Posts

Matthew Yglesias and Tyler Cowen tag team to put together the short argument for leaving as little up to the government as possible. To condense it to one sentence: most politicians put making sure they keep getting elected ahead of even trying to do the right thing in terms of policy. It’s sad that our only hope is that somehow the collective product of many politicians acting in their own self-interest will lead to an acceptable outcome, and it’s amazing that it ever happens, even though sometimes it does. ...

All of the health care reform bills Congress is currently working on include a health insurance exchange through which individuals can purchase health insurance. It’s one of the key aspects of the bill, as it’s essential to putting people who are unemployed or who work for businesses that don’t offer health insurance on the same footing with those who work for larger companies in terms of purchasing health insurance. Yale professor Jacob Hacker explains how the exchanges would work to the New York Times. One point I want to call out is that the city of San Francisco and the state of Massachusetts both run these types of exchanges already, so it’s not as though this stuff is untried. ...

jQuery author John Resig has written a great remembrance of a truly interesting individual. Nobody seems to know what is up with the person who played _why the Lucky Stiff on the Web, but _why appears to be gone, perhaps for good. As for _why himself, he appears to be one of the few people who gets to read their own obituary. His work has been much appreciated.

Felix Salmon on the economics of tattoos: Drewbie left me a comment this morning talking about people interviewing for jobs and not getting them, just because they had visible tattoos. I can well believe it. But at the same time, precisely because of this discrimination, I tend to both expect and receive much better service from people with visible tattoos.

As I noted in my earlier post today, the big news is that people are fretting about the Obama administration abandoning its commitment to the public option – a government-run health insurance company that would compete with private insurance companies. I’m a supporter of the public option, and I really hope that it makes it into the final bill. But it’s not the prize. The prize is the individual mandate. The individual mandate says that everyone must have health insurance. It’s the only non-negotiable piece of health insurance reform. ...

I really want health care reform to be enacted, so I’m going to keep talking about it. Last week Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an inflammatory op-ed about health care reform for the Wall Street Journal. He’s posted the unedited version on his own blog, and notes that he didn’t come up with the headline that appeared in the paper. Starting out with a quote warning of the dangers of socialism from Margaret Thatcher, who never tried to dismantle Britain’s completely socialized health care system, was his own choice. Radley Balko says it’s dumb to boycott Whole Foods even if you’re irritated by Mackey’s op-ed. ...

Giant Robots asks the question, Why Do Rubyists Test So Completely? It’s a good question. Developers on other platforms would benefit greatly from the culture of testing that has been established among Rubyists (and especially Rails developers). They have their own list, and I agree with all of the items on it. I have one reason that I’m surprised they didn’t list. Rails makes it really easy to start testing. When you generate a new Rails application, it gives you a place to put your tests. When you generate controllers and models, it creates skeletal tests for them. Nobody has to sit and wonder, “What should I be testing.” The framework tells you. So the next step is just to fill in the blanks. Then when you want to run your tests, you just type “rake” in your application directory. ...

It all started when NewsGator discontinued their sync service. I had been using NetNewsWire as my main feed reader for awhile, having left Google Reader a couple of years ago. Since NewsGator is discontinuing that service, NNW will now be syncing with Google Reader. When I set that up, it added all my NNW feeds to my old list of Google Reader feeds and created a huge mess. At that point, I had two options. I could go through the merged list of feeds and figure out which ones I wanted to keep and ferret out all of the duplicates, or I could just toss out all of my feeds and start over. ...

FiveThirtyEight has a wonderful post explaining the difference between nationalized health care (what they have in the UK) and single payer (what they have in Canada). The US government provides both systems to different groups of people.

I just happened to notice that David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, learned Ruby through hate driven development. Here’s his answer when asked how he learned Ruby: I learned Ruby by programming in anger. Attempting to make something real. Not just a toy program.