin to sum up my enormous gratitude for this. As readers of my dragon novels may surmise, I'm not someone who always sees mankind in the sunniest light. The fact that so many people jumped in for this cause so quickly has reminded me that the greatest thing about humans is their humanity. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Another thing to make me lose sleep....
Below is the screen shot of the Amazon home page when I signed in earlier today at a public computer. It's tiny, but if you click on it, you'll be able to see it better. Even small, however, you might notice that the world's premier online bookseller seems to have stopped pushing books. The main page does feature a prominent add for the Kindle, but everything else is electronics, sporting gear, music and movies. Not a single book is being offered. True, if you go there looking for a book, they'll have it. But to not have a single book on display on the splash page is a disturbing hint of the future for a writer such as myself.
Amazon was one of the forces that drove neighborhood bookstores to near extinction. Judging from the space they are devoting to their front page, they Amazon is firmly committed to no longer being an online "bookstore." Books are just an ever smaller part of their total retail package. I'm sure they'll always carry books, but if they don't bother to market them, it seems like we'll be on a downward spiral. They'll sell fewer books because they don't market them, and they won't market them because they don't sell.
Anyone want to tell me why I shouldn't be worried about this? Anyone? Please?
Amazon was one of the forces that drove neighborhood bookstores to near extinction. Judging from the space they are devoting to their front page, they Amazon is firmly committed to no longer being an online "bookstore." Books are just an ever smaller part of their total retail package. I'm sure they'll always carry books, but if they don't bother to market them, it seems like we'll be on a downward spiral. They'll sell fewer books because they don't market them, and they won't market them because they don't sell.
Anyone want to tell me why I shouldn't be worried about this? Anyone? Please?
Sunday, June 28, 2009
We Shall All be Healed
Yesterday, Books for Breasts passed the $1000 mark on funds collected, and I still have about 20 books left to give away!
Back in 2004, the Mountain Goats put out an album titled We Shall All be Healed. I suspect they borrowed the phrase from the prayer, "Heal us, Lord, and we shall be healed." I first listened to the album in Laura's bedroom. She was on chemo at the time, and was spending much of the day in bed. The album is mostly about the self-destructive behavior of drug addicts, but there are some lines within it that filled me with neo-religious visions. In one of the songs, John Darnielle sings, "I dreamt of a factory, where they manufactured what I needed, using shiny new machines." He's talking, in the context of the song, about methamphetamines, but I would find myself dreaming of men and women in white lab coats, toiling over test tubes and microscopes, typing data in to computer terminals. These were the invisible soldiers in the war on cancer, and it filled me with the hope that any day I would pick up a newspaper and find that there had been some breakthrough, and Laura's cancer could be healed. I knew of people who'd lived with cancer for ten years and more. If Laura could hold out ten years, I was certain she would beat the disease.
She didn't, alas, make it ten years. And, if she had, I no longer believe the cure is going to be found tomorrow, or the next day. The last five years of research have yeilded important discoveries, the chief and most important of which is that we still have much more to learn.
But, when America was discovered by Europeans, it took them a while to figure out what they'd found. They set up colonies before they really even understood the shape and scope of the continents they'd encountered. I feel like we are in a similar stage in the understanding of cancer: We are still making maps of its boundaries. We are still sending surveyors into its interiors. We do not yet know all there is to know, but we are daily pushing the frontier ahead of us. And, just as we continued to improve the technology to map America--today, I have the ability to look down on the roof of my house from space!--we are only going to increase our understanding of cancer. Even discovering our ignorance, learning, for example, that a drug wipes out cancer in rats but does nothing for people, is progress. As we seek to understand what doesn't work, we gain insights into what will work.
So, on this warm June Sunday morning, I'll give a little prayer of gratitude to those unknown explorers in their lab coats who are seeking a new, cancer-free world. And, I extend a great big, heart-in-my-throat thank you to everyone who's donated this past week. You've done a good thing. You've put your money where your heart is.
The day is coming. We shall all be healed.
Back in 2004, the Mountain Goats put out an album titled We Shall All be Healed. I suspect they borrowed the phrase from the prayer, "Heal us, Lord, and we shall be healed." I first listened to the album in Laura's bedroom. She was on chemo at the time, and was spending much of the day in bed. The album is mostly about the self-destructive behavior of drug addicts, but there are some lines within it that filled me with neo-religious visions. In one of the songs, John Darnielle sings, "I dreamt of a factory, where they manufactured what I needed, using shiny new machines." He's talking, in the context of the song, about methamphetamines, but I would find myself dreaming of men and women in white lab coats, toiling over test tubes and microscopes, typing data in to computer terminals. These were the invisible soldiers in the war on cancer, and it filled me with the hope that any day I would pick up a newspaper and find that there had been some breakthrough, and Laura's cancer could be healed. I knew of people who'd lived with cancer for ten years and more. If Laura could hold out ten years, I was certain she would beat the disease.
