My list for "innocuous" is rather long these days. Not obscene. Not overly garish. Doesn't take up much bandwidth. Loads promptly, and doesn't force a page reflow if it does get loaded. Doesn't include Javascript or Flash or anything else that executes. Doesn't include tracking cookies. Limited number per page.
With respect to that last one, when I go to the NYTimes front page, my ad blocker blocks 14% of the page elements. For the Seattle Times, it's 25%. The blocker keeps a running count of the amount of stuff blocked since it was installed -- 11% of page elements!
I was looking over my wife's shoulder the other day while she was asking questions about something. Between my ad blocker and my piece of Javascript that enforces considerable uniformity of font faces and sizes, it's really interesting just how different my view of the web is from hers.
"Living in SF" is relevant. There are plenty of good reasons to live in SF -- affordability is not one of them. She could undoubtedly do better in Minneapolis or Durham, both of which regularly make the lists of top cities for a combination of above-average income, low unemployment, and modest cost of living. At an extreme, Omaha's unemployment rate has dropped below 3% and her share of an SF apartment might rent her a small townhouse there. Admittedly, you do give up a lot of things moving from California to Nebraska :^)
About that time, there were similar conversations going on inside the companies that were spending tens of billions of dollars to build the commercial internet-access networks. The usual separation was into content creators, content consumers, aggregators, and gatekeepers. Pre-internet, there was reasonable money to be made as an aggregator or gatekeeper (the two functions often being intertwined). Post-internet, we're still waiting to see whether that's possible. Despite Wallace's assertion, there seem to be darned few people willing to pay for those functions.
Medicaid expansion. When I worked for the state government, and had to speak on a live mic about Medicaid and Medicare and the impacts those had on how our state information systems had to work, I sometimes wondered if people noticed the pause in my speech while I made sure that my mouth was saying the right one :^)
Alsotoo: I’m very curious to see what becomes of this CO single payer initiative.
I'm particularly interested to see how it's marketed, and received, in the rural parts of the state. It doesn't address the fundamental problem in rural health care -- lack of providers -- but it does presumably deal with the ACA's problem in rural areas. Which is that the insurance companies aren't interested in those areas, resulting in few choices and high prices. Single payer reduces the choices further, but should result in the rural folks getting the same premium as the Front Range suburbs.
OTOH, the results of Kynect and the Medicaid expansion have been quite popular in rural Kentucky, which just voted for a new governor campaigning on dismantling those.
But IIRC, they're fixed. On days when I'm feeling cynical, I think that this is one of the things Chief Justice Roberts has on his mind in supporting the ACA. Big corporations replace shopping across multiple states for health insurance plans that have shown a long-term trend to double-digit inflation rates with a simple fixed payment to the federal government.
I have no idea why we have HSA, MSA, HRA and FSA options with different rules for solving roughly the same set of problems.
At the risk of hijacking the discussion on my own post... In the US, government assistance comes with restrictions. Lots of restrictions. There is a portion of the political class whose price for passing some form of assistance is almost always to limit how much assistance, what it can be used for, and who can get it. Using the tax code to implement assistance -- eg, allowing the use of pre-tax dollars -- is just such a restriction, limiting the benefit to people who are generally employed.
The larger-scale version of your question is why does the federal government buy health care for people using all of Medicare, Medicaid, CHP+, the VA, Tri-Care, and the employer share for government civilian employees? Why not just pay some portion of the bills for health care for all those people? The revenue sources are, in practice, immaterial -- that's just accounting and the computers are damned good at that. Why not use that scope for leverage on service providers? "Our clients are (roughly) 50% of your business, we pay promptly, and since we can print money we're good for it; we insist that you give us at least the best price that you give anyone else."
Living in an initiative state for a long time now, I've gotten to where I pay more attention to those than the Republican or Democratic things. Ohio was a mixed bag this year -- the badly-flawed marijuana initiative lost, but the redistricting initiative won overwhelmingly. In my suburban county in Colorado, the initiative picture was pretty rosy for progressives -- let the state keep the excess revenue from the marijuana tax*, raise taxes for the public library system and guarantee that the county commissioners have to keep their hands off of that, and a message to people thinking about being on the school board to not mess with the AP students and their parents. The first item for the 2016 ballot cleared the signature hurdle last week -- state single-payer health insurance.
* The initiative passed in every county in the state, which is pretty much unheard of.
