What Google knows about you

If you have a gmail account, Google has released a dashboard that shows the information that google has associated with that account.

Details provided in this post, or can be accessed directly here.

(h/t computerworld)

 

The road to hell…

A sign from the 9/12 protest “The road to hell is a shovel ready project” (from Jordan Gehrke, via the corner)

And from Mollie Hemingway, National Care is like a hospital gown… You think your covered but you’re not. (picture here)

Symphony Woods Walk Through – Thur 8/20/09 @ 6:30

The Columbia Association Board of Directors’ Planning and Strategy Committee is having a work session at Symphony Woods Thursday at 6:30 to examine deteriorating and hazardous trees are planned to be removed.

Press release here.

Heathcare debate – deja vu all over again?

Over at the Corner at National Review they have been carrying on a discussion about the term “death panel” Palinism, and other elements of the heath care debate.

This passage caught my interest:

What drives me crazy about liberal complaints about conservative tactics these days is how selective they are. Obama, Barney Frank, Jacob Hacker, and others have said that they want these reforms — specifically the public option — to lead to single payer. But when conservatives take them at their word, suddenly it’s outrageous misinformation and “fishy” stuff. When the wind is at their backs, liberals look way off to the horizon, like Obama at a podium, dreaming of a future of European-style statism. But when conservatives use this to their advantage, suddenly it is outrageous to even consider the possibility of a road to hell being paved with good intentions. Suddenly liberals bleat that it is scare-mongering to look beyond what they are proposing in this exact moment, outrageous to ask “Where will this lead?” I agree entirely with Andy that conservatives are under no obligation to unilaterally agree to liberal terms or definitions but rather, as he puts it, “Our function is to call the opposition on such hair-splitting nonsense, not to make the fog harder to pierce.”

As the debate continues this summer it may help us to look back and consider the way that our seat beat laws were enacted.   Remember when it was just going to be a “secondary” offense, something that you would not be pulled over for to the situation today.  Now it is a primary offense and we have the national “click it or ticket” campaigns.   Wearing a seat belt is common sense and a “good thing”, I just bristle at the tactics and the way the legislation was incrementally  turned into the very thing that proponents originally said was beyond the pale and was just a “scare tactic” for anyone to suggest otherwise.  Seems like deja vu all over again.

Columbia Rocky Run Memorabilia Sale on Tuesday?

According to Jeff M in the comments on Columbia Rocky Run closes, it seems that they must be clearing the building out for the next tenants.

According to Jeff, you can stop by from 6 – 8 PM on Tuesday 8/11/09 and pick up items either free or at a nominal cost.

Its hard to believe that it has been a year already.

Heath Care Cost Savings by Reducing Paperwork?

There have been may claims and counter claims in the health care debate.   You may find it comforting that when pressed to come up with a model of efficiency in a government run program, President Obama picked the post office.

And then Sunday, Aug 17th on Meet the Press, Rachael Maddow made this statement:

I, I think the policy about what we actually do makes a big difference in terms of how much we have to spend and how much savings we get. One of the reasons that I think a lot of liberals and Democrats are in favor of a strong public option is because the administrative costs are so much lower in a government program, frankly, like Medicare, than they are in private insurance.  We waste so many billions of dollars on the administrative costs of having the private insurance-based system that we have now.  When you compare us to other industrialized country that don’t have that much of a reliance on all these different thousands of insurance companies, we’re wasting a lot of money just moving paper around.  Ask healthcare professionals how frustrated they are with how much paperwork they have to…(unintelligible)…

Increased government involvement in heath care is going to reduce paperwork?  Congress has passed the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, its successor, the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995.   In 2008, the Office of Management and Budget released the Information Collection Budget in 94 page report without any apparent irony.  Twenty nine years later, how are things working out?

Based on agency estimates of PRA burden, the public in FY 2007 spent approximately 9.64 billion hours responding to or complying with Federal information collections. This represents an 8.1 percent increase over the 8.92 billion hours that were reported for FY 2006.

What about Medicare, a government run heath care program?  In 2002 the Heritage Foundation published Why Doctors Are Abandoning Medicare and What Should Be Done About It.

• Physicians are drowning in a rapidly growing morass of confusing red tape and bureaucratic paperwork created by Congress. This regulatory morass undermines efficiency and diminishes the quality of patient care. A recent American Medical Association survey of physicians found that more than one-third of responding doctors spend an hour completing Medicare paperwork for every four hours of patient care. Every precious hour and dollar spent complying with Medicare paperwork means less time and money spent on patient care.
• Physicians get little help from Medicare and its contractors in interpreting the rules, regulations, and guidelines imposed by the Medicare bureaucracy. Medicare’s rules are so complex and confusing that even Medicare personnel and contractors rarely give physicians and other providers correct answers regarding the system’s regulations. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), customer service representatives from Medicare contractors answered only 15 percent of GAO test questions “completely and accurately.”

