Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A friend who is older, but not quite old enough for Medicare, is on Obamacare through the Mass Health Connector site. It took about 20 phone calls to get her established and it was supposed to be free, but lately they have decided that she needs to pay $5 per month. So every month they mail her a hardcopy bill and every month they want to receive a hardcopy check.

I am on Obamacare too, though without a subsidy. The web site didn’t make it at all clear that I would have to pay for the first $2,000 of my medical care. One would think that after more than $1 billion in IT spending (the Massachusetts site is built by the same contractor as the federal site) the comparison shopping tool would have shown total likely payments under the various plans, but it did not. I went to see the doctor a few weeks ago. There was no way for the front desk workers to find out that I had to pay out of pocket due to the deductible and collect the money at the time of the visit. They, or their billing service, submitted a $250 bill to Harvard Pilgrim. Harvard Pilgrim then knocked this down to $188 for undisclosed reasons, but paid the doctor nothing due to the deductible. I was informed of this via a hardcopy letter sent in the U.S. mail. Now the doctor will have to chase after me for $188 via hardcopy bills sent in U.S. mail.

Speaking of U.S. mail, I have the insurance set up on autopay from the government’s site. Despite this, every month I am sent a hardcopy bill via U.S. mail that says “do not pay.”

We went to the hospital recently with our 10-day-old baby. His color is now perfect so he shouldn’t need a bilirubin test but the protocol calls for one anyway due to the fact that the earlier results were not ideal. After a 30-minute wait he was tortured with a heel stick. Then the nurse managed to get a drop of his blood in her eye while doing the test. Now she will be tested for HIV every year for 10 years, despite the fact that the mother was tested for HIV prior to the child’s birth and would, if asked, agree to have another HIV test. After the blood incident the staff at the hospital wanted to have a doctor talk to us for permission to look up the mother’s medical records (the baby was born at the same hospital). But no doctor was available and we had to leave to get to the pediatrician for a scheduled checkup. On the way out they were looking at various screens from the IT system and also some printouts saying “But we need to know your name and phone number.” There was confusion as to the baby’s name and the mother’s name that took a while to sort out.

Mother’s summary: “We can’t have another child. I can’t handle another touchpoint with the American medical system.”

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“Supreme Court’s Gay-Marriage Ruling Allows Something Else: Gay Divorce” is a Wall Street Journal article on something that we covered in Real World Divorce. The Kentucky interviewee:

“One tsunami moving across the country is the gay marriage situation,” said Haynes. “We have a statute from 1998 that defines marriage as being between one man and one woman, but a federal court judge has ruled that it is unconstitutional.” Where do Kentuckians stand on the issue? “There has been a shift in public approval and it is now about 50/50,” said Haynes, “while lawyers ask ‘What’s so special about gay people that they get to avoid the horror of divorce?'” How does it work to be a state where gay marriage is illegal in a country where at least some states allow same-sex marriage? “I’ve got a case right now [August 2014] that a local judge is hanging onto. It is a lesbian couple with no children. They were legally married in Massachusetts. One spouse is a disabled Iraqi war veteran. The court system refuses to divorce them, which means they would have to go back to Massachusetts and live there for a year to get Massachusetts jurisdiction for the divorce.” What does Haynes think of the conundrum? “If you’re against gay marriage, why aren’t you in favor of gay divorce?”

The Journal article starts with a woman suing her wife in Georgia. This will work a lot better than in the past because now Georgia is forced to recognize same-sex marriages from other states (since the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act is void). The action then shifts southwest: “One Louisiana court processed a same-sex divorce before marrying its first same-sex couple.” There is a photo from Mississippi with this caption: “Lauren Czekala-Chatham, center, her attorney Carey Varnado, left, and her partner Dawn Jefferies discuss their appearance at the Mississippi Supreme Court in Jackson in January. Ms. Czekala-Chatham married another woman in California in 2008.” (Reader comment: “The attorney appears to be happy because he’s making a bundle on this case, and he knows more are coming.”)

Here is a sampling of the reader comments in the WSJ:

• Who cares? (Response from another reader: “Lawyers”)
• I doubt that there are Christian lawyers that will refuse to represent people in a same sex divorce. Lawyers have no principles. (See our History chapter, in which we note that “None of the attorneys interviewed expressed opposition to gay marriage.”)
• Please. Why is this page 1 news. (Response: “Because Lesbian Lives Matter”)
• I knew it… This whole thing about gay marriage was created by the Trial Lawyers Assoc so that they could increase their business. With marriage growing out of fashion in the ‘straight’ world, the only way to drum up more business is to get gays to marry so that they too will get divorced.
• Yes, divorce lawyers were strongly in favor of gay marriage because it means more business for them.
• The decision to stay together or not has been different for gay people, because they are together for love, and when love goes, they have been free to go. Even when children are involved, the thing has been to show the children that love includes freedom. … Marriage is seldom what people think it will be. It’s an individual’s sense of rightness of striving to be an individual, and be yoked for life at the same time, to someone different.
• Polygamy, when it comes and it will, is going to add yet another wrinkle to this process. I’m divorcing Jane, Mary, and Joanne but keeping Jennifer, George, and Bill – oh, and here are the visitation schedules for the 17 kids we have between us and acquired from previous relationships. Lawyers are going to have a field day.
• Why is it we think that same sex marriage would be any less a joke than the traditional? In the end if it is about money or sex it will fail. It is clear that is probably true about 50% of the time.
• Marriage never had any sanctity after all, it was Straights who ruined Marriage. (Our History chapter: “When I read arguments by opponents of gay marriage,” said one attorney, “I don’t recognize their description of straight marriage as some sort of sanctified institution. With no-fault statutes that kept the old alimony, property division, and child support rules, straight people made a mockery of civil marriage a long time ago. Marriage today is a way for a smart person with a low income to make money from a stupid person with a high income. What difference does it make whether the gold digger and mark are of the same sex?”)
• New Dictionary definition: gayvorce: noun, gay divorce

