choofnagle | June 29, 2009If you are a resident of California, rejoice, because the Supreme Court let stand a decision in the 9th Circuit finding that SB 1 (California's Financial Information Privacy Act) was not preempted by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In plain English, this means that California residents can opt-out of "affiliate sharing" among banks. Thus, if you have an account at Bank of America, you can ask the bank not to share information about your account with the company's 2,000 affiliates! This sets the stage for other states to limit affiliate sharing, and in all likelihood, it means that some…
choofnagle | June 23, 2009In Adam Sandler's 2008 masterpiece, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the actor is offered a job at an electronics store called "Going Out of Business." This is a shady operation that constantly makes false claims about products and rips people off. Sandler was mocking a real phenomenon--the liquidation companies named "going out of business" or "total liquidation sale." The Journal has a fun article on the issue today, focusing on a rug salesman who has settled down in Texas for a permanent going out of business sale. Barry Newman reports:
Many localities do have rules against such claims.…
choofnagle | June 23, 2009
Sounds like a more dangerous form of Scientology, according to the Chronicle's Scavenger Blog:
...Lee's yoga focuses on Brain Education, or as one official put it, "using your brain well." Part of this training includes the head-shaking Brain Wave Vibration exercise...Participants take basic yoga classes and are reportedly encouraged to attend pricey workshops, retreats and healing sessions. The group also sells followers $4,000 healing turtles, $800 healing necklaces and $90 vibrating power brains, according to a Boston TV station.
choofnagle | June 22, 2009David Rivkin and Lee Casey consider this question in today's Journal, explaining that the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence limits the government's power to unduly burden choices about healthcare:
It is, of course, difficult to imagine choices more "central to personal dignity and autonomy" than measures to be taken for the prevention and treatment of disease -- measures that may be essential to preserve or extend life itself. Indeed, when the overwhelming moral issues that surround the abortion question are stripped away, what is left is a medical procedure determined to be "necessary"…
choofnagle | June 22, 2009Christoper Rhoads and Loretta Chao report in today's Journal:
...the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.
The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture,…
choofnagle | June 11, 2009Obama's honeymoon is over, and so is my intermittent blogging, because business groups have finally started their machines! Christopher Conkey reports in the Journal:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it will spend $100 million in an effort to stem the "rapidly growing influence of government over private-sector activity," in a major new move by the powerful business group to counter the Obama administration's regulatory agenda.
[...]
Chamber president Thomas Donohue said his organization is launching its "Campaign for Free Enterprise" because an "avalanche of new rules, restrictions,…
denialism | June 11, 2009Orac has already pointed out the disgusting hate behind the Holocaust museum shooter and his holocaust denial. Others around the internet, in particular Pat at Screw Loose Change have pointed out he was an example of crank magnetism. Not surprisingly, he was also a 9/11 truther (which as Pat says, "scratch a 9/11 truther and you get a holocaust denier"), loved Mel Gibson, and promoted conspiracies about how Obama isn't a US citizen.
I am particularly interested in his anti-Federal Reserve craziness, which these days, especially among the Ron Paul crowd, I've noticed seems to be a stand-in…
denialism | June 8, 2009Our recent discussions of HIV/AIDS denial and in particular Seth Kalichman's book "Denying AIDS" has got me thinking more about the psychology of those who are susceptible to pseudoscientific belief. It's an interesting topic, and Kalichman studies it briefly in his book mentioning the "suspicious minds":
At its very core, denialism is deeply embedded in a sense of mistrust. Most obviously, we see suspicion in denialist conspiracy theories. Most conspiracy theories grow out of suspicions about corruptions in government, industry, science, and medicine, all working together in some grand…
denialism | June 5, 2009Science has an editorial today discussing a topic near and dear to me, what medical schools should require from undergraduates before admission.
Since I was a bit non-traditional as an undergraduate premed (I was a physics major), I am happy to see that they've ignored calls to overload undergraduate education with a bunch of pre-professional courses that prevent people from being anything but biology majors.
How should preparation for medical study be assessed? Medical schools generally determine scientific readiness for admission by course requirements and scores on the MCAT, which mainly…
denialism | June 4, 2009We're starting to hear about how Obama intends to implement healthcare in this country.
President Barack Obama says he's open to requiring all Americans to buy health insurance, as long as the plan provides a "hardship waiver" to exempt poor people from having to pay.
