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— Nov 20, 2009, 11:14 am
It was denounced as a socialist program that would compete with private insurers and add to Americans’ tax burden so as to kill jobs. One Republican representative predicted that “Americans would come to feel “the lash of the dictator”. Another Republican representative said, “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.” A Republican senator declared that it would “end the progress of a great country.”
The AMA called it a step towards nationalized medicine which still would not protect the neediest, said it was a cruel hoax and a delusion. One Miami doctor said, “it wastefully covers millions who do not need it. It heartlessly ignores millions who do need coverage. It is not true insurance. It will create an enormous and unpredictable burden on every working taxpayer. It offers sharply limited benefits.
“It will undercut and destroy the wholesome growth of private voluntary insurance and prepayment health programs… which offer flexible benefits in the full range of individual needs.”
The WSJ editorial page predicted that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warned that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”
The head of the AMA said that “a deterioration in the quality of care is inescapable.” The president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went further and suggested that for doctors to cooperate with Medicare would be ”complicity in evil.”
So what are these these quotes referring to? A reasonable guess might be the health care bill(s), given how familiar they sound if you’ve been following the debate at all. But they actually refer to two different programs, ones that you probably believe are essential to all Americans.
— Nov 19, 2009, 11:49 am
So I took a day to try and learn more about TinderBox. I still don’t grok it, but it’s still working better for me now. When making notes, I still turn to iOrganize, which I’ve been using for many years, but I really want to be able to link notes, not just group them the way iOrganize does.
There are a number of (in theory) small changes that would make it far more useable, and I wish I knew how to discuss it rationally with the author (whom I know). But oh well. I guess I’m stuck with what I’ve got.
— Nov 16, 2009, 12:10 pm
Starting more than a year ago, I started putting a lot of my feelings in a box. Not all of them, to be sure, but primarily the negative ones. And not consciously, but out of necessity.
For roughly three years before he died last February, my father had been falling into Parkinson’s-related dementia. The hardest part was not losing him gradually, nor even the distress he felt over his slipping mental faculties, but that my mother, now 81, was his primary caretaker. It was incredibly hard for her, both practically and emotionally, and I became one of her primary emotional supports.
This meant that I had to be able to put her first when she called me in hysterics over the latest thing my father had said or did. In order to do that I had to stop letting my usual feelings — primarily negative ones about myself and my life — get in the way. So how I handled it — as I said, unconsciously — was to put them in a box. Basically stop feeling them.
Click to continue reading “Putting feelings in a box can help”
— Nov 13, 2009, 1:00 pm
Trying to learn TinderBox which “is a personal content assistant that helps you visualize, analyze, and share your notes.” It’s very powerful, but intimidating as all get out. And I’m someone who almost never gets intimidated new software, at least on the Mac. Blender made my eyes glaze over, for example, although maybe if I had been doing 3D animation for years it would have felt comfortable.
Mark Bernstein, the author of TinderBox, is a casual friend and, while likeable, is not someone one can offer suggestions to, much less criticize in any way. Which is a shame, because I’m sure I could offer some constructive criticism.
At any rate, I need a better way to organize my voluminous notes which are currently mostly stored in iOrganize, which I highly recommend unless you wind up with Too Many Notes That Are Not Organized. iOrganize is a product I might well have written, and I wish I had it on my iPhone, since I absolutely hate the Notepad there. So, alas, Tinderbox it is.
“Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.”
— Nov 12, 2009, 11:50 am
One of the “fun” things about creating and maintaining educational websites is that emergencies have to be dealt with now. I managed to break a couple of things in the math publisher software mentioned yesterday, so when Larry was showing his students something about the blog, it didn’t work, throwing up annoying PHP messages. Fortunately, it was easily fixed, but Larry had to improvise in class while I fixed it. (And, of course, he’s more or less unreachable while teaching, so I’m hoping that he knows that it’s fixed.)
I fell into doing educational software and sites because of Larry, and that was mostly a Good Thing, since it allowed me to feel like I was doing some pro bono work for a good cause. I still have hopes that things that I’ve done for Larry alone — like the blogs — will make me some money down the road, since his success with what I’ve created is a great selling point, but then again I just can’t say no to Larry, so I do it even if the money is a pipe-dream.
— Nov 11, 2009, 1:02 pm
I maintain a blog for Larry’s students, which means making sure that the plugins that he uses work. Since he teaches math, that means making sure that wpmathpublisher, the math plugin works. Only occasionally it stops working.
Click to continue reading “One of my many obligations”
— Nov 10, 2009, 7:47 pm
…is that there is so much backstory. The reader doesn’t know the characters, the major events of the past, or what’s going on now. So every time I thought about starting a blog, I became paralyzed by how I would write about anything that wasn’t self-contained.
Well, screw it. If I keep letting that get in the way, I’ll never start. So I have and you’ll just have to disentangle the threads as I go. Hopefully I’ll be interesting enough to make that worthwhile.
The evolving categories are at the top of the page, so pick one of interest. I’m sure the look of things will change as I continue to configure this.
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