Dellanave » Opinion

I want to hate the health care law

david — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:12:46 +0000

I really want to hate this health care law. I want to tell everyone how stupid it is. How socialist our country has become. How this is the beginning of the end.

The problem is I can’t. Because honestly, the ~~bill~~ law just isn’t that bad. Once you get past a few things anyway:

We currently provide care in the most inefficient way possible. By some estimates up to 40% of health care spending is waste in the system. This law changes none of that, except pours more money into the broken system.
Nothing in this law changes the ratio of personal responsibility to public assistance. I eat good whole food, exercise, and keep my body as healthy as possible. And the other 30% of America, the obese 30% who easily absorb 50% more health care costs than fit people? They get lumped into the same pool, the same system, with no repercussions. This is broken.
Putting a private, for-profit corporation in between a person and medical care is a recipe for disaster. Health insurance companies have an obligation to maximize profits to their shareholders. The notion that they are supposed to balance profit and good on their own terms is a fantasy.

There are a few more smaller (big) reasons, but those are enough to trash the system whole-sale and start over. There is no fixing this “system” and patching more law on top of it isn’t going to doit.

Sources: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/07/09/lets-just-blame-the-fat-people/

Late to the Party Part 6, I discover Del.icio.us

david — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:48:54 +0000

So I know I’m late to the party. Really late. I was cleaning up my desk the other day in preparation to move, and I found this fantastic article about olive oil sitting on my desk. My Dad had given it to me, and I wanted to save it but I didn’t want this thing floating around my life for the next few years. And then it hit me. I should store this in the cloud, and I can probably find it online. 2 seconds later I had the article on my screen. Now what…. in Reader I star stuff that I want to save to go back to some day, but that wouldn’t work for this.

That was the lightbulb moment. OK, now I get del.icio.us. I finally created an account and have slowly started to add interesting things I remember or have found to it. I know I’m a late bloomer on this one, but I finally realized it has a purpose. My goal is to store everything in the cloud, and I’m one step closer.

My del.icio.us thingy.

How much would you pay to use Google?

david — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:26:36 +0000

I got to thinking about how much I use Google to answer questions the other day. My search activity calendar looks like this every month:

Even between Jan 1-3 when I was in Vegas I did 1-3 searches. Some months are even more heavy than this. So how much would I pay? I wouldn’t have a problem with paying up to $1500/year to use Google. Maybe even more if I had to. It is THAT valuable to me.

How much would you pay to use Google?

P.S. I think the search history is super freakin’ cool.

Update: Pam points out that the calendar is actually all web activity and not just search. Touché. That said, it doesn’t change how valuable I think Google is to me. I’d still cough up the $1500.

Why I Went Short GOOG at $700

david — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:16:09 +0000

I just read an article at Vestopedia about why the author sold his Google stock at $741. His reasoning was based on an article by Stephen Dubner (of the ever-popular Freakonomics) about regression to the mean by athletes.

Thing is, I don’t agree with the reasoning that Google should go lower because their freakishly high growth rates can’t continue and they will regress towards more “average” growth rates. Companies aren’t coin flips, they don’t follow statistical rules. Google has seen exceptional growth because they continue to innovate and add real-estate that allows them to grow at an incredible rate.

So why did I go short at $700? Obviously Google had already slid $40 points, but they could have stopped there right.. I shorted GOOG at $700 because the market is fearful and uneasy. I don’t have any doubt that Google will continue to grow at an incredible rate. Online ad spend isn’t going to decrease, and Google is constantly finding new ways to deliver ads. Android doesn’t excite me yet either, and a lot of their stock price was based on the GPhone. Bottom line is that while Google will continue to grow, I don’t think it merits the current multiple EVEN at extreme growth rates. It needs to come back in line. So far I’ve been reasonably correct as the stock has found support at $630. I’d probably cover at $600. We’ll see what happens next week. Right now the market is still scared, and I’m not ready.

How to Pass Up the Opportunity of a Lifetime

david — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:04:15 +0000

I was going to cross-post this on Shoemoney, but I’ll just link it instead.

So… Mint

david — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:25:20 +0000

I joined the seemlingly 60M other people in signing up for mint.com yesterday. Its slower than old people sex right now, but having been down that bumpy road I’m not going to complain too much.

At first I was like “Ohhhh pretty buttons” and I liked it a lot. Now that I’ve given it the 0.001% test, I’m not as impressed. Basically I’ve played with all the features and I’m left with that, “that’s it?” feeling. I’m not entirely sure what more I would want it to do, but I don’t feel that impressed. It also pointed out how much I’ve spent at Amazon, which scares the crap out of me. One thing I am phenomenally impressed by is how they just downloaded all the data from Amex and Wells Fargo without using the Direct Connect nonsense. If these guys can do it, why do I still have to struggle to get Quicken and QuickBooks to connect to my bank? Its absurd.

I’ll keep playing with it, and see how I feel in a few months.

On Paid Links

david — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:58:26 +0000

Yesterday I witnessed a pretty phenomenal panel at SES called “Are Paid Links Evil?” With a title like that, you know there is going to be some heat right off the bat. I wasn’t going to post at all, but I think I’ll throw my few cents in. First of all everyone on the panel (except Andy Baio) did a phenomenal job. Matt did a great job of toeing the company line, and diverting any questions into the question he wishes the attendee would have asked. Michael Gray in my opinion did a great job of hitting Matt’s points out of the park. Thats not to say that Matt doesn’t have some legitimate points, but Michael was able to pretty well knock down the ones Matt brought up. Todd Malicoat reiterated several of Michael’s points and added a few valid points of his own. I wouldn’t say he added anything earth shattering, but to be fair Michael covered almost everything. Greg and Todd added the “Look, we do this” perspective and I always love hearing Greg talk because he doesn’t mince words. This crack team really took a lot of the FUD-power out of the search-engine’s argument. Andy did a good job of convincing everyone that he wasn’t qualified to even sit at the same table as Greg, Todd, Michael, and Matt much less speak to the question of legitimacy of paid links.

