Why Healthcare Costs So Much

Medical costs are outrageous because people don't understand the concept of insurance. Let me break it down for you:
Insurance is at its core a pool.

Lots of people put money in and a few take money out. After all the people who needed to take money out have done so, what is left goes to the person offering the insurance and that's what they pay their employees and stock holders out of (think of it as their net revenue).
The problem with health insurance is that basically everyone needs to take some money out all of the time, which means that if the service was offered at the costs we had in the past, there would not be enough money to go around.

So, the insurance companies raise the cost of the service to make sure that there is enough money in the pool for all of the users and also enough left over afterwards for their own salaries and profit margins (which is why they offer the service in the first place, profit is not evil, it is what makes people offer goods and services).
The problem is that as it is structured now, preventative care costs money, so people don't use it. They prefer to just let their health slide and use the pool when they really need it. The problem with that is simply that if you were to add up the cost of the preventative care, it would not be as high as the cost of the emergency care. So, we should make preventative care cheaper or free (maybe not free, free always ends up with some fat chick beyond stomped to death in a Wal-Mart over some complementary toaster that comes with a TV).

The problem is that the insurance companies do not do anything to reward people for going to the doctor to get checked up or maintaining a higher level of health. They penalize the fat people. So, they use negative reinforcement instead of positive reinforcement. Unfortunately, insurance rates are not a "switch" and the American people are not toddlers, so negative reinforcement will not work here (I do advocate corporal punishement for young children where reason might not work).

What this bill should have done is encourage preventative care. Provide free preventative care to the really poor and they don't need to come in for heart surgery as often (I'm pretty sure you can have 1000 GP visits for the cost of every 1 open heart surgery).

Anyway, I just wanted to explain my thoughts on insurance.  If you share them or disagree, leave me a comment and we can discuss this further.

More Random Bullshit From Illinois

So, I am looking around on Facebook and an old grade school friend posted this story:

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/03/impatient-driver-accused-of-trying-to-hit-cop-at-gas-pump-northlake-cook-county-sheriff-sams-club.html

Please, go read it.

Have you read it? If not, go read it.

Seriously, it’s a doozy.

So, this guy is angry because the police office didn’t move his car fast enough.  First off, there’s no time limit on a gas pump.  If you want to fill up and then go browse the energy drink section for 2 hours, you are free to do so. 

Second of all, the article states that there were 24 pumps at the station.  Go find another pump.

Third, the guy showed the offender his badge.  That’s code for do this again and you get arrested.

I hope they lock this guy up and throw away the key.  That kind of stupidity needs to be punished, harshly.

Final Fantasy XIII Review

So, Final Fantasy XIII came out last week.  I have been playing it and while I have not finished it yet (I have this thing called a life), I wanted to wait until I got at least 10-20 hours in before posting a review.

Here are my thoughts on the game:

Well, it is streamlined.  Very, very streamlined.  You basically have a frantic combat system that reminds of a stance system in an MMO and long corridors that you walk down between boss fights.

There are no towns as far as I can tell.  You get access to shops and crafting from save points.  Crafting is limited to pouring junk type items into your weapons and accessory items to give them experience and level them up.  You can disable old equipment to get high level junk.

The characters level up in basically the same way that we were doing it in Osiris originally where we had different constellations for each character and you had to put points into each constellation to power it up.  Some of the stats are shared (like HP) but most is abilities.  When you switch stance, you switch your constellation and you gain all of the abilities for that constellation.  Like I said stats stack (so, if you put points into HP across all constellations, you turn into a tank).

The stance switch is preset in a menu since you switch stances for your whole party.  You basically get to set up combinations you think are good ahead of time and you switch to the one you think is right in combat.  There is no limit on switches and switching accelerates your active time gauge (so you do it the entire time).

You only get to control the main character in the party, although you do eventually get to pick your party and who you control.  The AI is very good and picks attacks and abilities quickly and very effectively, so you don't have to mess about with each character's individual attacks.  You also get to do more attacks each turn, so the pace of combat is very fast.

The bosses rock as you have to really be quick with the stances and think about their moves and plan stuff out, but you do it in real time.  That sounds bad, but you get to retry if you lose and that basically puts you right before the fight so you can change party members/equipment or level up some more before trying again.  This is really well done and it doesn't feel like punishment for losing (really well implemented feature).

The story is your typical anime bullshit with racist undertones and "mystery" which is all very formulaic.  But it does feel pretty fresh and the setting is kind of neat.  The best part about it is the lack of technobabble or random MgGuffins as far as I can tell.  The characters don't wonder at every little fucking thing, because they live in that world and I like that.

Dialogue is well recorded, but poorly written.  And I swear, one of the girl characters sounds like she's fucking the whole time.  Plus, the one black guy sounds like a blaksploitation character.  I am waiting for him to call someone a jive turkey or a honky.

