Obama's Healthcare Speech

Katie and I didn't have a chance to catch this evenings speach live so we read it together before going to be last night. This is the only reading we've done so far on Obama's proposals and what you're about to read is based entirely on that speech. You can be sure that I'll be doing more reading, both from those who are support and oppose this bill but for now, I'm mulling over what was said during the speech. And, as always, the devil is in the details. We've all seen good ideas get ground into worthless laws by the legislative process. The specifics of the bill (which I haven't seen yet) could make the intentions expressed by the President into a unhelpful legal mess.

Using lists as a crutch, here are my thoughts:

• Federal Cost Controls I think that our national deficit is a very significant problem that seems to be commonly overlooked when it comes to legislation. I'm a member of the generation that, unless something is done, will literally be paying the consequences of our governments overspending and want something done to address the deficit sooner rather than later. I am glad that the President wants to include provisions in the bill to require the program not add to our federal deficit and if the savings the bill is intended to produce don't arrive, then it would require cuts in the budget to keep the plan budget-neutral. Not knowing any details, I'm skeptical of the level of efficiencies to be gained through the other aspects of his proposal but I am quite glad to hear that there are concrete and realistic measures being taken to keep this program from growing out of control.
• Patient Cost Controls I was most surprised to hear the President propose a requirement for annual out-of-pocket maximums and removal of lifetime maximums from insurance policies. As a patient this is good news but it is not clear to me what the long-term consequences of this will be. Insurance companies have used things like a lifetime maximum to prevent a few patients from costing the company an extra-ordinary amount of money due to having to cover expensive treatments. This is another piece of the puzzle that prevents insurance companies from only insuring the healthy (see below) and because of that, I'm generally in favor of it. There's no such thing as a free lunch, though, and I wonder how this will play out over time.
• Required Coverage I like both sides of this coin, both requiring nearly everybody to buy health insurance and requiring insurance companies to ignore "pre-existing conditions" when writing policies. These two items go together, hand-and-glove. As the President said, many insurance companies have (logically) sought to reduce their liability by trying to only insure the healthiest individuals. By removing the ability to deny coverage to anybody based on pre-existing conditions (that is, things the insurance companies know will cost them money) this bill would force the insurance industry to treat all of us like potential customers. By requiring everybody to have insurance, we make nearly our entire country the customer-base for these companies which should be something they like. They just can't pick and choose anymore and have to treat us all the same. This is a big first step in divorcing health insurance from our employers which should give us, the workers, more security by making it easier to switch employers.
• Market Forces and Public Option The key to making me happy with a public option is that it is expected to operate more like a non-profit rather than a corporation subsidized by tax-payer dollars. This seems like a great idea to me; fighting the profit-driven insurance companies with a non-profit, patient-oriented entity. If a for-profit company can offer policies that are competitive with the public non-profit policies, then they deserve the money they earn. If they value they add is not enough to justify the price of their policies or if they become solely profit-oriented at the cost of making policy-holders satisfied, then they'll lose business. More generally, I see no problem in having for-profit businesses compete with non-profits even if in this case the non-profit is a government entity. The playing field is level as long as this government non-profit must be self-sufficient. I'm not totally clear on this but Obama said in his speech "Let me be clear - it would only be an option for those who don't have insurance. No one would be forced to choose it...." If my employer offers health insurance but I find that the public option is better for me, can I choose it? I think I need to be able to do that for there to be a true marketplace where choices force competition. In short, it seems like the public option might be a good way of introducing more market forces.
• Waste and Increased Efficiencies The $900 billion price tag (over ten years) for this reform is intended to be paid for by reducing waste and inefficiencies in the current system. Specifically, this alleged waste resides in the way Medicare/Medicaid is handled by the insurance companies in their attempt to increase profits. I'm skeptical of the amount of waste alleged in the President's speech but I'm not in a good position to know one way or the other. I hope the President has good data in this regard because the ability for this reform to work well for all relies on these savings. As the President said, if these savings don't materialize, expenses have to get slashed and the reform gets gutted.
• Subsidies From what I've read, if don't get insurance through your workplace and the open-market (with both the traditional for-profit insurance companies and the public non-profit company) can't offer an affordable policy, then a tax credit will be given to you which I assume is intended to make the policies affordable for low income earners. There is also a "hardship waiver" for individuals. I'm confused by this. Does this mean that as we move down the income scale the tax credit increases but insurance is still required until a given (very low) income level where the requirement to carry insurance is removed? If this is the case, I hope that the tax credits stop at that level as well.
• Uninsured There will still be uninsured living in the US. The President made a point of saying that the insurance reform will not help illegal immigrants and he also said that there will be a "hardship waiver" for those who just can't afford health insurance. There is nothing in the speech about hospitals being allowed to turn away uninsured so I'm assuming that those that are insured will be indirectly subsidizing those that aren't insured when they go to the hospital. (Hospitals make up the money they lose on non-paying patients by raising the prices over-all for paying patients. Its the same way stores make up money lost to theft; they raise the prices on the paying customers to cover the loss). The percentage of uninsured needs to be very low for this to work.

Katie and I came up with a few items of note that this bill didn't seem to address:

• Health Insurance Complexity As you've heard me rant about before, right now our health insurance system is quite complex. There is very little transparency in pricing, it is hard to shop around, billing overhead is significant for most providers, and the whole in-network/out-of-network stuff can drive you crazy. I heard nothing in the President's proposal to make any of this simpler. Whether you have a private or public insurance plan it sounds like you'll still be jumping through the same hoops. Providers will still have a mountain of paperwork to deal with, patients will still have to try to wade through bureaucracies to figure out how much a given procedure will end up cost them. I haven't had any personal experience with Medicare/Medicaid so I don't know if having the government as the insurer makes the process easier but I doubt it.
• Healthy Living There didn't seem to be any effort to include in the bill some kind of provision to encourage us as citizens to live healthier lifestyles. Legislation like this is not easy to write but I can't recall anything the President said that would encourage people to make better lifestyle choices. There was some talk about encouraging marketplace competition so maybe insurers will come up with a way to encourage us to reduce their costs by going through some kind of wellness program. Stealing from Michael Pollan, I would love to see our government overhaul the Farm Bill in such a way that it was not so cattle/grain/pig-centric. Are their good reasons for not subsidizing fruits and vegetables instead of corn which often gets made into either cattle-feed or corn syrup?

The big take-away: health insurance will be required by law just like auto insurance is. For those who already have insurance, the cost of complying with this law should not increase and may decrease (depending on how effective this new insurance market works and other devilish details). For those currently without insurance, this will be an increased cost that there won't be any legal way around. I don't know if, on average, the dollars spent on health-care per person will increase or decrease. The hope is that by growing the market and forcing it to run more efficiently (by introducing a public non-profit into the competition) that the average will stay roughly the same while providing insurance to many more people. In short, economies of scale might just make this a win-win.

The Great Car Exchange

This past Labor Day weekend I helped do a favor for my uncle living in Oregon by driving the car his son has in Kansas City half-way to Oregon and there, meeting with another party, switching cars and driving the replacement back to Kansas City. Actually, its a bit more complicated than that but that's the gist of it. My cousin had a rear-wheel drive Volvo and the weather in Kansas City can be such that rear-wheel drive is a bit dangerous. My uncle had a front-wheel drive Volvo he wanted to get to his son and recruited Katie and I to help make the car exchange happen. As it turns out, my uncle also recruited his brother (my father) to do the western leg of the drive so I also got to spend half a day with my parents in Evanston, Wyoming where we made the switch. Two thousand miles of driving, three days, several bottles of root beer. Good times.

