Category Archives: View

View 797 Tuesday, November 05, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously, 2012 Presidential Campaign.

Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare

Federal Register

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-06-17/pdf/2010-14488.pdf

IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE! Google’s secretive Omega tech just like LIVING thing .

Jerry

Emergent behavior – the crucial piece that turns a computator into a Heinleinian sentience – seems to have arrived:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/04/google_living_omega_cloud/

"Systems at a certain complexity start demonstrating emergent behavior, and it can be hard to know what to do with it."

Ed (pshrink)

IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE! Google’s secretive Omega tech just like LIVING thing

‘Biological’ signals ripple through massive cluster management monster

By Jack Clark, 4th November 2013

Exclusive One of Google’s most advanced data center systems behaves more like a living thing than a tightly controlled provisioning system. This has huge implications for how large clusters of IT resources are going to be managed in the future.

"Emergent" behaviors have been appearing in prototypes of Google’s Omega cluster management and application scheduling technology since its inception, and similar behaviors are regularly glimpsed in its "Borg" predecessor, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to The Register.

Emergence is a property of large distributed systems. It can lead to unforeseen behavior arising out of sufficiently large groups of basic entities.

Just as biology emerges from the laws of chemistry; ants give rise to ant colonies; and intersections and traffic lights can bring about cascading traffic jams, so too do the ricocheting complications of vast fields of computers allow data centers to take on a life of their own.

The kind of emergent traits Google’s Omega system displays means that the placement and prioritization of some workloads is not entirely predictable by Googlers.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/04/google_living_omega_cloud/

In Robert Heinlein’s masterpiece The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a large computer network on the Moon “comes alive” when the technicians add new system to the network. And of course science fiction stories have had intelligent self-conscious computers in stories since the Golden Age. Poul Anderson had a particularly attractive ship’s computer in some of his after Sandry stories. (See Starfog, 1967). Then there’s my own Starswarm, which I am still rather proud of. http://www.amazon.com/Starswarm-Jerry-Pournelle-ebook/dp/B006O1XF6U/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1383680625&sr=1-1&keywords=starswarm

A long time ago there was Eliza, a simple BASIC program that aped a Rogrian psychotherapist, and was actually thought to be intelligent; it was amplified by someone who sent me a copy of “Analiza” in what I believe to be CBASIC – alas, it was on 8 inch disks and I have long since ceased to have a way to read those, and I suspect any I have kept are now unreadable anyway. My fault for not putting them onto CDROM when I had the chance. Analiza was able to accept new scripts, and I played with it for a while: it could do a pretty good job of emulating an analyst, and what I added was scripts to deal with questions taken out of context – gentle admonition: “This will all go better if you stay to the subject. How do you feel about that?” and such like. It had groups of responses and would call one or another at random if sent to that group, with the goal of appearing not to be so repetitive. By being more directive it became more like a Freudian analyst and less like the Rogerian model of Eliza, and when I tried it on some undergraduates a number of them thought it might actually be intelligent if a bit limited. I wish I still had a copy.

Of course since that time psycho pharmaceuticals have become far more common, and the old schools of “talk” psychotherapy have vanished or been relegated to organizations outside the control of academic psychology. I suppose some such school still exist but I seldom hear of them. At one time debates among Rogerians, Freudians and disciple breakoffs such as Horney and Jung, Semanticists such as Wendell Johnson ( I studied under him at Iowa a lifetime ago), psychodrama, Primal Scream – these were important. They don’t seem to be any longer.

Incidentally, iPhone users can ask Siri about Eliza, but she doesn’t know about Analyza.

The question of intelligent computers becomes serious when we contemplate the future of armed drones. See

Killer Robots and the Laws of War

Autonomous weapons are coming and can save lives. Let’s make sure they’re used ethically and legally.

Autonomous weapons are coming and can save lives. Let’s make sure they’re used ethically and legally.

By Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman

With each new drone strike by the United States military, anger over the program mounts. On Friday, in one of the most significant U.S. strikes, a drone killed Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in the lawless North Waziristan region bordering Afghanistan. Coming as Pakistan is preparing for peace talks with the Taliban, the attack on this major terrorist stirred outrage in Pakistan and was denounced by the country’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who said the U.S. had “murdered the hope and progress for peace in the region.”

