Craft Yourself an Out, Hobby Lobby

A recent application for injunctive relief from Obamacare by Hobby Lobby was denied  by Justice Sotomayor on the company being required to provide birth control in its health plan for women.  Hobby Lobby will get its day in court on the issue, they just wanted to be exempted from the law while they were waiting for the trial date.I would like to argue that if Hobby Lobby has such a guilty conscience about having to provide birth control, their solution is quite simple.  Outsource your health insurance!   On page one of the U.S. 568 _ 2012 decision, it states:

Employees of the two corporations [Mardel & Hobby Lobby] and their families receive health insurance from the corporations’ self-insured group health plans. 

Rather than being self insured, Hobby Lobby and other for-profit non-religious conscientious objector institutions should underwrite their health insurance through an actual outside insurance company.  This way, they're not directly paying for birth control.  They're paying for an insurance service and that insurer is the Devil paying for the birth control ordered by its customers and their own doctors.


You see, there is nothing new about this tactic.  Companies pull out the culpable deniability card all the time.  For example, if Hobby Lobby wants its grass manicured, but cannot hire cheap undocumented workers, it can hire a Landscaping service whose job it is to vet its employees for proper eligibility to work.  This way if ICE comes knocking, HL can throw its hands up and say "Whoa there, Buster Brown!  We don't know anything about this.  That's the landscaping company's job!"

What are you willing to cut?

"America is a milk cow with 310 million tits. There's not a person in this country not getting something from the thing called government - state, local, municipal, federal, and bitching about that government as if it were an enemy." - Alan Simpson

It's easy to say you want a balanced budget and that you want to cut the national debt; until your interests are at stake.  Don't just point your finger at others and say they need to go on a budget diet, ask first what are YOU willing to do to go on a budget diet?  I for one am willing to have my taxes raised or have some of my deductions (home loan, student loan) or tax credits (child tax credit, hybrid credit) eliminated.

Once you've identified the things you're willing to sacrifice, you are now free to point your finger without guilt.  I feel that even so-called non-discretionary spending - Medicare, Medicaid and national defense could all use budget trims.  I am also for the creation of a Social Security fraud agency (if one doesn't already exist) whose budget is completely dependent on the amount of money recovered from those gaming the system.  Fifty percent recovered goes to the agency and the other half goes back to the American people.  Still, this sort of selective cutting may be costly in terms of money and politics and we may be better off simply saying "Once unemployment is 6% or less and GDP is growing by 2.5% or more, all government programs will be cut by 10%."

But this sort of sacrifice and compromise is hard work.  It may just be easier to keep pointing fingers.

Why Governor Walker's Delegation of Obamacare is a Good Thing.

In the post election world of 2012, faced with the inevitable decision on what to do with the new "law of the land" as John Boehner lovingly calls the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Scott Walker has elected to punt.  Many conservatives have gleefully proclaimed this David of Goliath level defiance as freedom from Obamacare in Wisconsin.  In reality, this is a perfectly legal option exercised by the governor.  More on that in a minute, first a quick lesson on Obamacare.

Starting in 2014, anyone earning over 150% of the poverty rate will be required to buy health insurance (the individual mandate) and any company employing more that 50 full-time employees will be required to provide (not necessarily pay for) health insurance.  For people who work for a small employer (<50), are self-employed or otherwise not able access health insurance, they will have two options: seek insurance as an individual, a daunting task for all but the healthiest vegan marathon runners, or buy insurance through your state's exchange so you have group bargaining power.  State exchanges can be administered one of three ways: by the state itself, by the federal government on behalf of the state, or as a partnership.  At the time of this writing, according to the NY Times, 18 states are going it alone, 12 are seeking a partnership, and 20 are punting to the federal government.  Keep in mind that these exchanges are nothing more than large group coverage containers with limited subsidization and plan formulation powers, they are not embodyment of socialized medicine.  People in joining state exchanges will buy insurance from private companies NOT the federal government.

Back to Wisconsin being one of the 20 deferring to the feds to run our exchange.  How could this be a good thing?  In a word, standardization.  Instead of a patchwork of 50 state run exchanges over half of these will be run or influenced by the federal government.  What the federal exchanges lose in personalization they more than make up for in efficiency.  We live in an age where it doesn't take months to cross the republic and weeks to share information.  Centralized policy administration makes sense and reduces redundancy.  You're giving up a lot of money in the first three years, but regardless of your motivations, Scott Walker, I salute your rightness, even if it's for the wrong reasons.

Why Lance Armstrong will Prevail

Lance Armstrong refuses to give the USADA the satisfaction of his attention.  He has moved on and so should we.  Here are the facts -

• Along with baseball at the same time, nearly everyone on the Tour was doping and very few got caught.  
• The UCI was inept and unwilling to adequately test race participants.
• The USADA admits on page 20 of its 202 page report "This case was initiated [..] based on evidence other than a positive drug test."
• The USADA cut deals with nearly all their witnesses. This effort was full of personal vendettas and quid pro quos and was done to take the heat off of the sport and focus it squarely onto a single scapegoat.
• Everyone will remember Armstrong as the winner of 7 titles, regardless of asterisks and medal strippings, because we can never seem to remember who came in second.
• At least five of the runners up to Armstrong's victorious races have faced their own doping demons, just minus the attention.

I'm not saying he didn't do it.  EPO is a commonly prescribed drug for cancer patients because it  boosts red blood cells.  The first time he took it he probably thought "Whoa! This stuff is great.  If I can ride a bike after chemo, What other miracles await?"  In the end Lance Armstrong beat cancer because he surrounded himself with good doctors, good drugs, a "geeked out" attention to medical analytics, and he fights like a son-ova-bitch.  Then he beat the USADA with his inhuman defiance.

So why the polarizing feelings about Lance Armstrong?  Like Franky Sinatra he did it his way and without apologies.  Armstrong lives on his terms and nobody else's.  We love him for his story and we hate him for his stubbornness and alien level of self reliance.  We love him because he worked harder than any other cyclist and we hate him because on top of that, he cheated so well he pissed cleaner than Mother Theresa.  We love him because we want to have a hero and we hate him because we want to tear them down.  And when the dam starts to crumble, he does just enough of a deft sidestep to clear our ignorant backlash and mind numbingly repetitive media mouthpieces.  He steps down from key areas (namely his charity which has arguably done more for cancer progress than the Komen Foundation), gets let go from others, all without holding a press conference, and we rage because in our anger we realize we hate him most of all because if we didn't, we'd have to hate ourselves.

Can Technology Make Guns Behave?

We all know the big ones - Columbine, Virginia Tech, and the Dark Knight Massacre, but every year especially in the U.S. it seems people fly off the handle and aren't content to just off themselves.  With each one, comes a flurry of discussion about gun control followed by the NRA backlash and finally the inevitable acceptance of action impotence.  However, with four major shootings in just the last month, I think it's worth a bit more of a palaver.

Imagine for a moment a world in which you could halt mass shootings without impinging on anyone's right to bear arms.  Imagine that you could program a gun to not fire under any circumstances you desire.  Could we as a society agree upon anything if this were possible?  There has already been talk of "smart guns" that only fire for their rightful owner.  This would certainly reduce accidental shootings and thus gun owner liability, but this certainly does not solve the mass shooter scenario to say nothing of creating a potential false sense of security, resulting in storage carelessness.

Now imagine a gun that doesn't fire on innocent people.  Is this possible?  How would innocent be defined?  In order for it to be engineered it has to be defined.  I can't completely answer that, but how about we start with one first small step - No gun shall ever fire on a child.  So what's a child?  Let's say 12 and under.  What if the child is threatening you or someone with a gun?  Okay, any child with a loaded gun does not qualify.  But I'm not even completely comfortable with this.  I can't imagine a child of 3 or under knowingly threatening and endangering another in such a way that required deadly force.  So how about this rule:  No gun shall ever fire on a child of 12 years or younger, unless that child possesses a loaded gun, unless that child is 3 or under.

So how do we implement this?  Imagine guns with facial recognition capabilities as well as the ability to broadcast their loaded status while in motion.  With facial recognition, the gun software could quickly create a facial features fingerprint, go to a database to find a match and then return an age all in the blink of an eye.  Since some guns are stored loaded, it's not practical to require a power source to advertise its loaded status.  However, once the gun is in motion (micro gyroscopes), the kinetic energy of that motion could effectively ping its effective capacity status to some reasonable distance (100 feet?).  There are problems with this, but it is a glimpse of the possible, and as technology improves more solutions are found.  For example, how is it that humans can recognize a child without knowing their exact age?  Once machines can recognize patterns as efficiently as people, there may not be a need for cached databases and online connectivity.  There may also be a way to expand the definition of innocent to that beyond children.  All this can be done without infringing on people's rights to own a gun.  After all, the constitution says nothing of the capabilities of arms, and if fully automatic weapons can be restricted, so can dumb firearms.

Until this technology becomes a reality we have to live with wackos and guns.  So in the meantime, let's send a message to these crazies.  If you're having any inclinations to take out innocent people in some twisted fantasy that gets you off every time your thoughts turn dark, do the world a favor and suck on the business end of your favorite glock right now.  Yes, right now.

Don't beat yourself up for being an almost lottery winner. There's no such thing.

I was reading through an article with recommendations on how office lottery pools can fairly play the lottery as a group.  There were some good points, but two in particular that got me thinking.  This led me to conclude that two of the points taken together are fallacious.  In a nutshell, one says "let the computer pick the numbers" and the other says "play every week so you don't miss the week that hits".  However, the truth is, if the computer picks the numbers on a week you didn't play, it would not have picked those same numbers if you had played.

Quick Pick lottery numbers (I use the Powerball term to cover all computer generated tickets) are generated at each terminal by a random number algorithm probably seeded by something unpredictable like atmospheric or electrical noise.  Many people have the misconception that if a lottery winner comes from a store in their neighborhood, they were much closer to winning than someone on the other side of the country because if they had been next in line instead of THAT person, they would have won.  Not true.  If we assume that your being there has no impact on the seeding mechanism of Quick Pick, the time factor alone is mind numbing.  There are limitless ways to interact with the checkout clerk to ask for a lottery ticket and if the button that generates that ticket were not pressed at the exact millisecond as before, you may as well have been a million miles away from that store.  Maybe the clerk pauses because you remind him/her of someone, or maybe you preface your request with "Um", or maybe the other winner had asked for tickets three times to be understood because of their accent.  Regardless, different numbers will be generated.

So let's assume that your lucky office pool buys some tickets and wins without your participation.  If you called in sick that day, your team merely thinking about your absence changed their behavior enough to generate the winning circumstances.  Said another way, if someone wins from playing Quick Pick, it's because everyone and everything behaved exactly as it did and the game was played at that exact location at that exact second.  This sounds like science fiction, but it is not.  This indeterminate randomness is absolutely necessary; otherwise, someone would have cracked the lottery by now.

This knowledge may not allay the jealousy you feel from seeing your coworker's new found wealth, but it can at least spare you the misery of continuously reliving the "what if" scenarios in your head.  About the only thing you can say with near certainty in this case is "Damn!  If only I had played the lottery with my team that day!  Then they would not have won and I would not have the misery of closely knowing the jackpot winners and seeing firsthand how much fun they get to have!"

sources:  http://www.molottery.com/powerball/understanding_chances.jsp

              http://www.ehow.com/how_2073998_enter-lottery-coworkers.html

What Makes Apple Better Even When it's Worse?

The latest U.S. Cellular commercials are trying hard to obfuscate their lack of an Apple offering by highlighting their Android lines and by poking fun at the Apple faithful as lemmings running off a cliff.  I shake by head when I hear this because people still don't understand why Apple commands this kind of loyalty.  So let me state the obvious.  It's not the specs.  To borrow from James Carville, "It's the usability, stupid!"

There are many smart phones with better cameras, faster processors and ultra fast 4G networks rocketing them ahead in the specs department.  However, in the interest of usability, Apple does the following things:

1. Control the hardware.  Apple's software is stable because it's designed to run on a limited line of devices, whereas Google and Microsoft license their software to just about anyone.  If you can't guarantee the hardware, you can't guarantee the software.
   
2. Control the user experience.  Apple will not allow network providers to dictate device features or create "exclusive" phones for their service.  True, Apple and AT&T did originally have an exclusivity agreement, but it was truly exclusive so the user experience never suffered. Samsung learned this the hard way and is now pulling in the reigns on Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.  Network providers may retaliate by lowering smart phones subsidies, but at least we'll get a common experience out of it.
   
