Jeff’s posterous

No Legislation without Participation

Patrick Lencioni has a great article over at The Simple Wisdom Project on the problems that come from the fact that members of congress often do not have to live with the consequences of the laws they pass. Universal health care is the latest example.

Here’s a great quote:

As it stands today, Congress is considering legislation that would substantially change the way health care in America is paid for and delivered. And regardless of how one feels about that, one thing is certain: members of Congress won’t have to participate in it. The bill expressly states that they are exempt, and as we know, they have a much better, richer plan.

Regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman, a liberal or a conservative, a teenager or a senior citizen, this just doesn’t make any sense. It gives one the impression that politicians are masters of the people rather than public servants, and that they see themselves as being more important than the people they are supposed to represent. Otherwise, why would they choose to exempt themselves but not firefighters or teachers or police officers or doctors?

Related posts:

• The Difference Between Negative Rights and Positive Rights
• Most Change Comes from People, Not Politicians
• Patrick Lencioni on the Two Core Problems with Socialism

Five Freedoms We’d Lose Under Obama’s Health Care Plan

A good article from CNN Money.

(HT: JT)

Related posts:

• Cost Versus Efficiency in Health Care
• Cato Institute to Obama: “Mr. President, We Disagree”
• Obama: The Economy Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better

The Lost Art of Reading

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

. . . What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age. [bold emphasis mine]

HT: First Thoughts

Captain Steve Answers Your Airline Questions

Feds At DefCon Alarmed After RFIDs Scanned

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What would you do with 20mm accuracy GPS?

I hadn't even heard of this project but it's already well underway with coverage to 1m accuracy across the entire state, and coverage to +/-20mm accuracy across a significant part of that including the entire Melbourne metro area and well beyond.

What they've done is install a bunch of base stations at extremely accurately known positions, each of which reads the location being fed to it via the regular GPS network and figures out how much that varies from its actual known position. It that "publishes" that correction data to make it available to compatible GPS receivers in the area, which then apply the same offset to the position they get from the regular GPS network to correct for local inaccuracies. The result is being able to track your position down to +/-20mm!

Very, very cool stuff.

Of course this is the same technology that's been available on things like self-driving tractors for years, where a local fixed reference point feeds correctional data to the tractor's autopilot to let it drive around a field all by itself with amazing accuracy. But it's previously been deployed as a point-solution, not just blanketed across the entire state in a frenzy of inspired brilliance.

This is the sort of technology that can change so many different things that it's hard to know what to begin with. Self-driving trucks etc is the obvious one, but think about what happens when this tech shrinks from its current $1,500 price tag to being something that's just a part of every phone. Then think beyond that: if GPS with 20mm accuracy could be produced at a low enough cost (I'm talking a few dollars here, a long way from the current reality!) it could be put into pretty much anything that you don't want to lose. Having something located to within 5 or 10 meters like with regular GPS is all fine and well, but it's really only to the point of telling you what room something is in, not whether it's on the left hand side of the third shelf in the kitchen, pushed to the back.

So I want ideas, people! What would you do with cheap, ubiquitous positioning technology with +/-20mm accuracy? Let me know!

There's more information on the DSE's "GPSnet" project at www.land.vic.gov.au/gpsnet

Major New Function Discovered For the Spleen

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Office on the Forest's Edge [Featured Workspace]

The only thing today's featured office shares with your average office is the fact that it has a roof and a floor. Beyond that it's quite a different space than most of us spend our days in.

Lifehacker reader Peter Frazier has the kind of home office and accompanying views that fill the daydreams of cubicle dwellers across the land. His office is glass on three sides with a cantilevered deck that looks over the densely forested shores of Chuckanut Bay. Peter describes his motivation for using the space as he does:

Like many in the computer industry, I graduated from college thin and fit, but since then, through years of all-nighters, sitting in front of my screen for long hours, and a rich diet I became overweight. I went from 190 to 242 pounds as I grew into each role: graphic designer, user interface designer, customer experience researcher, businessperson, husband, father, and community member. Last Fall I said, "Enough already!"

Recently I decided that working standing up would help me live a more active life. It's worked. Along with meditating, running, hiking, and kayaking, working standing up (with hourly interludes of pushups, situps or yoga) I've dropped 30 pounds. My thinking is clearer for longer and you're more likely to find me with things in perspective.

I'm fortunate enough to work at home above Chuckanut Bay in Bellingham, Washington.

This stand up desk is a piece of cedar with its live edge intact. On it I have room for a Dell 24" monitor as well as my MacBook Pro, and my good old Monsoon sound system. The hard drive holds the documentary I am working on called "Stumblebum".

Check out the photos below to see his office from different angles and make sure to visit the link below to his Flickr gallery for additional notes on each image.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

Apple Kills Google Voice Apps On the iPhone

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AT&T’s Special Treatment of the iPhone

Om Malik on the Google Voice/App Store situation:

Some allege that Apple is doing this at AT&T’s behest. That is just flat-out wrong: If it were true, then Google Voice would be banned on BlackBerry devices that use AT&T as well. As of this morning, everything is working fine on my AT&T-connected Bold (except for the usual dropped calls, of course). And are people forgetting that you need AT&T’s voice network to send and receive Google Voice calls?

Leaving aside my information from an informed source that it was indeed AT&T that got Google Voice pulled from the App Store, Malik’s reasoning does make sense.

But, trust me, it was AT&T’s decision. And this is not the first time AT&T has treated the iPhone differently than other phones they carry. Remember the SlingPlayer app? At AT&T’s behest, the iPhone version was restricted to Wi-Fi, despite the fact that the BlackBerry version works over 3G.

The big difference, of course, is that there is no single BlackBerry store.