Indeed. My cousin is an organizer -- among other things -- for the Teamsters. He lives in a right-to-work state and seems to spend most of his time in other right-to-work states. His FB feed regularly includes successful efforts.
This. Right at the end of my technical career, I was acquired by a large corporation that didn't ever make a profit*. But the CEO/COB took home his $3-5M and a zillion stock options every year.
* They had a huge cash flow and were, under the rules at that time, allowed to depreciate their large capital base at a rate much faster than it would actually wear out. Their financial statements barely mentioned profit and loss; it was all about EBIDA, baby, and that cash flow.
Certainly any comparison that involves options or stock grants given to employees would be suspect. Those aren't investments by the employee, those are (deferred) compensation provided by the employer. The key question in your second example boils down to "Is Kolohe, a purely passive investor, hiring you to provide special knowledge/labor/whatever?" The middle-class outrage over the tax treatment is because in most cases, they think the answer is "Damn right he is!" no matter how the paperwork may be structured.
...something like 40% of the remaining untapped energy reserves in the US are located under federal lands...
I might have guessed higher than that: everything more than three miles offshore; the federal land holdings in the West; on the order of another 100 million acres where the feds have disposed of the land but retained the mineral rights (eg, most of the land given to the railroads in the 1870s). Not just oil, natural gas, and coal, either. Most of the uranium and thorium reserves are on federal land. Some of the best wind resources in the West are on federal land (as well as offshore wind in the Atlantic). There's significant undeveloped conventional hydro in the West (significant in terms of the size of Western Interconnect demand), but much of it's unavailable because it would affect lands held in trust by the BIA. Lots of the best places for commercial-scale solar are federally owned. By far the best geothermal resource in the country is Yellowstone National Park :^)
The amusing thing is that Transcanada could have very quietly built the added capacity years ago along existing right-of-way, using an existing border crossing. Instead, it looks like they just drew a straight line with no regard to what that crossed. I've always assumed that Dick Cheney told them "Just use the straight-line route, we've got your back." But the route was such that it pissed off some of the Native Americans, and cut across one of the few pieces of real estate that the Nebraska environmental groups would care about particularly. That got it caught up in the courts, and the Nebraska state government, and before things got settled Dick wasn't in position to have anyone's back.
I seem to recall that Tolkien cautiously believed that "hobbit" was a new word, but that there is at least one use of it in 19th century northern European mythology. Obscure enough that it's unlikely any court would rule that characters resembling Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, etc aren't infringement on the trademark.
When I put my empty giant canvas bag in the bagging area, I get an "Are you using your own bag?" screen, and after an affirmative it goes on nicely. It appears that different stores can adjust some parameters in the software. At the store in the "bad" part of town, using your own bag invokes the "An attendant has been notified..." screen at payment time. That doesn't happen at the other stores.
When the Kroger stores here started self-check, the software was pretty bad. It's improved a lot over the years.
Where I usually get caught up are the things that are too big to bag. They still don’t seem to have figured that relatively basic thing out.
Most of the self-serve stations at the Kroger chain here have an "overflow" shelf big enough to hold pretty much anything they sell in the store. It's too high for many people to put large heavy items like a case of bottled water, so there's also a "Put item in cart" button on the touch screen that lets you put that type of item back in your cart instead of in the bagging area. If you use that button, you get an "Attendant has been notified to assist you" screen when you start to pay that has to be cleared by the clerk.
L4: Ah, the joys of a boom-and-bust industry. The oil bust in the mid-to-late 1980s devastated college geology departments when the oil and support companies not only quit hiring, they laid off lots of the existing geology staff. Colorado got current Gov. John Hickenlooper out of that one, since he elected to stay in the Denver area and do something entirely different.
The Lockheed thing is weird. They gotta have a handle on something interesting (which does not mean “fusion tomorrow”), or they wouldn’t have press released it. Unless it’s some weird internal political fight over funding or something.
If Lockheed had more than the Powerpoint slides they've shown, they should be able to do a reveal under non-disclosure and get the money, or at least the first piece of it, without any trouble.
I figure they're at the point where they're thinking, "We need a few billion coming in for something else, because one of these days Congress is going to wake up to the F-35 scam." Myself, if I were a Congress critter, the day after Lockheed announced that it would be almost four years after the plane passed initial operational capability before the software to actually fire the cannon in flight would be available, I'd have introduced a bill to close the whole project down.
