Rise of total health expenditures

Posted by Thomas Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:34:29 +0000

“In 2008, total national health expenditures were expected to rise 6.9 percent — two times the rate of inflation.” [1].

National Review says that the OECD average over the past four decades has risen on average 4.5 percent [2].

Doesn’t saying it’s growing 2x the rate of inflation seem a bit misleading when the average rate has been 4.5%?

Posted in Depressing Statistics | Comments Off

single payer health care

Posted by Thomas Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:28:51 +0000

My open letter to both my senators and my congressman. I’ve never done this before, but I suppose there’s a first time for everything.

I believe that de-facto government run health care will fail to meet any of its desired goals. I believe it will:

* not curb health care costs
* increase my taxes
* create another significant and permanent drain on the economy
* create yet another lumbering bureaucracy, being impossible to rollback
* create unsustainable inefficiencies in the market ultimately decreasing health care choices

Please vote against a single payer plan.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

Measurable Results

Posted by Thomas Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:58:25 +0000

When watching a “Garnier Fructis” commerical, and they ask if you “want volume you can actually measure?”, does it disappoint you when they don’t explain exactly how to measure it? :)

Posted in General | Comments Off

BL: 8/4

Posted by Thomas Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:20:03 +0000

8/4: 8mi @ 16.6mph

Posted in Bike Log | Comments Off

Enigma Variations

Posted by Thomas Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:32:24 +0000

I’ve been trying to figure out a tune since at least May 28, 2007. I managed to recognize it on the radio today and caught the name, Nimrod from Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar. There’s no telling when or where I played it, but obviously it got stuck up there somewhere. :)

Posted in General | Comments Off

Scrubs

Posted by Thomas Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:09:55 +0000

Also last Sunday, I finally finished the last 6 episodes of the 8th season. I guess I don’t have much to comment about besides that it was decent. Nothing really mind-blowing. But apparently I consider worth nothing. :)

Posted in General | Comments Off

Adventures with puppet

Posted by Thomas Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:09:26 +0000

Last Sunday I finally had sufficient desire to get puppet working on Sunday. But I ran into issues and didn’t get it working, sort of like If you give a mouse a cookie.

  1. Install puppet => realize the version in etch is a little old, my config doesn’t work out of the box, the documentation online doesn’t jive with the behavior I’m seeing with this version => debugging is difficult
  2. Decide to upgrade to puppet in testing => make a backup of the machine => disk has bad sectors in the image => machine doesn’t have ddrescue => machine doesn’t have internet access (for reasons still tbd) => download ddresuce deb => copy to machine => install ddresuce => finally make a backup of the image w/ ddrescue
  3. Try to verify the new image is good by firing it up in the vm => vm doesn’t like the image (fsck barfs due to physical # of sectors not matching the ext3 superblock) => finally figure out I can try to resize the ext3 disk image => image boots!
  4. I get tired of this, and don’t get around to upgrading to testing

Posted in Technology | Comments Off

Fabric Softener

Posted by Thomas Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:03:25 +0000

is thinking that I’ve got a fabric softener allergy. Not sure what else would account for this super itchiness on the soles of my feet. Nor would it particularly explain why it’s only started occurring in the last couple of days…

Posted in Tweets | Comments Off