1. We want every American to be have insurance (e.g. you shouldn’t have to pay for your own healthcare if you can’t afford it)
2. We think the cost of healthcare is too high

The major proponents of change would also have you believe that America has a horrible healthcare system because we have higher incidence of newborn fatalities and a lower life expectancy than other nations.  They say these are signals of a failed healthcare system.

But are they?  I’ve argued before, and I’ll argue again, that the cause of poor health in America has nothing to do with our healthcare system.  When you need critical care, there is no place better than America to get it.  America also is the runaway leader in healthcare research and generates more Nobel prize winners in Medicine than any other country.

So why do we die early?  Jamie Oliver, winner of this year’s TED Prize tells you why.  And the cost of the fix is cheap, and has nothing to do with our healthcare system.  The problem is us.  Changing insurance won’t make us live longer.  He’s a great speaker, I hope you’ll watch.

Obama seems to think the ruling was wrong, and attacked the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address.  Lawrence Lessig wrote a nice article about our general lack of trust in congress, spurred by lobbyists and corruption.  He recommends the Fair Elections Now Act, which is good, but won’t prevent the corruption we have today.

Lessig follows the obvious answer – which is more spending caps and more legislation.  And while these are good ideas, they won’t work, because they don’t address real problem:

The government distributes too much money.

Why has the amount of money spent on lobbyists more than doubled in the last 10 years?  Because our government is expanding.  When we give money to the Federal Government to spend, special interests line up to assist with the distribution of those dollars.  If we just don’t let the Feds get the money in the first place, the lobbyists will disappear.   But as long as the money is there, the lobbyists will remain.

On the surface, it seems like contribution caps should be enough.  But the reality is that there are just too many loopholes.  Although the limits are allegedly $5,000 per candidate per year, it doesn’t take much browsing through OpenSecrets.org to discover that individuals, PACs and corporations are all able to openly donate much more (example1, example2, example3).  Unfortunately, legislation to close these doors is difficult at best, and impossible due to freedom of speech at worst.  There are so many back-door mechanisms to donate money (e.g. “hey, I’ll buy you a ticket to come talk here in San Francisco”, or “I can run a TV show about you”, or “I can write an article for you in my paper about how bad your opponent is”), that it just isn’t realistic to expect we can possibly close them all.

Special interest groups have figured this out.  They’re not just buying a few candidates, they’re now buying all of them.  Consider AT&T, for example, who donated $4.5M to candidates last year.  If you believed that the $5,000 per candidate contribution limit applied, that would mean they would donate to ~900 candidates.  In actuality, they donated to ~430.  And since there are only ~500 Congressmen,  that means they donated to most of them!  And AT&T is not alone.  The National Association of Realtors, and practically every union are doing exactly the same thing:  buying “access” to more than half of Congress.

Once we realize that centralizing our spending through the Federal Government is the problem, two simple solutions emerge:

1. We need to give the government less money to spend.
2. When we do give money to the government, we should federate it through states and local agencies as much as possible.  Don’t leave decision making power in Washington, where a small number of politicians can be influenced.

This realization also highlights why Obama’s entire strategy leads to more corruption, not less. Obama spent over $700B last year in “stimulus”.  Did he really believe that he could distribute such a massive amount of spending without calling out the lobbyists in droves?  Does it really surprise him that when he announced that he wanted a federal takeover of federal student loans that Sallie Mae would kick up it’s lobbying to the tune of $8M?

The unfairness and corruption is caused by the lobbyists and campaign contributions, that is true.  But they are not the root cause, and they are impossible to stop without violating our own liberties (hence the Supreme Court ruling).  When all money flows through a small funnel in Washington, corruption increases.  Take the money back, federate our spending across the states and local governments, reduce spending and reduce taxation, and the corruption will decrease.

What does that mean?  It usually means that in order to trump up the savings benefit, the politician multiplied the annual savings by 10.  Or they did inflation adjustment, or added debt interest, or other complex additives to make the savings look bigger than it is.  At the end of the day, it is a bogus number.

