Silicon Valley Redneck

To the tune of "Monorail!"?

Seems the Sun currently has two south magnetic poles.

Which must mean it's harvest season for

Monopoles!

(Yeah, I'm guessing there really is a north pole, and maybe it's currently at the equator or something.)

"Cost sharing"

So you've bought yourself an Obamacare Bronze health plan.  Congratulations!  Now consider: what if you get sick?

Let's assume for the moment that you've chosen a plan that actually covers visits to real doctors, in your area, who are accepting patients.  Your expenses are 60% covered!  What, really, does that mean?

Well... consider this.  If you had one of those nasty old plans with 100% coverage, you'd pay nothing out of pocket, and the third-party payer (I refuse to call them "insurance companies" in this context) would pay... er... right around 10% of the bill, typically.  The other 90% of the bill, nobody really expected to be paid anyway.

With your modern comprehensive "real insurance" plan's 60% coverage, you have 40% "coinsurance", i.e., you pay 40% of the bill.

Which is four times the total amount that would have been paid under the old plan, right?

And it seems that the ACPA's fine print somehow repealed long-standing laws against kickbacks... anyone wondering what's going to happen?  Anyone?

Nobody from either party seems to be questioning what things ought to cost, as, e.g., Tom McClintock did with regard to education budgets a few years back.  Well, his work was widely ignored, so perhaps there's no point.

Just for kicks, though, let's make some wild assumptions and try to get a handle on what a routine doctor visit ought to cost.

Let's see, now.  We've got one high-skill worker and one medium-skill worker, each with continuing-education requirements.  Call the annual cost of employment, say, $200K and $125K respectively.

We've got an examining room.  Basically a broom closet, in a building with a receptionist.  Call it 100 square feet at $10/sq ft/month, so $12K/year.

We've got some moderately-specialized equipment, with useful lifetimes from 3 years to 25 years.  Allow $50K/year depreciation for the lot.

This comes to $387K/year.  Call it $400K.

If we assume 2000 working hours/year for doctor, nurse, room, and equipment, this gives us $200/hour.

Since routine doctor visits are scheduled in quarter-hour chunks, one quarter-hour visit ought to cost about $50.

Eternal Emperor's list price for an office visit this year is $331, whereof 40% is $132.40.

So, by my BOTE calculation, they're only overbilling (for a routine visit) by a bit over a factor of six; assuming the price doesn't change next year (yeah, right), the Bronze Plan $60 copay for the first three visits should actually be the entire payment, including profit, while the 40% coinsurance after that is about 2.6 times what a doctor visit would cost if we just burned down the whole damn third-party payer system and paid cash for routine health care at free-market prices.

And that, kids, is why, in the Great Recession and with people losing their jobs and their employer-provided health plans left and right, it was necessary to pass this monstrosity of lobbyist-written legislation to force everyone back into The System.  Because otherwise we'd be seeing spontaneous, free-market reform, and the masses might realize that they didn't need The System, and hadn't all along.

Uniform national policies

The thing about them is... they're often appropriate for one particular situation, but are applied over many, wildly different, situations.

Consider, for example, the new particulate-emissions standard for wood-burning stoves.  EPA boosters proclaim the negative externalities of wood smoke, and how the smoke from your stove harms your neighbors, yadda yadda.

But!  Consider the population density of the target market for wood stoves.  Yeah, they might be used by prosperous people in subdivisions, at 3 households/acre, in which case the smoke definitely affects the neighbors, and it's not like the users are depending on the things to avoid freezing to death.

Then again, they're very often used by dirt-poor people in totally-off-the-grid situations, where there might be 0.001 households/acre, so the neighbors are far enough away that any risk or botherment from stove smoke is far below the noise floor, and there may be no other heat available.

Central decision-making is a very blunt instrument indeed, which is one reason we used to have this thing called the Tenth Amendment, back before it was repealed in...

...wait...

...you say it wasn't repealed?  So what happened to it?

Corpsicle-backed securities

Been reading Cryoburn; a bit over a third of the way through now.

I keep having the feeling there's some sort of subtle allegory hidden in that book.  Maybe even a whole swamp-full of allegories.

Update: I must not go to the right trade shows.  I occasionally get, e.g., a nifty MCU development board in my schwag bag, but I've never been to a show where anyone was handing out genetically-engineered mini-sphinxes.  Nor even swamp dragons.

Anyway, a good read.  Now I'm partway through the one starring That-Idiot-Ivan.

HMO accounting

Apart from the bogus list prices for services... my HMO (whose name is not Eternal Emperor, but could be) has, as I may have noted before, rather wacky billing, handled in another state.

Well.

