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Tea Party is funded by Koch.

Covert Operations - The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all ...
A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud--and they're our candidates!" ...

The Kochs came to realize this in the '80s and '90s. The fruit of which is now being borne through the Republican and Libertarian propaganda machines.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

Live the moment.

To document:

    Relive the time you dated. How you got together. The decisions you made together. The first car, apartment, ...

For right now:

Ask your wife. She will know what is important.

Talk about what is going to happen. Kids and parents.

The NewYorker about terminal illness:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

If you'd said "100 years ago most deaths were not surprises" I'd have agreed; most people back then died of things like tuberculosis, influenza, etc.

The opposite case is made in a moving and educational article by Dr. Atul Gawande in the August 2, 2010, New Yorker, titled "Letting Go".

Some relevant excerpts:

For all but our most recent history, dying was typically a brief process. Whether the cause was childhood infection, difficult childbirth, heart attack, or pneumonia, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and death was often just a matter of days or weeks. Consider how our Presidents died before the modern era. George Washington developed a throat infection at home on December 13, 1799, that killed him by the next evening. John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson all succumbed to strokes, and died within two days. Rutherford Hayes had a heart attack and died three days later. Some deadly illnesses took a longer course: James Monroe and Andrew Jackson died from the months-long consumptive process of what appears to have been tuberculosis; Ulysses Grant's oral cancer took a year to kill him; and James Madison was bedridden for two years before dying of "old age." But, as the end-of-life researcher Joanne Lynn has observed, people usually experienced life-threatening illness the way they experienced bad weather--as something that struck with little warning--and you either got through it or you didn't.

These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition--advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn't. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty--with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence. Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are? Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly?

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/100329crbo_books_mayer?currentPage=all

Read this review of Thiessen's Courting Disaster. You'll learn to doubt everything he says.

You mean like:

Thiessen’s book, whose subtitle is “How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” offers a relentless defense of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, which, according to many critics, sanctioned torture and yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit. In addition, Thiessen attacks the Obama Administration for having banned techniques such as waterboarding. “Americans could die as a result,” he writes.

Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”

All this review does is list Thiessen's claims and show how he's completely wrong on every one.

For those of you who've forgotten this fellow, he's a former Bush speechwriter and author of the terribly misleading "Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack".

The New Yorker did a piece on that book, investigating some of the claims made within and revealing many to be clearly false. Basically the book was a defense of "enhanced interrogation". One claim that I recall off the top of my head is that information obtained by the CIA through enhanced interrogation was instrumental in preventing a conspiracy to hijack several planes flying from London in 2006. Yet according to the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism unit, all the intelligence involved was gathered in the uk. Thiessen's version of events is flatly contradicted.

This guy has been one of the primary fonts of misinformation and foolishness in the media since then. He has no credibility, and should be regarded only as a bellwether of neoconservative opinion.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/100329crbo_books_mayer?currentPage=all Read this review of Thiessen's Courting Disaster. You'll learn to doubt everything he says.

Missing from TFA is that readers can now pair thier PDAs, iphones and kindles with google maps to sync the core story with the gps acquired locations of Lundegattan, Sulsen and Dfhseewwwnchcgatten.

Also, I can't get this keyboard to produce umlauts.

Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all#ixzz0pWdlAepe

China seems to be particularly prevalent in this type of espionage as the Ghostnet report found. State support for the reasearch of zero-days presents a significant risk that hasn't been seen up to now and could render traditional defences like anti-virus void.

