Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Change Is Good

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If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Lao Tzu
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Winston Churchill

“I’ve been thinking ’bout catching a train
Leave my phone machine by the radar range
Hello, it’s me, I’m not at home
If you’d like to reach me then leave me alone.“
It is fairly well known by now that Socrates hated, hated the alphabet and its portent of change. “…for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves… You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing,” Plato wrote, of Socrates talking to Phaedrus. Since Socrates refused to write things down, we rely on Plato as his scribe. Change is good.

On a much smaller scale, I had occasion to back a pickup truck onto a trailer tongue the other day. I’ve always preferred to do that as a two-person job, one driving the truck and Rufus making obscure hand gestures whilst standing on the tongue. The truck I used had an optional backup camera with video that swivels and points and even has range lines to guide you on far better than watching the expressions on Rufus’ face. Change is good.

Once upon a time, I wished for a (convenient) VCR for radio. See I liked to listen to Car Talk but it aired on Saturday mornings and I was often interrupted by a dump run, so I missed many of those episodes. Change is good. In 1993, Carl Malamud launched his Internet Talk Radio as the “first computer-radio talk show.” Computer users could download his audio files each week and listen at their convenience. Today I can choose from more than 115,000 English-language podcasts including reruns of Car Talk.

Change is good. Except when it isn’t.

My crew chief (not Rufus) munged the Camaro shift linkage one fine summer day and sent me out on the track with 1st gear down and to the right where 4th gear should be, 2nd in place of 3rd, but 3rd up there where 1st should be, and 4th next to 1st taking the proper 2nd slot (this was loooooong before paddle shifters). Just try going up through those gears and back down again at full chat with a horde of other pony cars around you.

“You’re the driver,” my crew chief said. “You’re supposed to be able to adapt to these little changes.”

Um, no. I have better things to do than try to learn a new shift pattern at 160 mph.

I got a new crew chief. That change bit him.

Firefox ScreenshotAnother change. Firefox decided to redo all my taskbars this morning and tell me to upgrade from version 22 (released last month) to version 25 (released the other day). It was not a clean change. I had to rebuild some of the add-ons, fix the task and menu bars, and so on. And for whatever reason the page zoom is no longer “sticky.” Page magnification used to be sticky. In addition to the UI issues, it has also fried all my protected cookies, the tab options, and some other stuff I probably haven’t found yet. Gmail, Facebook, Pandora, my credit card site, and a couple of others all thought I was logging in from a new computer. It loaded my home button page because it no longer differentiates between that and the home page and TVGuide thinks I’m in Fargo, ND, despite the fact that Cookie Culler shows explicitly that I have my location, provider, and favorite channels set. This is one of the least satisfactory single app upgrades I’ve done yet.

I told Firefox that this version may be the worst browser ever, simply because I’m spending so much more time trying to fix it than browsing.

I have better things to do than try to learn a new shift pattern or new browser tricks when I’m already trying to figure out what Facebook has screwed up this week.

I got a new crew chief. I can get a new browser.

And I managed to get through this rant without once mentioning the guy who promised to turn our world upside down and ended up simply stealing our world.

It’s past time for a change there, too. Change is good.

 

Worser

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“The way this thing is going, it is a good thing we have a word like worser,” Bob Schieffer said yesterday morning on Face the Nation.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Lies.

“If the website doesn’t work, nothing else matters,” Barack Obama, 2010.

The Washington Post reports that in 2010 a pointed memo warned Mr. Obama’s top economic aides that no one in the administration was “up to the task” of constructing the insurance exchange and all the other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page Unaffordable Care Act into practice. The Washington Post. Not the Washington Times. Not the WashingtonExaminer.com. The Washington Post.

Didn’t matter.

“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” said Harvard’s David Cutler, a health adviser to Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Damned lies.

“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Barack Obama, 23 times from 2008 through 2010, and again in 2011. And again in 2012.

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) may have rolled out the official Doublespeak: “As I understand it, you can keep it up to the time the bill was enacted, then after that it’s a different story. I think that part of it, if true, was never made clear.” Your liberal friends will be quoting this now.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Statistics.

It’s not even the biggest startup. Amazon.com attracts about 65 million customers every month. Healthcare.gov must handle the 15 million people who buy their health insurance on the individual market. About 2.7 million of them tried in the first few days, or about half what Amazon handles each and every day during the Christmas season.

I use amazon.com and find it easy and intuitive. And the widgets I buy arrive in a truck 5 to 8 days later. I’ve tried to use healthcare.gov several times. It ain’t easy or intuitive and I still don’t have any idea of what policy I’ll have 58 days from now when my current policy evaporates.

And the hits just keep on coming.

