The Rusted Musket

Kudos to Obama for taking the time to meet with each family that was affected by the Fort Hood shooting. Its so easy to criticize politicians, and rightly so in many cases, but it is refreshing to see one taking the time to honor our soldiers.

When election time roles around what is everyone talking about? Its generally not the issues at hand, I mean sure they might think about them a bit on their own but other than a minority of people who love discussing politics people don’t pay a ton of attention to the current issues that the politicians are supposed to resolve. So then what do they pay attention to? The party and the candidates is who. It really comes down to whether you are voting for the corrupt business loving Republicans or the socialist money grubbing Democrats. Their current figurehead is important in the decision because, contrary to popular sayings looks, promises, speeches, lies, they all matter.

Its funny that we’ve come down to this as a nation, are you blue or are you red? If I vote Republican people will generally think one way of me, whether good or bad, if I vote Democrat they will think another, whether good or bad, but it really comes down to these two parties. Whatever happened to the third party, or even a fourth (God forbid that people should have to think that much), why can’t we have real choice? I don’t want the two parties one of which is usually just as bad as the other, maybe just a little more in line with my beliefs/politics. I wouldn’t mind voting a few Libertarians into office, or Constitutional party members. Heck its even pretty cool when Independents get in.

So I guess what I’m trying to get across is, don’t vote down party lines, vote for the person that is honest, that will listen to the people that voted him/her in and that stands for what you stand for. They don’t have to be Democratic or Republican, and I wish that fewer of those were voted in so that we could get some perspective in office.

Stay tuned for a post about terms in office…. 

This story is frankly rather frustrating. The gist of it is two Wisconsin men decided, 28 years after the fact, that PepsiCo illegitimately acquired their idea for bottled water (Pepsi’s Aquafina). The lawsuit stinks because of the numbers. First off this is 28 years after the fact, so IF Pepsi did steal the ideas why did these people not sue sooner? Also Pepsi had a bit of a mixup and missed the court appearance and a more than $1billion dollar judgment was made against them. That is a absolutely absurd amount of money in the first place. Thankfully Pepsi will be able to appeal the process and if they have to pay it’ll most likely be a lot less. Larger companies are willing to make a few million dollar payments in cases like these just to settle the thing…

The other rather stupid aspect of this is that there is a lawsuit such as this in the first place. It is these types of things that are clogging are courts instead of legitimate concerns we have money hungry people grubbing for cash. Its a waste of time and money.

I can’t help but poke fun at this article because the university system costs so much and its funny how expensive school is and how little we students seem to get. I mean they are getting these millions and millions of dollars and school is costing students 10k+, 15k, 20k, a year and many classes have 200 students which are essentially being taught by a TA. Yeah right that sounds like a great school! Where is all the money going then? Why do they *need* this money to “save” jobs in the first place?

Anyway, back to my original idea. College jobs are important, they can help to instruct people and ease them into the working world. However, State University jobs do not create jobs, where as that amount of money as grants or loans to small businesses would most likely create many more jobs. Why is that? Because a business, wants to and need to grow, to increase revenues and to eventually hire more employees. A College isn’t in the same class, the can become a money sink and don’t generally return a profit, or much of a revenue increase.

Its funny how, with all this stimulus, little of it found its way into small businesses’ hands. My wife and I wanted to get a small business loan and it was a royal pain to even apply and there is a very limited amount of funds available. And these are loans too, not grants or anything. It seems to me that the government needs to re prioritize.

All I can say about this is wow… It just makes me see how little the Peace Prize means. Huh, lets just give the prize out to someone who hasn’t done much of anything yet, our reason will be that he has good intentions… Thankfully the story points out that the committee for decided the award is decidedly leftist so it shouldn’t come as a surprise…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Obama getting a award of this sort, but shouldn’t he have to prove himself first? And…. Its not like Bush was a warmonger, he started two legitimate battles to help keep the USA and the World safe from terrorists. Obviously a lot of people don’t see it that way, but thats it, black and white.

