Little Talk:

***

A few more memories of my dad:

1. Like every econ-adjacent person (he was an operations research phd), my dad had his plan for reforming the tax code. His plan, to the extent I understood it, involved a kind of a progressive VAT tax. The key idea was that the first five or ten thousand of dollars that people paid in VAT would be refunded to them. The result was that people in the informal sector of the economy would have an incentive to report their income, rather than having an incentive to keep their income off the books.

2. At his first big job, with his first big employer, the company instituted a plan that if an employee came up with some idea or innovation which increased revenue, the employee would get a percentage of that revenue. One of my dad's colleagues came up with a simple idea, which led to a fairly large amount of revenue. The company perhaps felt that the idea was too simple and too obvious, and was not the kind of thing that they meant to reward. They refused to pay up. My dad's colleague sued, and got a somewhat sympathetic judge. At first. Before things got too serious, the company appealed, and got a more senior,  corporate-friendly judge assigned to the case, who found for the company, and nipped things in the bud.

3. One year, my dad dawdled, dithered and delayed in getting his flu shot. I particularly enjoyed the roasting my mom gave him, after he tried to come up with some reason to justify the delay: "Ranga, are you a complete illiterate? Do you understand anything about science?" Then she went into some detail about how the vaccines are made, details that I did not in fact know.

***

Notes on technical reading III

So, the bottom line is that slowly, over the past thirty years, I seem to have learned how to read. Perhaps over the next thirty, I will learn how to write!

I suspect we will find that slow, deliberate reading has some of the same benefits as slow, deliberate breathing or slow, deliberate exercise.

***

I read through the first four chapters of Thomson and Welling's PHP and MySQL Web Development, the last chapter of which ended in a long exposition on regular expressions. Well, it felt long, anyway. After reading about regular expressions, my head hurt, and I felt in need of a change, so I went to the library and borrowed five books:

1. Javascript Everywhere (Adam D. Scott)

2. Web Development with Node & Express (Ethan Brown)

3. MongoDB: The Definitive Guide (Shannon Bradshaw, Eoin Brazil & Kristina Chodorow)

4. Learning MySQL (Vinicius M. Grippa & Sergey Kuzmichev)

5. Using SVG with CSS3 & HTML5 (Amelia Bellamy-Royds, Kurt Cagle & Dudley Storey)

If I can renew the books a few times, I might be able to work through them. So far, I have done a first-pass reading of Javascript Everywhere (on the whole, very good), and have the read the first few dozen pages of Web Development with Node & Express (so far, excellent).

***

Big talk:

***

If you want to make sense of this era, you can perhaps think of it as a conflict between the impulse to cruelty and the impulse to laziness. You can perhaps think of it as a sort of demented Miller Lite ad, where instead of shouting "Tastes Great! Less Filling!", the people instead shout "More Cruel! Less Lazy!".

So if the left-coalition is opposed to cruelty, and the right-coalition is opposed to laziness, how is it that the the right-coalition wound up with a leader like Trump? My guess is that Trump took the traditional conservative opposition to laziness, and enhanced it with the pleasure of shamelessness, and the pleasure of a double standard: the message is that laziness is not ok for the wrong sort of people, but it is maybe kind of ok for the right sort of people. There were apparently a lot a people in modern society looking for some relief from the prison of shame, and the prison of the golden rule, and that desire for relief from judgement perhaps led them to be more ok with the idea of Trump as president, than they perhaps should have been.

The people who can get us out of this, perhaps, are the people who can reject both cruelty and laziness. We must stop justifying our laziness on the grounds that at least we're not committing genocide, we must stop justifying our cruelty on the grounds that at least it gets us off the couch. Let me know if you manage it.

Lefty & Center-Lefty

[Jan 20, 2021]

CL: Congratulations, Lefty! Starting today, you will not have a government that wakes up each morning dreaming up new ways to mess with people's lives!

L: Well, that's something. So you're telling me that we will have a government that wakes up each morning dreaming up new ways to help with people's lives?

CL: . . .Yes! Yes! Why not? . . .Yes! We can do this, Lefty! We can do this!

L: Really? Are you sure?

CL: Yes! I won't abandon you, Lefty! I will not abandon you! I will never abandon you!

http://www.cswap.com/1990/Cadillac_Man/cap/en/25fps/a/01_17

[18 months later]

CL: Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into, Lefty! Why did you have to run your mouth about socialism?

L: When Sinema said that she doesn't care, she'll either surf or ski, and when Manchin said that he doesn't do contracts, but what you do have is his word, hadn't you watched the rest of that movie?

I do in fact think that there will be long term benefits from running the economy hot, and leaving the zero lower bound. But no question, in the short term, a lot of pain from the mixture of higher prices and asset deflation.

***

During the Clinton impeachment, Barney Frank said, "Clinton is deserving of fairness, but not of indignation." The same thing seems to me true of Democrats in general. A government run by Democrats will not hire staff who generate policies like enhanced interrogation, or family separation. But it will not necessarily be all that nimble in counter-acting the effects of those policies.

I liked Ta-Nehisi Coates's point that voting is like taking out the garbage. You perhaps shouldn't get a medal for it. Nevertheless, still a good thing to do.

 Among the fault lines of modern politics:

1. Whether to be a Knocker or a Booster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosterism

2. Whether to speak truth to power, or to speak couth to power

3. Whether to hatao the garibi, or hatao the garib. (remove the poverty, or remove the poor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garibi_Hatao 

4. Whether to make your numbers by cost-cutting & consolidation, or to try to make your numbers by cleverness, or courage, or painstaking care.

The annoying thing about this era is that it often involves halfhearted attempts to do the right thing, followed by frantic, undignified backsliding. But perhaps that is true of any era. 

***

While cleaning out my dad's study, a document describing his 2006 Kaiser health plan caught my eye:

```

Annual Out-of-Pocket Maximum

For one Member: $1500 per calendar year

For an entire Family Unit of two or more Members: $3000 per calendar year

Professional Services (Plan Provider office visits)

Primary and specialty care visits (includes routine and urgent care appointments): $15 per visit

Routine preventive physical exams: $15 per visit

Well-child preventive care visits (0-23 months): $5 per visit

Family planning visits:  $15 per visit

Scheduled prenatal care and first postpartum visit: $5 per visit

Voluntary termination of pregnancy: $15 per procedure

Eye exams: $15 per visit

Hearing tests: $15 per visit

Physical, occupational and speech therapy visits: $15 per visit

Outpatient Services

Outpatient surgery: $100 per procedure

Allergy injection visits: $3 per visit

Allergy testing visits: $15 per visit

Immunizations: No charge

X-rays and lab tests: No charge

Health education: $15 per individual visit, No charge for group visits

Hospitalization Services

Room and board, surgery, anesthesia, X-rays, lab tests, and drugs: $250 per admission

Emergency Health Coverage

Emergency Department visits: $100 per visit (does not apply if admitted directly to the hospital as an inpatient)

Ambulance Services

Ambulance Services: $50 per trip

Prescription Drug Coverage

Most covered outpatient items in accord with our drug formulary when obtained at Plan Pharmacies:

Generic items: $10 for a 100-day supply

Brand name items: $15 for a 100-day supply

Durable Medical Equipment

Most covered durable medical equipment for home use in accord with our DME formulary: 20% Coinsurance

Mental Health Services

Inpatient psychiatric care (up to 45 days per calendar year): $250 per admission

Outpatient visits:

Up to a total of 20 individual and group therapy visits per calendar year: $15 per individual therapy visits, $7 per group therapy visits

Up to 20 additional group therapy visits that meet Medical Group criteria in the same calendar year: $7 per group therapy visit

Note: Visit and day limits do not apply to serious emotional disturbances of children and severe mental illnesses as described in the Evidence of Coverage.

Chemical Dependency Services

Inpatient detoxification: $250 per admission

Outpatient individual therapy visits: $15 per visit

Outpatient group therapy visits: $5 per visit

Transitional residential recovery Services (up to 60 days per calendar year, not to exceed 120 days in any five-year period): $100 per admission

Home Health Services

Home health care (up to 100 two-hour visits per calendar year): No charge

Other

Skilled nursing facility care (up to 100 days per benefit period): No charge

All covered Services related to infertility treatment: 50% Coinsurance

Hospice care: no charge

```

A couple of things to note about the document:

1. It seems to me a good picture of what reasonably good, straight-forward, no-gimmicks health insurance looked like, circa 2006.

2. The numbers are refreshingly free of data science. You can tell that the numbers have not been chopped up and spit out by the machine-learning meat grinder, it's just a semi-benevolent HMO executive making up fairly arbitrary numbers off the top of their heads. I think it's fair to assume that the species of semi-benevolent HMO executive, always endangered, has gone extinct sometime in the last 15 years.

3. If single payer is too difficult, perhaps it's possible to start by setting an out-of-pocket ceiling for various categories of care. For example, an out of pocket ceiling for ambulance services of $500 or $1000 dollars per trip.

Next post: October 27, 2022