Sooner or Later

Sooner or later, the fubar known as US Healthcare (AKA Obama Care) will eventually become Single Payer as the public will eventually demand that this ongoing travesty be transformed into an efficient, cost effective and open environment with the profit motive removed, able to function as a 21st connected system able to meet the needs of the people at reasonable cost, something not possible with the current system in place given just how complexified healthcare has become due to 

1: The profit motive permeating every aspect of medical (IT, doctors, hospitals, labs, imaging, big pharma & insurance) with the end result of the public paying way too much for services rendered in a system dominated by big pharma and the insurance companies and...

2 : Government Regulatory, where inefficiency rules due to collusion with the insurance companies and significant others rather then acceding to the wishes of the people who want a system like that of H.R. 676 that works for all and not just the privileged few.

To whit.

• Let’s take Senator Ted Cruz up on his challenge.
• Repeal Obamacare.
• But instead of throwing ourselves at the mercy of the insurance companies, let’s replace Obamacare and the insurance companies with a single payer.
• It’s going to happen sooner or later.
• Let’s strike while the iron is hot.
• Let’s do it now while Cruz is on the Senate floor.
• The Repeal Obamacare Republicans say that the Obamacare is 2,000 pages and its regulations are 20,000 pages long.
• They have an alternative plan that is 200 pages.
• Well, the single payer bill in the House (HR 676) is only 30 pages.
• Single payer wins.
• It’s shorter.
• It’s the only system that controls costs.
• It’s the only system that covers everyone.
• Where are the single payer Democrats who are willing to stand, and say — repeal Obamacare, replace it with single payer?

To add fuel to the fire, Matt Miller, a conservative writer who does op-ed pieces for the Washington Post, has some interesting words to say about the Canadian system. something naysayers in the US don't want to hear about because it's socialistic.

Take David Beatty, a 70-year-old Toronto native who ran food processing giant Weston Foods and a holding company called the Gardiner Group during a career that has included service on more than 30 corporate boards and a recent appointment to the Order of Canada, one of the nation’s highest honors. By temperament and demeanor, Beatty is the kind of tough-minded, suffer-no-fools wealth creator who conservatives typically cheer.

Yet over breakfast in Toronto not long ago, Beatty told me how baffled he and Canadian business colleagues are when they listen to the U.S. health-care debate. He cherishes Canada’s single-payer system for its quality and cost-effectiveness (Canada boasts much lower costs per person than the United States). And don’t get him started on the system’s administrative simplicity — you just show your card at the point of service, and that’s it. Though he’s a well-to-do man who can pay for whatever care he wants, Beatty told me he’s relied on the system just as ordinary Canadians do, including for a recent knee replacement operation. The one time he went outside the system was to pay extra for a physical therapist closer to his home than the one to which he’d been assigned.

Factoid: Yours truly has good friends in Quebec and Toronto and all agree that their HC system works. In fact, whenever both parties come to the states, they take out temporary insurance to cover any unexpected medical costs that are, in fact, covered under the CA system.

Isn't it about time Single Payer becomes the way to do business regarding all things medical. Makes sense to me.

Addendum: Interesting piece in the NYTimes titled Single Payer, Period where numbers don't lie.

Canadians or the French or Germans have little or no choice of who pays their medical bills. But they can choose any hospital and any doctor. And they’re not socked with the enormous uncovered bills that will still afflict insured Americans. Elsewhere, insurance pretty much covers what you need.

In contrast, plans offered through the exchanges will saddle those who gets sick with hefty deductibles and co-payments – $2000 deductibles and 20 percent co-payments thereafter are typical in Massachusetts, the prototype for Obamacare.

If you’re too old to twerk the news is even worse. Health and Human Services' news release featured premium costs for a 27 year old. At that age you can get a Silver plan in New Jersey for $3,030 annually. But for someone 63 the premium is $8,535.

Any questions?

Info-graphic - Big Data

Just found a terrific site displaying the talents of Jacob O'Neal, a gifted designer who knows what tech is all about. Click his info-graphic to get an accurate take on what Big Data is all about. You won't be disappointed. Seen below is an IBM image showing, in this case, the amount of content generated by users of wikipedia edit, something done at grand scale without question.

A visualization created by IBM of Wikipedia edits. At multiple terabytes in size, the text and images of Wikipedia are a classic example of big data.

MOOCs

BRT talked about Cousera, the first viable MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offering over a year ago, describing this initiative to be disruptive to the max. It seems this modest prediction was correct as this tech is going viral, something , as stated before, truly disruptive to the max, a force that will change higher education forever, which, in this writer's opinion, is a good thing without question. 

Available globally to hundreds of thousands of people at a time, these classes depend on highly sophisticated digital technology, yet they could not be simpler to use. Signing up takes less time than creating an iTunes account. You can create a user name and password and start exploring the rapidly expanding course offerings.

Seen below is A network diagram showing the distributive nature of Stephen Downes' and George Siemens' CCK08 course, one of the first MOOCs and the course that inspired the term MOOC to become adopted.

Dollars are now bits

Matt Taibbi, like Seymour Hersh, is relentless. Like Hersh, he has never been sued nor has his analysis on all things financial has ever been proven to be false, something yours truly treasures regarding the news as finding reliable sources who understand how the world works at deep level, is becoming ever more difficult given how utterly controlled the so called press is in the age of the web.

In his latest article for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports that Wall Street firms are now making millions in profits off of public pension funds nationwide. "Essentially it is a wealth transfer from teachers, cops and firemen to billionaire hedge funders," Taibbi says. "Pension funds are one of the last great, unguarded piles of money in this country and there are going to be all sort of operators that are trying to get their hands on that money."