One of the great things about the drive was getting to see a bunch of wind farms near the interstate. I'll put a few pictures up here but there are more on my Flickr stream. (I must admit, though, that once you've seen one wind turbine you've kind of seen them all. At least when you're driving by at 75 mph. Up close its a different story.)

Passing through Concordia, KS we saw this carved mural on the side of the tourist information/museum. I don't know how it was done or have ever seen anything like it.


Last but not least, in honor of a dear little girl I know who loves a DVD titled "I Dig Dirt", we saw one of the machines featured in said DVD. The photo is not near as impressive as seeing it action, even if just while driving by.

Return Paranoia

One of our rear turn signals burnt out yesterday and so before heading out on a road trip this weekend, I went to AutoZone to get a replacement. I used the convenient part selection book to find the correct lamp and purchased it. Upon heading home and removing the headlight cover I found that I had purchased the wrong lamp. Pulling out the broken lamp as a reference I went back to AutoZone, found the lamp I needed, and went to the counter to make the return and purchase.

The clerk started on the return first and instead of just scanning the item and asking if I wanted it back on my credit card she asked for my name, phone number and address. I told here I didn't want to provide that information and she said for returns it was required. Not believing this, I clarified that even with a receipt and even having just purchased the item five minutes ago (literally, I live no more than five blocks from the store) they needed all this information. She said yes, the computer would not allow a return without this information. After thinking this over a few seconds I decided that it wasn't worth getting my name in their database for who knows what reason and told her I'd keep the wrong lamps and go buy the correct lamps at another store. Fortunately for me, one of their competitors is five or six blocks the other direction from where I live.

I'm not normally a big privacy advocate but am tired of getting junk mail and phone calls from corporations (despite being on the "Do Not Call" list) and usually decline to provide this information to businesses. Until now, none of them have refused to do business with me because I won't give them a name, phone number, or address. This was a first and its a bit scam-y that you probably don't know they'll want this information until they have your money and you'd like to make a return. All the more reason to make sure you buy the right item the first time.

Which, by the way, it turns out I did. I was looking in the wrong spot for the burnt-out turn signal and once I figured this out, realized I had purchased the correct part. In this one special case, I was able to stand on principle AND not be inconvenienced. I still don't plan on shopping at AutoZone any more, though.

School is my life

As I suspected, with school now back in full swing I am once again fully busy. I've turned in my first two homework assignments and have started doing some background reading for my thesis. Due to a retirement and my lay-off, I've switched topics for the thesis and have to start over pretty much. Fortunately, I wasn't too far along in the process before all these changes hit. Even though we haven't decided that I'm doing a PhD, it is enough of a potential that I've got a handful of applications I'll have to do this semester as well.

So, consider this a pre-warning that my posting will probably get sporadic, just like they've always been.

(Oh, and we've finally got all the equipment we need to replace the backsplash in the kitchen and the front bathroom floor. That will also be sucking my time. Did I mention we're driving most of the Labor Day weekend to help move a car from Eugene, OR to Kansas City, MO? Fun times.)

Camping and Botanica

More photos are now up on my Flickr stream from a camping trip in Colorado with Katie's parents and a trip I made to Wichita's Botanica Garden. Enjoy!

Health Insurance Reform (part 2)

(Part 1 here.)

One of the podcasts I listen to (Planet Money) has lately been exploring the health insurance reform from an economics angle. They had a guest on this last Friday (Aug. 21st 2009) who made an excellent point that further illuminates to me that something is fundamentally wrong in the way health care works in the US.

DNA testing is slowing and surely growing in common practice. We aren't even close to something on par with the ultra-fast and comprehensive testing portrayed in Gattaca but were clearly headed in that general direction. There are tests now that can identify genetic markers that have been correlated to many types of cancers and other common genetically-induced maladies. All other things being equal, these tests are valuable for patients because they allow us and our doctors a more insightful view of our health. With more information we can make better decisions and, depending on a situation, may have incentive to make lifestyle changes to counter-act some of our genetic pre-dispositions. Using a very broad brush, I would say genetic tests are good for patients health...

... except if that information is by some means conveyed to a health insurance company and they use it to deny coverage. If I know that I have a genetic marker for a certain disease and don't disclose this to the insurance company when I try to buy a policy on the open market (that is, not through work or some other group plan), the insurance company has the ability to cancel my policy if or when they find out (called a rescission) . There was a recent hearing in Congress where health insurance executives were called to account for abusing this area of the law; it was not pretty. I am better off not having this information if I am trying to buy an individual policy because it isn't lying if you don't know the truth. Ignorance of my medical condition works to my advantage...

... except that this is my health we're talking about. I don't want to avoid information that could help improve my health so that I'm eligible for health insurance to treat the life-threatening disease I am genetically pre-disposed to. You see the problem? The incentives in our current system are all wrong. The health insurance companies don't want to have to cover people who are more likely to develop serious medical problems due to genetic pre-dispositions and patients want health insurance but shouldn't have to remain ignorant of any the results of any genetic testing for fear that they won't be able to get coverage.

The problem, once again, is revealed in the semantics: health insurance isn't really thought of as insurance any more, at least not by patients. We all get sick, we all need to go to the doctor, we all will have medical bills to pay. It isn't a matter of "if" but "when" and "how much". For the health insurance companies, I think "insurance" is the right word. They are thinking entirely in terms of liability and risk. We are insuring 500,000 right now: How many are going to get cancer? How many will be in a car accident? What is the average cost per patient? What can we do to improve our odds of having to make a big pay-out? Its all a numbers game and they are in it for a profit.

The fact that health insurance companies would like to have as much genetic testing information as possible so that they can remove as much risk from their pool of customers shows that something is wrong: who is going to cover all of us with genetic propensities that are completely out of our control? The insurance companies want to make as large a profit as possible and, to the extent the law allows, are going to do what they can to maximize that profit. That corporations are interested in profits should not surprise anybody. They have a strong incentive to reduce and eliminate costs by being as selective as they can with who they cover.

Our system is broken when information that is good for our health turns out to also be too expensive to know for our own good.

First day of class

I had my first class of the semester this morning at 8am. The experience was completely unlike a year ago when I started my graduate work. Then I spent fifteen minutes wandering around campus trying to figure out which poorly labeled building I needed to go to. When I finally found the lecture hall, I entered to see a sea of students from south Asia; I was probably one of ten US citizens in that class of over 100. I knew nobody in there.

Today, I walked into the much smaller room to see eight other students (the other five showed up after me). I recognized all of them and knew seven of them by name. I was good friends with two or three of them. Today was much better.

Day before school

Since today is my last day of my summer break before classes start again and I've finally got all the computer stuff here at working the way it should be, I'm finally going to put some of the pictures we took in Hawai'i up. I'll just be putting a few here but you can see a good deal more on my Flickr stream. (One of these days I'm going to get much better at keeping it up to date.)

We spent a good deal of time snorkeling, a new adventure for both of us. Snorkeling is super easy and in waters like we experienced with lots of wildlife, it was fun, fun, fun.

During one of our boat tours we saw both a monk seal and a sea turtle. It was humbling and awe-inspiring to see them both move through the water so easily and unencumbered.

There is a great deal of elevation change on the island that afforded some fantastic views

And of course, sunsets over the ocean are always great.

