In this short New Yorker article, James Surowiecki explains why rising oil prices have not thrown the U.S. into recession, and more generally, why oil prices do not necessarily have as big an impact on the economy as people tend to think.
I can follow his reasoning, and on a macroeconomic level, I buy it. But then I look at the effect that rising oil prices has on an average family. In our two-car family, our monthly expenditure on gasoline has gone up by at least $50 in the recently, probably closer to $100. Our income hasn’t risen, so that’s $50-100 that we do not have to save or spend on other things. Considering that every family in the nation is experiencing the same thing, I can’t help but think that this must have some sort of effect on the overall economy.
If it truly isn’t having much of an effect, then it reveals what a load of bull is spewed about tax cuts. I remember when the federal government sent $400/child pre-emptive tax refund checks to families a couple of years ago. This mail-out was heralded as a big stimulant to the economy. If significantly increased gasoline prices doesn’t have much of a negative effect on the economy, then this one-time payout can’t have had much of a positive effect either.

On Friday, the mother of one of Hannah’s school friends called to ask whether we were coming to the party at her house on Saturday.
After the call, Katie told me that she vaguely remembered an email invitation earlier in the week, but had forgotten about it. We were planning to have several good friends over a little earlier on Saturday.
Katie said that she had agreed to go because she thought that these parents were making an effort to get to know us better, since our daughters are friends and we just live a few blocks apart. Katie had told the mother that we would come over as soon as our friends left.
So, as soon as our last friends got in their car on Saturday evening, the four us of ran over to these people’s house. A woman whom we didn’t know answered the door; she was wearing a name tag and holding a role of raffle/game type tickets. I immediately knew what was going on. We walked in, and my suspicions were confirmed: a group of women was sitting around a table with a bunch of candles on it. The mother of Hannah’s friend said that her husband and kids were not at home, and tried to hint that the invitation was only for Katie.
Turns out, it was a Party Lite, which is apparently the current trend in home sales parties.
The kids and I high-tailed it back home, leaving Katie stranded. I felt really bad for her. When she got home a little later, I asked her the damage: the said she had bought the cheapest item, $15, and had refused to get on the mailing list or host her own party. Actually, I was proud of her. I know it’s tough for her to say no under such circumstances.
If Katie had realized the nature of the party earlier in the week, I’m sure she would have not gone.

Gee, I hope they weren’t packing nail clippers. I feel so much safer, knowing that the penguins were screened.

Our dog Tippie just got her summer shave. We did it ourselves, so it doesn’t look great, but it does help to keep her cooler. Tippie is half German Shepherd, half Husky (a ‘Shepsky’ to us), and she has incredibly long, thick fur–which makes her very hot in the Texas summers. Her undercoat is very light, so when we shave her, she is a completely different color. We call her ‘beige dog.’
Before and after pictures:

P.S. In case you’re wondering, the red collar with the black box is her shock collar for the invisible fence. We have a wooden picket fence around the back yard, but Tippie tends to dig under it and/or chew her way through it, so we keep her from the wood fence with an invisible fence. She’s a special needs dog.

In the same vein as yesterday’s post about test data in production applications, today I present production web sites that have the text ‘This is placeholder text‘.
(Via Jim Heid)

Protect our troops – from the womb to the war. What if the fetus you were going to abort would grow up to be a soldier bringing democracy to a godless dictatorship?

I notice that MissPoppy.com also hosts the Landover Baptist Church online store, so I’m inclined to believe they appreciate the absurdity of this object. But I have to wonder how many earnest buyers they get.
(Via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

This article in The Nation is pretty depressing:

As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was lost. . . The coast is not being rebuilt as it was–dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.
In January Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” Many were horrified at the idea of treating a massive human tragedy as a chance to seek advantage. But, if anything, Rice was understating the case. A group calling itself Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”

(Via Approximately Perfect)

If you go to the Nike Women Store Locator and select Afghanistan from the list, you’ll see that there’s a store named ‘blabla’ in a city called ‘test’ (found on This is Broken).
Oops. Somehow, the developer of this little application managed to get test data into the production application.

Well, it could have been worse: at least the city wasn’t named ‘f*ck’ and the store, ‘sh*t’ (asterisks for the sake of web filters, not because I’m a prude). As a software QA engineer, I used to use profanities in my test data. My vulgar data never made it into production, but my test system got used often enough for demos to management or, heaven forbid, customers that I finally learned my lesson.

Yesterday, I wrote a long entry about health care in the US and an interesting article by Paul Krugman.
The thing is, the US offers the best and the worst health care in the industrialized world. If you have health insurance, you can get very good health care. If not, you probably can only afford very poor health care. The point of socialized health care is evening this out.
The probem is that we probably cannot afford to provide the quality of health care that some receive. We need to create either a system that allows those who can afford it to continue to receive top-notch health care, while raising the minimum quality for everyone else, or a system that evens out health care. But of course, those who already receive top-notch health care are scared to death of the second option, which leads us down the road of classic American individualism: why should I have to sacrifice my own health care for others? It’s a difficult, and costly, dilemma.

In the early 1990s, my father-in-law was battling cancer. My father-in-law had been in business for himself, and had suffered from heart disease for many years. This combination of circumstances had the unfortunate result that he could not get health insurance–at any cost. Also, due to his health problems, he had lost most of his businesses and was not in very good financial shape. However, due to the generosity of the citizens of Bexar County, Texas, via a county health program, my father-in-law received treatment for his cancer, even though he could not pay for it all himself. The care he received wasn’t top-notch, but he wasn’t left to die, either.
At the same time my father was suffering from cancer, near the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first term as president, his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton took on the task of health care reform. I vividly remember the huge battle over the issue and over the First Lady tackling such an important issue.
One tactic that the Clintons’ opponents employed was to scream ‘They want socialized health care! Look at what a disaster it is in Canada and England!” The claim was, of course, false–the Clintons were not trying to institute true socialized health care (where the government owns all health care facilities)–but it struck a nerve with a lot of people and ultimately contributed to the failure of Ms. Rodham Clinton’s efforts.
At that time, I enjoyed pointing out to opponents that we already, in fact, had (and still have) socialized medicine on various levels in the US. In addition to the oodles of local programs, such as the county program serving my father-in-law, we also have several very large federal socialized health care programs, among them: Veteran’s Administration, Medicare, Medicaid. In fact, the VA runs a ‘real’ socialized health care system, in that it owns its own hospitals and clinics, employs the doctors, etc. Medicare and Medicaid, on the other hand, are government-run systems for paying for mostly private health care.
My comments stopped more than a few opponents in their tracks.
In a new New York Times column, Paul Krugman gives us an update on this issue. First, he compares what we spend on health care:

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.
Amazing, isn’t it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

Then Krugman summarizes what we receive in each country, respectively, for that expenditure:

What do we get for all that money? Not much.
Most Americans probably do not know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America’s high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.
A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services – we have lots of MRIs – but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors’ visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There is also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the United States than in other advanced countries.
The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad – but they do not actually receive more care. The title of their article? “It’s the Prices, Stupid.”

When you compare the U.S. to these countries with ‘socialized’ health care, we don’t stand up so well, do we?