Bob Hayes Online

Many conservatives are innately suspicious of any body wielding worldwide authority. (US military hyperpower is theoretically equally suspect, but since other countries COULD balance us, they just choose not to spend the money, it isn’t such a big deal.)

The problem with worldwide authority is that it loses the constraint of people being able to opt out. If the US becomes a Mormon theocracy, you can move to Mexico. If California goes communist, my in-laws can come to Colorado. If Modesto goes Nazi, they can go to Stockton. When power is local, people can opt out of that power, and that very fact tends to curb abuse of authority - the Temple Police will continue to be powerless outside of Salt Lake City, California can’t afford to go Communist because all the taxpayers will move, and Modesto is too busy creating photogenic sex crimes so they can get on the news to bother with the goosestepping and the bookburning mmmGLAVin.

Whereas if the UN has real power, and chooses to abuse it - where you gonna go? Mars is too cold. That’s one major reason why we hate the UN. The fact that it is a haven for thugs and kleptocrats and has committed more evil than good in its history is relevant, but not the key issue.

Liberals often think of the UN as representing the peoples of the world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t - it represents the GOVERNMENTS of the world. And most governments, most of the time, suck. It’s frankly amazing that the UN hasn’t sucked more.

A couple weeks ago, 3rd of 3 developed a high fever. Stoic dad wanted to let her gut it out on the couch, and save a few hundred dollars. Soppy mom insisted that she go to the ER (it was 9 PM). Guess who won that one.

The ER said she was coming down with a virus, beat them what it was because she didn’t have any other symptoms. They gave her Tylenol to get the fever down and recommended advanced medical treatments like keeping her comfortable and giving her plenty to drink. I brought her home a couple of hours later, having successfully shielded her from comprehending why the streetwalker in the next room was slurring her speech and talking about it hurting to pee.

A few days ago, we get the bill from the ER doctor. (I don’t know why, but this hospital separates the bills out, one for the ER itself, one for the doctor you end up seeing.) It was $204 - more than I want to pay, but in line with historical experience. I waited for the ER bill, which in the past has been around $100.

Today we get the ER bill. $1540. But, because the hospital loves us and wants to work with our financial situation, if we pay them by the 19th of March they’ll take 40% off, leaving it around 900 something. Cue my head exploding, wife quietly freaking, chaos reigning supreme.

So I get on the phone with the nice, calm lady at Centura who, I suspect, gets about fifty of these “wtf?” calls a day. She says the $1500 is for the ER service, is not a mistake, and that she can’t give me an itemized bill over the phone because of privacy regulations. But she can send me one - it will take a mere two business weeks to arrive. In the meantime, they want their money.

(Which, yeah. That’s going to happen. I wouldn’t pay $1500 for a whole child, let alone one ER visit. I won’t pay $1.50 to someone who hasn’t yet billed me.)

So a few questions for the hive mind.

1) Has something happened in the year since she last went to the ER, that the customary walk-through-the-door charge has increased fifteen-fold?

2) What’s my legal recourse here? In my surly 20-something days, I would have laughed and tell them to f*** off, and good luck collecting. (And the next time I visit the ER, it will be as Raoul Rodriguez, and try to prove different.) But these days I’m trying to buy a house, and trying to make all the red lines on the credit report read yellow or green instead.

3) Anybody got $1500 lying around they don’t need? (Oh, well, $950 if you can get it to me by 3/19.)

4) How is it possible for a commercial enterprise to legally demand money from people without presenting an itemized bill? (Technically, it’s not a demand. It’s an OFFER. That seems like thin cheese; if I were a judge in petty court I’d throw it out post-haste.)

5) WTF? I mean, what the F-ing F?

Colorado blogger Major Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq yesterday. A testimonial, his final words (left in the event of his death), and a moving memorial/comments thread at Obsidian Wings. His last post for the Rocky Mountain News is here.

RIP Major Olmsted.

(H/T Resurrection Song.)

Dan Fogelberg has died of prostate cancer at the age of 56.

It’s been many years since I listened to Dan’s music, but there was a time in my life when I enjoyed it very much. (I never stopped liking it, but he had such a long dry period that I just stopped.) He will be missed.

Get screened, kids.

Coding Sanity bites the bullet and upgrades from buggy, slow Vista to the high-performance reliability of Windows XP. Snicker.

My own Vista experiences have been relatively painless, at least personally, for the very good reason that I didn’t install it on any of the machines that I actually use. My long-suffering assistant has a laptop with Vista pre-installed; it’s a buggy, slow, piece of crap. It sucks to be her, and not just because she has to work for me. (I’ve got a desktop with XP for her, but we’re still working on getting it hooked up to the Internet so she can use a real computer again.)

So why DID Microsoft drop billions in R&D and untold billions in direct programming costs to shoot themselves in the foot? I don’t know, but I can guess: it’s the same reason that schools of education are still trying to find new ways of performing basic pedagogy 2500 years after the principles were first, and adequately, laid out. It’s boring to do things the same old way. It’s boring to say to people “this is our OS core, and it will remain stable into the indefinite future, and other than bug fixes and new device drivers, we will leave the kernel untouched.”

Programmers love to re-invent the wheel. Re-inventing the wheel is fun, satisfying, and achievable - and this time, we’ll do it properly with our new wheel flange code… Microsoft has a lot of programmers to keep happy and maybe throwing umpteen thousand person-years of programming time at reworking something that was working perfectly well is the best way for them to do that.

I just wish the rest of us didn’t have to use the resulting crap code.

Terry Pratchett, probably my favorite author, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He is optimistic and positive, and asks that his fans be the same - so other than to wish him the very best and to pray for his recovery, I will say no more.