NevDull’s Take On Things

Universal health maintenance a responsibility?

I have to admit that I’ve fallen out of touch with the state of the healthcare debate going on in Congress, and the votes. I found it so difficult to get past rhetoric and to facts, that it feels like I’ve been left entirely out of the debate. I’d love to discuss the merits, but it seems that everyone’s so set on passage or failure that discussion is only to determine who you feel sorrier for.

Plenty of the people I’ve spoken to think that healthcare is a human right. None have been able to answer my question about the extent of the obligation. Edge cases usually open for debate might be abortion or cosmetic surgery, and things like growth hormone treatments for kids who are destined to be short.

If healthcare is a universal human right, and I’m leaning towards thinking that it’s not, to what extent? I’ll forego the cases I mentioned above, and consider them certainly subordinate in terms of influencing my beliefs. I’m open to discussing first-aid and community-clinic level healthcare. Fell off your bike and broke your arm? Got a cold? Have a more dire symptom which may be something eminently treatable? I could buy into treating those as something considered to be a right.

If you need a triple bypass, it’s probably the consequence of lifestyle choices. If it’s your right to get a $50,000 operation, wasn’t it your responsibility to society to make good lifestyle choices? You have a right to both eat Big Macs and get someone else to pay for your choices?

Calling them “death panels” is a great way to demonize people who decide where the limits are, but someone’s got to make the decision. Rights must be balanced in some ways with responsibilities. There are limited resources available for healthcare. Even if the limit is now humongous, there’s only so much to go around. We can only pay with the money we have, and if healthcare becomes 100% of the economy, then nobody’s doing anything else.

If not, and there are a million people with something for which there’s a million dollar cure, we’ve got to spend a trillion dollars. What money will be left over for antibiotics when someone gets the measles because his neighbor refused to have his kids vaccinated?

If money gets in the way of the discussion, let’s instead consider that a cure for breast cancer can be made from the bark of a particular tree found only in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez decides to seize control of these trees and holds them “hostage”. Are we obliged to go to war to kidnap the trees for humanity’s sake? Even if there’s only 1, it’s 10,000 years old, doesn’t seed, and might die if cuttings are taken, or if we might foolishly attempt to relocate the entire thing? If we do try, and the tree dies during its extraordinary rendition, has someone committed a crime against humanity? If so, what if it can only cure one person?

There are obviously limits.

All I’m asking for is a discussion about what reasonable limits might be, and we can at least find out if there’s a place to compromise. After all, nobody wants even the best healthcare to be free if the system will collapse upon itself.

Got any ideas for a reasonable starting point?

Add comment December 11th, 2009

If a picture’s worth a thousand words…

…what’s a speculative simulation video worth?

This video from Youtube shows a Chinese television stations reports of the goings-on at Tiger Wood’s last week, including an animated simulation to illustrate what may have happened.

I haven’t gelled all of my thoughts on the matter. I have to assume that the people assembling speculation for a sensational news report will fail to entirely correct for or convey the existence of a bias in the facts and theories as reported. How much worse does it become when people feel like they’ve witnessed the event because they watched the simulation?

I don’t think that it matters much either way relative to this event, but maybe it’s time to consider the impact should this become commonplace.

1 comment December 2nd, 2009

I took the plunge, may the cloud be with me

I finally decided to move my mail to Google.

The domain with my primary e-mail address has been using Dreamhost’s POP service for a few years now, and while I can’t really complain too much about availability / downtime, POP just hasn’t been cutting it for me for quite a while.

Occasionally, Outlook farts and redownloads my mail, causing me to have duplicate mails. Sometimes repeatedly in rapid succession. Sometimes I’ve cleaned it up, others not. This behavior led me to keep a minimal number of messages on the server. Not none, but I think I had outlook set to only keep a day or two’s worth. This made the horrible Squirrelmail UI even less useful, since webmail only had a few days of stuff to play with, and even that still contained quite a bit of spam.

Dreamhost will run mail through an anti-spam filter and quarantine it, sending a junk mail report on occasion — but to reclaim false positives, it’s a pain in the rear through a crappy web interface with a lot of checkboxes. If any Dreamhost employees happen upon this — get yourselves a Web 2.0 drag and drop UI with autosave. Nothing like diligently checking boxes then accidently navigating away from the page or something and losing everything…

Add to that recent issues I’ve had with connectivity back into my main desktop, with my wonderful PSTs… I’ve even named one of them mylife.pst — I’ve learned over the years that the most vital thing to get onto a new build as I upgrade is my PSTs. When a hard drive starts to go bad, it’s the PSTs I make sure I have backups of. But I digress… since my mail has lived primarily on a single Windows PC, when I want to get to the mail that “fell off” my iPhone and I’m not at my home office desk, RDP is the only real option. When that’s not possible for any of a host of reasons, my data’s dead to me.

