Are my eyes really blue?

Now things are getting interesting, with the news that Eric Schmidt is off the board at AAPL. Officially, it's because things like Chrome and Android and the forthcoming netbook OS are moving Google into competition with Apple, and Schmidt has to recuse himself from so much as a result that he can no longer be an effective board member. Unofficially, the FCC probe into what's happening with Google Voice on the iPhone is probably accelerating what was inevitable anyway.

First things first: nobody wants to separate carrier and service more than I do. We have a third-world mobile infrastructure in this country, and that's an insult to the third world, which usually has a much more robust system than the US has. Part of the reason is because we have no interoperability between carriers - for the average non-techie consumer, the only way you can change carriers and keep your existing phone is to go from T-Mobile to AT&T after spending enough time/money with T-Mob that they will unlock your phone. If you get an unlocked phone or are willing to unlock it, you can go the other direction as well. You could kind of sort of go between Sprint and Verizon, maybe, but you need their help and consent since they register phones by ESN rather than SIM card. And you can't go from AT&T or T-Mobile to Verizon or Sprint, because we have two technologically incompatible wireless systems in this country.

In developing the iPhone, Apple didn't have a choice - as stated before, if you want a GSM phone that works in both frequency bands, your choice is AT&T, period. They did try some other things - home activation, for one - that gave some indication that it might be possible to change the way things are done. That went right away with the iPhone 3G, though, as did the pricing - the iPhone 3G had the same carrier subsidy as every other phone, because selling the phone at retail is financially uncompetitive when every other phone is $200 off with a 2-year contract.

For all intents and purposes, the iPhone is no different from any other smartphone on AT&T's network, with one exception: Apple has control of the App Store. Which means that unlike the Blackberry, for instance, all apps come from one place and can be throttled as needed. Example: last year, a Slingbox client for the iPhone was produced. AT&T balked, changed their terms of service, and now the client only works on Wi-Fi. Not only was the Google Voice app rejected, but all third-party GV apps were yanked from the store at the same time. Apple doesn't really have a motive for doing this, but AT&T has every incentive to shut off GV access, as it has the potential not only to turn AT&T into a dumb pipe carrier but to cut in on possibly the most lucrative thing AT&T has: text messaging.

See, SMS is part of the GSM standard. SMS messages are not data as such - they are piggybacked on the control channels for the GSM network. They're freebies on signals that have to carry through anyway - which is why text messaging holds up in times and places where you can't hold a phone call long enough to let it ring - but in the last couple of years, the cost has doubled to 20 cents a pop, sending OR receiving. Most carriers have covered it by saying "ALL messages are now the same, 20 cents" but the fact of the matter is that this is nearly the only place on Earth that charges on the send AND the receive, and raised the price of text messaging despite the complete absence of any technical requirement that would cost them more.

Google Voice has its own SMS.

Google Voice, in short, has the potential to reduce any cell carrier to a dumb pipe provider. Think AT&T wants that? Given that their network can't handle the data traffic they have now?

God rest Deep Throat's soul, he was right: follow the money.

* The great struggle of our time is Pre- versus Post-Enlightenment. The problem is that you cannot get the pre-Enlightenment true-believer to reply to post-Enlightenment stimuli (more crudely put, you can't reason with the Taliban) which creates...issues, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama.

* Google's Chrome OS (which I take to basically be Chrome browser + Google Gears + a Linux kernel and drivers enough to run netbook-grade hardware) is interesting to me because it threatens to make the netbook a net-book again. The One Laptop Per Child project produced the XO-1, which was sort of a proof of concept but never got to be as cheap as they hoped. However, it led to the likes of the Asus EEE and the current crop of netbooks, which are laptops. Small, cheap, weak laptops, but laptops nonetheless, with Windows (or similar), local storage with locally-installed binary applications, etc etc. Chrome threatens to get even leaner and lighter than that: imagine a machine which you turn on and get A Browser And That's All. How long can you go in Just A Browser? Actually, pretty far, if you're willing to do it all in the cloud - recall all the stuff on my previous List Of Google S, and consider that if you throw in Gears for offline mail handling and document composition, etc, you could actually get a hell of a lot done. And if all you need to handle is a browser, a TCP/IP stack, and drive a screen, keyboard and trackpad plus either Wi-Fi or WWAN or both, you eliminate the need for very much RAM or storage or most everything else.

* Which means that if you have an XO-1, you basically can have the Google netbook already - just open the browser and go to it. (God knows the Sugar interface is worthless for almost anything else.) This doctrine of just-enough-hardware-to-run-a-browser is pretty much the Palm Pre in a nutshell, too, and the iPhone and G1 aren't far off. You could make it big enough to see, light enough to travel, sell out on battery life since you don't need room for too many other components - hell, scale the iPod Touch up to 6x9 or so and you'd damn near have it. The implications for the local rumors du jour are left as an exercise for the reader.

* My friend is getting her sister back. This makes me happy.

