Walking the Tightrope With No Safety Net

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Ed Cone points to an article on the front page of the Washington Post that highlights the dire straits that many (25%) of North Carolinians are in with health care.  Literally 1/4 of all adult North Carolinians, or 1.8 million people, are living without health insurance and an additional 9% are underinsured. 

On a related note one of the doctor's from Lewisville Family Physicians wrote a Letter to the Editor at the Winston-Salem Journal pointing out that the terms "health insurance", "health-care coverage" and "health care" are incorrectly used interchangeably.  He says that instead of looking for health care reform we should be looking for health insurance reform.  From his letter:

Health insurance has become exorbitantly expensive. Insurance companies continue to raise premiums while at the same time reducing benefits. They can do this with impunity because they know that policy holders have no other choice but to pay what they demand, or choose to go without coverage. They also refuse to increase payments for services, continuing to pocket the growing difference. More and more people are taking the gamble and choosing to go without coverage.

I can tell you from our family's perspective it's hard to argue with him.  When we're spending over $8,000 a year on premiums alone, and we're doing pretty well compared to other families we've talked to, then you know there's something out of whack with the system.  It's also easy to understand how so many people end up having to live without insurance in the first place.  

Local Shopping: Burn Barrels

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I have lots of yard waste.  In fact after getting our new septic field installed I think I literally have a ton of torn down bushes and small trees that I need to get rid of.  Last weekend I had the kids help me move them to the small wooded area behind our house, but I'm not happy with it because I think I have a rather large brush fire in the making if we get a dry, hot summer.  Thankfully there's a solution at hand.

Last week my buddy Fig told me he'd purchased a burn barrel for $10 from Shouse's near the corner of Yadkinville and Reynolda Roads.  "A burn barrel!" I thought.  I don't have space to do an open burn of my big pile of stuff, but I figured I could burn a little every night in a barrel.  Yesterday when I was out in that neck of the woods I stopped by Shouse's to see if they had any more barrels.  Lucky for me they'd just gotten some barrels that had been used to ship molasses, so they used the biggest can opener I've ever seen to cut the top off and loaded the now open barrel in the back of the minivan for me.  Since the inside of the barrel still had some molasses coating it our old minivan smells pretty darn nice right now, and I assume that the first couple of burns are going to make our yard smell like a molasses cookie factory.

Here's Shouse's location via Google Maps:

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Our Friends to the East Get Their Own American Viticulture Area

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Most of us in the Winston-Salem area know about the burgeoning wine business in the Yadkin Valley.  Heck, Westbend Vineyards, one of the oldest wineries in the state is just down the road from me in Lewisville.  Well there's now a new official American Viticulture Area to our east in the Haw River Valley.  Here's a press release about the announcement and here's a link to the Haw River Wine Trail brochure.  Looks like there's an event called Art on the Haw River on May 2-3 that could be interesting too.

Have Your Say in the $3 Trillion Spending Spree

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The Boston Globe has an interview with Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel that is overseeing the bailout of America's financial system (thanks to Lex for the pointer).  It's a pretty quick read and if you're at all interested in what's going on with your trillions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to the financial muckety-mucks then I suggest you read it.  Here's the end of the interview, which I think gives you an idea of the stakes:

Q: Is there anything else that you would want people to understand?
A: I don't have a badge and a gun. The power of this panel is derived entirely from the voice of the American people. If they stay out of the policy debates, then Treasury can spend at will and reshape the American economy with no one in the room but insiders. If they are involved, the policies will look different.
It's the design of the rules going forward that will tell us or that will determine whether we are moving to a cyclical economy with high wealth, high risk, and crashes every 10 to 15 years. Or whether we will emerge, as we did following the new regulatory reforms in the Great Depression, with a more stable economic system that benefits people across the economic spectrum. It's an amazing moment in history.

So How’d You Spend Your Easter?

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I'm willing to bet your Easter Sunday was a tad more relaxing than mine.  To begin with my Easter-eve didn't end until well after 4 a.m. because, well, just because.  And it wasn't a good "because." Then we overslept and didn't make it to Easter service, which is saying something since the service didn't start until 11.  After that I decided to take care of all the bushes that had been torn out of our front yard and made into two big piles when our new septic field was installed last week.  I lost count, but I think it was something like ten mature bushes and one small tree that were all piled together, and since bushes are bushy they weren't easy to get apart, and trimmed down and moved to our rather large brush pile in the woods behind the house.  Even with the kids' help it took the better part of five hours and let me tell you those root balls weren't light. The fact that my chainsaw broke down midway through and I had to start sawing by hand didn't help matters, and of course the fact that I'm not exactly in fighting trim hurt my cause too.

