In Good Company

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A couple of years ago I was playing in a buddy’s poker tournament and he asked me and another guy named JB to help collect money and dole out chips.  My buddy had a system that he used to make sure he’d gotten all the money from every player, but JB and I quickly screwed it up and before you knew it we were short a bunch of money.  So we had 30+ guys who all claimed to have payed in their $100 and we were about $500 short.  I was so upset I’d been part of the screw up that I was ready to puke.  Eventually my buddy asked JB why he had bills in the pocket of his shirt and JB realized he’d put some bills in there when his hands got full and then forgotten about it.  Thankfully most of us had played together long enough to know it was an honest mistake but JB still turned red as an apple in his embarassment.

Well, it looks like JB and I are in good company in terms of screwing up the whole money/chip thing.  According to this story in Freakonomics the guys at the World Series of Poker ended up with $2 million in extra chips at the end of the tournament.  Normally you’d think that someone had to be cheating but it ends up that the extra chips were due to some of the WSOP employees being a little math challenged.  I can only imagine how embarassed the WSOP folks are about this.

BB&T to Offer HSAs

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BB&T, a rather large bank based here in Winston-Salem, announced
today that they will begin offering Healthcare Savings Accounts to
commercial clients through their employee benefit subsidiary.  From the
article:

BB&T Corp.
will begin offering health savings accounts, or HSAs, to qualified
clients interested in an alternative to traditional insurance plans,
the company has announced.

HSAs allow account holders to make tax-deductible contributions
that can be withdrawn tax-free when used for qualified medical
expenses. Unlike flexible spending accounts, money left unspent at the
end of a year remains in the account.  

Winston-Salem-based BB&T (NYSE: BBT) will offer HSAs to
institutional and commercial clients through its employee benefit
subsidiary Stanley, Hunt, Dupree & Rhine. The company will also offer the accounts to retail clients who are covered by high-deductible health plans.

Having been self-employed or owner of a small business for much of
the past 10 years I’ve been keeping an eye on these things.  The
biggest thing they have to overcome is the fear factor for people used
to traditional health plans and HMOs and the sticker shock many will
experience when they look at the out-of-pocket expenses before they
reach their deductible limit.  They’re also often confused with "use it
or lose it" plans so people are worried they won’t get to keep the
money they don’t spend.

Some view the HSAs as just another way for businesses to shift the
financial burden of healthcare to their employees, but especially in
the case of very small companies HSAs may offer the only way to provide
any health benefits.  And for the self-employed it’s definitely
something they consider.  Here’s some back of the envelope calculating:

Say you have a family of five, you’re with a traditional health
insurance company like BSBCNC and you pay $700 in premiums per month
which gets you 80/20 coverage for all medical procedures (you have to
cover 20%) and a deductible of $2,500 per year.  On top of that you pay
$30 per office visit and $15 per prescription.  Let’s assume that each
person in the family goes to the doctor once a year (very optimistic)
and gets one prescription per year and no one needs a medical
procedure.  That means your total expenditure for the year is $8,625
and if anyone in the family has to have an operation or stay in the
hospital you’re talking $10,000+ per year.

With an HSA, which is tied to a high-deductible health insurance
plan, you’re probably looking at premiums in the range of $300 per
month and a deductible of $5,000 per year minimum.  Assuming that
co-pays and drug benefits are about the same your looking at saving
$400 month in premiums or $4,800 year.  If you contribute the same
amount per month to your HSA account that you were paying in premiums
you’ll end up spending the same amount of money IF someone in your
family is sick and you exhaust your entire deductible. But if no one
gets sick you get to keep the money you don’t spend in the HSA account
and roll it into the next year, kind of like an IRA.  After a couple of
years you can actually reduce the amount you contribute each month
because you will have built up a cushion that more than covers your
deductible and incidental medical expenses.  With a traditional
healthcare plan your premiums are gone whether or not you’ve been
sick.  In other words the insurance company is keeping your money even
if you and your family have been as healthy as a horse.  The icing on
the cake is that your contributions to the HSA are tax deductible and
my understanding is that you can pay for things like over-the-counter
meds with the account as well.

One problem that HSAs have had in the past is that they’re typically
offered by
companies that no one has heard of so it makes people nervous turning
over such an important safety net to an unknown entity.  With name
brand companies like BB&T getting involved I think you’ll see these
things take off, so if you’re self employed or are a small business
owner you might want to check them out.

Also posted at Lowder Enterprises blog and Winston Salem Business.