Music is good, but nothing stick like the classic stuff.  It is all high quality, but like I said not memorable.

Graphics are holy shit, just god fucking damn amazing.  I mean, just wow.  I have never, ever, ever seen anything like this before.  The CG stuff is barely discernable from the game and that's a compliment.  The game just looks sharp.  There's a few stretched textures here and there in dark corners, but the characters are amazing, the enemies are amazing and the sheer amount of particles and solid and animated effects are mind staggering.

Overall, it is a good game.  Does it have the replay value of a Chrono Trigger or FFVII or even FFX?  No, there's no minigames, no card battle, no blitzball, just combat and that's unfortunate.  I will give this game an 80% and most of it goes to production value and polish (if this was a car, it would a solid gold, chrome plated Mary Kay Pink Cadillac).  Yeah, its not practical and you can't exactly drive around in it, but it is definitely a thing to behold.

 

Gameplay: 75%

Graphics: 100%

Sound: 85%

Control: 95%

Story: 60%

Character Design: 65%

Google to Exit China

A new article from MSNBC states that Google’s vaunted content filtering software seems to be leaking like a broken collander.  In a personal test, both information about Tibet’s history (from Western sources) and Tiananmen Square returned meaningful results on www.google.cn

The same article also mentions the projected effects of Google’s predicted pullout from China on China’s economy and IT development ecosystem.

My personal take on the issue is: If a company is not willing to work within the laws of a country and the country is not willing to change the laws to work with the company, then a split is inevitable.  Logically, if neither side is willing to compromise on the issue at hand, then a relationship is not feasible.

From a moral standpoint, the idea that Google pulling out will put a lot of people in China out of job is a sticking point.  However, if Google is willing to give up revenue (however much or little revenue it might be) in order to stick to its morals, then that is their choice to make.  Just as no one can keep you as an individual from standing on the corner and handing out your money to passerby, no country can force a company to not do something that will hurt its bottom line.  Is it unfortunate that people will be put out of a job?  Sure.  Does that matter in business? No.  Should it matter in business? Absolutely not, businesses are moral-less entities and as such people’s employment does not affect a business.  It might affect individual people, but not businesses as a whole.

Overall, I am firmly against censorship so I am firmly on Google’s side on this issue.  If they don’t want to follow the law, then they should leave.  Otherwise they would be breaking the law and could be fined (or maybe even jailed although the logistics of that are kind of tough) for breaking the law.  If the Chinese government does not want to allow free flow of information, then they should not get access to the services provided by Google.

The End of Time: Guns and Life and Death Decisions

The Doctor Who finale.  The end of David Tennant as the Doctor. A choice: to kill or let the Earth be destroyed.  A choice that he must make with a gun and a bullet.

OK, so guns, something that the Doctor does not use and murder.  Must be a really good and juicy ending to the story arc.  Oh, wait he shoots a machine.  Really, he was given an A or B question and he chose C? RTD is just fucking with us at this point right?

Now, to put this into perspective, let’s look at a good use of a gun as a plot device.

Full Metal Jacket.  If you have seen it: congratulations, you have seen a great movie.  If you haven’t: get your ass down to the video store and get a copy.

So the movie starts out with a group of recruits being trained to go to Vietnam.  Their Gunnery Seargent uses mockery and verbal abuse to harden the recruits into fighting machines as he feels it is his job to product warriors to go fight overseas.

I mean just look at this guy.  The recruits are in their underwear and this maniac is screaming at them because of some petty shit he finds to be an insult to the American way of life.  That’s a scary dude and on top of that he’s trained to kill.

So he picks on this one guy, Pvt. Pyle who is overweight and probably borderline mentally retarded.  He makes this guy’s life miserable.  The rest of the platoon at one point haze Pyle and beat the shit out of him with bars of soap wrapped in towels.

After that, Pyle seems to improve, but he’s actually gone crazy and ends up going apeshit and killing the Gunnery Seargent before blowing his own brains out.

Now why did I mention all of that.  Throughout the training, the recruits have the importance of their rifle drilled into their heads.  When Pyle goes crazy, he starts talking to his gun.  He then uses the gun to kill the Seargent and then himself.

The gun is used as a plot device as it it’s usage defines the recruits as soldiers (that’s how they kill the enemy) and then is used by Pyle to kill the Seargent and himself.  OK, so that makes sense as you kind of see it coming and when the murder happens, it is a satisfying end to the story arc.  The reaction follows the action of training as Pyle had become desensitized to killing.

On the other hand, the shit that we get in The End of Time is not logical.  The Doctor is told that he must kill to sever the link.  It is almost like the woman in white and Wilf are training him to kill.  You would think that he would shoot The Master or Rassillon or maybe he is another part of the link, so maybe he kills himself.  Shooting the machine doesn’t make sense.  We are told that The Master is the link, the other side is Rassillon.  Having The Doctor be the bridge I could buy since he ended the time war, but the machine had no part in the Time War.