Why am I sharing this with you?  Well, because my 42-year-old body is very unhappy with me today.  About every other sentence I type prompts spasms and cramps in my forearms.  My lower back feels like a really ticked off elephant ran over it at least 10 times.  My arms look like a deranged cat used them as scratching poles.  My shoulders are so sore I can't really lift my arms above my head.  But the worst part truly is the realization that I'm getting freakin' old.  Ten years ago, heck even five years ago, I'd have shrugged this off like it was nothing but today I can't even shrug.  I was going to ask the question "If I feel like this at 42 then what am I going to feel like at 52?", but I already know the answer.  At 52 I'll be just fine because I'm damn well going to pay somebody to do the job for me.  That, my friends, is what they call hard earned wisdom.

Apparently America’s Top Model Search NOT Coming to W-S Journal Newsroom

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In what appears to be an ill-fated attempt to buck up the morale in the Winston-Salem Journal newsroom managing editor Ken Otterbourg had this to say (found in an Arizona Republic article about how reporters are depicted in movies):

"Reporters are always better-looking in movies than in real life," said Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor of theWinston-Salem Journal, in North Carolina. "There's a phrase I use to describe most people who work at newspapers – myself included, all genders – which is 'newsroom pretty,' which is a lower grade of pretty than real-world pretty." 

Oh snap! But let's be fair and share the Big O's other quote in the story:

"In real life," Otterbourg said, "the sort of revelatory scoops on which movies are made rarely happen. It's more of a series of steps and monk's work at a courthouse or the like. And most reporters – even the good investigative ones – tend to have better social skills than the lone wolves of the movies. . . . Being a journalist is about getting people to talk with you, and nobody is obligated to talk to us. You can't do it by being a jerk."

To sum it up: reporters are really friendly, yet homely folks who toil in the bowels of places like the courthouse.

In defense of the Big O I should also point out that in the movies the actors are better looking than whomever they're depicting, whether it be reporters or lawyers.  The most notable exception, of course, would be any film in which Dustin Hoffman was the actor.

More On the Time Warner Tiered Pricing Plan

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Ben Hwang posted the best explanation I've seen about Time Warner's new pricing scheme for internet data usage.  His analogy using water, hose and bucket really helps put the issue in perspective and goes a long way towards tearing down some of Time Warner's arguments for the pricing.

BTW, Ben's one of the people behind Merchant's Mirror which is a local start up that I think will make some waves in the near future.  They've just moved into the incubator at Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship in Greensboro so I think you'll be hearing a lot about them.

Panic at the AP Disco

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I wonder if the folks at the Associated Press are having some sort of weird contest to see who can do the dumbest stuff possible.  First they steal every losing play of the recording industry's playbook circa 2005 and then they start attacking their own affiliates for embedding videos from the official AP YouTube channel.  I'm really not sure what's funnier, that they went after their own affiliate for embedding their content or that the AP exec handling the matter didn't even know that there was an official AP YouTube channel.  And of course he wouldn't have known that AP could turn off the embed function themselves and the problem would have been solved.  You can read/hear/see all about it here.

Transparency When No One’s Looking

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Last night we had a public meeting for the Lewisville Planning Board so that we could explain the access management ordinance that we've been working on for the town the last couple of months.  One person from the public showed up and since she represents a coalition of realtors and developers she was essentially paid to be there.  Now I know this stuff can be dull as dirt, but this is where the rubber hits the road.

Let's put it this way.  If you plan on building in Lewisville in the future and you want to know where you can access a road from your property, i.e. build a driveway, and you want to know what kind of driveway you can build, how far away it has to be from your neighbors' driveways and other details then you might want to take a look at what we're doing.  Or if you want to redevelop your land, you might want to know how the new ordinance will affect you.  Whatever, this is the kind of stuff that directly affects people but even when we advertise the meetings, as we did this one, people generally don't show up in droves.

Access management is just one of the things we're working on right now.  Because our Town Council declared a six month moratorium on development until we can get some new ordinances in place we're meeting every week to work on an access management ordinance, a stormater/watershed ordinance and a multi-family housing ordinance.  All of these will affect propert owners in one way or another so I would recommend that people check in on our meetings to see what's going on. 

Now, we're by no means the final word on these ordinances.  We'll eventually send our recommendations to Town Council and they'll make the final decisions, but most citizens don't realize that by the time it gets to the Council a ton of work has already been done and they've missed some golden opportunities to influence the ordinance before it even gets to the powers that be.  Every one of our public meetings has a public comment segment and we really do welcome any feedback we can get.  In fact we've already incorporated changes to our early drafts of the ordinances thanks to the feedback we've gotten from people who attended earlier sessions.

If you're a resident of Lewisville or are a business owner in Lewisville you really should check out what we're doing so you can be part of the process.  Don't wait until everything's 99% done and you have to fight the inertia of a downhill train.  It's not too late.  We continued our deliberations until our next public meeting which is May 13 at 7:30 at the community center next door to the library.  Hopefully we'll see you there.  If you'd like to catch up on what we've been doing you can check out our minutes here.