Tag Archives: America

Cosmic Justice

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According to the Detroit News, a 19-year old black woman, Renisha McBride, had a car accident in the predominantly white suburb of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, at around 2:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Her cell phone battery was dead, so she began looking for help. After knocking on the door or ringing the bell at a house on Outer Drive, she was shot in the head and killed. The Dearborn Heights police department found her body on the front porch. They know who killed her but haven’t released the person’s name.

Michigan is one of the states that now has a “Stand Your Ground” law. Michigan’s law says that a person has the right to use deadly force against another person if he or she “reasonably” believes such force is necessary to protect himself, herself or someone else from imminent death, great bodily harm or sexual assault. Given the facts reported so far, asking the woman ringing your door bell at 2:30 a.m. what she wanted or calling 911 would have been more reasonable than putting a bullet through her head. The incident is now in the hands of the Wayne County prosecutor.

In news that could be related, physicists have discovered that the Higgs field, what the New York Times calls “an invisible ocean of energy that permeates space, confers mass on elementary particles and gives elementary forces their distinct features and strengths” might undergo a phase transition resulting from a random quantum-level fluctuation. This phase transition would make the Higgs field much denser than it is now. That change would destroy everything in the universe more complex than hydrogen, the simplest element there is. 

In fact, a random fluctuation of this kind might have already occurred, meaning that the resulting phase transition (in effect, a wave of destruction traveling at the speed of light) might be heading for us right now. We won’t know if it’s coming or notice if it arrives: “the idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it”.

It would be as if Someone finally got fed up and turned off the cosmic switch that controls everything around us, including Dearborn Heights, Michigan.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your view of cosmic justice, it is very, very unlikely that the Higgs field will change any time soon. Nevertheless, it could happen, especially if Someone gets really fed up.

Update:  Apparently, it was a man who killed Renisha McBride. He did it with a shotgun and says it was an accident. He also says he thought she was an intruder (the kind who knocks on the front door or rings the bell?).  

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The death of Renisha McBride:  http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131105/METRO01

The Higgs field: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/finding-the-higgs-leads-to-more-puzzles

A nice, 14-minute video that explains how very unlikely it is that the lights will go out while we’re still around: http://www.ted.com/talks/why_our_universe_might_exist_on_a_knife_edge

In Case You’re Concerned About Health Insurance Cancelations

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It’s the media’s current ACA crisis. In other words, a lot of sound and fury, signifying very little.

The policies being canceled are those that don’t meet the ACA’s new minimum standards. All policy holders will be able to sign up for better policies. That’s the basic story. This short article in the New York Times explains what happened at a House committee hearing today:

Republicans were apparently furious that government would dare intrude on an insurance company’s freedom to offer a terrible product to desperate people.

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/the-uproar-over-insurance-cancellation-letters/

It’s worth reading, if only for its humor value.

Meanwhile, You Don’t Want To Be Poor In America

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The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, has issued a report relating to “welfare reform”, the law that Congress passed and President Clinton signed 17 years ago.

Federal funding for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (what used to be called “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” or “welfare”), hasn’t increased since 1996, so inflation has eaten away at the program’s benefits:

Because TANF benefits have declined substantially in value, they do much less to help families escape deep poverty than they did in 1996.  With the exception of Maryland and Wyoming, a poor family relying solely on TANF to provide the basics for its children (such as during a period of joblessness, illness, or disability) in every state is further below the poverty line today than in 1996.

In fact, the inflation-adjusted value of benefits has decreased by more than 20% in 14 states and by more than 30% in 26 states.

Believe it or not, the monthly cash payment to an unemployed woman with two children in Mississippi is $170. Where I live, in one of the highest income states in the country, it’s $424 for a family of three, exactly what it was in 1996 (that’s a 32% decrease in real value).

Of course, there are other Federal programs for poor people, whether they have jobs or not, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or “food stamps”). But you can’t pay the rent or buy shoes with food stamps. Next week, by the way, people receiving food stamps will start getting less. A family of four, other things being equal, will receive $36 less per month.