Assange has a long history of making vague conspiratorial claims of harassment that don't stand up to scrutiny

Similarly a New Yorker piece commented on the leaked video and noted that

These pieces of missing information are not just inherent limitations in video. The producers themselves have chosen not to provide them. There appears to be a purpose to the omissions, which is underlined by the Orwell quote at the start, the prefatory explanation, the quotes and dedication at the end, even the way the helicopter crew’s cruel remarks are edited in a few places for effect. Although the producers identify the camera of the Reuters journalist who, along with his assistant, will be killed by Apache cannon fire, they don’t point to the AK-47 or the RPG launcher carried by other men with whom the journalists are walking in a group. Stripped of much context and weighted with commentary, this video is both an important document of the war, courageously leaked after the military had steadily refused to release it, and, in its way, a propaganda film

Another article

Last year, for example, WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. Now Alpha Sigma Tau (like several other sororities “exposed” by WikiLeaks) is not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has. Rather, WikiLeaks chose to publish the group’s confidential ritual just because it could. This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism. In fact, WikiLeaks routinely tramples on the privacy of non-governmental, non-corporate groups for no valid public policy reason. It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks’ intrusions. The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks’ ruthless violation of their freedom of association, and even that has mostly been swept away in a wave of uncritical and even adulatory reporting about the brave “open government,” “whistleblower” site. On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior. Last year, without permission, it published the full text of the highly regarded 2009 book about corruption in Kenya called “It’s Our Turn to Eat” by investigative reporter Michela Wrong (as first reported by Chris McGreal in The Guardian on April 9). By posting a pirated version of the book and making it freely available, WikiLeaks almost certainly disrupted sales of the book and made it harder for Ms. Wrong and other anti-corruption reporters to perform their important work and to get it published. Repeated protests and pleas from the author were required before WikiLeaks (to its credit) finally took the book offline. “Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks

was there actually anything about Kodachrome that made it unique (in a good way)

As someone who has shot film and digital side-by-side, yes. Film isn't just "disposable digital sensor rolls." Each kind of film has unique working characteristics. To quote Pascal Dangin from this New Yorker article:

Dangin’s latest invention is a proprietary software package called Photoshoot. (He employs six full-time programmers at Box.) Its aim is to imbue digital photography with a specific sensibility—an opinion about the way pictures should look—of the sort that film once offered. “I am doing this because of necessity, because I believe the way that digital photography is done today is so wrong,” Dangin said one day. “Photography as we knew it, meaning film and Kodak and all that, was a very subjective process. With film images you had emotions. You used to go out and buy film like Fuji, because it was more saturated, or you liked Agfa because it gave you a rounded color palette.” With a ten-dollar roll of film, he explained, you were essentially buying ten dollars’ worth of someone’s ideas. “Software, right now, is objective. ‘Let the user create whatever he wants.’ Which is great, but it doesn’t really produce good photography.”

I'll elaborate on that "ten dollars' worth of someone's ideas" bit: It's very loosely akin to being able to choose from a set of experienced digital post-processing artists, each with a distinct look. Film companies put a lot of money into tuning the characteristics of each line of film, whether color or black and white, for the desired results.

Doing that gets the Daily show a lot of viewers, I would think that doing the same thing in a more rigorous journalistic environment would get you a lot of eyeballs.

This is exactly what I do not understand about online journalism. At the moment, newspapers seem to be in a race to the bottom, with each trying to publish the same sort of crap before everyone else; mostly rehashed press-releases, all the while complaining that nobody wants to pay for their news online.

Maybe I am part of a small target group. But, dear newspaper publishers: Please give me a website that
1. pays talented journalists a decent salary to go out and investigate complex stories, actually reveal novel information, and then come back and write lucid, enlightening stories.
2. does not show any ads, thereby making itself independent from corporations for revenue, turning the readers into the sole customers.
3. has a calm, clean layout, accessible from both the desktop and mobile devices, hassle free. Oh, and please actually fill my damn screen with text and images, instead of using 20% of its width to show 50-line articles broken into 5 pages, filling the rest with horrible flash ads.

I am willing to pay, say, 200$ a year for a subscription to this site (I currently pay a similar amount for print subscriptions to a weekly and a monthly paper). It doesn't have to have hourly updates, all I want is something to read for an hour in bed every evening. I don't understand why such a website doesn't exist yet. I know, ads are an important part of traditional publishing, but web publishing is cheaper (printing presses and paper boys are more expensive than servers and bandwidth), and there are great economies of scale: The first publisher to establish a high-quality online news service will be able to attract readers from the entire English-speaking world.

Seriously, I don't get it. Why is everyone still trying to make money with ads?

