UK Doctors: Don’t treat the old and unhealthy

According to the Telegraph:

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

Fertility treatment and “social” abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as “out­rageous” and “disgraceful”.

About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.

Utah Legislator Seeks to End All Open Wireless Connections

In Utah, Representative Bradley Daw has introduced a bill, HB 139, that would effectively end all free wireless internet access in Utah. Why? Because Rep. Daw thinks minors might use open wireless access points to access porn and therefore free wireless access must be stopped.

Jeremy describes this as the unintended consequences of legislating morality. He is exactly correct. And the unintended consequences are very large because this bill would impose civil penalties on anyone who has a wireless access point which a minor uses to access porn. If a minor uses the internet in a hotel lobby to access a pornographic picture–$1000 fine. If a minor accesses “harmful material” at restaurant, at a library, at a cafe, at a truck stop, or outside someone’s house–$1000 fine per violation.

Rep. Daw’s bill tries to exempt private internet connections, but there’s a good argument that anyone who keeps their wireless connection open and unencrypted could get fined. Here’s Rep. Daw’s language designed to exempt home internet connections, “This section does not apply to a person who maintains a wireless network within the person’s private residence to provide personal wireless Internet access.”

Is an wireless access point inside my house that broadcasts outside it “within my private residence”? It doesn’t sound like it. Second, in today’s world all wireless internet connections that are unencrypted are arguably an invitation for neighbors to use and are therefore not “personal wireless access.”

At this moment, my wireless card picks up signals from 13 different wireless access points. Twelve of the 13 wireless access points use encryption, but one does not. One generous person is freely offering their internet connection to his or her neighbors.

Why do I believe this? When you set up a wireless router for the first time, the router strongly suggests that you enable encryption. Yet one person somewhere near me chose not to encrypt their wi-fi. This person had that option (they are using a Netgear router), and instead chose to freely offer internet to her neighbors.

If I lived in Utah and a minor accessed porn through my neighbor’s router, there is a good argument that my neighborhood is civilly liable for a $1000 fine per violation.

What irritates me most about is that Rep. Daw understands all of this. He is a computer engineer. He also claims to support limited government. And yet he wants intrusive government regulation that effectively ends free internet in Utah and requires everyone to turn on encryption on their personal wireless routers.

Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn

This would be a great breakthrough, if it scales up to commercial amounts of biofuel:

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn’t interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

I’m very skeptical. The next paragraph of the article explains why:

“It’s not five years away, it’s not 10 years away. It’s affordable, and it’s now,” said Wes Bolsen, the company’s vice president of business development.

No.  It is not “now.” Check out the picture–it is a guy with a  40 gallon tank. That is not production at a commercial scale. A couple paragraphs later the article says that Coskata will build a pilot plant and produce 40,000 gallons a year.  By way of comparison, we use 400 million gallons of gasoline every day in the United States.

I really hope this process scales up to produce commercial quantities of ethanol. But for now I’m going to wait and see.

The Pork-as-Usual GOP

Robert Novak gives the GOP some really good advice–declare a moratorium on Republican pork, and appoint Rep. Jeff Flake to the Appropriations Committee.

If only the free-spending Republicans would listen…

Can Environmentalism Be Compatible with Capitalism?

Gong Szeto asks if environmentalism can be compatible with capitalism. The answer clearly is yes. Free market environmentalism explains how free markets can be used to improve the environment.  Rick Stroup describes free market environmentalism here.  Randal O’Toole answers frequently asked questions about free market environmentalism here, and Terry Anderson and Don Leal explain Free Market Environmentalism in this book.

Szeto quotes a writer who endorses recent article by Jared Diamond in the NY Times that excoriates Americans’ excessive consumption. While Jared Diamond may understand the spread of plants across the globe, he doesn’t understand economics. Randal O’Toole explains how Diamond has over exaggerated his numbers. O’Toole concludes:

Can Diamond possibly be unaware that his numbers are wrong? Did he just use GDP or some other measure of wealth and assume that consumption of raw materials was perfectly proportional to that measure? Or is he deliberately exaggerating the problem so as to promote his alarmist prescription?

Diamond’s prescription is, of course, government planning and control, such as what would be required by the Kyoto protocol. A better prescription would be to let markets work: if we really run short of anything, the price will go up, and people will consume less. That way, we won’t have to worry about the arithmetic skills and hidden agendas of the government planners who Diamond wants to empower.

What Does Goldman Know That We Don’t?