* All you Freudians looking side-eye at my research on airsoft and Nerf guns: feck off.

* After twenty years with a bad knee and two years of post-surgery, I'm FINALLY getting around to rehabbing it. I also have a pass for the gym at my office, at long last. The goal, such as it is, is to try to get myself semi-healthy in short order. To be honest, I'd settle for being able to hike up the hill to the stadium without getting winded and to slim back down to a 36 waist for the first time in a decade or so. God knows I need a new pair of jeans anyway...

* I'm still getting by fine on my iPhone 3G, but I'm having the same trouble most smartphone owners have: if you *use* it as a smartphone, checking mail and reading RSS and surfing the web and listening to some music, it will not last a full day roaming around the city unless you turn off Wi-Fi, turn off 3G, turn off push notifications after dinnertime and use an iPod Shuffle to catch up on your three hours worth of podcasts. And even then, you're coming back running awful light. Of course, your mileage may vary. You may travel with friends and be too polite to constantly check your phone during otherwise civilized conversation. =)

* From the Bureau of Ouch: this week's featured Coca-Cola Championship match on Setanta is West Brom vs.Newcastle. That'll leave a mark...

* I have two conflicting and irreconcilable impulses that run my life. One is a deep and compelling need to keep other people out of my S, and to stay out of their S. The other, apparently, is a deep and compelling need to be a stupendous badass and save the day. So the question is: how does a guy whose biggest need is not to be responsible for other people's S wind up as an emergency responder - not only for his neighborhood but for his place of work? For that matter, how does such a person wind up making a decade's career in TECH SUPPORT?

RIP John Hughes, even if I never saw most of his pics until I was out of the demographic. The only one I saw somewhat contemporaneously was Pretty In Pink which I saw in March of '87. Later, I managed to see The Breakfast Club (night before undergrad graduation) Sixteen Candles (grad school?) and of course Ferris, but the thing I always take away from his movies is that they somehow wound up with a happy ending. The only true-life finish that ever happened in a John Hughes movie was that Duckie answered the bell at prom time and got ditched for the preppy kid. And then of course they had to screw it up by throwing him a pneumatic blonde as a lovely parting gift.

Honestly, the only remotely accurate locker movie EVER is the best one ever made...Heathers.

Footbaw! Footbaw footbaw footbaw footbaw footbaw FOOTBAW!!

Footbaw.

The Pac-10 is in an odd spot. It has no conference title game, and doesn't need one, because everyone plays everyone else. In addition, with only three conference games, you would think teams would be more anxious about getting gimmes, and yet Pac-10 teams tend to go out and get Big Televen or SEC opponents in those spots. I think a few years back USC's three non-cons were Notre Dame, Arkansas and Va Tech. California seems to have a Big Ten opponent pretty much every year. And looking at last year's bowl performance, it seems like things are working out, given that the Pac-10 teams in bowls all won.

And yet, the Pac-10 gets no respect on a national level, it seems. Pac-10 officiating is the joke of the NCAA - the inconsistency is a show, and they always seem to fluff things in full view of the entire country - and it seems like every time something's gone awry with the BCS, it's always at the expense of a Pac-10 team. So what can the Pac-10 do to get back to national prominence? They can fix their biggest problems, in no particular order:

1) THE TV PACKAGE SUCKS. When people complain about "East Coast Bias," what they should be complaining about is the TV deal, because that's how people become aware of teams. Look at the other schools...Notre Dame bought their own broadcast network in 1990. The Big Ten has its own cable channel. Literally every SEC game is being televised this year thanks to a huge deal with CBS and ESPN that will let the Southeastern Conference reach a bigger percentage of Americans than anybody since Miles Standish said "ok, time to get off the boat."

But the Pac-10's secondary deal (after ABC's Game of the Week, usually in prime time) is with...drumroll...Fox Sports Net. The tertiary deal is with...Versus. VERSUS. The Pac-10's third-biggest game of the week is being sandwiched in between bull riding and Tour de France reruns. Ask a hockey fan about Versus. Then plug your ears. Honestly, FSN is no better, because they're showing the #2 game in prime time...ON THE WEST COAST. These games are kicking off at 10 PM in the East, where college fans who have been drinking for 14 hours already are almost completely unable to get stuck into another three and a half hours of action unless they are complete degenerates. And the people who vote in polls are a completely different sort of degenerate. If the Pac-10 is going to get back on top, the first thing to do is blow up the TV packages and, if necessary, take less money to get the games on a network that will take football seriously. NBC is in dire straits - Notre Dame only seems to get half above suckitude one year in four, the Arena League just bit the dust, NASCAR is on Sundays...they have plenty of time and nothing competing. Get on the horn and make a deal - a fourth place network can be had cheap. And from there, they can work on fixing the fact that...