Geography, geography, geography. Across the old South from the Atlantic to Texas, then up the Great Plains and some other parts of the Midwest, it was a bad day for the Democrats and a good day for the Republicans. OTOH, in addition to the things mentioned, Salt Lake City elected an openly gay mayor, earlier in the week Montana's Medicaid expansion scheme was blessed by the feds [1], and more importantly than the school board in Colorado, the voters across that state passed a referendum allowing the state to retain and spend the excess tax revenue from legal marijuana sales [2]. More importantly than the badly flawed Ohio marijuana initiative, the voters there overwhelmingly passed the redistricting proposal.
[1] The remaining three states in the Mountain West that haven't expanded are Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. The Republican governors of all three favor expansion. The Utah governor and Republican leaders in the legislature have agreed on a framework for expansion.
[2] An explanation of Colorado's excess revenue system is beyond the scope of this comment. Or a full-blown post. Most importantly, this proposition passed in every county, not just in the big counties along the Front Range that passed the original marijuana legalization.
All true. Laser photon thrusters producing a milli-Newton of force and accelerating actual macro masses can be demonstrated on a repeatable basis. No reaction mass involved, they don't require any new physics, and they're already three orders of magnitude more efficient than these microwave gadgets (in terms of Newtons-per-megawatt). I think it will be amusing if these new devices turn out to work because of some incidental maser effect doing the same thing.
Over the last 25 years, there have been a whole series of instances where the popular press has grabbed onto something that violates our current understanding of physics. Cold fusion. Powerful space drives that don't require reaction mass. Even Lockheed's announcement that the Skunk Works could produce a working hot fission generator in five years if someone would just give them enough money. My own belief about this trend is that it reflects the growing realization that the two biggies that speculative fiction has been promising for decades -- dirt-cheap energy and easy access to outer space -- appear to be receding out of reach.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “End of Sabbatical Report”
My list for "innocuous" is rather long these days. Not obscene. Not overly garish. Doesn't take up much bandwidth. Loads promptly, and doesn't force a page reflow if it does get loaded. Doesn't include Javascript or Flash or anything else that executes. Doesn't include tracking cookies. Limited number per page.
With respect to that last one, when I go to the NYTimes front page, my ad blocker blocks 14% of the page elements. For the Seattle Times, it's 25%. The blocker keeps a running count of the amount of stuff blocked since it was installed -- 11% of page elements!
I was looking over my wife's shoulder the other day while she was asking questions about something. Between my ad blocker and my piece of Javascript that enforces considerable uniformity of font faces and sizes, it's really interesting just how different my view of the web is from hers.
On “Linky Friday #140: Criminal Ed”
"Living in SF" is relevant. There are plenty of good reasons to live in SF -- affordability is not one of them. She could undoubtedly do better in Minneapolis or Durham, both of which regularly make the lists of top cities for a combination of above-average income, low unemployment, and modest cost of living. At an extreme, Omaha's unemployment rate has dropped below 3% and her share of an SF apartment might rent her a small townhouse there. Admittedly, you do give up a lot of things moving from California to Nebraska :^)
On “End of Sabbatical Report”
About that time, there were similar conversations going on inside the companies that were spending tens of billions of dollars to build the commercial internet-access networks. The usual separation was into content creators, content consumers, aggregators, and gatekeepers. Pre-internet, there was reasonable money to be made as an aggregator or gatekeeper (the two functions often being intertwined). Post-internet, we're still waiting to see whether that's possible. Despite Wallace's assertion, there seem to be darned few people willing to pay for those functions.
On “A Few Post-Debate Observations”
Medicaid expansion. When I worked for the state government, and had to speak on a live mic about Medicaid and Medicare and the impacts those had on how our state information systems had to work, I sometimes wondered if people noticed the pause in my speech while I made sure that my mouth was saying the right one :^)
On “My Health Insurance Premium Is Going Down”
Alsotoo: I’m very curious to see what becomes of this CO single payer initiative.
I'm particularly interested to see how it's marketed, and received, in the rural parts of the state. It doesn't address the fundamental problem in rural health care -- lack of providers -- but it does presumably deal with the ACA's problem in rural areas. Which is that the insurance companies aren't interested in those areas, resulting in few choices and high prices. Single payer reduces the choices further, but should result in the rural folks getting the same premium as the Front Range suburbs.
OTOH, the results of Kynect and the Medicaid expansion have been quite popular in rural Kentucky, which just voted for a new governor campaigning on dismantling those.