I just read this a while back. There are larger ramifications than political sniping, and beyond politics altogether.

It's a perfect illustration of why this phenomenon matters to all of us.

Some time ago, I read a New Yorker article about IQ tests. I remember them interpreting the Flynn effect as
the idea that over generations our thinking was becoming more and more abstract. This is not the same
as being smarter, although as society becomes more dependent on technology, it is adaptive.

A consequence of the Flynn Effect is that they have to "re-norm" the IQ test to make 100 be the average.

The big difference in the scores are in the areas of "this thing is like that." People from some cultures may group
things functionally (potato goes with knife because you use a knife to cut potatoes) score lower than people who
group things taxonomically (animal, vegetable, mineral).

Another consequence of the Flynn Effect is that when a new, re-normed version of the IQ test comes out,
more kids get labeled retarded.

Anyway, the article is an interesting read and may change the way you think of IQ tests.

I agree, but it's typically worst for sellers.

Given the environment of the near monopoly that Live Nation // Ticketmaster has over venues and artists combined with the desire of artists to underprice their tickets I fear it'll be a while before we see any substantive change.

I'd check out this new yorker article (subscription required) for a good review of the poor economic situation.

I don't see a link either, but the speech appears to be up at the New Yorker (as is his commencement speech to University of Chicago's med school last year).

I don't see a link either, but the speech appears to be up at the New Yorker (as is his commencement speech to University of Chicago's med school last year).

It's obviously impossible to know how many there were, but read this article for an example of how it happens:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

HERE it is...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/06/gawande-stanford-speech.html#ixzz0rEyC8iDU

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/atul-gawande-university-of-chicago-medical-school-commencement-address.html

I guess eleven-page spreads in the New Yorker would not constitute "shameless self-promotion?" http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian

horse shit. I trust wikileaks to make the judgement on those sorts of things far better than the government.

When Khatchadourian asked Assange if "he would refrain from releasing information that might get someone killed," Assange responded that there might be instances when the members of WikiLeaks got "blood on our hands."

http://www.newyorker.com/services/presscenter/2010/06/07/100607pr_press_releases

"While for me Chatroulette was nothing more than a one-time novelty and an interesting experiment by Ben Folds"

Well I don't know who "ben folds" is, but chatroulette was started by a russian teen programmer named Andrey Ternovskiy, who had positive experiences meeting people of other cultures in his uncles(?) Moscow based tourist shop. He tried to recreate this on the web. His vision was random people in the world having video chats to each other, to share knowledge and experience.

There was a whole newyorker article on chatroulette. I am not surprised that he is trying to monetize it, as he is young and had alot of interest stateside (as to be expected with any viral hit web 2.0 application).

Just because it was a novelty *For You*, does not mean that you get to attribute your, shall we say "wild guesses" to the motivations and ideals behind the site. They discuss cocks and stuff in the new yorker article and it seemed to me that he was planning some sort of filtering to make it more usable. You are always going to get trolls if you have a purely anonymous fourm. Fighting trolls on the internet is a skill one has to acquire and adapt. This is what he seems to be doing, in a slightly comedic but genuinely interesting way. He seems like a bright kid, so i wouldnt write him off as a one hit wonder yet.

"Let it continue on in the way it has or let it die. Let's stop bastardizing stuff because a bunch of investors don't like others seeing the raging members"

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that chatroulette was designed to display cocks. Raging members might be what your biases have led you to focus on, but it was never "the way" of the site, any more than slashdots way is penis birds or gnaa trolls. Perhaps if you actually read a bit more about the topic before commenting, you wouldn't be so mistaken in your key assumptions. (you must be old here, mr 4 digit userid!)

There's a some more background in this article from the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/31/100531fa_fact_groopman?currentPage=all

Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader, thus building a foundation for the successful resistance of the 1980s

. I guess what I'm trying to say is that WikiLeaks is straddling the gap between public interest and public concern in a way that is beginning to make me feel uncomfortable. Just me. Despite what the mods have deigned from on high I'm not trying to troll or anything like that. I am genuinly concerned that the project is grounded in what I consider to be ethically-suspect actions that potentially reflect an attitude to privacy, security, and mature discussion that I find distasteful.

