Interesting post from one of the guys at JammieWearingFool: "Congress Voted To Fire Me Last Night"

Their vote in essence caused me, and just about everybody else who works for a health insurance company, onto the unemployment rolls. It doesn't matter whether you are a claims adjuster, work a call center, sell the policies or some other job and you work for a private health insurance company or you are one of the evil heads of the corporation, your shelf life for having a job if the Pelosicare bill becomes fact is about five years.

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If you currently have a private insurance policy, starting in 2011 your premiums will double if you are lucky, and in most cases triple. It is unavoidable.

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My advice to anyone who works for a private insurance company is to dig out the resume, update it and try like hell to land one of the government jobs.

Read it all if you dare! Another, related view here: "PelosiCare's price controls will bankrupt health insurers in one year"
The blog points to text that in the bill that sets the minimum allowable loss ratio at 85%

An 85% loss ratio, as mandated by PelosiCare, would bankrupt insurers within a year. No mandated loss ratio has ever come close to 85%.

Graph taken from Here.

Yipe! Is he right? The issue seems complicated. Here is an interesting paper (pdf)

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the use and abuse of the medical loss ratio in the contemporary health care system and health policy debate. It begins with a survey of the ways in which the medical loss ratio has been interpreted to be something it is not, such as a measure of quality or efficiency. It then analyzes key organizational features of the emerging health care system that complicate measures of financial performance, including integration between payers and providers, diversification of payers across multiple products and distribution channels, and geographic expansion across metropolitan and state lines. These issues are illustrated using medical loss ratios from a range of nonprofit and for-profit health plans. The paper then sketches a strategy for improving the public's understanding of health plan performance as an alternative to continued reliance on the flawed medical loss ratio. This strategy incorporates data on structure and process, service quality, and financial performance.

I was watching a home improvement show which just happened to be on the Planet Green cable channel. On came a commercial where Steve Thomas, former host of This Old House, said a truly idiotic thing.

The commercial was quick, but while he appeared to be looking at either a furnace or a water heater he said of the no-doubt magnificent heater: "And this really does have a measurable impact on global warming."

Measurable impact?! Those were his words. "Measurable impact." I burst out laughing.

Utter and complete scientific illiteracy being presented as profound scientific truth.

This seems to me to be a perfect portrait of ousted Honduran president Zelaya:



That's him in a room in the Brazilian embassy, complete with two aero beds and tin-foil covered windows!!

I hated the original Stargate movie, but when I gave the SG-1 series a try, I liked it. Around home it's referred to as "Auntie's bad movie." I haven't been a fan of Atlantis, and watching a tiny bit of Universe, I don't think I'll be a fan of this one either.

You see, it seems to have a holodeck problem. The main plot of the show is that a bunch of people, military, science, and civilian, are stuck on a space ship umpteen light years from Earth. Plenty of possibilities for danger and dramatic tension as they struggle to survive. However, in the earlier SG-1 series they established an alien technology that allowed people from one place to inhabit the bodies of people far far away, to walk and talk from inside other people, all instantaneously--over thousands of light years. So right now, the people who are supposed to be stranded on a ship which is running out of fuel, air, water and food, are partying in a night club back on Earth. Blah!

I have a new post up on Square Dots.

Here's the latest employment graph:



It looks like within a couple of months, the number of people employed will be less than at the depths of the post-911 recession--this despite an increase in population of about 11 million since 2003.

It also does not look like discouraged workers are beginning to look for work again. The numbers of long-term unemployed remained about the same, and the number out of the workforce has increased since last month.

If there is any bright side, it looks like the slope of the establishment survey line is beginning to shallow out slightly, though the household survey has not done the same. And both lines are still on a steep downward trajectory. A rough calculation of the average of the establishment line from October 2008 to July 2009 shows a monthly decline of about 0.593 million jobs lost per month. The same calculation over the last three months, July 2009 to October 2009, yields an average of about 0.136 million jobs lost per month--still a decline, but the slope is leveling off. The household data shows almost no change, if not a slight uptick in unemployment. The earlier period saw an average loss of 0.51 jobs per month, the most recent 3 months show a 0.59 jobs lost per month.

I admit to being a fan of the website Hulu, where you can watch TV with limited interruptions (sometimes none) and watch at your own time and pace.

It seems to me that TV programming execs should be scared out of their wits by this and the Tivo phenomenon. The simple reason is this: if you don't have to watch something at a specific time, you tend to find other, better things to do, and, unless a show is really good (a rarity,) you begin to watch it less and less often.

I stopped watching Heroes because of that phenomenon (that and the fact that they didn't learn the correct lesson from Joss Whedon's Buffy: since the villain is almost always the most-interesting character on the show, you should change the villian every year to keep the show interesting.) And, now I feel myself slipping away from "Glee" (though the Kristin Chenowyth episode was great! as was the dancing football team!)

