jr conlin's ink stained banana

Well, the Intarwebs have their collective panties in a bunch about Google (allegedly) throwing in with the advertisers, and encouraging the health companies to 'defend themselves from Michael Moore by buying ads keyed to Sicko'.

So, since i have absolutely no love for Google and know full well that they Do Evil on a pretty regular basis, why am i highly skeptical of this?

Google owns blogspot, and has a history of setting up "company blogs" on it. You can too.
Google employees use "google.com" as their email address of choice. You can too.
15 minutes with a graphics package and you can make art just like Google.

The "blog" doesn't allow comments and has a total of four posts all featuring no "date", so they could have well been done within a 24 hour period.

In otherwords, i think Google got played.

i've seen this before, mind you. It's one of the reasons that Yahoo employees don't use "yahoo.com" for official emails. It's why you get customer care emails from "@cc.yahoo-inc.com". It's a big discussion point whenever folks are sitting around a table as to whether or not to put a new blog on 360.

What will be most telling is what Google does about this "blog" in the next week or so. If it's not gone by Monday afternoon (let's say 1700PDT 07/01/07), well, then feel free to morn the passing of whatever high horse you held the big G on, cause it's just not there.

Oh yeah, and for what it's worth, Yahoo! gave every employee a free ticket and time to go see that movie.

In the early 20th century, we became fixated by hats. These weren't just items of interest, they were required bits of apparel that a gentleman simply didn't do without. Watch movies, news reels and photos between the 20's and the 50's and i guarantee you'll see more than a few of them. What's more, if you were a man's man, you had more than one hat. You had a formal hat, one you wore to the office, and another you wore around town on Saturdays.

Mind you, there were some sections of society that weren't as fixated on masculine head apparel, but they were generally dismissed as being "rural" and "out of step". Everyone who mattered wore a hat.

Well, except Superman, but he made up for that half the time.

Unless you're in the service industry now, however, chances are pretty darn good that you work-a-day attire doesn't involve donning a fedora, bowler or any other sort of head covering.

Social sites, to me at least, bear a lot in common with that. Right now, EVERYONE has to belong to one.

(Yes it is, sorry, i tend to think about this crap a lot.)

(My blog, my rules. Deal.)

It seems to me that social sites are more about fashion than function. It's not hard to leave a footprint on the web, heck, it's probably far too easy to do that. The only thing that having a Facebook page over having your own blog gets you is… well… having a page on facebook. Same could be said about Myspace, Linkedin or any other. Hell, about the only thing it gives you is a way to find that guy you went to college with that did that one thing you thought was pretty cool.

You know, provided you can't work a search engine or something. i mean, it seems like these sorts of things are designed for the Bob Smiths, Hannah Johnsons, and Michael Boltons of the world. Of course, considering that everyone is now moving to those sites, i'm thinking that where once it might have been easy to find you, now, not so much.

For what it's worth, yes, i've got pages on most of those sorts of sites. If nothing else, i figure they'll just help my collective page rank for this site.

Plus, if i'm wearing a hat, it's for a reason.

Last night, i got to see Sicko, and it was an interesting movie. Basically, it was a sales pitch for socialized medicine by comparing our horribly broken system against the nationalized systems from Britain, France, Canada and Cuba. Mr. Moore's point being "Our system is corrupt and evil, folks in those countries are healthier and prosperous, therefore we should do that." It's a lovely dream, really, and it's hard to find fault, but it would never work here.

i pay federal taxes in the neighborhood of 36% of my income. That's high, but in the global scale, not bad. Local taxes (county and state) add another 10-15% onto that, which again, beats a lot of countries out there. Granted, none of that goes toward health care. My taxes go en-mass to funding the most technically advanced and sophisticated military that one expects the sole super-power and self declared international police force to have. What's left over goes for other various projects ranging from bridges and bus-stops in Alaska to accidentally useful things like interstate freeway repairs. Again, not one single penny of any tax money i pay goes toward my health.

i'll also add in that the current medical insurance system is indeed horribly broken, corrupt, and generally evil. In some respects, i'll happily expand that to darn near every for-profit insurance system established, including home-owners, car, farm, and any others you care to think of. It's hard to make money if your business is to give it away. Likewise drug companies have exceedingly deep pockets and are more than happy to toss a few billion dollars pocket change around in order to protect their true income.

Taking a more critical eye toward Sicko, however, you start to notice a few things. Like how the "Conservative" retired British Parliament member belonged to the Labour party (Funny, i thought the Torries were the Conservative ones, and the liberal Labour movement were the ones that launched the NHS). Likewise, it's a sales pitch, so they don't mention that like any other complex system, NHS doesn't always work right. But even stuff like that are minor compared to the biggest problem.

Which is, Americans are a bunch of cheap bastards.

Our country was started because we hated to pay taxes. Name me one election platform that didn't include a pledge to "Lower taxes". Yeah, i'm ok with paying nearly 50% of my income to the various municipalities, but a lot of folks aren't and happily fortify themselves against the godless forces of the IRS. Tell the country that they'll have to pony up $1200 a year more in taxes for a national health care system and folks will explode.

Of course, the folks with math skills will realize that they're already paying more than that. Folks who actually think of budgets would realize that while their post-tax income might take a hit, things normalize out pretty quickly. Still we're a debtor nation so the far too many folks buying designer jeans and iPhones will simply rack up higher credit card bills.