The CPBP report (with charts):

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4034

The food stamp news:

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/food-stamp-benefits-going-down-holidays-8C11418632

To B Or Not To B

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That is a question. If Hamlet were with us today, would he ask himself: “To blog or not to blog?”

That’s what I asked myself this morning. Whether I should put this blog on hold.

But how can I save the world (one blog post at a time) or find out what I think if I don’t speak whereof I can?

Especially today, after a respected reader shared this letter to the editor:

When seniors started enrolling in the new Medicare system, hardly anyone touched a computer, there was no internet, or broadband connection. The system worked. Today, the same tools are available to us as were available then: applications, telephone, person-to-person help. The preferred method of access is the Internet, but the Internet is really just a way to get one into the system. The media is spending way too much time complaining about the method by which people sign up. They should be pointing out that millions of people who have not had access to health coverage will now have it. We need more stories about people with sick children who can now get coverage, not how much trouble people are having logging in to a web site. (BTW, just to see how it would work, I went to healthcare.gov and created an account. No problems. Maybe they kick in when you try to actually sign up for something.) 

I hate the media.

Me too, much of the time.

Now, in this autumn of our discontent, everyone with access to a media bullhorn should keep in mind that large information technology projects almost always have problems, especially when a “drop-dead date” is involved. The Republicans will “investigate”, silly people on TV and the radio will say stupid things (except in Afghanistan), columnists will draw the wrong conclusions, but the problems will be fixed, millions of people will benefit and, as someone said the other day, the ACA isn’t just a website.

We should also remember that most people sign up for things as the deadline approaches, and in this case the deadline (March 31, 2014) isn’t “drop-dead” at all – it’s a soft deadline that can be delayed a while, if necessary.

On the even brighter side, healthcare.gov is getting all kinds of free publicity! Let’s hope everyone spells the name right – although that’s not required these days (“did you mean healthcare.gov?”).

For the icing on the cake, take a look at how Republican politicians defended the problem-plagued rollout of the Medicare prescription drug benefit eight years ago, when one of their own was in the White House:

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/10/24/2828261/hearing-post/

“The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.” (Henry V, act 4, scene 4)

The Big Website Foul-Up (It Takes A Village)

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Major problems with the new ACA website healthcare.gov are being reported and criticized throughout the media. It’s a great story, definitely worth reporting and much easier to write about than the complexities of the new law and how it will affect millions of people.

Fortunately, states that chose to create their own websites, like California and New York, are doing better, one likely reason being that their software requirements were easier to implement. It’s states with Republican governors or legislatures that didn’t create their own websites, like Texas, Florida and New Jersey, that are especially suffering. Although there are other ways to sign up for ACA-generated health insurance (by phone, and even in person), it’s still a problem for many people who live in those Republican-governed states.

Still, it’s an especially poignant example of how Republicans often put politics above principle or pragmatism. One would think that politicians who consistently criticize the Federal government (except for the Defense Department, etc.) wouldn’t depend on a Federal website delivering health insurance to their citizens, but go figure.

It’s also a great example of how large computer projects usually fail to meet deadlines, and how corporations that sell things to the government almost always find a way to make a whole lot of money. “We will deliver X by Y for $Z” repeatedly turns into “we will deliver X- by Y+ for $Z++”. Everyone involved usually has an excuse – it’s often the fault of those other guys – but whatever happens always results from a team effort.

For more on the software development aspect of the situation, here’s an honest, accurate appraisal from someone who has clearly been in similar situations:

In fact, we software developers suck at estimating how long it will take to build a web application (it’s time that we admit that). So, if we suck at it, imagine how poorly our managers who have never written a line of code suck at it when they pull estimates out of their asses to impose on their development teams and report to their bosses.

The whole article is worth reading, although I’ll add that these problems aren’t limited to web applications, many people who give optimistic estimates have done plenty of coding, and the people doing the requirements aren’t always the most blameworthy. Software developers frequently slow down the requirements-writing process by failing to give feedback, asking for repeated clarifications, arguing about which features are necessary and failing to move forward when progress could be made. In addition, there may be good reasons to roll out software that isn’t ready (sometimes, something is better than nothing). It really is a team effort.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/17/1248260/-A-software-developer-s-view-on-the-HealthCare-gov-glitches#