Obama opposed such an individual mandate during his campaign, but Congress increasingly is moving to embrace the idea.
In providing the first real details on how he wants to reshape the nation's health care system, the president urged Congress on Wednesday toward a sweeping overhaul that would allow Americans to buy into a…
choofnagle | June 2, 2009I'm very proud of the Know Privacy team, a group of three students who performed a broad analysis of online privacy issues for their master's project at UC Berkeley's School of Information. The study is featured today on the New York Times Bits blog. Several findings are notable:
They found: "From our analysis, it is apparent that Google is the dominant player in the tracking market. Among the top 100 websites this project focused on, Google Analytics appeared on 81 of them. When combined with the other trackers it operates, such as DoubleClick, Google can track 92 of the top 100 websites.…
denialism | June 1, 2009PZ brings to my attention this article in Newsweek which sums up Oprah's views on health, and one sadly must come to the conclusion that Oprah is a crank. Based on our definition of crankery, one of the critical aspects is the incompetence of an individual in judging sources of information. How else can you describe her dismissal of legitimate medical opinion for the pseudoscience of celebrities like Suzanne Somers or Jenny McCarthy?
That was apparently good enough for Oprah. "Many people write Suzanne off as a quackadoo," she said. "But she just might be a pioneer." Oprah acknowledged that…
denialism | June 1, 2009The onion, as always, nails it:
Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
I...I think it's finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I'm right, all we have to do now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and--oh, no! For the love of God, no! It's thoughtfully mulling things over!
Run! Run! It's making reasonable, fact-based arguments!
Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem rejoinders--ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue at hand! Question its character and keep moving…
denialism | May 29, 2009
Three systems widely cited as examples of universal health care are the so-called single-payer systems in the UK, Canada and New Zealand.
These systems I would describe as "socialized", and rely for the most part on taxation for funding. The system in Canada for instance, uses taxes to pay for health care administered by the individual provinces, and provided by a mixture of private and public hospitals and health care providers. Private health care is restricted in Canada, but is available in some provinces under publicly-funded private organizations called P3s. Private health…
denialism | May 28, 2009The question has come up again and again in our discussions on health care in the US and around the world, why does it cost so much more in the US when we get so much less?
The drug companies and their lobbyists are already out in force trying to make sure their pocketbooks aren't hit by the inevitable reforms that are coming. In particular they insist drugs aren't the problem in the US, it's administrative costs! I would tend to disagree.
Based upon my experience working in the sytem, the main causes of excess costs I would hypothesize are the following (in order of importance):
An…
denialism | May 28, 2009
Here it comes. How dare I suggest the US could learn anything from France? By most assessments France provides the best health care in the world, with excellent life expectancy, low rates of health-care amenable disease, and again, despite providing excellent universal care, they spend less per capita than the US. Using about 10.7% of GDP and about 2000USD less per capita than the US they are providing the best health care in the world. To top it off, France's system isn't even socialized. That's right. It's yet another system that is a mixture of public and private funding that, if…
denialism | May 27, 2009
What better argument for universal health care can you make than that of Germany? By far one of the most successful systems, it has had some form of universal health care for almost 130 years, and is currently one of the most successful health care systems in the world. It is again, a mixture of public and private funding, with employers providing most of the funding for health care by paying into one of several hundred "sickness funds" that provide health care funding to their employees. Germany is widely regarded as having excellent access, short wait times, care with the best…
denialism | May 26, 2009Seth Kalichman is a better man than I. Kalichman is a clinical psychologist, editor of the journal Aids and Behavior and director of the Southeast HIV/AIDS Research and Evaluation (SHARE) product, and he has devoted his life to the treatment and prevention of HIV. Despite a clear passion for reducing the harm done by HIV/AIDS, to research this book he actually met, and interviewed, prominent HIV/AIDS denialists. I confess I simply lack the temperament to have done this. To this day, when I read about HIV/AIDS denialists, and the the 330,000 people who have died as a result of HIV/AIDS…
denialism | May 26, 2009
The Dutch really have it together on health care, they have a system that has been proposed as a model for the US to emulate. In stark contrast to many other European systems, it's actually based entirely on private insurers, rather than a single-payer or entirely national system. Yet the Dutch system is universal, has far superior rates of satisfaction with quality of care and access, and still costs a fraction of what we pay for health care per capita in the US. How is this possible?
You can read the Wikipedia entry on the Dutch system or read about it on their Ministry of Health's…