So a few points:

- Matt argued that people are trying to muddy the water and accusing Google of saying that “all paid links are bad”. Matt drew a distinction between paid links that pass PR and paid links that would be clicked by users. If anything, I think Matt is muddying the water in this case. Look we all know what we’re talking about here, the buying and selling of PR. To say that some paid links are ok if they don’t pass PR is creating confusion, not clearing it up. Lets tackle the actual issue, is it evil to sell PR?

- It is in fact nearly impossible to rank in a competitive space without buying links. Google created this monster. You can’t just put your site out there and “do good” and expect to rack up links. It simply won’t happen. Buying some juice is critical. Unless Google can put a stop to it COMPLETELY, its futile to talk about doing it on any level.

- At the beginning of the session they showed this amusing video. As you can see I just linked to the video. The site is about home rentals. How is that a relevant link? How does that improve the user experience? It doesn’t. And yet before getting called out on it, Matt encouraged this type of thing as “creative”. So its ok to make an off-topic link-baiting piece, but buying a link from an on-topic relevant site to connect 2 sites that are in the same space is not ok by G/Y/M? Thats just ridiculous.

- One more thing I’m going to add in edit: lets not forget that this buying/selling links hurts Google’s OWN link-selling business. Like I said before, we’re talking about PR-passing links..but the reality is that this DOES affect their own bottom line with AdWords.

I think those are the key things I’d like to throw into the ring. Certainly no one “won” the argument, although if you were on the fence hopefully it pushed you either way more definitively. I think Google is going to go on a major PR offensive to spread FUD about buying/selling links. I do think it’s good that the search engines aren’t just getting a pulpit to spread their FUD like I’ve heard has happened in the past.

Watch Cramer Lose His Grip

david — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 18:14:11 +0000

This video of Jim Cramer going ballistic about the Bear Sterns issue in the market last week is hilarious. This guy knows his stuff, and if you’ve ever seen his show you know how passionate he is. On this segment he goes absolutely off the handle and it’s awesome.

Best quote: “You can’t even get a loan if you’re rich like ME.” That’s aggressive.

The Manliest Mancessory Ever

david — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:16:10 +0000

My friend Dick Masterson has this site.. If you can’t grasp tongue-in-cheek humor then stop reading right now.

OK thats out of the way.

Head on over to Men are Better than Women and check out Dick’s post on how manly watches are. This is the best post he has ever made, bar none.

If anyone wants to buy me a watch, this Vacheron Constantin is it:

A Computer Science Degree Does Hurt (A Lot)

david — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:24:47 +0000

The other day I was skimming through my feed reader and I came across a post by Leah Culver called A Computer Science Degree Doesn’t Hurt (Much). Having my own opinions about CS degrees (and degrees in general) this really caught my attention. Not surprisingly, I can’t help but disagree.

Like Leah says, you spend years in classes you don’t need. Writing an assembler in assembly for hardware that doesn’t exist is not a useful way to spend time. Poring over parentheses to write an artificially-intelligent tic-tac-toe game in ((scheme)) is not either. Learning some vague high-levelisms of operating systems isn’t going to help you when your web server is serving 1000 hits per second and you’re bumping up against the open file handle limit.

The skills you need to build real-world applications don’t come in school. In fact I don’t even think a CS degree gives you the faculties to learn this stuff. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met with a CS or CE degree that couldn’t do ANYTHING practical. I’ve interviewed them, I know this. Yes Leah, coding problems are hard. They can be fun. They’re not real though. Give your average CS major a programming problem and they’ll hammer out a solution in some obscure language. Ask them to architect the design of a high-traffic ad server with a db backend and they will run for the hills.

So why does the degree hurt so much? Because all that time you’ve spent in school is lost time. You’ll never get ahead of it. While the CS major was banging their head against some contrived optimization problem, the self-starter was re-writing a high traffic web application from scratch. While the CJ major was wasting their time in a college physics class, the hacker was learning how MySQL indexes affect in a real production database. While the CJ major is still trying to un-learn Scheme and Fortran and Java, the motivated hacker is hammering out a solution in Perl because its the best tool for the job and he’s been using it to build tools for all the years you spent in college.

Try it, get out in the real world. I absolutely PROMISE you that plenty of interesting problems will get thrown your way. They’ll come way out of left field and they will be a lot more fun to solve than something you’re going to get graded on. The tools you need to solve them are available to anyone. Especially if you don’t limit yourself to being a “programmer” who doesn’t know anything about the system underneath. Like I said, when you start banging against the open file handle limit or kernel memory limit, you’ll know you’ve arrived.

Our higher education system is flawed, most critically when it comes to fast-moving targets like Computer Science. While I doubt it will be our generation to stand up and make a change, I hope it happens soon. In the mean time, go do your thing. If you want to drop out and actually pursue something, don’t let anyone stop you.

P.S. It might be unfair to point out that Leah’s blog is toast from being dugg, but what the heck. Mine wouldn’t go down…. Got Experience?