There's some disagreement about what a "payment due by" date actually means.  For payments to the government, it means postmarked-by.  For credit-card companies, it's in-our-incoming-mailbox-by (which gets weird when the due date is on, e.g., a Sunday).

For Eternal Emperor, it appears to be check-received-and-processed-by, plus notice-of-payment-delivered-to-another-office-by-Sneakernet.

Because, see, I had a bill due last month.  I paid it last month, mailing payment in plenty of time to arrive by the listed due date.  Now, as I catch up on the past week, I'm looking at a past-due notice.

It's dated October 27th.

I'm also looking at my bank account.

My check was processed on October 24th.

They sent me a past-due notice three frickin' days after my check cleared.

This valley will self-destruct in...

...well, TBD; it's hard to predict these things with any accuracy.

Still, another alarming point to ponder:

A few years ago, my friend and occasional colleague Boris was sent off to India on a consulting contract, to work with a product-development team in some place that was supposed to be India's Answer to Silicon Valley.

From the tales he came back with, the upstart region had all the obvious necessities: first-rate universities and technical schools, bright young graduates of same, access to capital... just the stuff, right?

Except that: Silicon Valley (as was) grew up over the course of several decades, and had three generations of engineers active.  The overseas imitations, being new creations, had only the younger generation, and lacked the graybeards who'd seen all the mistakes (and made most of them themselves) and could avoid making the usual mistakes this time around.  Hence, the complex products designed by the teams of newly-minted engineers were pretty much doomed.

Given this (and this was about a decade ago), Silicon Valley ought to retain its advantage in the world for another generation - call it two or three more decades - just on the basis of having the graybeards around, which those other high-tech centers lacked.

Alas, the situation is changing.  The point was brought home to me at a social gathering this week, when someone noted that all the new tech jobs in the Valley are for twentysomethings who work 12-hour days for relatively low pay.  The graybeards, unless already well ensconced in stable companies, are finding themselves unemployable and wandering off in search of greener pastures (literally, in some cases).

And so the local advantage evaporates, and the Valley becomes just another international urban center filled with bright, overworked youngsters who lack the depth of experience to develop complex products and bring them to market.

Er, wait...

So there's this newly-discovered paleo-monotreme thingy.  Seems it was, back in the day, a platypus with nasty sharp pointy teeth.

Part of its name (Obdurodon tharalkooschild) is explained thus:

The second part of the name comes from an Indigenous Australian creation myth about the origin of the platypus. According to the story, in the Dreamtime, Tharalkoo was a headstrong female duck who disobeyed her parents' warnings not to swim downriver where Bigoon the water-rat could catch her...

Wait.  This is an ancient myth?

I are confoozed.  How long have there been rodents in Australia, anyway?

Update: Duh.  Seems Australia does have indigenous Muridae, including this critter.

Wait, haven't I seen this movie before?

Seems there's an epidemic of counterfeit drugs worldwide, including the U.S.

Very elaborate counterfeits, in some cases.

'Course, ya gotta be wary of the statistics, given that "counterfeit drugs" covers everything from "the factory ran off an extra batch of the product for distribution outside authorized channels" to "random floor sweepings packed in capsules."

Anyway, this springs immediately to mind.  And this.

Amazon strikes again

I just spent  the better part of an hour running around drugstores in search of a Deal on a Waterpik.

Now, a Waterpik (or, generically, a "water flosser" as it turns out they're called) had been on my oughtta-have list since the mid-1990s, mainly for cleaning chips out of tapped holes, and other such fiddly little machine-shop chores.  I'd just never gotten around to buying one.

Now I find myself facing the task of cleaning the support-material residue off a buncha 3D-printed parts with small fiddly crevices.  Such information as I can find on the material suggests that water is appropriate for the cleaning task, but immersion in warm water in the ultrasonerator hadn't seemed to do the trick.  Scraping with a scalpel and/or a dental pick, followed by wet swabbing, kinda-sorta works.

So, a Waterpik.  Comes from a drugstore, right?

Well... there's the cordless model, which might or might not be suitable for my purposes, for $40 or so, and the Ultra, which looks like just the ticket, for $60 or a little over.  Hmmm....

Heck with it.  I don't really need the thing today, so head home and check Amazon.

Waterpik Ultra, $45.  With Prime, so it'll be here Thursday.

And there are reviews.  And several competing items, with reviews of those.  The Ultra costs just a tad more than the competition, gets somewhat better reviews, and can deliver much higher pressure, so it sounds like the right thing to add to my workshop.

Update: Promised delivery was sometime Thursday.  When I got home from walkies at 0930 on Wednesday, the Waterpik was on my doorstep.  Service!

Penny for the Guy?

Remember, remember:

Getting elected to Parliament and voting to trim the Royal Budget is exactly the same as plotting to blow up Parliament with gunpowder and institute a Papist theocracy, and Ted Cruz should be hanged, drawn, and quartered*.