I just received a letter From Senator Diane Feinstein claiming a bill will save “$176 billion from 2014 to 2023”.  What that really means is an annual savings of roughly ~$17.6B.  That’s nice, but when put in perspective to the $3.6T spending package being proposed for 2011, it’s a mere half of one percent of spending.  And she calls this reform.

It’s not just the democrats doing this – all of them seem to use this kind of lying mathematics in order to fool their constituents.  It’s dishonest at worst and deceptive at best.

Intuit did a great thing this year – they simply sent out the install CD in the mail without my ever purchasing it (Intuit learns from AOL)!  I put it into my computer and almost installed.  But when I saw the price for TurboTax Deluxe 2009 Fed + State was $59.95, that seemed a little high.  So I decided to look online, and it was a good thing I did!

I was pleasantly surprised to find Amazon carrying the exact same product (TurboTax Deluxe 2009 Federal + State) for only $46.54, with an electronic download.  That’s a quick $13 savings if I just install from the net instead of the CD they sent me.  I almost bought that too…

But then I thought I should check H&R Block’s TaxCut price.  I’ve used TaxCut before and find it nearly identical to TurboTax.  The H&R Block website sells TaxCut for a little less than TurboTax, at $44.95.  That’s not enough cheaper than Amazon to be significant.  So, I decided to check Amazon again.

And wow! TaxCut Deluxe (Federal + State + eFile) is selling for only $23.75 if you download online!  Clearly this is a winner – less than half the cost of Intuit TurboTax.

As I wrote this, I bought and installed TaxCut.  So far, so good.

Cliff notes:

1. It has been known that TCP’s slow start adversely effects performance in high-latency, high bandwidth networks for years.
2. Increasing cwnd (reducing slow start) has been slow through standards due to concerns about internet collapse.
3. But web servers and browsers have already worked around TCP’s slow start by pummeling the net with excessive connections – effectively making slow start irrelevant.
4. If slow start has already been worked around, and the internet has not collapsed, it is time to seriously look at changing how slow start works so that we don’t have to open 30 connections in order to have a low-latency transaction.

Feedback is welcome!

The install was pretty simple from the DVD; it kept asking me questions, and I answered them quickly, and after about 5 minutes, the entire process was complete.  Because the process was so fast, that I thought I had done something wrong (perhaps I had been bit by the cluky ANSI installation interface), so I installed again.  But again, it was a quick process and only took 5 minutes and then it returned to the main install screen.  Puzzling.

After a minute of thinking, I decided to try to boot.  And it worked!

So the entire from-scratch install process only took 5 minutes!  I certainly didn’t expect any sluggish Microsoft-like install times, but 5 minutes was amazing.  I guess they needed a bigger “I’m done” screen so that idiots like me won’t have to install twice.

Interesting was reading about Scott Brown (highly publicized Senate race in Mass) and also where healthcare companies donate their money.  You might be surprised to know that it’s mostly going to Democrats right now, but I suspect that is due to their large majority population in congress.

For tech fans, reading about Microsoft’s PAC is also interesting.

Of course, if we really want to control our own government, we need to nix all political PACs and lobbyists.  Then OpenSecrets wouldn’t be such an interesting site.

The reason these “are you sure” dialogs exist is because of broken applications.  If applications just automatically saved your state and could restart with zero delay, you’d never need to see this dialog, because there would be no penalty to accidentally closing an application.

Fortunately, web applications are fixing this.  Because the web has so many errors, web applications are forced to auto-save all the time.  Also, unlike their desktop counterparts, web applications are much faster to restart.  They still need to be faster, of course, but they are an order of magnitude faster than their desktop equivalents already.

Instead there are countless online e-tailers that I can purchase everything I want from.  It hardly takes any effort at all.

I know it is just a matter of time before California (and other states) close the inter-state loophole, but until then – screw ‘em.

And when they do, they’ll just be fuelling to push online e-tailers off shore.  How long will it take before amazon.mx replaces amazon.com?  And you can’t tax that!  Ha!

