I know that several folks (myself included) were breathing a sigh of relief and discounting Fay as just a Tropical Storm.
Maybe we get to upgrade her to "just a cat 1 with a wacky path". The 11pm update has her actually strengthening over the peninsula, and a forecasted re-landfall as a Cat 1 hurricane near St. Augustine.
I’ve seen some really wacky storm paths simulated in the cat models…and well maybe they aren’t as truly bizarre as I once thought they were.
Usually you see storms impacting just part of Florida…but sheesh, it looks like Fay has something against the state.
Mercifully she isn’t forecast to go above Cat 1. If a Cat 3 or more storm were dancing this way across the state, could you imagine the assessments needed to cover the damages on state-subsidized wind cover?
Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. studio says it’s bumping "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" from its planned November release into next summer.
The sixth installment in the blockbuster franchise about boy wizard Harry now will open July 17, 2009 rather than Nov. 21, 2008 the studio said Thursday.
My wife and I were planning on celebrating our anniversary this November with a quiet holiday at home…and a trip over to a nearby multiplex theater which has an IMAX screen.
The article continues on to mention that the aftermath of the writers’ strike has left next summer’s movie season a bit sparser than normal. So, given an opportunity to boost revenues, the studio will have us wait an extra eight months.
If you haven’t already encountered it elsewhere, folks interested in the why’s and wherefore’s of Russia’s invasion of Georgia might want to check out this assessment published (and made freely available) by Stratfor.
Stratfor is a private specialist in geopolitical intelligence. The subscription price for full access to their articles is too rich for my blood, but I have found their publicly-released articles and teasers interesting in the past….although I don’t always agree with their analysis.
For example, on the Georgia mess, Stratfor opines:
It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.
Granted, I’m no expert on Georgia…but from other sources, I had developed the impression that the trigger for the Russian invasion, Georgia’s drive to stifle long-simmering secessionism, could easily be a manifestation of nationalism blinding leaders, triggering bad decisions.
I’d discount Stratfor’s assessment…except wasn’t it dogged adherence to bad intelligence which officially got us into the mess in Iraq?
Oh well. If the coming homestretch for the general election campaign needed a little spice to liven things up, the cries of hawks demanding up-sizing of the military in order to respond to such affronts to American interests, budget-be-damned should make the foreign policy debate more interesting.
I note that the Air Force’s hyped Cyber Command has been shelved. While I’m aware that that decision could be a reflection of inter-bureaucracy turf-squabbling and a desire to not duplicate other entities’ efforts….well, if we’re transitioning to a period of history where Russia is our adversary again, shouldn’t we be beefing up domestic network security from the potential antics of the Russian (and Chinese) hacker corps?
I know that I’m not alone in occasionally seeing postings or want-ads looking to fill certain positions and thinking, “they require a college degree for that”?
Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that’s the system we have in place.
Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes. […]
The solution is not betterdegrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.
Mr. Murray’s solution is certification exams like the CPA exam (or, presumably, actuarial exams) for many professions, in lieu of a Bachelor’s degree.
I’m not sure that I’d necessarily agree with that – after all, the downside in standardized testing is that the only thing measure by the test is one’s ability to take the test – but I have frequently wondered if many professions that “require” college degrees wouldn’t be better served by more-efficiently delivered vocational education.
Yes, there is value to a Bachelor’s degree – it’s a sign of persistence and some level of intelligence. There is value to the concept of students being exposed to the depths of new subjects, and hopefully being though to think.
But, when you look at how big the business of education has become, how many students leave college burdened with mountains of debt…especially if they’re entering a very specialized field…and if they can obtain student loans in the current credit environment… isn’t it natural to wonder “is this all really necessary” and “isn’t there a better way?”
If you’ve encountered one or two of my rants about the “health insurance crisis”, you’re probably aware that I’m rather frustrated over conventional wisdom’s assessment of “insure everybody, and everything will be hunky-dory.” Such a position fails, after all, to consider that there’s a problem with inflationary pressures on the costs of delivering care.
Some of those pressures arise from structural issues within our health care system. For example, consider this post at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care’s blog:
First of all, inappropriate — or non-urgent — use of the Emergency Room was not limited to uninsured populations. It showed up across the board. People covered by private insurance, Medicaid and Medicare were just as likely to use the ER for non-urgent care as people without health insurance. About 20% of all ER visits by privately insured and Medicare patients were for non-urgent purposes. About 24% of all ER visits by Medicaid beneficiaries and people without any insurance were for non-urgent purposes.
