The Iron Yuppie

Didn't it used to be much much easier to post a video on your blog? Hmph.

Anyhow, here's the link to the Bluefly ad.

The Catch

I must admit, even I, cynical TV watcher, was stopped when I saw this most recent campaign from BlueFly. No, it's not just because it's got a very pretty woman in it. Tons of ads do today. Nor is it because it's all about sex, even though it has practically nothing to do with the product (I assume it's clothing).

(As an aside, is it just me or have ad campaigns not only gotten more full of sex, but actually even less associated with the products? The other ad I saw about six million times last night was that DiSaronno one... which, entirely unnecesarily, features a woman giving a blow job to an ice cube. Give me a break. I'm sure every adult in human history has come to the conclusion that their generation was at least moderately more reserved than the current one and the world is going to hell, blah blah blah, but count me among those currently on that cliched bandwagon. I guess it's just strange that I'm now espousing that belief, despite spending my entire life up to this point vowing I never would.)

Anyhow, the thing that stopped me about it is that it’s not just full of sex… it’s actually Sexy. With a capital S. I’ve seen full length movies with naked women for 2 straight hours that doesn’t have the kind of elegancy and sexiness that this 30 second clip does (there’s a 90 second version as well on Youtube that I think is not quite as crisp (why was I have I seen movies with nothing but naked women in them for two hours, you might ask yourself. On this occasion, I believe the reason(s) for watching such a production can be found within the text of the question)). I find it surprising how immune one gets to quality (did I just call a commercial quality?) and how seeing something that works makes you realize how shitty everything else is.

Another aside, you want a great internet site idea? How about an IMDB that extends beyond movies & tv? I mean what if I wanted to see this woman in a movie, how would I know how to find her? Or there was a hilarious guy that my brother and I would joke about in a Visa commercial about 8 years ago, any chance of finding him again? Not likely.

Well it appears as if it's been more than a year since my last rant about Health Care, so here it goes.

First, I genuinely believe a society has a responsibility to give everyone a base level of health care. The reason for this is that if you do not have people who believe they will live long lives, I believe they degerate into shortsighted people who are less likely participate in standard consumption and generally are more likely to commit crime. And, like it or not, consumption is what makes our society work.

Second, I believe that at the lowest rate of return, people should be responsible for paying their own way. Yes, I am specifically saying that if you are a 75 year old male with chirrosis, you have to put up the money for a liver transplant. Something on the order of 100% of it.

The biggest problem is highlighted in a piece in the Atlantic Monthly "Putting a Value on Health". Specifically:

...health-care delivery in the United States is notoriously inefficient. Consumers lack sufficent information or expertise to make informed choices of physicians, hospitals and treatments. Also, because most of their health care is paid for by insurance, they tend to overuse the system. Physicians, for their part, usually profit from the tests and procedures they order and perform-- whether or not those tests and procedures are truly necessary.

I'm going to have to disagree with the author on at least half of what he says. Is there really proof that the average person is overusing the health care system? It just seems unlikely... it's not like I'm down at the emergency room every weekend, but the few times I'm there it's not like I see lines out the door of women getting free mamograms. Further, I don't think its the fact that everything is paid for by insurance as the reason consumers are less discerning. It's because the right information isn't really out there.

I agree with the author's main point that health care is inefficient. But then I have two questions: 1) what is the root cause and 2) how can I (or why would I want to) improve it? The root cause appears to be that people simply do not have the information necessary to make the correct decisions. When I have a broken leg, or a headache, it's not like I have a research guide in my back pocket ready to identify where to go for the highest return on money spent. The insurance companies have tried this, by guiding people to specific providers but then it feels like a huge pain in the ass, where I can only go to a physician who some nameless individual in an office a million miles away has approved for whatever reason (ideally this does make for a nice story, "we only approve the top 10% of doctors, blah blah blah", I wonder why that never took off).

But then the second component - why should I be responsible for improving it? Here the problem is that people don't feel enough of the pain. By drawing a line, and forcing everyone below that line to pay for themselves, you create a system where below that line everything becomes hyperefficient, with true market forces. Ah, but imagine if they were all tied together? I wonder if that could work. If you said "If 1000 people a year need coronary bypasses, the line is drawn at A. But if you keep it to less than 900, we'll draw the line at B." Would that encourage the group as a whole to behave better? If you saw a person smoking, would you encourage them to stop? Interesting question, though I'm not sure I want my neighbor to be my guardian.