Recent reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also challenged the legality of drone strikes. The protests reflect a general unease in many quarters with the increasingly computerized nature of waging war. Looking well beyond today’s drones, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations—the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots—is lobbying for an international treaty to ban the development and use of “fully autonomous weapons.”

http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-371963/

At the moment there is always a human in the link when a drone launches a Hellfire against a human target, but there are a number of automated weapons on modern warships: there’s no way humans can control the weapons and keep the ship safe against multiple attacks. Imagine 250 small autonomous helicopters with a range of 30 miles and a payload of a kilogram of thermite or C4 or both. Flying at under 10 meters altitude above the land (if the target is in harbor) or sea. Or a dozen Exocet cruise missiles. Or even a thousand one-kilo payload model aircraft. You can’t just raster the target area, and they’re closing fast…

On the general subject of the future of the Navy – how many Big Carriers do we need, and is that the most effective force we can build and afford – my son Commander Phillip Pournelle had an article in the May, 2013 Proceedings of the U>S> Naval Institute “The Rise of the Missile Carriers” http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013-05/rise-missile-carriers which has generated considerable debate among naval strategists. He has replied to some of that in

We Need a Balanced Fleet for Naval Supremacy

The following contribution is by CDR Phillip E. Pournelle, USN. CDR Phillip E. Pournelle is a Surface Warfare Officer and an Operations Analysts.  He currently serves as a military advisor to OSD’s Office of Net Assessment.
Lazarus’ essay entitled Naval Supremacy Cannot be ‘Piggybacked’ on Small Ships attempts to rebut essays of Captains Hughes, Kline, Rubel and Admiral Harvey (here and here) advocating the employment of small missile combatants operating as flotillas in the littoral environment.
Technological changes underway today will increasingly challenge the way we conduct business today.  The United States will have to adapt to retain its lead.  In order to adapt, debates such as these must be part of a larger Cycle of Research, an ongoing iteration of wargames, analysis, and fleet exercises.

http://www.informationdissemination.net/2013/11/we-need-balanced-fleet-for-naval.html

The United States has always been a maritime power – our first projection of force beyond our borders was against pirates, and our first foreign war was over naval matters and the laws of war – and the structure of the Navy has been a vital matter. The debate is important.

And developments in self-directed weapons is important. American overseas force projection carries us far from the sea and into the mountains of Pakistan.

Visions of a Permanent Underclass

A new book imagines an America of the rich and the ‘shantytown’ dwellers.

By

William A. Galston

In 1958, as millions of American high-school students were beginning their long infatuation with George Orwell’s "1984" and Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World," a major figure in the British Labour Party, Michael Young, published a far more prescient futurist tract. His essay, "The Rise of the Meritocracy" described a year-2034 dystopia in which general intelligence determined the distribution of income and status.

The losers knew that they were failures, and the ideology of meritocracy had eliminated the moral basis of complaint: The losers deserved their subordination and should accept it. In the end, they didn’t, and they revolted against a system that insulted their dignity.

Fifty-five years after Young’s neglected classic, economist Tyler Cowen has entered the fray with his latest book, "Average Is Over," which analyzes the dynamics behind the rise of what he terms the "hyper-meritocracy." As his point of departure, he takes some well-known trends—growing economic inequality, falling male wages, declining labor-force participation and the rising share of the national product flowing to capital rather than to labor.

Citing the work of economists such as David Autor, Mr. Cowen depicts a polarizing labor market, increasingly hollowed out as middle-skill, middle-wage jobs disappear. The Great Recession, he argues, unmasked the fact that U.S. employers had taken on more middle-wage workers than they needed or could afford. That’s why so many displaced workers are being forced to accept new jobs at lower wages—and why so many others have dropped out of the workforce.

The main driver of these disquieting trends is technology—specifically, smart machines that can do (and do better) an ever-rising share of what human beings do to earn their living. As this proceeds, some will win out: people who work with and around smart machines; managers who can organize these people; individuals with high general intelligence who can size up new situations and quickly learn what they need to know; and conscientious subordinates with the key new virtues of reliability and team play. Everyone else will lose out—except the marketers who know how to appeal to the wealthy.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303918804579107754099736882

The American education system, coupled with the drive for higher and higher minimum wages, seems designed to produce a society which would rather buy robots than hire citizens.

I suppose it is not appropriate to ask, Why wouldn’t it? Robots don’t form unions to demand guns, and they don’t feel entitled. And what do our schools qualify the lower half of the class to do?

Don’t buy into the Google ‘Omega’ hype.

