Saltzafrazz

Health Care Bill Scare

2009-11-08T18:31:00.004-05:00

Interesting post from one of the guys at JammieWearingFool: "Congress Voted To Fire Me Last Night"

Their vote in essence caused me, and just about everybody else who works for a health insurance company, onto the unemployment rolls. It doesn't matter whether you are a claims adjuster, work a call center, sell the policies or some other job and you work for a private health insurance company or you are one of the evil heads of the corporation, your shelf life for having a job if the Pelosicare bill becomes fact is about five years.

...

If you currently have a private insurance policy, starting in 2011 your premiums will double if you are lucky, and in most cases triple. It is unavoidable.

...

My advice to anyone who works for a private insurance company is to dig out the resume, update it and try like hell to land one of the government jobs.

Read it all if you dare! Another, related view here: "PelosiCare's price controls will bankrupt health insurers in one year"
The blog points to text that in the bill that sets the minimum allowable loss ratio at 85%

An 85% loss ratio, as mandated by PelosiCare, would bankrupt insurers within a year. No mandated loss ratio has ever come close to 85%.

Graph taken from Here.

Yipe! Is he right? The issue seems complicated. Here is an interesting paper (pdf)

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the use and abuse of the medical loss ratio in the contemporary health care system and health policy debate. It begins with a survey of the ways in which the medical loss ratio has been interpreted to be something it is not, such as a measure of quality or efficiency. It then analyzes key organizational features of the emerging health care system that complicate measures of financial performance, including integration between payers and providers, diversification of payers across multiple products and distribution channels, and geographic expansion across metropolitan and state lines. These issues are illustrated using medical loss ratios from a range of nonprofit and for-profit health plans. The paper then sketches a strategy for improving the public's understanding of health plan performance as an alternative to continued reliance on the flawed medical loss ratio. This strategy incorporates data on structure and process, service quality, and financial performance.

Green idiocy

2009-11-07T15:29:00.004-05:00

I was watching a home improvement show which just happened to be on the Planet Green cable channel. On came a commercial where Steve Thomas, former host of This Old House, said a truly idiotic thing.

The commercial was quick, but while he appeared to be looking at either a furnace or a water heater he said of the no-doubt magnificent heater: "And this really does have a measurable impact on global warming."

Measurable impact?! Those were his words. "Measurable impact." I burst out laughing.

Utter and complete scientific illiteracy being presented as profound scientific truth.

A perfect portrait

2009-11-07T08:55:00.003-05:00

This seems to me to be a perfect portrait of ousted Honduran president Zelaya:

That's him in a room in the Brazilian embassy, complete with two aero beds and tin-foil covered windows!!

Stargate

2009-11-06T23:37:00.003-05:00

I hated the original Stargate movie, but when I gave the SG-1 series a try, I liked it. Around home it's referred to as "Auntie's bad movie." I haven't been a fan of Atlantis, and watching a tiny bit of Universe, I don't think I'll be a fan of this one either.

You see, it seems to have a holodeck problem. The main plot of the show is that a bunch of people, military, science, and civilian, are stuck on a space ship umpteen light years from Earth. Plenty of possibilities for danger and dramatic tension as they struggle to survive. However, in the earlier SG-1 series they established an alien technology that allowed people from one place to inhabit the bodies of people far far away, to walk and talk from inside other people, all instantaneously--over thousands of light years. So right now, the people who are supposed to be stranded on a ship which is running out of fuel, air, water and food, are partying in a night club back on Earth. Blah!

Square Dots

2009-11-06T20:14:00.001-05:00

I have a new post up on Square Dots.

First Friday Employment Post

2009-11-06T10:42:00.010-05:00

Here's the latest employment graph:

It looks like within a couple of months, the number of people employed will be less than at the depths of the post-911 recession--this despite an increase in population of about 11 million since 2003.

It also does not look like discouraged workers are beginning to look for work again. The numbers of long-term unemployed remained about the same, and the number out of the workforce has increased since last month.