As to the accuracy, who knows what they're chosing not to show? That's a somewhat facicious point but there is an element of truth. If they're not above a little serrupticious information gathering then how can I trust that they're not also willing to make a few alterations here and there in what they chose to publisize. When they posted that video of military action the New Yorker ran an interesting piece at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/04/truth-but-not-the-whole-truth.html which makes some compelling points about the video as presented:

The producers themselves have chosen not to provide them. There appears to be a purpose to the omissions, which is underlined by the Orwell quote at the start, the prefatory explanation, the quotes and dedication at the end, even the way the helicopter crew’s cruel remarks are edited in a few places for effect. Although the producers identify the camera of the Reuters journalist who, along with his assistant, will be killed by Apache cannon fire, they don’t point to the AK-47 or the RPG launcher carried by other men with whom the journalists are walking in a group. Stripped of much context and weighted with commentary, this video is both an important document of the war, courageously leaked after the military had steadily refused to release it, and, in its way, a propaganda film.

I'm concerned that we're trading one kind of spin for another.

the united states used to dissolve the charters of thousands of corporations a year. Way back when, it was a valid punishment for fucking up. Then, suddenly, corporations became people too.

So, corporations should only be dissolved in Texas, on flimsy made-up evidence, right?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0412090169dec09,0,1173806.story

Amazon loves the Kindle because they have a fat profit margin on books (shipping costs less than bandwidth, no material cost), and tighter control over distribution and dissemination.

Amazon has been making a loss on each ebook sale.

Amazon had been buying many e-books from publishers for about thirteen dollars and selling them for $9.99, taking a loss on each book in order to gain market share and encourage sales of its electronic reading device, the Kindle.

[Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta%5D

(Multi-)Touch, on the other hand, is very limited in terms of use in anything creative.

Buh? Heard of Brushes? Used for, y'know, a New Yorker cover or two?

First, show how Wikileaks is somehow providing incorrect/incomplete/biased information http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/04/truth-but-not-the-whole-truth.html. Now, set the founder up for more publicity, implicitly encouraging violence upon him.

If that article was intended to show that Wikileaks is "providing incorrect/incomplete/biased information", then that article failed on numerous accounts. I won't list them here - it looks like the people commenting on that article (although going off the deep end in another way) have already taken that bother. I highly doubt that was its intent anyway as it goes more into the general topic of what you see in a video and what the actual circumstances were. It still fails even at that, but it's not really directed at Wikileaks.

You gotta hand it to the CIA. When they attack something like Wikileaks, they really take the long view.

First, show how Wikileaks is somehow providing incorrect/incomplete/biased information. Now, set the founder up for more publicity, implicitly encouraging violence upon him.

It's a chilling effect on anyone who might be initially inclined to provide information to Wikileaks under their cover of anonymity.

If anyone would like to read a somewhat middle-of-the-road (neither "IV IS GREAT!" nor "IP is the DEVIL!") discussion of Intellectual Ventures, The New Yorker did a somewhat in-depth article on them last year that I thought was interesting. I (being of the IP is the DEVIL! mindset) don't think he addressed the problems to society at large with having companies that primarily chew up intellectual advancement space by pre-emptive patenting. But, on the other hand, patents are time-limited, and if they patent lots and lots of stuff that just isn't feasible given current tech, in 20 years when it IS feasible, there will be prior art and the areas won't be patentable, so that could be a plus.

malpractice insurance costs

It's been about 7 years since Texas essentially eliminated malpractice lawsuits. Malpractice insurance cost is way down. Health care costs continue to increase. This guy is a malpractice lawyer so he obviously has a bone to pick, but he's got citations. This article is particularly enlightening, it's an article about McAllen, TX, the second most expensive healthcare market in the country, where Medicare alone pays out more money per patient than the residents earn per capita. The interviews with the doctors and hospital staff lays out where that money is going (hint: it's not paying for malpractice insurance).

we develop a great deal of the new treatments, which means that they cost more than the older treatments

So what happened to the older treatments that should presumably cost less? Health care in the US is like going to a car lot and the entire car lot is filled with Rolls Royce limos. The motto appears to be "Why shouldn't you pay half a million dollars, why would you even want anything less than a Rolls?"

