A Diary of a Blonde

Posted on November 7, 2011 by siggib

January: Had to return a scarf I received as a Christmas present as it was too tight.

February: Lost my job at the pharmacy, something about not price tagging correctly. It’s not my fault though as the bottles wouldn’t fit in the price gun.

March: I’m so proud of myself. I finished a jigsaw puzzle in six months and according to the box it was four to six years.

April: Was stuck on the escalator for the longest time when the power went out.

May: I wanted to go water skiing but had to cancel it as I couldn’t find any lakes with a sufficient slope

June: Lost the swimming competition for the breast stroke event, the other people cheated and used their hands

July: Locked the keys in the car and had to wait outside in rain and wind. What was worse is that the interior of my cute convertible got soaked as the top was down

August: Couldn’t dial 911 as my phone was missing the button with “11” on it.

September: Trying to figure out why some of my M&M have W’s on them

October: Damn it’s difficult to figure out this W issue with the M&M’s.

November: Baked a cake where I had to separate 12 eggs so I had to borrow 12 mixing bowls.

December: Went to a dance for 18 and over. It took a lot of time to gather the other 17.

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The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) debate

Posted on October 23, 2011 by siggib

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) debate has been going on for some time now and I just though I pen some of my thoughts on the subject. Just a quick thing about me first that I am super straight heterosexual male in my 40′s and those who know me I would expect can testify to how “girl crazy” I am. 

There are so many aspect to this debate it is hard to know where to start. There is legal, moral and multiple religious aspects. I guess one of the first questions that often comes up in such debate is “is homosexuality wrong?” which I suppose is very legit question. To me equally legit question is “is it wrong to be vegetarian?” Both questions can be debated at length without really coming to a conclusive answer, as it all comes down to your believes. My personal philosophy is that it’s not dinner (or lunch for that matter) if it doesn’t involve a big chunk of a dead animal. I’m kind of the opposite of a vegetarian, a meatatarian if you will, as I don’t eat much vegetable at all. I digress from my initial point, lets get back on point.

Another question frequently brought up in the LGBT debate is the question of why, or why are homosexuals sexually attractive to the same gender. The reasons offered during such debate tend to be grouped into two buckets that could be labeled nature vs. nurture. In other words are they born that way or is it a learned behaviour or maybe some sort of a psychological disorder that needs to/can/should be cured. My believe is that they are born that way and it is not something that needs to be fixed or cured. I base this believe on couple of different factors. First I’ve read that there have been studies done to show that femininity/masculinity is developed early in the womb by the proper dose of hormones at the precise right time of fetus development. If this hormone dose is the wrong amount or the wrong timing it will affect how masculine/feminine the baby will be to the point of affecting their sexual orientation. While I can’t vouch for the authenticity or scientific validity of these studies, and I certainly don’t believe everything I read, this does make a lot of sense to me so I am inclined to believe it. Think about why some women are very feminine and others are much more of a tomboys, or why some straight guys are more masculine than others. To me it stands to reason to me that sexual orientation is a continuous scale of masculinity to feminine. My other reasoning is based on my personal reflection, as I can’t imagine a scenario where I would be sexually attractive to guys. I’ve had few different “what if” debates analyzing different scenarios surrounding social norms, upbringing, values, etc., and I always come to the same conclusion that I could never be attractive to guys, or even pretend I was in order to fit in. Then I take that ideology and extrapolate on it. If me deciding or pretending to have a different sexual orientation is so unthinkable it stands to reason that others are the same way regardless of what their orientation is. So then to me any arguments claiming it is a choice, upbringing, etc., makes absolutely no sense to me which leads me back to the nature argument (i.e. they are are born that way, it’s just the way they are, etc.)