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“Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace” is a New York Times exposé about Amazon.com. Investors have been grappling with the principal-agent problem for centuries: fund a corporation, hire managers, and then sit back while they feather their own nests, e.g., by donating shareholder funds to local charities, hiring friends, etc. Perhaps because Amazon is still managed by its largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, if we believe the nytimes the company’s main interest in employees is getting the maximum productivity out of each worker. I.e., not a year of parental leave like Netflix, no celebration of the “whole person” behind the desk. Instead of celebrating this rare example of Econ 101 in practice, the journalists are enraged by this behavior and so are most of the commenting readers.

What do readers think? We keep hearing about how Millennials won’t get off their asses and work. Is it credible that Amazon has found tens of thousands of American Millennials who are so passionate about their jobs? Or did the journalists find a biased sample to interview?

[Separately, just looking back at the last week… I want to thank the Amazon staff for delivering my tennis headbands one day after ordering (promised for two-day delivery). Also thanks for letting me find the right balance bike for the 20-month old. Thanks for enabling a one-click replacement for the sound puzzle destroyed by Mindy the Crippler. And thanks for saving me a trip to Target to find 18M-size swim trunks (had purchased 2T size at Target previously but they were too big). And thanks for the Kindle system! So… even if you have to suffer some harsh words at work, our family does appreciate everything that you do.]

Related:

• The birth of Amazon.com
• discussion on ycombinator
• Washington chapter of Real World Divorce (unlike in California or Massachusetts, child support profits are capped and therefore working for Amazon is a better way to make money than having sex with a dermatologist)

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A Boston TV station interviewed me regarding Delta 1889, an Airbus A320 scheduled from Boston to Salt Lake City that encountered hail and diverted to Denver. Below is the big picture of NEXRAD data that one can see from a web browser and the plane’s track over the ground. The big picture is available for free to anyone with a web browser. Adding that capability to a little Cessna costs about $10,000 for the FAA-certified XM radio ($100 for a car?) and about $600 per year for the data subscription from XM. How much would it cost to put this $100 XM radio in a Boeing or Airbus? The regulator hurdles are so high that it would almost surely not be affordable to airlines. Therefore they rely on onboard weather radar that can see rain out the front plus advice from air traffic controllers who have at least local NEXRAD data on their radar screens.

Without the big picture the pilots would have had a tough time seeing that the space between thunderstorms was tight (the FAA says don’t get any closer than 20 nautical miles to a thunderstorm for fear of hail and turbulence, but that is just a rule of thumb) and that going south to Oklahoma or north through the top of Kansas would have been more prudent. Their onboard radar reflects wonderfully off rain but not so well from the dry baseball-sized hail that they encountered.

The primitive nature of electronics for aircraft was on full display during this incident. The pilots of Delta 1889 had cracked windshields that could have blown out at any moment, causing a depressurization. Their onboard radar was destroyed. But there was no way for them to have a dedicated communication channel to ATC. The controllers had to keep talking to other airplanes on the party line and giving what attention they could to the airplane with the emergency. (liveatc recording)

The pilots quite sensibly picked Denver, an airport with crazy long runways (one is 16,000′ long!). It is easy to fly any instrument-certified airplane, including an A320, down to about 200′ above the ground without being able to see out the windows. The final 200′ usually requires visual identification of the runway. However, due to their spectacularly foggy/misty weather, the British decided to build autoland systems starting in the 1960s. The typical domestic airline won’t maintain and test autoland to the extent required to make it legal to use day-to-day. Where autoland becomes a factor in the U.S. is for transoceanic flights. With the potential ability to land in fog they can cut down on the amount of reserve fuel that must be carried. However, even if autoland is not maintained and tested all the time it remains available to use and the pilots of Delta 1889 did use it (receiving a “nice job” from the control tower).

The pilots were heroes to everyone (including me, I think, since they sounded so cool on the radio after escaping the hail). But why weren’t the engineers who designed the windshields and the autoland system celebrated? Who went over to France to find the programmer behind the A320 autopilot and autoland system? Who found the glass manufacturer to find out how their product survived the pounding without subjecting passengers to depressurization?

