Health Care Nonsense

I was actually planning a nice little post here about the b___ s__t that Americans have been fed and largely believe about the US health care racket (errr... I mean "system"). 

But Wendell Potter (a former health insurance CEO) has done a much better job than I could and I won't plagiarize his work.  Please read it - it should disabuse you of almost everything that you thought "everybody knows" about American health care.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/12/01/16334/exploding-myths-about-american-health-care?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=watchdog&utm_medium=publici-email&goal=0_ffd1d0160d-ee2804a9ed-100121433&mc_cid=ee2804a9ed&mc_eid=14bacdf82a

The documentary he references:
http://remoteareamedicalmovie.com/screenings/

Wendell Potter's book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A16M7HC/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00A16M7HC&linkCode=as2&tag=thecenforpu0d-20

Do You Think Facebook and Twitter are Examples of Innovation That Matters? Think Again!

Watch, learn what innovation and the human intellect can do.  (And do NOT stop before the end!).

To H**l with SATs, ACTs, Give Me Thinkers!!

There is a lot of fluff flying about as to redoing the SATs and possibly the ACTs in reaction to that. The SAT's decision to do away with the essay portion of the tests is possibly the most colossally stupid move that they could have made. 

I swear...I would like to take all of these "universal test" organizations into a waterproof room and then fill it with water!.   They are SO out of touch with the real world.

I have been involved in hiring on and off for the last decade either as an advisor to a hiring manager or a hiring manager myself.  And I can tell you plainly, I have never been so disappointed with the candidates presented to me.   I mean, most recruiters are absolutely, completely worthless, lets face facts - it is an easy field to get into and you don't even have to really understand who you are recruiting.

But the candidates they do send are even worse.  We live in a flat world which is a world of ideas which people much smarter than me have written about. 

We live in a world where ideas are really the only marketable item for the future...and  our college graduates cannot express their ideas in any intelligible format (believe me I have tried to extract/read them).  

If you have the greatest idea in the world you have to be able to intelligently express it, support it, and define it in terms the world will understand and accept.  

Facebook/Twitter ain't going to make it folks....

Math is Fun Too!

My last post talked about the "War on Math and Physics" in the US according to a book I am reading.  These (and their close siblings) just happen to be some of my favorite subjects.  I am fascinated by physics, astrophysics and particle physics and try to keep up on the latest developments as well as I can considering I don't have a degree in any of them - just a rabid interest.  

Math on the other hand I use, mostly in indirect ways in my work with computer software, but a good understanding of mathematical principles and techniques is behind a lot of what I do and think about every day, and leads directly to the related fields of logic and reasoning (another of my favorite areas of endeavor).

Here is a TED Talk concentrating on just one aspect of math - the Fibonacci numbers.  This is a good reintroduction to the magic of math if you have been away for awhile, and it is just plain .. fun!

"Average is Officially Over"

I mentioned elsewhere that I have been rather disappointed in the whole "boomer" generation, which is actually the "me first at all costs" generation if you scratch the surface.  I have also mentioned I am reading the book by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum titled "That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind In The World It Invented and How We Can Come Back".

I am enjoying this book immensely, but that makes it a "slow read" because frankly I need to stop and think/assimilate occasionally.  This book pulls no punches, and it is full of facts and observations about the American experience the last several decades.  One of the most direct is from the chapter titled "This is Our Due" in a section entitled "The War on Math and Physics":

There is no other way to say this: Somewhere in the last twenty years of baby boomer rule, Americans decided to act as if we had a divine right to everything -- low energy prices and big cars, higher spending and lower taxes, home ownership and health care, booms without ceilings and busts without massive unemployment -- all at a time when the country was waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya, Our sense of entitlement expanded far beyond Social Security and Medicare to encompass...well, everything.  

How did this happen?  For one thing Washington DC showed more stupidity than is normal even for that brain-addled burg...of course the worst inhabitants are put there by the American people (paraphrased from the book):

Paul O'Neill (George W. Bush's first Treasury Secretary) warned Vice President Cheney that the growing budget deficits were unsustainable, and the huge tax cuts being pushed by the administration were unaffordable.  Cheney's response?  "You know Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms, this is our due."  A month later, Cheney told the Treasury Secretary to find a new job.

...Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, went on Fox News Sunday [July 11, 2010] and declared -- with no sense of irony at all -- that when Democrats raise spending in one area, the spending needs to be offset by a spending reduction in another area, but when Republicans cut taxes in one area, the cut does not have to be offset by any cut in spending.    [...] In other words, raising spending means that one and one makes two and the deficit grows.  But in the case of lowering taxes without lowering spending, one and one make one: there is no effect on the deficit.

I am getting into the part of the book where the authors map out a plan to fix things, but one very simple statement from the book that we as Americans have to understand and act on sticks in my mind:

"Average is officially over."

Nikola Tesla -- Could There be Another One of Him Today?

Nikola Tesla is one of the more fascinating characters of science, but sadly not all that well known or respected by the general public (who also does not know or respect science but worships the like of Bieber and Lohan and anyone on American Idol or Dancing With the Stars).

Anyway, here are some interesting facts about Tesla's life from PBS that you might not have known.  If you want to know more about his work, here is a page (also from PBS) with some information about the many areas of his work.

Finally, here is the Mythbuster's Adam Savage talking about the promise of getting today's youth away from their electronic toys and interested in actually creating, inventing, and making things that will continue to allow science, technology, and humankind to continue moving forward.

Watch Mythbuster's Savage on Finding the Fun, and the 'Danger,'... on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

The Beauty of Coding

OK, I confess up front that being a career-long "software guy" probably gives me a bit of a bias.  But when I see an entire generation of college graduates trying to become Wall Street brokers and hedge fund managers through the pursuit of the "holy MBA", I have to ask:  "What the he__ do you think you are going to build the next pyramid/bubble from if no one is producing anything?". 

Particularly when the rest of the world is.....

The Learning Revolution

Sir Ken Robertson spoke at a TED 2010 event as a followup to his earlier talk that I posted -- in many ways it completes the first one...and should give educators the world over pause for thought. It will be a radical shift for most educators, but it is necessary, and I really wish it had happened before I had been forced to slog through our incredibly boring, unchallenging, and largely irrelevant public education system.

Why I Hate Facebook

The title here is meant as an introduction to this post, but I really do hate Facebook, Google+ and Twitter (particularly) and have never participated in them and never will.  I just don't see the point and if there was a contest between which one I loathe more...Facebook, Twitter, or political parties of any kind I am not sure which one would finish last since all of them tend to either produce or encourage the same stream of brainless drivel and elevate the expositions of small minds and I hold them all in the same kind of contempt.  (I particularly love when I get emails that start out "I saw your profile on Facebook..." there is a real 'innovative' waste of electrons!).

Lets be real folks -- Facebook is NOT innovation by any stretch of the imagination. Facebook is a natural extension of the original Internet design as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee as a text and document sharing mechanism. It was a case of someone waiting until the technologies were in place and sufficiently advanced enough to capitalize on...then doing so. That may be innovation in the warped and sometimes sick sense of what gets Wall Street excited...but it is not technological or scientific innovation as practiced by the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or NASAs of the world.

However, a magazine arrived at the house the other day that really got my attention.  The MIT Technology Review has a long history (since 1899) of following things technological, and especially things technologically innovative.  The cover for the November/December 2012 magazine that they publish really caught my eye...and restated in few words what my frustrations have been with the state of science and technology in the USA (the small caption to the right says: "Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 moonwalker, would like a word with you.").

Fortunately, the issue talks about some people who are not giving up on the 'big problems', and more importantly recognize that we are currently falling way short.  The Founders Fund (sometimes referred to as the PayPal Mafia) is a dominant venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, and their motto is "We wanted flying cars -- instead we got 140 characters."  Interestingly enough, the firm places at least some of the blame on the VC community itself, which in the 1990s began a shift away from funding start-up firms with truly innovative ideas, to those that solved smaller, incremental or even fake problems as long as they would turn a short-term profit.

The issue is full of articles that talk to people who haven't given up, and covers topics as diverse as the crisis in higher education, dealing with the likely effects of a coming dementia epidemic, equalizing the distribution of energy to the 'have-not' areas of the world, government support for basic research, and more.  The ideas presented may seem unrealistic...but then so did Bill Gates' vision of "a computer in every home and on every desktop" when it was made.

Recommended for thinkers....