Questions for the Health Care Conservatives

I've been listening to the health care reform debate with increasing bewilderment. Not over what we should do. I've already been pretty clear about that. No, I really want the answers to these questions:

• Why is a private-sector bureaucrat incented to not pay for your health care better than a government bureaucrat whose directors are incented to keep you healthy?
• How can you call the insurance market, as it currently stands, a competitive marketplace? Most companies contract with only one insurance company, so the only way for most people to choose their insurance is to go work for someone else.
• Why are all the expenditures made by private insurance companies, the lack of which expenditures constitutes the supposed advantage a public option has over private companies, so valuable / important that we should continue wasting money that could otherwise go to keeping people healthy?
• How do you sleep at night, given all the lies and bullshit you're tossing out there to make people afraid?

Things I Dislike About Bainbridge Island

They say that Bainbridge Island has the highest per-capita number of lawyers of any city in the state. Possibly the country. I mostly like BI, the small-town feel, driving at night with my high-beams on because there are almost no street lights. All the trees. What I don't like is the self-important hypocritical nasty-ass gits who seem to flock to the place. Take, for example, the blog Let the dog in, that Google Reader was kind enough to suggest to me. I looked at the first post in Reader and thought, "meh." Then I got to the bottom of the post, where it says this:

"Copyright © 2009 Let the dog in!. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement and in BIG, BIG TROUBLE. Please contact legal@www.letthedogin.com so we can take legal action immediately."

It reminds me of the story I heard of a guy from the city who was putting up a fence at a park, and was greeted pleasantly each day by one of the neighbors, and when he was just about done with the fence was told that that same neighbor was suing the city because the fence was too high. Number one: who the hell would be taking posts from some random housewife (and I mean no disparagement to housewives, but usually what goes on in their house is of interest only to the people that live there) and putting them on their website? Number two: if someone were foolish enough to do that, who would be such an idiot as to reproduce such a notice along with the content? Really? You're going to set up a special email address for people to contact you about copyright infringement? Really? Really? Puhlease.

Poeta Vox Vocis

I find myself

vexed

by that lugubrious animal

The Poet's Voice.

You know it.

As it takes a piece of beauty

and rends it

piece

by

piece

with unexplained

pauses

and odd rushes of breathless heartless pointless babble

so unlike a brook that I can brook no reading

that treats its subject so harshly.

Poems are precious

not precious,

as poets recite them.

They are lively.

They should move with a natural flow,

like a happy creek,

not creak along

like an old man

with narcolepsy.

It's 1:30 in the Morning. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Perhaps your children are the pricks with the firecrackers and other things that go BOOM that are keeping me up. The acepromazine has mostly worn off my dogs, so I'm reluctant to go to bed, where the noises are more present then up here with the TV on. It's at times like this that I want one of those old loudspeaker trucks and an endless loop of Tiny Tim singing Tiptoe Through the Tulips, so I can park next to these assholes and let 'er rip.

A firetruck goes screaming up Stone Way. Is it uncharitable of me to hope that one or more of these nitwits has set themselves on fire? I think not.

If you don't know where your children are, perhaps you should get their asses in bed, and put the rest of us out of our misery.

Did I Miss a Memo?

So, apparently today was Be a Dick to Pedestrians Day in Seattle. Normally I find the place pretty friendly, but today on the way to work I was walking in an unofficial crosswalk (i.e. from one street corner to the opposite corner) and this douchebag in a pickup, one of these big guys who likes to drink a lot of beer and push people around, comes barrelling down 35th St as I'm crossing. I glare at him as I'm crossing, because it's clear that stopping is not in his plans, and as he slows down he yells, Get out of the fucking road! I glare more and yell, Respect the fucking crosswalk, asshole! while his buddy's on the phone in the passenger seat. Dude starts to slow down and ease over to the side of the road, so I start walking towards him, and he changes his mind. This being Seattle, though, as I continue my walk to work, a guy in a Forerunner who'd been waiting to drive across 35th leans out his window and says, I'm sorry man, that was bullshit.

Then on the way home, I'm standing on the edge of the Burke-Gilman trail under the Aurora Bridge taking a picture of it, and some punk on a bicycle goes whizzing by and yells, You're standing in the way! so I yell back, No I'm not! and keep taking my picture. What a weird day.

Intuit Doesn't

Back in the day, the folks at Intuit gave a damn about the user experience, but the people who cared seem to have long left the building. The sorts of things I see in Quicken 2008 or TurboTax just make me shudder. Let me give you a few examples:

• I'm filling out my taxes this year, for the 2008 tax year, and I enter a date, like, say, 4/13. Can you guess what date TurboTax thinks that is? 4/13/08? Ha! It actually thinks you meant April 1, 1913. I kid you not.
• I have my main Quicken file on a server in the basement, and the internal database management is so incredibly bad, after every operation, the entire screen flashes (I mean, every single UI control in the screen) as it redraws, and it puts up a little dialog telling me it's refreshing Quicken data. This is on a machine with several gigs of RAM just waiting to be used.
• While I'm talking about refreshing, I just had to close quicken, because it got into some kind of refresh argument with internet explorer, where each window kept repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting. You get the picture.
• My favorite idiocy in quicken is when it's matching up downloaded transactions, and rather than matching a transaction with an uncleared transaction for the exact same date as the downloaded transaction, it'll choose to match it against a cleared transaction for a month prior. I mean, who wrote that code? Sarah Palin?

The sad thing is, from everything I hear, all the other financial management packages suck even worse, so I stick with Quicken, and I stick with TurboTax. But damn!

Photos of the Week - 3/8

This week's images are two that I like a lot, but didn't quite make it into my Photo-a-Day project. They were both taken at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

I like the sense that these two are riding up to fairy-land, with the big umbrellas at the top of the escalator:

These ladies with their huge duffel/suitcases are in Vegas for serious. They ended up going up into the "Spa Tower" at the Bellagio.