I was listening to NPR last weekend, and there was a bit about the changes in family economics in the past 30 years, and the squeezing of the middle class. The part that jumped out at me, however, was the increased economic risks that modern families undertook.

I think its pretty safe to say that up to a certain income level, Americans will spend approximately as much as they make. Some will spend more on credit, and some will actually save a little, but in general we're not known for saving money. The American Dream seems to equal consumption. In the piece on NPR, they claimed that the fundamentals had gone from 46% to 75% of a family's income, but thats actually fairly irrelevant to me: if people have money, they will spend more of it, they will buy more expensive cars, live in more expensive houses. The bigger issue they pointed out, to my thinking, was that over the last 30 years, most families have gone from one income to two. This has increased the economic risks, because if there is a surprise problem, such as one member being laid off, or being unable to work due to a health condition, there is no backup. Before, there was the possibility of the other spouse stepping in, even at a lower income level, to help the family out. Now, the family is used to surviving, and in fact has made economic obligations on the basis of the dual income. The risk that a family will have a major problem has doubled since they now require two incomes to survive. Ouch. Unintended consequence, that is.

A side note that amused me was that this person on NPR was commenting about how family incomes, adjusted for inflation, had gone up by a very good amount, almost entirely due to the addition of a second income. They then commented out the fundamentals made up a larger portion of that income now, as I mentioned above. Of course, inflation is basically the aggregate/average/indexed value of how costs of goods have increased, so what you're actually talking about there is how the cost of some things increased a lot more than the aggregate did. It might mean that the calculation of the aggregate isn't correct, actually, ie that housing and cars don't play a large enough role in the determination of calculated inflation. It should also be said that plain old economics will tell you that adding a second income will certainly put you at an advantage to those families who don't have one, but as soon as everybody's doing it, the playing field has been re-leveled, and scarce goods like real-estate and housing will certainly inflate to meet the purchasing power of the doubled available income.

Capitalism, and the market, is a wonderful thing... but there are some "leveling the playing field" benefits of single payer systems. For one, if you have multiple companies competing in a cut-throat market, they will be forced to look at cutting employee benefits to gain advantage. Walmart, for example, uses labor practices that force a large percentage of their employees onto the public health care rolls. Another more obvious example is the problems some older companies are having with pensions. United ditched their pension obligations under bankruptcy protection, and now there are stories of GM looking at the same thing. When GM competes with a company in a country that has a single payer system, GM may be at a disadvantage, depending on the relative costs of taxes vs. health care. In addition, a company like United was at a disadvantage to a newer company like Jetblue because they have legacy pension obligations that Jetblue won't have for 50 years. And now that United has ditched its pension obligations, other older airlines like American are at a disadvantage because they still have their pensions to maintain.

One might argue that if none of these single payer systems existed, their wouldn't be this pressure for the US to have one as well. Granted, it would be reduced. But good luck getting other countries to ditch their single payer systems.

Another aspect of company systems is discrimination against those who are likely to cost more. That discrimination is probably mostly age discrimination, but it can also be weight or lifestyle based (obesity, those who are fans of risk taking sports) or even against those with families. The recent Walmart health care memo lead to this type of speculation, for example. We may be a way from Gattaca style discrimination, but its still there. And I'm not saying that companies will discriminate, but as long as their is economic benefit to doing so, some will be tempted.

There are, of course, problems with single payer systems as well, and generally no one is happy with the level of service of their government, but addressing the above problems in some fashion would definitely be useful.

As if their normal "registration required" crap wasn't enough, apparently the NY Times op ed columns now require a "New York Times Select" account, where you either have to get the newspaper or pay. Often, its easier for me to go to bugmenot than to remember what my login is for various sites, or easier just to look for other places for my news (or even just go to Google News which has some magic to get past the registraction).

I get the newspaper, or rather my wife does. Now I get to try and figure out what my home delivery ID is, and hope that both of us can actually use it on separate accounts. And of course I can't read the article I wanted _now_, since I'm not at home and we only get the weekend papers anyways.

Does the NY Times just want to fade into nothingness? Apparently your subscription gets you access to 100 stories from their archive, which also seems odd. Didn't most of their money come from that in the past? Are you telling me they think they'll get more money from people signing up to read their op-eds than they made on their archive? Or do most of the archive readers need access to more than 100 stores a month?

It should be about influence peddling, about eye balls, about getting people to your site so they can see the ads. Kos has a graph about the waning influence in the blogosphere of the top NY Times op-ed columnists because of this.