2) THE BOWL PACKAGE SUCKS OUT LOUD. Pasadena, San Diego, El Paso (!?!?), Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego again. Those are the Pac-10 bowl tie-ins, and they're not the sort of thing that's going to make people back East sit up and say "let's have a look at that," because none of them are back East. A top-10 Cal team got my attention in 1991 because they went to the Citrus Bowl and gave Clemson the beatdown, so it's not like those teams can't travel. But consider this: if you finish 3rd or even 4th in the SEC or Big Ten, you're going to be playing on New Year's Day, thanks to tie-ins with the Citrus, Cotton and Outback bowls. How many times in the last ten years has a team that finished second in the Pac-10 and ranked in the top 10 nationally played their bowl game on a weeknight in San Diego a couple of days after Christmas? It is incumbent on the new Pac-10 commissioner to blow up the existing bowl tie-ins at the first opportunity and make some deals that will get the Pac-10 teams playing on January 1 where people can see them. Other than...

3) USC. Anytime somebody mentions Pac-10 football and "East Coast bias," the simple retort is "USC." Darlings of ESPN, voted national champions by the Associated Press in 2003 despite a third-place BCS finish (if the East Coast bias is so great, how come Auburn of the mighty SEC didn't get a whiff of similar consideration the following year?), the Trojans are America's Team in the eyes of the national press, with Pete Carroll as the second coming of Bear Bryant and the incumbent QB invariably becoming LA's male answer to Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan. They are ubiquitous, they are inexorable, and they have basically sucked the oxygen out of the rest of the league.

This is the biggest problem the Pac-10 faces. For the last decade, the only way to keep USC out of the Rose Bowl has been to make it the national championship game and put somebody else in it...or put the national championship game somewhere else and put USC in it. Southern California has won the last seven Pac-10 titles in a row - read that sentence again - and despite sharing some of those, nobody else has taken their spot on Colorado Avenue on New Years' morning. USC's game is usually the Pac 10's game of the week, which means they spend more time on ABC than those harpies on The View...at the expense of nine other teams. Not for nothing do certain members of the blogosphere refer to the conference as the "Pac-One."

Unfortunately, it's also the thing that the conference can do the least about, with one exception: the NCAA is combining their probes of the Reggie Bush and OJ Mayo recruiting scandals into one big super-probe of USC athletics. This is the exact sort of investigation that laid waste to Alabama football in the late 1990s, because there is nothing the NCAA loves more than to bust out the whoopin' stick on a big-time program just to prove that they can and will. In Alabama's case, despite no finding of lack of institutional control or individual culpability on the part of any university employee, the school was supposedly "staring down the barrel of the death penalty." Which means that it is entirely possible that USC could be facing the risk of disproportionate punishment as well.

While the Pac-10 conference office doesn't need to egg on the NCAA, they should resist the temptation to try to shield their cash cow from the wrath of the big bad bully from Indianapolis. I distinctly remember seeing Washington fans in the early 90s in their "Pac-9: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Put 'Em On Probation" t-shirts, so it's not like the league has gone out of its way to protect its heavy hitters in the past.

Long story short: there's not that much that needs doing for the Pac-10 to climb the ranks again, but it's going to take an active commitment on the part of the conference management to get there. There is absolutely no reason why a conference like the Big East should have an edge on the Pac-10, let alone a bunch of halfwits like the MWC or (gah!) the WAC, and it's all because the previous administration thought that things were fine just as they were. But it's time to adapt - and the schools are getting there, the conference just needs to catch up.

So the other half of Team Black Swan had some interesting things to say about their voyage and how they got to where they are now. The notion that they wound up on what can charitably be thought of as a "deep cover embed" because it was the path of least resistance - well, it rings absolutely true. In my case, I went where the one job offer was after the great grad-school washout - and even if it meant moving to Washington DC (or thereabouts), I didn't have anywhere else to go, so I went. Even moving to Silicon Valley - well sure, I didn't have a job, but I had money in the bank, a fiancee who already had a job, a guaranteed room at her folks' house for as long as we needed it, and the firm conviction that sticking around would finish up with me in either Lorton or St Elizabeth's. So going west wasn't exactly a high-risk move, from a standpoint low on the Maslow hierarchy.

I guess all that is to say that speaking as a textbook Enneagram 6, I see absolutely nothing wrong in the logic of choosing the devil you know. Sure, the Ancestral Lands have their own problems, which are legion and show no sign of subsiding (when 2/3 of the population of the Ancestral Lands doesn't firmly believe the President of the United States is an American citizen, they have problems) but part of growing up Black Swan is developing the skill set needed to survive in such an environment. The capstone of that skill set, of course, being the ability to make a sufficiently spectacular escape when the time comes.

2.0 also nails something I have thought about myself, and I quote: "it sometimes gets tiresome to be defined by things you most certainly are not. Having the chance to define yourself based on things that you are and things that you want to be - that's where the action is." I'm still working on that bit...especially the last bit, because the question of "where do you want to be in your life at 40?" is taking on what the Smashing Pumpkins called "the resolute urgency of now." And having just dated myself horribly, I will wrap it for the night.