Read the transcript and view the video to see why Dollars are now bits.

All the News That's Fit to Print

Seymour Hersh rocks. Ruthless, bull dog tough and relentless, he's a reporter's reporter, an outlier and proud of it, has some strong words about the lack of a real press in America and what should be done about it. To whit

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Needless to say, yours truly can't wait to read his upcoming book on national security, something Bush and Obama won't be happy about when it's released later this year. His take on Snowden is spot on.

"Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we've all written the notion there's constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate, it's real now," Hersh says.

76 and still being a PITA. Not bad, not bad at all. :)

A Sign of the Times...

This simple chart from Daily Kos says it all in terms of why I like science, something bloviators, religious fanatics and the uneducated think is too difficult to understand as science requires one to question how reality works from the perspective of intellect and open mindedness rather then accepting a pat answer from on high, which conveniently precludes any of the rigor demanded of a discipline as hard edged as science truly is. Adding fuel to the fire is this sad factoid.

A sign of the times: Popular Science, the 141-year-old publication that's one of my favorites to pick up at airports for in-flight reading, shut off comments on its website today. An important part of the decision was trolls and spambots, just like we struggle to keep in check through community moderation here at Daily Kos.

But there's something else, too, about how people yelling nonsense skews the discussion away from science. Away from fact. Away from their mission, which is to promote science. Away from reality.

Any questions?

The Right to be LEFT ALONE

The right to be left alone, a concept originally coined by David Brin in his prescient Transparent Society work, is systemically being taken apart, not only by the NSA but also the DEA, FBI, CIA and, who knows, the IRS, with complicit assistance from FISA, the secret rubber stamp for 24/7 spying known by its formal nom de plume,  the Foreign Intelligence Court.

In the U.S. these days, privacy is so been-there-done-that.  Just this week, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret outfit that hears only the government side of any argument and has generally been a rubberstamp for surveillance requests, declassified an opinion backing the full-scale collection and retention of the phone records (“metadata”) of American citizens.  That staggering act was, the judge claimed, in no way in violation of the Fourth Amendment or of American privacy.  She also gave us a little peek at corporate courage in our brave new surveillance world, writing that “no holder of records [i.e., telecommunications company] who has received an order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an order.”

That story, like so many others in recent months, arrived thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden about the ever-widening powers of the National Security Agency (NSA), led by a general who, we now know, lives in a world of intergalactic fantasies of power and control out of Star Trek: The Next Generation and once even worked in an Army intelligence war room created by a Hollywood set designer in the style of that show.  As Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood indicate today, however, gigantic as the NSA’s intrusions on privacy might be, they are only part of an uncomfortably large story in which many U.S. agencies and outfits feel free to take possession of our lives in ever more technologically advanced and intrusive ways.

Just this week, in fact, the American Civil Liberties Union (for which both Calabrese and Harwood work) released an important new report on the post-9/11 morphing of the FBI into a “secret domestic intelligence agency.”  In addition to the subterranean surveillance of protesters and religious groups, the Washington Post offered this summary list of the ways in which, according to that report, the Bureau has expanded in the twenty-first century: “The changes highlighted in the report include the FBI’s racial and ethnic mapping program, which allows the FBI to collect demographic information to map American communities by race and ethnicity; the use of secret National Security Letters, which asked for account information from telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and credit agencies and required no judicial approval; warrantless wiretapping; and the recent revelations about the government’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act to track all U.S. telephone calls.”

Click on the ACLU graphic to learn how the FBI, under the esteemed Robert Mueller, III, was
transformed into a domestic intelligence and law enforcement agency of unprecedented power and international reach.

The FBI remains widely admired on Capitol Hill and within the Obama administration, despite a record of extraordinary abuse—particularly targeting racial and religious minorities, immigrants, and protest groups under the guise of counterterrorism after 9/11.

The abuse, enabled by a roll-back of post-Watergate intelligence reforms and encouraged by long-standing Justice Department and FBI practices, has subverted internal and external oversight by squelching whistleblowers, imposing and enforcing unnecessary secrecy, and actively misleading Congress and the American people.

Click here to get the complete report, needless to say it will not warm the cockles of your heart.

While reading this, one might say, "I have nothing to hide." and... with undue modesty, yours truly doesn't but that's not the point. The abuse of power and the total lack of safeguards regarding the right to be left alone is, something an amendment, along the lines of the 28th, should be acted upon before it's too late. Just read the first paragraph of 1984 to see why.

Entering the Valley of Death :)

Anyone who has done a presentation has experienced this moment of terror, including me. :)

The Tower of Pisa - in 3D

Novel approaches to solving really difficult problems, i.e. capturing large immovable objects, like the Tower of Pisa, in system to generate accurate 3D models in efficient fashion, never ceases to amaze, somethng CSIRO has done with a spring loaded portable scanner that acts like, in indirect fashion, a large bubble head doll.

Developed by the CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, the Zebedee technology is a handheld 3D mapping system incorporating a laser scanner that sways on a spring to capture millions of detailed measurements of a site as fast as an operator can walk through it. Specialised software then converts the system's laser data into a detailed 3D map.

While the tower's cramped stairs and complex architecture have prevented previous mapping technologies from capturing its interior, Zebedee has enabled the researchers to finally create the first comprehensive 3D map of the entire building.

Seen below is a partial rendering of the Tower. Pretty cool to say the least.

No Question is a Dumb Question...

PHD Comics strikes again because yours truly has been in this situation many years ago. :)