Tomorrow is Election Day. If you have a mail-in ballot, make sure you have it filled out tonight to go in tomorrow’s mail. If you actually have to go to the polling place, clear some time to be there. Be aware that it may take a little longer than it should. If you witness irregularities, report them.
Elections can work! Really! They kept this man out of public office.
In closing, a missive from the Duhpartment of Research: seat belts on school busses could prevent student injuries.
Wondering where I’ve been all week? Geeking out.
This week, The Hot New Computer Game of the Season was released, Battlefield 2142. And yes, I was playing it. It was not an easy road to this point. And that brings me to today’s post.
First thing, it was supposed to have been released Tuesday. And it was, if you were in Canada. We Americans had to wait until Wednesday. And nor was it as simple as walking in to your favorite retailer and picking up a copy; I had a couple on pre-order. Let’s just say I had one of the first copies and the very last copy out the door of the local Best Buy on Wednesday. By the time I arrived home Wednesday night, I was ready for action!
Or so I thought.
The box clearly stated that an 8x or better DVD drive was required. No problems, as my desktop box sports a snappy 12x drive. Unfortunately, an undocumented requirement for the installer is a 16x drive. InstallShield is apparently not smart enough to tell this is a problem; it pretends to start installing, and 5 minutes later when you realize the status bar has not moved, you check and find that no processor cycles are being used. I think InstallSheild and EA Games share the blame for this problem. One helpful soul from one of the grown-ups only gaming clans suggested a new DVD drive. Nope, not happening at 10 PM on a Wednesday night when all I want to do is play. This problem was solved by
putting the disk into a notebook computer on the other side of the room and mounting it remotely from the installation box a couple of reboots later! Kludgy, but functional.
At this point, it was time to download the patch. Yes, that’s right, brand new first-day-of-release game and there were already patches to download. Let’s just say I didn’t have any of the problems reported by so many others and leave it there.
Now, even before it was released, people were complaining that it contained Spyware. Those of you who understand how the internet works, move down to the next paragraph while I get everybody else up to speed. Simplified content follows: When you clicked on the link that sent you here, or typed my url into your browser, you were actually doing something pretty complicated. An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a number that is assigned to every computer on the internet. Most of you probably have “dynamic” IPs, which are randomly assigned by your internet service provider when you log in. Sites like mine have “static” IP addresses, which stay the same and allow people to find them. So when you told your browser to display my page, the first step was to ask a Domain Name Server what my IP was. Once your computer knew where to find me, your browser sent a request to my server to send the contents of this page to your IP address. As you can see, you cannot get any content without the server knowing what your IP is. Furthermore, many sites use something called “cookies” to keep track of you. This is what allows Amazon.com and Yahoo! and eBay to know who you are when you log in to your account. Anyway, back to the so-called spyware.
Here’s what the alleged spyware does:
2142 includes monitoring software which runs while your computer is online, and records “anonymous” information like your IP address, surfing habits (probably via cookie scans), and other “computing habits” in order to report this information back to ad companies and ad servers, which generates in-game ads.
Now, Battlefield 2142 is a mostly online game. You play head-to-head against other players, who might be anywhere. The only way the information about what these other players are doing can possibly be sent to you is if the server knows your IP address. As for the adware, already lampooned here, apparently the system might use information about where you shop online to determine what ads they should place on the in-game billboards. Of course whether or not Martha Stewart would still be a viable brand in the year 2142 is anybody’s guess. That’s not important! Of course, maybe I’m not as worked up as I should be about this because the box on whilch I play the game is strictly a gaming box. Let’s see them figure out what to advertise based on the fact that Jedi Knight 2 and Lego Designer have run on it recently!
Yesterday — the day after release for those of you counting — I encountered a different and utterly frustrating problem. I was consistently kicked off servers wihtin minutes of joining by PunkBuster, a widget that is supposed to prevent cheating in online games. Rest assured I was doing nothing wrong. After a number of attempts at fixing the problem, I googled and found a thread on EA’s site that referenced the problem. Let me save you the reading. If you are being kicked off 2142 servers by Punkbuster, download the manual update tool from EvenBalance.
