raving lunacy – oxymorons for the 21st century

US National Debt Clock
How to see how fast we are sinking.

On a link at TG Daily is a story World gives Blu-ray the thumbs down about a poll by Harris Interactive showing that Blu Ray is not getting it done. The story points out that only 7 percent of folks polled owned a Blu Ray Player (They had to count Sony Play Stations to get the number that high) It also mentions that the disks are expensive.(Part of that is the dollar per disk that is paid to Sony to produce a Blu Ray disk) Sony got screwed on Betamax during the VCR format wars and think that they will get us now. Plus the AACS is required on all Blu-ray discs and costs $1,585 per title plus $0.05/disc. Fuck em!

You can buy an up sampling DVD player for around 50-70 bucks and watch standard DVD’s at 1080p (the native Blu Ray resolution) on your Flatscreen TV if supported. You can buy a flatscreen that will do this for the money you will save buying DVD’s instead of Blu Ray.
I mentioned that Blu Ray would be the new laserdisk, and I am happy to be right. HD DVD has already crashed and burned.

I own a lot of DVD’s. Over 700 at last count. I even build my own cases to store them as commercial products are shit. I am an action, adventure and sci-fi movie and television drama junkie. The greatest thing to happen to television was putting shows on DVD. Really, watching a season of your favorite shows without commercial interruption is astonishing. Being able to follow the characters and the story arcs as they develop over the season is really a treat. Being able to watch shows that are no longer on air, at your pace on your schedule is almost as good as insane gut wrenching sex.

I have been through format wars in computers. 5 1/4 floppys, single side, single density, double side, double density, zip disks, LS250, and so on.I don’t want to play anymore. I still have around 200 movies on VCR that I am slowly replacing with DVD’s as they become available.

Buggy Whips, Edsels, Betamax, Blu Ray, Oh My!!

Last Friday marks 22 years clean and sober. In just a few years I will be able to say that I have been clean and sober for half of my life. I started very early and rode it hard for a long time.

It remains a day at a time thing.

Headlines around the web[1] are reporting that a recent study(Feb. 2005) by Harvard University[2] noted that medical bills accounted for 62% of bankruptcies.

This curious tidbit is not new, nor other problems with Insurance based Health care. From The National Coalition on Health Care [3] comes these nuggets:

Health care spending is 4.3 times the amount spent on national defense.

The annual premium that a health insurer charges an employer for a health plan covering a family of four averaged $12,700 in 2008. Workers contributed nearly $3,400, or 12 percent more than they did in 2007.2 The annual premiums for family coverage significantly eclipsed the gross earnings for a full-time, minimum-wage worker ($10,712).

According to a recent report, the United States has $480 billion in excess spending each year in comparison to Western European nations that have universal health insurance coverage. The costs are mainly associated with excess administrative costs and poorer quality of care.

Politicians are staging themselves around Health Care. This is political posturing. Everyone of these folks that is saying Health Care, really mean Health Coverage because they all have a large insurance company stick rammed up their ass. The only efficencies that are currently in the insurace industry is how fast they can deny your claim, exclude treatment and therefore payment, or use recission on your ass to just not pay at all.

The insurance industry should be the absolute the last group invited into any discussion about health care. When 62% of bankruptcies are related to medical bills, and 78% of them had health insurance, maybe you might want to think about why universal health care is a better idea.

[1] Google Search ‘Harvard University bankruptcies medical expenses’
[2] Harvard University Bankruptcy Paper – Final Manuscript (PDF)
[3] National Coalition on Health Care Health Insurance Costs

Copyright is seriously screwed up. Don’t get me started.
Now the Copyright Office is seriously screwed up. The Washington Post has this:
© 2009? Wishful Thinking, Perhaps, as Backlog Mounts

For $35 you can file electronically, for $45 you can file by mail, (which is going up to $65 in August) and for $695 bucks you can file an ‘expedited’ registration. Nowhere in the intent of Copyright was a class system mentioned.

