Health Insurance
I’ve been meaning to flesh this post out some more… since October. Instead of holding it up any longer, I’m going to release the draft version (right down to references to Presidential Candidates)… Both Candidates for President have health care proposals (Obama and McCain). But, the genesis for this blog was an idea for a way to provide health insurance for everyone. We have a fairly straight forward program called the Earned Income Tax Credit that helps workers at the bottom of the income scale. The same concept can be applied to health care. At it’s core, the Federal Government would provide assistance to pay for health insurance based on income. The less people make, the larger the assistance. Beyond providing assistance, the Federal Government’s would carry out several functions. First, the Government would set minimum guidelines for coverage. Second, the Government would monitor the insurance provider to prevent abuses. Third, the Government would require participating companies to write policies on all comers regardless of pre-existing conditions. More on that last point in a moment. Fourth, the Government would provide a website that would allow the public to locate insurers, compare prices, post comments about insurers and file complaints. In many ways (besides the fact the Government would not be making money off of it), it would resemble an Amazon.com for the health insurance market. The Government would not dictate absolute prices on policies. If the program is structured properly, the market should manage prices quite nicely. It would probably … Continue reading Health Insurance
The Housing Crisis and the CDS problem
This American Life is an award-winning radio program. Each episode focuses on a theme and usually covers it with stories about ordinary people. But every once in a while the stories are about something else. In May, they covered the Housing Crisis and this weekend, Collateralized Debt Securities, the financial items which almost caused a meltdown in our credit markets. Most of the coverage of the crisis has amounted to either a repetition of some summary (since most journalism isn’t focused on understanding) or people twisting themselves into contortions to prove their political viewpoint. As the second program points out, the CDS market has been completely unregulated. This state of affairs was fixed in 1998 by agreement of the Clinton Administration and a vast majority of the members of both parties in Congress. The belief was that those buying and selling CDS instruments were sophisticated investors (aka really smart big boys) who didn’t need oversight. Clearly, they were wrong. I suspect that over the next few years we will see new regulations designed to address a series of problems, including bringing transparency and sanity to the CDS market. The more interesting point in that program, for my purposes, was a comparison of the core solution in the plan Congress passed and the President signed with one that most Economists the program talked to favored. In the official plan, money will be used to buy something that is very difficult to properly price: toxic assets. In a very real way, the … Continue reading The Housing Crisis and the CDS problem
There is always a first post
I’ll be focusing on policy questions. At Policythunk, I’m interested in discussing ways to solve our problems. Posts will narrowly focus on a specific topic. Since this is all about policy (as opposed to personalities and politics), I won’t generally be discussing people, political parties, who stuck what rider into which bill and why a certain pork provision is evil. My posts will be informed by a fusion of ideas draw from progressive thought, libertarianism, a strong belief in civil liberties and a long list of thinkers of all stripes. The world in general and the U.S. in particular, face a list of critical immediate problems. Each of this problems is immense and, in some cases, may be unprecedented in human experience. When I find links to background material that is reasonably complete, clear and concise, I will include that, too. I won’t quite say that the background material is required reading before posting comments. But, please be up to speed and stay on topic. I’m open to views by people that are up to speed and on topic. I’m very impatient with people (even those I agree with) who clearly arn’t up to speed or can’t stay focused. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook
duck the soup
Speaking of weird. The U.S. patent system is a disaster. They’ve granted patents for all sorts of obvious things including Amazon.com’s storing of your credit card number so you can click and purchase. Wow, revolutionary idea. Some of the patents get stranger. All of this is old news except for the fact that Apple licensed one-click buying in essence legitimizing one of many patents that should never have been granted in the first place. Maybe it’s time to boycott Apple and Amazon.com… On a more positive Apple note, OS X seems to be living up to a lot of the hype. Mac users are going to have to adjust to major changes in the behavior of their OS, but Apple seems to have pulled off wedding the two extremes of computing: server iron (BSD Unix) and a great GUI (Mac OS) into one package. It’s almost frightening to think of Apple regaining their old technology lead over Microsoft. If you want to learn more Mac OS Rumors (Thurs 9/21), ZD Net, Macintouch and for those who just can’t get enough, MacWorld will drown you in articles. One article over at MacWorld is a great summary of the whole situation. The good, the bad and the ugly is all out there on this one. The two items above are typical of Apple. The balance between love ’em and hate ’em shifts, but Apple under Steve Jobs rarely lets you feel vanilla. If Apple had won the original OS war with Microsoft, … Continue reading duck the soup
quack?
