President Obama’s stay-in-school speech (full video and transcript) – Daily Kos TV (beta)

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The Longer People Stay Married to Each Other…

Two items….

1. I had reported on the Peoria Health Care Town Hall. Barbara went with Lynn and me; Lynn is one of my political buddies and, like me, she is a hot head. So Barbara sat between us so we wouldn’t make trouble.

Almost all of the speakers were well behaved and listened to respectfully; there was one who started in on off topic things (illegal immigration, border control, super highways, etc.) and people in the audience yelled at him to get back on topic and to make his point.

Guess who was standing at the back and telling him to get back on point? Hint: it wasn’t Lynn and it wasn’t me. (yes, she had lots of company).

2. I got home from work yesterday and saw this:

No, I did not buy this nor did I recommend it; this was in no way my idea!

8 September 09 (still buggy)

Workout notes Gentle 4.2 mile run (39:30); I slept in and missed yoga class.

Politics I have to admit that I am mostly annoyed by some at Daily Kos; it appears that some there think that President Obama has a magic wand that he can wave but just won’t.

Don’t get me wrong: I completely approve of principled criticism (e. g., Paul Krugman from the right, David Frumm from the left). I approve of trying to put pressure on him to push for this policy or for that one. But I don’t approve of those who think that the President can just show up and “just do” things. It isn’t that easy.

Health Care Here is one of my biggest issues with the reptiles that we call “insurance companies”:

The untimely disappearance of Sally Marrari’s medical coverage goes a long way toward explaining why insurance companies are cast as the villain in the health-care reform drama.

“They said I never mentioned I had a back problem,” said Marrari, 52, whose coverage with Blue Cross was abruptly canceled in 2006 after a thyroid disorder, fluid in the heart and lupus were diagnosed. That left the Los Angeles woman with $25,000 in medical bills and the stigma of the company’s claim that she had committed fraud by not listing on a health questionnaire “preexisting conditions” Marrari said she did not know she had.

By the time she filed a lawsuit in 2008, she also got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and her debts had swelled beyond $200,000. She was able to see a specialist by trading office visits for work on the doctor’s 1969 Porsche at the garage she owns with her husband.

“I’ve had about 10 visits,” Marrari said of the barter arrangement that has proved more reliable than her insurance. “The car needs a lot of work.”

Rescission — the technical term for canceling coverage on grounds that the company was misled — is often considered among the most offensive practices in an insurance industry that already suffers from a distinct lack of popularity among the American public. Tales of cancellations have fueled outrage among regulators, analysts, doctors and, not least, plaintiffs’ lawyers, who describe insurers as too eager to shed patients to widen profits. [...]

In the only case to go to trial in California, an arbitration judge awarded $9 million to a beautician who had to stop chemotherapy for her breast cancer after Health Net dropped her policy. Company officials declined to comment.

In a pending case, Blue Shield searched in vain for an inconsistency in the health records of the wife of a dairy farmer after she filed a claim for emergency gallbladder surgery, according to attorneys for the family. Turning to her husband’s questionnaire, the company discovered he had not mentioned his high cholesterol and dropped them both. Blue Shield officials said they would not comment on a pending case.

Officials from three insurance companies told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee this summer they had saved $300 million by canceling about 20,000 policies over five years.

So if a public option puts these bastards out of business, I’ll celebrate.

Our Health Care Problems Are More Vivid When Presented in Colorful Graphical Video Form | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

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(from Cosmic Variance)

I should make a personal comment here: way back in 1999 I saw my doctor for a burning pressure in my chest. He told me the following: “I could stress test you but we’d learn nothing from it; a true positive reading is of such low probability that any positive reading would likely be a false positive reading. Your symptoms are classic reflux. I could do an upper GI series on you, but that would probably cause more pain or problems than it would prevent. So in this case, it is best to treat the symptoms and so I am going to give you an ant-acid. It will probably resolve itself in a month.”

And that is what he did and that is what happened. That was a low cost but effective treatment.

Yes, I still have this doctor.

Unions: as unemployment goes up, perceptions of unions goes down.

Computer issues/outages or instability of big sites: connection with the economy?

If outages are becoming more frequent, the economy may be at fault. The Association for Computer Operations Management (AFCOM), reported in December that half of all data centers it surveyed were planning cuts, and nearly 12% of the survey respondents said they believed service disruptions would increase.

Another warning sign comes from Uptime Institute data. The Santa Fe, N.M.-based data center engineering and consulting firm issues what it calls Flash Reports to its members when it sees a data center experiencing failures that could occur at other sites with the same kind of hardware. That hardware includes circuit breakers, batteries and UPS systems.

In all of 2008, Uptime sent out six Flash Reports, according to Ken Brill, Uptime’s executive director. So far this year, it has sent out 17 reports detailing equipment problems and it has four others pending. Brill isn’t sure what’s causing the uptick, but he believes it’s significant.

The drive for energy efficiency may be prompting data centers to cut back on redundant equipment and run their systems harder, exposing equipment flaws that may have been there all along, said Brill. Cutbacks are another possibility. “We’re not doing the maintenance we should be doing, and when you don’t do maintenance, you increase the probability of catastrophic failure.”

Ted Maulucci, CIO at real estate developer Tridel Corp. in Toronto, doesn’t see a systemic problem, even though he had to deal with an outage by a data center provider. He believes fiber-based connectivity is improving performance and stability. “Five years ago, it was not uncommon to experience the odd interruption, whereas today it has been pretty rock solid, other than the major failure that happened,” he said. [...]