Except to reaffirm that yes, pimento cheese wears a helmet.

...but word comes this morning from the mighty Orson Swindle at EDSBS that the Pac-10 has done a deal to put a team in the Alamo Bowl.

Now, I will leave it to my wife to lay out the merits of the Alamo Bowl (hint: if you're experiencing bonding between the football players and the band geeks, your bowl may suck) but I am not sure that sending the #2 team to San Antonio is any great improvement. I had something in mind more like the Citrus Bowl or the Cotton Bowl or some such, not some indoor play-on-a-rug-on-ESPN-some-weeknight kind of bowl. If you're just trading San Diego for San Antonio? Let me tell you something, there is nothing - NOTHING - in the entire state of Texas that should ever be seeded over San Diego. San Diego is a 1 seed. San Diego is the '27 Yankees. Texas is the '62 Mets.

The other problem is that it doesn't improve the matchup - it's still #2 Pac-10 vs #3 Big 12, which is a no-win situation. But then, the Holiday Bowl is going to be #3 Pac-10 vs #5 Big 12 now (Insight Bowl swooped in to geth #4 Big 12) which means that once again, Pac-10 teams will be playing down in all their bowls but one.

You'd almost think the Pac-10 didn't acknowledge the existence of any bowl but the Rose Bowl...OH WAIT...

So the latest fashion among red-state limpdicks is apparently to stand around conspicuously close to Presidential events brandishing weapons, making much of the fact that they are within the letter of the law. This is basically the equivalent of the six-year-old who waves his hand in your face screaming "I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU! I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU!"

Personally, I don't have a lot of trouble with the idea of firearms ownership in general. All mine are in the ancestral land rather than here, though, because quite frankly I don't need them in a place where the majority of folks don't want to shoot everyone like me. So what the hell is going on in these other places that people feel the need to suddenly just happen to exercise their rights in close proximity to an event that contains most of the things they oppose in one place?

If you remember my previous work, you know that there are essentially three political parties in this country: the Left, the Right, and the South. Until roughly 1964, these were conflated oddly, with most of the Left and the South under the umbrella of "Democrat" and most of the Right under the umbrella of "Republican." The big shift was the move of the South from the "Democrat" label to the "Republican" from 1964-72, but also consequential was the shifting of everyone that fell under "Left" to the side of the Democrats. Don't forget that in the Civil Rights era, a lot of the heavy lifting came from liberal Republicans in the Northeast (of the sort known in the early 80s as "Gypsy Moths") working in concert with non-Southern Democrats. (This is also why the notion of "bipartisanship" is obsolete, with the ideologies having sorted pretty cleanly into two parties with little admixture outside of a few red-state Democrats - there's a big difference between needing to rustle up 51 "Left" among both parties and having to get 60 Democrats, but that's a tale for another time.)

In an amazing surprise,* there is a huge overlap between the most virulent health-reform opponents, the "Birthers," and the population of aging rural Southern whites. This is a population whose doom is written clear as day: America is getting ever more non-white, the South is losing its influence over national politics, fewer than one American in five lives in a rural area, and they themselves - not to put too fine a point on it - are dying. As a cohort, the "South" is in its twilight; the people who voted reliably for Wallace, then Reagan, then both Bushes and finally Palin (note that the ever-so-shocking** "Don't Blame Me" bumper stickers assert that the owner voted for "Sarah", not "McCain) are seeing their world and society change around them - politically, culturally, the works - in ways that are insurmountable.

So those folks marching around with their Glocks and their M4-geries and ominous sign-waving about the "tree of liberty" aren't just out there to decry "socialism" or try to scare people. They have the Southern disease, and are convinced that the world can be made to return to the way it was. They cannot succeed - ask King Canute about tides - but they can make things difficult along the way. After all, if you're facing an existential crisis, you'll do whatever it takes to rage against the dying of the light.

The problem is, the last time this particular cohort tried to make things difficult, 168 people died in Oklahoma City. After eight years when you could get bundled off by persons impersonating the Secret Service for having arrived at a rally with the wrong bumper sticker, I personally think that somebody needs to do a better job asserting that while an armed society is a polite society, a polite society frowns on continual public penis-waving. And if the Emily Post approach comes up short, well...the Feds have always got the hydrogen bomb.

(My actual thoughts on the forthcoming health care debacle will be coming along later.)

* WHOPPING GREAT HEAP O' SARCASM WARNING

** WHOPPING GREAT HEAP O' SARCASM WARNING PART DEUX ELECTRIC BOOGALEAUX

BRETT FAVRE IS NOT BIGGER THAN THE NFL.

Ideally, I would love to see him doused in worcestershire sauce and locked in a room with Michael Vick's dogs. The decidedly unChristian part of me would love to see him take his first snap from scrimmage in an exhibition game and go down with two broken legs.

