Silicon Valley Redneck

Am I missing something here?

That incident with the two drunken Secret Service agents who drove into a barricade... yeah, you know the one.

Every single story I've read regarding that has said, in one way or another, that both of them were driving.

Were they in separate vehicles?  Do Secret Service cars have dual controls?  Was one sitting in the other's lap?  Were they both midgets, and driving Calvin-and-Hobbes style?

"Honesh', ossifer, nobody wuz drivin'.  We wuz all inna back, shingin'!"

"Selected a plan"

So here it is, coming up on the deadline for switching my Kaiser coverage to something Obamacare-compliant in time for Bealtaine....

I go to the kp.org site, which used to work fine with Iceweasel.  Mostly, it still does.  But!  The new stuff added to promote signing up for the new plans doesn't even think about working.

So, fire up Chromium, sign in to kp.org, and go to "shop for plans".  It promptly forgets that I was signed in.  Apparently there's a complete separation between existing customers and new customers.  And I need to choose a brand-new username.  Hey, look!  My existing one is available!  But I can't use my existing password, because it contains special characters, and some imbecile has decreed that passwords may not contain special characters.

So, I stumble through the fool application process; this being off-exchange and unsubsidized, at least I don't need to fill in detailed financial records.  Nor even smoker/nonsmoker...?

And: previous coverage, Kaiser, yes.  Fill in the magic number.  Coverage before that?  Only two options: "yes, and here are all the details" or "no".  No option for "yes, but that was 14 years ago, through a long-since-defunct employer, and I have no records nor recollection of what it was".

Then, Electronic Signature!  The awesome security feature of... type your name twice.  Because clearly no impostor can spell my name the same way twice... right?  But... shouldn't the test be three times?  If I say it three times it is true, and all that?

Finally: Apply!  Get summary page.  Print summary page.  Hyperlink sez: "Click to payment detail page".  Clicking hyperlink does nothing.  Middle-clicking hyperlink gets the previous page, in a new tab.  There's no smegging way to get to the page for entering a credit-card number!

And so I click on the hyperlink for "paper application" and it sends me a PDF... with all the fields freaking' blank.  It threw out all the information I'd filled in, and just sent me a blank form.

At this point, I presume I'm in the official statistics for "Signed up for Obamacare coverage!" despite having been given no option for actually paying the first month's premium.

Oh, and the "cheap" plans?  Bronze and lesser silver?  While the descriptions of coverage are complex and highly confusing, it looks to me like the coverage is absolute crap.  And it's not like they're actually cheap, either.  I went for top-silver, which is still cheaper than my old plan but doesn't look like out-of-pocket costs get too far out of hand.  And, since it's direct from Kaiser, I ass-u-me that it actually covers treatment at Kaiser facilities.

Update: Oh, great!  Now I'm trying to fill in the PDF form.  Previous coverage: Kaiser, dummy!  Dates of coverage: uhhh... I try to fill in the range, near as I can remember... and I get errors.  The PDF won't accept the things I'm trying to fill in.  Looks like it wants exactly one date, not in fact a range.  I leave it blank.  They've got my name and medical record number; let them figure it out.  Or, I guess, I can write in an explanation with a pen after I print it out.

Oh, and the field for credit card expiration date?  Calls for format "mm/yyyy"?  Expects a full date, mm/dd/yyyy.

Was any of this even alpha-tested?

Really, now: when it comes to forms, I make a pretty good Napoleon's Corporal, having a real knack for failing to grok which-of-several-possible-meanings is called for.  And I've seen, many times over the years, that forms are generally filled with ambiguities and just-plain-wrong questions.  But... did anyone, ever, try to fill out this PDF (clearly not), let alone run through the on-line application process?

I see tired people.

Once upon a time...

Back in the day, people lived by the Sun.  When the Daystar was high in the sky, there was bright, full-spectrum light.  When it was low on the horizon, the extra distance through the atmosphere filtered out the shorter wavelengths, leaving an orange glow.  When it was below the horizon, there was darkness, and it was time for diurnal species to sleep.

Then some bugger invented fire, and there was light through the night: flickery, yellow-orange light, heavy on the longer wavelengths and largely lacking in blue.

Eventually, Mr. Edison came along, and illuminated all our homes with his indecent incandescent electrical light-bulbs, which were kind of like fire only quite a bit hotter (so less blue-deficient) and not so flickery.

Along came the fluorescent lighting-tube, which harnessed a mercury-vapor lamp to produce blue and ultraviolet rays and a phosphor coating to transform those rays into a semblance of white light.  And colors looked kind of funny, because it was a mixture of a few discrete wavelengths instead of a continuous spectrum, but it saved on electricity.  And so the factories in which people labored during the day were uniformly lit by these large, efficient illuminatory devices, which had plenty of blue in the spectrum.

And so the people received the bright noonday spectrum of the factory lighting thoughout the day, before going home to their reddish incandescent lighting at home.

But now it has been decreed that the incandescent lighting must go, and all must light their homes by efficient methods: and the ones that are available are fluorescent, whether twisty tubes with mercury vapor or solid-state with a blue LED to pump the phosphor.  And they all have strong blue emissions.

Thus it shall come to pass that the people shall labor all the day in the paperwork factories under the fluorescent lights, and then return to their homes to try to relax under the fluorescent lights, and they shall spend their waking hours from the first to the last bathed in blue-rich light, and their not-waking hours shall furthermore be sleepless.

(Yes, "warm white" LEDs have a strong blue component, at around 450 nm.)

OK, this economic-recovery jobs number comes as a surprise.

Yeah, this is a lot bigger than I thought: electrical engineering jobs in the U.S. dropped over 10% last year.

Now, here's a weird thing.  Top EEs are still in much demand, around Silicon Valley and elsewhere.  But!  Talk to a recruiter who's trying to fill a position - for a short-term contract, with no benefits, but requiring highly specialized knowledge - and it seems that employers are very reluctant to pay an EE with 30 years experience the wages of a journeyman plumber, auto mechanic, or cheap lawyer.

Apparently "tech jobs" these days pay what a desperate new college grad will accept, and little more.

But we still have a dire shortage, and need to import more techies from overseas.

(Apparently the techies-from-overseas these days tend to be from wealthy families, so rather than working here for big bucks and sending money home, they're working for starvation wages and being subsidized by their families.  That's a huge change from a couple of decades ago.)