I cleaned out a lot of old files today and came across these two gems.
First up we have a 1997 receipt for a 15MB CompactFlash card for $260. Note that it’s megabytes, not gigabytes.
Second is a 1998 receipt for 2 32MB memory sticks for $138. Note that again it’s megabytes, not gigabytes.
I’m looking forward to what we can buy for $100 to $200 15 years from now.
Health care in America is a huge topic right now. There are many opinions, but most people fall very squarely on one of two sides: either the government gets heavily involved, or it doesn’t. I suspect very few people know the full details about any of the legislation that’s in play. I know I certainly haven’t read any of the official documents. Most people are emotionally attached to one belief or another, almost universally along our two-party lines. There’s a lot of misinformation and propaganda all over the place, with people saying they’re against this or that, or for it, without really knowing what that really means.
I’m not an expert in this either. I’m not writing this to set anyone straight or convince anyone that this or that is the One Right Path. Instead, what I see is that few people really think through what health care encompasses, and what some of these social decisions really mean.
I’m asking questions that I think everyone should ask themselves. Think about them. Decide what you really think about these things. Then go look at the legislation regardless of the party that backs it and see how it aligns with what your answers are. When I personally do this I find that there really isn’t any complete health care answer, nor does there even seem to even be a good one. I believe this is because there’s too much fighting over meaningless political sides, and not enough thought being given to how we might really answer these questions.
It all comes down to cost. That’s not going to get any better. It’s surely only going to get worse. We humans seem to be extremely good at coming up with miraculous ways to deal with health issues, and those solutions continually get more expensive and more complex. Insurance costs are not really the issue. Even if we eliminated insurance completely, medical costs will still continue to go up. We live long lives, and they’re getting longer. We are getting better and better at understanding diseases and coming up with complex (expensive) treatments. Health care is a growing money sink.
There’s one main question that drives everything: Who should have access to the health care they need?
It’s a tricky question. There is a vast difference in cost for different ailments. A simple nasal infection costs much less to treat than a heart transplant.
How do we pay for that? Saying “taxes” is not really a valid answer. It’s too abstract. If you really mean, “Each person in the country should put a percentage of their income into a pot to pay for it”, then say that. What percentage? A fixed amount? How much? Does everyone pay into the pot? What about the people who don’t have money for the pot? What if someone decides they don’t want to put money in the pot? Keep in mind that this will be extremely expensive if you are going to pay for all health care. Charity donations are not going to come close to covering the costs. It’s going to be a crapload of money, and the costs are just going to keep going up. If it cost 50% of your income to ensure that everyone could be treated for every ailment, would you want to pay it? How about 80%? 95%? Don’t try to say “it’ll never cost that much.” If you go down this path there is conceivably no end in sight. We’ll keep inventing amazing machines and drugs that prolong life, or cure the rarest of diseases, or test for as yet unknown problems—all at increasingly great expense. We already have the means to keep some people alive in an incapacitated state for long periods of time, but at great expense. If that’s what they or their family wants, then it’s got to be paid for if all health care is available. Maybe everyone having all their health needs met is what you feel is morally correct. If so, you have to remember there is no magic available to pay for it and it’s going to be increasingly very, very costly. Be sure you are willing to personally pay that price.
Very few people can afford any possible treatment they might possibly need at some point in their life. A denial of health care because of a personal lack of means leads to a large percentage of our population living in misery with medical problems they can’t afford to fix, with many of them dying due to those medical problems. Charity doesn’t even come close to covering the gap, so it’s not fair to fall back on that. If you are 100% against spending even a penny on other people’s health care needs, then you need to be honest and say that you don’t morally have a problem letting people suffer and die that you could potentially help. This is not a new idea: this is the way things are today to some degree. Many people die because they can’t pay for the necessary transplant, or live in misery because they can’t afford the drugs that would help them. Charity doesn’t cover all needs, and as costs continue to rise they will cover even less. If we cut off all government aid right now (Medicaid and Medicare, for example), there would be much misery and death among many Americans. If you believe in “everyone helps themselves,” then remember that applies to you and your family also.