With all that being said I’m actually going to argue that the why doesn’t even matter, here is why via analogy. I hate nuts, pretty much all nuts in all forms. The absolutely worst type of nuts for me is peanuts, and especially peanut butter. Just the smell of it turns my stomach. I know a lot of folks don’t understand how I can hate something so passionately that they love so much. We could try to analyze the reason, maybe I have some sort of nut allergy and my body knows it at some level without my brain recognizing it and then try to “cure me” so I can enjoy the same love of peanut butter as so many enjoy. In the end does it really matter why I hate peanut butter? And discrimination against me for hating peanut butter, such as denying me right or a privilege simply based on the fact that I hate peanut butter, is just wrong. Does it really matter why vegetarian don’t like meat? Should we try to cure them? Should we pass a law requiring all restaurants to only serve meet dishes? Does it really matter why we have the preference we do?

Lets look at the religious aspect of this debate. There are number of religions out there that teach that homosexuality is wrong, immoral, sinful, etc., They mainly site the Bible (or their holy book, such as Koran, etc., depending on the religion) as the reason. I was brought up in a Lutheran house hold in a Lutheran society in Europe and I was never taught that. I was taught to love thy neighbor unconditionally and without judgment. I do not believe that Jesus and God discriminate based on your preferences, I believe you will be judged based on how you treated those around you, not by who you choose to love. I believe that all love (and I mean true love, not manipulation and control tactics labeled as love) is good and there is no such thing as sinful or immoral love.

Lets look at the legal aspect of the LGBT debate which is often referred to as “the same sex marriage debate”. The US federal government passed a law in 1996 called “The Defense of Marriage Act (Public Law 104-199)” commonly known as “DOMA.” This law defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman.  It also allowed states, territories, possessions and Indian tribes to choose whether to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Since then six states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. All other states, with three exception, plus the federal government do not recognize same sex couples married in these six states as legally married and do not grant them the legal rights that are granted to couples that fall under the DOMA definition of a marriage. It seems to me that the arguments behind DOMA are all religious based, which to me seems a violation of the first amendment to US constitution often referred to as “separation of church and state”. However it seems that so far the Supreme Court disagree’s with my opinion, despite other less relevant issues have been deemed a violation.

Some say the term “marriage” is a religious term and since their religion believes homosexuality to be wrong the term “same sex marriage” is offensive. They say that same sex unions can have all the same rights as long as it isn’t called a marriage. That’s a fair point, but it doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that some other religion believes there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, so if marriage is a religious term it should be open to all religions to use according to their believes. The solution to me seems to be to either ban the word marriage altogether and replace it with union and/or prepend it with religious affiliation such as Catholic-marriage, civil-marriage, Baptist-marriage, Presbyterian-marriage, etc. If we are going to be really specific about the definition of the term marriage based on religion we need to allow each religion to define it based on each religious views. Or we can just all be tolerant and accepting of other folks views, believes and preferences.

After all it basically boils down civil/human rights issue to me. There was a time when child labor was perfectly acceptable, women had no rights, and folks with colored skin had even less right and in many cases were someone’s property simply based on the color of their skin. We look back on those days with horror as we have matured way past those sort of discrimination or so we like to believe. However I believe the current “same but different” attitude against LGBT folks is of the same mindset. It didn’t work back in the sixties for the blacks and it doesn’t work any better today for LGBT people.

In the end I believe we all just need to be accepting and tolerant of others view, believes and preference. We shouldn’t be worrying about what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes, nor should we try to control who people choose as their spouse.

As always I am very interested in your thoughts and comments on this issue.

Posted in Philosophical, Politics, Religion | 2 Comments

The difficulties understanding a woman…..

Posted on August 7, 2011 by siggib

A man on his Harley was riding along a California beach when suddenly the sky clouded above his head and in a booming voice, God said, “Because you have tried to be faithful to me in all ways, I will grant you one wish.”

 

The biker pulled over and said, ‘Build a bridge to Hawaii, so I can ride over anytime I want.’ 

 

God replied, ‘Your request is materialistic; think of the enormous challenges for that kind of undertaking; the supports required reaching the bottom of the Pacific and the concrete and steel it would take! I can do it, but it is hard for me to justify your desire for worldly things. Take a little more time and think of something that could possibly help mankind.’ 

 

The biker thought about it for a long time. Finally, he said, God, I wish that I, and all men, could understand women; I want to know how she feels inside, what she’s thinking when she gives me the silent treatment, why she cries, what she means when she says nothing’s wrong, why she snaps and complains when I try to help, and how I can make a woman truly happy. 