But finally, there's another point. The cost of goods seem to be spiraling out of control. The author highlights a mention about cataract surgery, originally requiring "up to a week in the hospital and [offering] only uncertain results. Now it's a quick highly effective outpatient surgery." Yet, adjusting for inflation, costs have only fallen 1% y/y. How is that possible? A week in a hospital is only 1% more expensive than a 2 hour visit where a machine does most of the work? Further, someone in the pharmaceudical industry is going to have to explain to me their cost structure. I understand the nature of investments, where only one out of every 10 investments pay off, but do all 10 investments really add up to $500 M in cost? That's about 50 highly paid ($200k/year) investigators and 10 huge lab investments ($1 M each) working for 25 years. Really?

I'm sure there are plenty of smart people looking at this, but I just never see any progress. Sometimes I hope for some kind of crisis that forces a complete revisiting of the system as a whole. One might argue we're already there.

Normally I'd feel even the slightest twinge of guilt posting an entire script from a TV show, since it's really someone else making with the funny, but this is so good, I don't even know what to say. It's so packed with humor, it's as good as the Simpsons in their prime.

Tracy Jordan: Who else is going to be at this thing?
Jack Donaghy: You’ll be on stage with NAS…
TJ: No, he hates me! We used to date the same girl.
JD: What about Young-G-Z?
TJ: Forget about it… I called his pitbull a gaywad on 106^th and Park.
Liz Lemon: That would do it…
JD: The Game
TJ: Nope
JD: T.I.
TJ: Ain’t nothing happening…
JD: Superhead
TJ: No can do
JD: Fab-u-lous
TJ: Won’t do
JD: RuhDonkeyKong
TJ: Nooooo!
JD: MC SkatCat
TJ: What?
JD: Homunculous
TJ: (Shakes head)
JD: Raw Dog
TJ: Heeeeeeeeeeeelllll no! Me and his beef goes way back. We were both cast members on a Nickelodeon show called Ray-ray’s mystery garage!

(Flash back)

RD & TJ: Brush your teeth, Brush your teeth, when it’s time for bed you got to brush your teeth!
RD: Hey chump, you scuffed my sneakers. Dr. J wears these!
TJ: Sorry man… I’m pretty drunk.
RD: Know what, I’m going to eat your family.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a little thing I like to call comedy gold.

This site is awesome (http://librarything.com). It's basically what I've been doing here by tracking through the note to self blogs. Here's a particularly nice article about it <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/business/yourmoney/04novel.html?_r=2&oref=&oref=slogin>. I only wish I read enough to make it worth it. On the other hand, where is this, but for TV shows or movies?

Why when I hit Shift-N for new folder does it NOT open the new folder for reading? What do they think I'm going to do with it? And why, when a folder is expanded, will it not jump to the next folder, only the next feed? This is irritating.

Good things about MS products recently:

Live Writer continues to impress me. No tool comes close in ease of setup and ease of use... except I still can't figure out why I'm having problems uploading images. Oh well.

Exchange/Outlook now auto parses the "To:" line so when I create a rule, the DL is auto-populated in the "When a message is sent to:" drop down list... nice work!

Bad:

Contacts in Outlook are a mess. It's much much harder than one would think to combine contacts together when you have dupes. And the integration with Windows Messenger is a blessing and a curse... great, I have all those random people I responded to in my contact box, but there's virtually no information about them. And in the process of trying to clean them up, somehow it broke the link between that and Windows Live Messenger and now the process of recreating all those IM contacts is incredibly painful. Ack!

• J = next post
• cntrl + N = next folder
• cntrl + P = previous folder
• spacebar = scroll post
• shift-spacebar = reverse scroll post

Of course these things are just as hidden as in bloglines. In the help file? Gimme a break.

I've always been fascinated with the IRA and the troubles (as the Brits refer to them). There's a particularly interesting, although likely the book is fairly biased to Michael Collins, still should be interesting.