This weekend we had a significant weather event as a tornado blew through and caused a lot of damage. In a lot of areas, tornadoes caused power outages and a number of traffic lights were out, even after power was restored in some cases.

I was surprised to see that many, many drivers did not treat intersections with disabled traffic signals as four way stops. I don’t know whether people don’t know that’s the law, or they just don’t care, but I repeatedly saw people blowing through intersections without even slowing down.

When I lived in Houston, KLOL (now a Latin station, apparently, but for many years a classic rock mainstay) ran a traffic segment called “Traffic in Bondage,” reported by the TrafficMaster Lanny Griffith. Houston has lots of traffic, and Lanny Griffith was perhaps the greatest traffic reporter ever. How many traffic reporters do you know of who have a devoted fan base?

One of his signature bits was, “Traffic signals are out at Westheimer and Gessner. Treat it as a four way stop! Hwah!” Everyone who listened to KLOL heard that, usually multiple times per day. This, to me, will always be the essence of public service journalism. I wish someone had taken a poll at the time that compared the level of awareness of what to do when traffic signals are out among Houstonians to Americans in general.

We don’t have such a traffic reporter here, and very few people seem to know how to drive. When you arrive at an intersection with the traffic signals out, treat it as a four way stop.

On an unrelated note, in the photo, Lanny Griffith is biting a Key Map of Houston, which was the best navigation aide you could possess prior to the age of MapQuest and GPS receivers. Owning one was absolutely essential if you had a job that required driving around. The company that publishes them is still in business and still produces maps only of Houston and its surrounding areas.

Tyler Cowen positions himself as pro-choice when it comes to health insurance. Here’s his basic proposal:

When people turn a certain age, allow them to trade in the current benefits package for a minimalistic package (set broken limbs and offer lots of potent painkillers), plus some of the rest in cash, doled out over the years if need be. For some people, medical tourism will fill the gap.

But if a person wishes, he or she can keep the extant benefit structure and forgo the cash altogether. No one is forced to take this deal.

It sounds fine in theory but I worry about it in practice. These sorts of deals are contingent on the idea that if you opt out of comprehensive care, we (as a society) let you die, or suffer. When happens when a senior who has opted out developers Alzheimer’s Disease, or Parkinson’s Disease, or ALS, or some other slow-developing terminal illness that is expensive to treat? What happens when they develop a chronic condition that isn’t going to kill them but is going to require constant care for the rest of their life? Unless we’re willing to put them on an ice floe, then everyone else is going to wind up paying their medical bills one way or another. Or perhaps their family will go broke trying to purchase medical care for them.

As a society, I don’t see us being willing to let people really suffer the consequences of their choices. Even people who make healthy lifestyle choices become ill and get into accidents all the time. My prediction is that people will regularly take on lots of “health risk” and that in the end, bailouts will be available, regardless of the choices they’ve made. Our public policy has to acknowledge that

Interestingly, a number of people raise this issue in the comments and Tyler responds glibly. I really am not sure how he accounts for this problem, putting me in the group of people he describes as irrational.

Andre Torrez takes issue with the excessive carping about products we see on Twitter and in other outlets:

I think making the right choices when you face them is the best way to say how things should be done. Having empathy for people doing what you are doing is as important as having empathy for your own users.

Path dependence is as operative in software development as it is anywhere else. Most developers aren’t doing things that seem stupid or wrong because they themselves are stupid, but rather because decisions previously made reduce the options that are available to them.

Nearly every developer I know would love to work with better designers and spend more time on design. They’d like to do continuous deployment, spend time writing test suites for their code, do code reviews, and use the latest and greatest tools to get their work done. And yet they are stuck using antiquated tools and processes because that’s what their boss understands, or because their project has been around awhile and it’s too difficult to make time to migrate, or because it’s hard to reach consensus about change on their team.

To put it more simply, things rarely suck because nobody has come along and told them that they’re not good.