If there is any bright side, it looks like the slope of the establishment survey line is beginning to shallow out slightly, though the household survey has not done the same. And both lines are still on a steep downward trajectory. A rough calculation of the average of the establishment line from October 2008 to July 2009 shows a monthly decline of about 0.593 million jobs lost per month. The same calculation over the last three months, July 2009 to October 2009, yields an average of about 0.136 million jobs lost per month--still a decline, but the slope is leveling off. The household data shows almost no change, if not a slight uptick in unemployment. The earlier period saw an average loss of 0.51 jobs per month, the most recent 3 months show a 0.59 jobs lost per month.

Do you Hulu?

2009-11-04T23:31:00.002-05:00

I admit to being a fan of the website Hulu, where you can watch TV with limited interruptions (sometimes none) and watch at your own time and pace.

It seems to me that TV programming execs should be scared out of their wits by this and the Tivo phenomenon. The simple reason is this: if you don't have to watch something at a specific time, you tend to find other, better things to do, and, unless a show is really good (a rarity,) you begin to watch it less and less often.

I stopped watching Heroes because of that phenomenon (that and the fact that they didn't learn the correct lesson from Joss Whedon's Buffy: since the villain is almost always the most-interesting character on the show, you should change the villian every year to keep the show interesting.) And, now I feel myself slipping away from "Glee" (though the Kristin Chenowyth episode was great! as was the dancing football team!)

NY-23 Results

2009-11-04T10:31:00.003-05:00

I was right about what would happen in NY-23. The Republican who lost support and dropped out still got 6 percent of the vote, and that was enough to give the win to the Democrat over the Conservative Party candidate.

Today of course, you will have endless talk from pundits about the "deeper meaning" of this race, most of it nonsense.

Truth to Power

2009-11-03T13:59:00.003-05:00

Student criticizes Khamenei at official gathering:

A lone student at a gathering of the country's academic elite took the unprecedented step of criticizing Leader Ali Khamenei in his presence on Wednesday morning, according to the Office for the Preservation and Publication of the Works of Grand Ayatollah Khamenei and opposition news sites.

Read the whole article. I am astounded by this student's bravery. I wish him well.

Economic recovery

2009-11-01T19:16:00.002-05:00

I'd be very surprised if we were actually seeing the beginning of real growth in the economy, unless, of course, we are talking about a brief uptick followed by a second retreat. The reason is very simple:

Why would any employer of any size hire one additional worker in this climate?

Similarly, why would any prospective entrepreneur go out on a limb to start a new business in this climate?

Why would anyone take the risk of such things with so much uncertainty about the economic future and government mandates, regulations, and stupidity?

American Wins the 2009 NYC Marathon

2009-11-01T14:02:00.002-05:00

Meb Keflezighi became the first American man to win the New York City Marathon since 1982 on Sunday.

"The USA gave me all the opportunities there is in education, sports and lifestyle," he said. "To be able to represent the USA is a big thing for me."

Congratulations!

Score One for Hillary!

2009-11-01T11:02:00.002-05:00

Hillary Clinton, during her recent trip to Pakistan:

"Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002," she finally asserted when challenged about Washington’s tough prescriptions for Islamabad. "I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to."

The US Secretary of State also took a swipe at the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies, telling the senior journalists, "If we are going to have a mature partnership where we work together" then "there are issues that not just the United States but others have with your government and with your military security establishment." She said she was "more than willing to hear every complaint about the United States'' but the relationship had to be a "two-way street."

At one point during the exchanges, when a journalist spoke about all the services rendered by Pakistan for the US, Mrs Clinton snapped, "We have also given you billions."

Well done Mrs. Clinton! How refreshing to hear an American diplomat dishing it out rather than just standing there and taking it. Finally, someone in power has the nerve to tell the truth.

Bayes, Laplace and the Sun

2009-11-01T08:00:00.005-05:00

William M Briggs mentions Laplace's Rule of Succession in a recent blog post. Briggs' is a blog about statistics and related matters that I highly recommend. Laplace used the rule, which relies on Bayes' Theorem, to calculate the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow. It is an elegant and fascinating bit of analysis. According to Wikipedia, Laplace's method give odds 1826250:1 in favour of the sun rising tomorrow.

But I beg to differ! Using Bayesian analysis, I calculate that the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is 1/2!

Here is my argument. Let N+1 be the number of days from the start of history through tomorrow. Suppose at first that we know nothing about the sun, neither the related physics nor the past history of its rising. This was Laplace's assumption as well. Suppose we only know that the sun rises on some subset of the N+1 days in question. With only this knowledge, we assume a uniform prior probability distribution on this subset. Thus we assume that all 2^(N+1) possible subsets of the N+1 days are equally likely to be the sun-rising subset, each having probability 2^(-N-1). Now suppose we are given additional knowledge, specifically that the sun rose on the first N days. There are then only two possibilities for the sun-rising subset: the set of all N+1 days, and the set that contains only the first N days. By our prior assumption, and a trivial application of Bayes Rule, we see that each of these possibilities now has the posterior probability of 1/2. Thus the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is 1/2.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Related post here.

Amazing Pumpkin

2009-10-31T15:47:00.002-04:00

This is the most amazing carved pumpkin I have ever seen

Check out the rest at the artist's web site. You can see several shots of the process he goes through in making one of these. This man has serious skills!

Horror Film List

2009-10-31T14:00:00.007-04:00

Just for fun, I reordered this list of horror films to my liking. Click to zoom. The first column is my rating (10 being best). The second column is the ranking from the website, from 1 to 100. Some things I would add, like the original Dracula. Some of these aren't really horror. If we are not strict about the genre, why not add Delieverance for example? I'm impressed with how many I have seen. It seems I haven't been keeping up though, much of the new stuff I have missed. The modern movies like Hostel and Saw are just too disgusting, and un-enjoyable.

Happy Halloween 2009

2009-10-31T13:17:00.001-04:00

Happy Halloween everyone!

NY-23

2009-10-31T11:47:00.003-04:00

I was going to write a post about NY-23, the upcoming election for a Congressional representative from New York's upstate 23rd district. The title of the post was going to be "Who Cares." Really, I thought, what is all the hub-bub bub? It's about one seat in the House for goodness sake.

But today it got interesting. The Republican candidate has dropped out!

The Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, remains. The question I have is can he win? Despite the Republican dropping, I suspect she will still get a substantial amount of votes. It depends on how the ballot is structured, but I suspect that many people will just vote the party.

It would be a shame if the conservative vote were split. This Hoffman chap seems to be pretty good. I disagree with him on gay marriage, and am not so interested in the abortion issue. But his fiscal stance is right on. Good luck Mr Hoffman.

Health Insurance Facts

2009-10-30T14:07:00.005-04:00

Here is a very enlightening essay on Health Insurance.

It turns out that claims about too little competition are based on a misinterpretation of the data and that non-profit insurers are so abundant that the largest insurer in virtually every state is a non-profit.

I recommend it. Despite a year-long debate on health insurance, I have not heard much about these points before.

I think that the politicians now pushing for massive health insurance reforms have no idea what they are doing. They have no knowledge of insurance. The current proposals are more about a government power grab than a serious attempt to address problems in our current system. Our current leadership sees corporations as inherently evil, and government heroic.

I expect the result to be a disaster.

Arnold's Memo

2009-10-30T08:30:00.003-04:00

I wasn't going to comment on Arnold's naughty memo, but then I saw this post at The Corner.

Schwarzenegger deliberately etched an obscene word into the official public record, where it will stay forever.

It probably took his staff a good deal of effort to devise the acrostic. So think about it: Amid a fiscal crisis requiring severe cutbacks, a public employee had to use government time and resources to carry out the governor’s potty-mouth prank. This incident sends the message that he does not take the crisis very seriously. And one hopes that he did not assign a female aide to the task: Such is the stuff of sexual-harassment lawsuits.

Nobody should expect elected officials to be perfect in their private lives. But we can expect them to behave like adults in their public lives. By pulling a stunt that would land a junior-high-school kid in detention, the governor has flunked this standard.

I say good for Arnold. I thought the memo was amusing and appropriate.

As for the post at The Corner, I think John J. Pitney Jr., the Roy P. Crocker professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is in serious need of lightening up.

Britain Has Lost It

2009-10-28T19:02:00.003-04:00

Is it just me, or has Britain gone nuts? It seems like every couple of days there is some bizarre story coming from there. Sure, there are bizarre stories coming out of the USA. But the US stories are usually about individual people who act in bizarre ways. Britain's nuttery is more institutional, a result of government, and often the product of Political Correctness run amok. The latest:

Parents banned from watching their children in playgrounds... in case they are paedophiles

Read it and believe it.