They need more gawking morons like you to round out their site.

Ah Slashdot, where the genuine request for more information and recognition of your own shortcomings is met only with the satisfying sting of childish name calling. It makes me a 'gawking moron' to ask if anyone knows how I could find out more about genuine news in a country designed to filter out genuine news? Well, I'm kind of sick and tired of people telling me to ignore China.

I was hoping I'd find more information resources similar to Letter from China except hopefully from a Chinese native citizen. Instead I get an insult and a link to sites seemingly dedicated to a mix of gossip, weird news and some actually decent content.

Well, if you think I'm merely a 'gawking moron' I'd better follow your lead and just shut up and get back in line and stop thinking. That is the safest thing to do, right?

That's a valid point to make, but the priority that I'm putting forth is not cost--it's life. And this legislation will save lives, if for nothing other than the removal of pre-existing condition clauses.

That said, on its current path, the cost is unsustainable. And I agree that this legislation doesn't do enough to curb the costs. For a way to fix the cost problem, I would not suggest throwing the consumer into the middle of it, but putting a regulation in place that says doctors can't be paid by procedure, and that they must be disallowed ownership stakes in the places in which they practice (which would just be a way of ensuring point number one can't be circumvented by proxy). You'll understand what I'm getting at if you read the article I'm linking.

The best discussion I've seen on our runaway healthcare costs is here. In short, it's an investigation into why, of two cities in the same state with the same demographics, one pays triple.

Another thing which I'm not sure wound up included or not was the thing that spawned "death panels": we spend something like $30,000 per person in the last month of life. End of life counseling, hospice care, etc. can dramatically lower that cost since family members would know, ideally by living will, what the desires of their loved one were. It would give people the ability to say (e.g.) "if I don't know who I am anymore, just pull the plug." That alone would save a lot.

I can't take credit for finding this. Another Slashdotter was kind enough to link it the last time Perelman came up, but I found this to be very enlightening and illustrative of Perelman's personality as well as the whole Yau controversy. It's an article from the New Yorker co-written by Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind. It contains what was at the time the only interview with Grigori Perelman, but I'm not sure if that's still true.

Annals of Mathematic: Manifold Destiny

For those just in, here's an article covering Perelman and his theorem.

This wikipedia entry covers some controversies following the article.

And from New York:

"These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits."

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill

If car insurance worked like health insurance, we'd never see the real costs of things like oil changes because we'd only pay the co-pays. And the costs would rise since every shop would need an extra person to handle the paperwork and claims.

This is the quasi-logical rhetorical form that gives the economics profession a bad name, for it conceals everything about the issue worth thinking about.

The underlying structure is the timeless vapour-lock of the insipid: "if there is enough food in the food, how come people are starving?"

Indeed, good question, and it happens to have an answer: distribution is often a harder problem to solve than production. This surprises anyone why? The former is largely a political problem (venality and custom), the later is largely an industrial/engineering/scientific problem. Our accomplishments on the later front include the green revolution, fiber optics, and sending a man to moon, on the former front our wreath of achievement is CNN.

In the case of our hyper-technological medical system, it's a miracle of paper-work that anyone gets the right sequence of treatments on a prompt and cost effective basis. The paper-pushers are hardly a burden on the system, they are practically the whole of the system, unless you regard the human brain as a leech on the human organism.

E. O. Wilson: Trailhead is a nice read. Now imagine what it requires to individually and fairly compensate every ant in this society for their individual contribution as measured by the outcome to the hive of the trails they blaze or toil upon? You'd need a whole other ant hill just to keep track.