By the time I got this sorted out, a new and exciting problem I couldn’t solve came up. The master server at EA — the one that keeps track of how well everyone is doing and hands out rewards accordingly — wasn’t working right. As a result, nobody was getting promotions and nobody was able to unlock new skills or weapons. Since at this point people were working on basic stuff like the ability to run more than 50 meters without getting winded, this was a big deal. Luckily, EA was on the problem and fixed things within about 18 hours.
Even with all these problems, the gaming community still rates it a nice solid B+/A-. Now if you will excuse me, I have some shooting and fragging to do.
In closing: it’s all Iraq, Iraq, and more Iraq. Would you like some extra Iraq with that?
What? Has the ShortWoman lost her mind? The purpose of rent control is to keep housing prices reasonable!
Well it doesn’t work.
Last week, frequent commenter Jukkou-san sent me an article entitled Americans becoming increasingly house poor; Census data shows percentage of income spent on dwelling up in 49 states. It’s an interesting article, and well worth your time to read it. But the short version is that all over the nation, people are spending more of their income on a place to live — regardless of whether it is purchased or rented — than ever before. The finger pointing begins at “why.” It’s higher interest rates, say some. It’s higher house prices, say others. No no the real culprit is that incomes are stagnant, say still others. Frankly all these points of view are valid.
But as the article drifted into warnings about overextended homeowners and the interesting mortgage products that allowed them to get that way, I got distracted by the maps. And it occured to me that there was the same red/blue distribution I discussed in July. Another phenomenon common (though not universal) to these hot housing markets are rent controls. Unfortunately, the only actual list of cities with rent control that I could find is for the state of California, but you can’t help but notice California is one of the states with the biggest problem. I don’t often agree with the Cato Intstitute, but rent controls drive the price of housing up over the long term.
To illustrate, let me use a fictional example, Utopia City. We will use as the underlying assumption that everybody needs a place to live. We can agree on that, right?
Utopia City has a thriving economy. A half dozen large companies employ about a third of the workforce, new jobs are created on a regular basis, the schools may not be world class but they are better than most urban school districts, the cost of living is decent. However, as the city grows, they are finding that they are having big city problems. They have attracted many new residents, and as a result, housing is becoming scarce. Now, any good capitalist knows that when something becomes scarce, it is possible to raise prices, right? And that is exactly what the apartment complexes of Utopia City did.
So rents went up. House prices went up too, but somehow that wasn’t a big deal. After all, weren’t houses supposed to go up in value? Ok, so maybe they were going up faster than the national average, but that’s because the local economy is good. More to the point, with house prices there is not a small number of management companies that laypeople think effectively control prices that everyone can point to as being a “problem.”
At some point there was a city council meeting where somebody mentioned that with housing prices going up, they were going to have a problem attracting people to be teachers and policemen and firemen and nurses in Utopia City. They always put it this way, rather than talking about the barristas, janitors, waiters, grocery cashiers, painters, and seamstresses that could really benefit from reduced housing prices. Somebody suggested a tax incentive for building “affordable” housing. Somebody else criticized that as a short term fix for a long term problem. No, this person went on, what we need is a way to control what housing costs. And since they couldn’t control what Joe and Jane Average were selling their house for — if it occured to them at all — they declared that there would be rent controls beginning at the first of the new year.
Well the obvious thing that happened was that landlords raised rents all through the 4th quarter, so that rents would be relatively high by January 1. They had to do this because who knew when they would next have the chance to raise them? The second obvious thing that happened is that a large percentage of the apartment complexes under construction suddenly became “condominium communities.” Some apartment complexes began the process of becoming condos, trying to sell units to the current residents. Applications for building permits to build new apartments dropped drastically. The few applications that were made were for ultra-luxury high-end high-rent communities.
Supply of rental housing had already dropped, and the regulation was brand new. The people of Utopia City still had to live somewhere; if there was no rental property, they would just have to buy. And this in turn drove house prices up. But that was just the beginning.
Over the next ten years, multifamily housing construction continued to lag. The supply of existing multifamily housing declined as landlords converted properties to condos, or bulldozed them to sell the land to home builders. The quality of rental housing declined, as inflation caused gross margins to decrease — leaving less money leftover for maintenance. The combination of less rental property and lower quality of that rental property caused people to have a higher-than-average desire to purchase a home. Again, house prices rose.
As your shampoo bottle probably says: “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.”
