Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Dangerous For Your Health?

27 Comments

Yet another time bomb in the “stimulus” package, that won’t be debated:

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

The last entity that I want monitoring my health care is the federal government.

This bill is apparently chock-a-block with stuff like this, each and every one of which should be discussed, debated and if passed, passed on its own merits with its own bill, and has nothing to do with stimulus. This is quite possibly the worst piece of legislation in the nation’s history, and it’s being rushed through with almost no debate, discussion, or even knowledge of its contents by those voting for it. The Founders would weep.

If they vote for the conference product, I hope that Collins, Snowe and Specter all lose their next races, even if they’re replaced by Dems. At least they’ll be honest Dems.

[Early evening update]

(Democrat) Mickey Kaus explains how this bill will roll back, if not completely undo, welfare reform.

Administrative, General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

On Not Being A Dove

3 Comments

A long but fascinating essay from the late John Updike. I found this passage quite interesting:

The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of [the president] by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property—the USA and its many amenities—intact. A common report in this riotous era was of slum-dwellers throwing rocks and bottles at the firemen come to put out fires; the peace marchers, the upper-middle-class housewives pushing baby carriages along in candlelit processions, seemed to me to be behaving identically, without the excuse of being slum-dwellers.

Emphasis mine.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. They weren’t anti-war — they were just on the other side.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Rough Night

2 Comments

So, after being up for about twenty-two hours, I got to bed about 11 Pacific. I got a call about quarter after one informing me that my luggage had arrived at LAX (no mention of where it had arrived from). I said, yes, please deliver it.

A while later, I got another call telling me that they were at the condo. I got the luggage (I thought) after a long and unnecessary dispute over the proper amount of the tip to the delivery guy, who (at the risk of seeming racist) seemed to be in both accent and appearance Middle Eastern. I ended up giving him more than I should have from cash that I hadn’t realized I had. Then (at least so I thought) back to bed.

About 2:40 AM, there was a knocking on the door downstairs. I thought “now what?” and ignored it, hoping that it was one of the other doors. But it persisted. I got up, and there was a guy claiming to be delivering my luggage. He said he would have just left it outside, but didn’t know if it was a good neighborhood for that.

He was right. He did have my luggage. The other delivery had apparently been an annoying dream. I took delivery (with no tip) and went back to bed, hoping that it had been real this time. In the morning, it turned out to have been.

And note, I really couldn’t have twattweeted this:

Lugj l8t to LA. Got urly morn call to delivr from LAX. Got nther call was here. Rgu bout tip. Was dream. Real dlvry l8tr. Finely got sleep LOL.

See, it’s just not the same.

Technology and Society

Now What Is Google Doing?

3 Comments

An emailer points out that a search for “Rand Simberg” in Google results in a malware warning for every single site associated with my name. However, it’s hard to take it personally, because apparently it is doing it with all searches (at least the few that I tried). Google has apparently decided that every site on the Internet is dangerous to your computer. I wonder if they have a new algorithm that’s screwed up?

[Update a few minutes later]

Whatever it was, they seem to have fixed it. I still have tab open with the problem showing, though. I guess I should take a screenshot.

[Early evening update]

For anyone curious, I didn’t do a screengrab, but here’s a sourcegrab from a typical search result this morning. A screengrab would be redundant at this point, since I could easily fake one from the source if I wanted to take the trouble to hack the HTML. But I didn’t. It’s the real deal.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Heh. I hadn’t noticed this the first time I looked. The only site that it doesn’t think will harm your computer is google.com.

[Monday afternoon update]

Here’s the story on what happened with Google.

[Bumped]