 

And it's election day here in Sunnyvale... which has always (in the couple of decades I've lived here) been a low-key thing... until just recently.  The influx of Great Gleaming Office Towers and Great Big Boxes in the Flatlands** to house the (still largely hypothetical) hordes of new cubicle dwellers has brought big-money big-city politics and tribal warfare.  In the space of a few years, elections have gone from "Ho-hum, a few of our fellow-citizens have agreed to stand for low-prestige local public office" to "ZOMG, glossy flyers and endorsements!  Which of these bastards are endorsed by the permanent ruling class, so I can vote for the other bastards?"

(It's interesting to note that the glossy-flyer candidates are all endorsed by the public-employee unions, the Sierra Club, and the local Republican Party.  So... we've got two candidates per seat.  The Well-Funded Establishment Demopublican, and the Other Bastard.  Decisions, decisions.  (Actually, one seat had a third candidate, but he didn't even bother submitting a candidate statement.))

 

* Unlike troops, politicians may be quartered in peacetime.

** Great big boxes made of pre-stressed concrete***.  Great big  boxes in the flatlands, great big boxes all the same.  There's a tan one, and a tan one, and a tan one, and a tan one, and they're all made out of pre-stressed concrete and they all look just the same.

*** Perhaps not, but the actual construction material probably scans even worse.

Guess what else is going away?

Obamacare doesn't affect those over 65, right?  I mean, they've got Medicare and all, so there's no such thing as being "uninsured," or having "substandard" coverage, surely?

BZZZZT!

My parents have fancy, high-end Medicare supplement (or whatever they're called) plans.  My mother has one from HealthNet, which basically pays for everything Medicare doesn't, no questions asked.

It's no longer available, as of 01 Jan 2014.

What, Medicare-supplement plans need to include maternity care and pediatric dentistry now?

For the moment, she can be added to my father's retirement Medicare-supplement plan... which is employer-based.  Will the same thing happen to it in a year?

WTF??????

I'm sorry, perhaps the title is unclear.  Allow me to restate it, in the largest available font:

WTF??????

I refer, of course, to just about everything going on these days this item in the WaPo, and in particular to the test mentioned, whereto a PDF is linked from the article (for those too lazy to find the link, it's here).

Go on.  Look over that test.  If your reaction is anything other than

WTF??????

I can only surmise that you hold an advanced degree in a subject that doesn't involve math in any way*.

Apparently, just for the purpose of the early-grades Core Curriculum, there's been a proliferation of friendly-non-mathy-sounding terms, such as "number sentence" and "subtraction story."  Oh, and "Use cubes to solve**."

I can see, offhand, just three problems with such terminology:

1. They're nonstandard, and will be of no use later on.
2. It's not at all clear what these terms are supposed to mean.
3. They add unnecessary complexity to the problem at hand.

I can see how these might be considered advantages in some regards.

For example, it greatly reduces the advantage of choosing one's parents to include STEM types, as no one with a STEM background will be able to make heads or tails of the new terminology.  This makes it all fairer, right?

Also, as with nonstandard file formats, it promotes vendor lock-in.  Which is good, right?  Like standardizing on Microsoft Word, or nonportable Bronze-Silver-Gold health plans?

Not clear, from the information presented, how much of this is really due to Common Core per se, and how much is test-and-curriculum-vendor interpretation... but that test and the teaching materials which must be behind it were clearly created by a team of imbeciles.

 

* Nor communication.  Nor any skills amenable to objective evaluation.

** Actually, I can think of a couple of things that could mean, in context.  First, it could mean "Use little cubical tokens to represent the items in the problem," and, second, it could mean "Roll the dice to choose an answer."

Need a safety cover...

...on this computer's reset button.  Probably on the server's, too.

Huckleberry was rolling around on the floor and somehow managed to hit RESET.

Unlike the OVERLOAD button in diplomacy, the RESET button on a computer is generally not considered a good thing to press without careful review of the situation.

Oh, well... the machine was overdue for a reboot (so's the server; its been pestering me for months to reboot it to complete an update), and I don't appear to have lost any of my work.

Glucose.

I snuck a couple of Fun-Size Snickers Bars yesterday... which turned out to be rather more sugar than I can handle at the moment.  Ick.

After an egg-and-sausage breakfast and some exercise, I'm more or less back to normal.

Seems not everyone is, though.

In the little time I was on the highway coming back from morning walkies, I saw an alarming amount of aggressive, angry, oblivious, or just-plain-crazy driving.

Sugar overdose?  Party hangover?  Christmas-shopping-season madness?

Whatever.  Not a good morning for being on the roads, regardless.