 

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• Road warrior 1: “You can’t rely on Uber because they could be shut down at any time by government regulators.”
• Road warrior 2: “I never know if I am going to get there because most of the drivers are immigrants from Muslim countries and have at best a tenuous grasp of local geography.”
• Me: “Maybe Uber should be renamed to Insha’Allah, as in ‘We will get there, Insha’Allah.'”

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Video nerds:

I want to interview two people. Maybe I will be behind the camera since nobody needs to look at me, though generally I am opposed to disembodied voices on video (I’ve got a 5-year-old trained to say “No talking behind the camera!”). A standard stereo lav mic setup is what I have used in the past. One for me and one for the interviewee with the two mics going to the LR channels on the camera (example from a video dating experiment). But what happens with three lav mics? Now the wireless mic receiver also has to be a mixer, right? And what is the right setting to mix three channels to two? Put the two interviewees on the left channel and the interviewer on the right? Does this product even exist? I don’t want to have two boxes in front of the camera if I can possibly avoid it.

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

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“Total U.S. Auto Lending Surpasses $1 Trillion for First Time” is a WSJ story that shows (a) for all of the whining about how the American middle class is getting squeezed, it still has plenty of money (don’t think the one-percenters need to get car loans), and (b) Americans are putting a huge amount of money into the dumbest possible asset. Cars have always been a terrible investment due to rapid depreciation. On the other hand, that made them good status symbols because people could see that you had money to burn. But with semi-automatic and totally automatic (self-driving) cars just around the corner, how can it possibly be a good idea for a society to invest $1 trillion in yesterday’s technology?

[The article also shows that Americans are basing spending decisions on a machine with a 20-year life based on today’s oil prices:

“A lot of the gain we’ve seen is from light trucks, SUVs, cross-overs, minivans and pickup trucks,” said David Berson, chief economist at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, Ohio. “Because gasoline prices have come down, it makes it less expensive to run the vehicles that use more fuel” and frees up consumers’ budgets to put toward more cars or higher car loan payments.

]

Related:

• Cost of converting entire U.S. to electric cars? Zero.

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Illustrating the depth of ignorance of family law in the U.S. is this advice column in the Detroit Free Press:

I have a 12-year-old daughter. Her biological father passed away when she was 2 years old. I got married when she was 5. He and I separated when she was 10. We’re now divorced. … He calls and asks to take her to dinner or to do fun things during the day. This is great, but he does not help me financially. … I sometimes feel resentful that I am the one paying for school activities, birthdays and necessities, and he still gets to spend time with her whenever he wants without helping me. I’ve always wanted to be kind, and I can provide on my own, but this has become a nagging thought. … I wish he … would give me a monthly amount, like child support.

The columnist responds that, due to the lack of any biological link between the potential defendant and the child, litigation to turn the child into a cash source wouldn’t work. But the “Post-Divorce Child Support Collection… from non-parents” section of http://www.realworlddivorce.com/PostDivorceLitigation shows that it is in fact possible.

[Separately, the article also shows the superior financial security enjoyed by successful child support plaintiffs compared to married parents. The biological father “passed away” and it is possible, e.g., if the seeker of advice had been married, that the widow suffered a loss of income as a result. Had she divorced the biological father and obtained a child support order, the father would have, at least in many states, also been ordered to purchase life insurance (at an additional cost, above and beyond the child support cashflow) with his plaintiff as beneficiary.]

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North Carolina offers employers a relatively low-cost labor pool. Nonetheless a two-day trip showed how companies are able to reduce the number of workers. I visited one of the world’s most successful business enterprises, which enjoys tremendous pricing power and commensurate profits. The buildings had all been designed with receptionist-staffed lobbies. Their empty desks were still there (what to do with them?) but in front of each desk was an automated badge-printing kiosk with a keyboard for entering one’s name and the name of the employee being visited. The little guard houses at the drive-in entrances were vacant, having been replaced with an audio/video system to allow a single guard to run multiple gates from a comfortable air-conditioned office.

The Nordstrom department store cafe where we ate was designed like a Chick fil A . We ordered our food at the register and it was brought to our table when ready, thus enabling the waitstaff to be substantially reduced. I wanted headphones for the return flight to Boston. I purchased them from a BestBuy robot at the RDU airport.

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One of my classmates from MIT (we graduated when the Wisconsin ice sheet still covered most of Massachusetts) emailed to say how excited she was that young women were suing employers more frequently than women had in the past (unclear that this is true; it could just be that Ellen Pao-style lawsuits now get more press coverage than previously). Ellen Pao in particular is a hero to her. Why? “Lawsuits force men to listen up.”

I responded with “ask yourself why a U.S. company would want to hire women at this point at the same wage as a man. If every female employee comes with a statistical risk of being sued and spending $10 million defending the discrimination lawsuit, then the only way for the female employee to be equally valuable to the company if she is paid a lower wage. … So women like Ellen Pao actually lower the wages of other women in the workforce.”

Was she persuaded by this Econ 101/Accounting 201 argument? Apparently not because she responded with “This email of yours is wrong and ignorant and sexist.”

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