I finally took the plunge and signed up for Google Apps Standard and used the Google Email Uploader to set my beloved email on angels’ wings and watched it flutter into the cloud.

It took a while to get everything set up — Dreamhost made it easy to switch to using Google Apps, having the right template in place to make the DNS changes in one easy step. I made the switch and scrambled to get myself to normal before the hour got too late (which it did a few nights this week, partly due to this switch), concerned with figuring out which e-mail addresses I’d had on the domain. Dreamhost made it so easy to switch to Google, I did it before copying and pasting the old config somewhere for safekeeping. With it being non-obvious how to set up forwarding-only addresses, I started to create an account for each address I’d used. Realizing that Google Apps lets you add a catch-all, I knew I had my insurance, and again went looking for how to have aliases.

I’m happy to say that I found them. Logged into the Google Apps control panel as an administrator, Manage This Domain -> Users and Groups [Users tab] -> click on the user account for which you’re adding the aliases. The feature is called Nicknames. You have to add them one at a time, but it’s just what I was looking for.

Everything’s finally uploaded. I added Google Sync, to add ActiveSync compatibility (it’s in the control panel under Service Settings-> Mobile) and configured my iPhone to use it for push mail, calendar sync, and contact sync. I’m still debating just using the webmail interface (with offline enabled) or Outlook as my primary access method to my mail on my main desktop — I thought I’d quit Outlook and re-examine if I see withdrawal symptoms.

Totally off-topic: My main PC is named Shaq – it’s big, black and powerful – full tower case, water cooling, 4 cores @ 3.2GHz, 8GB of RAM, about 8TB of storage. When I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, there was a guy across the hall named Martin with a NextCube he’d named clewis, short for Carl Lewis, since it was small, black, and fast. It’s funny how I’ve carried that with me and used it 16 years later. Props Martin!

Add comment November 4th, 2009

Want Nick Arrojo’s Advice?

1 comment May 3rd, 2009

Sustaining the Unsustainable – Student Loan Debt

When you take some time to think about the mortgage crisis that’s helped turn our markets to mud, it seems to come down to overpaying for things without a well-reasoned calculation of risk.

Until about a month ago, I lived in Greenwich Village in New York, and walked by New York University’s buildings each day. According to the College Board, the costs for a student who lives on campus total $51,982 a year.

Assuming no increase in costs, that’s $207,928 for an undergraduate degree.

Somehow, they report that the average indebtedness at graduation is $33,637. I presume that they’re referring to the debt load that the student carries. What won’t show up in that figure is the amount of home equity borrowed against by parents to pay the expected family contribution.

In any event, someone’s coming up with $200k. There are many reasons why self-selection would dictate that the median household income of students at NYU would be higher than the $50,233 American average, but even if the average is twice that, after taxes and living expenses for the rest of the family, they’re not coming up with $52k out of pocket, unless they’ve been extraordinarily diligent in saving.

While undoubtedly there are a number of students who will work at high-paying jobs coming right out of school, most of their classmates won’t. Parents won’t always make rational decisions, putting something like the pride of having a child at Princeton above economic sense. If they’ve got the money, it’s none of my concern. If they don’t… who bears the consequences?

Imagine graduating college with $100,000 in debt, at 21 years of age. Assume that the graduate may have a child 10 years later. If a parent’s education isn’t paid off by the birth of his child, when will the cycle end? That’s $833 per month, every month, for 10 years, before considering interest. Twice that for a couple.

How do we get some sanity here?

Making more money available isn’t the answer. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to send everyone to college. Maybe we should treat education loans more like standard unsecured credit, or make education loan decisions based upon likely ability to repay given not just credit history, but school transcripts and historical economic success of similar loan applicants.

Of course, that idea dies an early death at the hands of those who think it unfair to the economically disadvantaged. So… what do we do? And how do we not screw ourselves with subprime education lending?

Are the people losing their houses now paying their student loans? Are they going to be any time soon?

1 comment May 3rd, 2009