Brett Favre is no longer fit for purpose as an NFL quarterback - ask any Jets fan about the tail end of last season and then plug your ears - and the only reason we are afflicted with Hamlet-in-a-helmet is because the sports media cannot stop acting as if this is somehow a consequential bit of news. This is why I love the Redskins but truly despise the NFL.

I will stop beating this dead horse as soon as ESPN's done fucking it...

Millenium.

It was a word to conjure with. 1999, the edge of the Great Odometer Rollover, the dawn of the 21st Century (if you're going to be pedantic about 2001, feck off) - the arrival of The Future.

And it really felt that way. We had the Internet, the World Wide Web, all sorts of knowledge right at the fingertips. We had phones small enough to fit in your pocket that worked all over the country and could call any number, no long distance, no roaming. Music was only a couple of clicks away - okay, more than a couple, but if you could get Napster working, a little time and patience would get you all manner of free songs. And if it didn't, well, there was always a whole wide world of FTP sites and search engines that, let's be honest, were more safely navigated on your Mac.

And that was going well, too - I was rocking a Powerbook G3 Series 233 Mhz, 14" screen, with 96 MB of RAM and a whopping 2 GB drive - the same processor and RAM as the desktop machines, and just about as fast a machine as you could buy for $2000. Apple was definitely NOT dying - hell, in two years, the stock had gone from $15 to $125. But then, the tech sector was running away - Amazon, Netscape, all manner of companies that couldn't have existed five years earlier were now pushing the stock market to dizzying levels.

I distinctly remember sitting in my cube at work, using my time and effort during the day to seek out and find new MP3s to download - and when those ponderously long downloads started, I would run out and troubleshoot Palm III handhelds for people who couldn't grasp that when you brought your laptop back, you had to plug the cradle in before your Palm would sync.

And the free stuff! Free dialup ISPs. Free DSL in some places. I think a couple of donks got free cars. Advertising was going to drive everything. Peapod. Kozmo. You would get stuff delivered. No more grocery shopping, hell, no more runs to the 7-Eleven! God, what I would give to have that back up and running.

I think Web 1.0 was largely a transitional phase - even things that were classed as a "pure Internet play" were largely just taking meat-world goods and services and selling them on via the Internet with no actual brick-and-mortar presence. In a world where the hottest machines were barely a third of a gigahertz and the hottest connection was ISDN, *real* pure Internet plays, things that only exist as Internet phenomena - things like social networking and digital music - weren't really on the cards. Similarly, the next big wave of ingenuity depends on enough smartphones out there for critical mass. Don't forget that things like Bluetooth and DSL and satellite TV and digital cable and hybrid cards all *existed* in 1999 - they just hadn't reached anything like critical mass. Or, as a wiser man than me put it, "the future is here already, it's just not evenly distributed."

Which is why 1999 was when I first started thinking about moving to the thin end of the distribution. Or, put differently, the bleeding edge.

Universal heath care has been out there as the great liberal hope since the age of Roosevelt. Its roots as a concept go back all the way to Bismarck's Prussia, and FDR reluctantly cut it out of what became Social Security in the 1930s. Almost all Democratic Presidents since (and a few Republicans) have tried to move the ball on increasing the public role in providing health care, with varying degrees of success - but the most recent effort, in 1994, is the one that sticks in the public mind. The American public was told that if "Hillarycare" became the law of the land, you wouldn't be able to pick your doctor and faceless bureaucrats would be in between you and your doctor. So Hillarycare went down to defeat...and we got all the threatened side effects after all with none of the benefits.**

The key thing that makes the US different from all other major industrialized nations is that our system of health care provision largely came about as a result of wage and price controls during the Second World War. Unable to offer money, employers instead began offering health insurance coverage to employees. Somehow, the notion that your health coverage is provided by your employer became more or less standard, proving the old French maxim that "nothing lasts as long as the makeshift." And employee-paid insurance covering fee-for-service medicine was more or less the way things went for the next fifty years or so.

The situation became more complicated with the rise of HMOs as the keys to containing health care costs. Almost all employers replaced classic indemnity coverage with some form of HMO or PPO in the 1980s and 1990s. The biggest problem with this is that large-scale for-profit provision of health care services breaks in the free market - one doesn't normally shop for kidney replacement surgery the way one would price watermelons or tennis shoes, so comparison shopping and competitive pressures are diminished. Worse, though, is the fact that making a profit depends on taking in more money than goes out - which means that for-profit HMOs and insurers have a financial disincentive to provide the services their customers pay for. When a company's financial health relies on not providing the goods and services for which it is paid, something has broken down in the world of capitalism.

For some reason, there is a general consensus that moving to a system of government-run health care is beyond the pale and not open for discussion. Fine. The Brits seem to be perfectly happy with the NHS in the main, but that's had sixty years to become an institution. Right now, the far horizon of discussion is universal single-payer health insurance (i.e. the government becomes everybody's insurance company) and various measures short of that are being kicked around.