Like I said, there's more to see on my Flickr stream. Vicariously enjoy as the school year starts up again.

Health Insurance Reform

I don't know much about the specifics of the current discussions and debate regarding health insurance reform. Since Congress has not finalized a bill in both houses prior to their August recess, I believe a lot of the details are still up for debate. What I do know about is my experience with health care and health insurance when I injured my back a few years ago. Based on that experience, I have some thoughts and opinions on how this system should work. More specifically, my thoughts are more along the lines of identification of problems I experienced. Its much easier to point out flaws than develop solutions and after thinking over this stuff for a few years, good solutions still allude me.

The trend in health-insurance I've noted is the move to HDHP (high-deductible health plans) and HSA (health savings accounts) and which usually are presented right along with the buzzword-BINGO term of "consumer-driven health care". The idea behind consumer driven health care is to bring a market-based approach to making health care better and more affordable.

The first part in this plan is the HDHP. Deductibles are raised to several thousand dollars in an effort to make the health-care recipient have "skin in the game". The "consumer" (more on the use of that term later) aka "patient" is responsible for paying all of that deductible and so has an incentive to shop around and find the most economically efficient way to get the services he/she needs. Its the consumer's money paying for the service and just like consumers have for ages, they will force the market (health care system) to provide quality products/services at competitive prices.

The trick to making HDHPs work is the second prong of this new idea, the HSA. The HSA is a tax-advantages account that holds funds used to cover costs of health care for the account owner. Money from these accounts can only be used for approved health-care services (physicals are OK, going to the witch-doctor is not) and all contributions are tax deductible. Also, this account is independent of the employer; when I lost my job at Cessna I kept my HSA and can continue to use that money for any health expenses I may have in the future.

The first real catch in consumer-driven health care shows up when the question of who is mainly responsible for funding the HSA arises. At Cessna, the employee is. The company contributes about 20% of the annual maximum contribution and the employee can choose to contribute more (tax-deductible) money or not. In my case, as a Cessna employee, the result of this was a significant increase in the cost of health care by me, the employee. I was responsible for 80% of the annual deductible whereas before this change, it was more like %40. I know of two other companies that have HDHP/HSAs and the employer provides the majority of the funds. In these cases, the employee bears roughly the same cost burden as they might under a more traditional plan but now has an incentive and discretion to use those funds more wisely.

The HSA funds aside, though, "consumer-driven health care" has a fatal flaw that will somehow need to be addressed if it is ever to take hold. The root of the problem is actually revealed in the syntax: "consumer". Consumers are people who shop around, look for good deals, make informed purchasing decisions, do their research, drive markets to better value and better products. Very few of these apply in a health-care setting.

Firstly, patients have a SEVERE knowledge gap regarding what kind of treatment and care they need. This will always be true and this is why we go to doctors. Granted, if an individual has a long-term specific condition, he/she can actively educate him/herself and ask intelligent questions of the doctors. Cancer patients tend to become more educated over time because they have an incentive and the time to become more educated. But nobody, when presenting with a severe pain in the stomach for example, will wait to hear the doctor's diagnosis, go home and read up on it, and decide whether he/she agrees with the doctor. As patients, we must place or trust in the our doctors and do the best we can to be informed as we go through treatment. In this regard, we are never informed consumers in the health-care market.

Secondly, as things stand right now, patients/consumers have a very hard time determining the price for a given procedure. Have you ever tried to shop around for routine treatment, trying to get the best price? I dare you to try. I started and gave up quickly. The structure of the health insurance system right now is not designed to easily define the price of a given procedure; there is no price tag for a colonoscopy (as was my case).

I know I won't get this exactly right but here is how the billing system worked when I was under the health insurance at Cessna. The health care provider has a number that most closely approximates the sticker price for a given procedure. If you were independently wealthy but had no insurance and walked in and asked for that procedure, that's how much you'd pay. If you do have health insurance, though, your insurance company has signed up with one or more "networks". I don't know all that goes into being part of a network but I do know part of it: price control. My health insurance, by being part of a given network, had gotten the health care providers to agree to charge a certain amount for a given procedure. By being in that network, the health care provider has a greater likelihood of seeing more patients because the health insurance company provides financial incentives to the patients/consumers to use in-network providers. So, if I go to in-network providers, rather than charging me the sticker price for the procedure, they charge me the lower network price and the provider sees more people like me who are trying to control their own health-care cost. You still with me?

Now, with the reduced price, the health care provider sends the bill off to the insurance company (as a courtesy to the patients, rather than making them deal with this mess). The insurance company takes that bill and looks at the specific agreement they have with me, the consumer/patient to determine what, if any part of this they will pay. Have I met my annual deductible? Am I in the cost-sharing payment zone? Is this preventative care that the insurance company pays for entirely? Is treatment even covered? (Have I gone to the witch-doctor who is then trying to get paid by the insurance company?) The health insurance company runs the claim through their computers and comes up with the amount they will pay the health-care provider. A payment for that amount is made.

The ball is back in the hands of the health-care provider. Odds are, the amount that the insurance company paid is not sufficient to cover the bill they sent. The provider then has a choice; do they bill the patient for the remainder or do they just absorb the loss. Most of the time, I'm guessing they bill the patient. To me, the end consumer/patient, this is my actual out-of-pocket cost.

Do you see all the machinations that number went through before I eventually got the bill? Trying to predict this number can be very difficult. The health-care provider should be able to quote the in-network cost they will bill the insurance company and it should be possible to call the insurance company and, if given the right information, they should be able to have a very good estimate on how much they will pay the health care provider but I'll let you guess how easy and how many phone calls it would take to figure out the final cost to the consumer/patient. If it was two phone calls totaling less than 30 minutes, I would be thrilled. In my experience, it was nowhere near that simple.

(As a side note, this billing shenanigans is entirely avoided for organizations like Kasier Permenante, a health care provider that is also an insurance company. There is no external billing, no passing-the-buck. All of these costs are monitored and set in-house and because there is no distinction between insurer and provider, the final cost is much more easy to determine up-front. Also, the patient never has to wonder if a given procedure is covered by insurance; if the doctor's prescribe it, the procedure is covered.)

In my case, it gets worse. As an example, my doctor recently suggested I have a colonoscopy done and I started trying to look into how much this would cost. It turns out that there are several parties involved in a colonoscopy. There's the facility (provides the location for the procedure), the doctor (the one actually doing the procedure), an anesthesiologist (keeping the patient safely unaware during the unpleasantness) and if a biopsy of something in the colon needs to be done, a pathologist of some sort. In the case of my health care provider, my doctor would perform the operation and the clinic I went to had a colonoscopy suite. When I called asking about prices, my clinic was able to quote to price they would bill the insurance company with a high degree of certainty for those two parts of the bill. The anesthesiologist, though, was brought in from out-of-house and any one of several may be used during that procedure. Each anesthesiologist has a different cost, I had no control over which one was used the day of The complications for the pathologist was similar.

So what I am supposed to do as an empowered consumer in this consumer-driven health care? How am I supposed to compare prices when there is literally no define-able price tag? Do I go look for a larger clinic here in town that also has a colonoscopy suite and also staffs an anesthesiologist and a pathologist so that all costs could be known ahead of time? That wouldn't even solve the problem because then I would only have a price for that clinic and not knowing what I was getting for that price doesn't really help me. How can I compare prices when I can only get one place in town to even get me a quote, anyway?

My point, if it is not utterly obvious, is that consumer-driven health care is dead in the water until a price tag for procedures is readily available. There is no way it can work until I can call five colonoscopy providers in Wichita and get five prices. Even then, I face the difficulty of not knowing what I'm getting for my money? Do I go with the cheapest provider? Do I go with the provider I know best? How do I learn about each of these providers? Online reviews for doctors? Ask around?

You see, we aren't consumers when it comes to health care; we're patients. There may be some areas of health care that could eventually fit a market-based model. Colonoscopies are routine; it may be possible to create a health-care system where a consumer can effectively shop around for a colonoscopy using a traditional consumer mind-set. Maybe there will be online reviews for colonoscopy providers. Maybe a clinic in town will specialize in colonoscopies and find a way to provide a cheap and effective way of doing the procedure and they end up doing most of the colonoscopies in town. It could happen and I don't necessarily think it would be a bad thing. I also agree that one way to control health-care costs is to provide incentives for patients to get the least expensive, best treatment they need. Having skin in the game is not a bad thing at all.

But we're patients, not consumers. We're not customers and clinics are not merchants selling wares. At some point, health care is a highly personal and personalized/customized system. Whatever the reform brings, if it forgets this point we all loose. There is no other way to keep people healthy than by treating, handling, and caring for them on an individual basis, case-by-case. This is why we go to see doctors in person, often ending up waiting longer than we'd like in some lobby. We need that individualized care and market-based models, if permitted to control the entire system, do not afford the individual.

Scooter is sold!

Today I finally realized one goal I had for this summer: the sale of my scooter. In late March I replaced my scooter with a more traditional motorcycle but due to a lot of factors wasn't able to sell it until later in the summer, after we got back from Hawai'i. I put it up on Craigslist a while back and have had a fair number of inquiries, a few offering to buy at half the offering price, one or two that came by to looker, but no serious offers. Until today.

I was able to sell it for about what I hoped and I'll be able to get a refund on registration which is only a month or two old. As a bonus, we now have more space in our garage and my wife is very happy to be done with it.

Now that I'm done with it, I'm still can't say that I think it was the best choice for a first bike, especially given the fact that I was able to buy my current bike for less and I suspect it will last longer. The scooter did fill its role in providing cheap transportation for three years, though and in that regard, I can be satisfied. The funny thing is that now that I'm won't have to be commuting to Cessna this school year, I may not end up riding the motorcycle much since I'll be on bicycle much of the time. When that time comes, though, I suspect that I'll have an easier time selling the motorcycle than this scooter.

Officially Unemployed

Though I have not been working for the past 60 days at the request of my employer, August 7th was my last day of employment at Cessna Aircraft Company. Today I got three or four mailings from the Kansas Department of Labor outlining how employment benefits work and what I need to do to file a claim. I will be going to school this fall and it is not clear to me whether I will be eligible for benefits during that time. It seems kind of weird that, generally speaking, you can't earn unemployment benefits after being laid-off if you go back to school to re-train for another job (like I'm doing). One of the letters that I got made it very clear that I need to be seeking full-time work to receive benefits and I think from their perspective, schooling (even if for another job) keeps you from doing just that, at least if the school is during the day. We'll see how the state views my situation when I start back up with classes in a week.

In the meantime, Cessna may have hit bottom here in the past month or so. There are no new announced lay-offs at this time and engineers will be unaffected by the lay-offs on the 14th of this month. We'll see what happens when that day arrives but if no new announcements are made, then it will be the first time in about a year that the company will not be in a state of pending lay-offs. In fact, I've heard that in some engineering areas, it has become apparent that the company cut too deeply and that they are either trying to re-hire employees they laid off or are generally looking to fill some positions.

I don't know if my area is one of those that is trying to re-hire or not but I kind of doubt it. I certainly haven't been contacted to see if I would like to come back on. When the good times do return, my group will probably be in the same position it was for most of my time at Cessna: multiple open positions and having a hard time filling them. Cessna has difficulty hiring people for the job I had because the work is relatively specialized (compared to some of the other work for electrical engineers at the company) and it is hard for them to compete for talent.

Probably the biggest barrier to overcome in the labor market is one they have no control over: their location. Wichita, KS is not attractive to many graduates in electrical engineering when they could be working in a big city like Dallas or Chicago or more scenic places like California or Oregon. It would seem that to overcome this Cessna would want to offer something to entice people over; things like higher salaries, good benefits, etc. Unfortunately, in my experience, this doesn't seem to be the case. Many other companies offer higher salaries (though they may not be once cost-of-living is factored in), better benefits, and a better living location than Cessna can. In my move from Micron to Cessna, this was exactly my experience. I moved from wonderfully scenic Boise to the great, flat plains of Wichita, took a significant pay cut, ended up with three weeks less of vacation per year and higher health insurance costs. The only reason I accepted all these things was so that I could be with the woman who is now my wife; I think these material losses were worth it. There is no way I would have made this move, though, if it hadn't been for her.

I wish the best for Cessna, especially as my wife is still working there, but I fear they may have painted themselves into a corner. We'll see over the next year or so how things turn out for them.

Mail-Order Monday

Yesterday was a great day to get stuff in the mail.

First up: rear baskets for my bicycle. When bicycling to school, I've been pretty unhappy with having to lash my bag to my rear bicycle rack with a bungee cord. It usually held but I tended to knock the wiring off my rear light and spend a few minutes each day trying to get it all plugged back in correctly. Katie and I looked around and found some baskets that seemed like they would work both for me going to school and grocery shopping when need be. Behold the Wald 582 baskets installed on my blue Breezer:

The baskets can also fold up like so to allow for easy storage:

Installation was straight-forward but not simple, at least with my rear rack. Three clamps secured by screws were provided for each side. I had to re-bend the clamps as they were clearly designed for a rear rack with a thinner frame. It was also a bit tricky to figure out how to get the necessary screw-driver and pliers in position to screw those clamps down tight. I don't know if there is an easier way of doing things but it definitely seems like an area of improvement.

The second package that arrived was actually addressed to Katie but when she got home she informed me that it was actually for me: a new (to me) iPod! Mine died a month or two ago and though I have easily survived without it, I am glad to have a replacement. There is a lot I like about this new one but the most significant is that Apple can replace the battery when it wears out; Apple didn't provide this service for the older ones I used.

The only order we've placed that still hasn't come in is the tile for our backsplash. It was supposed to be in Friday, then Saturday, then Monday... We were very happy with our shopping experience at this hardware store (Star Lumber) but actually getting the items we've ordered has turned out to be, while not frustrating, not an experience that is endearing us to them. Is it better than Home Depot and Lowes? Probably. The company is locally owned which is another point in its favor. Now they just need to get their act together and make the delivery experience as high quality as the sales experience. You only really have one chance to make a good first impression and they may have blown it here.

Greetings from the Land of Digital TV

I'm guessing you've heard that over-the-air TV is digital now. They made the switch back in February until they decided to really make the switch in June. Based on their fancy models, surveys and hopeful predictions, coverage for local stations would increase not decrease. Except when it doesn't.

Take Wichita, for example. For reasons I don't understand, our CBS affiliate has its transmitter over 40 miles from Wichita. When the switch to digital happened, we lost that station (along with a number of others) and got spotty reception on the rest. And it isn't just us. Almost everybody I know (who doesn't have cable or satellite TV) was adversely affected by the switch to digital TV. And I'm not talking about the whole converter box thing, either. That was a whole other mess.

The solution to this problem is fairly simple: buy and install a better antenna. Though back in the old analog days indoor rabbit ears worked just fine, they no longer suffice. In fact, almost all of the antennas sold in stores won't work either. For Wichita, an old-fashioned, eight-foot long, ugly collection of thin metal rods known as a roof-top antenna is needed.

You see, though the switch to digital was also supposed to push all the stations up into the UHF band where small roof-top antennas would work, that didn't exactly happen.

In Wichita, for example, both CBS and PBS are still on VHF which require much larger antennas, those with elements measured in feet. Oh, and these larger antennas cost $50-$100 new not including the hardware to mount them.

So for the past few months we've been without TV, only really being able to receive three channels, only one of which was a major network station. Then I had the bright idea to check Craigslist and was able to find an antenna for $10. We bought a mast at the local hardware store and had it up in just a few hours. After we first bought our house I spent a lot of time up in the attic doing things like installing bathroom vents, a ceiling fan, vents, all in preparation for having some insulation blown into the attic. Thinking ahead, I also used this time to run some coax from a connecting plate I installed in the living room near our TV up through the attic and under the eaves of our roof where I coiled most of the cable. It sat there for nearly two years until now when it was finally connected to our antenna.

And it worked. We now get all the major stations clearly.

Boy, I sure do love Craigslist.

And The Data Goes Poof!

Remember the other day when I wrote about my network drive not working and that LaCie was sending me a new part to see if we could make an easy fix? Well the part came today and I made the replacement: no dice. Back on the phone with tech support.....

After a bit of a conversation and a few more quick tests, the tech guy determined that the unit was going to need to be sent in for work. The worst part: it was going to come back wiped clean of all my data. Thankfully, I've got a backup for this device so that data loss is minimal, mostly a week or two worth of podcasts I hadn't listened to yet; oh well. The bigger loss is my time, both in trouble-shooting this problem and in getting all the data restored once the device comes back.

Let this be an example and warning to all: you can never have too many back-ups! If you care about the data and consider it valuable and irreplaceable, do yourself a favor and invest in some kind of minimal backup. Get an external hard drive and a program like SuperDuper! so that you have at least one extra copy of your data if something goes wrong.

The level of ambition and redundancy in any given back-up scheme is a function of how paranoid you are about your data. For example, getting an external hard drive and making a copy of your computer's hard drive is great in that it provides a safe copy of your data when your hard drive dies (it will happen, sooner or later). But what about a fire? If the external hard drive is sitting right next to your computer, they both can get burned up. Or what about more global disasters like floods or tornados? Very quickly you can up end trying to manage multiple back-ups and keep everything sufficiently in sync. Even if the data is valuable, we all have a life to live and don't want to spend it messing with the tools we have for our convenience.

In our case, the back-up scheme isn't too crazy: the LaCie device has two hard drives in it that are always exact copies of each other. My first back-up rule of thumb is that any data worth having should exist on more than one physical drive because all hard drives will fail sooner or later. In the case of the LaCie device, two drives inside the device mean that I can put any data I like on that device and my data will be safe from a single drive failure. The data is not safe from theft of that device, fire, or failure. So, taking my paranoia to the next level, I have an external drive that I use to backup the LaCie on a semi-regular basis. The problem with "semi-regular" is that it happens when I feel like it and it is a pretty manual process. In this case, all the data that is lost will be from the last time I backed-up the LaCie a few weeks ago. Also, I use SuperDuper! to backup our household computers to the LaCie device every evening. So, as you can see, sadly, the bulk of my backing-up centered around this device that failed.

Lessons learned from all of this?

1. I don't think I'll be buying another LaCie product anytime soon. Technical support has been great but I have problems with the device everytime the power glitches and now this. I was hoping that by using a simple RAID 1 device data recovery would be easy and I wouldn't be dependent on a particular vendor for the safety of my data. It looks like that is not the case.
2. In an ideal world I'd replace the external hard drive I use to back-up the LaCie device with another LaCie device. I know this contradicts the above statement and we don't have the money for another external device so it isn't going to happen soon. A second device would have allowed me to removed the hard drives from the broken one and send it for service without any data loss (much less my time).
3. Off-site backup for valuable data is something we're looking into. We're looking into one now called Mozy. I haven't figured out what data we'd put up there but I'm thinking we're going to go for it. The big catch for us is that our upload speed is slow enough that it will literally take months for us to get all our valuable data uploaded. The good news is that once it is there, it should be safe from virtually all problems. This service is the last resort in case our house is destroyed; neither we nor it seem set-up for on-the-fly data recovery for a whole hard drive.
4. I'm looking into getting a cheap uninterruptible power supply for the LaCie device so that if our power does go out, I can shut the unit down safely and not have to mess with all the problems it has been giving me.

Today's Project

With all our non-working time off, Katie and I have been doing some home improvement stuff. Last night Katie changed the upholstery on dining room chairs to some cool micro-suede fake polyester leather stuff. They look and feel nice.

Today I installed a pulley system for getting our bikes in the garage off the floor. If you've ever seen ads for things like this (big hooks being more common) they usually feature an attractive women in "work-out clothes" one hand on the bicycle as if she had just hung it up. Two things: unless she is a lot stronger than she looks and/or the bicycle is a $4000 10 lb. bike, she did not just get done hanging it up with one hand. Two, often these photographs seem to be done in 12-foot garages where hanging the bike by the front tire places it completely out of the way.

Since neither of these facts apply to our garage situation, we grabbed a kit that makes a simple pulley system with lowering hooks to grab under the front handlebars and the seat. We've got two of them installed in such a way that the bikes are out of the way but we can still get them down easily enough. (We realized during the planning process that the bikes needed a place to "land" when we wanted them down. For example, though hanging them above the car would save space we would have to move the car every time we wanted them down. This definitely made finding a good spot a big more tricky.)

I wouldn't say that raising the bike is trivial with this system but it is possible for Katie to do it without too much effort. So far my only complaint is that the rope seems to tend to slide out of the grooves in the pulley when its not being loaded down. We'll see if this ends up being a pain over the long-term.

Photos

Over the past few weeks Katie and I took two trips: one was our "second honeymoon" (also known as "we're probably never going to be a position to do this again") trip to Hawai'i, the other a trip to Westcliffe, CO where Katie's parents recently purchased some land. Both trips were great and wonderful in different ways and I have photo's to share from them.

Except that when we got back from Colorado, the device I store my pictures on (a LaCie 2Big Network for those of you who may care) wasn't working. The power went out while we were gone and this device has always had trouble with power glitches. Usually I'm able to get it back up and running with only a minor amount of effort but this time it looks to be more serious. I called tech support and we're slowly working on a solution (parts are being shipped to me right now). In the mean time, my pictures are locked up and unavailable which means I can't share them with you; you'll just have to wait.

(As you'll probably realize, I haven't updated my Flick'r stream in quite some time. This is keeping in par with the frequency of my posts here, only worse. What can I say? I have no excuse.)

In Last Week's Episode...(Or What I've Been Up To In The Past Few Months)

I once again have very little excuse for not being more active in my blogging. In this case, quite a bit has happened since I last wrote.

As of August 7th, I will no longer be an employee of Cessna Aircraft Company. Due to a federal law, Cessna has to give 60 days notice when laying-off 500 people or more and I was given my notice on June 5th. I am doing my best to not take it personally but this is a bit difficult as I was one of seven in our group of 40 or so that were chosen for this first round to really affect our group. As the company is doing very poorly financially and seems to be in survival mode, I didn't necessarily expect to avoid the lay-offs completely but I had hope. I viewed myself as a valued employee who had made a lot of significant contributions to the project I was working on and seemed to have a good skillset. I didn't consider myself one of the most valued employees but I hoped I was in the top 35% in my group. To find out I was in the bottom 17% is unsettling to say the least.

I don't know why I was specifically laid off. At the group meeting days before the notices went out our boss told us the factors involved in assessing and ranking the individuals in our group, things like attitude, technical skills, professionalism, etc. Noticeably absent from the list were things like salary, years of experience and current project. I honestly can't imagine how I could have ranked so poorly by the official standards that I would end up at the bottom of the list. When I told my co-workers I had been laid off (minutes before walking out the door for the last time), I could tell they were just as surprised as I was. Everybody's best guess is that, despite the official ranking criteria, the reason for me being laid-off has something to do with working half-time and pursuing a Master's. I don't know why developing my technical skills would be perceived as a liability but it may have been.

So what's next for me? Well, I still have two more classes in the fall and a thesis to finish up before I complete my Master's. I had a great idea for a thesis related to my project at work that is probably not an option now; back to square one at this point. After that, its hard to say. I may end up pursuing a PhD at Wichita State or at another institution and depending on how long my thesis takes, that could happen as soon as the spring or fall 2010. Katie and I are still discussing all of this because we'd like to start a family sometime before I would finish my PhD (since that would be in ~2014) but if she's going to be providing the income for us, she can't be a full-time mom as well. There are a number of options, we just need to figure out which one is best or most feasible for us.

In the mean time, I've been plenty busy with around-the-house projects. We might install an attic fan, maybe a skylight, probably replace our front door. (I may have not made it clear above but as of right now, I am still technically a Cessna employee and will be until Aug. 7th. I am still getting paid by them but, again, for reasons I don't understand, they would rather not have me around at work and have asked me not to come back.) I've got plenty of time to think and pray over my future and have also been doing just that.

Wind Power

I've just turned in a paper for one of my classes on wind power and offshore wind farms.  Have a read if you want to see what's kept me busy lately.  I've got a presentation on this on Tuesday.

Spring has arrived

• This week was the first evening we were woken in the middle of the night by our weather radio warning us of a severe thunderstorm in the county somewhere.
• Right now we're sitting through our first tornado warning for the county.  No tornados to report at this time but it is raining quite heavily.  This leads to....
• Its raining and blowing so hard our dogs, normally not ones to mind the water but rather enjoy it, have opted to stay inside, even when given the chance to go out and play.

Welcome to spring in Kansas.

Another Great "This American Life" Story

Well, I haven't got around to my "top ten" list for "This American Life" yet but I've got another clip from one of the shows. I've actually had this sitting around for a while but didn't have a good way to share it until I recently set up my Google site. 

Anyway, if any of you have ever spent any significant amount of time overseas, particularly in a culture where you don't know the language, don't know the customs, don't know the how much you should tip, and don't know how to get a taxi ride back to where you're staying, well, this show is for you.  I heard first before our two weeks in China and after that trip can identify with it even more.

I hope you enjoy it.

(Oh, the full show is here: listen online for free, download the show for a buck (well, actually $0.95 USD).  You'll get tired of hearing me say this but this will surely be one of the best dollars ever spent.

FDIC Ride-Along

In the same spirit as a police officer ride-along, This American Life did a piece recently where one of their contributor's got to sit in on the process of the FDIC shutting down a bank in Vancouver, Washington.  Here's the clip.  The whole hour is good to listen to, though, and I'd recommend that you check it out.  

(In addition to listening to all their old episodes online for free and subscribing to their podcast where you can download the latest show for free, it looks like they've added the option to purchase individual episodes for $1 from their website.  This is a steal!  One hour of fascinating radio to own and cherish forever for less than anything you can buy at Starbucks. I'll have to put together a "best-of" list so that all three of my loyal readers can get the most bang for your bucks.)

What I've been up to

When I was trying to explain to one of my brothers why I haven't posted lately due to end of semester school work, he suggested that I post what I've been working on to my blog.  In that spirit, here is a paper I turned in yesterday that I've been working on for a week or so. I've two tests this week and another project due next Monday. (and another next week and another the week after that, and another test next week...)

I highly suspect that this will be the content on the blog for the next month.  I hope that you like electrical engineering!

And the new motorcycle is...

... as you can see its not a Honda Rebel.  That deal fell through for mysterious reasons that are not clear at all to me.  After not getting back to me in a week and a half (after several calls) I finally managed to get a hold of him and he informed me he had "waited too long" and that he couldn't register the bike to sell it to me.  The motorcycle was no longer for sale.

(Side commentary:  I don't buy his story completely.  I've learned recently that Kansas requires that all vehicles be registered at all times and this guy had left the bike unregistered for over a year.  I believe that there would be some complications in registering it but there is no way that the State provides no means to register a vehicle with a valid title and bill of sale whose registration has lapsed.  Put differently, what is he going do with the bike if he can't register it.  It has no license plate so he can't ride it.  Is he going to sell a wonderfully cared-for bike for scrap metal?  I think there is more going on here than I was told.)

Thus began a month long search for my scooter replacement.  Compared to what most people were asking on Craigslist, most motorcycles weren't even an option for me.  If I was interested in the bike and the price was not too far from what I had, I would email and ask if they were flexible on price.  Some were, some weren't.  Lots of emailing, phone calls, even checking out a few bikes in person.   Katie was highly involved in the approval process as I wanted her to be comfortable with whatever I ended up with. When all was said and done, I ended up purchasing a bike that I found one of the very first weeks I was looking but took nearly four weeks to finally take a look at.  Shown above, the bike is a 1996 Kawasaki KLR250.  Until I get a chance to repaint the body, we call the "Teal-mobile".

I've ridden it to work and school for two days now and I'm very happy with it. It has a few minor things that need to be repaired, the biggest one is a leaky fuel shut-off valve followed by a carburetor rebuild.  Right now, with neither of those fixed, the bike has a tendency to leak fuel while parked (unless I get the valve in just the right spot).  I should pick up the gaskets for the valve on Monday and be able to fix it that evening. Until the carburetor gets rebuilt, though, I'm keeping the gas can in the Buick so that Katie can fill it up and bring me fuel when (not "if") I forget to close the valve when I park.  I just know that's going to happen at some point.

Things I like about the bike: its simple (single cylinder), not expensive, liquid-cooled, doesn't get blown around in the wind near as much as the scooter, it fits my height well, has low mileage, generous suspension for handling the potholes of Wichita and should get good fuel economy (we'll see after a few tanks).  

Things I don't like: its teal and purple and it leaks gas.

That's all for now.

A Further Note on Why I Don't Like Trains in Wichita

On the way home Katie and I got stopped by a train.  It was the back-and-forth kind that slowly heads one direction for a few minutes, stops for a few minutes, heads back the other way a few minutes.... You get the picture.  The trains that are just passing through town aren't that big of a deal; usually less than a five minute wait.  The "Sunday Driver" trains take at least twice as long, often longer.

So Katie and I are sitting there, watching, waiting.  We see the rear locomotive approach the intersection and ... come to a stop.  Sigh.  After a few minutes, the locomotive pulls away rather quickly and this time there is no train attached.  We are both very excited by this.

And the the cross-bars don't go up.  The red lights are still flashing and the warning bell is still clanging.  We see the cross-bar for the on-coming traffic rise and then stop half way.  It hangs there for a minute then drops back down.  Shortly, our cross-bar rises half way for a few minutes and then drops back down.

It takes a few of these cycles for us to get close enough to see the source of this mystery.  The cross-bars are being directly lifted by (I presume) a train company employee.  He lifts one for a few minutes and then cross the street the lift the other.  

This is a first; never seen anything like this before.

Twenty minutes of waiting.  During rush hour.  We had plenty of company.

Taxes 2008

Katie and I just finished doing our taxes for 2008 and once again, I was quite impressed with Kansas' online FREE electronic filing.  After the muted pain of our Federal returns ("muted" by the use of TurboTax) the Kansas electronic filing was five minutes.  Copy a few values from the federal return, enter bank information for electronic deposit and we were done.  

One of these days very soon the Federal government will have free electronic filing for all simply because it will save a large pile of money/work by not having to deal with enter information on paper returns into a database.  Every year they inch closer and closer to this by allowing more and more "low-income" earners to file for free. (I think if your total income was less than $55,000 this year you could file for free.)  Right now, probably over half of the tax-payers could file for free.  My prediction: in less than 5 years over 90% filings will be electronic.  You heard it hear first.

(Oh, as a bonus side-note, TurboTax thinks the likelihood of an audit is "low" this year.  We haven't been audited yet for our 2007 return so we may have slipped of their radar for now.  I do have a friend, though, who is being audited for his 2007 return and due to my past experiences he has come to me for a bit a preparation guidance.  Once the word gets out that I'm fought the IRS behemoth twice and have been victorious, their going to be beating down my door for help.  I might have to start charging.)

In Wichita, at 3am...

I woke up at 3am this morning with a very runny nose.  After 20 minutes of attempting to blow my nose quietly so as not to wake up Katie, I finally gave up and went out into the living room.  (I have no idea what precipitated all of this but I went through about a dozen tissues in half an hour. Katie thinks I may be allergic to something.  Something that only shows up at 3am.)

My nose cleared up but now wide awake, I had the opportunity to explore the wonders of early morning television in Wichita.  Here are the results:

Several newscasts

Jay Leno

Infomercials

Leave it to Beaver

Now you know.

Life and Transportation

Yes, this is the first post in quite a while.  I mostly have no excuse.  I've started my second semester of graduate school, trying to get life organized after the Christmas holiday, took a a class offered through our church, working on taxes, and trying to take a respectable inventory of our house.  None of these really seemed worth writing about (at least by the time I ended up having time to actually do the writing.)So what is the cause of break the silence?  Not something important  or monumental but, rather, something fun.

I got a motorcycle.

Just got back from looking at it with Katie and though the owner needs a few days to do title paperwork, I am effectively the new owner of a 2001 Honda Rebel.  Compared to the scooter I've been riding, this things seems to be a dream.  It has all kinds of great features like gears, high-beams, readily available parts, etc.  It even sounds so much better than the scooter.  The bike is definitely on the smaller side for somebody my height. but I on the quick ride up and down the street it seemed to work for me.

Speaking of which, shifting on a motorcycle is going to take a little getting used to.  My scooter has not discrete gears so I never had to worry about shifting; just "twist and go" as they say.  Now I'm having to work a clutch and a shift pedal; there's not indicator of what gear you're in except for a light that comes on when you're in neutral.  I might have to toodle around the neighborhood of the seller to get the hang of things before I make the journey home.  As the seller commented to Katie while I was making a fool of myself on my test ride: "He's a bit out of practice, isn't he?" 

Yes, yes I am.

So what of the scooter?  My plans are to get it back in running shape and sell it.  I don't know how long that will take as the repair will involve removing the engine block.  In fact, the length of time it might take to repair it was a major factor in deciding to purchase a motorcycle.  Without my scooter life was considerably more complicated in getting both Katie and I where we needed to be.  Though purchasing a new bike may seem like overkill, the price was right and if/when Katie revokes my motorcycle privileges, I should be able to sell it for close to my purchase price.  

Was it a mistake to purchase the scooter?  I've thought about this over these past three years of ownership and am divided on it.  It wasn't a mistake in that the purchase price and operating cost of the scooter has still been much less than that of owning a second car.  (At 70 mpg, insurance at ~$150 a year and not more than $200 for parts total; the scooter has been very affordable to own and operate.)  Could I have made a better purchase with that money?  Yes, undoubtedly.  For a first bike, though, everything worked out fine.  I've learned about motorcycle riding and ownership and financially it has worked out in our favor.  Whatever I can make in selling the scooter is going to be gravy.

Not much more to say right now.  I'll post pictures when the deal is done.

Another Reason I Love Portland (In Which My Nerdity is Confirmed)

Take a lot at this hasty picture taken in the parking garage at Portland International Airport.

The item of interest that you should note is the beam with read beacons stretching down the length of parked cars.  By the time my brother had parked the car beneath one of these I already knew just fantastic they were.  These were the heart and soul of the coolest thing yet to hit parking areas since yellow paint.

These are simple sensors that somehow tell if a parking spot is occupied or not.  If the spot if filled they turn red, if it is available they turn green.  If this is all they did their usefulness would be immense.  As you drive by rows and rows of parked cars a glance at the lights would tell you if any spot was open.  No more surprises when the spot between two SUVs which looked open is found to house a 1985 Civic.

It gets better though.  At nearly every junction in the parking garage is an LED display indicating how many open spots are available down a given path.  It even breaks it down by handicapped and non-handicapped spots.  To park your car you find a floor on the parking garage that says it has spots available, find a row with an open spot, and look for a green light.  It worked brilliantly for us by pointing the way to the closest open spot on level.

And, actually, I lied about this being the best thing since yellow paint.  The very same garage implemented something else not near as cool but also very useful a few years ago. Instead of taking your parking ticket at paying at a "toll booth" on your way out of the airport, they installed ATM-style payment kiosks throughout the parking garage that allow you to pay for parking before you even get in your car.  This effectively adds dozens of additional payment points and greatly speeds up the payment process.  Brilliant!

Biggest Home Extreme Loser Makeover

I just got off the phone with a good friend of mine and he made a very interesting point regarding the similarities and differences between two reality TV shows: Biggest Loser and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.  Both shows are aimed at helping people who are in a situation that is difficult/not healthy.  The course of action each show takes, though, is fundamentally different.  

Extreme Makeover is all about the "wow" factor.  The show tries to find a down-on-their-luck family who has a problem that can be fixed by extreme home improvement.  Well, maybe not all of their problems but at least some of their problems.  And actually, the show likes to focus on the big changes their making (to their home) and all the good it will do them.  It often seems the families in need are doing things like running a shelter for blind, paraplegic dogs or a foster home for run-away Chinese orphans, etc.  The point is, based on a handful of viewings, often a new living situation will go a long way towards helping the family.  The crew shows up, sends the family on a vacation, changes everything, and brings them back for a heart-pounding reveal. Very dramatic, makes for good TV, fits well in a one hour time slot.

This mode of assistance is very different than Biggest Loser.  Biggest Loser is all about long-term changes.  The obese individuals shows up and sign themselves into the ranch for as long as they can stay, possibly as long as three months or so.  They are on-board all day, all night, week after week.  Every day they are making choices about what they eat, how hard they work out, what they are going to do to try to lose the most weight and continue to stay in the competition.  The only way they get on the show is by having developed a fitness pattern that is horribly bankrupt and by coming to a realization that they need to change something soon and change it in a drastic way.

