TDDPirate’s Ideas

In the past, there was a limit to the expenses, which could be incurred by medical treatment of people needing medical attention. Usually the requisite know-how ran out before money. In other words, people died when their physicians no longer knew what to do.

Nowadays, there are more and more cases, in which the constraint is monetary rather than know-how. In other words, there are more and more cases, in which patients die not because physicians do not know how to treat them, but because money is not available to pay for known treatments.

Another factor, which did not exist in the past, is the ability of technology to keep the bodies of brain-dead people alive, by means of intravenous feeding and heart-lung machines. Such a treatment, of course, costs a lot of money, and could last for several years.

This change leads to an ethical dilemma, which did not exist in the past.

In the past, families could commit to treating a sick family member at any expense, and have reasonable expectation that he’ll either get well or die before the entire family is driven into abject poverty.

Nowadays, families are more and more confronted with the dilemma when to stop financing treatment of a sick family member. The sick family member could be elderly, needing care due to an age-related malaise. Or he could be a young child with congenital deformity or childhood cancer.

Another aspect of the dilemma is how to allocate financial means among family members, usually elderly, who need to be taken care of - and other family members, usually young, who need money for tuition, downpayment on dwelling place, and other expenses which will help get them ahead in their lives.

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007
Some of the stories are startling. For example:
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

The information is slanted against Israel - see:
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
On the other hand, the story of Palestinian terror acts, before the Wall’s construction was started, is not widely known outside of Israel and is not in the list.

Economists and politicians routinely argue in favor of basing social assistance programs upon relative poverty lines. Such programs have the effect of favoring equalization of income in a country, rather than emphasizing the idea of a safety net for that country’s residents.

Paul Graham has an interesting paragraph in his Mind the Gap article:
If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I’d take the first option. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to. It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If, as the evidence so far implies, you have to have one or the other in your society, take relative poverty.

In light of this observation, it can be seen that each day, several people from 3^rd world countries vote by their feet in favor of absolute poverty lines. They do so by immigrating to more affluent countries. They do so even if they are illegal immigrants. They do so even if they end up being in one of the lowest socioeconomic classes in the affluent country of their choice. They do so because they believe that they and their families would be better off being illegal immigrants in an affluent country rather than be legal and sometimes relatively prosperous in their country of origin.

The most interesting observation for me is that economists and politicians discuss feelings of resentment and discrimination among people who find themselves below relative poverty lines, while ignoring that those people probably value more adequate schooling and medical care for their children, which are better for the poor in affluent countries than for the middle class in 3^rd world countries.

One more observation is that humans can be divided into immigrant types and non-immigrant types. The above discussion applies to immigrant types i.e. people who are willing to take a risk, immigrate to an unknown country, try to survive there without the familiar faces and patterns of life - with hope of doing better. Non-immigrant types value more stability and security, and are willing to forego opportunities in favor of this. It is possible that non-immigrants (who are usually the majority in countries without significant percentage of immigrants among their residents) are the ones who favor relative poverty lines.

Instead of using statistics of people who registered as job seekers and/or getting unemployment benefits to measure the real unemployment rate, I suggest that supermarkets and grocery shops honor coupons for giving discounts on foods and other basic needs.

According to Eric.Weblog() and Joel on Software, coupons are an effective way to segment the market into people who are well-paid and people who are poorly-paid. Those who are well-paid do not bother with coupons, and those who bother with coupons to save some money are the ones who are not well-paid and/or have too much free time on their hands.

Thus, a well-oiled socialist government should keep tabs on the rate of coupon usage and use it to switch on or off its socialist policies.

In response to the news about the anticipated $1BN tax windfall from the Iscar Metalworking Co. 80% interest sale to Buffett deal, today’s Yediot Aharonot publicized an article listing 12 ideas what to do with the $1BN.

ALL THOSE IDEAS are about spending the money in one year.

Where are the suggestions to use the money to reduce taxes and/or the national debt in various combinations?

Personally I favor the idea of using all of this windfall money to pay off government debts. This way we’ll benefit from it also in future years, by having to reserve smaller part of the yearly budget to debt payoffs (interest and capital).

It has been noticed again and again that small enterprises have agility advantages, which big and established corporations lost as they grew to their present size. Everyone realizes the advantages of small size, but seems to be unable to bring those advantages into a big corporation.

Maybe the following insight can resolve the dilemma.

Let’s consider the examples of building a small house vs. that of building a giant shopping mall.

The project of building a small house is easily-managed. There are few stakeholders to be consulted about designing the house. If plans need to be changed midway, they can easily be changed (of course, assuming that there is budget and the ROI figures are good enough).

On the other hand, when building a giant shopping mall, which involves also rerouting of roads around it, there are several stakeholders. The Electric Company needs to be involved with supplying electricity to the mall, and with re-routing electrical wires around it. Water and sewage systems need to have adequate capacity. Proper mix of shop sizes needs to be determined. Big construction loans need to be negotiated. Firefighting provisions are mandatory. You get the picture.

In the same way, small companies are agile, because they do not have a big network of external stakeholders, who need to be considered when changing corporate policies. On the other hand, if a big corporation wishes to make a small change in its policies, it is liable to find that several of the external stakeholders have an interest in the status quo, and will be damaged by the change.

My conclusion is that a big company may be able to regain the agility of a small business if it can reorganize itself to implement a business version of the Law of Demeter. Each decisionmaker and policy formulator should confine his interactions and influence to his immediate neighbors. Any policy changes should have an effect only on a small number of stakeholders. A stakeholder should be able to buffer another stakeholder, which interacts with it, from changes made by other interacting stakeholders.

If this policy is adopted, then stakeholders can be agile.

This runs against the empire building tendency of top level executives.

This article in the Right To Create blog likens broken patent systems (and I’ll add that by extension - also broken copyright legislation) to broken windows (the fallacy of economic benefit caused by a small boy who throws a stone through the shopkeeper’s window, causing money to be spent by the keeper to pay a glazier to replace the window).

Thomas Frey predicts the collapse of the Income Tax system in USA.

Few weeks ago I was in the offices of the Israeli organization of small businesses (by the way, simply-smart.com, their Web site designers, royally botched their job - at least as far as the Web site viewability under Mozilla 1.7.8 at the moment of writing this blog entry is concerned; 2.5 second long surfing session using this browser version would have showed them that the current Web site design is totally broken) to see an exhibition of art by people with disabilities. At this opportunity, I saw on a table a report about the woes of the business licensing system in use in Israel.

It seems that like the American Income Tax system, the Israeli business licensing system is being abused by using it to accomplish additional politically-desirable ends besides ensuring the safety, health and honesty of the business.

The Bureaucrat in Your Shower discusses regulation of maximum water flow rate in showers taken by USA residents.

I agree that it would be better to charge higher prices and make water desalination economically viable. Or at least require attachment of water consumption meters to shower heads, so that people can see exactly how much water they are consuming. Water consumption meters together with existing technology would at least allow people to enjoy brief and intense showers while conserving water in the large.

In Dharamsala, Dalai Lama’s home in exile, they managed to install a solar-powered wireless mesh at low budget.
Network Watch article
Tibetan Technology Center blog