Personally, I don't know what the best option is. These are the things in the forefront of my mind, though, and I would like to see them addressed at some point in the process.

1) A lot of people have said that administrative costs are a big part of the growth in what we pay for health care in the US. This is not surprising for several reasons. Anecdotally, I can say for myself that getting reimbursed from one's Health Savings Account varies from irksome to right-royal-pain-in-the-ass, and I can only imagine what it's like for a doctor's office that deals with a dozen different insurance companies, all with unique forms and different co-payments and varying requirements. I would not object to a single-payer system, irrespective of who ran it, just for the sake of not having to deal with all the damn papers anymore. And God help you if you go through three different insurance providers in 18 months and have to sort all that out. Anything that can reduce the paperwork - some sort of standardization of forms? Some sort of info portability (see below)? - would be an unalloyed good.

2) I realize that it's a potential IT security nightmare. I don't care. In the year 2009, a country that put a man on the moon forty years ago with sliderules and adding machines can bloody well figure out a way to handle a patient's medical information that goes beyond "a big manila folder with colored tabs on the side." It is absolutely crazy that anybody can pull my credit history in about thirty seconds but it takes a couple of days' worth of faxes and phone calls to get my chiropractor, my physical therapist and my orthopedic surgeon on the same page.

3) If you take regular medication, it should be butt-simple to get on a system where you get the drugs mailed to you instead of standing in the damn line at Walgreens every month with the extras from the Star Wars cantina.

4) In the late 1980s, "cat health" was added to Medicare - in exchange for a small increase in premiums, things like prescription drugs coverage and complete coverage for catastrophic health incidents were added to Medicare. It was a great scheme - the axis of Reagan and Rostenkowski angling for a repeat of the Gucci Gulch victory of 1986 - but within a couple of years it was repealed, because the people who were going to benefit from it balked at paying any more. Fifteen years later, a prescription drug benefit - unfunded - was slapped together as Medicare Part D, and as for catastrophic coverage? Well, medical expense is now the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy, so plainly something got lost along the way. People need to get familiar with Luckett's Law: "shit costs money." Everything - health insurance, tax cut, F-35 fighter jet, fine bottle of 18-year-old Jameson's - costs money. And some things are worth paying for (the Jameson's, for instance, which is about the only way you can come home with an 18 year old and not get your ass beat down).

5) The same year that I got married, I also got a will and an advance health care directive. I was 33. If you're married - hell, if you're not married, and especially if you have kids in either case - you should have both. The time to think about whether you want to "live" hooked up to a machine in a 10-year coma is not after you're comatose. You should have a plan, in writing, notarized, and you should revisit that shit on a regular basis in case it suddenly doesn't seem like such a good idea for your ex-boyfriend to be the one in charge of whether you get put on the heart-lung machine or not. Should the government make this kind of advance planning mandatory? Well, obviously not. Should they make it as cheap, simple and easy as a Chi O on bid night? Hell yes.

6) If I get one more call from the pharmacy saying that they need a doctor's authorization before filling my order, I will take a hostage. You have a doctor's authorization, ass honk, it's called a prescription. Shut up and give Daddy his pills right fucking now. (see #3 - ed.)

7) The way insurance is supposed to work is that you have a bunch of folks paying in but only some of them pulling out at any given time. This is one place where the economy of scale actually works in health care - the more people you have in the pool, the better off you are. Something that lets small businesses team up into one big thing that gives them GM-size negotiating power with insurers is probably a good idea, whatever form it takes.

8) There is a very good case to be made that General Motors went under because it was no longer a car company - it was a retirement fund and health insurance provider that tried to defray costs by building vehicles on the side. The figure of "$1500 a car" gets thrown around as the premium paid for a car built in a country where the company is paying for the health care, and I don't know how accurate it is, but I will bet you any money that if GM didn't have to pay for the health care of its workers and retirees, it wouldn't have gone bankrupt. The question of whether the employee's share of taxes for health care would be covered by just giving them the cash difference that GM was paying is one I am not qualified to answer without a lot more time in the books with Excel and Excedrin, but it merits thinking about (viz. #7 above).

9) "Anybody can go to the emergency room" is not a universal coverage plan. For one thing, ER-based medicine could not be more expensive if it came wrapped in unicorn eyelashes and soaked in dragon tears. For another, the sorts of folks who only go to the ER, and only as a last resort, are probably the least likely to be able to pay for it later. Look at it like this: would you rather pay to change the oil, or wait until the engine blows up and pay for a new one? Now, if you have to choose between paying for somebody's oil change or their engine rebuild, which would you rather get stuck with?

10) Looking around the world, there are a lot of different systems and a lot of ways of doing things. But if you look at the other industrialized nations, two things stand out: 1) Nobody else copies our system. We are the only ones who do it like this. 2) Nobody spends as much money on health care as we do, and yet nobody seems to have appreciably worse health care overall. There may be something to be said for looking at what other countries without single-payer or single-provider do, how it works, and whether there is anything worth considering for our own future use. Remember Jobs's Axiom: great artists steal.