"
But IIRC, they're fixed. On days when I'm feeling cynical, I think that this is one of the things Chief Justice Roberts has on his mind in supporting the ACA. Big corporations replace shopping across multiple states for health insurance plans that have shown a long-term trend to double-digit inflation rates with a simple fixed payment to the federal government.
"
I have no idea why we have HSA, MSA, HRA and FSA options with different rules for solving roughly the same set of problems.
At the risk of hijacking the discussion on my own post... In the US, government assistance comes with restrictions. Lots of restrictions. There is a portion of the political class whose price for passing some form of assistance is almost always to limit how much assistance, what it can be used for, and who can get it. Using the tax code to implement assistance -- eg, allowing the use of pre-tax dollars -- is just such a restriction, limiting the benefit to people who are generally employed.
The larger-scale version of your question is why does the federal government buy health care for people using all of Medicare, Medicaid, CHP+, the VA, Tri-Care, and the employer share for government civilian employees? Why not just pay some portion of the bills for health care for all those people? The revenue sources are, in practice, immaterial -- that's just accounting and the computers are damned good at that. Why not use that scope for leverage on service providers? "Our clients are (roughly) 50% of your business, we pay promptly, and since we can print money we're good for it; we insist that you give us at least the best price that you give anyone else."
On “Our lazy media: More curious liberal bashing”
Living in an initiative state for a long time now, I've gotten to where I pay more attention to those than the Republican or Democratic things. Ohio was a mixed bag this year -- the badly-flawed marijuana initiative lost, but the redistricting initiative won overwhelmingly. In my suburban county in Colorado, the initiative picture was pretty rosy for progressives -- let the state keep the excess revenue from the marijuana tax*, raise taxes for the public library system and guarantee that the county commissioners have to keep their hands off of that, and a message to people thinking about being on the school board to not mess with the AP students and their parents. The first item for the 2016 ballot cleared the signature hurdle last week -- state single-payer health insurance.
* The initiative passed in every county in the state, which is pretty much unheard of.
On “America Indentured, Part II: Villains”
Indeed. My cousin is an organizer -- among other things -- for the Teamsters. He lives in a right-to-work state and seems to spend most of his time in other right-to-work states. His FB feed regularly includes successful efforts.
"
This. Right at the end of my technical career, I was acquired by a large corporation that didn't ever make a profit*. But the CEO/COB took home his $3-5M and a zillion stock options every year.
* They had a huge cash flow and were, under the rules at that time, allowed to depreciate their large capital base at a rate much faster than it would actually wear out. Their financial statements barely mentioned profit and loss; it was all about EBIDA, baby, and that cash flow.
On “Carried Interest is Not Labor Income – The Capital Structure Perspective”
That's a very nice clarification, thanks.
"
Certainly any comparison that involves options or stock grants given to employees would be suspect. Those aren't investments by the employee, those are (deferred) compensation provided by the employer. The key question in your second example boils down to "Is Kolohe, a purely passive investor, hiring you to provide special knowledge/labor/whatever?" The middle-class outrage over the tax treatment is because in most cases, they think the answer is "Damn right he is!" no matter how the paperwork may be structured.
On “Linky Friday #139: Humans, Robots, & Onions”
...something like 40% of the remaining untapped energy reserves in the US are located under federal lands...
I might have guessed higher than that: everything more than three miles offshore; the federal land holdings in the West; on the order of another 100 million acres where the feds have disposed of the land but retained the mineral rights (eg, most of the land given to the railroads in the 1870s). Not just oil, natural gas, and coal, either. Most of the uranium and thorium reserves are on federal land. Some of the best wind resources in the West are on federal land (as well as offshore wind in the Atlantic). There's significant undeveloped conventional hydro in the West (significant in terms of the size of Western Interconnect demand), but much of it's unavailable because it would affect lands held in trust by the BIA. Lots of the best places for commercial-scale solar are federally owned. By far the best geothermal resource in the country is Yellowstone National Park :^)
"
The amusing thing is that Transcanada could have very quietly built the added capacity years ago along existing right-of-way, using an existing border crossing. Instead, it looks like they just drew a straight line with no regard to what that crossed. I've always assumed that Dick Cheney told them "Just use the straight-line route, we've got your back." But the route was such that it pissed off some of the Native Americans, and cut across one of the few pieces of real estate that the Nebraska environmental groups would care about particularly. That got it caught up in the courts, and the Nebraska state government, and before things got settled Dick wasn't in position to have anyone's back.