3. Offer easy OS upgrades for free and not too frequently.  This will ensure a quick adoption rate. 
•  I can't speak for Google, but Microsoft got it all wrong and is now taking a page from Apple's playbook.  It took Microsoft over 10 years to get 51% of their users off of Windows XP because they were charging hundreds for features that made us yawn.  Windows 8 pricing?  $40.  
• Apple offers updates every one to two years.  Every time I turn on my Xbox 360 or reboot my Win7 machine, I'm getting forced updates with no idea what benefit I'm getting.
• Windows 8 distribution is now more like the iTunes Store.  Nix the DVD, and offer downloads
  
4. Design is dictated by usability and vice versa.  Engineers are critical for some things, but leave them out of the design discussions unless you want key features hidden 8 menu layers deep.
   
5. Apple only introduces features that are mature and stable.  A fast network and 200 megapixel camera are useless if your apps and OS crash. Apple also control's apps through a tight QA process. 
   
6. Don't compete on price.  It cheapens your image and invites the crowds that want to jailbreak your product to death.  These folks then kick and scream to their friends about how it doesn't work.
   
7. Protect your intellectual property.  Everyone takes the pinch zoom for granted and many claim it should be not be patentable because it's "intuitive", but that's exactly why it deserves a patent!  Someone came up with that idea and they deserve to be paid.  Apple also goes aggressively after unlicensed third party accessory makers.  This may increase the price, but it ensures that these things have some quality standards.
   
8. Eliminate competition at the point of sale.  Apple's own stores sell only Apple products.  Now they control the manner in which the products are displayed and have expert help who are qualified to answer questions.  Despite a lack of choice for consumers, the stores and the gadgets are exciting enough to draw people in.

Why Ron Paul is so Appealing

I consider Ron Paul to be a true Liberterian.  It's too bad that in our two horse representative republic he has to run as a Republican just to have the means to compete.  So how does Ron garner support from both liberals and conservatives?  His message is consistent and he practices what he preaches: get government out of the way.  This message appeals to conservatives who believe in free markets, limited government and lower taxes.  The limited government argument also appeals to liberals because there are two other worse options:  Democrats with good intentions but bad spending habits and the propensity to "parent" us and the fake tyranny of mainstream Republicans who only believe in  different government not smaller government.

Libertarian and Liberal both come from the Latin root liber meaning free (as in liberty).  Libertarians believe in a freedom where they can make their own choices and liberals believe in freedom through a government that provides safety nets and a counterbalance to capitalism gone wild.

I believe that government does have a role to play and I would rather have a government that's on my side (not wealthy enough to buy my own puppet) than no government at all, but every year that our debt rises, I pull a little closer to the limited government tent.  Ron Paul is right that Republicans pretend they want limited government.  What they really want is a government who lines the coffers of business, limits the choices and role of women and robs money from social services to play chess games around the world.  Liberals and conservatives both have different ideas of what bad government is and given the choice between bad government and no government, we choose the latter.

Proposition This: The Constitution has Spoken.

You don't have to agree with gay marriage or even it's dubious brother from another mother "civil unions", but as an American citizen you should respect the Constitution which has served us so well. I will step out of the way now and allow our Constitution and its custodian, our judicial system, do the talking on this historic day:

Summary of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

1. State and federal citizenship for all persons regarless of race both born or naturalized in the United States was reaffirmed.



2. No state would be allowed to abridge the "privilege and immunities" of citizens.



3. No person was allowed to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law."



4. No person could be denied "equal protection of the laws."

- Amended July 9, 1868 (source: http://americanhistory.about.com/od/usconstitution/a/14th-Amendment-Summary.htm)


Separate but Equal is inherently unequal.

-Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, May 17, 1954

The Iowa Supreme Court has the responsibility to determine if a law enacted by the legislative branch and enforced by the executive branch violates the Iowa Constitution. The court reaffirmed that a statute inconsistent with the Iowa Constitution must be declared void, even though it may be supported by strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion.

-Varnum v. Brien, April 3, 2009

Marriage in the United States has always been a civil matter. Civil authorities may permit religeous leaders to solemnize marriages but not to determine who may enter or leave civil marriages. Religeous leaders may determine independently whether to recognize a civil marriage or divorce but that recognition or lack thereof has no effect on the relationship under state law.

-San Francisco v. Arnold Schwarzenegger, August 4, 2010

Proposition 8 served no purpose , and had no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California. The Constitution requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.

-Perry v. Schwarzenegger, February 7, 2012