Watch What You Say

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Here’s a piece of news for all you trolls and haters out there; watch what you write/say or you could be on the wrong end of a very expensive lawsuit.  A woman in Florida recently won an $11.3 million defamation suit  and a lawyer in Georgia won a libel suit against a former client who’d started a blog and written some nasty things about him.  According to the article about the Georgia lawyer bloggers have been considered bulletproof because they weren’t worth suing, i.e. they didn’t have deep pockets like media companies.  Apparently that’s changing:

Legal analysts say the lawsuits are challenging a mind-set that has
long surrounded blogging: that most bloggers essentially are
"judgment-proof" because they — unlike traditional media such as
newspapers, magazines and television outlets — often are ordinary
citizens who don’t have a lot of money. Recent lawsuits by Banks and
others who say they have had their reputations harmed or their privacy
violated have been aimed not just at cash awards but also at silencing
their critics.

Later in the article the founder of the Media Bloggers Association recommends that bloggers bone up on libel law because eventually someone’s going to get sued and lose their home. 

My recommendation?  When you’re writing about someone think of it has having a conversation about one of your neighbors or co-workers.  It’s perfectly fine to have an opinion about the person and you can tell anyone you want what that opinion is, but you can’t make accusatory statements about that person unless you’re ready to back it up with proof.  For example it’s perfectly legal to say "I think Joe is an amoral jerk" but it’s a completely different thing to say "Joe’s a pervert who diddles little boys."  Statement number one is an opinion, statement number two is an accusation.  The worst that can happen with statement number one is everyone you say it to might think you’re a jerk or Joe might challenge you to a fight, but with the second statement you could end up in court.

For the record I love everyone…we’re all God’s children…blah, blah, blah…don’t sue me.

Greensboro Has Wireless Envy

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Over in Greensboro Ed Cone posted an item about Winston-Salem/Forsyth County getting ready to offer municipal wi-fi and lamenting the lack of such an effort in Greensboro.  Much discussion ensued and it’s one of the few times I can remember reading anyone write something re. technology that states Winston-Salem is ahead of Greensboro.

Ed also says that Greensboro’s downtown wireless corridor isn’t the same thing as municipal wi-fi (too limited) and I’d agree; we also have a free wi-fi corridor on Fourth Street in W-S but what they’re talking about doing is a much bigger deal.  Hopefully it works.

WinstonNet is the group behind the wi-fi effort.

**Update: Check out DarkMoon’s analysis of the deal here.

For Those Who Think Blogs are a Waste of Space, Time or Whatever

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I’ve been asked more than once what I like about blogs.  I’ve produced a variety of answers but when I distill it down I come up with two words: prose and variety.  Up until a couple of years ago I could only read those writers that the media gatekeepers let through, but now thanks to blogs I can read all kinds of writing from pros and amateurs alike, and the scary part for the pros is that the amateurs’ prose is usually more interesting and colorful.  They have far more distinctive voices and because they aren’t edited (for the most part) it comes through loud and clear.  Here are two recent example that I’m sure would not have found the light of day just five years ago:

From Driftglass, taking on David Brooks’, whom he calls "Bobo", and his comparison of our reaction to Congressman Foley’s misdeeds to The Vagina Monologues:

No matter how many fleets of atomic-powered back-hoes the GOP leases
for a million dollars a minute from Halliburton to deepen the trenches
into which they have already sunk the bar for the minimally acceptable
level of degenerate Republican behavior, worms like Bobo will always
insist that somehow, some way, the non-GOP majority is somehow equally
awful and equally culpable.

Behold this snip from his latest masterpiece of mendacity…

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who
befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking
them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The
second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her
neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up
to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave
her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl,
which was interrupted when the girl’s mother called. Then she made the
girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The
first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The
second predator is a character in Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina
Monologues.”

And having “established” somewhere in the depleted nimbus of brain
cells that still scurry around in his soft head that a FICTIONAL
CHARACTER from a play is somehow exactly the same as a real child
predator, notice how his next paragraph begins (emphasis added)

“Foley is now universally reviled. But the Ensler play…”

And off we go on a dissertation on vile, lefty art and how “cosmopolitan culture” has just gone and ruined the social fabric.

Rooned I tell’s ya!

Desperate
to evade the question of why a child predator was allowed to range and
hunt free at the heart of the Family Values Party, and why virtually
the entire Party of Personal Responsibility is now bending every oar
hysterically ducking their Personal Responsibility, Bobo begins to
unload the strawmen by the job lot:

But why is one sexual predator despised and the other celebrated?

