I love Planters.  From Honey Roasted Peanuts to Dry Roasted Sunflower Kernels to Mixed Nuts, they make some tasty snacks.

But a man can only turn a blind eye to injustice for so long.  Shown below are the entire contents of a 248g pack of Planters Deluxe Mixed Nuts: Cashews, Almonds, Brazil Nuts, Pecans, and Pistachios:

What’s wrong with this picture?

This is not an anomaly.  I eat these regularly and it’s always the same.  This time I decided to separate the nuts to see if the disparity was really as bad as it seemed to be.  The results:

Cashews: 113g
Almonds: 113g
Brazil nuts: 8g (2 nuts)
Pecans: 8g (~6 nuts)
Pistachios: 8g (~16 nuts)

I know some nuts are more expensive than others so I don’t expect the ratios to be exactly one to one... but TEN to one?  That’s just pathetic.  Planters, you oughta be ashamed of yourselves.

Steven Brill just published a long article called Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.  It’s a good article and worth reading, despite being far too long at 11 pages.  There’s so much repetition that it probably could have been 5 pages instead, and it’d be a better piece for it.

It’s surprising to me, though, that the author fails to identify (or at least, fails to state) what is the clear cause of the outrageously expensive medical bills that he details in the article’s several anecdotes.

He spends a lot of time pointing out exactly how much profit is being accumulated by many "non-profit" hospitals, and how much they are paying to their executives and administrators.  It’s the same as the situation with "non-profit" colleges and universities: the term non-profit is purely a marketing term, and a deceptive one at that, since hospitals, colleges, and universities are among the richest organizations in the country.  They are making tons of profit -- tens of millions of dollars per year in many cases -- they just aren’t structured in a way that it gets distributed to shareholders.

The problem is that medical bills are insanely inflated, and the implication seems to be that the cause is these rich fatcats running the hospitals -- or at the very least, those rich fatcats are evil even if they aren’t actually the cause.

The author correctly identifies chargemaster prices as part of the problem.  He gives many examples of chargemaster highway robbery, such as pills or alcohol wipes that cost several dollars each in the hospital even though their actual price in the free market is pennies each.  And he recounts how administrator after administrator was unable to explain to him exactly where the chargemaster prices come from or why they’re so high.

He also goes into detail about Medicare and private insurance and their strengths and weaknesses, including how a lot of insurance is limited to a few thousand dollars of coverage while medical bills routinely reach tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands.

Despite all the good reporting and detail provided on these many aspects of our health care system, nowhere does the author state the simple economic fact that is at the root of the problem: the decoupling of the customer from the payment.  In other words, the person receiving the service is not the person who pays the bill.

Whenever you insert a third party between a buyer and a seller, whether that third party is an insurer or the government, the result is an interruption of the price signal and a distortion of the market.  In many cases this leads to a bubble, as we’ve seen in housing and higher education.  When "someone else" is paying the bill, the buyer has no incentive to care about the price, which means that the seller -- whose goal is profit, after all -- will raise prices.

So when the government pumps billions of dollars into the housing market to "make housing affordable", the actual result is that prices skyrocket until the market is destroyed.  When the government pumps billions of dollars into higher ed to "make college affordable", the actual result is, again, skyrocketing prices as the bubble inflates.  And "making health care affordable", as Obamacare purports to do, by making it "free" for many people, outlawing copays, etc, will again in fact cause the opposite to occur: it will get more expensive.

There are many problems in the U.S. health care system, but none are more important or more fundamental than this one.  Hospitals, drug companies, and medical device makers can only charge outrageous prices because patients don’t pay them directly.  Further decoupling the patients from the prices will exacerbate the problem, not solve it.

The failure of politicians to understand this most basic economic principle has led to massive damage and suffering in our health care, housing, and education markets.

A new restaurant called A Ca Mia just opened in Walnutport, owned by a well-regarded chef with decades of experience.  Between that and the fact that the only other restaurants in the area are fast food, we were anxious to check it out.

The Food

I was very happy with my meal.  There was the traditional bread with dipping oil, then a salad with vidalia onion dressing, and Meat Sauce Bolognese for my entree: "Our traditional combination of veal, beef and pork meat slowly braised and cooked in a red wine tomato sauce."  For dessert I had the cannoli, which used puff pastry instead of the usual thin shell, and it was delicious.

You choose whichever kind of pasta you’d like in the Bolognese, and I chose penne.  The portion size was gigantic: I ate about a third of it, and took the rest home, where I weighed it to find it was nearly two pounds left over.

My only complaints are minor: the salad was served in a bowl that was just barely big enough to hold it, which means that it’s virtually impossible to mix after pouring on the dressing (which they serve on the side); the "dipping oil" for the bread was actually a mountain of minced garlic covered in a small amount of oil, which was so spicy from all the garlic that it was slightly painful to eat; and they don’t offer sweet iced tea, nor raspberry iced tea, to drink -- just soda and unsweetened tea (and of course water, milk, and hot drinks).