Second, another 25% of all ER visits for each group were for primary care treatable/preventable maladies. In other words, almost half of all ER visits were either for conditions that could have waited at least 24 hours to be addressed, or could have been solved in a doctor’s office.[…]
[T]hese data also illustrate the limits of a care delivery system that’s built increasingly on a specialty care model. If 70% of all physicians are specialists and only 30% are in primary care — and some 40% of what goes on in an ER belongs in the office a primary care provider, something’s wrong.
It’s not mentioned in the post, but presumably the stats mentioned above predate Massachusetts’ experiment with universal health care, the goals of which are commendable and praiseworthy…but which have had the side-effect of significantly increasing the wait-time to get appointments with primary care physicians.
On Friday, the Governor M. Jodi Rell, unveiled the Connecticut Solar Lease Program. The program is run by the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund (CCEF), and it is the first of its kind here in the US. By pulling together a number of rebates and tax credits, the CCEF is able to lease solar energy systems to CT residence for a relatively low fixed monthly rate.
To qualify for the program, Connecticut residents must pass a credit check, be below 150% of the areas median income, and install it on a 1-4 family owner occupied structure. Depending on your homes energy needs and the installation needs, some systems can be as little as $50 a month while others could run over $200. They estimate that for a typical home with a 15 year lease will pay about $120 a month.
The website for the program is at ctsolarlease.com, where one can find income eligibility caps and an online application.
I could quibble with the eligibility criteria (e.g., the cap is higher in Fairfield County than in Hartford County), and I notice a certain lack of information on who might be funding any subsidies or guarantees for the program…but really this is a cool idea: getting longer-term, sustainable energy options into the hands of folks who probably could use extra help in doing so.
I have an ongoing project in which “expected relocations” is a variable. So I’ve been trying to keep tabs on word about just how bad the real estate market has become in certain portions of the country.
One influence on my variable is easy enough to understand: how many people are underwater on their mortgages? Even if they’re keeping up with the mortgage payments, there is a certain amount of distress in the market brought about by folks who cannot sell their houses because they owe more than the property is worth.
Almost one-third of U.S. homeowners who bought in the last five years now owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, according to Zillow.com, an Internet provider of home valuations.[…]
The highest percentages of homeowners with negative equity were located in California. In four of the state’s metropolitan areas — Stockton, Modesto, Merced and Vallejo-Fairfield — the number of homeowners whose mortgage debts exceeded the values of their properties topped 90 percent, Zillow said.
In five more California areas — the Inland Empire (Riverside-San Bernardino), Bakersfield, Yuba City, El Centro and Madera — the percentages were more than 80 percent.
With so many home-owers underwater…is it time to rename California as “Atlantis”?
Well, I’ve had a chance to slightly-more-than-skim through it, and I can offer a few thoughts:
On health care and health insurance – I don’t think the Dems are planning to rely on too much in the way of contributions from the health insurance sector this cycle. Several pages of the document seem focused on grilling health insurers.
There is, at least, one comment in the platform expressing a desire to control health costs, but the focus seems to be on addressing inefficiencies in the system (where there is indeed room for improvement), rather than the real drivers of health care inflation – Americans’ perceived entitlement to the latest and greatest (and generally very expensive) procedures and treatments, and the tendency for medical professionals to treat specific complaints, rather than undertaking thorough diagnosis, and considering the potential efficacy of less-sexy-but-still-effective treatments. The platform buys into the notion that Americans should have access to the very best health care (and admirable goal), but does nothing about the unspoken question of “who’s going to pay for this”?
(Actually, I should take that back. Throughout the platform there are promises to not raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000. Above the magic $250,000 mark, the platform calls on households to pay “a bit more”.)
There are actually quite a few calls for new programs, to bolster the health and welfare of Americans. They are all admirable goals….but the only spending cut I see mentioned in the platform involves ending our military involvement in Iraq. I wonder if a Democratic monopoly in Washington would actually be significantly less fiscally irresponsible than the Republican monopoly was, or the lame duck / deadlocked government we have now is.
True, I didn’t expect to see a robust fiscal plan laid out in a platform…but it would be nice if a few more hints of budget-balancing could be seen in the document.
Also on the health care reform section of the platform – I can’t help but notice how many of the abuses (and perceived abuses) the Dems seek to end are targeted towards traditional health insurance providers. Most health insurance these days comes from employer-provided plans which would likely be relatively exempt from such reforms…and/or have already been subject to such reform through amendments to ERISA.
Missing from that section – reform of ERISA itself. While ERISA definitely provided some much-needed consumer protections in what was a then-failing pension system in the 1970’s….there are a few loopholes in the law which permit administrators of employee health plans to behave badly with minimal repercussions. More detail can be found in an earlier post of mine…and it’s something that I’d like to see fixed.
The Social Security plank is disappointing, I think. While it’s understandable that the Dems would slam corporations for underfunding pension plans, or walking away from promises previously made, statements like:
We recognize that Social Security is not in crisis
smell a bit like an attempt to score political points, rather than paint a constructive plan. Yes, the platform advocates bolstering Social Security’s financing, and yes “crisis” is in the eye of the beholder…but acknowledgement that acting sooner rather than later would reduce the burden of any fix, and acknowledgement of the even-worse fiscal situation of Medicare would be refreshingly frank from a political party.
Oh well. Democratic and Republican platforms these days seem to be mostly puff pieces anyway, so my frustration is to be expected. I imagine this document and the forthcoming GOP platform will only reconfirm my disappointment with both major parties.
Dang, I’ve accumulated quite a bit of material worth commenting on during the craziness of the past few weeks. Some of the more interesting articles include:
Redstate referenced an article in the Telegraph entitled “The Great Oil Bubble Has Burst”. While Redstate seems inclined to play up the influence of off-shore drilling expectations in the recent rationalization of oil prices, the more complete story seems to be the free market coming back into balance. Yes, the markets seem to reflect expectation of new supplies, and global economic slowing is shifting expectations of demand, and these shifts in turn seem to end the incentive to dance the contango.
However, I do notice that both articles also fail to touch on expectations of the US Dollar strengthening / Euro weakening impacting dollar-denominated oil futures contracts, as well as China presumably ending its massive stockpiling of diesel fuel for Olympics power-generation.
It’ll be interesting to see where the new oil/fuel price equilibrium emerges. It’s a little odd that I’d ever be happy over gas and heating oil prices locally dropping below $3.90 – a year ago that would have been an unsettling price to think about. Hopefully planners and venture capitalists will continue to see the market potential of alternative power sources (wind, solar, non-food-based-ethanol) enough to justify further development of such technology.
You may have heard that the Olympics are on. NBC apparently racked up record ratings, which annoys me since it will only support that network’s practice of tainting the games (and its ceremonies) with inane, fluffy chatter. You’d think that with the advent of digital multicasting, there would at least be some move to provide a commentator-less soundtrack, as well as additional coverage of some of the less-popular (but more interesting) sports.
Tyson Foods drew some flack in Nashville media for one provision in its recently announced 5-year contract at a Shelbyville processing plant – workers will no longer receive Labor Day as a paid day off, instead picking up Eid al-Fitr, the end of the month of Ramadan. The fuss seems to be focused around the appearance of sacrificing an American holiday for an Islamic one.
However, not much seems to be made of approximately 60% of staff at the plant being Somali (and presumably Muslim)…and that not much work would be done that day anyway. It seems like a rather practical approach to maximize plant efficiency while being sensitive to workers’ wishes. It’s similar to how even the most secular institutions in the U.S. observe Christmas Day.
The Dems reportedly have reached the necessary compromises to draft a platform for the ’08 election season. I’m hoping to have time to look through it more carefully later, but I can observe now that quickly searching for the word “insurance” and skimming through the results makes me feel oh-so-loved, and causes me to wonder if I should be searching for “bread and circus” as well.
And finally, while I might feel unloved by the Dems due to my association with the “evil” insurance industry, I still can’t help but compliment the Obama camp for seemingly almost mastering the art of media hype. The current example of this is was the invitation broadcast far and wide for a text message alert when Barack’s veep choice (presumably Bayh) is announced (presumably in the next day or two).
Whew! And now, it’s time for me to head back into the salt mine….
I’m surfacing briefly. It’s been busy at work and at home, so my attention has been focused on things offline for the past several days.
My wife and I did, however, catch some of the recent political ad fuss. I probably wouldn’t have mentioned McCain’s “celebrity” ad, which compares Obama-hype to the circus surrounding Britney and Paris, here if it weren’t for Paris Hilton’s rebuttal ad.
Even though both my wife and eye roll our eyes (or worse) whenever Paris Hilton is mentioned…we both agree that her rebuttal was excellent. We got to talking about both ads, and our thoughts turned towards a flawed premise in McCain’s original ad.
My wife described a suitable response to address that flaw…and I have attempted to depict that response, YouTube-style:
Yes, I still suck at video. I’ve learned that converting PowerPoint to YouTube is much tougher than it ought to be…and that PowerPoint is probably not the right tool to create a video in in the first place. But for something thrown together quickly….it’ll do.