…he asks.

See kids, this is what happens when you drink the Koolaid, then lick
the Koolaid powder off the floor, then smoke the packet in came in:
Lying becomes so automatic to you – pulling out of your ass whatever
works to cover up the Scandal of the Day becomes such a reflex – that
you lose the capacity to distinguish between a character in a play and a real Congressman who hunts real children…

The honest answer to Bobo’s absurd question is, of course, is that Art is supposed to be provocative you imbecile. 

It is supposed to illuminate, not laminate. 

And
to get that job done, we allow Artists enormous latitude. We allow them
to create scary villains. Flawed heroes. Plots that creep us out. In
literature, we allow the Good Guys to lose. Badly. Or to drown. Or let
the life-saving fire they finally managed to strike with their frozen
fingers and last match to be smothered by a dollop of snow falling from
an overhanging limb…

And we allow it. Hell, we demand it. We need Provocation like we need
air: Without it, the Southron Slave Empire that the Red Staters
no-sot-secretly covet would be entering its three-hundred-and-fiftieth
year of continuous operation. Rape and murder of non-whites would still
be a God-sanctioned perk, and Dr. King would have ended up at the end
of a Conservative Christian rope the first time he opened his mouth and
said, “I am a Man.”

Congressmen, on the other hand, are not
hired to peel the skin off of the human soul and show us the miracles
and murder that contend in our hearts.

Congressmen are hired to do a job of work much like house painting and pothole-filling. 

Congressmen are not hired to molest children.

Congressmen are not hired to cover up for the molesters of children.

This
is a concept which is not beyond David Brooks’ comprehension, but
beyond his honor. He is not actually dumb enough not to know better,
because he is not a stupid man, but a despicable man.

When he dissembles to deflect judgment away from child sex predators and their enablers in his Party, he does it by choice.

Because he is a Good Republican and not a Good American.

Because
it does not matter how many times Republicans hits your grandma upside
the head with a shovel, Bobo will forever waddle onto the crime scene,
pick up the bloody weapon and screech, “But the Liberals…”

And from Fec, on describing a conservative blog conference in Greensboro last week (this boy can turn a phrase):

Weird moment:  Jim Capo asking Scott Johnson
to repeat his statement that the MSM was the mouthpiece of the
Democratic Party. The words were almost visible as they wafted over the
sheep. Capo followed the silly words in disbelief as they slowly
settled on the garbage.

Weird moment: Understanding that this is the future of the GOP and we are doomed, doomed I tell you.

Weird moment: Talking to the John Locke folks and realizing that
particularly in politics, nice guys finish last. They don’t understand
that all things are possible once you surrender your integrity. Man,
that’s too evil even for me, but worthy of contemplation. The idea
being that someone like me can thrive in the complete absence of
integrity.

Unless things change radically you won’t see writing like that in any op-ed column or on any mainstream media outlet of any kind.  They have to worry about ad sales and other business niceties while the others can speak/write their minds.  It’s kind of like barbershop banter writ large and I love it.

BTW, I think I’m going to adopt Driftglass’s "Because he is a Good Republican and Not a Good American" but replace "Republican" with "Politician." 

Also, Fec’s "all things are possible once you surrender your integrity" is this decade’s "carpe diem."

Update: As a raving moderate I am genetically predisposed to seeing both sides of every coin.  Here’s one reason you would be justified in thinking that blogs are a waste of, well, everything. Can we say TMI?

A Voting Toolkit

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Now that we’re entering the heavy campaign season for the 06 elections I think we need a toolkit on how to gather information so we can make informed decisions at the polls.  Below are some links to sources of information about Congress and people running for Congress:

Is Foxx Obtuse, a Partisan Lap Dog, or Both?

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I’ve spent a little time lately looking at our Congressional leaders and the amount of money they spend doing their jobs, but I haven’t felt any burning desire to dive into the political maelstroms that are kicking up since there’s so much of that going on everywhere else.  But after reading Lex Alexander’s post in which he shares comments made by Virginia Foxx to him re. the Foley Scandal I just have to say my piece about my own US Representative.