Kim’s meal, however, was disappointing.  She called ahead to ask whether they have any gluten-free meals, and they said yes.  But when we got there, our waitress told us that they could make pretty much any regular meal gluten-free upon request.  That might sound good at first, but in reality what it means is they haven’t actually put any time or effort into making good gluten-free meals.  Technically it’s true that they can make most of their meals gluten-free by serving them without the pasta, but that doesn’t mean the resulting meals are going to be any good (e.g. lasagna without noodles would be pretty pathetic, and not at all the same as lasagna with gluten-free noodles).

The chicken and broccoli that Kim got is a prime example of this.  I’m not sure exactly what it would have looked like in the regular version, but the gluten-free version was 3 large chicken breasts surrounded by some broccoli on a plate with a very watery white sauce.  The chicken did not seem to be seasoned nor seared at all, and the sauce was not creamy, not cheesy, just watery.

The Atmosphere

A Ca Mia probably didn’t have many good options for where to site the restaurant in the Walnutport area, through no fault of its own, of course.  But the location is quite small, and the tables are packed into it pretty tightly.  It’s a single room, and I believe it’s all tables, with no booths.  It feels crowded.  There was a waitress or busboy hustling past us pretty much the whole time.

The restaurant is also noisy.  Partly this was because of a large, rowdy group seated near our table, and partly it’s because it was a Saturday night (though it was 9:30 PM, nearly closing time) -- but it’s also partly because of the single-room layout and the lack of sound-dampening design features (particularly carpet) in the space.  It feels more like a cafeteria than a restaurant.

The Verdict

I would gladly eat at A Ca Mia again, despite its flaws.  The menu is expansive, with about 60 entrees (including a large seafood section) and over a dozen appetizers.  And as I mentioned, there are few if any other decent restaurants in the area, so it’s almost the only game in town.  They had a 45-60 minute wait around 6:30 PM so they seem to be doing well.

On the other hand, Bravo is only 20 minutes down the road.  And as much as I did like the food at A Ca Mia, it is just not in the same league as Bravo.  If it were considerably cheaper, that’d be one thing, but our meal (two entrees, two sodas, and two desserts -- no appetizers and no alcohol) was $50 before tip, which is the same price or more expensive than a meal at Bravo, or Outback Steakhouse, or P.F. Chang’s, etc.

And A Ca Mia just doesn’t have much to offer people with a gluten intolerance, which is a significant portion of the population, even if many of them haven’t discovered it yet.  The restaurant could certainly stand to take 5 of those 60 entrees and replace them with a few well-designed dishes that are truly gluten-free.

These Occupy Wall Street kids are really upset that, after taking out loans, you have to pay them back; that sometimes the only jobs available pay less than you’d like; and worst of all, that some Americans make more money than you do.  It’s a laundry list of typical far-left complaints, mostly absurd and therefore not worth paying much attention to, except when the complainants flock together and start blocking traffic.

Of course anyone with half a brain can see that it’s all a lot of misdirected hostility:

Quoting Doug Mataconis:

This "corporations run the government" meme has been around since the 1970s, and it’s no more true now than it was then.  As Rick Moran points out, if corporations really ran the government would we have an EPA, OSHA, SEC, the EEOC, the FHA, the Department of Labor, or any of the other number of state and federal agencies that regulate corporate behavior?  If corporations truly "ran" the government, then why would any of these organizations exist?

Corporations do influence the government, of course.  But then so do labor unions, the legal profession, the medical profession, special interest groups based on one form of racial or ethnic grievance or another, and lobbying interests ranging from Iowa corn to Texas oil.  The problem isn’t corporations, the problem is that we have a government that has its fingers in nearly every aspect of the economy.  That means that policy makers have the ability to pick economic winners and losers every day, and it’s only natural that those policies would be of concern to the people that they’re going to impact most directly, the businesses affected by them.  That’s lobbying and petitioning the government for redress of grievances, not "running the government."  This kind of reflexive anti-business mentality seems to be quite common in some sectors of society, but it has little basis in reality and seems firmly entrenched in resentment and envy rather than an honest examination of the country’s political system.

If you’re mad about the bailouts, then you march on the corrupt government that distributed them, not on the businesses that received them.  The too-big-to-fail businesses -- including banks and automakers -- should have been allowed to fail; the fact that they were instead bailed out represents a problem in the government, not in the businesses.  It’s idiocy to expect a failing business to not accept a handout.

