I got my hair cut the other day. It’s a great haircut because my stylist took two hours to do it. Really, you should check it out.
One of the reasons I got so much extra time under the snip-snips was because my stylist was ranting at length about the evil health insurance companies that our brilliant politicians and their bang-up health care reform bill are going to protect us from. I kept trying to convince her that the drug companies are the ones that need some knuckling, not the insurance companies…and that a system that pays doctors based on the quantity of “care” (would you like 17 x-rays with your order of the super-sized blood test today, ma’am) instead of the quality (like actually healing patients) is where the spiraling costs of care are coming from.
Continued…
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Posted in Absolutely Significant, As Usual, Government, Politics, Will Destroy You.
Tagged with congress, Government, greed, health care, obama, Politics, reform, waste.
By The Fishwrapper
– September 28, 2009
The blog has been down for a while, as you may have seen if anyone reads this thing…
This is due to Lunarpages, which now is having trouble with people hacking into their servers and deleting files, OR with their own system replacing files with emptiness (i.e, 0k empty files), which is not my idea of zen by any means.
Fishwrap is now with a new hosting company, and again I cannot urge strongly enough that nobody use Lunarpages for hosting. They are simply terrible. Once great, now sad. This is what happens when you move your server farm somewhere and start having lower-order animals run it.
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Posted in General.
Tagged with bad hosting, lunarpages.
By The Fishwrapper
– May 6, 2009
Not that anyone possibly cares or thinks about the truths I spout forth here like chunks of the wisest projectile vomit, but if you do, Australian satirists Clarke and Dawe are here to tell you why you shouldn’t, in this video.
Continued…
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Posted in Business, Economy and Finance, Politics.
Tagged with clarke and dawe, humor.
By The Fishwrapper
– March 25, 2009
Reading the recent Congressional Budget Office analysis of the proposed federal budget, two things become immediately clear. First, the Obama administration - while nowhere near as guilty as the Bush administration - is padding budget assumptions in order to make new government spending look cheaper than it actually will be. The second is that the deficit and ever-increasing national debt have become so huge that it’s difficult to understand what the numbers even mean.
It’s important to wrap our feeble brains around them, though, because underestimating budget deficits by $2.3 trillion, or causing debt to rise by $9.8 trillion, may seem like numbers you’d hear about a country like Zimbabwe, increasing debt has real effects on Americans. And numbers this high will have substantial, noticeable effects on you.
Continued…
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Posted in Absolutely Significant, Economics, Economy and Finance, Finance, Recession.
Tagged with budget, congressional budget office, deficit, national debt, recession, stimulus.
By The Fishwrapper
– March 24, 2009
San Francisco County Assessor Phil Ting sent me an email the other day asking me to read his article in the Examiner about turning San Francisco into a “No Foreclosure Zone.” After reading it, I wanted to respond to Mr. Ting publicly, because his ideas either betray a fundamental ignorance about financial policy management, or a shell game that plays on populist heartstrings to cover up the fact that he’s willing to fill San Francisco’s tax coffers through any means necessary, ethical or not.
Guess which one I think it is?
Continued…
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Posted in Economics, Economy and Finance, Politics, Will Destroy You.
Tagged with bad policy, economics, loan modification, moral hazard, phil ting, san francisco.
By The Fishwrapper
– March 23, 2009
Apologies to anyone who has tried to access the blog over the last 48 HOURS that it’s been gone after my oh-so-crappy-and-soon-to-be-kicked-to-the-curb hosting company, Lunarpages, DELETED the entire website.
It’s sad when companies fall so far, so fast. Six months ago Lunarpages was considered among the best shared hosting providers around. Great uptime, fast service, excellent staff. Who knows why, but the company has tanked into the gutter as if it shipped it’s entire server farm to Ghana and hired one 95-year-old guy with AIDS to run it.
Check out the ratings across the web, and it’s simply amazing how quickly a company can go downhill. Who knows, maybe they’ll suffer the fate that used to befall companies that suck it back in the old days of capitalism.
If you ever need proof that companies that don’t work should be allowed to wither and die or implode like a child actor’s career, here you go.
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Posted in Business, Stupid decisions.
Tagged with Business, incompetence, lunarpages.
By The Fishwrapper
– March 19, 2009
Joshua-Michele Ross recently wrote an article about the evolution of social media into a “Social Nervous System” - noting that the interconnectivity of people that now exists has turned into what can genuinely be called the beginning of a hive mind. He includes several compelling examples of this critical mass of information coordination reshaping not just online life but the physical world, and notes that costs for participation in the nervous system of the hive are rapidly approaching zero, so almost everyone will soon be a part of this giant brain that will increasingly drive human endeavor.
Continued…
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Posted in Culture or Lack Thereof.
Tagged with puny human, singularity, social media, social networking.
By The Fishwrapper
– March 16, 2009
you can rant too