In response to Republican Senator Lamar Alexander’s contention that premiums will go up under reform, the President cites the Congressional Budget Offices report that his proposal will lower costs for individuals by between 14 and 20%. President Obama cites some of the Republican ideas he’s included in his proposal and makes it clear that he welcomes additional Republican ideas to contain costs.
angol here :: People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Saying you don’t believe something will not change the fact that it is true! Hope is back!
Elink Video ::"It's a good talking point, but it doesn't actually answer the underlying question"
In a discussion of insurance market reforms, President Obama asks Republican Senator John Kyl to move away from talking points and focus on finding common areas of agreement. The President responds to Kyl: “Any time the question is phrased as ‘Does Washington know better?’ I think we’re kind of tipping the scales a little bit there, since we all know that everybody is angry at Washington right now it’s a good talking point, but it doesn’t actually answer the underlying question, which is do we want to make sure that people have a baseline of protection?'”
angol here: I believe that what’s mostly said in Presidential forums can be classified as ”
“It’s a good talking point, but it doesn’t actually answer the underlying question”
“
Elink Video :: "American families will drown if we try an incremental approach"
Senator Tom Harkin reminded those at the meeting that while it’s easy to get caught up in the debate over numbers and policy details, it’s ultimately about making progress to help ordinary folks across the country struggling under today’s broken system. Senator Harkin said, “I keep thinking we have got to bring it back home to what this is all about. We all have our stories. I got a letter yesterday from a farmer in Iowa that really encapsulates it. [He said] ‘I’m a 57-year-old Iowa farmer. I’m writing to voice my concern regarding my family’s rapidly escalating health care costs. On Saturday, February 20th, I received a noticeinforming me that our health insurance premium will be increasing $193.90 per month to a monthly total of $1,516.20. This is a 14.6% increase.'”
rePost :: Road pricing in the Netherlands & using math to reduce traffic | A Smarter Planet Blog :: Quick notes
I constanly site this during conversations with friends about traffic. Looks just about right.
1. Road pricing trial results in the Netherlands.
Consistent with the themes in this morning’s transportation forum, road pricing is a growing tool being used by cities and states around the world to change behaviors drivers and shift the balance of transportation from car-dependent to a more multi-modal form system. Six month ago, IBM and NXP Semiconductors began a pilot in Eindhoven to implement variable road pricing based on traffic demand, time of day and type of car (i.e., size + environmental impact of vehicle). Following are some insights from the pilot:
- * Seventy percent of drivers improved their driving behavior by avoiding rush-hour traffic and using highways instead of local roads.
- * On average, these drivers in the trial saw an improvement of more than 16 percent in average cost per kilometer.
- * A clear system of incentives is critical to changing driving behavior.
- * Instant feedback provided via an On-Board Unit display on the price of the road chosen and total charges for the trip is essential to maximizing the change in behavior.
via Quick notes: Road pricing in the Netherlands & using math to reduce traffic | A Smarter Planet Blog.
rePost :: National Juries :: Overcoming Bias
Read the whole thing by clicking through the overcoming bias blog!!!
Would something like this work for the Philippines? No as long as the Education System is in shambles we cannot do anything as radical as this.
National Juries
The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. …
The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.
To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day. All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.
More here. This logic is simple and strong enough for most folks to both understand and accept. Yet most would still prefer our current system – why?
via Overcoming Bias : National Juries.
Elink :: Worldometers – real time world statistics
This website is awesome. Data wonks WOOT!!!
Worldometers – world statistics updated in real time
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World Population
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| Current World Population | ||
| Births this year 1 | ||
| Births today 2 | ||
| Deaths this year | ||
| Deaths today | ||
| Net population growth for today 3 | ||
| 1) “this year” = from January 1 (00:00) up to now 2) “today” = from the beginning of the current day up to now 3) “net population growth” = births minus deaths |
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rePost::Animal rights thugs: Researchers' children are not off limits : Respectful Insolence
This is despicable and must stop.
Animal rights thugs: Researchers’ children are not off limits
Category: Bioethics • Biology • Medicine • Politics • Science
Posted on: February 24, 2010 6:00 AM, by OracRemember Dario Ringach?
He’s the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing primate research. Terrorism and intimidation worked, but who could blame Dr. Ringach? He was afraid for his family. That’s because it was more than just threatening e-mails and phone calls, but rather the campaign of intimidation included masked thugs banging on the windows of his house at night, frightening his children, as they have done more recently at UC Santa Cruz. The last straw was when a group of truly idiotic animal rights terrorists tried to attack a colleague of Ringach’s by leaving a Molotov cocktail on her doorstep; only the incompetents got the house wrong and left their firebomb on the doorstep of an elderly neighbor. This was one of the rare cases where extreme incompetence was a good thing, because the firebomb didn’t detonate, and no one was hurt. But the message had been sent. A year and a half later, in 2008, Ringach’s case and other attacks and threats directed against UCLA researchers, such as when animal rights terrorists flooded the home of another researcher named Edythe London, led UCLA to fight back by suing extremists to stop their campaign of terrorism against researchers.
via Animal rights thugs: Researchers’ children are not off limits : Respectful Insolence.
rePost :: Scumbag Animal Rights Villains Harass Children for Father's Speech : Good Math, Bad Math
This is despicable and must stop.