A founding principle of America is that all this score keeping is a pro bono service of the invisible hand. That's what "invisible" primarily means by those who invoke it: that you never see the bill for services rendered. A health system based on less individual score keeping for the corporate participants (such as the Canadian system) strikes most Americans as inimical to the American way, yet at the same time the cost of all this score keeping is brushed off the table as inefficiency and overhead endemic to the regulatory structure as opposed to being endemic to the problem itself, delivering health care products and services so complex and litigious and expensive it boggles the mind.

Yes, it's possible to stiff the invisible hand, if you don't mind watching 20% of American society line up for the soup kitchen while the nation fences with Asian tigers for increasingly sparse petroleum resources.

I've been trying to decode the lure of "the invisible hand" for over a decade. Visibility in America is anything or anyone that collects its debts; invisibility is everything else. Amazing what can hide in a word and for how long. The old gag in America is that as soon as the invisible hand becomes visible (by collecting its debt for services rendered) it's immediately dismissed as a burden of regulation, with the same fatuous logic that in a world with enough food for everyone, no one starves.

In the glib theory of the invisible hand, a twenty year old American male lacking health insurance who comes down with testicular cancer can borrow $100,000 against future earnings (without posting hard equity of which he has none), to cure himself of the cancer and remain a valuable member of the American work force, since this is the most sensible economic outcome. Equity-lite loans worked great with housing.

If your family posts equity, that's sugar-daddy insurance, a whole different ball game. In the American myth, everyone has a loving sugar-daddy to fall back upon when the heartless banks demand equity against their loans, and thus a productive future worker never falls through the cracks of too little treatment too late.

Compare to Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that the most successful people in business do not take big risks and in fact are very good at minimizing the downside of any venture:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/18/100118fa_fact_gladwell (subscription required)

Clickable link

Background on medical checklists saving lives (and yet meeting up with resistance at times from medical practitioners) in this important New Yorker piece by surgeon/writer Atul Gawande:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

Gawande now has a book out about checklists called "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right" that expands on this and also describes the usefulness of checklists in other areas: http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0805091742 (If the topic interests you, btw, Amazon apparently is selling this $24.50 hardcover book for only $10).

They're not going to hunt you down in trained squads.

Oh no?

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/01/18/100118sh_shouts_allen

I won't argue that it takes away from freedom of choice, as does an income tax and any other kind of tax or anything else that benefits the public collectively at taxpayer expense. It's unpopular, but so are denials based on preexisting conditions, and voters overwhelmingly want that practice stopped. But we can't have one without the other.

The problem with the "car insurance paying for oil changes" analogy is that if your car breaks, you can buy a new one. Fundamentally, car insurance is about protecting *other people* from *you*. Health insurance is about protecting yourself.

I agree that the best cost reduction mechanism is certainly not addressed in the legislation. More information on that is in this incredible (and like yours, nonpartisan) New Yorker article. I've skimmed yours, and will do a more thorough read after work.

What the article I've linked says is that it's unnecessary procedures that are the biggest cost. Bureaucracy, depending on your sources and whether you talk about Medicare (whose admin costs are less) or private insurers will run anywhere between 3% to 15%, which is significant but static--it's not a growing percentage, and it's not nearly enough to account for such growth in premiums (119% since 2000).

Driving costs down from where they are expected to be (not down absolutely, but bending the curve a little) can be done in part by ensuring that we cover preventative care, which is a good part of the base package proposed in this health reform.

And for the record, sometimes routine expenses can be catastrophic. I work for the pharmaceutical industry. One of our drugs (which my stepfather happens to be on) costs upwards of $400 a bottle. With insurance it's a manageable $30 or $40. Just because it's recurring (like, say, insulin) doesn't mean it shouldn't be insured, since I'd wager that recurring expenses of that size can add up to bankruptcy for the majority of people. And bankruptcy doesn't fix your health issues, so even after that, how do you keep paying?

On another level, insurance that pays for routine expenses is, in some sense, paying to protect the both the insurer and the insured against catastrophe in the future. That's the idea of preventative medicine.