 

God replied: ‘You want two lanes or or four lanes on that bridge?’

 

Author unknown

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The American Tourist and Mexican Fisherman by Heinrich Böll

Posted on August 7, 2011 by siggib

An American tourist was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.

Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The tourist complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “Only a little while.”

The tourist then asked, “Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?”

The Mexican said, “With this I have more than enough to support my family’s needs.”

The tourist then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life.”

The tourist scoffed, ” I can help you. You should spend more time fishing; and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat: With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor; eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York where you could run your ever-expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

The tourist replied, “15 to 20 years.”

“But what then?” asked the Mexican.

The tourist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”

“Millions?…Then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

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Congressional Reform Act of 2011

Posted on June 18, 2011 by siggib

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971…before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land…all because of public pressure.

This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. Term Limits.

12 years only, one of the possible options below.

A. Two Six-year Senate terms

B. Six Two-year House terms

C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

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The backup dilema

Posted on October 31, 2010 by siggib

If you do anything on your computer besides checking your Gmail account, reading CNN and shopping at Amazon you need to backup your computer. Be it your picture gallery, your Quicken file, your letters, your novel, etc. If you don’t want to loose it, you need to back it up. As advanced and prevalent computers are these days, they still break, hard disks, die, etc. Having just one copy of a file in one location is asking for trouble. For anyone familiar with Murphy’s law you’ll know that the chances of something happening to a file is in direct portion to the importance of the file and inverse portion to the number of backups. If all you ever use is Opera, Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer likely the only thing stored on your computer are your internet site favorites. If you’re a chrome user (I’m not familiar enough with Opera and Firefox to know if this holds true for them or not) your favorites can be configured to be backed up to your Google account. So if Chrome is the only application you ever use you probably have nothing to worry about. However most computer users do not fall into that category. If you don’t care if you loose everything you’ve got stored on your computer (pictures, files, emails, contacts, etc.) you don’t have anything to worry about either, again very few folks fall into this category. If you don’t read your email in an web browser, instead use an application like Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, Windows mail, Outlook express, Outlook, etc., chances are all your emails and contacts are stored on your computer and without a backup you risk loosing it all.

Generally speaking I would say there are three types of users when it comes to backup volume: light, medium and heavy. This is how I would define each category.

  • Light users has less than 2 GB of files to backup
  • Medium user has less than 20 GB of file to backup
  • Heavy user has more than 200 GB of files to backup

A novice user may be asking what a GB is. In simple terms it is a measurement for a size of a file, kind of like the metric system. It is difficult to explain how big it is in manner that gives an accurate perspective as files can be any size. It’s like trying to explain how many cups are in a liter or a quart without first defining the size of the cup. Generally speaking though you can store about 1000 low resolution pictures or about 250 MP3 songs in 1 GB.

For a light and medium users there are a lot of viable options for backing up online for reasonable price. For light users there are even free options available, here are few options:

  • My Other Drive offers free backup for up to 2 GB, the catch is that if you go over 2 GB you’ll start to pay.
  • Drop box Also offers free backup for up to 2 GB with subscription over that.
  • OffSiteBox Offers fee backup for up to 1 GB with subscriptions over that.
  • iDrive Also offers free backup for up to 2 GB with subscription over that

I haven’t tried any of these services as I’m a very heavy backup user (I have close to 2000 GB of files I want backed up) but they all look like a good solution for the right scenarios. One thing to be aware of is overseas companies offering online backup solutions. These might all be great companies but the problem is that network connectivity overseas is a lot slower than domestically. It’s a simple law of physics that it takes longer to go 6000 miles than 2000 miles, even when traveling at the speed of light as in the case of internet connectivity. Therefore I would stick with companies in the same continent as you are (so in the US for those of us in the US) for this purpose. The only overseas company I’ve come across offering backup service is Live Drive which is based in London England. Unless they have established a presence in the US (as in US customers data is backed up to a servers in the US) I would stay away from them (unless of course you live in Europe), simply for performance reasons. As an example when I measure the transit times from my computer in Kirkland WA to the iDrive servers the average result is 36 milli seconds where as to the Live Drive servers the average is 181 milli seconds. This means that it would take me 5 times as long to backup or restore the same amount of files to Live Drive compare to iDrive.