Being granted copyright and registering it are two different animals, with serious implications.

Maybe we should outsource the Copyright Office to Google, as they seem to be the only folks who can copy, present, publish and announce stuff in near real time.

Online website sales provide a company a cost effective way to offer products and services without a lot of the overhead with physical locations. They also provide physical stores the ability to reach prospects on a global scale.

In the online world there are many tricks that websites use to track you. From requiring cookies to be turned on to use websites, placing multiple cookies on your computer from third party ad servers, to requiring registration with personal information for use.
The goals of these are ’stated’ as being necessary to bring you superior service and separate you from your money. Everybody says that they keep this information private, and only share it with the people in the company, and online partners, who they disclaim and disavow in terms of what they do with this information. Basically your ass gets sold down the river to anybody with a checkbook.

Online Shopping carts get abandoned all the time for any number of reasons. One of the biggest factors in this the ability to get Quality, Price, and Service, which, off line you had to settle for one or two and could not get all three.

Getting you to buy is magic. There is no script, offering, or sale that will convert lookers into buyers. Online merchants have tried all sorts of things. Usually when you left a site, you were done, just like walking out of a store at the mall. You moved on, they moved on.  But there continue to be various digital schemes to convert you into a cash cow.

The latest scheme is the Digital Thug of the Week – Abandonment Tracker Pro

This NYT article Just Browsing? A Web Store May Follow You Out the Door gives you a good overview of how this technology works.

Abandonment Tracker Pro which says “Abandonment Tracker Pro’s real-time behavioral targeting algorithms automatically tune themselves to your site’s unique characteristics,” like these:

Automated abandonment follow-up campaigns

* First response in real time
* Multi-stage campaigns to maximize conversion
* Intelligent handling of repeat visitors ensures offer integrity

Self-learning behavioral targeting

* Self-optimizing follow up optimizes revenues
* Advanced behavioral analytics
* Learns when an offer is needed to maximize conversion

Easy integration

* Prepackaged integration with major email systems
* Prepackaged integration with major CRM systems
* Easy integration with your internal systems

Source http://www.seewhy.com/atpro

This is digital thuggery.

Imagine walking out of a store and having a salesperson following you down the street, screaming “Why didn’t You BUY!!!” This is the digital equivelent of what these people are offering. You get demoted from customer or prospect to ‘abandoner’.
Getting an email and or a phone call from an online shopping expedition is the ugliest thing I have encountered to date. Companies that use this technology, may see a short term sales rise, but once the implications of this sink in, they will not get any repeat business.

Offering me shopping is one thing, but stalking me because I didn’t buy, guarantees that I will never darken your site or door again.
The sites that will take the biggest ass whooping are those that make you put items in the shopping cart to see the ‘best price’.

Here is their most recent customer list. At least those that actually admit to using this.

You Can’t Delete Stupid
The latest lunacy on the interwebs is the kerfluffle over Holocaust Deniers. Those being the folks who believe that the Holocaust never happened.
Rabid calls are going out as the sensitives are acting like Arlo Guthrie’s song Alice’s Restaurant and that this will start a revolution.

Never mind freedom of speech, association or expression. You have a shot of curing ignorance. Legislating it away doesn’t work either. Think War On Drugs. The most startling assumption made with these periodic moral cleansings is that if you don’t agree, you are the enemy, and cannot belong with the good people. Ask any felon who has served their time and according to the State, has paid their debt. There is nothing on the planet or between the chair and keyboard that won’t cause a disagreement sometime. It is amazing how intelligent folks forget that.
You Can’t Delete Stupid

In the real world there are two types of folks, Other Guy and Next Guy.
Other Guy is the one who does the absolute minimum and in case of any problem blames the Other Guy.
Next Guy is the one who anticipates what is coming next, and does their job with an eye toward making it easier for the next guy to do their job. These two types live online also.

Google is a Next Guy.
People bitch about Google incessantly. But when you look at their bitching, it pretty much ends being an Other Guy whine session.
Google is not an advertising company. Despite all of the whining by Agencies, Newspapers, and Magazines, and the whole Social Media PR industry, Google figured out how to make advertising work on the web. Text Links. Basic and entirely too low tech for the Web 2.0 crowd and your Flashturbators, whose idea of a good ad is to yell at you. Putting the guy who is actually paying for the ad budget in control was a stroke of genius. Sharing some of that with independent web site owners closed the deal.

Google is not a search company. You wouldn’t know it especially since Googling anything is usually the first step in finding things on the web. Here again, stripping it down to the absolute basic, pointed out that Keeping It Simple will win every time. I think that the Chief Googlers have gotten over the whole verb thing as well.

Google is an Information Company. They collect information, collate it, store it, and spit it back out. They are not evil incarnate, nor are they the savior of civilization. Information has a neutral value. People fuck it up.
Google is a Next Guy.
Here is a slide of what Google is doing.

You might want to print it out and mount it above your mirror.

Online health records are getting a lot of publicity, but very little significant traction. In one of the more public tests e-patient Dave recounts his experience in uploading to Google Health. And here is the spin behind that experience.

A couple of issues stand out for me. One is the insurance billing code nonsense. Every Insurance company has Not Invented Here Syndrome. So every time you are exposed to a hospital experience, a small army of billers has to drag down the particular manual to be able to submit a claim in hopes of getting paid. That this adminitrivia is such a large part of overhead is part of what is driving health care costs through the roof.

Part of the current adminstration’s plan should be to create codes for all procedures and require insurance companies to use them or not have a hope in hell of getting a dime. The VA has such a system that seems to work.

Hospitals need to change. They are currently being run like hotels. You get charged for everything in the place, regardless of use. They look at occupancy rates, and add extras, to make their ‘nut’. The design is lunatic. If you have ever needed blood work, x-rays, and MRI’s you find yourself riding elevators and stacking up mileage as they move your around like grocery stores putting the milk bread and eggs at the back of the store. This helps them keep you there longer to get an extra day of occupancy out of your insurance company. Fixing the problems is not the preferred outcome, as the longer they can keep you, the more they can charge.

Out Patient Aftercare is heresy of the blackest sort, because of the billing scenario above. Insurance companies are not working to reduce hospital stays either as this article in the NYT shows.

They are not paying for health, they are paying for procedures. Seriously fucked up.

VRM is a theory that we own our data and should be in control of our relationships with folks who want to sell us stuff.

Dave over at e-patients has posted “Meaningful Use”: a pivotal definition for new-wave medical records systems which looks at coming medical records that are headed to the same place.

Dave outlined these principles on medical records.

My principles

* Patient is a first-person word. Your time will come: someday it will be you, your child, your mother, your spouse on that hospital bed or at that roadside being tended by an EMT. The way to think about this is in the first person: “my data,” not “patients’ data.”
* It’s my data. It’s my life that’s at stake. I have a right to seek the best care in the world, and if that means exporting a copy of my data from your system and taking it somewhere else, I have a right to do that..
* Corollary: No more proprietary data. Whose data is it, anyway? We must put an end to the era where a system provider thinks the data they collect is their property. Lives are at stake. Vendors must adapt to a world where they earn their margins by creating on-going value, not by holding data captive. This includes images (CT scans, MRIs, etc) as well as lab results and everything else.
* Let each constituency say what works for them. Patients shouldn’t say what doctors need, and doctors shouldn’t mandate how patients should and shouldn’t describe things. (Warning: experts on both sides should be able to comment on / warn the other about apparent errors. Docs must be able to say “Whoops, you overlooked this,” and patients must be able to say “Whoops, you overlooked this.”) [[link to medpedia post]]
* Enable participatory medicine – doctor-patient collaboration. Make it possible for each party to view the same data. (Ideally, I’d like to enable collaboration tools such as online discussion of my medical records – but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)Source e-patient.net

Replace Patient with Customer and you see what I mean.

Bonus Link: Health Care Relationship Management