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.

While watching C-SPAN this afternoon, in a subcommittee meeting a congressman said that we (the US) spend “more than 2.5 times more in health care compared to any other country in the world”¹. I thought to myself, self, that’s depressing, so I went digging to find out if this was accurate or not. A cursory inspection of 1 and 2 leads me to believe he misspoke and that what he meant to say was that we spend 2.5 times the median. This would have been a prime example of pop up news where a little bubble pops up and says “what he meant to say was…”.

In other news, I was wondering the other night if there is a point at which the economy can no longer sustain the expansion of spending. I was thinking specifically of health care at the time. If you gave everyone in the US all of the health care they required, paid for by the rich, would the rich be able cover it all? I mean it basically what you want to do is have the least number of people have to pay taxes, and simultaneously you want them to all to have full health care, there has to be an equilibrium point at which you’ve increased the non-payers such that the money they require equals the amount of revenue generated by the rich.

Equally you have to expect that as this happens you reduce incentives to become rich. See exhibits A and B. I think we’ve already seen this with industry moving from California to Texas². Just like Ireland, the companies will gravitate to the states with the least tax burden. Despite companies acting in direct fiduciary interest (as required by US law), some are seeking to close existing loopholes.

I want to see our companies remain the most competitive in the world. But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens. — Obama³

Wait, isn’t that self-contradictory? How can disallowing actions companies perceive to be in their own best interest keep companies competitive? Restricting US companies participating in the global economy makes them less competitive, not more. As much as I dislike Ballmer, he agrees. There’s got to be some serious game theory on this subject around here somewhere.

You look at Reagan’s inaugural and Kennedy’s oratory, they do not say that it will be easy, but that these things must be done now and not later, that we must do them together, that we will do them together, that we will sacrifice as one, and that we will triumph as one.

65% Bill Richardson
64% John McCain
60% Chris Dodd
60% Tom Tancredo
58% Mike Huckabee
57% Mitt Romney
56% Fred Thompson
55% Ron Paul
54% Barack Obama
54% John Edwards
53% Hillary Clinton
52% Joe Biden
45% Mike Gravel
44% Rudy Giuliani
39% Dennis Kucinich

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

What is the single greatest action the United States should do tomorrow to directly reduce the United States’ contribution to the global warming crisis?

If your foreign policy were to return the United States to a time when we were respected around the world, how do you propose to mend ties to our allies, to rebuild old bridges and build new ones, and to reach out at a time when our friends are few and far between?

I wonder would Al Gore take another shot at the Vice Presidency to further his global warming message? Surely the second highest office in the land would be the best place to further his cause…

Which is the greatest folly, that the electorate imposes the expectation that one person can solve all of the United States problems, or that all of the politicians’ opiate laden bullet points, detailing their nine-point plans, can save us all from impending doom?

Other major policy issues in the upcoming presidential race that I’m to lazy to postulate questions about:
privacy, war on drugs, healthcare, social security, education, war in iraq, foreign policy, energy policy, nuclear energy, terrorism, fear

And, to top it off, what we really need:
unification of the two halves of our country; a leader to unite the people, to bring a sense of nationalism back to the masses, a single common goal, worthy of a national charge, benefiting the United States and the world

“It’s time to chill the f*ck out. To quote some old dude, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. Enough said, next question.”

Hilary and Barack and who knows who else have formed presidential exploratory committees.

“You pick the smartest, most capable, most honorable individual you can think of…”
— Leo McGarry

I think that sentiment will be driving my decision. A person who is honorable, trustworthy, dare I say patriotic, who would adhere to a more strict interpretation of the Constitution. Actually, I don’t think I can use patriot as a criteria. It has been twisted. I don’t mean it in its current connotation, but that connotation from the Colonial era. A statesman, a patriot, a federalist, a contitutionalist.

I finally just put 2 and 2 together. For the past day or so, I’ve noticed a severe slowness in the responsiveness of one of my shells in a screen session. I had also noticed in a “ps axf” that there was an ssh session open to wesley. Neither of these things were adding up. I just realized that most likely I had ssh’ed to wesley, then back again to argento. The reason for the slowness wasn’t due to high load or low memory, but simply network lag and overhead of going to Texas and back again. Oops…

I have spent a good deal of this weekend again working on the home network. I installed a new Xen image for my database machine, figured out that Samba can’t do straight Kerberos authentication (only with real AD :(), packaged Resin for Debian for real this time (yay! finally!), watched a bunch of Scrubs, watched a bunch of movies over again, got Azureus working headless on my new shell server (compute0), did some laundry, stayed up too late, got up too late, found out my internet connection can push 15Mbps+, setup cricket for snmp monitoring of all of my new machines, hmmm, that’s all I can think of right now…

I haven’t fixed the car door and it’s been too cold to ride or finish the table.

I’m out of photos now. Must take more.