In closing, Religion has no need of your puny Regulations; as many as 20% of resumes may contain lies (and just so you know, I actually will call your previous employer!); Krugman on Hastert; and finallly choosy moms choose a good economy.
So it turns out that not only are Americans less healthy than the British (who have universal health coverage), Americans are also less healthy than the Canadians (who also have universal health coverage).
Specifically, Americans suffered with more diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, and arthritis. More Americans were overweight, more Americans reported not being able to afford medications. You might find it to be of concern that Canadians are three times more likely to have an unacceptable wait time to see a doctor, but it’s still only 3.5%. Think about that the next time your 10:15 appointment begins at 11:00. By contrast, Americans are seven times more likely to put off medical care because they can’t afford it.
Even Forbes is running an article that quotes experts saying things like “We (Americans) have the best doctors, best hospitals, and best nurses in the world. But the way we finance healthcare just doesn’t let us do the job. Given what we are now spending on our healthcare system, we can do better — if we just had national health insurance and were allowed to do it right.” In short, The Best is available to Americans, but it doesn’t matter if we can’t afford it. And that’s in Forbes, a publication with well-known old-fashioned socially and fiscally conservative philosophies.
The time has come to stop mucking about with an expensive system that doesn’t work, and implement a system that has already been proven in several nations.
In closing: another strand of the Gordian Knot called immigration; one town tries to decide what to do when a river doesn’t run through it anymore; the last two CEOs turned Treasury Secretary did such a fine job that President Bush nominated a third one for the job; we need alternative energy sources so badly we can’t bother with conservation anymore; and finally (thanks Brian), a man who is tough on a bathtub.
Massive Juice Sets
Yesterday, the Governor of Massachusetts signed that big health care bill. Contrary to the Grey Lady’s coverage, this will not make them “the first [state] to provide health coverage to virtually all of its citizens.” Nope, anybody who calls this “universal health care” is unclear on what the phrase means.
There are two components to this legislation. Part one is that any employer with more than 10 employees who does not provide health benefits to employees will have to pay a fine of $295 per employee per year. Inasmuch as a typical business can easily spend $295 per employee per month on health insurance, I consider this laughable. Raise this fine twelvefold and just maybe it will have the desired effect.
The other major thing this legislation does is impose a tax penalty for Massachusetts citizens who fail to obtain health insurance. You may point out that states already require motorists to have automobile liability insurance; you can get out of that requirement by not owning a car, and last I heard Boston had a decent mass transit system. Nor does this compare to requiring homeowners to have insurance on their homes; that requirement is from the mortgage holder, not the government. The biggest problem is this: the state is requiring citizens to get insurance, but they are not requiring the insurance companies to write policies, and they are not requiring that insurance companies charge affordable rates.
In the end — unless you live or do business in Massachusetts — all you need to know about this bill is that the insurance companies did not oppose it.
I wonder if this bill will be referenced in 2008 as “proof that universal health care doesn’t work.”
What Woz That?
And now for something completely different, a man who loves practical jokes.
Yesterday, Steve Wozniak spoke at the University of Washington to a low-tech crowd. He told fun stories and such. One tale he related involved putting a metronome he had made into a classmate’s locker at school. The incessant tick drove school officials nuts.
Today, he would have been expelled, if not charged with faking a bomb threat. How the world changes.
Don’t forget to look over at the right column on the main page. I just updated the “Stuff I Read” section and added “Webcomics I Read.”
Also, I finally joined BlogHer. A special welcome to anybody who clicked through from there! Also, a warm welcome and thanks for reading to folks who come to us through Jerry Kindall, Pure Land Mountain, Bloglines, HealthyConcerns, Down the Avenue, Elisa Camahort, World Blogs, Fecundity, Foomart, and anybody else I might have forgotten.
I promised an item on healthcare, and here it is. As a polite reminder, the 40+ million Americans without health insurance — almost one in every 7 people — are breathing their germs on you every day.
Yesterday morning I was listening to comments to a gathering of state Governors by the CEO of Wal-Mart. And you know what? even though he may be part of the problem of healthcare insurance, he is right about one thing:
“The soaring cost of health care in America cannot be sustained over the long term by any business that offers health benefits to its employees. And every day that we do not work together to solve this challenge is a day our country becomes less competitive in the global economy.”
