Less examined marketplaces

Business to business interactions or B2B is when businesses sell to businesses. It's a pretty common term as is Business to Consumer (B2C). Less common is G2B and G2C for Government to Business and Citizen/Consumer respectively. Sharing the terms tends to lead to sharing the same sort of paradigm thinking about the interaction. But these aren't the only combinations that are possible. Other possibilities are C2B, C2C, C2B, B2G, G2G and C2G. I started thinking about these less discussed terms when I read about a G2G experience that went horribly wrong and we ended up admitting Iraqi IED builders as refugees into the US because the fingerprint database proving they had waged war against us wasn't hooked up to the DHS systems for checking for excludable aliens.

So why do we find B2B and B2C very useful but not necessarily the other possibilities? Is it that those sorts of interactions don't happen? Hardly. C2B is also called the labor market and is huge. C2C is sometimes better known by its most famous participants, eBay and Craigslist. B2G is the traditional government contracting space.

Changing the label tends to change how you think about the interaction. Imagine if C2B interactions were thought of more like B2C. It's an interesting alternative view.

How Socialized Healthcare Systems Actually Fail

Three reports on appalling conditions in the UK's NHS should have everybody thinking second thoughts about socialized medicine. For supporters is the stark reality of how bad care can get in a 1st world country if it is socialized. For opponents the lesson is less obvious, more subtle. It is a political danger. 

Socialized systems do not fail right away. They rot out from the inside over a long period of time. It took a good long time for NHS to achieve its current state of decrepitude. A US collapse will take a good long time too, perhaps 60 years. 

But the collapse started when Medicaid and Medicare shifted incentives in medicine in the mid 1960s. We're at year 50 in the countdown but our half private/half socialized system will not fail in the same manner. The NHS got as bad as it is today with 60 years history of controlling far more of medicine in the UK than Medicare and Medicaid control in the US. 

Certain parts of the system may break very quickly. Others may take decades to be ground down to the poor care levels outlined in those three damning reports. The truly worrying bit is we don't know which bits are on their last legs, waiting for Obamacare to plow them under and which bits will survive, for now. We won't know until systems start to fail. 

comment box revolutionaries

Over at ChicagoBoyz, where I cross post, the commentariat is talking revolution. It's nonsense, of course because we are nowhere near ready. I can tell because the people are heavily armed and we aren't undergoing a spate of assassinations of our political class. This sort of talk is a warning sign, but still a pretty early one on the road to Civil War II.

But we're far enough along on the path that I worry. I worry about someone from either side doing something stupid and being too few degrees separated from the nonsense. I worry about the small but not zero chance that things change in a hurry.

We have deep wells of civic bonds but they are straining and if they ever snap, it will be worse than the Yugoslav wars.

Obamacare Scrooged

People signing up for Obamacare are being robbed by the government. This time it's not metaphorically, like when your perfectly satisfactory insurance plan is made illegal and all the compliant plans are more expensive and have worse terms but literally. People are having their accounts debited improperly during the Christmas season. And because it is being done by the government, there is little recourse to sue due to sovereign immunity and, of course, those most injured haven't the money to hire representation anyway. I think Pope Francis calls it 'despoliation of the poor'.

Double debits, wrong day debits, wrong amount debits, these are all standard hazards with any sort of Electronic Funds Transfer (ETF) system. There's nothing particularly new about these issues. It's all part of the back end errors that those dastardly Republicans have been hyperventilating about and Democrats have been pooh poohing for weeks now.

You never know when Tuttle will turn into Buttle in one of these systems. But what's in a name?

Merry Christmas Cross posted: Chicagoboyz

Uninsured Against Obamacare

Uninsured americans don't like Obamacare. Those who are uninsured and think that the law is a good idea has dropped 11 points to 24% while half think it will have a negative impact. By any reasonable metric, whether the law is a good idea, will it help or hurt the healthcare system, or whether it is of personal benefit to them, survey respondents are turning away from this law. 

Since this reform was supposed to be all about solving the problem of the uninsured, this is a damning indictment and one more layer in (as they say over at Instapundit) "the Obamacare onion of fail."

White Castle doesn't have this much in onions. 

Mike Rowe impresses me more and more

I am more and more impressed by Mike Rowe. I agree with him that there's something wrong with our tastemakers' vision of what a good job is and the consequences for todays students are large and negative.

HT: Reason Magazine

parsing technorati - part I

Task: Download all technorati politics blogs listings, import them into FM pro and parse each blog

First, figure out how many pages actually hold blogs. Not all pages in the listing will have actual blogs. In the politics set, There are 697 pages listed but the last blog is on page 691.

In terminal, create a folder and download the file using wget

wget http://www.technorati.com/blogs/directory/politics/page-{1..691}

Filemaker won't import a folder without the files having certain endings, a little bash work and that's done

for i in *; do mv "$i" "$i.txt"; done

Now off to filemaker. I create a new database and import a folder, choosing text files as the file type and tell it to create a new table. The text content of each file is loaded into the new database along with the name of the file and the location of the import. Once that's done, all that's left is to parse out the individual blogs.

But that's a tale for part II