The meeting ended on a boisterous note. "That fuckin' rocks!" Cameron called out in response to an image of a snarling maw of thin blue-veined tissue, the mouth of the pterodactyl-like banshee that Jake's avatar domesticates for his ride. "Look at the gill-like membrane on the side of the mouth, its transmission of light, all the secondary color saturation on the tongue, and that maxilla bone. I love what you did with the translucence on the teeth, and the way the quadrate bone racks the teeth forward. It's a sharky thing. As wacky as this creature is, it looks completely real. Maybe I'm getting high on my own supply." He was practically out of breath. "The banshee lives! He's a fierce-looking sonuvabitch."

I think Cameron was a motivator and drill sergeant, heavily involved in the technical aspects of the work, and was certainly not someone that just handed the job off to the SF guys to do. Interesting article here. I'm not sure I'd want him for a boss, honestly.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/03/071203fa_fact_specter

. And it is well known that Iran has actually not supported Hezbollah, contrary to popular American rhetoric.

Absolutely. For some reason, however, some local Lebanese paramilitary groups were so pissed off about this non-existent Iranian presence in Lebanon (and their support for Hezbollah), that they've declared war on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards - specifically, Kataeb (Falange) did so. Weird people...

Also, Hezbollah are armed with such products of Iranian military complex as Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rocket artillery, and Ra'ad and Toophan AT missiles. Clearly those must be gifted to them by Allah's divine intervention, since we know that Hezbollah is not supported by Iran at all.

Iranians are not suicidal virgin seekers.

Indeed, and using volunteer militia to create passages through mine fields by means of human waves is a very good testament to that!

I don't really care about Sherman Alexie's opinion as a commentator on intellectual property in the digital age, or a lot of the politics topics he might opine on when he appears, for instance, as a guest on The Colbert Report. But as a fiction writer, he is known and worthy of being known. One of my favorite short stories, "What You Pawn I Will Redeem", is written by him. It may even hold some key to his position on the topic, which is probably more complex than "open source is bad because I'm a filthy greedy novelist." I'm on the radical edge of support for open source and digital culture, but some of their ramifications for society and culture scare me a bit, too.

Interestingly, his story is still available online on the New Yorker site:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/04/21/030421fi_fiction?currentPage=all

I recommend reading it, but only because it's a brilliant story. I first read it in the magazine and bought the collection of short stories it later appeared in as a result of that exposure. I suppose this could have happened as a result of, say, a link to a free copy posted on the internet somewhere. But, in fact, it would have a much greater probability of happening precisely because it appeared in the New Yorker and not at the end of a random link on the internet.

Well, by all means then, master, please enlighten me. How is refusing either lucrative positions or the prize in his particular context somehow ethically praiseworthy rather than simply eccentric?

From an article on the New Yorker, I think it sums it up better than TFA:

Perelman repeatedly said that he had retired from the mathematics community and no longer considered himself a professional mathematician. He mentioned a dispute that he had had years earlier with a collaborator over how to credit the author of a particular proof, and said that he was dismayed by the discipline’s lax ethics. “It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens,” he said. “It is people like me who are isolated.” We asked him whether he had read Cao and Zhu’s paper. “It is not clear to me what new contribution did they make,” he said. “Apparently, Zhu did not quite understand the argument and reworked it.” As for Yau, Perelman said, “I can’t say I’m outraged. Other people do worse. Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”

Then another bit at the very end of The New Yorker:

Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s logic: “To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.” Others might view Perelman’s refusal to accept a Fields as arrogant, Gromov said, but his principles are admirable. “The ideal scientist does science and cares about nothing else,” he said. “He wants to live this ideal. Now, I don’t think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to.”

If you still do not understand why his refusal to accept the money, I'm not sure I can help you. Somethings are greater than any amount of money.

-Tynin

Sylvia Nasar, also the author of "A Beautiful Mind", wrote a great piece about Perelman shortly after the publication of his proof. Deeply moving, in my opinion.

'So in exchange for CCTV surveillance everywhere, UK residents get more reasonably priced mobile data service.'

Absolutely!. How else could Airstrip One get a Telescreen not just on every street corner, but in every pocket..?

Of course, in some areas we still have a lot of catching up to do:

http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact6