Test data in production

If you go to the Nike Women Store Locator and select Afghanistan from the list, you’ll see that there’s a store named ‘blabla’ in a city called ‘test’ (found on This is Broken).
Oops. Somehow, the developer of this little application managed to get test data into the production application.

Well, it could have been worse: at least the city wasn’t named ‘f*ck’ and the store, ‘sh*t’ (asterisks for the sake of web filters, not because I’m a prude). As a software QA engineer, I used to use profanities in my test data. My vulgar data never made it into production, but my test system got used often enough for demos to management or, heaven forbid, customers that I finally learned my lesson.

Socialized medicine, continued

Yesterday, I wrote a long entry about health care in the US and an interesting article by Paul Krugman.
The thing is, the US offers the best and the worst health care in the industrialized world. If you have health insurance, you can get very good health care. If not, you probably can only afford very poor health care. The point of socialized health care is evening this out.
The probem is that we probably cannot afford to provide the quality of health care that some receive. We need to create either a system that allows those who can afford it to continue to receive top-notch health care, while raising the minimum quality for everyone else, or a system that evens out health care. But of course, those who already receive top-notch health care are scared to death of the second option, which leads us down the road of classic American individualism: why should I have to sacrifice my own health care for others? It’s a difficult, and costly, dilemma.

Socialized medicine

In the early 1990s, my father-in-law was battling cancer. My father-in-law had been in business for himself, and had suffered from heart disease for many years. This combination of circumstances had the unfortunate result that he could not get health insurance–at any cost. Also, due to his health problems, he had lost most of his businesses and was not in very good financial shape. However, due to the generosity of the citizens of Bexar County, Texas, via a county health program, my father-in-law received treatment for his cancer, even though he could not pay for it all himself. The care he received wasn’t top-notch, but he wasn’t left to die, either.
At the same time my father was suffering from cancer, near the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first term as president, his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton took on the task of health care reform. I vividly remember the huge battle over the issue and over the First Lady tackling such an important issue.
One tactic that the Clintons’ opponents employed was to scream ‘They want socialized health care! Look at what a disaster it is in Canada and England!” The claim was, of course, false–the Clintons were not trying to institute true socialized health care (where the government owns all health care facilities)–but it struck a nerve with a lot of people and ultimately contributed to the failure of Ms. Rodham Clinton’s efforts.
At that time, I enjoyed pointing out to opponents that we already, in fact, had (and still have) socialized medicine on various levels in the US. In addition to the oodles of local programs, such as the county program serving my father-in-law, we also have several very large federal socialized health care programs, among them: Veteran’s Administration, Medicare, Medicaid. In fact, the VA runs a ‘real’ socialized health care system, in that it owns its own hospitals and clinics, employs the doctors, etc. Medicare and Medicaid, on the other hand, are government-run systems for paying for mostly private health care.
My comments stopped more than a few opponents in their tracks.
In a new New York Times column, Paul Krugman gives us an update on this issue. First, he compares what we spend on health care:

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.
Amazing, isn’t it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

Then Krugman summarizes what we receive in each country, respectively, for that expenditure:

What do we get for all that money? Not much.
Most Americans probably do not know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America’s high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.
A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services – we have lots of MRIs – but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors’ visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There is also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the United States than in other advanced countries.
The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad – but they do not actually receive more care. The title of their article? “It’s the Prices, Stupid.”

When you compare the U.S. to these countries with ‘socialized’ health care, we don’t stand up so well, do we?

States’ rights

While attending his county Democratic Party meeting, Rafe Colburn made an astute observation:

North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall was the other elected official who gave a speech, and hers was almost entirely a defense of federalism and the importance of state’s rights. For my entire life, I thought that state’s rights was a Republican issue, but now I see that it’s a power issue. The party in power in Washington wants to exercise that power, and the opposition at the state level wants to prevent it. So now we’re in a situation where Republicans want to expand the power of federal government, and Democrats at the state level want the federal government to butt out. I think this is the reason for the clash between Republicans in Congress and the federal judiciary. The conservatives in federal courts haven’t gotten the memo that the Republican party no longer cares about federalism, and the Republican Congress will not accept checks or balances.

