Mon - December 27, 2004ROITGroup Library IHere's one for my side of the household
entrepreneurial ventures, Microsoft
SharePoint: Building Office 2003 Solutions. As usual, there'll
eventually be a review forthcoming but I got a chance to take a peek at it and
it's looking pretty good.
Posted at 04:32 PM Maria Medical Purchases IVThis one is another book for handling patients.
This time it's Managing
Patient Expectations: The Art of Finding and Keeping Loyal Patients .
As before, a review will come in later.
Posted at 12:26 AM Maria Medical Purchases IIIHere's another MM purchase, the Field
Guide to the Difficult Patient Interview , another page turner on the
road to having a successful medical practice.
Posted at 12:24 AM Sat - December 25, 2004Maria Medical Purchases IINo newly minted US medical practice is complete
without a book on Preventing
Medical Malpractice Suits. We're starting with this one. I think that
people underestimate drastically how much malpractice premium pressure
psychologically pushes doctors into new behaviors. It's not a pretty sight and
very bad for the country.
Posted at 10:28 PM Maria Medical Purchases IQuickbooks is probably one of the most
recommended pieces of small and medium sized business accounting packages. As
Maria Medical will be Mac based, We'll be getting
the Mac 2005 version. This article will be updated with a review as we
get to know it a bit better. The hope will be that we're going to be able to
script this application to provide a greater than normal set of integration with
the billing software and EMR system.
Posted at 09:26 PM Sat - November 27, 2004How to Understand AmericaThe US is a democratic republic based upon two
parties and five political traditions. The traditions endure far better than the
parties and move between the parties, influencing their political platforms. If
you do not understand what are the five political traditions and only take in
information from one or a few of them, the US will always surprise. For those
who are unfamiliar with them, the five traditions are Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian,
Madisonian, Wilsonian, and
Jacksonian.
The US is a revolutionary country whose revolutionaries were essentially conservative. This fact of history is especially important today. When challenged, the conservative strain in any country goes back to the founding principles of the nation. For the US, such challenges turn conservatives into a very unusual sort of radical. This unusual political circumstance is generally a footnote in American history. Existential challenges are rare and has happened only twice in the US' history, in the formation of the Republican party and its ascent to power under Lincoln and today in George W Bush's administration with it's War on Terrorism. Mass media in the US is configured in a very unusual way. Following a decades long period (starting in the 1930s) of center-left dominance, traditional media was predominantly center-left. This led to the center-right having their story told largely by hostile voices, a situation which led the center-right to create it's own counter-institutions in new media outlets of newsmagazines and journals of opinion as well as in dying media backwaters such as AM radio. The international visibility of center-left dominated media is muchfrom news sources who maintain their own cordon sanitaire and do not read, listen, or react to the alternative media structures of the US center-right, you will be laughably misinformed, even dangerously uninformed, though you do your part and consume your national news media voraciously. Far too many foreigners seem dangerously uninformed about american realities. If you woke up and neither you, nor anybody you knew, could explain why George W Bush was reelected, it's a strong warning sign. If everybody was depressed over how such a bad man could have possibly been elected, this is a dangerous warning sign that you and your set have not gotten enough information to even come close to predicting the US. It's not a problem of you disagreeing with the US electorate. Diversity is the spice of life. It is that those whose opinions were different were invisible to you and when they made their force felt at the ballot box, you were shocked by their very existence. Your news media had an absolute duty to explain these people to you and they failed to do so. That failure is just one data point in a very busy graph. Pay attention to photographs. They are gold mines into the editorial slant of a news outlet. If you consistently see unflattering photos of one side of a debate, be aware that this is an attempt at subliminal manipulation to influence you into dismissing their arguments without thought. Most of the time there are complimentary and embarrassing photographs available for both sides of any debate. Posted at 10:50 AM Read More Thu - August 26, 2004Sat - November 1, 2003into dismissing their arguments without thought. Most of the time there are complimentary and embarrassing photographs available for both sides of any debate.Posted at 10:50 AM Read More Thu - August 26, 2004Sat - November 1, 2003Taming FactionFaction is the great downfall of ancient
Republics. Factional strife was rampant in all accounts of the old republics and
brought down a great deal of them through internal weakening. Republics were all
small experiments and they all seemed to fail, and fail again. A large territory
such as the US seemed destined to need a strong hand to guide it either through
hereditary monarchy or some other method of choosing a strongman.