He went on to say that mandating he spend a certain percentage of his payroll on health coverage was just not going to work. Like it or not, I tend to think he is right.
As I listened to people commenting on what Mr. Scott had said, again and again I heard how the problem was at least in part that people had no incentive to limit their healthcare costs. This was interspersed with survey results showing that the overwhelming majority of respondents were paying more towards healthcare than they were a year ago. The commentators implied that the problem would be solved if corporate America offloaded more of the costs to the end users of healthcare, for example through HSAs and high deductibles/copays. After all — I actually heard someone say this — if people had to pay more of their healthcare costs they would think twice about “unneeded” emergency room visits or medical tests.
Let me take the spin out of that for you: the cost of healthcare will come down if you just don’t worry about that crushing pain in your chest at 3 AM. And somehow it will be more affordable if you pay for everything instead of letting the insurance company cut a deal with the hospital.
Let me start by puncturing a great myth of healthcare costs: healthcare costs are directly controlled by insurance companies, who alone determine what they will pay healthcare providers. You cannot go into your doctor’s office and say “Okay, you can run that cholesterol test, but I’m only paying you $X.” First of all, you are one person with no bargaining power. Second, it is illegal for your doctor to make such a deal with you. Your insurance company, on the other hand, has the ability to arbitrarily decide how much they will pay for any given procedure, and your doctor only has the power to accept the insurance payment, or not do business with that company. The fact that insurance companies are not able to contain costs in this environment is evidence that the system is broken.
I am going to say this again and hope it sinks in: if you want to “unload healthcare costs to consumers,” change the tax rules so everybody can deduct health insurance premiums. Couple this with state-level rules simplifying premiums and eligibility; who knows how many businesses are never started because the people involved can’t get individual coverage? This way, Joe and Jane Average can look at their employer’s health insurance plan, and if a better deal or better coverage is available elsewhere, they can just buy it. Of course, this does little to help the many people who can’t afford a few extra hundred dollars a month for private coverage or an HSA.
A better plan, one that will benefit everybody, is universal health care. You know, the CEO of Wal-Mart would look really progressive if he supported such an idea. Oh, and for the record? He supports a higher minimum wage too. He says it’s to benefit his customers, and while that may be true it will almost certainly impact the wages he pays, too. That sword cuts both ways.
If you want to read more on healthcare in general, please visit my friend Elisa Camahort and her colleagues over at Healthy Concerns.
There’s a lot of things going on in the world right now. A lot of people are talking about the Senate deciding that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over certain prisoners. Or President Bush, master of revisionist history, revising history by accusing others of revising history. Or the delayed House vote on the Federal budget — just like the last few years there’s no need to rush since the fiscal year started 6 weeks ago. Or the Democratic world rejoicing at what appears to have been a resounding victory over the Republican world in Tuesday’s elections. Or Pat Robertson’s continued silliness, this time calling down God’s Wrath over a school board election. There are already plenty of voices talking about that. I am uninspired to frost those particular cakes.
Instead, I would like to engage in some name-calling.
No, it isn’t what you think. George Lakoff is still thought of very highly in liberal circles. His fundamental idea, as you may recall, is that words — framing, or what we call things — matter. That’s fine, as far as it goes; political rhetoric is full of loaded terms like “tax relief” and “pro-choice” and “death tax.” Everyone who has been paying attention knows that these loaded terms are meant to make us think of things a certain way: “There’s a tax on dying? We’ve got to put an end to that!” Yet we have not stopped to consider the fundamental frames around our entire political spectrum.
“Conservative” brings to mind sober people in pressed blazers who worked hard to climb up the socio-economic ladder, who put aside 10% of their earnings for charity and another 10% for savings, and who are furthermore more or less content with the status quo. “Liberal” brings to mind long haired hippies and drug inspired music and whining about how we should take care of people and the various ways the world needs change while doing darned little about it.
“Right” versus “Left” is an even worse comparison. First of all, the overwhelming majority of people are very unsure what these labels mean. If you were to ask a dozen people whether they are “right” or “left” most of them would say “right,” but if you were to ask them their actual views, some of them would look a lot more centrist if not downright “left.” And who can blame them, everybody wants to be right. There’s the other problem. “Right” the direction cannot be distinguished from “right,” being correct. There is the unconscious feeling that “Left” must surely be “Wrong.” This idea has a long history of linguistic support: “gauche” is French for “left,” and who wants to be gauche?; “sinister” is Latin for “left” and certainly nobody wants to be known as sinister.
