b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
Most Popular
- Historical Yearly Average Gasoline Prices
- Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity
- Real-time Sand Animations
- Adobe Acrobat 7
- Adobe Announces Name Change and New Product
- Largest Technology Boondoggle in Public Education History
- Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
- Skype - Disruptive, Not Compelling
- Aluminum Christmas Tree Museum
- Network Printing Hell and windoze XP
Book Reviews
Recently
Just Out: New Book On Solving Health Care Crisis
Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
It's Not a Rate Increase, It's a Reclassification
Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
It's Not a Rate Increase, It's a Reclassification
Theme Design
IT Support
Hosting
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Just Out: New Book On Solving Health Care Crisis
I just read about the new book, Solving America's Health Care Crisis by Dan Perrin and Pat Rooney, in the Downsize DC newsletter. Downsize DC is an organization with principles of downsizing government and personal responsibility that I support. So I went to Amazon to check out the reader reviews. The book is new - released May 2 - so there aren't a lot, but all eight of them are 5-star ratings.I'll be checking this out. Health care in the US clearly needs an overhaul, and Euro-style social medicine is equally clearly not a useful answer. Government never, ever, runs anything like health care (or education, welfare, or anything else) effectively, instead creating an ever-growing bureaucracy that produces less and less for more and more dollars. Hopefully Perrin and Rooney and provided a roadmap to a system that gets people the health care they need with the proper incentives to keep costs under control.
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 6:54 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL |
Categories: Health, Policy & Regulation
Terry Frazier at 6:54 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Health, Policy & Regulation
Monday, October 29, 2007
Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?
For anyone who's managed to miss the news for the past 6 months, the southeast US is in a 100-year drought. As we are wont to do in such cases, we have ignored this for the past several years until now all our lakes and reservoirs are nearly empty. Suddenly, we have a crisis.Imagine that.
So what do our vaunted civil servants do in this precarious situation? They implement outdoor watering bans. They argue with other states. They complain to the Army Corps of Engineers. They shutdown car washes and landscape companies. They go on TV and tell us how dreadful it is, and how sorry they are that people must lose jobs, and that they just can't help this awful, awful situation.
All the while they completely ignore the blindingly obvious, brain-dead simple, straightforward, and guaranteed 100% foolproof solution to the problem. Any 3rd-grader could suggest this.
Raise the price of water!!!
Oh, I know we can't raise the price. After all, it's completely unfair to the poor.
Bullshit.
The average person can live comfortably on 1,000 gallons/month. They don't even need to be particularly conservative to do that. We could probably survive well on 750, but let's say 1,000 to be compassionate. So for a family of four you need 4,000 gallons.
Let's be really, really compassionate for the poor. Set the price for the first 5,000 gallons at $10. Set the price for the next 1,000 at $10. That's $20 for up to 6,000 gallons - enough to serve a family of 7.
Set the price for the next 1,000 at $20. The next 1,000 at $30 and so on. At 10,000 gallons you're paying $150. By the time you get to 15,000 gallons (a typical amount of water used in one month watering a yard) the cost is now $550. Nobody gets a pass. Everybody pays.
You think people won't stop using excess water once they get a $550 bill? I sure will. If they won't (or don't), raise the incremental price to $20 per thousand. I don't know anyone who would spend $1,100/mo on water. If you have that kind of money more power to you - there aren't going to be enough of you to significantly raise total usage and we can all get on with our lives without these self-serving, jackass politicians grandstanding on TV with all their new emergency regulations.
Car wash owners would have to run out and change their coin-ops from $2 to $10. Or $20. That will hurt business, but people who want to spend $10 or $20 can still wash their car now and then. And maybe the owners will figure out they need to recycle. Ditto for industrial users and the power company. Office building managers will have to figure out how to actually operate their sprinkler systems, or turn them off. And landscapers will have to stop guaranteeing their plants. But we'll get over it.
It's absurd to try and reduce the use of limited resources in every way imaginable except the one way that is best designed for managing limited resources - economics.
But this is the government. I wish I could be surprised.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 11:12 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL |
Categories: Economics, Policy & Regulation
Terry Frazier at 11:12 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Economics, Policy & Regulation
Monday, May 7, 2007
It's Not a Rate Increase, It's a Reclassification
The new AT&T - "We're back. And it's just like nothing has changed."According to the article, no one regulates phone card rates. Not the state of MO, not the FCC, nobody.AT&T now charges eight minutes for one of these one-minute calls in Missouri
Jo Ann Weitkamp knew something was wrong. The minutes on her prepaid telephone calling card were disappearing faster than she was talking.
Weitkamp, 72, lives in an apartment for seniors in Warrenton. Every few months, she visits a Sam's Club store and pays about $28 to add 1,000 minutes to her calling card. She's found that an inexpensive way to keep in touch with family members.
Until now.
Since February, AT&T has been charging Missouri customers eight minutes on their prepaid calling cards for each minute they talk to someone in Missouri.
The charge formerly was one minute for each minute called.
[...]
"We're following the law, and this is something we're required to do by the FCC," said Amanda Ray, a spokeswoman in Dallas for AT&T.
She says the change is not a rate increase.
"It's a reclassification," Ray said. [...]
The problem here isn't the rate, it's the deception. AT&T wants to be allowed to change rates without state permission. Fine. Do that. But don't lie about it. Don't throw in some bogus multiplication factor when you agreed to provide per-minute charges.
There are two industries that deserve to be uttelry destroyed - the music industry and the telcos. They are both saturated with an entitlement mentality that defies description, and are populated by lying rat-bastards of the highest order. Good riddance to them both.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 11:10 AM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL |
Categories: Business & Finance, Policy & Regulation
Terry Frazier at 11:10 AM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Business & Finance, Policy & Regulation
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:06:57 GMT
License: Unless otherwise expressly stated all original material, of whatever nature, created by Terry W. Frazier and included in this website, its related pages and archives, is licensed under a Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.
Disclaimer: This is a personal website. The views expressed here are those of the author and no one else. This is also an experiment in thinking out loud, so there are no warranties as to the reliability or accuracy of anything presented here. Source material -- references, citations, quotes, photos, and other elements -- are gathered from publicly available materials and some of it may be restricted. Any trademarks used are the property of their respective creators or owners. All are reproduced under the principle of Fair Use.