But the US has no strongman and really never has. The solution adopted to tame the problem of faction was ingenious. Instead of trying to ban them, circumscribe them, or suppress them, they are encouraged beyond belief in the United States. In fact, everybody belongs to multiple factions simultaneously. There are factions by race, social class, geographic area (some really small), ideology, political unit (of which there are many that are overlaid on top of each other), religion, economic standing, as well as by several other criteria, both mundane and bizarre. The effect of this multiplicity of faction is that there is since everybody belongs to many of them, they are all minorities, all losers in the political game simultaneous to the fact that they are usually winners as well to some extent. Your party might have won a majority but your religion may be unhappy about some policy that your party favors. So are you happy or angry with the current government? Very often, the answer is both. Thus, when it comes to minority rights, the people of the US have a remarkable perspective. Since virtually everybody has the experience of being both a winner and a loser, in the majority and the minority, often at the same time, safeguarding minority rights is the same as safeguarding your own personal rights. There is no permanent majority so the arrogance that tends to accumulate in the majority is much less present. Posted at 04:38 PM Fri - October 17, 2003Network Demarcation PointsCable TV has the same sort of demarc system. You
may need to pay for additional TVs but if you cut the inside wiring and add a
splitter, you're not altering the cable company's wiring. You're altering your
own.
In the case of the Internet, where is the demarc point? Here, there is no fixed definition in law. If you get DSL is the modem you buy from the carrier yours or the carrier's? It varies, and your rights on the internet vary right along with it. The Internet is unique in that all computers have the capacity to be both consumers of information passed on by producer computers and also be producer computers for other consumer computers. With costs quickly dropping under the pressure of Moore's law, what ends up happening is possibly the greatest haphazard capitalization of ordinary people that the world has ever seen. But being a producer means that you are a competitor, even if only a potential competitor, to a variety of fat bloated, entrenched interests. Add a permanently connected networked computer with a digital video camera, you can be a competitor to TV stations, movies studios, and movie theaters. With a SIP phone, you're a competitor to the phone company. With a MIDI interface added you're a competitor to music production studios, radio stations, concert halls, and juke box operators. The list goes on and on. Some of these markets don't know or don't care you exist (concert halls and juke box operators are examples). Some are accommodating and happy to integrate new entrants into the mix (music production studios, for example). But then there are those who know, understand, and find the potential of that many new entrants in the field deeply frightening and unacceptably threatening. These are the ones that are pushing back. And if they win, they will snatch defeat from the jaws of possibly the most world enriching innovation to come down the pike since the industrial revolution. Posted at 04:45 PM Read More Tue - October 7, 2003Red Queen Example - Capital Drain v0.0.1Let's take two countries, country A and country
Z. A is in the 1st world, Z is in the 3rd. In each of these countries let's take
two investments. In country A, project (a) generates a 5 year ROI of 10%. In Z,
project (z) generates a 5 year ROI of 18%. All things being equal project (z)
would get funded over project (a). But they are not equal. The political risk
factors of Z are much higher than A. In the current environment, the political
risk is worth 14% ROI. That makes the politically adjusted ROI of (a) and (z)
10% and 4% respectively and the money stays in 1st world A to fund project (a).
Now let's say that due to political pressure, treaty negotiations, or military
invasion on the part of A, the political climate in Z changes and the new
political risk levels are cut in half to 7% more risk for Z. That changes the
ROI levels of (a) and (z) to 10% and 11% respectively and the money goes to fund
(z), reducing capital invested in A for a few years.
So A spends money to reform Z and gets rewarded with lower capital investment, 'exported jobs' and a lot of brickbats from the 'international community'. So why do it at all? Because, in the future world where (z) doesn't get funded, somebody who would have been absorbed into (z)'s workforce gets ticked off enough to emigrate to A, grow botulinum toxin as a revenge attack, and stick it in the food supply at a meat packing plant causing a mass casualty event rivaling 9/11. Posted at 12:01 PM On Civilian CasualtiesMilitary planning has some very macabre traits.