I was right about what would happen in NY-23. The Republican who lost support and dropped out still got 6 percent of the vote, and that was enough to give the win to the Democrat over the Conservative Party candidate.

Today of course, you will have endless talk from pundits about the "deeper meaning" of this race, most of it nonsense.

Student criticizes Khamenei at official gathering:

A lone student at a gathering of the country's academic elite took the unprecedented step of criticizing Leader Ali Khamenei in his presence on Wednesday morning, according to the Office for the Preservation and Publication of the Works of Grand Ayatollah Khamenei and opposition news sites.

Read the whole article. I am astounded by this student's bravery. I wish him well.

I'd be very surprised if we were actually seeing the beginning of real growth in the economy, unless, of course, we are talking about a brief uptick followed by a second retreat. The reason is very simple:

Why would any employer of any size hire one additional worker in this climate?

Similarly, why would any prospective entrepreneur go out on a limb to start a new business in this climate?

Why would anyone take the risk of such things with so much uncertainty about the economic future and government mandates, regulations, and stupidity?

Meb Keflezighi became the first American man to win the New York City Marathon since 1982 on Sunday.

"The USA gave me all the opportunities there is in education, sports and lifestyle," he said. "To be able to represent the USA is a big thing for me."

Congratulations!

Hillary Clinton, during her recent trip to Pakistan:

"Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002," she finally asserted when challenged about Washington’s tough prescriptions for Islamabad. "I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to."

The US Secretary of State also took a swipe at the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies, telling the senior journalists, "If we are going to have a mature partnership where we work together" then "there are issues that not just the United States but others have with your government and with your military security establishment." She said she was "more than willing to hear every complaint about the United States'' but the relationship had to be a "two-way street."

At one point during the exchanges, when a journalist spoke about all the services rendered by Pakistan for the US, Mrs Clinton snapped, "We have also given you billions."

Well done Mrs. Clinton! How refreshing to hear an American diplomat dishing it out rather than just standing there and taking it. Finally, someone in power has the nerve to tell the truth.

William M Briggs mentions Laplace's Rule of Succession in a recent blog post. Briggs' is a blog about statistics and related matters that I highly recommend. Laplace used the rule, which relies on Bayes' Theorem, to calculate the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow. It is an elegant and fascinating bit of analysis. According to Wikipedia, Laplace's method give odds 1826250:1 in favour of the sun rising tomorrow.

But I beg to differ! Using Bayesian analysis, I calculate that the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is 1/2!

Here is my argument. Let N+1 be the number of days from the start of history through tomorrow. Suppose at first that we know nothing about the sun, neither the related physics nor the past history of its rising. This was Laplace's assumption as well. Suppose we only know that the sun rises on some subset of the N+1 days in question. With only this knowledge, we assume a uniform prior probability distribution on this subset. Thus we assume that all 2^(N+1) possible subsets of the N+1 days are equally likely to be the sun-rising subset, each having probability 2^(-N-1). Now suppose we are given additional knowledge, specifically that the sun rose on the first N days. There are then only two possibilities for the sun-rising subset: the set of all N+1 days, and the set that contains only the first N days. By our prior assumption, and a trivial application of Bayes Rule, we see that each of these possibilities now has the posterior probability of 1/2. Thus the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is 1/2.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Related post here.

This is the most amazing carved pumpkin I have ever seen

Check out the rest at the artist's web site. You can see several shots of the process he goes through in making one of these. This man has serious skills!

Just for fun, I reordered this list of horror films to my liking. Click to zoom. The first column is my rating (10 being best). The second column is the ranking from the website, from 1 to 100. Some things I would add, like the original Dracula. Some of these aren't really horror. If we are not strict about the genre, why not add Delieverance for example? I'm impressed with how many I have seen. It seems I haven't been keeping up though, much of the new stuff I have missed. The modern movies like Hostel and Saw are just too disgusting, and un-enjoyable.

Happy Halloween everyone!

I was going to write a post about NY-23, the upcoming election for a Congressional representative from New York's upstate 23rd district. The title of the post was going to be "Who Cares." Really, I thought, what is all the hub-bub bub? It's about one seat in the House for goodness sake.

But today it got interesting. The Republican candidate has dropped out!

The Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, remains. The question I have is can he win? Despite the Republican dropping, I suspect she will still get a substantial amount of votes. It depends on how the ballot is structured, but I suspect that many people will just vote the party.

It would be a shame if the conservative vote were split. This Hoffman chap seems to be pretty good. I disagree with him on gay marriage, and am not so interested in the abortion issue. But his fiscal stance is right on. Good luck Mr Hoffman.