Obama isn’t trying to fix health care, he is trying to give health care away on tax payer’s dime. Read this article by Bloomberg…. You see, the real problem with health care isn’t that some people don’t have it, the real issue is rising costs in health care and the lack of proper legislation. We don’t need a “public” option, what we need is for a cap on malpractice lawsuits, we need better consumer education about health care options. We need doctors to be paid not based on how many patients they see, but on the level of service they provide. Last time I was at the doctors office I was charged $150 and I only saw a doctor for 10 minutes and a nurse for about the same. They ran some basic tests and that was it. A visit like that shouldn’t cost so much.

Don’t get me wrong though. Doctors should be paid well. They had to go to school for 11ish years and they can have a high stress, risky environment. They ought to be paid well, but $150 for 10 minutes of a doctor’s time is absurd.

Just thought everyone should read some of the highlights of the bill…
You can get it here: http://docs.house.gov/edlabor/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf

I found a list of points about the bill but some of it was inaccurate, so I’ve written or reworded each point and checked the actual bill to make sure that it was accurate.

Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure.

Page 29 Lines 3-16: There will be a annual dollar limit on health care cost-sharing, meaning that YOU will have to pay what the government won’t cover

Page 30: A government committee will “recommend” (mandate?) what treatments and benefits people will get

Page 42: The “Health Choices Commissioner” will decide health benefits (similar to the committee)

Page 50 Sec 152: Is interesting because it is vague enough that it provides health care for everyone, including illegal immigrants… Unless there is some other provision I’m missing that counters that.

Page 58 Lines 5-13: The Government will have real-time access too all of your finances and every person will be issued a National ID Healthcard.

Page 59: The federal government will ‘‘(C) enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with the related health care payment and remittance ad-vice” so basically they can transfer money from your account. It doesn’t specify whether they have to notify you or not.

Page 102 point 3: Those eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled, apparently whether you want to or not. Which would probably mean that the current health care you have you wouldn’t be able to use.

Page 124: No company can sue the government for price-fixing. No “judicial review” is permitted against the government. Put simply, private insurers will be crushed.

Page 127: The government sets Doctor’s wages.

Page 145: An employer MUST auto-enroll employees into the government-run public plan. However, the employee may explicitly state that they wish to use different insurance.

Page 146: Employers MUST pay at least 72.5% of full-time employee’s medical premiums, no if ands or buts. Employers MUST also pay a portion of health care costs for part-time employees as well.

Page 149: Any employer with a payroll of $400K (about 8 employees, we are talking small businesses) or more, who does not offer a health care plan, pays an 8% tax on payroll

Page 150: Any employer with a payroll of $250K-400K, who does not offer a health care plan, pays a 2 to 6% tax on payroll

Page 167: Any individual who doesnt’ have acceptable health care (according to the government) will be taxed 2.5% of their income. What is acceptable isn’t spelled out very well.

Page 170: Any NON-RESIDENT alien is exempt from the above tax

Page 195: Officers and employees of Government Healthcare Bureaucracy will have access to ALL American financial and personal records.

Page 203 line 13-14: “The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax.” Verbatim quote…

Page 241 lines 6-8: “Service categories established under this paragraph shall apply without regard to the specialty of the physician furnishing the service.’’ So from the sounds of it a pediatrician will get paid the same as a brain surgeon (no offense to pediatricians).

Page 253: Government sets value of doctors’ time based on “time, mental effort and professional judgment, technical skill and physical effort, and stress due to risk”.

Page 265: Government mandates and controls productivity for all healthcare industries. On the surface this may not look like a bad thing, but given what the rest of the bill is about, they could they could basically put anyone out of business that they don’t like.

Page 268: Government regulates rental and purchase of power-driven wheelchairs.

Page 272: Cancer patients get special health care rationing

Page 280: Hospitals will be penalized for what the government deems preventable re-admissions.

Page 298: If a doctor treats a patient during an initial admission that results in a readmission, you will be penalized by the government.

