exempli gratia

I got a new alarm clock that lets you plug in your iPod and will wake you to the music from your player. (if you don’t have your iPod docked then it weakly beeps at you)

The Finale from “Chorus Line” is a good way to wake up in the morning. The Dropkick Murphys The Rocky Road to Dublin also works. Loreena McKennett- not so much.

I won the Gleneagle Men’s Club Match Play Championship this week.

I also shot my best round ever – an 88. I think my handicap is going down.

before I forget…. Every rainbow has two ends…except  Mobius Rainbows and Sundogs

Normally I would expect the rainbow to be after the storm, but this is Colorado

We had some weather floating around today

I read Paul Krugman’s column on our future prosperity, and then found that Avedon had also read and commented on it along with some links to other commentors. One of the best I saw was about cheap-labor conservatives.

Work cheap or starve, a motto to live by.

These cheap-labor conservatives should read the mission statement for the United States sometime. It’s right there in the first paragraph of the Constitution -  after “We the People of the United States, in Order to”.

• form a more perfect Union,
• establish Justice,
• insure domestic Tranquility,
• provide for the common defence,
• promote the general Welfare, and
• secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

and ends “do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

About the only mission they seem to care for is to provide for the common defence, because there is money to be made there.

I hadn’t realized how insidious these trackers have become. This WSJ article discusses how cookies have grown since their Netscape days. There is also a link to a tool that tells you who has what installed on a domain site, about half way down the article.

Is there advertising on web pages? I should probably pay more attention and be less oblivious.

Genius is seeing  patterns where no one has seen them before.

Insanity is seeing patterns where none exist.

Creativity is illuminating or illustrating patterns.

I was thinking about free markets. When many people talk about ‘Free ‘ markets I wonder exactly what they mean.  Is it ‘Free’ as in laissez-faire? Is it ‘Free’ as in ‘no monopolies but anything else goes’? Is it ‘Free’ as in caveat empor? Or is it ‘Free’ as in open and above board – a level playing field with free access to all? Somehow I don’t think the last option fits with most uses of ‘Free Market’.

I was thinking about free markets in terms of rivers. Some people think that rivers should be free. They should flow unobstructed, where ever nature takes them. People have noticed that building communities along rivers led to many good things. Not only do they get the enhanced agriculture from the constantly refreshed alluvial plain, but they also have a handy transport highway on the river itself. The communities learn to deal with the annual floods that refresh the fields. Life is good and everyone prospers. But, once a generation the river runs wild, floods outside its expected fields, diverts its path, gouges new channels, leaves communities high and dry, threatens prosperity, induces change. All-in-all, rivers may cause more damage in one year than all the good produced since the last catastrophe.

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Each year, the federal government wastes billions of American taxpayers’ dollars on improper payments to individuals, organizations, and contractors.  These are payments made in the wrong amounts, to the wrong person, or for the wrong reason.  In 2009, improper payments totaled $98 billion, with $54 billion stemming from Medicare and Medicaid.  We cannot afford nor should we tolerate this waste of taxpayer dollars and in our health care system.

From the White House

Let’s see, $3,830 Billion budget -  $98 Billion waste. That’s about  2.6% percent waste. Not the best of numbers, but certainly not worth going into a paralytic fury about.  I suppose it is easier for some people to grasp a much smaller number than the almost $4 trillion dollar federal budget. Why not allocate another $1 Billion to Inspector General offices to reduce the waste. If they can reduce the waste by 2% or more they more than pay for them selves.

The 2011 Medicare/Medicaid budget seems to be about $755 Billion. with $54 Billion in waste that is over 7% fraud. HHS is planning to increase their Fraud unit budget $250 million in 2011 to $561 million. Maybe that will reduce the waste a bit.

That leaves $44 Billion in waste for the remaining $3075 Billion  budget, or 1.4% waste.

I was going through the federal budget looking to see who had Inspectors General in their budget items. I was surprised to see that not all departments have an Inspector General. Especially surprised the Department of the Interior doesn’t have one large enough to have its own budget line item. Somewhere in the text write up the Inspector General is mentioned. I guess that explains why billions of dollars from the Indian Trust funds have gone missing. But Interior not only has the BIA but they also oversee our royalty payments from the industries extracting minerals from public lands.

At least GAO gives the citizens a chance to report the fraud they see.