It’s just a complex feedback-driven network-/processing-/storage-/workload-distribution system, there are no *cognitive* emergent behaviors concerned.

This is a very worthy and admirable achievement within the IT space, but it has nothing to do with ‘AI’. ‘Omega’ is an automated bounded-domain application, nothing more.

——-

Roland Dobbins

Oh, I doubt that just hooking up large networks will spontaneously generate consciousness, and I am familiar with the argument that nothing else ever will, but it’s only now that computers are fast enough to allow the kinds of programs that might make expert systems look sentient even to run in real time. When I was writing Starswarm I had to give a lot of thought to requirements of a real AI entity: not that I could design one, but what would one need for there to be a possibility of it working.  I am sure there are a few more iterations of Moore’s law to come, and when I look at what we can do now as compared to what we had …

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 796 Friday, November 01, 2013

All Saints Day

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously, 2012 Presidential Campaign.

Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare

Federal Register

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-06-17/pdf/2010-14488.pdf

It is now clear that the Obama Administration was quite aware that not only would most individual health care plans be cancelled under the Affordable Care Act, but also many of the employer provided health care plans would be unsatisfactory under ACA and therefore could not be kept by their holders. It is not certain that the President knew all this but to assume he did not would be to assume that he paid no attention to important matters in the implementation of his health care act, and out of ignorance announced that if you liked your plan you could keep it.

Napoleon Bonaparte said that one should never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. During the last days of the Romanov dynasty it was widespread within the Russian Empire that “the Little Father” could not have known of the terrible injustices going on, and “If only the Tsar knew” all the problems would be fixed. Pleas of incompetence rather than malice have often been a last resort for both incompetents and cynically for tyrants.

Meanwhile the enrollments are going very slowly, at a rate that will make it impossible for there to be enough young and healthy people to sign up at the new rates that will make ACA affordable. That is: the insurance companies can continue to offer ‘affordable health care’ to persons with pre-existing conditions only if the premiums are supported by enough people without pre-existing conditions now paying far higher premiums in order to pay for those who are already sick. That of course assumes that the level of health care continues rather than is drastically cut. The actual numbers used in assessing the costs and benefits also assume that costs can be lowered through many means including lower payments to care providers from medical specialists to orderlies; a questionable assumption.

I have no disclosable source for the following, but I feel an obligation to say it:

Subj: Fwd: Don’t log into Obamacare site.

Obviously I haven’t verified this, nor will I!

According to one congress critter, once you log in and sign up for Obamacare, YOU CANNOT BACK OUT. So DON’T LOG INTO THE SITE out of curiosity because it could haunt you.

I do not care to verify it either. I repeat I have no revealable source but it comes from someone I consider sane and intelligent.

Destroy the Market To Save It

Jerry,

As far as I know, the ACA shouldn’t directly affect your Kaiser coverage.

Indirectly, ACA pulls a bunch of nominal future funding out of Medicare, and at one point there was talk of discontinuing the Medicare Advantage program to save some of the money cut, but that seems not to have happened. At least not so far. My guess would be that the political fallout was deemed excessive, but that’s just a guess.

Also indirectly, if the ACA ends up damaging Kaiser’s delivery system, then of course you may have problems too.

Meanwhile, what actually is happening sounds unbelievable, but take my word on it. I’ve been following this closely for a while.

By deliberate design, forced by regulations promulgated by this Administration under ACA, the majority of us pre-Medicare types currently insured either individually or via employers will lose our current plans after 2014.

Employers will then have to either spend considerably more to substitute ACA compliant plans, pay modest fines and drop their full-time employees onto the ACA exchanges, or push employees back to part-time less-than-30-hours status.

Individuals will then have to either buy considerably more expensive (if healthy, as most are) ACA compliant plans, or do without and pay the fines.

This was all supposed to happen at the end of this year per the actual text of the ACA as passed. The Administration decided to delay most of this till 2015 (after the 2014 elections) by executive fiat.

I’m not sure why some but not all individually insured people are getting the chop on the original schedule, thus providing graphic warning of what’s to come. Apparently the insurance companies were left with the option to cancel individual coverage for ACA non-compliance at the end of this year instead of waiting till next. Apparently a lot of them are now exercising that option for their higher-cost customers.

Actual information as to the whys of this is scarce, probably for the obvious reasons.

The first few million individuals cancelled seem to be serving as the canary in a coal mine. I don’t know why this Administration let that happen. Perhaps it simply didn’t occur to them that the insurance companies might do this? Or perhaps they simply didn’t think anyone would notice.

Either way, November 2014 is now one year away. The canary has noisily died. The majority whose current insurance is yet to be affected by ACA should be finding out about it by next October, if not sooner.

The next 12 months will be interesting.

Porkypine

Physician friends tell me that some of their patients have truly horrible health insurance plans and are well rid of them; but of course they don’t know what they will get in exchange. Apparently there are some health care plans worse than if their holders had simply put the premium money under the mattress. At least they would have something. Of course with ACA images of babies and bathwater become inevitable.

The principle question on health care is, who is obliged to pay for what for other people? If I am entitled to something, someone else is obliged to pay. Given that we are borrowing money to do all this, we all have some share in the increasingly huge debt. This is one way to transfer money from younger people to older people, and from the productive to the unproductive,

And they never catch wise….

All news in Los Angeles is now concentrated on the incident in Terminal Three, in which a male person dressed in camouflage but probably not military issue clothing removed an AR-15 rifle from a bag and began shooting. The airport was shut down, no planes were allowed to land or take off, and massive ground and air traffic jams resulted.

The shooter was quickly subdued (and may or may not be dead). The shooter is rumored but not confirmed to be a TSA employee, and the victims, more than one but under ten are rumored but not confirmed to be TSA employees as well. At least one is said to be dead. An officer involved shooting is confirmed.

Planes are now landing at LAX. It is not clear if any are taking off yet. Traffic jams continue. As it happens I had to drive out to Kaiser this morning and heard this on the radio as I drove home When I first heard it all flights to LAX across the world were not taking off. That restriction appears to have ended. The International Air Traffic Jam is extensive and will take time to clear.

There were no consequences out here in the Valley where I live, but in west Los Angeles and surrounding communities it’s a pure-dee mess.

Let’s Kick the Air Force Out of Space.

<https://medium.com/war-is-boring/740cf5a8e930>

Roland Dobbins

Despite the title, the article is reasoned, not mere polemic.  The Navy has long experience at long missions in isolation. The Air Force does not…

View 796 Thursday, October 31, 2013

All Hallows Eve

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously.

One reason I try not to be involved in breaking news is that much of the information needed to understand what is happening simply is not available. This was the case with the statement that 160,000 Kaiser members had got letters of cancellation of their plans. There were no other details, including who and why.

This probably comes closest to an explanation:

Kaiser Plans

From BuyKP.org

Click through: 2013 -> get a quote

Has this disclaimer:

The plans offered on this site are available for coverage starting in 2013 and are effective through December 2013. Please note that all 2013 Kaiser Permanente plans will be discontinued on December 31, 2013, so that we can renew coverage on January 1, 2014, onto a new plan that includes all the benefits of the Affordable Care Act.

So all their plans are canceled, to be replaced by ACA plans

David LeFevre

I have not received any such notice from Kaiser, and apparently there are exceptions. At least I hope so. When we were first married we had the usual young people’s health care insurance through the aerospace industry: basically, we pay for anything normal and were insured for anything major. That lasted until the 70’s by which time we had four boys, and I was setting out on a career as a free lance writer, which meant that my income was, uh, variable. Roberta worked in education and got medical insurance through that. We determined that what we really wanted was Kaiser health maintenance, which essentially was, pay your membership dues, pay a reasonable co-payment per visit, pay your dental and eyeglasses bills, and Kaiser took care of everything. It wasn’t easy to get into Kaiser except through a group, and free lance writers were not in any recognizable group. We managed to get into Kaiser through Roberta’s employer, and that pretty well chained her to that job, and a long freeway trip every day. Eventually she needed to retire. By then I was making a decent income, and there was this thing called COBRA under which you got to keep your health care plan for several years by paying a not small but not unreasonable monthly fee, and when that ran out the choice was to continue with Kaiser and pay it myself, or go find something else. We chose to stay with Kaiser, and they took care of all of us as a health maintenance organization, and over the years I realized just what a good deal we had compared to most of my friends including many in the movie industry.