His latest article calls out Video Professor as a scam, and I think he’s right on target again.  If you don’t put your prices on your website, you’re a scam.  Video Professor sucks.  Go Mike!

To answer the question, let’s look how States generate their electricity.  The Energy Information Administration has a nice summary table.

On average, ~50% of America’s electricity is generated from coal.  California’s largest source of electric power is natural gas, and generates only ~1.5% of its power from coal.  But, if you buy your electric car in Indiana, you’ll be trading your gasoline for electric power which is more than 90% generated from coal.

Now, I’m just doing fuzzy math, making simple assumptions based on some published statistics.  My numbers could be wrong (perhaps electric cars are charged at night, and the profile of energy sources at night is different than what is consumed today).  Maybe someone smart can correct me on that.

But on the surface, it doesn’t seem to me that switching from gas to electric will make our skies cleaner.  Why do many states and governments offer rebates to switch?

Others have noticed this problem too. 

In the video, IE9 is still quite a bit slower than Chrome.  But it is fantastically superior to IE8.

The great thing about this is that competition works.  Microsoft had the opportunity, but didn’t significantly improve their JS engine performance for the last 10 years.  It took Google Chrome, what Ballmer calls a “rounding error” to finally make Microsoft improve in this area.  In a few years, whether you pick IE or Chrome or Firefox as your browser, rest assured your browser is fast because of competition.

The House plan allows employers to chose:  either they can provide private insurance and pay nothing to the government plan, or they can simply pay 8% of payroll to the government and everyone gets the government plan.

Today, employers are already paying more than 8% of payroll for healthcare premiums.  In fact, small businesses are paying between 11% and 14% of payroll to health insurance premiums.  With medical costs rising, this figure is only going up.

So even if your employer doesn’t switch to the government plan now, they eventually will.  A reduction in wages by 6% can be achieved by switching your healthcare provider?  What board of directors *wouldn’t* switch?

Now you might, like Obama, believe that the health care insurers are making too much in profits, so the private insurers just need to reduce prices.   I’m sure they will try to compete with the new taxpayer-funded pricing.  Keep in mind, however, that while a cut from 14% of payroll to 8% of payroll is only a 6% savings for the company, that represents a 43% drop in revenues for the health insurer.  These companies will need to cut costs to reflect the new pricing; which roughly translates to a 43% drop in covered care.  Because of the reduced coverage, this will give employers all the more reason to switch the the simple, no-overhead plan – the government plan.  As more employers switch, more private insurers will go out of business.   It is just a matter of time.

Oh – and how did the government calculate the figure for an 8% payroll tax?  Nobody knows!  Should it be 9%?  7%?  Nobody knows!  It appears to be a number masterminded to drive Health Insurers out of business.

Obama is about taking away freedom and taking away choice.  Government healthcare does improve healthcare for 10% of Americans, but it makes healthcare worse for 90% of Americans.

I evaluate spending proposals by considering what long term value is being built.  The government can inject cash into the economy, but after the short term injection, will value remain in the economy which can benefit us for the long term?  Or is it just a short term spend?

Cars for Clunkers is a short term fix.  It adds cash to the economy for a short period, and allows Americans to continue consuming more goods than we probably need.   What happens to cars?  They get consumed – they get driven, used, and eventually (5-10 years later) get scrapped.  So when the government signs up to spend $5B on cars, they’ve injected a temporary cash boost to the auto-industry, and helped consumers get some “stuff”.  But in the end, Americans receive no long term value from this cash injection.  And when the government stops spending, the auto makers will need to layoff the workers they hired to accommodate the short term needs of the boost.

A better use of money is to build things of value.  If the government wants to create jobs, it should invest in building things.  Building schools, improving roads, and building national or local infrastructure builds long term value.  Unlike the car which will wear out in a few years and provide no value, building a school lasts for decades.  Not only do the citizens building and running the school benefit now, but the school is still usable by our children and grandchildren in the long term.

Tell your congressmen to vote no on any short-term cash injections.  All spending should build value.  If your senator can’t show long term value in their spending, it is not worth it.