Dr. William Davis is a renowned cardiologist with a new book that’s probably the most important thing you’ll read this year.  Here are a few long but really good quotes from just the first few pages of the book:

Quoting Wheat Belly:

I recognize that declaring wheat a malicious food is like declaring that Ronald Reagan was a Communist.  It may seem absurd, even unpatriotic, to demote an iconic dietary staple to the status of public health hazard.  But I will make the case that the world’s most popular grain is also the world’s most destructive dietary ingredient.

Documented peculiar effects of wheat on humans include appetite stimulation, exposure to brain-active exorphins (the counterpart of internally derived endorphins), exaggerated blood sugar surges that trigger cycles of satiety alternating with heightened appetite, the process of glycation that underlies disease and aging, inflammatory and pH effects that erode cartilage and damage bone, and activation of disordered immune responses.  A complex range of diseases results from consumption of wheat, from celiac disease -- the devastating intestinal disease that develops from exposure to wheat gluten -- to an assortment of neurological disorders, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, curious rashes, and the paralyzing delusions of schizophrenia.

If this thing called wheat is such a problem, then removing it should yield outsize and unexpected benefits.  Indeed, that is the case.  As a cardiologist who sees and treats thousands of patients at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and the myriad destructive effects of obesity, I have personally observed protuberant, flop-over-the-belt belly fat vanish when my patients eliminated wheat from their diets, with typical weight loss totaling 20, 30, or 50 pounds just within the first few months.  Rapid and effortless weight loss is usually followed by health benefits that continue to amaze me even today after having witnessed this phenomenon thousands of times.

I’ve seen dramatic turnarounds in health, such as the thirty-eight-year-old woman with ulcerative colitis facing colon removal who was cured with wheat elimination -- colon intact.  Or the twenty-six-year-old man, incapacitated and barely able to walk because of joint pain, who experienced complete relief and walked and ran freely again after taking wheat off the menu.

Extraordinary as these results may sound, there is ample scientific research to implicate wheat as the root cause of these conditions -- and to indicate that removal of wheat can reduce or relieve symptoms entirely. [...]

I call it wheat belly, though I could have just as easily called this condition pretzel brain or bagel bowel or biscuit face since there’s not an organ system unaffected by wheat.  But wheat’s impact on the waistline is its most visible and defining characteristic, an outward expression of the grotesque distortions humans experience with consumption of this grain. [...]

Many overweight people, in fact, are quite health conscious... Most will say something like "I don’t get it.  I exercise five days a week.  I’ve cut my fat and increased my healthy whole grains.  Yet I can’t seem to stop gaining weight!" [...]

Diabetics became nondiabetics.  That’s right: Diabetes in many cases can be cured -- not simply managed -- by removal of carbohydrates, especially wheat, from the diet.  Many of my patients had also lost twenty, thirty, even forty pounds.

But it’s what I didn’t expect that astounded me.

They reported that symptoms of acid reflux disappeared and the cyclic cramping and diarrhea of irritable bowel syndrome were gone.  Their energy improved, they had greater focus, sleep was deeper.  Rashes disappeared, even rashes that had been present for many years.  Their rheumatoid arthritis pain improved or disappeared, enabling them to cut back, even eliminate, the nasty medications used to treat it.  Asthma symptoms improved or resolved completely, allowing many to throw away their inhalers.  Athletes reported more consistent performance.

Thinner.  More energetic.  Clearer thinking.  Better bowel, joint, and lung health.  Time and time again.  Surely these results were reason enough to forgo wheat. [...]

The bottom line: Elimination of this food, part of human culture for more centuries than Larry King was on the air, will make you sleeker, smarter, faster, and happier.  Weight loss, in particular, can proceed at a pace you didn’t think possible.  And you can selectively lose the most visible, insulin-opposing, diabetes-creating, inflammation-producing, embarrassment-causing fat: belly fat.  It is a process accomplished with virtually no hunger or deprivation, with a wide spectrum of health benefits. [...]

So why has this seemingly benign plant that sustained generations of humans suddenly turned on us?  For one thing, it is not the same grain our fore-bearers ground into their daily bread.  Wheat naturally evolved to only a modest degree over the centuries, but it has changed dramatically in the past fifty years under the influence of agricultural scientists.  Wheat strains have been hybridized, crossbred, and introgressed to make the wheat plant resistant to environmental conditions, such as drought, or pathogens, such as fungi.  But most of all, genetic changes have been induced to increase yield per acre.  The average yield on a modern North American farm is more than tenfold greater than farms of a century ago.  Such enormous strides in yield have required drastic changes in the genetic code, including reducing the proud "amber waves of grain" of yesteryear to the rigid, eighteen-inch-tall high-production "dwarf" wheat of today.  Such fundamental genetic changes, as you will see, have come at a price.