There are two other options for either light or medium users that claim to offer unlimited backup for one flat monthly fee, but I would not recommend these for heavy users. These are called Mozy and Carbonite. While the promise of unlimited backup can be enticing there is usually a catch to those offers. I haven’t tried Mozy but I did try Carbonite and I can not in good conscience recommend them. If you want an unlimited plan I would try Mozy simply because they aren’t Carbonite.

Generally speaking there is a gotcha’s when it comes to unlimited backup plans in that the company may have a desire to keep their space use down by limiting the number of copies they store and how long they store it. Say for example your Quicken file gets corrupt and you can’t open it, your backup file is most likely corrupt too so unless you have at least couple of different versions your backup can’t help you out. This is why it is important to keep few revisions of a file and any good backup solution will do that for you automatically. Another scenario is you accidentally delete a file of your hard drive, the backup company could decide to delete your backup too which defeats the whole point of a the backup. What if they keep it for a month and then delete it but it takes you six weeks to notice it is gone. These are the dangers of an unlimited backup plan. When you pay for the space you use it is in the companies best interest to keep many version of your backup and never delete files from the backup until you explicitly delete it from the backup as this increases the space you use. If you backup 10 GB of files and keep three copies then you’re paying for 30 GB backup.

My issue with Carbonite is I feel they are deceitful and unreliable. They claim they give you unlimited backup but they neglect to tell you that if you attempt to backup more than 35 GB you’re backup becomes so slow that it becomes unusable. They burry this information deep in this support article where they outline that if you exceed 35 GB that your backup speed will be cut by a fourth, and if you exceed 200 GB your backup speed will be one twentieth of a user that has less than 35 GB backed up. At that speed it will take you years to backup just few GB, so in practical terms you really can’t backup more than 200 GB. When I contacted support to complain about my backup speeds they gave me the total run around, blaming my internet speeds, telling me stories about how some users have really slow connection and basically just telling me bunch of stories. At no point did they actually fess up on how to they were set up, I found that support article by digging around their knowledge base system. They would never attempt to do any troubleshooting or do anything beyond providing irrelevant canned answers. I complained loudly to every contact at Carbonite I could find, including support and sales with no results. Then I found them on Facebook and told my story on their wall, initially they just deleted my posts but after I persisted awhile I was actually contacted by their VP on Support who apologized for the run around the support gave me and tried to justify their policies. He offered me a refund which is the only reason why I’m still a customer. I have no intention of ever paying them, but as long as they keep giving me free service I might keep them around. In the time I’ve had them I’ve gotten couple of automated emails saying that the computer hasn’t contact their computers for over a week and to please turn the computer on connect it to the internet. I contacted Carbonite support asking for explanation and told them that this computer is never turned off and always connected, even supplied proof of that. No response from support in any fashion. I’ve also found a lot of complaining on other blogs about Carbonite loosing peoples files so when they went to restore, there were files missing or in some cases their entire backup.

For heavy or very heavy users (like myself) the options are much more limited. All the online backup options are prohibitively expensive, for example OffSiteBox charges $164.95/month for 500 GB. Amazon Web Services seems to charge $75/month for the same amount. My Other Drive seems to be considerable cheaper as their ads talk about $240 per year for twice that amount. What I opted for was to maintain a local backup as I find it much more cost effective. I purchased few external USB drives and file synchronization software. For one time investment in hardware I had myself a backup solution with only thing missing was an off-site option.

There are a lot of options when it comes to file synchronization software, I ended up going with a program called Goodsync and I have been very happy with it. The license for it $23.95 and it provides a lot of flexibility. A good backup solution though needs to have an off-site option to protect against things like fire. My solution lacks this right now. One option would be have extra hard drives and trade drives with drives off-site, either your office, safe deposit box, etc. Another option is to put the second drive into a fireproof data safe.

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Blogging application review

Posted on October 30, 2010 by siggib

I’ve completed a cursory review of applications that allow you do your blogging off-line and synchronize to your blog later. I’ve played with Blogjet, BlogDesk and Windows Live Writer for the most part. I’ve looked at other applications as well but never got as far as even installing them for one reason or another, usually because their web sites didn’t compel me to even give them a try. I am windows user so I mostly concerned with that. Generally the free application are feature lacking compared to the once you pay for. The exception to that is Windows Live Writer which has all the features of a commercial application, thanks to the deep pockets of Microsoft. Lately though I’ve been getting bad taste in my mouth with the Windows Live suite of application, such as Microsoft forcing stuff on you (like the bing bar) via Windows Update. Another reason why I disliked Windows Live Writer is the size of the composer window. This is why I choose not to use Windows Live Writer . I went instead with Blogjet as it fully featured, easy to use and has the modest one time licensing fee of $39.95 at the time of this writing.

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Are women better than men?

Posted on October 24, 2010 by siggib

Are women better than men?

Someone once asked me if I though men or women were the better gender so I figured I’d blog a little on my opinion there, what my thoughts are surrounding that and my reasoning. For those that don’t know me I am a red blooded heterosexual male in his early 40′s at the time of this writing.

First a little disclaimer: I’m going to be talking generalities and stereotypes here. As such when ever you talk generalities and stereotypes you tend to over generalize, and as such it is very easy to find cases where such overgeneralization fails. I’m specifically staying general while acknowledging that it doesn’t hold true in all cases. I further acknowledge that I will be over generalizing, and exaggerating on purpose to illustrate a point. OK with that out of the way there are at least three separate topics embedded in the question “Are women better than man”.

  1. Can one survive (individually and/or as a species) without the other
  2. Which one is more capable, wider skill set, etc.
  3. Personal preferences

Can one survive (individually and/or as a species) without the other?

The short answer to that one is an unequivocal NO. Of course the species can not survive with only one gender. So lets expand the question into exploring which gender “needs” the other more. Naturally each gender will claim that they don’t need the other one. However I’m going to argue that men would have a much harder time being without women than the other way around. While I presume most guys will deny this and argue against this, even make derogatory statements against me for making this argument with statements such as “I’m revoking your man card”, I think those same guys would agree with me when they think about it even if they can’t admit it. One only needs to analyze a random sampling of single men vs. single women to see evidence of what I’m talking about.

As a species which would work better to repopulate society, lots of women of child bearing years and only handful of guys, or lots of guys and only a handful of women. Again I’m going to argue that here women have the upper hand. While it is still necessary for sperm to come from a man, a man doesn’t actually have to be involved with the process of impregnating women. Modern science has made it possible for a women to get pregnant without ever having to even see a man. I have not heard of science growing a baby without a woman carrying it to term. While it may run counter to social norms one man can impregnate many women even without any scientific means. While some might argue that this makes the man more useful, etc., it does demonstrate that fewer men than women are needed to maintain the species, making the women more important.

Lets look at an analogy. Lets say for the sake of argument that a person could either know how to drive a car or know how to start it, that it was impossible for the same person to both know how to start the car and drive it. Ideally the number of starters would equal the number or drivers. They are both important as without the one the other is useless, you can’t a drive car that doesn’t start, and there is no point to start a car than no one can drive. If there a lot of starters and very few drivers, most of the starters have nothing to do. However just because the drivers are factor of magnitude greater in number than starters things can still work smoothly. Drivers may have to wait a bit until a starter comes along but ones the car is started the driver is on their marry way and the starter can move onto the next car. To put the analogy in context of bringing a baby into the world, a man gets the process started but after the woman is pregnant the man is not really needed. Therefore I submit that women are better than man in this context.

Which one is more capable, wider skill set, etc.