Presumably, they know their business and they know what they are doing, but this armchair quarterback thinks this is a really bad idea.

Our process for placing a judge on the US Supreme Court seems heavily flawed to me at the moment. After Robert Bork, in particular, we've come to the point where the President searches for someone with no known record. That person then goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee where he won't answer any questions about his opinions, especially if they might pertain to cases that could come before the court. And barring anything unforseen, they get placed on the court.

Arguably one of the most important, longest lasting and most far reaching positions of power in the US, and only a handful of people know anything about how they'll make decisions. Seems fairly flawed to me.

And perhaps, the way judges are supposed to work, they do the right thing by refusing to answer those questions. But if thats the case, it is the duty of the senators voting to approve the nomination to reject candidates with no record. Only by reviewing the candidates judicial record, and perhaps law review articles, etc, can they make an informed decision. There is no guaruntee, of course. There are examples of judges who have shocked everyone with their departure from their record, but its the only valid mechanism we have to actually know what we're in for. But we should know what we're getting.

Listening to some of the testimony of John Roberts, he claims that every case is unique, and he can't comment on vague questions, and he can't comment on things that are likely to come before the court, etc. Being a judge, to him, means taking the context, the laws, and the precedents and the history and rendering an opinion. Except his opinion does influence his decisions. The Supreme Court is seldom unanimous.

Not that I don't expect Roberts to get approved. But we need to change how we're doing this, which mostly requires the senators to not accept this type of nominee. We need nominees with more judicial experience, so we have a record on which to judge them.

Today, there were two large tech company acquisitions: eBay bought Skype and .

Now, the deal for Siebel makes a great deal of sense, unless you're worried about Oracle becoming more of a monopoly. The current market cap for Siebel is $5.39B, and they have $2.24B in cash on hand. They had revenue of $1.32B for the last year, and $883M in profit. This makes the $5.85B price Oracle agreed to fairly reasonable.

eBay is paying $2.6B for Skype, with another $1.5B offered for meeting financial targets. Skype seems to be a stretch for eBay because it doesn't seem to fall into the eBay business, but it could indicate a desire to move beyond just auctions. Skype isn't public, but some information was given out, they expect revenue of $60M this year, and $200M next year, but is not profitable. 54 million members, expected to double in a year, puts it at between $1-$2 dollars in revenue per user per yer, a very low number.

Now, Siebel is an older company, and its not going anywhere fast. Its been pretty flat for the last 2 years, and about equal to mid-99 before the bubble. Its a very obvious deal for Oracle and a fairly easy to understand price. Oracle is currently valued at $69B, has revenue of $11.8B and profit of $9.15B, so its about 10% of its value for about 10% more in income/profit, though I'm not sure how much of its own business would be cannibalized.

eBay is worth $53.1B and has $3.86B in revenue and $2.66B in profits. The only way this makes sense is if VOIP is on the verge of taking off, and Skype stands to be the largest player in the space... and that there is profit enough there in the business of undercutting the current telecoms. It seems like it may be a stretch to me. The potential is there... but its a risky move on eBay's part. No points for being risk averse, though.

A Reuters article about the flaws in job-based health care is some interesting reading. As an employee (and former employer) in the Bay Area who switches jobs often, I've often complained about the fact that my health care is attached to my job. Every time I switch companies, I have to redo my health care, I may have to change doctors if they aren't in the plans I'm offered, I may have hassles from the insurance company about covering pre-existing conditions. And if I want to start my own company, I have to pay COBRA fees to keep my existing coverage, or get my own personal coverage, or get my startup to offer health care.

One idea some friends of mine kicked around was starting a Credit Union or Professional Organization (or using one of the existing ones) to provide health care for its members. Increasingly, however, I'm thinking the only way to really do this is universal care. I know its going to suck, but when you look at all of the competing pressures, I don't know how else to do it. For instance, younger single people have few problems, so they are more likely to opt-out of the system. But if they do, that leaves just the more expensive people in the system, raising rates for everyone. Maybe individual coverage (like auto insurance) would work if we have laws requiring people to have health coverage, but then you might have companies which target "good health" people like some insurance companies target "good drivers". Where "good health" doesn't just mean "in good shape, doesn't smoke", but could mean "has good genes" or "is single under 30". Universal coverage means "everyone gets coverage" and payment is based on taxes, which means "ability to pay", and that ends up being pretty "fair" as these things go. Of course, then you get crappy government service, and crackpots (some are even doctors) in Sacramento or Washington determining what health care is good for you, and want "violates the sanctity of life" or they just don't want to provide because keeping some military base open (that the military wants to close) is more important than health care.

