Curious dating phenomenon

A fair number of people post blog entries stating when they have been dumped or broken up with someone, but do not post anything when they get together, particularly when they get back together with a person about who they previously posted about breaking up.

This is by no means universal.

But there have been at least three cases I can think of on my friends list (you know who you are) who have done this. I'm reading along and and they are posting about an anniversary or birthday party with their beloved, and I'm thinking but you break up with that person 3 weeks ago! I'm confused.

Continuing my grumpy old man-ness

The Dalai Lama is just another peddler of new age happy bullshit. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for compassion. But his philosophy is about as useful as a 1960s Kumbaya singing hippie. If everyone would just be happy, we'd all be happy!

He's happy though, so he wins.

Health care

I don't have a full policy prescription for fixing our health care system. Some bullet points on what I do think though:

• we're addicted as a country to drugs that don't do all that much good and cost a lot of money due to patent monopolies and clever promotion
• we have far less tolerance for the medical profession getting things wrong than other countries
• the incentives behind our private insurance system (healthy people have no incentive to get insurance, and insurance companies have no incentive to insure sick people) mean it won't work as is, nor will it with minor tweaking.
• our export/import policy puts lower income workers like steelworkers and janitors in competition with foreign labor, but protects higher income workers like doctors from foreign competition, increasing the costs of consumers of medical services.
• We make a lot of bad health care choices culturally (eating too much, getting too little physical activity, smoking, etc.) while still expecting the health care system to maintain us like it could if we didn't make those choices.

I'm sure there are more things I can think of. I don't know what the right combination of policy prescriptions is to fix them. And I don't know what the right combination of items fixed will actually change things. All I do know is that we'll need to nationalize some parts of health care in order to fixed it. Either that or make some really creative changes to the system to change the current incentives.

Back north early

I am heading back north early tomorrow to fix a Dynavox. I emailed a couple of people to cancel plans. I think I got everyone. If I didn't... well...