If you are overweight or have any kind of sickness at all -- or even if you don’t -- you owe it to yourself to try simply removing wheat from your diet for 30 days, and see if it helps you.  It costs you nothing and could literally save your life.  The first time you think about cutting out wheat, the reaction is usually something like, "But what am I going to eat without bread, pasta, cereal...??!?"  But it’s actually pretty easy: just eat lots of meat and vegetables, plus smaller amounts of fruit, nuts, and seeds.  It helps if you already know that saturated fat is good for you, because then you won’t be worried about replacing "healthy whole grains" (which are actually killing you) with "artery-clogging saturated fat" (which is actually good for your heart and the rest of your body).

Perhaps the best thing about Dr. Davis, Robb Wolf, etc, is that these guys aren’t trying to sell you anything; they’re just trying to help you.  Well, technically they’re selling books, but you only need the books if you want all the details and the proof: they give away the "secret" for free on their websites and in their book summaries.  The "secret" is that if you cut these foods (wheat in Dr. Davis’ case, or all grains plus legumes and dairy in Robb Wolf’s opinion) out of your diet -- ideally for good, but at least for 30 days to see how it affects you -- then you’ll be far healthier for it.

Here’s Ricky Gervais on the cover of some magazine, attempting to look jaded or tough or something, while mocking Christianity:

Scrawled across his chest are the words "I have no balls."  Well, he thinks it says "Atheist."  But considering that mocking Jesus is about the safest, most politically correct, and least original thing that anyone could do, it’s clear what the real message is.  Yawn.  Call us back when you grow a pair and start mocking Muhammad.

In a piece about yet another massive failure by the government, Doc Zero provides this concise observation about the absurd hypocrisy of government spending:

Quoting John Hayward:

It’s funny how spending is always such an urgent business that we can’t even read the legislation, or carefully investigate the individuals and corporations we are compelled to subsidize.  On the other hand, even the smallest spending reduction is an agonizing process which stretches out for months, while Democrats denounce budget cutters as heartless monsters who want to kill as many women and elderly people as they can.

Which reminds me of a bumper-sticker I saw yesterday: "Liberalism: such a good idea, it has to be mandated."

Quoting Chris Kresser:

Let’s just make this crystal clear: 9 out of 10 cases of heart disease are completely preventable without drugs.  With sales of statin drugs reaching close to $30 billion this year with Lipitor alone bringing in close to $14 billion, this might come as some surprise.  But the pharmaceutical companies are, quite literally, invested in people taking their cholesterol-lowering drugs in spite of the complete lack of evidence that lowering cholesterol prevents heart disease.

In order to understand the changes we need to make to prevent heart disease, we have to briefly examine what causes it.  By now you know that the answer is not "cholesterol".  In fact, as I mentioned briefly in last week’s article, the two primary contributing mechanisms to heart disease are inflammation and oxidative damage. [...]

Over the past century we’ve seen a consistent decline in the consumption of traditional, nutrient-dense foods in favor of highly processed, nutrient-depleted products.  The flawed hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease has wrongly identified health-promoting foods like meat, organ meats, eggs and dairy products as harmful, and replaced them with toxic, processed alternatives... The average American gets 57% of his/her calories from highly refined cereal grains and polyunsaturated (PUFA) oils.  The #3 source of calories, behind grains and PUFA, is sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.  Refined grains, polyunsaturated oils and sugar are all major contributors to both inflammation and oxidative damage.

Not only do refined carbohydrates, vegetable oils and sugar contribute to inflammation and oxidative damage, they are also completely devoid of micronutrients that would protect us from these processes.  Meats, fruits and vegetables are all high in antioxidants that prevent oxidative damage, and rich in other micronutrients that play important roles in preventing heart disease.

If you only follow one health-related website, make it The Healthy Skeptic.

Quoting Stephen Moore:

More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined.  We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers.  Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees.  Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills? [...]

One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence.  In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment.  It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.

Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions.  Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services--fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations--through competitive contracting to private providers.  But unions have blocked many of those efforts.  Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.

Quoting George Monbiot:

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami.  The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system.  The reactors began to explode and melt down.  The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting.  Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

My favorite response from the anti-nuclear enviro-wackos is the statement that this is "worse than Three Mile Island."  It’s hard not to be worse than Three Mile Island considering that there were virtually no ill effects whatsoever from that incident.

These plants have survived operator errors and the worst natural disasters because they were designed well -- fifty years ago.  Just imagine how much better off America would be if we could actually build some new nuclear plants, using the newer and much-improved designs, instead of relying on dirty fossil fuels and foreign nations for so much of our energy.

Though it pains me to say it, because I generally find her to be irritating at best, Ann Coulter is right-on in her "Look For the Union Fable" article:

Quoting Ann Coulter:

The need for a union comes down to this question: Do you have a boss who wants you to work harder for less money?  In the private sector, the answer is yes.  In the public sector, the answer is a big, fat NO.

Government unions have nothing in common with private sector unions because they don’t have hostile management on the other side of the bargaining table.  To the contrary, the "bosses" of government employees are co-conspirators with them in bilking the taxpayers.

Far from being careful stewards of the taxpayers’ money, politicians are on the same side of the bargaining table as government employees -- against the taxpayers, who aren’t allowed to be part of the negotiation.  This is why the head of New York’s largest public union in the mid-’70s, Victor Gotbaum, gloated, "We have the ability to elect our own boss."

Democratic politicians don’t think of themselves as "management."  They don’t respond to union demands for more money by saying, "Are you kidding me?"  They say, "Great -- get me a raise too!"

Democrats buy the votes of government workers with generous pay packages and benefits -- paid for by someone else -- and then expect a kickback from the unions in the form of hefty campaign donations, rent-a-mobs and questionable union political activity when they run for re-election. [...]

Anytime there is the slightest suggestion that perhaps in the middle of a deep recession, public school teachers should pay 1.5 percent of their salaries toward their extravagant health care plans for their entire families, suddenly we get television ads of hard-working men doing dangerous jobs on docks and in foundries while being abused by their greedy capitalist overseers.

The unions must be desperately hoping that no one will notice ... Wait a minute!  WE’RE TALKING ABOUT TEACHERS!  This isn’t the Discovery Channel’s "Dirty Jobs" -- it’s Mrs. Cooper’s seventh-grade "values clarification" class. [...]

But government workers think the job of everyone else in the economy is to protect their high salaries, crazy work rules and obscene pensions.  They self-righteously lecture us about public service, the children, a "living wage" -- all in the service of squeezing more money from the taxpayer to fund their breathtakingly selfish job arrangements.

There’s never a recession if you work for the government.  The counties with the highest per capita income aren’t near New York City or Los Angeles -- they’re in the Washington, D.C., area -- a one-company town where the company is the government.  The three counties with the highest incomes in the entire country are all suburbs of Washington.  Eleven of the 25 counties with the highest incomes are near Washington.

For decades now, the Democrats have had a good gig buying the votes of government workers with outrageous salaries, benefits and work rules -- and then sticking productive earners with the bill.  But, now, we’re out of money, no matter how long Wisconsin Democrats hide out in Illinois.

Quoting The Wall Street Journal:

The steep deficits that states now face mean that teacher layoffs this year are unavoidable.  Parents understandably want the best teachers spared.  Yet in 14 states it is illegal for schools to consider anything other than a teacher’s length of service when making layoff decisions... "Fourteen states have these rules but about 40% of all teachers work in those states, and they’re the states with the biggest budget deficits."  In addition to New York, the list includes California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.

The unions that support these laws insist that seniority is the only "fair" way to reduce the teaching work force... [but] "only about 20% of the teachers who have the least seniority are also among the least effective teachers in a district.  About 80% of the time, there’s a teacher who’s worse that you could have laid off but didn’t because they had more seniority."

Suck the taxpayers dry, and screw the kids.  It’s the union way.

Quoting Victor Davis Hanson:

In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration -- Peter Orszag, Larry Summers and Christina Romer -- assured us that record trillion-plus budget deficits were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment.  For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an addition $3 trillion in national debt.  All three have quietly either returned to academia or Wall Street. [...]

The public might have better believed the deficit nostrums of former budget director Peter Orszag had he not retired after less than two years on the job to position himself for a multimillion-dollar billet at Citigroup -- itself a recent recipient of some $25 billion in government bailout funds.

Because it’s not enough to destroy the economy and blow up the national debt; to be a truly successful politician, you’ve got to take advantage of the situation and derive millions of dollars in personal profit from it.

I love the HELMER drawer unit from IKEA.  It’s a sturdy metal unit, about two feet tall, a foot wide, and a foot and a half deep, and it’s perfect for storing and organizing all kinds of stuff.  I have five of them now, three of which are filled with computer, A/V, and electrical parts, and the other two contain various office and household stuff.

One of them is a new addition, and as I assembled it, I was impressed with the packaging and assembly as much as the product itself.  The entire thing assembles with no screws except to attach the handles to the drawers (and for the casters, but I don’t use those).  And check out the packaging compared to the assembled unit:

Before:

After:

The box seems super heavy just because it’s so dense: it’s basically all metal in there, except for about a dozen small styrofoam blocks for cushioning.  Once you open it up, you just take the parts and bend/slide/snap them into place.

IKEA has a reputation in some quarters for making cheap stuff, but HELMER, he’s pretty tough.

(show full-size image viewer)

On this week’s TWiT they talked briefly about the original, 5 GB, hard-drive-based iPod, and Dan Shapiro said:

I was working at Microsoft when this came out, and everybody was clustered around one of the first ones that somebody brought in.  And the thing that got everybody, just, their heads spinning around, was they put a speaker in here just so that they could make it click when you turned the wheel.  That was what blew everybody’s mind.  And everybody around the table said, "We would never do that here."

Leo responded: "No.  Because it’s bad engineering!  It’s crazy!  And yet, it’s great UI.  It’s brilliant UI."

If you’ve watched any TV during the past 20 years, then you know the rule of political correctness in advertising: in any disagreement, confrontation, or conflict between a white person and a non-white person, or a man and a non-man, the result must be that the person who is white and/or male is the "loser" in the situation, with bonus points for portraying the white/male as an utterly incompetent fool.

Which is why this Hyundai Sonata commercial shocked and appalled delighted me.

Comcast’s TV and internet service is pretty good.  I mean it hardly ever goes down, and it’s pretty fast.  It’s such a stark contrast with their customer service.

Yesterday I called Comcast to ask them to come out and replace my old modem with a DOCSIS 3 modem.  Their website explicitly states that there is no cost for this upgrade (other than the modem rental fee I’m already paying every month).  But the woman on the phone insisted that I’d need to upgrade my service to a more expensive package to get the new modem.

So I hung up and called back.  It’s impossible to talk to the same person twice at a giant monopoly like Comcast, so I knew I’d get a different person, and I assumed the next person would be a little less dense.  It turned out that he was indeed a little less dense.  He immediately said yeah, no problem, there’s no cost and we’ll send someone out tomorrow, how’s 7-9 AM?  I said that was fine.

So today, 9 AM comes and goes with no sign of Comcast.  I call them at 9:15.  They tell me my appointment is for 11 AM to 1 PM.  I tell them that’s wrong, but it’s no use.  We reschedule it for later in the week.

A few hours later, around 1:15 PM, I get a call from a Comcast technician.  He’s just calling to confirm our appointment and he’s about 5 minutes away.

So, to recap: the first person attempted to extort higher payments out of me based on a lie about DOCSIS 3 modems.  The second person told me my appointment was at one time, but scheduled it for a different time.  And the third person rescheduled my appointment (or so she said) but didn’t bother telling the technician in the field about it.

You’d think that in this kind of bad economy, companies could afford to fire people who are incompetent, and replace them with intelligent people, from the vast pool of unemployed workers.  But apparently not.

Well, maybe "available" isn’t exactly the right word, since they’ve already sold a crapload of them via pre-order, so many in fact that they may have already burned through their first manufacturing run; they’re currently on a 10-day back order in the online Apple store.  Still, the iPad does technically launch this Saturday: that’ll be the first day you can see one (and if you’re lucky, buy one) in an Apple store.

In addition to having sold millions of dollars’ worth in pre-orders, the iPad is already a huge success in another way: it’s caused many big sites to start offering standard-format video instead of Flash-only video.  As I’ve been complaining here for years, Flash is complete and utter crap on Linux and Mac, running slowly, with jerky video, hogging the CPU, and causing browsers to crash.  This Vimeo video for example uses 100% of the CPU and is totally jerky in Flash, but clicking the "Switch to HTML5 video" link results in smooth video and ~25% CPU usage (this is in Chrome/Ubuntu).

I’ve always considered it a feature, not a bug, that the iPhone didn’t support Flash; now with more and more sites supporting HTML5 video, that’s clearer than ever.  We have Apple to thank for breaking Flash’s stranglehold of suckage on web video.

Who is the iPad for?

Since the iPad was announced a couple of months ago, many geeks have been opining that it sucks for one reason or another.  Lack of Flash support was one reason, though clearly that’s mostly irrelevant now.  Lack of 3rd-party multitasking is another issue, though it sounds like the iPhone OS 4.0 software update may provide that.  Then there are things like lack of USB ports, no memory card slots, etc.

But those are mostly geek issues.  It’s stuff that the average person doesn’t know or care about.  And clearly, as with the iPhone, Apple’s target market here is not geeks, it’s the average person.  Geeks want perfection; the average person just wants something useful that works well.

The iPad makes sense if you think of it as an appliance rather than a computer.  Computers are complicated, with all the messy business of software, configuration, wires, peripherals; the iPad has none of that.  It has "apps" instead of software; very little configuration; wireless instead of wired connectivity; and no peripherals for most uses.  And perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t have these alien interfaces we call "mice" and "keyboards" -- instead it uses a much more natural touch-based interface.

To geeks and anyone under 30, mice and keyboards are hardly alien.  But most people aren’t geeks, and there are huge numbers of older people for whom alien is exactly how they think of computers.  My dad for example won’t touch a CD player, much less a computer.  CD players and similar devices tend to have tiny screens, a bunch of tiny buttons, and horrible interfaces.  And computers with their mouse/keyboard/screen interfaces and loads of messy windows are something that he simply has no interest in trying to learn.  But an iPad, with its big bright screen and text, its windowless one-screen-at-a-time interface, and its natural touch-based controls?

I have no doubt that he would resist the idea at first.  Maybe we’ll have to have mom get one, and leave it lying around the house for him to see.  But I can’t help but think that a super-simple device allowing him to discover the internet, read books and newspapers, and -- well, that’s plenty to start with -- might be really useful for him.

There was a segment on the Factor last week about a documentary called "Tapped," which is apparently one of these plastic-is-evil-and-so-is-bottled-water deals.  They invariably show footage of some polluted stream or lake with a plastic water bottle floating on it.  The implication is clear: if you drink bottled water, you’re an evil consumer who hates the earth.

Never mind that plastic water bottles are fully recyclable.  No, the bottle-haters would have you believe that whenever someone finishes a bottle of water, they take the empty bottle to the nearest river, lake, or ocean and toss it right in.

Of course if you drink bottled water, you’re also an idiot, because half the kinds of bottled water sold are really just purified tap water!  You big dummy!  Never mind that a) such purified water actually says "purified water" right on the label, so anyone who specifically wants spring water instead (as I do) just buys spring water instead, and b) there’s not actually anything stupid about buying purified tap water because it’s cleaner than raw tap water.

But buying bottled water is just wasting money, because tap water is free!  Well, no; in most places, tap water isn’t free.  You either pay a monthly water bill, or you pay for the electricity and maintenance of a well and whatever equipment your system uses to clean and/or soften the well water.  And the water isn’t exactly the same either; people who want good clean drinking water from their tap often install for example a Brita filter which is of course not free.  Finally, the bottle-haters dishonestly use the $1+ per bottle, single-bottle price in their comparisons, not the 21-cents-per-bottle price that you pay when you buy it by the case.

And let’s not pretend that tap water is necessarily clean and pure; quite often it’s filthy and nasty.  In our case, we used to have a well, which produced water that was decent sometimes, but anytime it rained, the tap water turned brown.  So we switched to municipal water -- which was quite expensive, but not nearly as expensive as fixing or replacing the well would have been -- and now what comes out of the tap is basically pool water.  I can barely stand to brush my teeth with it because of the chlorine taste.  And whenever there’s a storm, they crank up the chlorine level even further -- since storms cause raw sewage to overflow into the rivers that supply our tap water -- to the point where I literally cannot stand to put the tap water into my mouth because of the chlorination.

Bottled water makes that a non-issue.  And there are plenty of other benefits to bottled water, independent of any purity or cost issues.  It is of course extremely convenient to be able to grab a bottle to take with you whenever you’re going out, or exercising, or taking a hike or a bike ride.  And having a few cases of bottled water in your house is good disaster preparedness, whether it’s just a small electricity/water outage, or a more serious long-term situation like a blizzard, hurricane, earthquake, EMP, etc.

If you want to drink tap water, and advocate the drinking of tap water, go right ahead; but don’t be a fascist about it.  There’s nothing stupid or evil about bottled water.

Milton Wolf on Obamacare:

Obamacare proponents would have us believe that we will add 30 million patients to the system without adding providers, we will see no decline in the quality of care for the millions of Americans currently happy with the system, and -if you act now!- we will save money in the process.  But why stop there?  Why not promise it will no longer rain on weekends and every day will be a great hair day? [...]

I believe there is a better way.  The problems in the American health care system are not caused by a shortage of government intrusion.  They will not be solved by more government intrusion.  In fact, our current problems were precisely, though unintentionally, created by government.

World War II-era wage-control measures - a form of price controls - ushered in a perverted system in which we turn to our employers for insurance and the government penalizes us if we choose to purchase insurance for ourselves.  You are not given the opportunity to be a wise consumer of health care and compare prices as well as quality in any meaningful way.  Worse still, your insurance company is not answerable to you because you are not its customer.  It is answerable to your employer, whose interests differ from your own.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the treasurer of Massachusetts, where they’ve already tried government-run health care, fears that Obamacare will bankrupt the country.

Including $5 million in cash.  For filling in while Steve Jobs was out sick for a few months.  On the one hand it’s absolutely insane, but then again so is that $40 billion pile of cash profits that Apple is sitting on top of.  They’re mind-bogglingly successful, and their top dogs deserve great compensation for it.  And let’s not forget: we’re not talking about financial executives who nearly destroyed our economy (while performing a job in which they create nothing whatsoever) and were rewarded for it with boatloads of taxpayer bailouts; no, we’re talking about a company that creates products that people love and sells them by the millions.

The NYT has a great story in two parts (here and here) that provides a tantalizing glimpse into the future of cancer treatment.  Scientists and doctors are designing drugs that target specific genes in order to directly alter cancerous cells, as opposed to more traditional approaches like chemotherapy and radiation treatment which are essentially brute-force attacks that damage the patient as much as the cancer.

Targeted therapy for cancer is not brand new, but it’s nascent compared to the more traditional therapies.  It is a long and slow process to determine, develop, test, and finally administer the specific drug needed for a specific cancer.  In fact it’s a process that takes years, designed for patients who often only have months to live.  The NYT articles on this process are exciting but also frustrating to read; but results like this, showing dramatic tumor reduction in just 15 days, are simply amazing.

FuturePundit has more good news on the cancer front:

Death Rate Dropping From Cancer: Some reports have cited limited improvement in death rates as evidence that the "war on cancer", which was initiated in 1971, has failed.  Many of these analyses fail to account for the dominant and dramatic increase in cancer death rates due to tobacco-related cancers in the latter part of the 20th century. [...] For all cancers combined, death rates (per 100,000) in men increased from 249.3 in 1970 to 279.8 in 1990, and then decreased to 221.1 in 2006, yielding a relative decline of 21% from 1990 (peak year) and a drop of 11% since 1970 (baseline year).  Similarly, the death rate from all-cancers combined in women increased from 163.0 in 1970 to 175.3 in 1991, and then decreased to 153.7 in 2006, a relative decline of 12% and 6% from the 1991 (peak year) and 1970 rates, respectively.

It’s slow progress, but it’s progress.

Glenn Reynolds on the Government Motors government inquiry into Toyota’s potential brake/accelerator issue:

Quoting Glenn Reynolds:

Personally, I’d like to see some Congressmen forced to testify before a panel of car dealers, about the budget deficit’s Sudden Acceleration Problem.

This Reason article about government corruption (redundancy noted), and specifically the public pension disaster, is just infuriating:

Quoting Reason:

These days, government workers fare better than private-sector workers in almost every area -- pay, benefits, time off, and job security. ... The average federal worker made $59,864 in 2005, compared with the average salary of $40,505 in the private sector.  [...]

The average federal salary (including benefits) is set to grow from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 in 2010, CBS reported.  But the real action isn’t in what government employees are being paid today; it’s in what they’re being promised for tomorrow.  Public pensions have swollen to unrecognizable proportions during the last decade. [...]

These huge pension increases have eaten away at public finances, most spectacularly in California, where a bipartisan bill that passed virtually without debate unleashed the odious "3 percent at 50" retirement plan in 1999.  Under this plan, at age 50 many categories of public employees are eligible for 3 percent of their final year’s pay multiplied by the number of years they’ve worked.  So if a police officer starts working at age 20, he can retire at 50 with 90 percent of his final salary until he dies, and then his spouse receives that money for the rest of her life.  [...]

Although Americans may have a vague sense that the nation has run up a great deal of debt, the public employee benefit problem is not well known.  Yet the wave of benefit promises is poised to wash away state and local government budgets and large portions of the incomes of most Americans.  Most of these benefits are vested, meaning that they have the standing of a legal contract.  They cannot be reduced.  [...]

In California unfunded pension and health care liabilities for state workers top $100 billion, and the annual pension contribution has shot up from $320 million to $7.3 billion in less than a decade.  In New York state, local governments may have to triple their annual pension contributions during the next six years, from $2.6 billion to $8 billion, according to the state comptroller.

That money will come from taxpayers.  The average private-sector worker, who enjoys a lower salary and far lower retirement benefits than New York or California government workers, will have to work longer, retire later, and pay more so that his public-employee neighbors can enjoy the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.  The taxpayers will also have to deal with worsening public services, since there will be less money to pay for things that might actually benefit the public.  [...]

The United States had 2.3 state and local government employees per 100 citizens in 1946 and has 6.5 state and local government employees per 100 citizens now. ... 54 percent of the economy is private, 28 percent goes to the feds, and 18 percent goes to state and local governments.  The trend lines are ominous.

Bigger government means more government employees. Those employees then become a permanent lobby for continual government growth.  The nation may have reached critical mass; the number of government employees at every level may have gotten so high that it is politically impossible to roll back the bureaucracy, rein in the costs, and restore lost freedoms.  [...]

It’s a two-tier system in which the rulers are making steady gains at the expense of the ruled.  The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies.

Read the whole thing -- it includes a few specific examples of scumbag officials gaming the system that will make your blood boil.  It’s enough to make you want to torch your house and dive-bomb your plane into a government building.

Here’s an article about some university researchers working on a device to create hydrogen from just sunlight and water.  It’s been done before, but their process greatly improves on the efficiency of the conversion and the lifespan of the device.

But towards the end of the article, there’s this bit about the fact that some of the parts are made of gold and platinum:

He and colleagues now plan to refine the system, including lowering the cost by making it with less expensive materials.  "There is no major reason for using gold or platinum," he says: those materials were used simply because they are common in the laboratory.