The argument went something like this… mp3.com was helping people steal music. The record labels wanted to make sure that the artists got their fair share. The cavalry road off to battle and came back victorious with a lot of gold. But where are the checks for the artists? Courtney Love is sueing for her portion of the mp3.com settlement. This is the same woman who said "What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software. I’m talking about major label recording contracts." Australian Ross Clark sent an email. Soccer has been going since Wednesday among brush fires and a drought that sounds worse than the one here. The olympic torch has been carried around Australia by 100 runners for 100 days. To top it all off, Australian poet Mark O’Connor has been playing Olympic Poet, travelling the country. One of the annoyances for some people of using Apple equipment is that it’s difficult at best to upgrade the processor after you buy. Well, those with Powerbook G3 Series laptops now have an upgrade option Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook
potato rain
Here is Dallas, it’s officially been 80 days without rain, although a couple of small rain showers hit parts of the area earlier in the week. Even that unofficial 76 days is more than ten days above the old record. TV Minder has a great article on Why TiVo is almost, but oh-so-frustratingly not perfect. There’s also a Hack TiVo site and you can always visit the official TiVo site, too. A number of outfits are working on internet-only feature films. Creative Forces has a trailer for their first internet feature. Both the trailer and the future release will be in the QuickTime format. The QuickTime site, of course, has always got a batch of trailers for big-budget movies to distract you. It doesn’t quite qualify as a Hopelessly Complete Waste of Time, but Rapper Dentist is darn close. The better site is MC Hawking which "covers" Physicist Stephen Hawking’s second career: rap artist. The mp3s are a kick. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook
I’d settle for last week
We’ve finally updated our list of hosted sites, adding 4til7 (the new domain for our own Tim Wood), slamCDs (a speciality recording label for poetry; particularly slam) and PoetryVideo.com (scheduled to re-open later this year). Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook
gimme future now
While the PowerPC chips (by Motorolla and IBM) that power Apple’s products are stalled at 500MHz, Intel is planning to announce the Pentium IV shortly. The chip is supposed to start at 1.4GHz and analysts expect it to hit 10Ghz in about 4 years. Of course, Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs –especially with Apple’s OS X shipping in the next six months– it wouldn’t be too surprising to see the PPC speed issue solved soon. A new round of PPC chips in the 600-800MHz range is rumored to be later this year and rumors fly that Apple is talking with everyone from Transmeta and Intel to Compaq about chips. The later is probably the most interesting rumor. Compaq’s Alpha –originally developed by Digital– powers servers and high-end workstations. One of the sites we host —artsdfw.com— broke the news over the weekend –before the official news conference in Austin– that Texas has a new Poet Laureate. Click through for more details. Texas Poet Laureate NOW! should have more details soon. And the final bit of Texas poetry news… Texas teams took second and fifth at the National Poetry Slam in Providence RI recently. It’s becoming something of a habit for Texas teams to take home one or more spots in the top ten each year. If the numbers were run, it looks like Texas, New York and California are all in the top five as far as the number of teams in that top ten on a regular basis. Share with: … Continue reading gimme future now
swirly swishy yawny
Ever thought "I’ve seen that swooshy/swirly logo before and, darn, doesn’t that slogan sound familiar"? Well, you’re not imagining it. Check out Enormicon for some wonderful parody. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook
baada-zing
How’s the computer going to work in the future? Boring. A much better question is how should a computer work in the future? Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen wrote a short article in 1996 called The Anti-Mac Interface that looks at what people will be doing in the future and how that should change computers. Towards the Anti-Mac looks at where we’ve made progress and what still needs to be done. Interesting. And none of it is about what gadgets –DVD, USB, acronym-whatever. In case you missed the news, Harrison Ford’s character in Blade Runner was a replicant. A List Apart runs some very good articles on website design. Usability Experts are from Mars, Graphic Designers are from Venus talks about the ongoing battle between those who like things to look good and those who want practicality. It’s the age-old battle between form and function. The article does a good job of covering it. The really interesting challenge is how to fuse the two. Will Internet kill TV the same way (Music) TV killed radio?. Interesting bit of well-done Flash. Of course, when you find out that –at least when I’m typing this– "amazon.com" is on the list of top 100 search phrases you have to wonder about the future for other reasons. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook