An understatement from Scoble

Robert Scoble says:

Wanna speak at a Visual Studio conference? Chris Kinsman says he's looking for ASP.NET talks and that Fawcette Technical Publications has a call for papers.

One thing to be warned on, though, is that Fawcette is well known for not paying speakers on time (if at all).

Robert's well known for making little things sound big, so I want to point out that this may be one of the few instances of him, in that last line, making an understatement. I'm still waiting for them to pay me for speaking at a conference several years ago.

Personally, I'd rather talk for a conference like SXSW Interactive that says up front that all I get is a conference pass versus working for a promoter that signs a contract saying they'll pay but never do.

Rock 'n' Roll Novels

Wrapped Up in Books: A Guide to Rock Novels gives a top 50 list of rock and roll novels. I've only read three of them: Spider Kiss (Harlan Ellison, 1961), Glimpses (Lewis Shiner, 1993), and Idoru (William Gibson, 1996). Of the other 47, many sound like something I'd enjoy, so I'll have to check them out.

OTOH, the writer left off what I think is one of the best rock and roll novels of all time: Paperback Writer: The Life and Times of the Beatles, the Spurious Chronicle of Their Rise to Stardom, Their Triumphs and Disasters, Plus the Amazing Story of Their Ultimate Reunion (Mark Shipper, 1978). Oh for the 70's, when we could make jokes about a Beatles reunion and think that it could still come true… Yes, I still have my copy of this book.

New Orleans Talking Blues

Via Making Light, it's the New Orleans Talking Blues:

When levees are flooded and hurricanes roar,
When the waters start seeping up under the door,
You'd expect the escape plans to include the poor
But this isn't that kind of song.

Serenity's a'comin'

Yep, it's only three more weeks until Serenity's here, so I thought I'd remind people of the widget I made. You can get it here or here.

One of the most interesting things about that widget was that I put a small easter egg into it. My best guess is that over 300 people have found the easter egg so far, and I've haven't received a single comment from anyone complaining. Cool!

OTOH, I haven't heard anyone complimenting me on it, either…

Blog Quickies

I'm clearing out a bunch of open tabs:

• PPK's started a addEvent() recoding contest over at QuirksBlog. If you understand why this is cool, you should enter.
  
  
• How to cook an egg with just a radio and two cell phones.
  
  
• Google UnSafeSearch: what pages of yours aren't being seen by those using Google SafeSearch? (hat tip: ResearchBuzz)
  
  
• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart presents Evolution Schmevolution: A Daily Show Special Report, airing nightly from September 12-15 at 11:00 pm. Now that's what I call "must-see TV".
  
  
• You heard that story about the woman who's suing her doctor for telling her she's obese? Here's her side of the story — and it's rather different.

MBOX Spotlight Plugin?

I have a need to search through some archived email MBOX files, and (silly me) I thought that Spotlight would do the job, since an MBOX file is just a tarted-up text file. But Spotlight doesn't do it on its own, and a search with Google and VersionTracker didn't turn up any Spotlight plugins that will do the job. I thought I'd throw it out to our readers, who often have found stuff that I can't. Please let me know if you have spotted this plugin in the wild.

On LinkedIn

Over the years, I've joined just about every social networking site out there. The only one where I'm still seeing action is LinkedIn, for some reason. I'm not sure what it is about the site versus all the others, but I had twothree people ping me to be connected just today.

If you're on LinkedIn, add me as a connection.

This is the bottom, I hope

I've barely blogged in the last week, because every time I try to say something about Katrina and/or New Orleans, I just lose it. And I wait for things to get a little better so I'll be able to write, and I hear something worse. And now, I read this:

[After visiting the Astrodome,] Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to Houston."

Then she added: "What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them."

That's it. This has got to be the bottom. Please. I can't take it getting any lower than this.

Later note: In our comments, Dave Dombrowski objected to the editing of the quote. I listened to the audio, and here's the corrected transcription:

"What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

Emphasis added by me to show what E&P left off. Boy, yeah, they really edited it to make her sound worse, didn't they?

American Idiocy: Health Care Edition

Malcolm Gladwell, of Blink and The Tipping Point fame, has an excellent article in The New Yorker about health care in America. Be sure to read it. In short: the American health care system is not the best in the world; we spend far too much money to get far too little care; and the "solutions" pushed by the Bush administration are the exact antithesis of what will solve the problems of the uninsured.

Current thinking about insurance, says Gladwell, is concerned about "moral hazard," which is the term economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured. The idea is that people with better health insurance will make more wasteful health care decisions than people with less insurance coverage. While this may make sense in the ivory tower, the reality on the ground is that most people with great health insurance coverage still only go to the doctor when they're actually sick, not just for the hell of it. Yet moral hazard — an idea at odds with the reality of how Americans actually use health care — is now driving the push towards Health Savings Accounts (HSA's), and the trend towards ever-higher deductibles and lower benefits.

Having been forced into a combination of an HSA and a high-deductible health plan, I can attest that I am not getting better care than I did with my previous plan. I am, for sure, receiving much more expensive care, which makes me more inclined to put off routine maintenance visits. Yet because I am relatively well-off, I have the "freedom" to pay for those visits out of my own pocket, and I do.

The 2004 Economic Report of the President, which laid out the policy basis for HSA's, argues that Americans have too much health insurance, and steps must be taken to make it more expensive to obtain health care (which would "make the market more efficient"). The report also argues that many people do not have health insurance because they choose not to, rather than because they are poor:

Sered and Fernandopulle see the lack of insurance as a problem of poverty; a third of the uninsured, after all, have incomes below the federal poverty line. In the section on the uninsured in the President’s report, the word “poverty” is never used. In the Administration’s view, people are offered insurance but “decline the coverage” as “a matter of choice.” The uninsured in Sered and Fernandopulle’s book decline coverage, but only because they can’t afford it. Gina, for instance, works for a beauty salon that offers her a bare-bones health-insurance plan with a thousand-dollar deductible for two hundred dollars a month. What’s her total income? Nine hundred dollars a month. She could “choose” to accept health insurance, but only if she chose to stop buying food or paying the rent.

In the past week, we're heard the Bush administration use the "they chose not to" line in another situation: they said that poor people in New Orleans and Biloxi "chose" not to evacuate out of the path of Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, the implication is that if you choose not to do something, you bear all the responsibility for any adverse consequences. But in the real world, neither group of poor people have or had any real choices. Many of the dead in New Orleans did not have the financial resources to get out of town (no car, no plane, train, or bus fare, no money for hotels), and many of the people who will die because they can't afford health insurance are facing just as much of a lack of choice about the matter.

The difference is that we can still avoid the looming health care disaster for millions of our American brothers and sisters. All we need do is wake up and put our country on the path to government-sponsored universal health care, as has every other industrialized country in the world. It will end up costing Americans less for health care, not more. It will end up covering the 45 million citizens currently without decent health care. It will strengthen the American economy, not weaken it. It will save millions of families from needing to declare bankruptcy because of medical bills.

Why can't we do this? Politics and greed, of course. So I, for one, choose only to vote for politicians who want to solve the problem of health care for all Americans once and for all. Noodling around the edges of the current system will not work. Health Savings Accounts and other right-wing nostrums will only make the problem worse. We need to rebuild the health care funding system in America, and we needed to get started on the job 50 years ago. So let's get started now.