She didn't, alas, make it ten years. And, if she had, I no longer believe the cure is going to be found tomorrow, or the next day. The last five years of research have yeilded important discoveries, the chief and most important of which is that we still have much more to learn.
But, when America was discovered by Europeans, it took them a while to figure out what they'd found. They set up colonies before they really even understood the shape and scope of the continents they'd encountered. I feel like we are in a similar stage in the understanding of cancer: We are still making maps of its boundaries. We are still sending surveyors into its interiors. We do not yet know all there is to know, but we are daily pushing the frontier ahead of us. And, just as we continued to improve the technology to map America--today, I have the ability to look down on the roof of my house from space!--we are only going to increase our understanding of cancer. Even discovering our ignorance, learning, for example, that a drug wipes out cancer in rats but does nothing for people, is progress. As we seek to understand what doesn't work, we gain insights into what will work.
So, on this warm June Sunday morning, I'll give a little prayer of gratitude to those unknown explorers in their lab coats who are seeking a new, cancer-free world. And, I extend a great big, heart-in-my-throat thank you to everyone who's donated this past week. You've done a good thing. You've put your money where your heart is.
The day is coming. We shall all be healed.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Books for Breasts!
Followers of my blogs, and the readers who read the acknowledgement pages of my books, will know that I lost my partner Laura Herrmann to breast cancer in May 2006. I've been interested in cancer research since then and have privately made contributions to cancer related charities, but I've never put out any sort of appeal on my blogs to solicit for this cause, until now.
Last week, I received several cases of my latest book Dragonseed. One of the ongoing themes of Dragonseed is the idea of healing, both from physical and spiritual wounds. Within the book there's a miraculous object called a dragonseed: Eat the seed, and all your injuries will be healed. Even your oldest scars will vanish.
I have some science fiction hoodoo underlying the dragonseed. The technology to create a pill that will both diagnose and cure any illness is pretty far out in our future, if it exists at all. But, the part of this that isn't science fiction or hoodoo is that I believe that technology has the power to work miracles. We have MRI and PET scans that can look into a human body and see it working in minute detail. We have developed surgical tools and techniques that can remove diseased tissues from a human body without doing undo damage to healthy tissues. My father had a heart attack recently, and the doctors had to place stents in his arteries. The incision to perform the operation was small enough to cover with a band-aid. And, right now, there are researchers who are taking apart cancer cells molecule by molecule to understand the genetic engines that drive them to a degree unimaginable only a few decades ago.
We live in an age of miracles because we live in an age of knowledge. Modern computers are finally powerful enough to process all the complex data contained within a human cell. The only barriers remaining between our present understanding a cure for any disease you can name are time and money.
These are not insignificant barriers. New technologies are always expensive. And, to be blunt, the world has a limited supply of really smart people, and a nearly unlimited supply of problems for them to solve. For better or worse, money is one of the most important driving forces of where the smart people focus their energies. In the sixties, it was decided we would put a man on the moon. We threw money at the problem, and produced a glut of rocket scientists. In the eighties and nineties, computer technology was fed enormous sums of money by the stock market, and smart people focused their energies on designing hardware and software, and with the result that today my cell phone has more memory than I do. There is a lot of money today flowing into health care, but only a fraction of this money goes to research of any given disease. I'd like to invite you to increase the fraction going to breast cancer research, both due to my personal connection to the cause, and because I think that this is the right moment in history to truly make a difference. I firmly believe this is a disease than can be cured within our lifetime. I don't know if one day we will simply swallow a magic pill and be healed, but I do know that the day will come when we will be able to profile any cancer cell and match it with the appropriate drug to wipe it out.
To help bring this day closer, if only by a minute or two, I'd like to announce my "Books for Breasts" promotion. Anyone who contributes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation through the "Team Dragon" fundraising page will get a free signed copy of Dragonseed.
You can contribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation by clicking here. This will take you to my personal fundraising page; just click the button that says "support James." Then, to get your signed copy of Dragonseed, just email me your mailing address to nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com. I've set aside 50 copies for this cause; if I give them all away by the end of July, I'm pretty sure I can get my hands on another 50.
I've set up a modest goal of raising $300* through this promotion. This means I need to average contributions of $6, which is less than you'd pay for the book on Amazon. However, I'll send you a book for a contribution in any amount, even if it's just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who's with me?
*Okay, I obviously seriously underestimated the generosity of my readers. I hit $300 in under 24 hours. So, I'm going to raise my goal to $1000. Thank you to everyone who's given so far, and everyone who has helped spread the word via blogs and twitter. If I run out of books, I've had some interest from other writers in contributing their books to the cause. I'll keep you posted if it comes to this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