(I suspect this is where most people fall, it’s just a question of how big the pots should be, and who manages the pots.) We do this today with Medicare and Medicaid, as well as with our private insurance programs. It’s an inefficient system, we don’t come close to covering all the health care needs of everyone, and not everyone even has access to one of these pots. But many do get at least a portion of health care that they couldn’t afford on their own. So to think about this path, throw out today’s system and just think of it as, “I pay some percentage of money toward general health care”. If this is completely repugnant to you, then make sure you are okay with the discussion in the previous paragraph. Having a pot of limited money causes us to have to answer many very hard questions. Who doesn’t get health care when they need it? Do we simply let the person who needs an artificial heart die because we can’t give him that big a portion of the pot? Do we tell the 4-year-old who needs $60,000 worth of treatment every year to stay alive that life is rough, but there’s not enough in the pot for you? How should that pot should be divided? Remember, it will not cover all needs, period. It probably won’t even cover most needs. People will need to be denied things. You don’t get to say charity will cover the excess, because they won’t and don’t. There’s nowhere near enough charity to pay for all the health care that people can’t afford. Charity is also not magic money, it comes out of someone’s pocket, so we can consider it to be one of these pots. Do you get to decide how much to put into the pot, and how does that affect your health care coverage? Should everyone be forced to pay into a pot to begin with? What if they choose not to? Do we let them suffer and die with no health care if it comes to that? There will also certainly be people who can’t afford to put anything into a pot. Do those people automatically become attached to a pot others paid into? (Otherwise we are back in the previous paragraph.) So how do we decide when someone gets denied health care? Should it be based on their contribution to a pot? Should a committee come up with a big document that tries to cover all possible outcomes? Should ruling bodies be formed to rule on each question as it comes up, much like our court system? (Note that these decisions are being made today by insurance companies, including Medicaid and Medicare.) Do not fool yourself into the happy world of everyone getting treated for everything. That’s the limitless money option we covered a couple of paragraphs above.
If you say, “People can buy insurance if they want it, but I don’t want to pay any taxes to pay for other’s health care,” then you are really in the “People should simply get the health care they can personally afford” camp. Many people can’t afford to throw money into a pot. You might say your real problem is with giving a pot of money for general health care to the government to manage. If you want to privatize it you’re back to paying into your own pot (insurance) and many people can’t be (aren’t) in that club. We have Medicaid and Medicare now, and they aren’t sufficient to keep everyone in good health. Do you think a different government pot is going to work better? You should figure out how it’s going to match the answers you gave to the questions above. If you’re okay with the current system, then you’re basically answering with a combination of “people should get the health care they can afford” plus “I’ll let someone else decide who doesn’t get access to this big pot I’m paying into with taxes.” Take government management out of the picture, it’s secondary to deciding how you really feel about health care costs as discussed above. Answer the questions. Decide what you’re really comfortable with. Then we as a country can have real discussions about how to meet those needs, and how much or how little the government should be involved, and in what way.
Today I went to see the Kansas City Symphony “side-by-side” with the Youth Symphony of Kansas City, my first visit to the new Kauffman Performing Arts Center. Despite my 15-year-old sleeping through 3/4 of the performance, it was nice.
Parking is very conveniently plentiful in a garage below the Center, but it will cost you $7. You can get inside the Center through interior corridors, or go upstairs and walk across the green space, which is what we did. The view from there:
Once inside, everything seems very, very white.
It looks like there really aren’t any bad seats in the house, except, ironically, the one my son was sitting in. His view was slightly blocked by the little fence some lawyers surely had put in at the bottom of the balcony stairs. For reference, this picture was taken from the right mezzanine, row BB, seat 601.
All panoramas taken on my iPhone 4S and stitched together using AutoStitch Panorama.
From the outside the museum doesn’t look like much. Inside it’s a pleasant surprise.
You start with a somewhat long and cheesy video, and then walk by a full-size diorama of the first rider taking off and wonder if that’s about it for the museum. But then you get into the museum proper and it’s quite nice. It’s not immense, but it’s much bigger than it looks when you first arrive, and it’s nicely lit and clean. The displays are all interesting and well done.
If you’re driving through St. Joseph it’s worth a stop. Heck, we’ll probably take the kids up sometime just for this since there’s a really nice play area, and we live less than an hour away. It’ll be a nice day trip. Something different to entertain the kids with.
Dan Frakes, a Macworld editor, recently posted on twitter that he doesn’t want iTunes Match to be involved when he hits shuffle on his phone. This post is to explain why he’s wrong in more space than I get on Twitter.
One of the big ideas behind iTunes Match is that all of your music is available in the cloud for download on demand. iTunes Match is designed so that music in the cloud intermixes freely with music actually stored on your device, with the only difference being a little cloud icon next to songs that are in the cloud. I can create playlists that consist of all cloud music, all local music, or any mix of the two. If I have a playlist that I think I might want to listen to when the cloud isn’t available (like on an airplane) or when I don’t want to waste my data allotment, I can easily scroll to the bottom of that playlist and hit “Download All” while I’m still in a location where I can transfer the data and the transfer is essentially free.
iTunes Match will also buffer songs to some degree. I’m a little fuzzy about how long songs are kept around and what the caching policy is, but in general a song you recently heard will still be on your phone and not need to download again.
So should shuffle play songs that are not downloaded? It should, for the sake of consistency.
If you’re a person that doesn’t download any songs, then shuffle that only played local music would be totally useless. That would be a confusing prospect for the user, so having shuffle pull songs down from the cloud makes sense.
