In the past couple weeks we got a fair dose of rain. Fall it may be by the calendar. Spring in this portion of southern California is any time it rains – which is generally around Spring or Fall, and occasionally in the middle of Winter. Spring is defined by the simple brief presence of water.
A recent piece in the Houston Chronicle and echoed in the reporter’s weblog criticises Wal-Mart for trying to control their employee costs. Reading the internal Wal-Mart communication gives a somewhat different message. I know it is fashionable to criticise Wal-Mart just now, but this article (and many like it) miss the real issue.
The real issue is the unchecked rising cost of health insurance.
Profit-making commercial entities (like Wal-Mart) are amoral entities – not moral, not immoral – simply as they are organized to stay in business and make a profit. The company that does the best job in this game stays in business, and companies that do a lesser job – as with many of Wal-Mart’s competitors – lose business.
Every company in the United States that offers health insurance to their employees, is faced with a problem, and this chart from Trends & Indicators in the Changing Health Care Marketplace tells the story.
We – collectively – have a problem. The cost of healthcare is increasing at a completely unjustified rate. Over the past several decades an ever-larger portion of our total income (as a nation) has gone to healthcare.
NCHC | Facts About Healthcare – Health Insurance Cost
Experts agree that our health care system is riddled with inefficiencies, excessive administrative expenses, inflated prices, poor management, inappropriate care, waste and fraud. These problems significantly increase the cost of medical care and health insurance for employers and workers.
With better technology the quality of healthcare should have gone up, and the cost should have gone down. Since that did not happen, something is wrong.
Schneier on Security: FBI Abuses of the USA Patriot Act
This week marks the four-year anniversary of the enactment of the Patriot Act. Does anyone feel safer because of it?
I’d want a rollcage for this gadget. One good pothole or bump at speed and the wheel(s) end up slower, and you go face-down fast.
At least with the Segway you aren’t trapped inside a structure.
Negotiators on Torture Bill Feeling Heat
Congressional negotiators are feeling heat from the White House and constituents as they consider whether to back a Senate-approved ban on torturing detainees in U.S. custody or weaken it as the White House prefers.Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Bush administration is floating a proposal that would allow the president to exempt covert agents outside the Defense Department from the prohibition.
Meanwhile, some newspapers are calling for lawmakers to support Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record)’s provision that would ban the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in U.S. government custody, regardless of where they are held.
Lets flip this around.
Does anyone think it is OK for foreign agents to come into the United States and torture an American citizen, merely if an agent thinks that citizen might know something the agent considers important?
McCain is dead right, and the Administration is dead wrong.
Apple faces lawsuit over iPod defects
The plaintiff named in the California lawsuit, Jason Tomczak, bought a nano in September that he said quickly became so scratched he could not view the screen. Apple replaced that device because of a battery problem, but the complaint said the replacement nano also became so scratched that Tomczak decided to return it.
I don’t get this – even if Apple (or a supplier) used a soft plastic for the screen, how the heck could he get the device “so scratched he could not view the screen” – in a single month?!? Absurd.
Given the overwhelming slice of the market claimed by the iPods, I have to wonder if this “issue” could be either
or both?
Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared For Full-Scale Zombie Attack | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
ZPI researchers noted that tens of thousands of Pittsburgh citizens live in close proximity to a cemetery. This fact, coupled with abnormally high space-radiation levels in eastern Pennsylvania and ongoing traffic issues in the East Hills and Larimer areas, led Cornelius to declare the likelihood of a successful evacuation as “slight to impossible.”
Tim Bray is feeling a touch guilty…
ongoing · Bits on the Wire?
So I wrote a quick note to Jim along the lines of “Uh, what about XML?”
Months later(!) Jim Waldo responds with “What is XML?” – in effect elaborating on the question in interesting ways without attempting an answer. Elaborating on the question is quite reasonable. XML is simply data structures serialized into a common text format – but different folks tend to attach different connotations to the use of XML.
Saw Jim Waldo when he gave a (quite interesting and entertaining) talk at the first JavaOne conference in 1995 – I believe he was talking about Jini (or a precursor?). Interesting stuff, but not relevant to anything I was doing at the time, so I filed Jim away under “guys whose work is worth checking on”.
About a week ago I checked back, read up on Jini, and can see how using Jini could introduce some powerful simplicity into complex distributed applications. Might even be useful to apply to some of the larger problems I can see working on over the next several years.
To my mind the use of Jini versus XML primarily comes down to a single question – “Loosely coupled or tightly coupled?” – in the context of distributed applications.
Within an organization you can reasonably deploy tightly coupled applications. If you can reasonably expect a JVM on both ends of the network connection, using Jini makes a lot of sense, as you could save boatloads of development time, and some classes (no pun intended) of problems simply go away.
Between organizations you want things to be more loosely coupled. The notion of dynamically loading a Java class from another organization into my JVM gives me hives. There might be cases where this makes sense, but this would be more the exception than the rule. Pumping your inter-application data through XML is likely going to require more development and runtime work compared to Jini. The payback is better isolation – essential when the level of trust is less, and when the range of versions is greater.