I'm from the Government

Whether the website works isn’t the problem. The website is symptomatic of the problem.

“They didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. My liberal friends devoutly believe that you don’t actually need to know anything to run a business. Or, apparently, to run a government.

“It’s very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills,” Dr. Cutler said.

That’s our choice. Do we trust a government that trains for disaster, then rolls out FEMA; that has the greatest web gurus in the world, then gets caught spying on Angela Merkel; that has 3-1/2 years to build a Blue Cross website, then rolls out Ms. Feinstein’s sorry excuses? Do we trust that government to stitch our wounds and mend our broken bones?

My liberal friends are devout. And wrong.

And the hits just keep on coming.

 

Snapping Out

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Starting today, We the Overtaxed People will give food stamp recipients less money each month because a “temporary” $5 billion stimulus has expired. Those funds, along with certain COBRA and ERRP benefits and more, came from the 2009 Recovery Act.

Let them eat cake!One in seven Americans, or about 47 million people, depend on SNAP (the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) to pay some or all of the cost of their groceries. The average beneficiary received $133.41 in food stamps per month last year.

“A family of four will lose $36 per month!” my retired newspaper editor buddy Lido “Lee” Bruhl said.

No.

That family of four simply had an extra $36 per month to spend for a little while. Kind of a windfall. My buddy Lee has always wanted to tax windfalls at 120%. Or more.

One wag wondered, “if obesity is the problem the left claims it is, then they should be happy.”

Heh. I do note that most food stamp recipients buy better cuts of meat than I do, but that’s not the right question.

Learn to fish, GrasshopperThe Food Stamp Act of 1964 appropriated $75 million to 350,000 individuals in 40 counties and three cities. By April of 1965, participation topped half a million. Participation topped 1 million in 1966, 2 million in 1967, 3 million in 1969, 4 million in February, 1970, 5 million one month later, 6 million two months later, 10 million in 1971, and 15 million in 1974. As of 2013, more than 15% of the entire U.S. population receives SNAP assistance. Washington D.C. gives SNAP to 23% of its population.

The $75 million Food Stamp Act of 1964 had grown to $78.4 billion and the 350,000 to 47 million in 2012.

The right question is, why do liberals think it’s better to enslave our population (47 million and growing and growing and growing) than it is to teach them to fish?

 

We Don’t Need No Steenking Details — Book Them Orders

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A liberal friend is impassioned about how she finally will get insurance January 1.

I’m glad she was able to get a plan, glad that the combination of premium and subsidy (actually a credit against next year’s taxes as in “many people who apply will qualify for reduced costs through tax credits that are automatically applied to monthly premiums”). I hope her carrier comes through rather than dumping her, a problem reported by CBS News last night.

Premiums for 38 Plans from healthcare.gov
I also hope she was able to find enough info about the plan she chose to know what coverage she got. See, this chart I’ve printed from healthcare.gov is pretty much all the info healthcare.gov is giving us; what I see is that monthly premiums for the dozen or so “bronze” plans, f’rex, range from $413.66 to at least $548.64. The five “platinum” plans range from $721.56 to $782.63.

What’s a “bronze plan”? How much does a “gold plan” pay for what service? What’s this “Catastrophic plan” that suddenly appeared for about the same premium? Nowhere did healthcare.gov tell me what a bronze plan actually covers or why there is a difference between all the different platinums. Here in South Puffin all those platinum plans are offered by Blue Cross and only Blue Cross. How can there be a dozen different plans at a dozen different premiums that all offer the same coverage?

At least Mr. Obama promised us he’ll fix the website!

Shopping for a Medicare Advantage plan for SWMBO was a cakewalk by comparison.

 

We Don’t Need No Steenking Details — Part II

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5 years to develop Exchange website and 2 years of testing?

Say what?

“They had the architecture. They had the pieces,” software engineering manager Liz Arden said. “With any kind of competent team, this is a one-year project with the testing integrated in the development.”

“The White House said that it would fix the insurance marketplace by Nov. 30, raising the question of how people whose current policies do not comply with the law will get new coverage in time,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Uh huh.

That’s the same White House that said, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” That’s the same White House that, with rose [garden] colored glasses just days before HealthCare.gov went live, pitched how much we would love it,

The bad news? The Administration will eventually bow to pressure to extend the deadline leaving all of us *with* private insurance out in the cold. See, the policy I have (and the policy you have) is no longer available December 31.

I am one of the millions with individual or small group policies who lose our insurance on December 31. That would be the insurance policy Mr. Obama promised we could keep.

What am I supposed to do when the law says I have to buy a policy and there is no policy to buy because the federal government (we’re here to help) pulled a FEMA on us.

Oh.

FEMA.

Now I understand.

Never mind.

I'm from the Government