That lasted until I turned 65, when I was told my rates would go up by a factor of four, but I had another choice: I could let Medicare pay my Kaiser dues, and things would essentially go on as they always had. By then all the kids were out on their own and not covered under the Kaiser plan anyway. As far as I was concerned those were the only choices – I never even considered going anywhere but Kaiser where we had been happy for decades. So we chose the Medicare Advantage option and I took out some kind of supplementary insurance plan for a nominal monthly payment. It all went smoothly and when Roberta turned 65 some years later her Medicare payments went to Kaiser as well (in the intermediate years she had been covered at Kaiser under my account so far as I can tell – the payments I had been making to Kaiser had covered a family membership although by that time she and I were the only family members. In any event that was my status and when in 2008 I developed brain cancer and needed a long and expensive series of radiation treatments involving about ten specialists everything was covered including the parking fees for getting to the treatment center.

And all was well and all has been well. Our copayments are reasonable, high enough to discourage frivolous visits but not so high as to make us reconsider going to the emergency room when it seemed reasonable to do so. I don’t think Kaiser can be cloned into a universal health care system, but if it could be I’d be in favor of that. The people there don’t seem to be spending their time wishing they were somewhere else. Everyone is cheerful and friendly, from the orderlies to the medical specialists. It all works, and I have found that true at five local Kaiser establishments and one in Texas.

So when I heard that Kaiser was cancelling its memberships I was concerned. I wanted details. I have yet to find many. I do not know why.

Source of Kaiser Health News quote Re:Kaiser Permanente cancellations

Jerry,

Here is an email exchange I had today with Julie Appleby, one of the co-authors of the Kaiser Health News article about Kaiser Permanente’s cancellations …..

——————————————————————————-

Hi, thanks for your note. We interviewed Kaiser directly.

You can also find more information about enrollment in group and non group coverage in California in this report http://www.chcf.org/~/media/MEDIA%20LIBRARY%20Files/PDF/C/PDF%20CAHealthPlansInsurersAlmanac2013.pdf

Best,

Julie

From: Steven Cooley [mailto:swcooley@me.com]

Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 9:23 AM

To: Julie Appleby

Subject: Source for Kaiser Permanente cancellation number in Kaiser Health News article

Ms. Appleby,

In a recent article you co-authored in Kaiser Health News there is the following quote ….

"Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state."

What is your source for this quote?

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Steven W. Cooley, M.D

The pdf referenced above doesn’t enlighten me very much, but it does present an enormous amount of information about health care financing in California. Indeed it tells me more than I really wanted to know.

What is clear is this: The Affordable Health Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare, will end a very great number of medical care plans. It is not true that “If you like your health care plan you will be able to keep it” or that “If you like your doctor you will be able to keep him.” Moreover, it was known at the time that President Obama famously made those promises many times. What it really meant is “If you like your health care plan and I think it’s good enough for you, you will get to keep it,” which is not quite the same thing. The purpose of the ACA was to end “inadequate” health insurance.

The new plans have all kinds of minimum coverage mandated by law: I am unable to confirm that the new plans require women older than 45 to have maternity care insurance, but that has been reported by many sources. There are a number of items mandated for the minimum plan acceptable to the ACA regulators; there is also the mandate that all plans must accept anyone applying without regard to pre-existing conditions. If you are in third stage pancreatic cancer, they still have to take you at the same premium that someone ten years younger and not afflicted will pay. That sounds wonderful, but what it means is that the younger healthy person must pay the same premium as the middle aged overweight person already suffering from pancreatic cancer; and that premium is going to be considerably higher than what the younger person was paying.

There are a hundred variations on that story, but that is the essence of it. And this is the source of the widening opposition to the Affordable Care Act: it turns out to be affordable for the old and sick, but not affordable to the young and well, whose best economic option is to have no health care at all, pay the fines (which are fairly nominal), and go take out a health care policy only when they are sick and need one. That is the best economic course, and it’s hard to show that it is not a moral choice. The alternative is for young people just starting a family to pay a substantial part of their income to support the medical care of older sick strangers; and it is not at all clear why they have a moral obligation to do that.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/29/this-is-why-obamacare-is-cancelling-some-peoples-insurance-plans/ 

The President’s Broken Health-Care Promises

It was well known, even in 2009, that millions would lose their health plans under ObamaCare.

By

Karl Rove

For nearly four years, President Obama has frequently offered some variation of this promise about the Affordable Care Act: "If you like your health-care plan," as he said in a speech to the American Medical Association in June 2009, "you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

NBC News caused a kerfuffle on Monday when it reported the Obama administration knew for years that millions would be forced off their preferred insurance plan. This hardly amounts to a revelation: the president and his people, along with Democratic Party leaders, had to know that this would happen.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303618904579167611885025296

I call your attention to another article in today’s Wall Street Journal:

One Quick Fix to Ease the Coming Doctor Shortage

The White House proposes to cut on-the-job training for new M.D.s just when we need more physicians.