If you have some play lists with songs that are all downloaded, then hitting shuffle for that play list will obviously play everything in that list. You might also have play lists with songs that are only in the cloud. Hitting shuffle in that case must go to the cloud to play music, so that’s what it does.
So now if you have a play list with some music downloaded and some in the cloud, it would be inconsistent and confusing if only a portion of the songs ever get played. And that is why shuffle should, and does, play through all your music whether it’s in the cloud or not.
The big pain here is that when we’re using our phone on the cellular data network most of us are limited to how much data we can use. This is an area where I think you’re expected to be somewhat responsible for yourself. If you try to watch Netflix shows over the cell network you will quickly blow through your data allotment. That’s not Apple’s fault and you should be aware of what you’re doing. Similarly, if you listen to a ton of music that’s streamed down from the cloud using iTunes Match, you, the user, should be aware that you’re using up your data allotment. Apple should not prevent you from doing this if you want to, that’s one of the main reasons to have iTunes Match. Shuffling is just another aspect of playing the music — if that’s what I want to do, so be it, and let me shuffle everything.
For those worried about using up data, the solution is simple. Make a play list with those songs you want to shuffle and hit the “Download All” button at the bottom of that play list to make sure all the songs are on your phone. Shuffle just those play lists that you’ve downloaded. No cell data will be used and we can all live in harmony with a shuffle button that works as it should.
Just a bit of follow-up based on further Twitter discussions.
What it really comes down to for me is that “shuffle” is just a variant of “play”. If I am on a play list and hit “play”, I expect everything on the list to be played. I don’t expect it to skip the items in a cloud whether I’m on 3G or not — that’s one of the great features of iTunes Match. And, indeed, play does play items whether they’re in the cloud or not.
Hitting “shuffle” should do the same thing, and it would be very confusing and odd if there were certain circumstances where shuffling was now different than its usual behavior and different from the behavior you get when you hit the play button. For this reason, shuffle should play all items in the list.
The big momma is In San Diego and is called Comic-Con. Our local version is called Planet Comicon and pales in comparison. But it’s local and much cheaper to attend.
I have the pleasure of having built up an acquaintance with Don Rosa, a terrific author and artist of many Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories. If you’re an American you’re probably thinking, “So what?” but if you’re a European, your jaw probably dropped on the floor and you’re drooling with jealousy. Don is the equivalent of a rock star over there, where they read enough Disney comics to make them the best-selling comic books in the world. Wacky, eh? And I’m not kidding—when Don does signings over there, the line stretches huge distances. He gets recognized frequently in the street. Here in the U.S. his line is never more than 2 deep.
Before the con I emailed Don and asked if I could give him a hand, and it turned out that my son, Calvin, and I were able to help out more than any of us expected. The way things worked out, it became very handy for Don to have us pick him up at the airport the day before the convention and drive him down to the convention center to help him set up.
Don is a really nice, down to earth guy, and he really felt like he was putting us out and taking advantage of us. We certainly didn’t mind helping and thought it was a lot of fun. It turned out to be beneficial to all 3 of us in the end.
When we got to the convention center, it was Calvin’s job to cut tape so Don could set up his booth without messing with that detail. My job was to sit around and do nothing, but I think all three of us enjoyed being able to talk during the two-hour set up process.
There was a long way to go for everyone before the show opened. It was interesting to see the chaos and all the work needed to be done less than 24 hours before the con opened.
We finished helping and dropped Don off at his hotel.
The next day Calvin and I arrived at the convention center right around opening time and we discovered that Planet Comicon was a lot more popular than we expected this year. The parking lots were jammed. We had to park a good distance away. When we got to the front of the building we discovered an amazingly long line.
This looked like something we had seen at San Diego Comic-Con last year! Inside, the line was even nuttier.
So here’s where helping Don really paid off. When we arrived to set up the day before, the first thing Don did was obtain guest passes for us. With these passes around our neck we walked by everyone right into the exhibit hall. Thank you, Don!
The plan was that Calvin would sit with Don at his table to give him a hand. Don was insistent that he was self-sufficient and didn’t need help, but Calvin really felt like he could contribute something and wanted to do what he could. It turned out Don was right.
Calvin still had a good time, but we all agreed that after lunch there wasn’t much point to sitting back there anymore. Calvin joked that he helped the guy at the table next to Don more than Don, when he sat there as “guard” while the guy left for a bit. Wouldn’t want anyone to mess with that actual outfit Kate Beckinsale wore in Underworld.
After lunch Calvin and I strolled the aisles and fought the crowds and had a good time. We caught Don without any customers at one point (thankfully, a somewhat rare event) and I showed him comics and a few other things on my iPad. He jokingly asked where the camera was, not expecting that it actually had one. So I took a picture of him with the iPad.
After that Calvin and I said goodbye to Don and went home. We will be back tomorrow with my 5-year-old who is extremely excited to meet Don for the first time and get a sketch from him.