Healthcare: Her phone's ringing off the hook

Dr. Danielle Martin's getting calls to run for office from all parties at all levels of government. Watching this C-Span hearing from the US, I'm not surprised. She ranked with the best three others on the panel, and made former Canadian, Reagan-Thatcher-Murdochite Sally Pipes look silly.

Our healthcare system may not be perfect, people may be dying needlessly, but not as many as among our neighbours to the south. Hearing about France's, Denmark's, Taiwan's system, I think I'd be glad to trade aspects of our system for aspects of theirs, but we stack up pretty good. And we have another really articulate spokesperson that we can be proud to call a fellow-citizen. When you get past your best times of doing medicine, I'd be happy to see you as cabinet or prime minister, Dr. Martin. Well-spoken, well-stated, well-pointed out on all fronts.

Pranking Indian Computer Jackers

I just finished pranking some Indian ComputerJackers. You know, the guys who claim to be from "Microsoft Windows"? I let them talk and told them that I would have to take down all their instructions so that I could follow them after I hung up. Why's that? Because I only have one telephone line and I use dial-up for Internet. They believed me for a bit and passed me on to three or four other people before they gave up. Saying that I use the Opera browser was the last straw. How many little untruths passed my lips in the space of 10 minutes -- that's 10 minutes of international telephone time they got no return on, 10 minutes reprieve to some other poor victim. 10 minutes in which my sons, admiringly, called me crazy. To which I replied, but you put me up to it. Maniacal laughter ensued.

For the record, their first step was to send me to double-u double-u double-u dot A em why why . com (why should I give them a click-through?) and they claimed to be in Sacramento. AMYY is, of course, based in Moscow, with a local dial-in in Virginia's DC suburbs (I visited them with a text browser, in case the site itself was a 0-day-sploit source and checked the Contact Us page). I was waiting for them to give me the temperature in Sacramento in Celsius (it's 16 there, right now), so I could nail them to the wall over units of measure. No typical 'marican uses SI units (they'd say it was 61) and I was relishing that last skewering step.

At this conference, Richard Mouw talked about "Just Adultery", as a side-handed critique of "Just War" theory. I think I could add a five minute talk-a-roo on "Just Prevarication".

I wonder how many times I'll have to lie like that before they stop calling this number? The story will be different next time. Maybe I'll claim to be running Lindows.

Haiku #34 - Techno-conomy

Straight from department 402.

Technical debt and

Keynesian economics

Don't ever mix well.