By

Atul Nakhasi

Ryan Scully wanted to be a doctor from the moment he began volunteering as a paramedic and firefighter during his freshman year of college. In medical school at George Washington University, he passed all of his preclinical and clinical requirements, as well as two national licensing exams required of all medical students. Just before graduation in 2012, though, he learned that he had not been accepted into a residency training program necessary for gaining his certification as a practicing physician. He would receive his M.D. degree in May with the rest of his class—but without a hospital training spot, he could not practice medicine.

Last year 1,761 M.D.s shared the same fate. And now the White House wants to set aside even less money for doctor training while reorganizing the nation’s insurance market. At a time when the new health-care law is expected to create a demand for more physicians, a proposed $11 billion budget cut over the next 10 years guarantees there will be fewer doctors. This could have a serious effect on the health of the nation.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303680404579139563450701076

I have before commented that the real bottle neck to entering the medical profession is the lack of teaching hospital residencies.

I suggest we consider setting up some at VA centers in major cities. This would have the advantage of insuring better treatment for veterans while meeting some of the looming doctor shortage. I can think of other places for teaching hospitals. Yes, they are expensive, but it’s amazing how much a billion dollars will buy even in these days.

We already borrow money to pay Bunny Inspectors. May I suggest we would be better off paying that money to finance internships and residencies for recent MD graduates?

Enough for the moment. I will wait for comments before going on. It’s lunch time anyway.

Subject: The VA and teaching

Jerry, you said in today’s column that the VA should set up teaching residencies in some of its hospitals in major cities. I think you should know that there’s no need for them to do this, as they already have. As you probably know (but your readers won’t) I’m under the care of several different specialists at either the VA clinic in Sepulveda or at the VA medical center in West LA. (It’s that big building just to the west of the 405 at Wilshire.) Except for my ophthalmologist and audiologist, all of my appointments are with residents, although their attendings also see me after the resident is finished. And, the first time I was hospitalized for my low platelet condition, I was asked if I’d mind being examined by several students. Naturally, I gave my consent and was examined, one by one, by about half a dozen aspiring doctors. I know that the Wilshire VA is a teaching hospital, and unless I’m badly wrong, most if not all of their major facilities are.

Oh I knew that many already exist: my point was that more would be a better use resources than many of the federal government projects we fund.  Expand what we have and open some more; and of course the VA need not be the only places.

View 796 Tuesday, October 29, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

Regarding the source of the news that Kaiser cancelled 160,000 memberships in Northern California, all of those statements including the one in Forbes Magazine come from a single line :

“Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people – about half of its individual business in the state.” http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/October/21/cancellation-notices-health-insurance.aspx

In a publication called Kaiser Health News. It was quoted in an NBC Health News story that ended:

Jay Hancock contributed to this story. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. http://www.nbcnews.com/health/thousands-get-health-insurance-cancellation-notices-8C11417913

I have been unable to find any story from a northern California source listing anyone who had received this cancellation, nor have I heard from anyone who says his/her membership was cancelled.

I have this:

Kaiser Cancelations

Jerry

The low cost plans are being canceled. One gets a new plan in 2014.

Going to the Kaiser web site and getting quotes for my birthday [1957].

The new plans have new free services, that show up in your monthly bill.

For reference the plan prices:

Prices December 2013

Copay: $602, $555, $490

Deductible plans: $584, $487, $459, $415 HSA Deductible Plans: $448, $390, $318, $336, $258

Prices January 2014

Copay: $782, $727

Deductible plans: $715, $598, $596

HSA Deductible Plans: $571, $480, $446, $439

David LeFevre

But it has no source listed. I would have thought a story of 160,000 cancellations in Northern California would have caused at least news in that area, but I have been unable to find any. Our local Kaiser office was unaware of any of this when I called the PR department, and friends on staff locally have not heard of it. It is not astonishing – the ACA is going to cause restructure of many health plans – but the details are lacking.

One possible speculation is that a number of employers which offered Kaiser as one of the alternatives to the employee health care plan have withdrawn that option recently, but the bare statement that 160,000 memberships were cancelled does not seem to have any other source or support than the Kaiser Health News report that has been repeated by other publications including Forbes and NBC. I would be glad of any other information on this.