Here again I’m going to argue for the woman. First lets examine what men tend to be better at generally speaking. The most obvious one is that a man can generally lift heavier items than women, in today’s society though there isn’t a lot of need for that, so how important is that ability? The other is that men tend to have greater spatial abilities. Spatial abilities is the ability to visual objects both in two dimensions as well as in three dimensions (for example to take a two dimensional architectural plan and visualize it in 3D), the relationship between the objects and the ability to rotate those objects in your head. Key example of this ability is when you are looking at a map, those with high spatial abilities keep the map oriented the same way regardless of which direction you are going, those with lower spatial skills will want to rotate the map so that the direction they are going points up. Men tend to have higher spatial skills, this has been attributed to men being greater navigators and scientists. Some have argued that all the greatest inventors in history have been men as well as the greatest warriors and politicians and thus men must be superior. This is a false argument in my mind as we don’t know all the variables. Throughout history woman has always been the caretaker of the family and as such undoubtable has had little time to be tinkering with stuff that would lead to invention. Men on the other hand, history tells us, were not that involved in their families and thus had a lot of time on their hand so they would tinker with stuff. So what is the true reason for all those great inventors through history were men? Is it just because men have superior spatial abilities, or because women were too busy raising families to have time for that, or a little of both? We will never know the answer to those questions, I suspect the answer is along the lines of “little of both”. So we’ve identified two things men tend to be superior at: lifting heavy things and spatial abilities. So now lets look at things that woman are better at. Here are few items I can think of where women outshine men:

  1. They can multitask. Guy’s are very single focused. Each gender is amazed at the other in this regard and both have their uses. In today’s society being able to focus on a lot of different things is a huge advantage in my opinion.
  2. They can tell the difference between eggshell, cream, ivory, and off-white, as well as the difference between hunter green and forest green and all the other different shades of colors. To guys it’s white, red, green, blue, etc. Not so much as critical skill set I suppose but still amazing to me.
  3. They can give birth to a child, talk about miracle of life!
  4. They are better communicators. They can talk about more than sports and cars. Most guys that seems to be all they talk about. I am constantly amazed the breadth of conversation women can have, sometimes all at the same time.
  5. They are much better at paying attention to detail for example they actually remember your birthday. As result they are better care takers.
  6. They can talk about their feelings, this is not something a guy is capable of doing. Guys can’t even identify their feelings let alone talk about them.
  7. They have stronger immune systems which may explain why they tend to live longer

So with 7 items versus 2 items I think it is clear which is the greater gender. Some may argue that men are greater leaders but is that really true? Are men really greater leaders or do women just let men think they are greater leader, in which case is that a strength or a weakness? My take is that is strength. If you look at most households men may claim they are in charge but up on closer inspection it is really the woman that is in charge.

Personal preferences

I have been called “girl crazy” which is a accusation I can not deny. As I think is evident from this post that I hold women in the highest regard. I guess it is all summed up in this joke:

Question: What did God say after he created Adam? Answer: I can do a lot better than that!!!!!

Then he created Eve and was pleased with his work.

Posted in Philosophical | 1 Comment

Testing BlogJet

Posted on October 24, 2010 by siggib

I have installed an interesting application – BlogJet. It’s a Windows client that allows me to compose and edit my blogs off-line. I’m testing it out and will let you know how I like it.

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein

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Healthcare reform problems

Posted on September 7, 2009 by siggib

There’s been a lot of talk about health care reform. From what I’ve heard there have been a lot of emotionally charged statements made, that don’t seem to be all that relevant or maybe just too heavy on emotions and too short on specifics. Take for example the statement “No one should die because they couldn’t afford health care”. On the surface that is a statement I can totally get behind and I totally support the spirit in which I believe it is offered in. When I start to analyze it and pick it apart I realize that it’s pretty vague and very emotional. For those that don’t know me I love to be the devil’s advocate and pose ridiculous questions as food for thought, and/or to illustrate a point. For example if we take that statement extremely literally one could interpret that people that can’t afford health care just simply shouldn’t die, even if they get hit by a train. Of course this is an extreme example bordering on ridiculous, made strictly to illustrate a point. If one were to simply take the statistics of people that died while not having insurance it produces fairly meaningless statistics in my book as it could include people that died under circumstances where their lack of insurance was irrelevant (like in my extreme example, if you get hit by a train you’ll die regardless of your insurance status). In some cases we will never know if having insurance would have helped, as in cases where insurance declined to cover procedures that have unverified success rate. People could argue that it isn’t fair that not all people get access to all treatments, which quickly rat holes to an observation that live isn’t fair. Is it fair that some people are homeless while other live in multimillion dollar mansions? Is it fair to make me pay sky high medical bills for someone who got cancer because they decided to smoke? Smokers don’t like non-smokers to tell them to stop smoking the same way non-smokers don’t like to pay for medical issues that arise from smoking.

