Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I took Mindy the Crippler, PC for her 12-week veterinary appointment today. The doc wrote everything down by hand on paper to be placed in a folder. I asked “Are electronic health records popular among vets?” She responded that vets used computer systems for reminders and recording vaccinations but generally not for the full health record. “It slows everything down too much [to use a computer],” she noted.

The vet world is mostly uninfluenced by insurance companies and government, so I’m wondering if the fact that computerized records apparently don’t yield net benefits in that domain should make us skeptical that they will pay off in human medicine.

[I might add that, unlike in human medicine, Mindy the Crippler, PC was seen on time and I was able to schedule follow-up visits on dates/times that were convenient for me. What did the vet get paid? Seventy-five dollars, which is about 1/6th as much as my doctor charges as a retail rate and almost exactly the same as my doctor gets paid for an exam (see previous posting about my $83 checkup). The vet might be more profitable because the $75 was collected with a simple credit card swipe.]

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Continuing in the category of reviews-of-round-the-world-sailing-trips-by-someone-who-gets-seasick… I watched Maidentrip the other night, a documentary about a 14-year-old girl’s round-the-world solo voyage in a 38-foot sailboat. Aside from the nautical aspects of the voyage, in which the teenager displays far more prudence than most adults, the movie is kind of interesting from a legal point of view.  Laura Dekker was reared primarily by her Dutch father starting at about age 5 (according to the movie, the German-born mom went to live with a boyfriend and left the child [a rational financial decision in Europe, where obtaining custody and collecting child support may not be profitable]). The father was a sailing nut and boat-builder who allowed the girl to take trips commensurate with her skill but unconventional given her age. The Dutch government fought a 10-month lawsuit, ultimately unsuccessful, to try to prevent Dekker from embarking on her journey, which had been approved by both of her joint custodial/biological parents.

Note: the movie is available for streaming from Netflix.

Related: my posting about Wild Eyes (Abby Sunderland’s round-the-world attempt) and All is Lost

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For people who are quarantined in their houses or apartments due to the fear of contact with Ebola, how about a service called “e-shutin.com”? With one click you register and get

• upgraded cable TV subscription with all premium channels
• higher speed Internet
• Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription
• Amazon Prime subscription
• additional streaming music subscriptions
• Peapod online grocery delivery subscription
• a sign for the front door reading “UPS/Fedex: Please leave packages. No signature required.”
• subscription to Audible
• upgraded Netflix subscription to 8 disks out at once

Any other ideas?

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It was Head of the Charles this weekend in Boston. Here was a conversation on the Weeks Footbridge:

• “Did you hear that one of the teams in the Eights is all government workers?”
• “No. How are they doing?”
• “Much better this year. They kept coming in last in previous races, so they sent someone to spy on the Harvard and Yale teams to try to find out the secret of their high performance.”
• “What did the spy tell them?”
• “At Harvard and Yale they have only one person yelling ‘The rest of you should row’.”

 

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The Guardian notes that this month marks the 20th anniversary of the Weblog (article on Dave Winer).

The standard HTTP/HTML Web was and is great for 3-30-page ideas. Winer was perhaps the first person to see that the world needed some different technical standards to deal with three-paragraph ideas.

[I owe Winer a personal debt of thanks for it was his arrival at Harvard’s Berkman Center that resulted in me trying out the Weblog.]

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Having spent a childhood with Spaghetti-O’s in the pantry closet and Velveeta in the fridge I tend not to worry too much about industrial chemicals in my life. The same cannot be said for the distaff side of our household. Thus a trip to Crate & Barrel to find a sleeper sofa turned into an education regarding flame retardants. It seems that the wise politicians and regulators in California back in 1975 essentially forced furniture buyers nationwide to bring toxic, yet ineffective, flame retardants into their households. Now, 40 years later, the wise politicians and regulators are forcing furniture manufacturers to go in the opposite direction. See this NRDC page for a summary history.

How does this affect a Massachusetts shopper? Just try asking a retail clerk if a particular sofa was made with particular chemicals…

[And separately, maybe this explains Americans’ lackluster performance in school and stagnant wages. The NRDC page says “Americans carry much higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies than anyone else in the world” and “Children exposed in the womb have lower IQs and attention problems.”]

Finally… the government seems to want me to go back to my Velveeta-eating roots. The FDA has banned French cheese, such as Roquefort, made according to 1000-year-old recipes (CNN).

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Harvey Silverglate has published an interesting article on whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, previously welcomed by one U.S. government agency with fast-track citizenship and now being prosecuted by a different government agency, should be tried in the Boston area or elsewhere.

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One of the top economic writers of the New York Times and his editors have published an article entitled “The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century”. There is no mention of the fact that there is a global market for labor. Here’s a comment that I posted in response:

Why the narrow focus on the U.S.? “The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century” is certainly not a headline that would make sense to someone in China or Botswana. The pool of money for wages worldwide has grown dramatically in the 21st Century and people all over the world are enjoying dramatically better lives as a consequence. If I am not getting the share of this pool to which I feel entitled, perhaps my resentment just proves the adage “When the market gives you an answer you don’t like, declare market failure.”

Could it actually be that one reason we don’t get our former share of global wages is that we are unable to think globally?

[And, as a minor point, if employers provide health insurance to employees and the cost of that insurance has gone way up, isn’t that itself a substantial increase in compensation? Perhaps there has been wage growth in the U.S. but it isn’t noticeable unless we have to go to the hospital.]

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A friend is going to be giving a TED talk soon. He asked me what it cost to get a family portrait done in the 1850s and guessed “In today’s dollars I expect it was >$1000?” He didn’t say why he was interested but I am assuming that it was part of an argument about the wonders of technological progress.

That set me to searching and I found this page on daguerreotypes, which was the first photographic process that was practical as a consumer product. It turned out that $2 was the price to have a family portrait done by Mathew Brady, whose work today is sought after by art museums. Adjusted for inflation with http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ that’s about $55 today, i.e., about half what you’d pay to have a 19-year-old do a portrait session with a few prints at your local J.C. Penney.

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One of my MIT grad school classmates bought a decrepit beach house in Beverly, Massachusetts, the renovation of which ran afoul of various town committees. The Boston Globe ran a story on October 5, 2014 about how the multi-year approval process will end: “Beverly’s historic Loring House set to fall; Roomba co-creator eyes demolition”.

Most of the argument seems to have concerned stuff that was going to happen inside the house.

[The historic commission guy’s use of the term “nouveau riche” was inappropriate in my opinion, though I guess it makes it obvious that he doesn’t like Helen (we all liked her back in grad school! So I guess this is evidence that success breeds envy/enemies). The term makes sense in a country such as France or England with a nobility, but not in the U.S. The people who built that house were lawyers, according to the article, not dukes and princesses. Being an inventor in 2014 is not somehow crass compared to being a lawyer in the U.S. in the mid-19th century.]

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