My advice to RTD: “Stop writing crappy endings, if you can’t come up with an ending for an arc yourself, just steal one from someone who could.  Your fans won’t be upset, heck you can even make it a nod to a fellow filmmaker and people will respect you for it.”

The old series was great because there were consequences for The Doctor’s actions.  Perry never made it back to Earth, The Doctor could have stopped the Daleks from existing but failed.  He changed the course of events on planets, but that hardly happens anymore.  RTD teased us about killing Rose, but then he didn’t kill her.  He teased us about a companion dying but then no one died.  Hell, even David Tennant’s own death sequence turned into a frigging walk down memory lane.

I just  hope that the next season brings some better stories.  Otherwise Dr Who is turning into another Heroes, but worse.  Even Heroes kills off some of its characters in order to show that a plot exists.

WoW Stats

I found this picture on a link on Digg.  Don’t know where it originally comes from but whoever they are, thank you for putting things into perpective.

Via: Online Schools

Those are some amazing stats.  I especially like how WoW has become a billion dollar a year business.

I know I have played it and enjoyed it and gotten bored and quit and then found reasons to come back and play some more, so it really is a compelling experience.

Acer Aspire Revo 1600 Review

I have been looking into getting one of these Nettop PCs for a while now.  The idea of having a super thin, super light terminal that I can hook up to my home network and my TV to view videos on and browse the web has always seemed like a basic thing to have in a home.

I found one of these Acer Aspire Revo 1600 units at TigerDirect.com for $170.  It was a refurb, but from my experience, these are actually higher quality since they are inspected more closely than the models that go out as new.  I have purchased a lot of refurbished things over the years and have come to the conclusion that the reason they were returned is due to lack of understanding of the product by the original buyer.

The first thing I noticed about this unit is how clogged it came with bloatware.  A dozen game demos, Office demos, MS Works, anti-virus, Google desktop, just tons of stuff.  So it ran slow and I mean very slow.  OK, so I went ahead and uninstalled all of that stuff since I know of lighter freeware alternatives and hey there’s a spry little box under all that clutter.

The model I have only has one GB of DDR2 which hamstrings it a bit, but it still putters around online pretty well.  Some video streaming sites don’t do so well, but basic web tasks are just fine.  From personal experience, it seems like it is slow because it is always paging to the hard drive.  So, it needs more memory.  Luckily, you can add up to 4 GB of memory and I do plan on doing so to give this little box a little more pep.

Another drawback is that it does not have integrated WiFi.  Well, that’s not a drawback to me since more integrated WiFi solutions in these little boxes has terrible range.  So, I find that it is better to just find a good performing dongle and use that.  I don’t have to worry about massive range since I live in a medium sized apartment, so I went for the Tenda WiFi 802.11N adapter.  It was $15 at MicroCenter and it was very easy to install.

I tried this box in the farthest corned of my apartment and it was still getting full bars, download speeds were also very good and definitely on par with other WiFi solutions I have found.  So, the lack of WiFi out of the box is not really a drawback.

The ION graphics do pretty well.  I installed World of Warcraft and with the settings set way down (as I knew I would have to set them for onboard graphics).  It ran at 25-30 fps.  Not great,  but not terrible considering the computer is so low on RAM.

The CPU kind of sucks, but it does its job well enough and for a $200 PC it is amazing.  It is Hyper-Threaded and handles multi-tasking far better than I expected.  The only thing that this machine doesn’t do well is Flash.  But then again, I’ve seen Quad-Core i7s where a bit of poorly written Flash code causes full loads on the CPU, so I won’t call that a big setback.

In terms of connectivity, this little guy is amazing.  It has 6 USB ports.  One of them is capped with a little rubber stopper, but it does work. It has a media-card reader on the front as well as audio inputs for a headset and an e-Sata port for external hard drive.  It also has VGA and HDMI on the back.  The HDMI is the main draw of this box as it will power a 1080p set making your thousand inch TV able to browse the web.  Yeah, that is as cool as it sounds.

The keyboard and mouse it comes with are pretty lackluster but they do function and do so well enough.  The keyboard has that chicklet layout that Apple pioneered with its laptops and the feel of the keys is actually quite good.  This is a compact keyboard, so you do not get a num-pad.  This is slightly better than a netbook keyboard.  Functional, but not much more.  It looks nice though with a nice finish on the face of the casing.

The mouse is crap.  It is too light and squeaks when you click it.  The scroll wheel is also too big for the mouse, but again it is functional and usable, but not great by any stretch of the imagination.

Overall, the unit is nice and small, and once you de-clutter it, it does a great job as an internet terminal.  Just don’t expect it to replace you full-tower box unless your full-tower box is from 2000 or earlier.