Eternal optimists

A lot of people are making doom and gloom predictions about what will happen in the next few years of decreasing availability of oil. On the other side are the optimists like John Scalzi:

As bad as it may get, I don’t think it will get as bad as many people might fear — or at the very least, won’t be bad for long. To begin, America and Americans are happy to put off until tomorrow what ought to be done today, and this emphatically includes dealing with energy issues. However, when Americans are finally at a point where something has to be done, it gets done. . . And so with something like an oil peak; if America is looking down the barrel of ruin, it will suck it up and do what is necessary to persevere. It’s done so before within the last 100 years with WWI, the Depression and WWII. We are admittedly out of practice (a happy side effect of having dealt with the issue so well before), but we can and will do it again.

I agree with Scalzi that the Great Depression and the two World Wars are good examples of Americans dealing with difficult situations, but if Scalzi is also suggesting that the effect of diminishing availability of oil will be ‘no worse’ than those times, I have to take issue with him.
The Great Depression had a severe impact on the lives of many Americans–including rampant hunger, homelessness, etc. I certainly would not want to live through a comparable economic downturn. Likewise, most Americans had to make great personal sacrifices in order to mobilize for the second world war: food and fuel rationing, being strongly urged to put their savings in government bonds, etc.
If the coming economic situation rivals the Depression or World War II, then I would consider it pretty severe.

News flash: government no better than industry

Ed Felten has an informative blog post about the U.S. government’s proposed radio-enabled passports. After a short discussion of some of the potential problems with this technology, and why the government didn’t go with a technology that reads passport info only on contact, Ed concludes:

It seems that the decision to use contactless technology was made without fully understanding its consequences, relying on technical assurances from people who had products to sell. Now that the problems with that decision have become obvious, it’s late in the process and would be expensive and embarrassing to back out. In short, this looks like another flawed technology procurement program.

Peak oil

There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether we have hit peak oil production (this BoingBoing entry links to a lot of good articles). But I’ve come to the conclusion that many people are missing the point. Peak oil production is only half the equation. Demand for oil is the other half. Things start to get rough if oil production peaks, but it also gets bad when demand increases significantly compared to production. Taking demand into the equation, things are looking grim for the US, as several large countries–primarily China and India–have developed to the point that their demand for oil has increased significantly, competing with the US for a finite production.

The falling dollar

Over the last couple of months, I’ve tried to make sense of the devaluing dollar, the fact that China a a few other nations buy so much of the bonds to cover our federal deficit and what it all means. I’m happy to report that my understanding was pretty much correct. This New Yorker article by James Surowiecki explains the situation pretty succinctly.
In short, Americans have been maintaining our standard of living on borrowed money, and the Chinese are our largest lender. Of course, it’s been in their best interest to maintain our consumerist lifestyle, since the US is a big export customer for Chinese goods. But if the Chinese ever decide it’s not in their best interest to continue buying (so much of) our debt, our fate is in their hands. It’s all a vicious cycle, and it cannot continue forever. This concern keeps me awake nights.

Sensible choices

Paul Rademacher created an application that combines real estate listings from Craigs List with Google Maps. It’s really cool.
But Dan Hartung points out one cool feature of Paul’s application that any real estate site could benefit from: overlapping price ranges. On most real estate sites, the value ranges on the dropdown are discrete prices ranges, e.g., $50-100K, $100K-150K, $150K-$200K. In Paul’s application, however, the ranges overlap: $50K-$150K, $100K-$200K, etc.
I remember when we were house hunting a couple of years ago, our price range was right at one of the price borders for one of the real estate sites. It was a real hassle to have to check out two complete price ranges. Paul’s solution would have helped us.