11) I don't have any answers. I am open to suggestions. (Note that spittle-flecked invocations of socialism do not count as suggestions.) All I know is that if we can find some way to spend less money on this stuff, it will be easier to handle all the other problems coming down the road in future (the forthcoming physical infrastructure collapse, the ass-backward broadband and wireless coverage in this country, the inevitable inflationary pressure when the Fed tried to reel in the post-stimulus oversupply of money, etc etc).

12) I have a one-inch crack in my skull from puzzling all this out. I just figured out the banking thing this weekend, that's how zippy I am.

* Team Black Swan East gets a nickel. I told you he was smart.

** You may or may not see this as a benefit, but it's pretty much a lock that Ted Kennedy would have retired ten years ago had universal health coverage become law.

1985.

You didn't think I could remember that far back, did you?

Thirteen years old. No girlfriend. No car. Nothing but stacks of comic books. And then some. Nevertheless, quite the eventful year...

It's not often I have housekeeping news, but today I do. My kind host who hooks me up for free is making the move to MT4 as part of the migration to a new server, and I am taking the opportunity to clean up some stuff.

Going forward, the old RSS feeds (esp. in LiveJournal) may break, so you need to hit up this lovely site from now on at either:

http://www.iwasmisinformed.com

or

http://staggerlee.org

Any modern browser should give you the automatic XML option to put into your feed reading device as well.

Onward!!

From Apple's response to the FCC:

The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone's core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail. (emphasis mine)

I believe one of the features of Google Voice for Android, on T-Mobile's G1, is that you can opt to route all your handset phone usage through Google Voice. I don't know what that gets you, other than the GV number, direct access to GV SMS and cheap international dialing, but nevertheless, I strongly suspect that there is something similar in the GV app for the iPhone. Given the terms of service explicitly stated for iPhone apps re: replacing core functions in the phone, if that is in fact the case, then it's no bloody wonder the app has not been approved.

GIven the circumstances described re: the number of applications being reviewed vs. the number of staff reviewing, it's obvious that the "working 90 hours a week and loving it" mentality is alive and well on 1 Infinite Loop, Himself or no Himself.

What happens when your entire life as you know it is blown up and completely replaced within four months with one you never could have conceived of? I'll give you a hint - it's a tad bit disorienting...

It's sunny out now, brighter than at any point all weekend. For somebody who gets reverse-SAD and is actively depressed by the heat and the humidity and the direct sunlight, this is not a good move. It's been a decade or so since the beach meant warm sunny weather and bodysurfing and the like - living in close proximity to San Francisco, Half Moon Bay, Pacifica and the like has led me to think that cool and overcast with "marine layer" is the default state of the ocean. And honestly, I'm really OK with that. I would much rather see the surf from under a jacket with a bracing dose of Scotch whisky to hand, with the cool comfort of sea mist drifting in with the sunset.*

But at the moment, the sun has broken through the clouds, there are sparkles on the breakers, and the blogging pit at the beach house is starting to get uncomfortably warm with a good three hours of sun left and the light streaming directly through the windows. Not really the desired result, but then, I guess you can't have everything. I confess this beats the hell out of the old style of beach - the chaos of the Redneck Riviera, the endless plethora of airbrushed T-shirts and salt-water taffy and go-kart racing. The quiet-solitude approach to beach vacationing suits me infinitely better, which I guess is a testament to the desire to get into 5-space and make everything else disappear for a while until I can recharge.

Pace those endless drives of the previous post, I'm wondering whether the prolonged road trip served the same purpose in the old days. Just me, a car, a radio and some terrible junk food, and a long way to go. Problem is, in the old days, it was an easy way to wind up too much in my own head and spiral out into all manner of unhealthy mental digressions. These days, the most driving I ever do is on autumn Sunday afternoons when I decide that the gas burned driving around listening to Sam and Sonny calling the game on satellite radio is ultimately going to be less expensive than heading down to Dan Brown's to watch the big screen and wash away the misery in cut-rate Guinness.**

If I had the money, retiring to the coast somewhere in the vicinity of HMB and parts north would be ideal, especially if I could retire today. I may have to settle for visiting the city in the Sunset or Richmond and parts west to get my fog fix, though...I don't think I can afford to quit work right now.

* At this point the evidence of my ethnicity should be insurmountable.

** Seriously, how much proof do you people want?

Whenever the topic of death comes up, I always think that the experience of losing someone close to you is something that plunges you into a deep dark place - and the person that surfaces is never the person who went under.

For Ted Kennedy, too much of his life was shaped by death. One hopes that he finally found refuge from all the ghosts.