Added at 1530:

" Kaiser cancelled the memberships of 160,000 members in California"

Dr. Pournelle,

Don’t know about the numbers, but here is a decent explanation of why insurance would be cancelled:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/29/this-is-why-obamacare-is-cancelling-some-peoples-insurance-plans/

Kit Case

All of which is true enough, and probably explains the mysterious “Kaiser cancelled 160,000” report. Apparently ACA has so many exceptions to the “you can keep your policy if you like it” section in the bill that it there are more exceptions than guarantees.  This is another reason for the sticker shock, and it is still happening. The Republicans offered to let Obama have a year off to fix ACA, but he turned that down in a huff.  He may regret doing that.

Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insurance – Investigations

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/28/21213547-obama-admin-knew-millions-could-not-keep-their-health-insurance?lite

From the article:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

John

No one is astonished to learn that many cannot keep their old insurance policies because the policies will be cancelled: after all, the insurance company calculated the premium on the basis of no existing medical conditions – pre-conditions – and now if the policy is continued they must accept those with pre-conditions or acute maladies at the same premium cost as they used to charge for those without pre-conditions. That is a formula for bankruptcy; so the policies must be cancelled, and the coverage offered to the previous holders at the new premium rate which will have to be considerably higher than what they used to charge, or they can’t stay in business. You can’t pay out more than you take in and continue to exist.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/02/010212075309.htm# implies that Einstein’s Special Theory is falsified. It also invites revival of an ether theory (a medium in which light waves can wave). Michelson, whose experiment was the main impetus for the Special Theory that abolished ether, never accepted the Special Theory, but Relativity both Special and General are accepted by nearly all physicists (if not understood well by very many of them; the math is brutal). Petr Beckmann in Einstein Plus Two (alas, long out of print and never reissued, but popularized by Tom Bethell in Questioning Einstein http://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Einstein-Is-Relativity-Necessary/dp/0971484597) presents an ether theory to wit, that the ether is gravitational fields, which he says is consistent with all the observations including GPS and the clocks east and west phenomenon**, but with much simpler math. That theory would be consistent with these observations as well.

Obviously science fiction writers would be pleased to do away with the Special Theory and its absolute limit to the speed of light, but most, including me, have written around it one way or another.

** Note: On October, 1971, J. C. Hafele of Washington in St. Louis and Richard Keating of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, borrowed two cesium clocks from the Naval Observatory and bought each a first class found trip seat on commercial flights, one headed east, the other west.  The clocks were strapped into the seats and never moved again until they returned, nor were they observed in transit.  “The experiment may be the cheapest ever conducted” to test relativity, Scientific American explained. When the clocks were returned to Washington, the west bound clock had speeded up by 273 nanoseconds compared to an identical clock that remained at the Observatory, and the east bound clock had lost 59 nanoseconds. The previous position of Einstein was that “Moving clocks run slow”, but there had been no prediction of a time difference depending on the direction of travel. The explanation by the relativity theorists involved a new frame of reference and a long defense as to what that reference frame was needed. Beckmann’s theory predicted the time differences due to the travel of the clocks through Earth’s gravitational field.

Yesterday’s View had this:

Some numbers to contemplate:

                                 Expenditures in 2011 (Billions of Dollars):

New Homes                     $337 Billion

Automobiles                     $328 Billion

Computers                       $375 Billion

Comply with Tax Code     $392 Billion

Which generated this letter

Dr. Pournelle,

[I delete the Patron Subscription renewal notice with thanks]

In a recent post, you included this information:

Expenditures in 2011 (Billions of Dollars):

New Homes $337 Billion

Automobiles $328 Billion

Computers $375 Billion

Comply with Tax Code $392 Billion

Would you mind sharing your source? I would love to share this with some friends, but I hate to quote unsourced numbers.

Thank you,

Beth

The source of that is The Growth Experiment Revisited: Why Lower Simpler Taxes Really Are America’s Best Hope for Recovery, by Lawrence B. Lindsay. http://www.amazon.com/The-Growth-Experiment-Revisited-Americas/dp/0465050700

Lindsay, one time Harvard Professor of Economics, was a close advisor in economics to Ronald Reagan, and later was the principal economic advisor to Bush I, an economic period that produced budget surpluses. His Reagan years were reported in The Growth Experiment; in this new book he reports on what has happened since 1990 when The Growth Experiment was published.

