Saturday, September 26, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Death Panels and Stupid People
First, a quick programming note. A few weeks ago I told Pax that one of my upcoming blog posts would be a response to one of his posts. I just wanted to let him know that I haven't forgotten about that, but haven't had the time to write a substantial blog post lately. All I've had time for lately are quick little link-laden and photo-laden blog posts like this one.
OK, on to the business of this post. About 2o minutes ago, I came across the video below. Before watching it considering the following ( If you are in the USA you probably know this stuff already, but if you're not in the USA you may not ):
There is a big debate taking place in the USA about health care reform. President Obama and the Democrats want the federal government to be more involved in health care ( like almost every other industrialized nation in the world ). Republicans are doing everything they can to stand in the way of meaningful health care reform, mostly because they get huge campaign contributions from private health insurance companies ( These companies have a 30% profit margin. Democrats want to provide people with a "Public Option" to private health care. This would presumably force private health insurance companies to compete with the public health care system, which means health care premiums would go down and health care companies would no longer be making a 30% profit. Health care companies have been spending a lot of money to keep this from happening. ). This is not to say there aren't legitimate fiscal arguments to be made against government-run health care, but Republicans have not even attempted to make legitimate arguments. Instead, they have used scare tactics, most notably the "Death Panel" scare tactic. Republicans are basically claiming that government run health care will lead to seniors citizens being denied life-saving medical treatments in order to save money. They are essentially telling people, "If you let the Democrats pass their health care bill, Obama's going to kill Grandma.". For example, Sarah Palin posted the following on her facebook page:
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
Keeping all that in mind, watch the following video:
I think it should be clear to anyone with half a brain that this video is very well-done satire. The video is clearly pro-Democrat, pro-Obama, and is completely in favor of meaningful health care reform which includes a public option. However, when you look at the comments on the video, you'll see that a lot of people didn't get that this video is satirical. A lot of folks thought this video was against Obama's health care plan. I was kinda amused and disturbed by this. One astute commenter summed up my feelings pretty well:
Yes, shimarlie1, a lot of Republicans are THAT dumb.
Rich
OK, on to the business of this post. About 2o minutes ago, I came across the video below. Before watching it considering the following ( If you are in the USA you probably know this stuff already, but if you're not in the USA you may not ):
There is a big debate taking place in the USA about health care reform. President Obama and the Democrats want the federal government to be more involved in health care ( like almost every other industrialized nation in the world ). Republicans are doing everything they can to stand in the way of meaningful health care reform, mostly because they get huge campaign contributions from private health insurance companies ( These companies have a 30% profit margin. Democrats want to provide people with a "Public Option" to private health care. This would presumably force private health insurance companies to compete with the public health care system, which means health care premiums would go down and health care companies would no longer be making a 30% profit. Health care companies have been spending a lot of money to keep this from happening. ). This is not to say there aren't legitimate fiscal arguments to be made against government-run health care, but Republicans have not even attempted to make legitimate arguments. Instead, they have used scare tactics, most notably the "Death Panel" scare tactic. Republicans are basically claiming that government run health care will lead to seniors citizens being denied life-saving medical treatments in order to save money. They are essentially telling people, "If you let the Democrats pass their health care bill, Obama's going to kill Grandma.". For example, Sarah Palin posted the following on her facebook page:
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
Keeping all that in mind, watch the following video:
I think it should be clear to anyone with half a brain that this video is very well-done satire. The video is clearly pro-Democrat, pro-Obama, and is completely in favor of meaningful health care reform which includes a public option. However, when you look at the comments on the video, you'll see that a lot of people didn't get that this video is satirical. A lot of folks thought this video was against Obama's health care plan. I was kinda amused and disturbed by this. One astute commenter summed up my feelings pretty well:
Yes, shimarlie1, a lot of Republicans are THAT dumb.
Rich
Monday, September 21, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Michael the future scientist
A few few hours ago, I was looking for my 5 year-old son Michael, and found him watching the video below:
About 5 minutes later he came downstairs and started talking excitedly ( and accurately ) about isotopes.
Sorry to be bragging about my kid again, but I'm just blown away, even though I see this kind of stuff pretty much every day.
I should probably emphasize that he's pretty much 100% self-motivated when he it comes to this stuff. We encourage him and occasionally introduce new topics to him when he asks us questions ( He'd been asking a lot questions about how computers work lately, so now he understands that a computer is basically a set of on/off switches, and he knows how to convert binary numbers to hexadecimal numbers ), but he does most of his leaning via independent study on YouTube. ). I've told him what scientists are are, so now he tells us he wants to grow up to be a scientist. He says he wants to build a rocket ship someday called the "Michael 5".