One of these shows is focussed on a change in circumstances, the other on a change in process or, because these are people after all, character.  Extreme Makeover does a one-week blitzkrieg on your life, Biggest Loser is in for the long haul, hoping to make you a fundamentally different (and better) person. 

Extreme Makeover isn't a bad show, doesn't have evil motivations, and is not despicable.  The kind of aid they provide can be very effective helpful.  There are families out there that have one significant problem in their lives that a new house could go a long ways to fixing. Sometimes money is the only barrier.  Sometimes.

There are some down-sides, though, to building them a new house.  Invariably, the house is bigger than before which almost guarantees larger utility bills going forward.  (Granted, they do try to use energy efficient techniques/appliances but no amount of efficiency will change the fact that there is twice as much square footage to heat/cool.)  Sure the kids get totally decked-out rooms with INCREDIBLE interior design but, especially for younger children, their interests will change in time.  When the love of airplanes wanes, what do you do with the 747 cockpit that has been built into your room?

What Extreme Makeover does is very generous and I truly hope that every family that is helped has thrived since receiving their new home.  I doubt this is the situation, though.  It may be like winning the lottery; after the emotional thrill wears off, the blessing may end up being more of a curse.  Once the crew drives away and leaves you with your new house, its all up to you.  Any problems you had before that the new house doesn't fix are still going to be with you.  You're not a new person, just the same old person in a new house.  Maybe with higher heating bills, to boot.

Biggest Loser has a much less ambitious goals in some ways; they just want to help you learn to eat right and take care of your body. Sure, the winner at the end of the show gets some money but its not even enough to make you independently wealthy for life.  Maybe just enough to pay off the mortgage and/or buy a new car but that's it.  The real prize is the change in who you are. Your attitude towards food is new. You see the value in exercise.  You've learned to accept the pain of working out or denying yourself ice cream.  You've put in a lot of hours in the gym.  Every pound lost has been the difference between calories in at the dinner table and calories out on the treadmill.  There's no way around it and they have spent as long as three months living with that reality in their face.

And there aren't any excuses, either.  There is no 2 lb. handicap because you grew up on Twinkies and never stopped eating them.  No week off because your parents just divorced and you have been over-eating to avoid the emotional pain.  The cause of the problem is irrelevant. If you want to stay on the show, you're going to have to work at it, just like everybody else.  No excuses, just work.

I don't I know if either show does any long-term follow-up (I'm guessing not simply because it may not make good TV), but I bet the Biggest Loser people have a much better chance of experiencing lasting change. In a non-trivial and mundane way, they've been transformed.

Generalizing this to society as a whole, I think most of our problems need change that is more like The Biggest Loser than like Extreme Makeover.  Most people's problems can't be solved by throwing money at the problem, even if they think it can.  The big, difficult problems in our world require change in people at a fundamental level and it is VERY difficult, if not impossible, for that to happen in any other way than long-term personal commitment on the part of both those giving and those receiving help.  Everybody has to work at it and there are no excuses; if you want change, if you want to be transformed, you've got to put in the hard time.

I hope that whatever the future brings, that we as a society can learn to not accept quick fixes and instead be willing to commit to long-term, hard work to fix our problems.   We need to be willing to roll up our sleeves and make an effort in each other's lives, doing our best to help others and stick with it over the long-haul.  Real change is hard work and we need to have the patience and strength to not give up.  Transformation is hard-fought but long-lasting.

Snow and Driving

Speaking of snow, on the way home this afternoon, driving slowly and carefully on the highway, I saw a bright red car off in the ditch at the right-hand side.  At first I thought it was a fancy sports car and was chuckling to myself at the misery of the hot-rod driver who clearly thought the laws of physics didn't apply to him, even when it snowed.  (Turns out it was a Dodge Stratus and I revised my evil laugh to more sympathetic thoughts.  Only good, honest, non-rich people own a Dodge Stratus.  Clearly.)

Then an idea occurred to me.  What if the highway patrol intentionally placed a few bright colored cars in the ditches as snows begin to fall to remind other drivers of the danger?  A cautionary tale with a sad ending on display for all drivers to see.  All we'd need would be a few brightly colored cars at strategic points to do the trick.  Of course, usually weather like this produces its own non-contrived roadway mishaps and they don't seem to care all drivers straight.  

Maybe its because the cars aren't red.  That must be it.

First Snow in Wichita

Well, at least the first snow that has accumulated.  (We were gone over Thanksgiving and we heard it snowed then.)

Basil and Anise are having a lot of fun with the snow, the first time they have experienced it.  Both seem to enjoy eating and frolicking in it.  Here's the proof:

Man Purse

After months of constantly mis-placing my wallet, keys, phone, and work ID, I've finally purchased a bag to keep track of everything.  The straw that broke the camels back was when I couldn't find my wallet for about 24 hours and decided that as soon as I found it, I would get a bag.  Thankfully, I did find it (I was afraid that it might have been stolen/left in public) and a bit of web-shopping found a bag for me.  I've had the bag a few days now and love it.  I can put everything I need in it and when I walk out the door and I can have confidence that I have everything.

Politics, Journalists and Nerds

Recently, (OK, a few weeks ago), the NY Times published a little opinion piece showing how the stock market has faired under Republican vs Democratic Presidents.  Their conclusion was that the market does better under Democrats.

Enough buzz was generated around the "internets" (my wife hates it when I say that) that pundits on both sides of the aisle started attacking and defending the conclusions.  Some of these statements seems legitimate, some seem fallacious, but it seemed hard to pin down any sort of definitive answer.  Party loyalty seemed a bigger factor in these discussions than any attempt to find out the truth of the matter.

Enter the nerds.

Theodore Gray, the co-founder of Wolfram Research and professional math/computer nerd, grabbed a pile of data and started to analyze it.  Not any sissy journalist kind of analyzing in an Excel spreadsheet.  No, he went gang-busters and started to try to account for things like inflation, lag between a president taking office and when his policies were implemented and companies paying dividends.  The results showed that the choice of assumptions regarding these factors he included dramatically influence the results.   Change the lag between inauguration and impact on the market and the best party overall could change.

The most interesting result, though, was what stock returns looked like spanning both Democratic and Republican presidents.  In other words, choosing to invest in the markets regardless of the party of the sitting president.  (Which, to the best of my knowledge, is what most people do anyway.  I'll let you know if I here of anybody pulling money out of the market based on the result of this up-coming election.  Don't hold your breath.)  Check out the article to see the results.

The article demonstrates an opinion I've held for a long time: life would be better if we had more nerds.

Wall•E

Katie and I saw Wall•E this past weekend and we both loved it.  (We almost always see our movies at the cheap theater, thus the five month wait from its release date.)  The film is unique is so many regards but probably the most striking is the fact that very little dialog takes place the entire film.  Some reviews of the movie said this would make it less accessible to children, ostensibly the target audience.  Another blogger pointed out that the Road-Runner cartoons are 100% dialog-free yet seem very effective in entertaining the little-ones.  I concur.

From a photography nerd stand-point, the film also has a unique new visual style thanks to the use of a new virtual camera used when rendering the film.  This new camera brings a very strong traditional film-look to the film with things like zooms and shallow depth of focus strongly displayed through-out the film.  (I've got to get going to work or I'd write more, maybe in some other post).  

All told, a great film, undoubtedly the most worthwhile movie I've seen in past few weeks.  It is films like these that show just how mediocre most movies are today and how wonderful, enjoyable, and effective a well-executed story can be. 

Go see it for yourself.