Derek's Rantings and Ravings 2.0

Obama was recently quoted, in a CNN story, as saying:

“That’s why I’ve said we’ve got to have health reform this year — to drive down costs and make health care affordable for American families, businesses and for our government,” said Obama.

If your goal is to “lower the costs for families, businesses and government”, en toto, then you are destined for failure.
Let’s say it costs $500 for an operation, and 1,000,000 people a year get it. That’s $500,000,000 a year in costs for that operation. Let’s assume for round numbers that the population of the US is 10,000,000 (this is not right, but we’ll use it as an example).
Now, in a pure-capitalist society, those 1,000,000 people all pay $500. The rest of the country pays nothing.
In a pure-socialist society, those 1,000,000 patients all pay nothing. The government pays $500,000,000 to the medical providers, and charges everyone in the country taxes totalling $50 per person. Actually more than that, probably about $100 per person, because the government infrastructure for billing, processing, collecting, and then paying out to programs all has to be accounted for.
But at the end of the day, the “total cost to the American people” hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s only gone up (from $500,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 because of government overhead).
So if you want MORE expensive healthcare for the country, … yeah, you should definitely sign up for Obama’s plan….

A recent Huffington Post article had the headline:

Nearly 3 In 10 Say Fox News Too Tough On Obama

This just in:

Over 70% Say Fox News NOT Being Too Tough On Obama

I’m not a Fox News fan by any stretch, but with numbers like that, HuffPost shouldn’t have tried to spin it at all. They should’ve just shut their mouths and let the numbers slide, rather than making more readily available the statistics that a vast-majority of people think Fox News is A-OK when it comes to its Obama coverage.

Sometimes, I need pain to remind myself of what I already know. So, as previously mentioned, 0U PDUs suck. From all vendors, in all cabinets, in all power configurations, they all suck.

Um, yeah, if you haven’t actually watched the finale for BSG, crawl out of your cave and go watch it now….
Last night, I had some friends over (Mark, who doesn’t have a blog with an entry dated within two years of today, and Damion) to watch the series finale. We had some snacks (including an awesome cake), and D played a perfect hostess, allowing us to keep our geek on without having to worry too much about racing out into the kitchen for drink refills.
Overall, I though it was good – a fitting end to the series. I had to lower Damion’s expectations early (telling him I’d read an interview with Ron Moore that the whole “Daniel” thing was a throwaway line he used which suddenly sprang into an Internet-fueled life of its own, so that he shouldn’t expect any great Daniel-related revelations). About the only complaints I had were:

• I wish we knew for certain what the frak was up with “New Kara”, and what she was
• I’m not a HUGE fan of “Head Six” and Head Gaius” having such a central role in guiding humanity’s fate
• Most importantly, I understand the reasons for the capstone ending, to show that definitively “this is our earth”, but I think I would have been happy with the original ending (which was clearly the helicopter shot of the Old Man talking to Roslin’s grave). Something just struck me as “off” about the ending….

I guess it’s interesting that “god”, or who/whatever, was basically explicitly communicating with Gaius over all those years when he questioned his own sanity.
The high points?

• Old-School Cylons are way more bad-ass than the flimsy modern ones. When they were assaulting the Big G, one or two shots would take down a modern unit, but the old ones…. man they just kept shrugging that shit off.
• There was just a great shot of a red-stripe holding an old-school Cylon in its hand and executing it, during the assault, that made all three of us spontaneously crack up
• A nice touching callback to Stu Phillips’ original score from 1978, made during the journey of the (mostly) unmanned fleet ships into the Sun.
• I love how Galen simply doesn’t care about the future of humanity, or the Cylons. He discovered the bitch who blew his wife out an airlock, and he’s going to snap her neck right then and there, be-damned the consequences… it was totally in-character. I’d actually forgotten about that whole plot line when they mentioned the “knowing everything about one another” aspect of the data-dump… it wasn’t until Tory kept hounding them about “forgiveness for secret sins past” that I was like “oh yeah, she’s so dead… will it be before or after the data-dump is done?”

It’ll be interesting to see “The Plan” when it comes out…. but I’m not sure about “Caprica”… I’ll certainly give it a watch, but it just doesn’t seem to be as “gripping” as BSG was. Part of me wishes “The Plan” had come out already, and that “Caprica” had not been greenlit. Just end it here, without milking the franchise to the point of pain (something BSG-showrunner Ron Moore has constantly complained about when it comes to the Trek franchise).
I do know it’ll be really tough for another show to fill the void BSG has left in my television viewing habits…