Hopefully, I'll get to ride on it someday. :)
Rich
About 5 minutes later he came downstairs and started talking excitedly ( and accurately ) about isotopes.
Sorry to be bragging about my kid again, but I'm just blown away, even though I see this kind of stuff pretty much every day.
I should probably emphasize that he's pretty much 100% self-motivated when he it comes to this stuff. We encourage him and occasionally introduce new topics to him when he asks us questions ( He'd been asking a lot questions about how computers work lately, so now he understands that a computer is basically a set of on/off switches, and he knows how to convert binary numbers to hexadecimal numbers ), but he does most of his leaning via independent study on YouTube. ). I've told him what scientists are are, so now he tells us he wants to grow up to be a scientist. He says he wants to build a rocket ship someday called the "Michael 5".
Hopefully, I'll get to ride on it someday. :)
Rich
Monday, September 14, 2009
53 Inch Penis
OK, now that I've got your attention, I'd like to introduce you to one of my favorite bloggers. His name is Nate Silver, a name that may already be somewhat familiar to you if you followed the 2008 US presidential election, or if you just occasionally glanced at the blog links I have on the right side of my blog page. My page has had a link to Nate's blog ( fivethirtyeight.com ) for quite a while now, and I've been following Nate's work for even longer than that. As I confessed in one of my previous posts, I'm big-time baseball stats geek, and Nate has been a god to baseball stat geeks ever since he invented something called PECOTA ( WARNING - the link to the left is SUPER geeky! ).
In 2008, Nate gained a bit more mainstream fame when he started the political blog fivethirtyeight.com. 538 stands for the total number of electoral votes in a US presidential election, and the 538 blog was initially dedicated to predicting the results of the 2008 presidential election. Nate wound up predicting the presidential election winner correctly in 49 or the 50 states, was only a few votes off in predicting Obama's and McCain's electoral vote totals, and predicted Obama's and McCain's shares of the popular vote within 0.1 %.
He did this by using the same sort of statistical methods that made him a god to baseball geeks. He looked at almost every poll taken by almost every pollster, and used sophisticated statistical and probabilistic models to predict the most likely election outcomes in each state.
After the election was over, he decided to keep the blog going. The blog analyzes the political issues of the day using statistical tools. While that may seem a bit boring, it works because Nate also happens to be a fine writer ( He's written for a few baseball books. ). This brings us back to the title of this blog post. Check out this post from Nate, or more specifically, the few paragraphs below:
( Just some background before you start reading the excerpt from Nate's post below. The blog post was talking about crowd size estimates. On Sept 12th, the far-right held a protest against Obama in Washington. The initial estimates said about 70,000 people attended, but right-wing bloggers were soon claiming that 2 million people attended the protest. )
------------- Text below from fivethirtyeight.com ------------------------------------------------
But yesterday, someone told a real whopper. ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol. By the time this figure reached Michelle Malkin, however, it had been blown up to 2,000,000. There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That's not a twofold or threefold exaggeration -- it's roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.
The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn't "in error", as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.
---------------- Text above frofivethiryeight.com ------------------------------------------------
I've read a lot of political blogs in my day, but I've never read one that evoked the image of a 53 inch penis. Ya gotta love Nate Silver.
OK, maybe you don't need to love him, but I certainly do. We're talkin' big time man crush here. Considering how much I love politics and statistical analysis, the 538 site almost gets me horny. It really gets me wondering ...
If you've been reading my blog for a while, you already know how I feel about smart girls with glasses. You also might remember how I swoon for politically astute liberal women like Amanda Terkel.
Well, Nate Silver is a politically astute extremely intelligent liberal guy with glasses. I kinda wonder how I'd be reacting to Nate right now if I were a woman. It's kinda hard to say, but I've got a feeling that my blog would have a lot of posts like these.
Rich
P.S. OK, that was a rather random post, but don't worry, I'll have another up soon. I really have no choice to write another post soon. I like to pull up my blog page while I'm eating lunch at work ( because it had links to all my favorite blogs ), but if I pull up a blog page with the words "53 Inch Penis" at the top, I've got a feeling that Human Resources might want to have a chat with me soon.
P.P.S. I just realized that this is my 100th post. I can't believe I've already written than many.
In 2008, Nate gained a bit more mainstream fame when he started the political blog fivethirtyeight.com. 538 stands for the total number of electoral votes in a US presidential election, and the 538 blog was initially dedicated to predicting the results of the 2008 presidential election. Nate wound up predicting the presidential election winner correctly in 49 or the 50 states, was only a few votes off in predicting Obama's and McCain's electoral vote totals, and predicted Obama's and McCain's shares of the popular vote within 0.1 %.