Oh yeah, that's the other point that was kinda glazed over in the movie. Socialized medicine would have a major impact on the economy that would probably take around a decade to balance out. That sort of long term correction already happened in the countries spotlighted, but i doubt that we'd have the stomach to actually live through 10 years of collective belt tightening.

For what it's worth, i'm a believer in not-for-profit insurance. Thanks to my Dad being in the military, i belong to USAA for home and car and get a rebate check every so often. i've also found their services to be perfectly fine, and their rates to be below what anyone else offers. Having something like that for health would be pretty nice too. i also wouldn't mind if the government actually decided to crack down on drug companies. Most of the new drugs they produce, society doesn't really need and there's no arguing that they gouge like nobody's business. Of course, we citizens could solve that problem by not asking our doctors about that drug we saw a commercial for. Instead, try working with your doctor to see about minimizing the various drugs you require. Yeah, it involves more effort than simply popping a pill, but it's body hacking and it can be pretty fun. i surprise the hell out of my doctor on a regular basis by declining medication in favor of effort, and have generally had no real problems or issues to speak of. Blood pressure is fine, blood sugar is well in control, cholesterol is in the healthy range, and yeah, i could stand to lose about 10-15 pounds and need to be more active, but i'm hardly obese. Compared to my family history, i'm doing just dandy, with ne'er a pill to pop.

i don't think that socialized medicine is a cure all (pun intended), but i do believe the current system has proven to be a complete failure and needs to be replaced. i don't think that the current system could be easily swept away overnight regardless of what sort of political revolution were to happen. We're pretty deep in the hole as is. It's going to take a lot of effort over a long time to get us out of it.

Still, pretty entertaining movie aside from that. If you get a chance, go see it, or wait and rent the DVD.

i always find it interesting when someone hits a meme.

Granted, i never will have to worry about that, what with being at the Used Slurpee Cup level of bloggers, but it's always interesting to watch the ebb and flow that goes with suddenly being in the collective consciousness of the digital hive mind.

Still, it's fascinating to see the sort of wave crash effect hit someone like good Madame danah boyd. Ms. boyd is a quite accomplished scholar of social systems and her thoughts tend to carry a fair amount of weight. She's an acknowledged expert in a given field, yet as an academic, she has two different "modes" of presenting her thoughts. One is very formal, involving calculated and well researched statements reflecting research and study and highlighting correlation and conclusion. In other words, your typical research paper.

The other is the equivalent of sitting at a coffee shop for an hour.

The funny thing is that it's often those latter statements that seem to have the highest likelihood of spreading like an Atlanta lawyer on a transcontinental flight.

Kent and i got into a quick discussion about this and i think he touched on something kinda key. He noted that it won't be long before academics realize that they don't necessarily need the structure and peer review that they previously always had. They can be more open and have greater impact without it. i disagreed, since i know that often that peer review system exists for a good reason and a lot of folks actually like it since it helps them refine and defend their assertions instead of just shouting them into the void.

What i countered was that the established peer review journal isn't threatened at all, it's simply undergoing it's own peer review process, as folks realize that there are some larger assertions that require that sort of review to lend weight to their importance while lesser observations may not.

So what you'd have is qualified research, and the academic equivalent of Mythbusters which may find out something just as important, but will probably also include broken stuff on fire while a bunch of folks are rolling on the floor laughing. Think of that later group as unqualified intellectuals.

Where the danger lies is for the general populace (that would be you and me) relying too heavily on the unqualified and ignoring or dismissing the qualified. In other words, if the smart folks are willing to be a little less rigorous with their observations, it's more important for us to pick up the slack. Recognize that an off-the-cuff statement by an expert is still an off-the-cuff statement and that while they may have insight we don't, it doesn't mean they're infallible.

For what it's worth, i'm actually really in favor of that. This is how it's supposed to work, and we all get a little smarter because of it.

And i can use the extra smart.

i'm a fairly social guy. While not a complete extrovert, i have no problem sharing things like what i'm doing, where i'm going, what i've seen and what i find interesting, to a point.

i've also got a bunch of stuff i don't want to share with the planet. i've got private bookmarks, events, and pictures that i don't want you to see. Unfortunately, the current Web 2.0 atmosphere kinda screws with that. What makes matters worse is that you're never really sure if your sharing things or not.

The way i see it, public sites are just that. Public. i share things there that i want to make public. i know that the sites will use those data points for whatever ends they want, including things like profiling me for ads or "points of interest" which i happily ignore.

For some other stuff, i'm less likely to share. You don't need to know when my parent's anniversary is. Nor do you need to see those photos i took for insurance purposes, nor those links i have for machine statistics, or lots of other things that while you don't need multi-machine access to, i do.

That's why i've been trying to find stuff that does some of that coordination for me. i figure i can run my own address book, calendar, bookmarks server and other bits. Unfortunately, a lot of those are not as clear cut as i'd prefer. (e.g. Thunderbird only allows one LDAP server per account, which sucks if you've already got one you use, and while ICS is a fairly standard form of calendar sync, not everything accepts it.) i'm still kinda surprised that more people aren't of the same mindset. Yeah, you can use existing services to do this sort of thing, but those always have strings attached. Some of them can be kinda nasty or raise questions even if you're the tiniest bit paranoid.

i'll let folks know what i settle on, if anyone is interested in solving this too.