Month: September 2009

Four Rejected Palin Book Titles

First: 87 Ways to Satisfy Sarkozy in the Sack (and Keep Him Begging for More).
Second: Palin’s Digest: Recent Publications Summarized in 400 pages. (Yes, All of Them.)
Third: Annular Bragg Resonators: Beyond the Limits of Total Internal Reflection
Fourth: Bridge to Somewhere: 14 Fabulous Days with the McCain Campaign

Invisible Hand

Ezra Klein puts this simple concept as well as I’ve yet seen:

Liberals don’t think that Congress will pass a bill outlawing private insurance. They don’t think the Supreme Court will render a decision naming WellPoint “cruel and unusual.” Rather, they think the market will, well, work: The public option will provide better service at better prices and people will choose it. Or, conversely, that the competition will better the private insurance industry and that people won’t need to choose it.

But that confidence rests on a very simple premise: The public sector does a better job providing health-care coverage than the private sector. If that proves untrue – and I would imagine most every conservative would confidently assume that that’s untrue – the plan will fail. The public option will not provide better coverage at better prices, and so it will not be chosen, and it will languish. Indeed, if it languishes, it will lack customers and thus lack bargaining power and economies of scale, and get worse even as the private insurers get better. In that scenario, the public option not only fails, but it discredits single-payer entirely.

The liberals are willing to bet that they’re right. It’s not a sneaky strategy: It’s an up-front wager. The conservatives are not, however, willing to bet that they’re wrong. They’re willing to say the public option will fail, but not give consumers the chance to decide that for themselves.

If we had a working government, maybe we’d get to try things, work for good policy, and ultimately get to the best outcome for the American people, whatever that might be. Why are the conservatives in this argument so afraid of The Market? What don’t they want us to find out?

Common Experience

See if this rings a bell with regard to your typical visit to the doctor’s office:

A [patient] walked in and was generally walked right back into a physician’s office. They get good care. They are not rushed. They are examined thoroughly

[Patients] receive top-notch, wait-free care, and money is largely no object. [Patients] pay a flat annual fee of $503, and it covers all expenses – without submitting claim forms to their insurer. Despite soaring costs throughout the health care system, prices have been largely stagnant in [this practice] for 17 years.

Man, America really does have the best possible healthcare system in the world. How could that possibly be improved upon? Plus, everybody gets a choice of 10 plans with nationwide coverage networks. Pretty fantastic, eh? Oh, wait, that’s not your experience? Oh, right, that’s the in-house health clinic that members of Congress provide for themselves. Worth noting that many who don’t even pay the paltry $503 fee still take advantage of the care.

Is it any wonder we can’t get reform passed?

Resolved: All healthcare benefits for sitting members of Congress shall be sunset effective December 31, 2009. Furthermore, all members of Congress shall be ineligible for Medicare or any other government supplied benefits for themselves or their families during their term of elected (or appointed) service beyond the normal provisions for their salary.

It’s the only way to get an honest attempt at reform.

Why not 100 votes?

Ben Nelson, (D) of Fucktardia, has lots of fascinating thoughts to share on the healthcare fight:

Voters should be able to evaluate “what’s been done and what remains to be done” before they go to the polls, Nelson said.

“Public debate can occur in the context of an election,” he added.

So, then, the outcome of the 2008 elections, the one held less than a year ago, in which healthcare was a central, if not very nearly THE CENTRAL issue, which came up in debates at the primary and national level…those elections: not to be counted. There should be several more elections, and if healthcare proponents can win each in a landslide: then and only then we can begin to consider taking up real reform.

But stopping with that sort of vaguely insane talk isn’t enough. Not for Ben Nelson:

But Nelson said 60 votes isn’t enough. The Nebraska Democrat said he’d only feel comfortable voting for a bill that he knows can get at least 65 votes.

“I think anything less than that would challenge its legitimacy,” he said.

Why stop there? Why settle for some interim position? The only possible outcome here is full commitment: that’s it, unanimous vote. Anything else would be unacceptable. And, presumably, after a unanimous vote and a Presidential signature, you’d need to let the states decide, unanimously, whether or not to implement. Why, it all makes perfect sense. It’s the only way for it to be legitimate.

[The public option is a] major step toward universal health care coverage.”
With 40 grandchildren of his own, he said, he does not want the country to go in that direction.

–Senator Jim Bunning ®  wondering why, when it comes to healthcare, someone won’t please think of the children

Page-tearing

Princeton has been running a Kindle-DX trial, in which several classes were selected, and the students in those classes were issued a Kindle-DX pre-loaded with the reading material (and whatnot) associated with that class. The article contains both the predictable and the WTF-able.

