National Health Care - Bad idea or big mistake?

Megan McArdle weighs in, well worth reading.

My apologies to Dave Barry.

Health update.....

Quick update on yesterday, my first colonoscopy.
I declined sedation (benzodiazepine, the stuff that makes you forget most of the procedure ever happened). They did, however, give me an analgesic (just a little bit to relieve discomfort).....Fentanyl, a drug 100 times as potent as morphine. Apparently, some people find this opiate enjoyable, but after the initial hit (which was sort of a dizzy wave) I felt completely normal.

Fully, or almost fully, alert I was able to enjoy the roller coaster ride through my large intestine on the video screen. He took out two small polyps on the way out (they go in quite rapidly, most of the inspection is done during the slow extraction). Very minor discomfort, the USA is one of fairly few countries where sedation is the norm.

Afterwards, a broccoli, onion, and cheddar cheese omelet!

Sherborne Lane sounds quite classy....

...but apparently it was originally "Shitteborwelane, later Shite-burn lane and Shite-buruelane (possibly due to nearby cess pits)".

I suppose local real estate agents insisted on the change.

But I find the older street names refreshingly honest.

'Skip' Gates - not much to say....

But I agree with Andrew Sullivan that if we are concerned about police abuses, there are other cases with higher priority.

Finally, a truly FAIR tax....

A tax on tallness.

My only reason for objecting to this one is that it is a bad precedent. What next, a tax on intelligence?

Medical Rant....

It's the 21st century. Truly and indisputably. Don't try to tell the doctors that.

They still give me multiple forms to fill out that require me to enter my name and address. Even better than that, they ask me to tell them who they are.

Then they ask broad questions with only the most tenuous relationship to the case that are particularly burdensome on those of us who feel compelled (I have no idea why) to answer honestly. "Are there steps in your house?" OK, I can see why that might matter when it comes to counseling me about my behavior after a procedure that might leave me woozy. "How many?"

WTF????!!!

Maybe they are trying to catch the person that has just a single step down into the kitchen or something, but how useful can that count really be? (There are 26 steps, by the way, including the stairs to the second floor, the stairs to the basement, and single steps down to the family room from both the breakfast room and the dining room) It must make a pretty big difference whether I live in a tiny 4-story house with ladders or a sprawling mansion that has twelve places with shallow single steps....

Then I am supposed to give my height, in feet/inches and in centimeters, and my weight, in pounds and kilograms. They can't do their own effing conversions?

Don't even get me started on the "recreational" questions. Do I smoke cigarettes? Yes, approximately one puff every decade or so.

I write software forms that allows users to enter information using the fewest steps possible. User friendliness is the first thing we think about. If I decided to make a hobby out of doing tonsillectomies on my friends without bothering to get a medical degree first they would have the law down on my butt so fast my head (or tail) would spin. But they haven't the slightest compunction about having rank amateurs designing their user interfaces.

Get with the program.

Some advertisements are a bit hard to swallow....

This one for Gaviscon must have been a bit embarrassing.

The video here does not have the badly phrased tag line, but the coloring is still a bit out there.

XKCD

always has insight.

And my wife always complains....

...that we only have a toilet on the ground floor and the basement. For four (or right now, three) people. It could be worse.

Change....

It's not easy moving from Germany to the United States. When I grew up in Germany, World War II was occasionally mentioned -- as a really bad time -- but nobody really dwelled on it. In America, on the other hand, popular comics still included the World War II comics like Sergeant Rock. Even Captain America was still battling mostly Nazi villains. It was considered very humorous to make gestures in my direction ("A German! Let us machine gun him!") Popular culture had Germans always ready to kill and torture innocent people. I so did not want to be a villain - there weren't, to my knowledge, even S&M clubs around where that sort of rep would make us popular.

Imagine my dismay when America came out in favor of torture - or at least winking at it. As long as our side was doing it, it was just "enhanced interrogation techniques." Orwell really knew his stuff.

One of the things that made me prefer Obama to Bush was that he didn't seem to want us to be the villains. Greenwald points out nothing has changed.

American Dream

Guy: That's the new American dream--fuck up your life so much that you get your own tv show.

Spotlight personality

Not only was Carl Michael Bellman a great composer of drinking songs, he had a whole genre of jokes named after him. One from my youth, before I knew it was a Bellman joke:

An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a German all died in the war and were sent to hell. The devil greeted them and said that he admired them for their bravery and wished to give each of them a chance to escape damnation. If any one of them could set him a task he could not perform, that one would be sent up to heaven.

The Englishman made the first attempt: one of His Majesty's greatest warships was sunk at Scapa Flow....can you restore it to its former glory? A hundred demons were set to the task, and it took them only 5 minutes to raise and repair the ship.

The Frenchman tried next: in the bombing of our cities, ten of our finest artworks were destroyed - can you bring them back and enrich our culture? A thousand efreets were dispatched, and the art was resurrected in 15 minutes.

As the Englishman and the Frenchman toddled off to eternal damnation, still pleased they had done something for their fatherlands, the German made his request: I'm going to fart now - can you paint it green?

Satan was baffled and the German was saved.

The Flynn effect....

This not only has some interesting information about IQ, and how it seems to keep getting better (The Flynn Effect) - how do the curmudgeons who think the world keeps dumbing down deal with that? - it has one of the funniest corrections ever.

Of course.....

some of my friends are already doing this.

Word of the week

Hypergamy

A good quote goes with this one, too:

Consult, for example, Ring Lardner’s humorous story “I Can’t Breathe”—the private journal of an eighteen year old girl who wants to marry a different young man every week. If surveyed on her preferred number of “sex partners,” she would presumably respond one; this does not mean she has any idea who it is.

F.Roger Devlin

Ain't technology wonderful....

The headline pretty much says is all:

Pea shooter traditionalists decry use of laser sights at annual competition

A record NOT to break....

OK, Guinness Book of World Record made a completely understandable faux pas... and then compounded it by doing what seemed like trying to sweep it under the rug with bullying.

To be honest, I wouldn't be very surprised if it was just an ordinary trademark defense without consideration of content, but it still looks embarrassing.

For those of you who don't click through, they had a "break this record" link - understandable in most categories, but not a good idea in most deaths caused by an act of terrorism.

HT Overlawyered

Quote of the day

Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing down a road that has led him to great sucess." - F.A. Hayek

Synecdoche update....

A while ago, that was our featured word.

Interesting take from Overheard:

Professor: An example of synecdoche would be, "get your ass over here." You want all of them, not just their ass. But sometimes, you do just want their ass. And we all know how that goes. But that sort of thing doesn't happen in a classroom... usually.

Quote of the Day

"It's not that everything he says is wrong, but the bits that are true aren't interesting, and the bits that are interesting aren't true. "

- Megan McArdle