It’s really quite simple.  I don’t know Rep. Foxx personally but based on her comments on this and at least one other issue I have to ask whether she’s a Republican lap dog or just plain dense.  And it’s not just that I disagree with her take on things it’s that I think what she’s doing is stupid from a pragmatic, political angle.  Let’s start with the Foley issue.  Here’s an excerpt from Lex’s blog:

During my telephone conversation with him Thursday, Rep. Howard
Coble, the 6th District Republican, called on the National Republican
Congressional Committee to return $100,000 it received earlier this
summer from former Rep. Foley’s political-action committee. The NRCC
works to elect Republican candidates to the U.S. House of
Representatives. Because Republican control of the House is in jeopardy
for the first time since that party took control of the chamber after
the 1994 elections, the NRCC understandably wants to raise as much
money as possible to help Republican candidates in close races. Foley,
prior to news of his scandalous Internet communications, was considered
a safe bet for re-election and still has roughly $2.8 million in his
PAC.

The NRCC’s problem, however, is that news reports indicate that the
NRCC’s chairman, Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, had been told months
ago about Foley’s potentially problematic behavior. He accepted the
money anyway — and also is reported to have been instrumental in
talking Foley, who had been thinking about retiring, into running for
re-election this year.

No quid pro quo has been proved, Coble said, but "appearance-wise, it does not look good."

Rep. Virginia Foxx, the area’s other Republican House member, has no
problem with Reynolds’ behavior. And she thinks that if at least two
newspapers — the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times — were
onto the story but had chosen not to publish anything at the time the
NRCC got Foley’s money, she doesn’t see why Reynolds should have done
anything differently: "There were at least two newspaper outlets and
they didn’t think it was worth reporting. Then why fault Reynolds for
doing what he did? If the news media had thought at the time that it
was so inappropriate that something should have been done, then maybe
they should have done something."

Can she possibly be serious?  Why fault Rep. Reynolds if we don’t fault the papers?  Well let’s start with the fact that he’s a member of Congress and it’s his job to do something about it, as it would have been hers if she were privy to what was going on.  Is she saying that she’s not obligated to report misgivings about a fellow Representative unless the Winston-Salem Journal also reports on the situation?  Furthermore, here’s what the St. Petersburg Times’ editor said about deciding not to run the story:

I led deliberations with our top editors, and we concluded that we did
not have enough substantiated information to reach beyond innuendo.

We were unsuccessful in getting members of Congress who were
involved in the matter or those who administer the House page corps to
acknowledge any problem with Foley’s ambiguous e-mail or to suggest
that they thought it was worth pursuing.

And we couldn’t come up with a strong enough case to explain to a
teenager’s parents why, over their vehement pleas to drop the matter,
we needed to make their son the subject of a story – and the incredible
scrutiny that would surely follow.

It added up to this conclusion: To print what we had seemed to be a
shortcut to taint a member of Congress without actually having the
goods.

I guarantee you that if they’d run the story as it was Rep. Foxx would have jumped all over them for reporting rumors and trying to sabotage a sitting member of Congress.  Also, she should take note that had Rep. Reynolds and the other party leaders who’d been warned about Foley done their jobs the story would have run with corroboration.

As I said I’m not just stunned because I disagree with her stand on this issue, I’m equally or more stunned at her political ineptitude here.  Instead of just saying "I think we should investigate this matter and take whatever actions are appropriate" she tries to shift the blame and in the process looks less adept at that than my 5th grade son.

The Foley incident where Rep. Foxx has looked like she’s living in a different, partisan universe.  Earlier this summer she went to Baghdad and here’s some excerpts from a Winston-Salem Journal article about her trip:

The war in Iraq is
going well, Iraqi government officials are determined to have a united
government, and American soldiers are satisfied with their equipment
and their mission, said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-5th, who visited Iraq
yesterday and Sunday…

Foxx and other members
of the congressional delegation stayed with troops overnight in a
military compound in Baghdad that is one of Saddam Hussein’s former
palaces and had lunch together yesterday. (Ed. Comment: Sure she got a real good idea of what the situation on the ground looked like from there)…

Yesterday, after
Foxx’s visit, there were several kidnappings in Baghdad, the latest in
a string of sectarian violence that has escalated in recent months.

Foxx said she did
not see any evidence of this (Ed. See comment above). but said that the government officials,
particularly al-Bolani, are committed to making sure "the terrorists
don’t create a civil war."…

Ideally, she said,
military leaders and government officials told her they hope to have
Baghdad "secure" and a "place where people can feel safe" by the end of
the year. (Ed. She really bought this?)

There have been
reports that American military personnel do not have adequate supplies
or that their morale is low. Foxx said that her meetings with soldiers
did not support this. She said that at one point she asked the
soldiers, while their supervising officers were not within earshot, in
hopes to get the most honest answer, and they told her they were fine.