He did this by using the same sort of statistical methods that made him a god to baseball geeks. He looked at almost every poll taken by almost every pollster, and used sophisticated statistical and probabilistic models to predict the most likely election outcomes in each state.
After the election was over, he decided to keep the blog going. The blog analyzes the political issues of the day using statistical tools. While that may seem a bit boring, it works because Nate also happens to be a fine writer ( He's written for a few baseball books. ). This brings us back to the title of this blog post. Check out this post from Nate, or more specifically, the few paragraphs below:
( Just some background before you start reading the excerpt from Nate's post below. The blog post was talking about crowd size estimates. On Sept 12th, the far-right held a protest against Obama in Washington. The initial estimates said about 70,000 people attended, but right-wing bloggers were soon claiming that 2 million people attended the protest. )
------------- Text below from fivethirtyeight.com ------------------------------------------------
But yesterday, someone told a real whopper. ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol. By the time this figure reached Michelle Malkin, however, it had been blown up to 2,000,000. There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That's not a twofold or threefold exaggeration -- it's roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.
The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn't "in error", as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.
---------------- Text above frofivethiryeight.com ------------------------------------------------
I've read a lot of political blogs in my day, but I've never read one that evoked the image of a 53 inch penis. Ya gotta love Nate Silver.
OK, maybe you don't need to love him, but I certainly do. We're talkin' big time man crush here. Considering how much I love politics and statistical analysis, the 538 site almost gets me horny. It really gets me wondering ...
If you've been reading my blog for a while, you already know how I feel about smart girls with glasses. You also might remember how I swoon for politically astute liberal women like Amanda Terkel.
Well, Nate Silver is a politically astute extremely intelligent liberal guy with glasses. I kinda wonder how I'd be reacting to Nate right now if I were a woman. It's kinda hard to say, but I've got a feeling that my blog would have a lot of posts like these.
Rich
P.S. OK, that was a rather random post, but don't worry, I'll have another up soon. I really have no choice to write another post soon. I like to pull up my blog page while I'm eating lunch at work ( because it had links to all my favorite blogs ), but if I pull up a blog page with the words "53 Inch Penis" at the top, I've got a feeling that Human Resources might want to have a chat with me soon.
P.P.S. I just realized that this is my 100th post. I can't believe I've already written than many.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Edison Rocks!
As those of you who have looked at my YouTube profile may know, I live in Edison, New Jersey. Actually, September 29th will mark the 6th anniversary of when we moved into our house ( Michael was born on October 15th of the same year, so we were cutting it rather close. ).
Well, a few days ago, I came across this article. Apparently, Edison has been ranked as one of the top ten places to grow up in the United States. Of course, just because "U.S. News and World Report" says something, doesn't make it gospel, but it's nice to know that Edison was ranked that high. Choosing a place to buy a home can be a very stressful experience. You are always worried about making the right choice, especially for your kids. I've always felt that we made a good choice for our kids, and it's nice to have some validation of that.
BTW, as nice as Edison is, not everything is sunny and bright. I just came across the following comments attached to the article:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, a few days ago, I came across this article. Apparently, Edison has been ranked as one of the top ten places to grow up in the United States. Of course, just because "U.S. News and World Report" says something, doesn't make it gospel, but it's nice to know that Edison was ranked that high. Choosing a place to buy a home can be a very stressful experience. You are always worried about making the right choice, especially for your kids. I've always felt that we made a good choice for our kids, and it's nice to have some validation of that.
BTW, as nice as Edison is, not everything is sunny and bright. I just came across the following comments attached to the article:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Edison
When you are traveling around to write stories or visiting as a tourist, you don't get the real feeling of living in certain cities or towns. What used to be nice areas in Edison are now overcrowded and dumpy because of the multitude of Asian Indians who moved there. Also, I read stories about San Jose that include many Latino gangs and crime. The United States is not what it used to be.
For Kathleen
This comment is for Kathleen---Edison is a great town. The Asians (Indians, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese) are one of the main reasons they made it to the top 10 list. The academic ratings of the school is that much better cause of them. If you havent noticed, most of America is full of minority groups, that's what makes America--the FOREIGNERs. The only natives to the US are the Native American Indians. It said to see close minded, ignorant people like yourself.
edison
agree with kathleen about edison.
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Nobody sane could believe, even in jest, that Obama is suggesting 'Death Panels'
Someone please set me straight here..I don't want to believe Reps are THAT dumb.