Private Mars Rocket II

I know and work with somebody who is very good at their job. They seem to have some problems with general non-job-related tasks. For example, they have been driving a car for several months with expired tags.

I am not surprised to report that they have not yet gotten the COVID-19 vaccine. Reaching people like that should be (and appears to be) our next focus, as opposed to arguing with The New Millerites. Reaching some of those people will be a matter of incentives, like the "shot and a beer" promotions being ran in many areas. For others, it will be a matter of convenience. The easier it is for them to get shot up, the more likely for that to happen.

Alas, this means the pace of vaccinations will slow. That's just the way the cookie will crumble.

Over the weekend, I visited my parents in downstate Illinois. One of the men at the gun club had recently recovered from a hospital stint due to COVID-19. Last night, my personal trainer told me his father-in-law, a man in his mid-60s with a heart condition, was in the hospital with COVID-19. This morning, I learned that Wisconsin is building a field hospital.

This business of COVID-19 is out of control.

Two questionable items from my recent job hunt and some good news:

Item #1

I signed up for a job web site, and they offered a free resume review, tied to a service that will, for a fee, write your resume. So I submitted mine. I got some decent feedback and did a rewrite. When I signed up for another job site, I got the same offer so I submitted the revised resume under a different email address.

I got the exact same recommendations! Verbatim, with the same generic example. Oh, and another offer to have somebody write my resume for me for a fee.

Item #2

I applied online for a job posted on a web site. It was clearly posted on behalf of a company by some headhunter firm. Two hours later, I'm talking to that firm and being told for a high four-figure payment upfront ("don't worry - most people cover it with their signing bonus") we'll get you a much higher-paying job. I think not.

Good News

I had applied to the VA for healthcare. I sent the application in, and it went nowhere. So I called, expecting to get a runaround. Nope - the very helpful person figured out what was missing and got me taken care of straight away. It was actually quite pleasant.

Posted elsewhere, in response to a question on how America can "fix healthcare."

This really isn't rocket science. Most of the rest of the world has figured it out years ago. The solution, in broad strokes, is:

1) Get everybody to pay into the healthcare system, whether via taxes or private insurance. Actually, taxes are cheaper because private insurance has marketing and profit overheads. But everybody is important, in that you don't want some freeloader rolling into an emergency room, especially for something that could have been managed cheaply had they been able to see a doctor sooner.

1a) Everybody in is also important in that, just like auto insurance or homeowner insurance, those that don't file a claim subsidize those that do.

2) Allow the large payers (in our case Medicare / Medicaid) to negotiate pricing. In every other country, they do so, and get meds and equipment at a fraction of the cost. For example, in Belgium, if you need an artificial hip joint, you get the same one you do in the US (both made in a factory in Indiana) but the Belgium one cost $800 and the US one costs $20,000.

3) Pay doctors on performance, not activity. Right now, my doc has every financial incentive to order every test I'll take. Penalize hospitals for things like hospital-based infections. Again, the financial incentive of a hospital is to keep you in. These changes will force the health-care system to get more efficient.

Most of the rest of the world accomplishes this by having a government paid-for (Canada) or government-ran (UK) system that relies on private insurance for supplementary things, like private rooms or other upgrades. In fact, in Canada, they call it Medicare and it works like US medicare except you buy in at birth. I'll say it because somebody will comment on it, but even when Canada has to ship somebody to the US (which they do, at government cost, because it's cheaper than having Canadian specialists) they deliver quality health care at a fraction of the cost.

Some of the melting snow has turned to fog, but personally that's a small price to pay for 24 hours of melting. Here, have a few scattered thoughts.

Hilary Clinton

As you may have heard, Hilary decided she needed a private email server in her house to do official business with. It is exactly these sorts of shenanigans that make me hope she doesn't run for President.

Autism

I was reading an article in the dead-tree version of the Chicago Tribune about how working with animals seems to help autistic people. So, I was wondering - is some of the apparent increase in autism due to the lack of interaction modern humans have with animals? I mean, up to the 20th century, everybody "worked" with animals like horses. Now we don't.

