Lingonberry juice @ IKEA

It’s been a lot of fun lately experimenting with location based applications. With awesome platforms like Foursquare and Gowalla, it’s interesting to see what location aware social services are capable of.

The technology and the ideas are new enough that there are pretty significantly different takes on what makes a great location base service, and with my initial survey of the available applications I had decided that Foursquare seemed like the best fit for what I wanted out of a location based service.

What particularly drew me to Foursquare was the idea of “tips”. The premise of digital graffiti that could provide socially useful tips for strangers seemed like a very cool way to spawn emergent social interactions. But in practice, Foursquare doesn’t do a good job delivering. The “tips” functionality seems to be a completely unstructured text without definite purpose. The “mayoral” competitions are very fun, but kind of reinforce a competitive nature that isn’t really what I’m trying to get out of emergent social media. I’m hoping for new augmented social experiences that build community, not competition.

A recent dinner with Nate Dillion opened my understanding of the Gowalla platform immensely. A recent social media conference in Lawrence, KS featured an executive of Gowalla (that is a KU graduate!). It clarified that what makes Gowalla different from Foursquare is a model that doesn’t focus on competition, but instead uses the idea of collecting stamps on a passport. Where I previously misinterpreted the stamps as a form of “virtual items” like a massively multiplayer online game (offline game?), really Gowalla focuses on documenting your real world experiences in an attractive way.

Additionally, Gowalla has been adding really great features, like “trips” (pub crawl, anyone?) and “events” and other abstract “locations” that people attend. Meanwhile, Foursquare still won’t even let me help correct/merge trashy location entries.

Add to those differences a very attractive iPad app and an API that will let my friends and I develop against Gowalla as a service… and that’s pretty much a switch.

So goodbye Foursquare friends. It’s been very fun campaigning for mayor with, er, against you. But I’m looking for friendlier experiences with superior implementations.

Gowalla, here I am.

Some quick images of the “Spaces” configuration in OSX for revenant.  He was curious how many virtual workspaces were supported.

Peanut Butter, Chocolate Torte at Bluestem Bistro

It’s not a hedge against expense, it’s a hedge against risk.  Increasing insurance coverage cannot solve for skyrocketing health care costs, and it seems like the majority of the people participating in the conversation misunderstand what insurance is and what insurance does.

Creating a simple insurance plan is trivial.  Let’s say that ten of our close family and friends decide to make an “insurance fund” to cover unexpected medical expenses.  Each of the ten people deposit $100 a month, adding a total of $1,000 each month.  Then, whenever someone has a medical emergency, they can use the entire pot to pay for the emergency.  That’s the entire basis for “insurance”.  The most important lesson of insurance is to realize that the majority of the insured must pay more than they receive in return. 

It’s worth stating again, because the <blink /> tag has gone out of style and it’s the most important lesson that anyone can learn about insurance: the majority of the insured must pay more than they receive in return.  That’s an inarguable, non-negotiable truth of the system.  You can’t spend more money than is in the pot.

Now why would anyone pay more than they receive for medical care?  And how does this protect my family against the skyrocketing costs of health care in the U.S.? The short answers are “peace of mind” and “it doesn’t”.

The reason that people are willing to overpay for medical care by buying insurance is to buy peace of mind that if the odds work out against you, your life won’t be ruined.  The idea is that only 1 in $big_number people have a medical issue that is catastrophic to their fiscal well-being, but anyone could end up being that 1.  So lots of people pay into a system that says, “you probably won’t be the one, but thanks to your payments, if you’re the one, you’re covered.”  That peace of mind is nice, it helps one sleep at night.  Lots of people are willing to overpay for medical care to have that peace of mind.

But how does that protect your family against the skyrocketing costs of health care in the U.S.?  It absolutely doesn’t!  The response to increased health care costs are increased insurance premiums!  That’s because higher health care costs do not change the odds, the risk, of becoming ill.  They only change the expense of the event when it happens.  Therefore, to cover that expense at the same risk, insurance premiums go up to match the new costs.

But, one immediately considers, insurance doesn’t just cover emergencies; health insurance is useful for a wide range of everyday practices, from preventative care to minor check ups.  Really, that’s just a side effect.  When insurance companies arranged for everyone to pay into the pot to protect themselves from the risk of catastrophe, they found that the pot was much bigger than the payouts.  While I’m sure at first it was just a big profit-party, competition soon increased and there were many insurance companies to choose from.  To lure customers in to a particular insurance pool, they offered “benefits” to membership that covered much more than just emergency care.

After considering insurance from this perspective, it should be easy to see why all of the controversial aspects of insurance are a fact of life.  People with pre-existing conditions have a difficult time getting insurance because they already lost the risk game.  They can’t contribute to the insurance pool, they will only drain it.  (And accordingly, these pre-existing condition customers can all get together in their own insurance pool, but it’s going to be very very expensive because the majority must overpay for health care for insurance to work.)  Really, people with pre-existing conditions don’t need health insurance (protection from risk), they need more money for medical bills.

The difficult thing to see, is that all of this health insurance is a big part of why health care costs are rising!  All the little benefits that insurance plans have a distorting effect on our fiscal sensibility.  That’s because we spend our money on insurance premiums, and then we spend other people’s money on the actual health care.  And, of course, we’re all much less frugal and intelligent with spending other people’s money.  It ruins the elasticity of demand for medical care, it encourages unnecessary medical spending, and it increases the health care costs across the board.

So whenever you hear someone say, “Everyone needs health insurance because health care is so expensive these days,” little alarm bells should go off in your head, because you know that insurance can’t help with high costs and that health insurance requires the majority to overpay for health care.  ”Everyone needs health insurance because health care is so expensive these days,” makes as much sense as, “Health care is so expensive these days that everyone should pay extra to make sure they don’t have to pay less.”

This entire focus on health insurance is a sham.  It’s a trick to capture the political capital of Americans that don’t understand insurance.  Whether you’re a liberal or a conservative or any other persuasion, you shouldn’t be allowing “insurance” to be the focus of the debate.  Our health care costs are too high.  Insurance cannot bring down costs (and in fact, makes them worse).  Anyone that has a plan for you to consider to improve the state of health care in our nation should be addressing health care costs, not health care insurance.  Public or private, universal medical insurance is not the answer.

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard is certainly worth watching.  It’s entertaining, well produced, and brings up a number of important point worth starting a conversation over with your friends and family.

However, the video is not without it’s downsides.  It’s packed with politically loaded, factually incorrect statements.  For every statement about human welfare and market manipulation that had me nodding my head, another naive or ignorant statement made me wince.  (For instance, in a segment about planned obsolescence, she stupidly describes the CPU as the only part of a computer that improves each year, ignoring all of the other components in the system that improve each year as well.  That’s uneducated misinformation of the same exact kind she rails against from corporations.)

But, on the whole, I think that the video is valuable.  Misinformation aside, it’s certainly true that the materials economy is amok and worth scrutiny.

A comedy edit of the skateboarding footage taken when my brothers came to visit.

During the short session, I mostly focused my first-time camera work on capturing tricks (and trick attempts) by Michael. However, “Matt Matt”—who can also skateboard—always seemed to find a way into the frame. Lindsay and I thought this was entertaining, and so I put together this highlight reel.

The still at the end shows (left to right) myself, my wife Lindsay, Matt, and Michael after the session. Mom took this photo just before they left.

Longer cut of footage taken during a skateboarding session at Cico Park with my little brother Michael Landrum.  This edit contains pretty much the entire session.

First cut of some footage taken during a skateboarding session at Cico Park with my little brother Michael Landrum.  This quick edit shows off the tricks that Michael hit during the session.