Page 317: Doctors are now prohibited for owning and investing in healthcare companies!

Page 317 line 21: Prohibition on hospital expansion. Hospitals cannot expand without government approval.

Page 341: Government has authority to disqualify Medicare Advantage Plans, HMOs, etc.

Page 379: Telehealth Advisory Committee (healthcare by phone).

Page 425: Government will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc.

Page 429: Advance Care Planning Consult will be used to dictate treatment as patient’s health deteriorates. This can include an ORDER for end-of-life plans.

Page 430: Government will decide what level of treatments you may have at end-of-life.

Page 469: Community-based Home Medical Services: ACORN maybe?.

Page 494: Government will cover mental health services: defining, creating and rationing those services.

The next 25 pages deal with creating a medical research facility
The next section is about improving transparency of nursing homes.

And thats about as far as I feel like going. It is a 1000+ page document after all…

Well I’ve just have one of the more crazy months of my life, at least as far as web sites go. You see the host that I have three websites on decided to “sell out” and completely changed over owners and management. Somewhere in that process my three websites went down for pretty much three full days. After that I decided I should find some place else  as the change of owners scared me a bit. So I try and contact the support people to get my domains transferred… A day goes by, two days, three days a week and I don’t hear anything from them despite bombarding them with emails. Finally I get really fed up and threaten legal action (hey, domains are really important) and they finally respond assisting me in the domain transfer process.

Since I have three sites and might end up getting more (working on doing more website work) I figured a resellers account would be good. So I signed up for one of them and just finished transferring the site yesterday. Just in the nick of time too as I got a email this morning saying the shared hosting server I was on had been hacked and all data lost… Lovely!

Anyway, I’ve learned some important things from this.

1. Don’t be sucked in by the whole “free domain with a hosting account” crap, keep your domain at a larger domain registrar like godaddy, joker, dotster, etc..
2. Don’t have your domain at the same place as you host. Its just not worth it if something happens to that host. I say this because larger hosting places like godaddy and dreamhost don’t generally provide the level of service and reliability (at least on the shared hosting or smaller reseller accounts) as a smaller, reputable host does.
3. Lastly, don’t pay for a year in advance. Stick to a month to month or every quarter. The potential savings are just not worth the hassle of trying to get money back  if (its a big if admittedly) something goes wrong.

Let me just close with this: the internet is a ever changing place… I was perfectly happy with the host I had for over a year. They had good uptime, a very helpful staff and decent prices. But in the world of the internet anything can happen.

Diane Sawyer isn’t my favorite person in the World partly because she is just plain annoying and has this arrogant air about her, but also because she just doesn’t get it when it comes to a lot of topics. She recently aired a 20/20 episode about how having a gun to defend yourself wouldn’t be a good thing, or something to that effect. Well Ignatius Piazza has some nice input on that. I want to specifically point out a couple news stories he mentions.

This story is frankly rather crazy. But these guys looked pretty serious until the man decides to defend himself.
This story is rather chilling because the poor lady had just been raped and the guy came back a second time. Thankfully this time she was prepared. Note that the police couldn’t have gotten there in time. It only takes a few minutes to be raped and murdered.
Or this story, what would have happened if the student didn’t have a gun in his backpack, and hadn’t chosen to defend his friends and himself? Him and his friends would be dead now which is what the two “invaders” wanted.

Also, keep this in mind. Before World War II started Hitler began disarming the population of Germany, specifically Jews and other people he deemed trouble makers or inferior species. Unable to defend themselves 13 million people were murdered. All because of gun control… This is hardly a isolated incident either, look at Stalin and the 20 million “dissidents” he murdered between 1929 and 1953.

Isn’t this kind of a oxymoron? I mean think about it, everyone is inudated with scantily clad women on a daily basis, whether it be on TV (Baywatch anyone?), or the advertisments people get in the mail, or the tabloids at the grocery store checkout. So why is there court action against someone who merely has a scantily clad mannequi? Its so irconic that people care more about a bit of plastic than what their own kids are likely wearing…