Good Old Fashioned SF

The various puppy-flavored SF movements and my friend jeff_duntemann have expressed distaste for modern SF, and think various "gatekeepers" are holding the good stuff back. Well, from Tor, a big New York publisher, comes the heavily-marketed Unbreakable: A Novel. Written by Mr. W. C. Bauers, it's a straight-up space opera with starship battles, ground actions and libertarian colonists.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

Like the label on the tin says:

A) A depressing article on the sickest town in America.

B) An interesting old picture - Ladies of the Revolution!

C) A pilot and his co-pilot, the cat.

D) Here's a detailed breakdown of male and female Hugo award winners by year.

E) From IO9, a visual illustration on the amount of meat we eat. The amount has doubled from 1960 to now.

A late post today, because this morning I was conducting disaster recovery testing for my bank. I find that very ironic, considering the current flap over Ebola. I also find myself in deep agreement with the comment that resiliency and the ability to handle outlier events is not efficient from a bottom line perspective of a single entity with profit as its primary focus.

In the case of my bank (the entity I'm responsible for) disaster recovery training means maintaining 40 or so computers and phones in various back rooms, waiting for a once-a-year test. Although these spare machines aren't primo, they are (and have to be) serviceable, as do the spaces we're reserving. But we do it, in large part because our regulators insist that we have a DR plan and that we test it.

Apparently regulators are not making sure hospitals are testing their plans, as evidenced by the Charlie Foxtrot in Texas.

A) Jim Wright, is, as usual, on fire about Ebola in Atlanta. As an American, you're about a billion times more likely to trip over your cat and take a header down the stairs than you are to catch ebola on any given day.

B) Somebody forgot to tell the walruses that global warming was a hoax.

C) What It's like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class. Hint - it's just a bit nicer than economy on Aer Lingus.

Thanks to President's day, I am not at work, but thanks to a snowstorm I'm limiting my outside activities. Herewith, some random thoughts:

1) Various Neanderthals in science fiction continue to shoot themselves in the feet (Mary's "critics," not Mary, are doing the shooting). In other news, water is wet and it's cold in Chicago in February.

2) A fascinating short film - how wolves change rivers. If a wolf can change a river, a man can change the climate.

3) From Jay Lake, who's become (not by choice) a connoisseur of cancer treatment: The French way of cancer treatments.

4) Over the weekend, I went to see the new movie The Monuments Men. It was very well done and quite moving. I highly recommend it.

5) Speaking of things highly-recommended, I picked up a new reviewing gig at Heroines of Fantasy. (Alas, it pays the same as my other gig.) My first review, of the very entertaining book The Shifter's Trail, is up on the site.

I have heard told that the current snafu with the Obamacare website is “Obama’s Katrina.” I remember Katrina, and I don’t recall the government getting shut down to defund FEMA or 30+ states refusing to cooperate with FEMA, nor do I see people stranded on rooftops yelling for help health insurance.

On the other hand, it’s definitely a screw-up, and it’s on Obama. Now, it’s mostly a computer screw-up, and the list of large organizations that botched a computer roll-out is, well, large. But that’s an excuse, not a fix, and the Obama administration needs to get it fixed.

Yet somehow I doubt this will have the impact on Obama or politics in general that Katrina did. As I recall things, Katrina was the latest in a string of screw-ups. There were two wars both of which were going to hell in hand basket, and Bush came back from vacation to insert himself and his party in the Terry Schiavo mess. Like I said, Bush was developing a reputation for screw-ups, which Obama has not.

I’m also not sure about the impact of this on the 2014 elections. As an IT guy, it’s impossible for me to believe that the web site won’t be operational by the spring if not sooner, and we won’t vote until November. That’s an eternity in politics. I would also note that cuts both ways – last month the progressive types were banking on winning back the House on the back of the government shutdown.

In short, this too will pass.