Can we please stop referring to the liberal end of the political spectrum as “left”?
Even the modern “Red” versus “Blue” distinction has problems. Why on earth are we using a system of classifying political thought on an coincidental color-coding on the 2000 Election electoral map? How on earth did these terms survive past Thanksgiving of 2000? Surprisingly, I think that Red/Blue labels are damaging to the Democrats. Consider this: would you rather be called a red-blooded American or a blue-blooded American? Hang a label like “Blue” on a patrician like John Kerry and watch him be ridiculed as an elitist snob. Red/Blue perpetuates the image of sushi eating latte drinking volvo driving coastal types ridiculing the hard working farmers and factory workers of the heartland, which the former refers to by the derogatory title “The Flyover States.”
We’ve got to take Red/Blue out back, shoot it, and put it out of our misery.
Every system we have of classifying current American political thought is subject to ridicule, but what should we put in its place? It is unfortunate that “Conservative” versus “Liberal” is the best thing we have, but if we must have an alternative naming convention, I think I have an idea.
Let’s take a page from the 70s. In several key respects, modern Conservatives are just as uptight as they were in the 70s, so I propose calling them after the famous Conservative TV Patriarch of the era, Archie Bunker. Archie was a man who believed in the New Testament, because it was the part of the Bible that was “still good.” He was a my-President-right-or-wrong support-our-troops kind of guy — if he was around today, you bet there would be a patriotic magnet on the back of his car. He was against his wife working, against his daughter wearing short skirts, against having the wrong sort of people in his neighborhood. He never met a stereotype he didn’t like. He was for hard work, lower taxes, and the Good Old U.S.A..
Oh, but if we use this metaphor, it is only fair to start referring to the Liberal end of the spectrum as the Meathead wing. Meathead — Michael Stivic — was Archie’s very liberal son-in-law. The contrast and conflict between the two was pretty much the thing that made the show work. He was the sort of guy who would wear a “make love not war” shirt under an army surplus jacket. He was a married college student, trying to get a good education and get a better job than his own father could ever have hoped for. He would have been for women’s rights even if his wife didn’t have to work to help him get through school. To be sure, there were holes in his View Of Everything, but nothing like those in Archie’s views.
Both terms are equally derogatory. Meathead States sneer at Archie Bunker States at risk of being called Meatheads. The Archie Bunker wing can mock the Meathead wing only by admitting that they are Archie Bunker.
In closing, “Gee, who could have known kids need sleep?” and a place I’ve got to check out!
Somehow, modern America is stepping sideways into Nineteenth Century France. Prison terms for stealing food to feed starving children could be right around the corner.
The House of Representatives Agriculture Committee has voted along party lines to cut over $800 Million from the Food Stamps program, incidentally taking away subsidized school lunches from about 40,000 kids. This is just part of the $3700 million in proposed cuts the committee came up with.
If you think that desperate parents will not turn to crime to feed their children, you weren’t paying attention to Katrina’s aftermath. If you think they can solve their problems by just getting a [insert expletive] job, you haven’t been paying attention to fuel costs and the “working poor.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. The federal budget is way out of control and seriously needs to be reigned in. Creating desperate families with hungry children (who will spend their school days wondering what they will eat instead of how to solve the math problem in front of them) is not the answer. We could follow Wolfowitz’s admonishment to cut farm subsidies. We could end billions of dollars of tax breaks to some of America’s most profitable corporations, oil companies. We could stop paying for mercenaries and re-think how contractors are selected. Then of course there are the obvious things that could be done to help balance the budget: cut pork; let certain tax cuts for the very rich lapse; let the IRS audit more large corporations and fewer low/middle income American voters.
Nope, certain members of Congress would rather take candy from a baby… or take school lunches from kids who made the mistake of being born “poor”.
I volunteer time at a school library. Just outside the library there’s a sign that always makes me do a double take. On first glance, it would appear to say “Math is the Laramie of Wyoming.” Then I remind myself that it really says “Math is the Language of Reason,” which makes a lot more sense.
Anyway, off on the right column of the main page, you’ll notice something new. Yes, I finally got around to putting up a link list.