My brother works for Goldman Sachs and I hope he got a nice bonus last year because Goldman, unlike the other big Wall Street firms didn’t get killed in the subprime crash. In fact, Goldman made over $10 billion last year, even as Citigroup lost $10 in the 4th quarter alone.

Micheal Lewis, who loves stories about how a few people beat everyone’s collective wisdom (see Moneyball and The Blind Side), writes this article explaining how Goldman didn’t get killed like everyone else:

What’s odd about the subprime crash is Goldman Sachs Group Inc. A single firm took a position contrary to the rest of Wall Street. Giant Wall Street firms are designed for many things, but not, typically, to express highly idiosyncratic views in the market.

…

By the end of 2006, the people creating and selling subprime mortgages and other so-called CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), had put Goldman Sachs in exactly the same position as every other Wall Street firm. Left to their own devices, traders in subprime-mortgage bonds would have sunk Goldman just as they sank Merrill Lynch, Citigroup Inc., Bear Stearns Cos. and every other major Wall Street firm.

Smart Guys

Enter two smart guys who trade Goldman’s proprietary books to argue to the CEO and chief financial officer that the subprime market feels soft and that Goldman should short it. This they do, in such massive quantities that they more than offset the long positions in subprime held throughout the rest of the firm, leaving Goldman short the subprime market and in a position to make billions when it crashes. End of story.

And it’s a good story. But consider what it implies. Their own traders and salespeople in subprime mortgages and related securities had put Goldman in exactly the same position as every other Wall Street firm: long subprime mortgages.

The only difference between Goldman and everyone else was that Goldman had, in effect, an entirely separate enterprise, sitting on top of the firm, with the power to reverse the judgment of its own supposed experts in various markets. They were able to do this, apparently, without ever saying a word about it to their own traders. Instead of telling the fools trading subprime mortgages that they are wrong, and that they should unwind their positions, they simply offset their trades.

Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is my favorite museum. Over four years ago, the Smithsonian opened the Udvar Hazy Center in in Chantilly, VA which features a number of exhibits they couldn’t fit in the Air and Space Museum on the Mall. I have always wanted to go to Udvar Hazy Center, but I had never gotten around to it until Saturday when my parents were visiting my wife and me. Below are some picture of our trip to the Museum.

SR-71 Blackbird

The exhaust of the SR-71s Pratt & Whitney J58-P4 engines. These powered the SR-71 to a world speed record of 2,193 mph and allowed it to set the altitude record of 85,068 feet in sustained flight.

Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde

Space Shuttle Enterprise

Read the rest of this entry »

CDs Sound the Same as SACD and DVD-A Technologies

I was pretty sure this was the case, but now there is a recent double blind study that shows that people can’t hear the difference between the sound from CDs and the higher resolution SACDs or DVD-A.

Also, it is difficult to hear the difference between MP3s with high bitrates and uncompressed audio straight from CDs. If you want to retain the audio fidelity of your music, but you want it in smaller file sizes, check out Hydrogen Audio for a lot of information on compressed (and uncompressed) audio formats.

Eee PC Resources

The Eee Pc is a small laptop computer. It sports a 7″ screen (800×480 resolution), a 900 MHz processor, a solid state hard drive of 2 or 4 gigs, and an impressively low price of $399 (for the 4 gig model). One of the reasons the price is so low is because it runs Xandros linux. It’s not a desktop replacement, but by all accounts it is a great ultraportable laptop–handy for websurfing, email, and easy to tote around.

Here are links to Eee PC resources on the web:

Asus’s Official Eee PC Homepage

• Official downloads for Eee
• English User Manual
• English Quick Start Guide

Wikipedia entry

Wikis/Guides

• EeeUser Wiki
  
• EeeGuides.com
• Wiki.eee-pc.de (German wiki)

Forums

• Eeeuser.com forums
• eeeplace.com — The Eee Pc dev community

Blogs

• Eeeuser.com
• Asus Eee News, Mods, and Hacks
• EeeHackers
• Eee Pc World

Eee Mods/Upgrades

• IVC Wiki — This is an impressive amount of internal upgrades including GPS with antenna, bluetooth, a card reader, power switch, 802.11n wifi, fm transmitter, and modem.
• Asus EEE PC Tweak Guide

Other Operating Systems

• Windows XP
  • IVC Wiki
  • EEE Guides
  • Eeeuser Wiki

• Ubuntu Gutsy

Purchasing Options

• Amazon
• Buy.com
• J&R
• Newegg
• Pricegrabber

Apropos of Nothing–Machinery

Machinery, originally uploaded by heiwa4126.