I heartily recommend this book to your attention. It is all essential to understanding a way out of the train wreck we find ourselves in.

I am working on a report on what has happened to science, and how “Science has lost its way” as Michael Hiltzik put it in Sunday’s LA Times. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027,0,1228881.column#axzz2j8pM1NRd

Very few science experiments are every confirmed; when they are the error rates in the original reports, though peer reviewed and published in leading journals like Science and Nature, are astoundingly high. It is a matter of very great concern.

And it’s lunch time.

I have a good deal of mail reflecting the following views:

Mass Cancellations Jerry,

More corroboration for the Kaiser Health News story: The Director of "Covered California" (which I gather is the official California state Obamacare implementation organization) says 800,000 to 900,000 Californians overall will lose individual coverage this January 1st due to Obamacare not grandfathering their plans.

http://blog.sfgate.com/djsaunders/2013/10/29/coveredca-chief-up-to-900000-will-lose-health-plans-on-1231/

Given that Kaiser Permanente has 40% of the overall California health insurance market, 6.6 million customers overall, 1.1 million of these non-group (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/29/business/la-fi-mo-health-insure-market-20130129),

160,000 losing their individual Kaiser coverage at the end of this year seems highly plausible and in rough proportion to the national numbers being reported.

Note also that this implies hundreds of thousand more Californians losing their Kaiser individual coverage at the end of next year, and millions more Californians overall losing their individual coverage then

– see my previous letter.

Kaiser Health News, for what it’s worth, has been one of the more reliable and factual Obamacare news sources I’ve found during the last couple years I’ve been following this. They are in fact associated with the Kaiser Foundation; they’re not some fly-by-night outfit.

And 900,000 Californians losing coverage this year makes the 2 million nationwide estimate I quoted earlier look distinctly conservative.

I’m not surprised that you had a hard time finding others reporting this story a day ago, by the way. This story is just in the last 24 hours hitting mainstream media consciousness, after being ignored for years.

I suspect we’ll see a lot more data emerge in coming days.

Porkypine

I have never doubted that a very large number of healthcare insurance policies would be cancelled as a result of the Affordable Care Act, nor have I any doubt that some of them will be at Kaiser; thus when I heard the 160,000 at Kaiser story I was merely looking for some details.  The surprise came when I did not find them, nor have I yet a week later., I found a number of citations of NBC news and Forbes but they all traced back to a single sentence in the Kaiser Health News issue – a simple assertion without details or cause.  And I do note that Kaiser Health News although founded at the same time as Kaiser Permanente is not the same group and does not have so far as I can see any sharing of Directors or staff.  I don’t actually question that 160,000 memberships have been cancelled – but I have yet to find any details, or hear from anyone it happened to.  This seems very odd to me, because Kaiser Health News is not a source of news about Kaiser policy: it reports but it does not make or govern or debate Kaiser policy. If it is reporting inside knowledge it certainly doesn’t have much detail to report.  That seems odd.

Normally when 160,000 people lose their health insurance there will be a flood of local stories featuring people who have just lost their insurance, with much weeping and sorrow.  I haven’t found those. Perhaps the news media have a reason for neglecting the stories: indeed my suspicion was that this was a direct result of ACA and reporting the details would have been seen as harmful to Mr. Obama and ACA. 

And I first saw it about a week ago, and thought that by now it would have sunk in. Perhaps it has.

We have not seen the last of the consequences of ACA. I am still concerned how it will affect me: although I paid my Kaiser membership fees or premiums for years, when I reached 65 I was told that I could either allow Medicare to pay them for me, or I could pay about 4 times as much as I had been paying the day I turned 65.  On reflection I decided to allow you to pay it for me, since clearly the 4 times as much was not insurance premium cost: I wasn’t any more likely to be critically ill at the end of my birthday month as I was when it began.  My payments increased because the law said they would, and for no other reason. 

I will be interested in how this all turns out. I am one of those who is pleased with the health care plan I had before the Affordable Care Act, but then I was happy enough with what I had been paying before I turned 65. I wasn’t given any choice in that matter; I do not know what choices I will have this time. Everyone I talk to at Kaiser says I should not worry about it.  We’ll see.  I am of an age to frighten MBA administrators of health care plans…

And this from the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/29/this-is-why-obamacare-is-cancelling-some-peoples-insurance-plans/