"There was no sense of any problems," she said, "There was no indication of unhappiness." (Ed. Oh come on, in the private sector that would be like a VP going around her CEO to bitch to the Board of Directors.  It ain’t gonna happen).

So again I ask, is she really this obtuse or is she a party hack?  Personally I think she’s a party hack and my evidence to support this is her early and consistent push for immigration reform.  That’s a hot-button issue in this neck of the woods (see this W-S Journal article) and I will definitely give her props for being a consistent advocate for immigration reform, even if I don’t agree with some of the solutions she proposes.

Still her recent comments and stances on issues like the war and the Foley matter really have me thinking she’s more commited to her party than the good of her constituents.  I’m sure she’s worried about her party losing the majority in November, but her comments and behavior, and that of her party’s leadership are only serving to highlight why it’s time they get a little butt spanking.  Maybe it will help them remember where they’re from and what they’re supposed to be about. Sadly the Democrats aren’t any better, but I guess it’s their turn to figure out how to further screw this country up.

How to Know What the Hell Your Kids Are Talking About: Part 1

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Okay, I finally have to admit that I’m not just behind the times, I’m way not-cool.  Increasingly I realize that I have no idea what the hell people under the age of 30 are talking about, and forget understanding what teenagers are saying.  Their language is a sea of acronyms and obscure IM and gaming references and I find myself trying to translate their words by studying the context in which they’re said.  Unfortunately one of the victims of modern culture is the ability to speak or write in fully formed sentences, much less paragraphs, so it’s kind of like trying to interpret what someone is saying to you over a bad mobile phone connection.  Example:

Me: What’s going on?
Other: I…crack…house.
Me: You’re at a crack house?
Other: No, I…itched…a crack…in…sister.
Me: You’re doing what with your sister?

Later I’m told he was patching a crack in the walkway in front of his sister’s house.  You get my drift.  So anyway I’ve been reading all these terms that I really don’t get like "n00b" and "pwned" which make me say to myself, "WTF?"  So I did a little research and I came up with an essential tool for my "Parenting a Teenager Toolbox."  It’s the Wikipedia page dedicated to internet slang and it’s an absolute must though FWIW I suspect it’s probably several steps behind the current slang.

And You Thought Going Blind Was the Worst Possible Outcome

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I can remember hearing all the crazy things people used to say to disuade boys from pleasuring themselves.  You know, spanking their proverbial monkey.  Hairy palms and blindness were the most oft-warned side effects of this ubiquitous practice.  Well, since we don’t have an epidemic of men with fuzzy hands, wearing dark sunglasses and using a tap cane we can safely assume that these warnings were fabricated by grossed out moms and priests who wanted to keep all the fun to themselves.

Interestingly, though, Iran’s supreme leader Sayyid Ali Khameini has weighed in on the subject of self diddling (found via Boing Boing).  According to his blog men should not exercise their wrists during Ramadan.  He has a Q&A section where he addresses the issue:


Q: "If somebody masturbates during the
month of Ramadan but without any discharge, is his fasting invalidated?"

Iranian Supreme Leader: "If he do not intend masturbation and
discharging semen and nothing is discharged, his fasting is correct
even though he has done a ḥarām (forbidden) act. But, if he intends
masturbation or he knows that he usually discharges semen by this
process and semen really comes out, it is a ḥaram intentional breaking
fasting."

Here’s the interesting thing to me; by saying that it’s not good during Ramadan it seems to me he’s saying that it’s okay during the rest of the year.  Combine that with the whole "virgins waiting for you once you blow yourself and a few hundred innocents up" thing and you’ve got quite the recruiting video for young radicals.

Stupid Lawyer

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Budvase
I know, I know, many of you will probably find the title of this post redundant, but I’ve known at least one really fine lawyer in my day.  Maybe one and a half.  Anyway, here’s a post on bookofjoe about a cease and desist letter he, Joe, received from a lawyer who was supposedly defending the patent of one of her clients.  In the letter she insists that bookofjoe immediately stop manufacturing or selling the product pictured to the left.  Small problem:  Joe didn’t manufacture or sell the vase, he simply wrote about it. 

Maybe ten seconds of due-diligence by the attorney or one of her paralegals would have prevented this waste of time. But wait, maybe that’s the point.  Ten seconds of due-diligence doesn’t rack up the billable hours that penning a carefully crafted cease and desist form letter does.  Ironically the ten seconds of due-diligence might have actually led to more billable hours since Joe conveniently supplied a link to the seller of the patent-offending device. 

Ah, lawyers.