"
I seem to recall that Tolkien cautiously believed that "hobbit" was a new word, but that there is at least one use of it in 19th century northern European mythology. Obscure enough that it's unlikely any court would rule that characters resembling Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, etc aren't infringement on the trademark.
"
Nope. It's an old Scottish term.
"
"Hobbit" in this usage is trademarked, held by the Tolkien estate. I believe they are reasonably active about protecting it.
"
When I put my empty giant canvas bag in the bagging area, I get an "Are you using your own bag?" screen, and after an affirmative it goes on nicely. It appears that different stores can adjust some parameters in the software. At the store in the "bad" part of town, using your own bag invokes the "An attendant has been notified..." screen at payment time. That doesn't happen at the other stores.
When the Kroger stores here started self-check, the software was pretty bad. It's improved a lot over the years.
"
Where I usually get caught up are the things that are too big to bag. They still don’t seem to have figured that relatively basic thing out.
Most of the self-serve stations at the Kroger chain here have an "overflow" shelf big enough to hold pretty much anything they sell in the store. It's too high for many people to put large heavy items like a case of bottled water, so there's also a "Put item in cart" button on the touch screen that lets you put that type of item back in your cart instead of in the bagging area. If you use that button, you get an "Attendant has been notified to assist you" screen when you start to pay that has to be cleared by the clerk.
"
Moving to the state and starting a beer business is a fine old Colorado tradition.
"
L4: Ah, the joys of a boom-and-bust industry. The oil bust in the mid-to-late 1980s devastated college geology departments when the oil and support companies not only quit hiring, they laid off lots of the existing geology staff. Colorado got current Gov. John Hickenlooper out of that one, since he elected to stay in the Denver area and do something entirely different.
On “What’s in this Black Box?”
The Lockheed thing is weird. They gotta have a handle on something interesting (which does not mean “fusion tomorrow”), or they wouldn’t have press released it. Unless it’s some weird internal political fight over funding or something.
If Lockheed had more than the Powerpoint slides they've shown, they should be able to do a reveal under non-disclosure and get the money, or at least the first piece of it, without any trouble.
I figure they're at the point where they're thinking, "We need a few billion coming in for something else, because one of these days Congress is going to wake up to the F-35 scam." Myself, if I were a Congress critter, the day after Lockheed announced that it would be almost four years after the plane passed initial operational capability before the software to actually fire the cannon in flight would be available, I'd have introduced a bill to close the whole project down.
"
The Lockheed remark should say "hot fusion". My fingers seem to be particularly stupid this morning.
On “Questions on Framing and Perspective”
Geography, geography, geography. Across the old South from the Atlantic to Texas, then up the Great Plains and some other parts of the Midwest, it was a bad day for the Democrats and a good day for the Republicans. OTOH, in addition to the things mentioned, Salt Lake City elected an openly gay mayor, earlier in the week Montana's Medicaid expansion scheme was blessed by the feds [1], and more importantly than the school board in Colorado, the voters across that state passed a referendum allowing the state to retain and spend the excess tax revenue from legal marijuana sales [2]. More importantly than the badly flawed Ohio marijuana initiative, the voters there overwhelmingly passed the redistricting proposal.
[1] The remaining three states in the Mountain West that haven't expanded are Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. The Republican governors of all three favor expansion. The Utah governor and Republican leaders in the legislature have agreed on a framework for expansion.
[2] An explanation of Colorado's excess revenue system is beyond the scope of this comment. Or a full-blown post. Most importantly, this proposition passed in every county, not just in the big counties along the Front Range that passed the original marijuana legalization.
On “What’s in this Black Box?”
All true. Laser photon thrusters producing a milli-Newton of force and accelerating actual macro masses can be demonstrated on a repeatable basis. No reaction mass involved, they don't require any new physics, and they're already three orders of magnitude more efficient than these microwave gadgets (in terms of Newtons-per-megawatt). I think it will be amusing if these new devices turn out to work because of some incidental maser effect doing the same thing.
Over the last 25 years, there have been a whole series of instances where the popular press has grabbed onto something that violates our current understanding of physics. Cold fusion. Powerful space drives that don't require reaction mass. Even Lockheed's announcement that the Skunk Works could produce a working hot fission generator in five years if someone would just give them enough money. My own belief about this trend is that it reflects the growing realization that the two biggies that speculative fiction has been promising for decades -- dirt-cheap energy and easy access to outer space -- appear to be receding out of reach.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.