Scumbag Animal Rights Villains Harass Children for Father’s Speech
Category: Chatter
Posted on: February 24, 2010 2:00 PM, by Mark C. Chu-CarrollThis post is off-topic for this blog, but there are some things that I just can’t keep quiet about.
Via my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Janet over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, I’ve heard about some absolutely disgraceful antics by an animal rights group. To be clear, in what follows, I’m not saying that all animal rights folks are scumbags: I’m pointing out that there’s a specific group of animal rights folks who are sickening monsters for what they’re doing.
The background: There’s a neurobiologist named Dario Ringach. Professor Ringach used to do research using primates. Back in 2006, when he did that, animal rights targeted him, and his children. The did things like vandalize his house, put on masks and bang on his childrens windows, and protest at his children’s schools. Professor Ringach disappointingly but understandably gave in, and abandoned his research in order to protect his family.
Fast forward a couple of years. Last week, Dr. Ringach, along with Janet and several other people, participated in a public dialogue about animal research at UCLA. Dr. Ringach spoke about why animal research is important. That’s all that he did: present an explanation of why animal research is important.
via Scumbag Animal Rights Villains Harass Children for Father’s Speech : Good Math, Bad Math.
rePost:Transco:The gathering storm – Roger Ebert's Journal
You can substitute the Philippines for Chicago, Transco for the parking meter and you get what happened to the transmission part of the Philippines Power System.
Hiring private companies to handle city services is a two-edged sword. I believe our Mayor Daley now regrets he signed a 75-year-lease with a company to take over the city’s parking meters. There was a time when Chicagoans grumbled about parking fees but figured, well, they’re a lot less than in New York. These bandits came in and immediately quadrupled parking meter fees. In the Loop, an hour which in 2008 cost a quarter now costs $3.50.
Has this resulted in windfall income for the city? No, according to the Chicago News Cooperative. Daley got a $600 million upfront payment, and will spend that amount in two years. Chicago gets $1.15 billion over 75 years. But wait! Wait! The deal is good for Private Enterprise, right? Conservatives like Rumsfeld even wanted to privatize the U. S. military. At least stockholders can profit from our parking meters. That’s good, or it would be, if 25% of the new meter company weren’t owned by Abu Dhabi’s Sovereign Wealth Funds, another 24% by German investors, and the rest by Morgan Stanley.
As nearly as anyone can figure out: (1) Chicago would have made more money owning the meters itself, (2) Parking Meters LLC is making money hand over fist because it quadruped the charge for a fixed-cost service, and (3) Chicago business is hurting because retail customers resist paying $3.50 an hour, or up to $29 fee in parking garages after you stay more than 15 minutes — or one hour, or whatever. Parking garages fees have doubled. Now most retail stores offer discount parking if they stamp your ticket — which costs them money, so they’re paying Abu Dhabi too. It doesn’t take Stephen Hawking to figure out that Abu Dhabi and Morgan Stanley wouldn’t have come anywhere near our parking meters unless they knew they could clean up. Chicago got taken to the cleaners.
via The gathering storm – Roger Ebert’s Journal.
rePost::Grameen Bank – Response to Wall Street Journal article
Excellent read. This was a letter written by Yunus defending his bank on accusations of below board practices. Loved reading this.
A Counter-Culture
Grameen had to create a banking counter-culture of its own. Grameen's central focus is to help poor borrower move out of poverty, not making money. Making profit is always recognised as a necessary condition of success to show that we are covering costs. Volume of profit is not important in Grameen in money-making sense, but important as an indicator of efficiency. We would like to make more profit so that we can reduce interest rate — and pass on the benefits to the borrowers. In Grameen system when a borrower cannot pay back we try to activate our system to help her overcome her problems, rather than go in a punishing mode.
We consider credit as a human right. We built our system on the faith that the poor always pay back. Some times they take longer than the originally scheduled time period, sometimes natural disasters like flood, drought, cyclone, etc and political unrest, rules and procedures of the bank, make it difficult or impossible to pay back; but given the opportunity they pay back. Non-repayment is not a problem created by the borrowers, it is created by factors external to them.
We have always carefully avoided the practices of the conventional banks to make sure we do not fall into the same logical loop which kept the poor out from financial institutions. Grameen had to create new systems to balance financial and human considerations. For example, it presents loan information separately for women and men, lists meticulously every single business of the borrowers in its annual report, and recognizes that a house is not just a house, but a workplace for the poor women, something that is categorised as a 'consumption' loan by the conventional banks is actually a 'production' loan for the poor. Grameen is a system based on human-relationships, not on threats of penalty imposed by legal system or any other agency. Grameen required new style of business, new banking culture of its own.
Sometimes people who are used to conventional banking become suspicious of Grameen because it is different. It is a conflict of two different banking cultures. Just because they do not understand us, they think we are wrong. When they spend some time with us with patience they start enjoying the exciting world of Grameen banking.
via Grameen Bank – Response to Wall Street Journal article.