The health care system is in serious trouble and does require a lot of work. It is a complex problem and it’s easy to latch onto one symptom instead of digging down to the root of the problem. Common troubleshooting wisdom is that solving a symptom isn’t really solution, you have to find the root cause and address that then symptoms go away. Analyzing symptoms is a good start as it provides data points for your root cause analysis but it’s only a start.

The health care system has many components that all could be contributing to our current crisis. There are the insurance companies, the doctors, the hospitals, the drug companies and the patients. Focusing on only one aspect isn’t going to produce the best solution.

There seems to a lot of talk about national health insurance or national medicine, etc. That sounds a lot like national HMO and/or socialized medicine. Having grown up with socialized medicine in Iceland (located in northern Europe) I believe socialized medicine works about as well as HMO’s. Do we really want to the HMO’s to take over all health care; is that going to fix the problem? From what I’ve heard HMO’s are on one hand being heralded as a solution and on the other hand are used as an example why the system is totally broke.

Here are some of the other symptoms I see:

  • Drug companies charge a small ransom for the drugs, seems like they charge whatever they want.
  • Insurance companies sometimes care more about their bottom line than the insured
  • There are unscrupulous doctors and hospital administrators.
  • Hypochondriacs go to the doctors demanding quick fixes for everything in the form of a pill
  • Some people would rather have liposuction or gastric bypass than do the work of losing weight the old fashion way of watching what you eat and get exercise. Not saying those aren’t valid medical procedures that have their uses and necessities, just that there is the potential for over use.

Since the problem has multiple components we can’t solve it by attacking just one of the symptoms. Yes we need to ensure everyone has access to affordable health insurance. To keep health insurance affordable we need to keep cost of health care down by ensuring drugs are reasonable price. We also need to ensure doctors and hospitals keep their costs in check. Without that we have no hope in keeping insurance affordable. People also need to take responsibility for their own well being and start to take care of them self. Eat sensible, get exercise, etc.

The government regulates how much a moving company can charge, the same goes for utilities companies (Gas, Power, Phone, etc.) as for many other types of businesses. From what I can tell health care provided do not have tariffs.

It is a fact of life that everyone dies, it sucks big time to lose someone you love. We only have limited time on this earth and no one knows just how long they’ve got. Some people live to be 100 while we lose others in what is often described as “in the prime of their life”. Modern medicine may offer theories as to why that is but frequently those theories are proven wrong. As when a chain smoker and heavy drinker that never exercised lives to be 100 and a health nut and exercise fanatic with low cholesterol and otherwise declared fit as a fiddle by the doctors dies of a heart attack at age 40.

While recognizing that losing a loved one is probably one of the worst experiences anyone can have, there comes times when we have to be pragmatic about it. Does it really make sense to spend endless amount of money to keep someone a life artificially? I’m sure we would all be willing to pay whatever it took so that we could have few more months with a loved one. What if it was someone we didn’t know? Would you be willing to pay higher taxes so that some stranger at the opposite side of the country could have few more months with a loved one? If we end up with some sort of government health care your tax dollars will pay for it. If there isn’t some sort of limit to what procedures will be covered it will end up increasing your taxes. Health insurance, whether governmental or private, is simply a business. All business that want to stay in business do a cost benefit analysis when they spend major money. You do the same kind of analysis whenever you make major purchases (hopefully at least). Would you purchase a new car if it came with no warranty and no one was known to drive it more than 6 months before it completely broke down? The same goes for health insurance companies. While it may seem heartless and cold I can totally understand their decision to not cover a procedure that has very low success rate, etc. What is not cool is when the insurance companies denied treatment when that treatment is proven to totally cure a life threatening illness.

Whatever the solution is I believe it needs to allow for health insurance for all as well as keep all aspects of the systems more accountable both in terms of cost, fees and performance.

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