random incoherence and infantile meanderings

1. Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1180: Egg on Newegg’s face – The thing is… NewEgg will make good for everyone who got a fake product. Unlike most everything, I trust them. Like I used to trust Amazon.
2. TWiT 236: Leave It To Molly
3. Tekdiff 5th Anniversary episode!
4. Episode 4 – Spherical Tomi: A Novel of Despair
5. clock – podictionary 1107
6. canopy – podictionary 140
7. The History of Rome 84- Longing For Death
8. Cover to Cover #397A: L. E. Modesitt, Jr – Modesitt is amazing. The forced falseness of the opening ads on the other hand are horrible. Read the copy or relate your experiences with the Cytrix products but please stop the
9. Dead Robots’ Society Episode 118 – Save The Drama
10. Road to Magical Happy Greatness Episode 8: Leave Tiger Alone

75:21 | 79:47 | 74:44 | 5:03 hrs.

1. Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1181: ACTA: it’s bad for the brand
2. Psychology 3256 (Winter 2010) – Factorial ANOVA 01
3. Psychology 4007 (Winter 2010) – The Gender Similarity Hypothesis
4. Psychology 1107 (Winter 2010) – Stress and Health 02
5. Biology and Psychology 3506 (Winter 2010) – Antipsychotics

74:44 | 79:06 | 74:10 | 4:54 hrs.

1. Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1182: Where we’re going, we don’t need rails
2. The Empress Sword 05
3. Out of the Coffin Episode #56 – Interview with Gail Carriger author of SOULLESS
4. The History of Rome 015a- The Second Samnite War
5. HP Podcraft Episode 32 – The Rats in the Walls: Part 2
6. Psychology 3256 (Winter 2010) – Factorial ANOVA 02 – That noise? That is the sound of my head spinning.
7. Agony 837: A 2010 Interview with Dan Simmons
8. DarkCompass 405 The Banana Method
9. ChinesePod Newbie – Please let me through!
10. storm – podictionary 141

I messed up my numbers for today – oops.

1. Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1183: War and peace on the Internet
2. SciAm Ice, Ice, Baby: The Physics of Curling – Yeah… I listened several times and I still don’t understand the physics of curling. Maybe with GoToMyPC I would have been able to see it better.
3. FourCast More power for the AI! – Ep. 20
4. 1UP.com – 4 Guys 1UP – 02/26/2010
5. Into the Dark Episode 053 – Lock, Stock, & Two Smokin’ Aces – I haven’t seen Lock Stock or Aces 2, but I enjoyed Aces 1. I have no idea what the story was, which didn’t really matter to me because this was a purely visual joy ride. I really want to see Lock Stock now.
6. ISBW ISBW #142 – Feedback!
7. Slice of Sci Fi #254: An Interview With Ted Raimi of “Legend of the Seeker”
8. Slice of SciFi #253: VoiceMail Show
9. Cover to Cover #397B: Books and . . .
10. Quirks & Quarks 2010-02-27 – I was putting the groceries away and had to keep rewinding the Spiderman section. Very cool, if I did in fact understand what was said.
11. Cybrosis – Episode 09
12. The Good Parts, Episode 15: Entitlement
13. Beware the Hairy Mango Episode 27 – Jim Comes Out
14. Dead Mech Episode 12
15. The Empress Sword Episode 06 – Magic Sword – I had a feeling…
16. Tor.com Story Podcast #11: “Down on the Farm” by Charles Stross – I’ve heard this one before… somewhere. It was a somewhat better recording, though nothing against the read itself. Either way, it was and is a good tale.
17. leech – podictionary 1109

72:33 | 87:39 | 76:52 | 10:47

I had to make a new account today. The requirements for username were:

• Begin it with a letter or a number
• Include at least one letter and one number
• If you use your e-mail address, you don’t need to include a number
• 5 to 50 characters and no spaces

Really? My username HAS to have a number?

Tomorrow, when I come back to USE this account I won’t remember my username.

Oh! I know, I’ll just write it down on this piece of paper with all of my passwords that are also too convoluted to remember. Because, like a secret, it isn’t secure until NO ONE knows.

Frogs.

1. Buzz Out Loud Podcast 1179: The guy who makes OK Go go
2. The Writer Exciter: Affairs of the Colon
3. Get Published Episode 25 – Interview with Erik Buchanan
4. Resonance FM Voice On Record
5. Podcast: I Speak Fluent Giraffe: Henngar the Hungry
6. The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast, Episode 8: Magic! Medicine! Fantic Episy!
7. podictionary kerfuffle – podictionary 1106
8. 38. How to Drive Your Geek Wild in Bed! – Lessons From A Geek Fu Master
9. Bite Club – Episode 33

72:23 | 80:53 | 75:21 | 5:32 hrs.

First, read these two posts by Jay Lake.

the long and grinding road

More on the weird billing, and costs of healthcare

Just to be clear: He has insurance. And is probably going to be driven penniless by the cost of his treatment. Got that? Okay… now my opinion.

The entire health care issue, in my overly something opinion, can boil down to this: is every human life worth fighting for, to the bitter end… or do we value some lives over others, value some lives longer than others?

And by we, I mean literally we, we the people, the ones who live and breathe and suffer and die. All of us.

Do we value life so much that we will pay for radical treatments, experimental drugs (and the research that goes before), and optional surgeries? Or do we think that some lives are worth more than others?

This has all sorts of implications from abortion policies to euthanasia. Too many implications for my mind to do more than boggle over right now.

If some lives are worth more, how do we sort it out? Who is worth more? Why? Maybe the ability to pay for insurance IS our sorting mechanism.

If that is the case, the current state of insurance seems to me to indicate that the most valuable lives are the ones that are HEALTHY and insured (i.e. paying into the system.)

That strikes me as a really piss poor way of choosing who is valuable enough to save.

-=-=-=-

On a different angle, the idea that public for-profit companies run health care insurance is foolish. The goals and mottoes of the company and customers are in direct conflict with each other. The company’s goal is to increase profit. Which simply means taking in more money while paying out less. The customer’s goal is to pay a small amount frequently so that in the event of a situation (or emergency) there is not a large amount to pay out.

Okay, that’s probably not quite accurate. The customer really wants to put in a little bit frequently in order to stay healthy. The customer doesn’t really want insurance so much as steady and covered care. If the ends to the means is through insurance, so be it.

I spent years buying into the idea that the government was the scary evil thing. Since the government is people and we are the people, well, it is still a scary thing. Scary and stupid rather than scary and evil. But now I’m buying into the idea that corporations are evil. When the ultimate goal, for which everything else is sacrificial, is to increase profit every quarter, then there is NO ROOM FOR GOOD. In the same way that the absence of light is dark, the absence of good is evil.

So yeah, I trust the tea party idiots more than I trust any insurance company. And those tea party yipyaps probably want to kill me because I LOOK different.