You'd think that broadband would be designed to be easy to use. After all, the average person using broadband these days is not a computer user. I know network setup isn't completely obvious, but DHCP certainly goes most of the way there. Having now used both Y! SBC DSL and Comcast High Speed Internet, they both make the process really annoying and practically spyware in their install kits.

Take Y! SBC DSL. They use PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE). This has something to do with their provisioning and usage logging. I'm willing to admit that they know their business better than I do and there may exist reasons for using this that outweigh the "plug and play" ease of use that the system would be without it. But on top of all that, they require you to use their software to set the account up. They mostly ignore the case of using a cable/dsl router. The software setup is actually half a series of web pages, and half built into their software (if you know the right web address, you can access their sign up process at around stage 4). Part of their software then installs a whole bunch of Y! software crud including Y! Messenger, Toolbar, their own browser in the newer versions, etc. Courtney really appreciated all this when I did it with her work laptop last time (since I didn't have a Windows machine at the time to do it from). I don't need nor do I want all of this bundled crap. At least, after the annoyance of figuring it out, it actually worked flawlessly for 2 years.

At the new place, I got a Comcast cable modem instead. Mostly because SBC claims it takes a week to get DSL service, whereas Comcast offered installation on Saturday and Sunday. Comcast uses a system more like that used by hotels and other "sign-in to use" services where they intercept all web traffic (and block other ports) until you register. On the surface, sounds better than the software route used above, except instead of the simple web registration that you'd get in a hotel or anywhere else that used this method, all you get is a "download this software to register". Windows software, I might add. 22MB of download. The page uses relative URLs for images, so if you go to some url that isn't at the top level of a domain, all of the images in the page fail to load. And they don't use a fully qualified domain name for the download link, just "cdn", so that fails as well. Or maybe there was some other failure going on there, since it worked later on. If you pop in the CD they give you, it has the 22MB registration software on it. So, you pop it in and register, and away you go. They make you reboot your computer (which shouldn't be involved at all, I have a gateway router/NAT), and the modem, and bam it works. Except it stopped working 20 minutes later. Reboot the modem, it works again until I try it next, and then I couldn't get it to work until I called Comcast support, they had me reboot my computer, the router and the modem, and it works (and he was connected to my modem and didn't understand why it didn't just work before). I'm expecting to go back home tonight and find it doesn't work. And to top it all off, they replaced the rotating World IE throbber with the C in the Comcast logo. How nice. Luckily I don't use IE. Unlike the Y! crud, which I could uninstall, I don't see anything in the list of programs to uninstall to fix that.

You'd think a little bit of software to set your computer to use DHCP would be fine. Or even instructions. They have instructions on their site on how to set your computer to use DHCP (they don't call it that, of course). Can they really not have made whatever provisioning/registration/whatever crap done on their end?

In my old age, I'm beginning to be less and less willing to deal with all of this stuff.

This past weekend, we hired the Delancy Street movers to pack and move into our house. Efficient, professional, I'll recommend them. The oddest feeling though, was to sit there and watch them move everything (and answering the occasional "where does this go?"). If I didn't need to direct it, maybe it wouldn't have been anything special (it wasn't as odd when they were packing, for instance). I did manage to sunburn the back of my neck, though.

Someone needs to come up with a simple widely adopted standard for serial cables to connect all A/V equipment. Maybe it won't do everything (video separate for now?) but after tearing apart two stereo/tv/dvd systems and pondering having to set them up in the new place, I'd really love being able to run just one cable from each device to the closest device, and have every cable be the same. Instead I have the weird chain of different cables for the video signal (with splitting/etc) and then the one to many for the audio (receiver to everything else). And on top of that are the computers...

Maybe I'm just a luddite that I thought "serial" and not "bluetooth"...

Hmm, this article by Neal Stephenson is an interesting counter-point to the earlier article by Ted Rall that I picked on. He basically equates the Jedi with the engineers and scientists who make the world we live in possible. His point is interesting and somewhat accurate, though equating engineers with Jedi would confer on us more power and coolness than we actually have. In reality, engineers and scientists tend to be masters of small domains, and modern society depends on many of these domains working in concert.

On the other hand, as Lazarus Long (no relation) said, specialization is for insects.

Which lead me to an interesting article about how to fix the software complexity problem. His claim is that every part of a system should be able to charge for its use. That is one way of solving the problem. The other is libraries, of course, which developers do exchange, sometimes for money, sometimes to encourage use of the system, and sometimes for free because it also doesn't cost us anything to share something after we've built it.