The predictable: Kindle is different than a book. It doesn’t have page numbers, for instance. Look at this magnamity in action:

[the professor] has permitted his students to use location numbers in their written work for the course

Wowie, that’s big of him. When future historians revisit “India: A Land of Contrasts” from this class’ 2009 collected output they will, however, face some cross-referencing challenges. This does, though, get at some fundamental usability issues with Kindle. The book has been reformatted and (obviously) needs to be repaginated (and actually repaginates on the fly if you visit an endnote and then return, for instance). I get that. But it would be a minor thing for Amazon to add a “Give me the page number from edition X” feature; you could presumably even generate page references from several editions if you wanted to. Seriously. Why isn’t that already there?

You can’t really mark up a Kindle. You can “fold” pages down and create a bookmark; you can (at least on the “real” Kindle, not the iPhone app) highlight text, search text, add notes, and do other stuff along those lines. But, without recourse to a straightforward touch-based interface, students report consternation in that many of these markup features are either lacking or extremely inconvenient:

“It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

[-and-]

the annotation software was “useful but not as easy or ‘organic’ feeling as taking notes on paper.”

[-and-]

“A huge benefit to the Kindle is having large quantities of reading available at your fingertips and not having to print and lug around books and articles,” she said. “Some disadvantages are the necessity to charge the Kindle and the impossibility of ‘flipping through’ a book.”

The underlying theme of these comments leads us inevitably to the WTF-able (emphasis added):

Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs

Indeed, I think most students learn by tearing up the pages in a book. How else am I supposed to undermine the progress of my classmates? I ask you, how am I supposed to fuck them over on a Kindle? Water? Sharp objects?

As somebody who recently read Infinite Jest on the iPhone Kindle app, I feel some of this pain. Searching is actually non-existent on the iPhone version, so count your lucky stars you Kindle-DX users. Conventional page numbers are not there in any version of the device. But you can flag portions really easily. Too easily for my tastes, actually; I flagged pages by accident on several occasions. You can jump around reasonably easily, and the numerous endnotes were a dream; no using two bookmarks and flipping back and forth, finding the entry in inevitably tiny text…Kindle handles it all for you, even though it somewhat disconcertingly (at first, anyway) returns you to the space after the endnote, not to the page-view you had previously. With DFW, the endnotes are often quite, uh, lengthy, and some re-contextualizing to where you were is often a must, thus requiring a page-back, page-forward move to get back into the previous format of the page. But, with one or two exceptions, the Kindle performed perfectly in navigating multi-nested notes and always sorting out where to go to after. Seriously, read (and lug around) the annotated War and Peace and then the Kindle Infinite Jest. See which endnote approach you prefer. And, of course, there’s the constant availability and no-light readability.People never seem to mention those with “real” Kindles. Oh, wait, it doesn’t have a built in light-source. And it’s a separate, unitasking gadget to lug around, and so not really ubiquitous in the sense of something you have with you all the time, no matter what. Is it different: to be sure. Is it in many ways better: without a doubt.

So, does that mean this whole e-Book idea is kaput? I seriously doubt it. Everything they specifically complain about in the article comes down to interface, design, and performance. A more capable reader, some kind of tablet, let’s say, coming from a company with legendary interface success, a company familiar with portable computing and always-available networking, a company that can manage a large internet-attached “store” of some kind, such that copyrights can be honored, and that furthermore could put applications, or “Apps” into circulation such that this tablet would be useful for many tasks beyond just book reading and tip-calculation. Then add in a pre-indoctrinated user-base. Why, that company would really be onto something. Too bad nobody is positioned like that.

MM$

I never quite got why iPhone users were so hell-bent for MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). Just send an email, for chrissakes. More characters, send pictures or whatever else you want (though, on an iPhone, the flexibility to send anything as an attachment is admittedly more limited than at a desktop). While you presumably add a bit more potential latency into the transaction, you’re not guaranteed instant delivery on a text anyway. Likewise, if you’re that concerned, email to a text gateway (though, with AT&T, that just about guarantees a many-hour holding time for said message). Jeff Carlson hits the nail on the head in this TidBITS article:

While MMS has many of the same properties as and more limitations than a rich, HTML email message, there’s less friction in using MMS. This is intentional, as MMS is a huge boon for carriers in terms of profit margins, which are very high. A 1 MB email message containing several photos would cost nothing to send on an iPhone (included in the flat-rate data plan), whereas a 100 KB MMS message requires a messaging subscription plan or incurs the $0.30 fee without. You can see which the carriers would prefer.

MMS seems utterly designed to:

a) make money for the carriers

2) shoe-horn something more akin to email onto older, crappier phones

-and-

iii) make money for the carriers

What’s the rumpus, iPhone owners? I understand the belly-aching over tethering. But MMS? Who cares. It will only serve to degrade an already tottering network. Stick it to The Man. Send an email.

Explain that to me

Barack Obama reports, you decide:

“I was up at the G20 – just a little aside – I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them,” the president said. “One of the leaders – I won’t mention who it was – he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind.

"He says, ‘Barack, explain to me this health care debate.’

"He says, ‘We don’t understand it. You’re trying to make sure everybody has health care and they’re putting a Hitler mustache on you – I don’t – that doesn’t make sense to me. Explain that to me.’”

via Jack Tapper