Are the Conservatives Right on Healthcare?

One of the major arguments people like Megan McArdle use against the healthcare reform passed last year is that the cost-saving measures included in the plan won't work. People like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias say they will work, they hope.

This Politico article provides ammunition for the conservatives.  Various interest groups and lobbyists are rising up against the Independent Payment Advisory Board.  If one is a cynic, watch for the lobbyists to get legislation weakening it or killing it included in some big package of must-pass legislation.

CDC Does What Every Gov Website Should Do

And that's publish their website metrics.

Of interest, in the list of referring websites, usa.gov ranks just below google.de and google.co.za at no. 38.  That tells me the theory that people will look at usa.gov and then go to other government sites is rather dubious. But that's my preconception. Maybe it's a reflection of poor design between usa.gov and cdc.

Bad Apples

 Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, a study on the effect of "bad apples" on group dynamics, also highlighted on NPR's This American Life.  The  bad applies include the "depressive pessimist", the "jerk" and the "slacker". The lesson from the research appears to be: groups live down to the level of their worst performer.  Except that a very skilled leader can diffuse the effect.

This post, linked to from the above, references McConnell's "Rapid Development", a very good book on the process of software development.  I'd like to think I was good in dealing with bad apples, but I wasn't.  Disliked conflict too much to be consistently good.

The World Ends in Seven Days

At least the world of new Internet addresses, according to this Technology Review post.  We've exhausted the universe of valid unique IP addresses (using IPv4) and we haven't converted to IPv6.  So the doomsday we dodged with Y2K is about to occur.

A Little Invective Adds Savor to the Day

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has a long excerpt of a review of a book by a sociologist.  The last paragraph she quotes goes:

In a blurb, Michael Burawoy, a previous president of the American Sociological Association and a prominent leftist sociologist, calls the book “encyclopedic” in its breadth and “daunting” in its ambition. He states, “Only a thinker of Wright’s genius could sustain such a badly needed political imagination without losing analytical clarity and precision.” With the correction that Wright is no genius and that the book is suffocatingly narrow in scope, impossibly cramped in imagination, and irreparably muddy in execution, the blurb is accurate.

Faceless Bureaucrat Goes to the Birds, and Global Warming

Reston has a custom of bird counting, and the results are just in.   The birds which are most common here, in mid-January, are birds which don't belong here: specifically Canadian geese and American robins.  They both should be south of here, or at least that's my understanding.

A little Googling reveals I'm mistaken, as is much too often the case.  Robins (the males stick around to fight for territory in the spring, the females being wiser head south).

Samuelson on Sex: Funny

“If Casanova is not the definitive authority on sex, neither is a eunuch.”

From a piece on Paul Samuelson, the late MIT economist.

A Test of Open Government

The following language has been included in most recent USDA appropriations acts.  (Do a search in Thomas.loc.gov.)  It's a gag order imposed by the appropriations sub-committee.  It's also a test of whether the Republicans will adhere to their call for open government. Note the language prohibits telling the President or OMB of information provided to appropriations.

Sec 710 of 2010 Ag Appropriations Act

Sec. 710. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration shall be used to transmit or otherwise make available to any non-Department of Agriculture or non-Department of Health and Human Services employee questions or responses to questions that are a result of information requested for the appropriations hearing process.

AOL and DOD

Matt Yglesias posts on a recent New Yorker article on the  (hoped for) revitalization of AOL, specifically the idea that many people are still paying AOL even though it's not their ISP and it's perfectly possible to use the AOL mail system and the AOL interface without paying. He calls it a "scam".

Why do people do such things? The answer is, of course, there's a tremendous inertia in human affairs.  Many of us don't like change.  Many are lazy.  Many procrastinate. Many value time over money. So the bottom line is we don't do the things we ought to, like changing from AOL, or backing up our hard drives, or changing our passwords every six months, or...

That's true of the government as well.  Just look at the Marines.  They haven't land on a beach since Inchon in 1950, but they were still buying amphibious tanks. 

And it's true of private enterprise as well.  Just look at GM in the 70's, the 80's, the 90's. Then it went bankrupt.

Boeing Can't Do Big Projects Either

The government has problems doing big projects on time and under budget, but so does Boeing.  They just delayed their new plane again: it's now 3 years late. See article.