And  according to the NY Times in April of 2009 – Doctors Are Opting Out of Medicare.  The reason, “The doctors’ reasons: reimbursement rates are too low and paperwork too much of a hassle.”  So it does not look like things are getting any better.

Proponents of government run health care like to cite that Medicare spends 3% on overhead while private insurance overhead runs around 12%.  However, depending how you account for things, Medicare overhead estimates run from 3% using percentage of overhead to total money spent, to around 16% if you count overhead per individual instead of total dollars.

However you slice it, I just can’t see a government run program reducing paperwork and providing efficient, consumer oriented service.  Dealing with an insurance company probably does not rank on anyone’s list of fun things to do, but surly dealing with the government, aka the DMV, the IRS or even the post office rank even lower.

Chances are that a 1000+ page bill is not going to provide the efficient, streamlined process that Ms. Maddow envisions.  After all, the Paperwork Reduction Acts of 1980 and 1995 seem to indicate otherwise.

Obama Panders to His Base, Plays the Race Card

President Obama, admitting he doesn’t know all the facts of the case, nonetheless said Wednesday (7/22/09) that “the Cambridge [MA] police acted stupidly in arresting [black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr.] when there was already proof that they were in their own home. There’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

To recap the story, Gates lost his keys and broke into his own home. A witness saw the incident and, thinking a burglary was in progress, called police. When police arrived, Gates refused to answer the door. Police claim Gates refused to show any identification, or identify himself to the police, and was ultimately arrested for disorderly conduct. Soon after the all too predictable hue and cry over the oppression of a black man by Cambridge Police, the charges were dropped. (They probably would have been dropped, anyway.) To his credit, the police sergeant accused of racism after he arrested Gates insisted Wednesday that he won’t apologize.

Let’s look at the incident from the police point of view. Having received a call of a burglary in progress, they discover a man inside who refuses to come to the door or identify himself. Had an actually burglary been in progress and had the police simply left the premises at that point, they would have rightly been accused of being derelict in their duty, and no doubt Gates and Obama would be chastising the police for their double-standard failure to protect black people’s homes. Instead, Gates chose to make a media event over a minor confrontation, and the PC media are ever so willing to oblige him. Obama, who insisted during the campaign that we would rise above racial divisions, nonetheless reverts to the reflexive call of racism, although there is no suggestion that the police acted contrary to standard procedure. Do you think that the police would have acted any differently if a white homeowner had responded the same way?

Put nothing in writing, ever.

President Obama released a memorandum on January 21st, 2009 for the heads of executive departments and agencies titled “Transparency and Open Government”“.  It opens with the following paragraph:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

So how does Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, show her commitment to this “unprecedented level of openness?”  According to Representative James Sensenbrenner, R-WI (from the Washington Examiner) in a July 8th letter to Edward Markey, Chairman, House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming:

I initially raised these concerns in a letter to you and Congressman Towns dated June 9, 2009.1 In that letter I cited two incidents. First, Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), revealed that the White House had held a series of secret meetings as they were crafting the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Nichols admitted that there was a deliberate “vow of silence” surrounding the negotiations with the White House on vehicle fuel standards.2 According to Nichols, “[Carol] Browner [Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change] quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials.” Negotiators were instructed to “put nothing in writing, ever.” Clearly, Browner’s actions were intended to leave little to no documentation of the deliberations that lead to stringent new CAFE standards.  [emphasis mine]

That certainly is going to make will make it harder for the Obama administration to implement this part of the Transparency and Open Government memorandum:

My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.

Maybe I just misinterpreted what President Obama meant when he said “unprecedented level of openness.”  I assumed that he meant more openness, but apparently, at least to Carol Browner, he really meant less.

(First heard on the Mark Levine show)

Mark Sanford’s Excellent Argentinian Vacation

Via Jim Geraghty at the NRO’s Campaign Spot.

What I Did on My Argentine Vacation

If Mark Sanford shows up at his press conference today with some long-lost elderly Nazi in handcuffs, all is forgiven.

He also might be all right if he reaches into his satchel and holds up the Golden Idol of Fertility.

Unfortunately it seems that he was up to something like this:

Hopefully he also got a sail boat and a pair of crocodile boots; his political career is over.

(I realize the  original was set in Columbia, but this one is the first South American romance film that popped into my head.)

Volcanic eruption in Japan photographed from International Space Station

From Watts Up With That

6/12/2009 Kuril Island, Japan volcanic eruption captured from the ISS

The eruption occurred on June 12, 2009.  Click over to Watts Up With That for a detailed description of the phenomena captured in this photo.