It always has. Like any safety system, there is a point past which threats are
considered too unlikely or too far off to budget for and create a defense.
Opinions legitimately vary on this which is why the UK is much more interested
in searching for catastrophic meteor impacts than the US is. There is no right
or wrong answer on this because nobody really knows when such a thing might
happen.
Unfortunately, some of these 'far fetched' attacks happen and then people die. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on 9/11/2001 were one spectacular example of such an unlikely attack. Posted at 12:52 AM Read More Mon - October 6, 2003Is it getting too cheap to cause mass havoc?When the first atomic bomb was made, it took a
tremendous amount of technical know-how and infrastructure to build and keep a
bomb. The US, on a war footing, could not have quickly produced a 3rd atomic
bomb if the Nagasaki bomb had not ended Japanese resistance.
Today, the real nightmare is when we all can make our own WMD. We're not there yet but it will soon be within the capability of a highly motivated and large sub-national group to do it. Al Queda's efforts to do just this have been uncovered in several countries. Posted at 03:52 PM Read More Sun - October 5, 2003VersioningJust to keep track of things better, I'm going to
start adding version notes to essays. This way, people will be able to easily
tell when changes occur.
Posted at 04:37 PM Sat - October 4, 2003Red Queen Economy v0.0.4Thomas Barnett's New Rule
Sets paradigm has significant implications for the world economy.
Shrinking and eliminating the non-integrating gap nations implies that they must
end up with significant economic growth and quickly. Like everywhere else,
economic growth will take labor (which the Gap has), land (which some of the Gap
has and some doesn't), and capital (which is very scarce in the Gap). The demand
for capital will rise as the risk premium on projects in any particular Gap
country fall.
Given the pool of local capital is not likely to increase as rapidly as the Gap risk of economic activity will fall, the inescapable conclusion is that the 1st world will suffer relative capital loss for a time as all those third world pumps are being primed with capital that would have otherwise gone to 1st world projects. We enter the world laid out by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass where the Red Queen runs Alice ragged only to find nothing much changed: Alice looked round her in great surprise. `Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!' `Of course it is,' said the Queen, `what would you have it?' `Well, in OUR country,' said Alice, still panting a little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.' `A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'' In the real life world of a Red Queen economy, we produce more and more capital but find a great deal of it shifting out of country to other lands, leaving us, if not standing still, certainly progressing much slower than we might have expected under an older regime that kept capital at home. For a great many people, this will not be a happy economic situation. For those who do not earn anything from capital, their labor will constantly be devaluing. They're going to have to constantly improve in order to run in place. The short run bright side will be limited to those who are in the capital markets who will profit from those Gap capital inflows. As a country, the process is likely to help us on the national security front a great deal more than an even greater amount of foreign aid and we get the bonus of lower international graft levels and less government waste. The long run consequence of our going into a Red Queen economy is that, eventually, the pumps are primed for self-sustainable growth all over the Gap and all over the world people are living their lives to their full economic potential in a truly integrated global economic system that everybody has a stake in. When it arrives, poverty will only be relative, a failure to keep up with the neighbors. The kind of grinding, degrading poverty that robs lives and leaves talent useless for lack of opportunity will be gone from the world. That, in the end, is our best hope for avoiding catastrophe as the ability to cause mass destruction costs less and less and is available to more and smaller groups of people. Unfortunately, most people aren't currently making the connection of prosperity in the Gap leading to security in the Core. Glenn Reynolds has noted that outsourcing is likely to be an election issue but doesn't connect up to the national security issue. If Barnett is right and, more importantly, if Barnett is truly being listened to in the White House, opponents of outsourcing (a manifestation of the Red Queen economy) are likely walking into a buzz saw. Posted at 11:42 AM Read More BTUA British Thermal Unit is a precise measure of
energy. It is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1
pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit when the water is near 39.2 degrees
Fahrenheit.
Posted at 10:43 AM Read More |
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Published On: Dec 27, 2004 04:33 PM |
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