With him goes virtually the last fighter from an era of pre-Vietnam muscular liberalism - an era of happy cold warriors who saw nothing wrong with drawing lines in Berlin, or Cuba, or Southeast Asia, while bringing the same sort of crusader instinct to the home front on things like racism and poverty. There was an age when people believed that you could literally do anything and everything - heal the sick, make the lame to walk and the blind to see, walk on the moon, make the poor at least moderately comfortable if not reasonably affluent, have black and white hold hands in harmony and drive the Reds out of the peace-loving nations of the world.

At some point, we ran up against our limitations as a country, and in too many ways and too many places, we somehow decided that if we can't succeed, we shouldn't even try. Ted Kennedy was a memento mori of those limits, but he was also something like the ghost of a guilty conscience - a reminder that there was a time when possibility was endless and America's goals and dreams weren't measured out in feasible expectations and half-loaves.

I wrote a few days ago that Ted Kennedy would probably have been gone from the Senate years ago had some sort of national health care passed. Something, anything - full-on NHS-style socialized medicine, national single-payer, some sort of pool-plus-mandate-plus-subsidy hybrid, anything, just as long as every American could see a doctor when they needed one without feeding their entire worldly livelihood into a chipper-shredder and going bankrupt. It's probably just as well that the cancer got to him first, because seeing the dream deferred yet again after almost five decades of trying...well, watch your life's work run on the rocks for fifty years and see how well you take it.

There'll be time enough to grill later, but for now, house rules state that everybody gets a free pass across the river. Hopefully the boatman brought the Chivas.

Newt Gingrich should have retired in the summer of 1995 and gone directly to Biloxi. Or Atlantic City, I don't know if there was casino gambling in Biloxi by then. The Congressman from GA-6 caught aces on the flop, the turn, and the river - to wit:

* Tremendous public discontent in 1992, to the point of 19% vote for a third party candidate.

* Democratic President elected with only 43% of the popular vote. **

* A Republican Party so long out of power in the House of Representatives that they were willing to hand the controls to this maniac from down South, at a time when the GOP was still not a lead-pipe lock in that part of the world.

* A groundswell of anti-incumbent sentiment going back at least one election cycle.

* A slew of retirements and open seats resulting from changes in the campaign finance laws that would have otherwise resulted in lawmakers giving up a windfall of campaign cash upon leaving office.

* A talk-radio world just coming into its own, providing a megaphone to rile up the faithful and rally the troops.

Newt made a bet: that a guy who wouldn't last two weeks in a serious Presidential campaign could shift the balance of power to the Congress, and within the Congress to the House, and effectively make himself Prime Minister of the United States. It was a preposterous longshot, especially for anyone who knew APSA's 1950 treatise on the subject and the institutional difficulties it would present. But he pulled it off.

Obviously, it didn't last. He was in over his head, and had the misfortune to be up against one of the three greatest political communicators of the 20th century in American politics, and the era of Newt lasted about as long as it took Clinton to be re-elected. Ultimately, the Republican takeover of Congress would have one lasting legacy: providing a supine and compliant legislature to the second Bush administration, which had no room for any executive power not residing at 1600 Penn or the Naval Observatory.***

The Gingrich legacy, if you want to be precise, is in the Senate. Since Bob Dole left to run for President in 1996, the Republican leadership in the Senate has always been Southern - first Lott, then Frist, then McConnell. But Gingrich and his team also introduced measures to limit the impact of seniority, make some changes to how chairmen were picked - in short, took steps to make the Senate run more like the House. And it had an effect - of the current Senate, 53 of 99 have served less than two complete terms. You will probably never again see a Robert Byrd, a Strom Thurmond, a Ted Kennedy - somebody whose career is measured in generations rather than years, somebody with that kind of institutional memory. In fact, two-thirds of the Senate were only elected in the Gingrich era or later, including 25 of the 40 Republicans.

I feel like the worst kind of son of a bitch saying this, given how utterly critical it was in my last life - it's sort of like pissing on the Magna Carta - but "Folkways of the U.S. Senate," the seminal 1959 article by Donald Matthews that is to Congressional studies what V.O. Key is to Southern studies, is only of interest as a historical document now. The modern United States Senate is a louder, prouder, more obnoxious version of the House of Representatives - and at least in the lower house, the Speaker has the power to make the trains run on time. I take no pride at all in saying this, as a former Senate Youth (1990) and former acolyte (however briefly) of Bruce Oppenheimer, but it's got to be said: the title of "world's largest open-air kindergarten" no longer belongs in the south wing of the Capitol.

* I hope that if she ever sees this, Dr. Barbara SInclair can find it in her heart to forgive me for aping the title of her landmark book on the Senate, which I am not worthy to carry into the toilet for reading material.

** Ah, but how much did Bush the Elder have? The people who went around crowing about "only 43%" were annoying as hell simply because yes, it's less than a majority, but it's more than your guy got. I think that was largely sour grapes at the idea that they should have won if not for Ross Perot - and on that score, I will say that they have a legit beef, but there's no blue ribbon for should've.

*** Look, if you still think Unca Dick didn't have final veto around there, I don't know what else to tell you.