India's Preemptive Surrender?

2009-10-27T23:59:00.004-04:00

This public statement seems like a bad idea to me. Why would you declare to an adversary, who has a history of belligerence against you, that you are weak and wary of a fight? What is the expected response? Found via the Elephant Bar.

Update: A partial backtrack?

It's a Zombie Invasion!

2009-10-27T00:31:00.003-04:00

What's up with all the zombie movies?

Data source. Has this weird phenomenon peaked?

Balloon Boy

2009-10-21T11:26:00.002-04:00

I read about Balloon Boy on the net, without seeing any video. But once I saw the video, it was clear to me that there was no way a 45 pound 6 year old boy was inside that balloon

In the video you can see the balloon isn't even bottom heavy:

Googling around, I see others thought the same. Another good point

Aside from the lack of sufficient lift, just look at the photo! It is obvious from the shape of the balloon that it is not carrying much weight; else it would be pulled into a classic teardrop shape.

Seriously, it's not even convex. The media, I suppose, was more interested in drama than bursting everyone's bubble here. Odd though that there wasn't someone pointing out how ridiculous this hoax was while it was happening.

A slight defense of Shepard Fairey

2009-10-17T23:58:00.005-04:00

Several commentators in recent days have decried the lack of celebration of the falling of the Berlin Wall. Obama has decided to send Clinton to the festivities in Germany instead of going himself. Others have pointed out that to properly celebrate the end of the Eastern Bloc you must explain just what the Eastern Bloc was and why we spent decades fighting it. And to properly celebrate the fall, you have to mention such names as Thatcher, Reagan and Bush I.

Yesterday afternoon, while driving past LACMA museum on Wilshire in West Los Angeles, I noticed about 8 sections of the Wall have been erected across the street from the museum (interestingly, not on the museum grounds at all.)

A little research showed that Los Angeles is actually holding one of the biggest celebrations around. There are the sections of the wall on display, there is a contest to make your own wall graffiti, and they will actually be building a wall across the very-busy Wilshire Boulevard--this to give people a taste of what it was like to have your city and country cut into two.

[ The Independent (UK) ] The Wall Project, the largest commemoration in the US of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, will be staged in Los Angeles with segments of the real Berlin Wall along Wilshire Boulevard for public viewing, October 17-November 14.

A two-part initiative, ‘The Wall Along Wilshire" part consists of 10 original 11-foot-by-three-foot segments of the Berlin Wall with an original border tower, to be installed on Wilshire Boulevard as an outdoor gallery. These real sections were donated by Berlin resident, Thomas Goerner, who owns the property on which the segments stood.

The other component, "The Wall Across Wilshire," will stretch over one of the busiest streets in LA, near the Los Angeles County Art Museum, blocking traffic.

So what does this have to do with the title of this blog? And who is Shepard Fairy? He's the artist responsible for this:

He's also being sued by AP, because it was one of their pictures that he used as starting point of his picture, and they want some of those juicy royalties.

He's been in the news the last day or two, because he has admitted to lying in his documentation in the lawsuit. Blogs are blasting him as a liar.

However...Shepard Fairey also happens to be the leading artist in the Los Angeles Wall commemorations.

"The Wall Across Wilshire," will stretch over one of the busiest streets in LA, near the Los Angeles County Art Museum, blocking traffic. Panels will be painted by Shepard Fairey, the graphic artist who created the iconic "Hope" poster for Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

So, I'm more than willing to give Fairey quite a pass on this one.

Watching O'Reilly

2009-10-17T19:00:00.004-04:00

Speaking of O'Reilly... why do I tune in? I usually end up watching very little of it. Basically, I listen to his intro bit, then tune out unless there is Bernie Goldberg or a few other segments like "Is it Legal?" which I enjoy. Perhaps it's just force of habit. There isn't anything else worth watching at that time slot either.

Ann says: His body-language segment is idiotic. I can't stand watching him, and usually go do something else...in fact, I haven't been able to stand him since his summer of the shark a couple years ago, when he overhyped shark attacks.