Mother in hospital

Boy this daily blogging thing just got tough. I don't deal with hospitalized relatives very well. Either I'm off the daily regime or the waiting is going to drive me so crazy that I'll actually develop a major posting buffer.

We'll see.

For those who care, unexplained high blood pressure landed my mom in the hospital last night. They've got it down from OMG to ridiculously high but haven't gotten it down to anything reasonable and they don't know why it's high.

Citizen Intelligence use case: the temporarily motivated

It has happened to us all, we read, listen to, or watch something that strikes a chord. We are outraged, motivated, energized, but only for a short time. We move on to the next story on the page, or the next item in the host's stack of topics to go through and urgency and motivation disappear. One energizing moment follows another and only a very few of these moments result in action. That time between motivation and its replacement by some different motivating force is the window that modern idea wordsmiths have to create and effect a call to action.

But what if at the bottom of the article were a button saying 'monitor' and with a simple button press, alerts would be set and a widget would be loaded into your personal government oversight dashboard? What was a few minutes of concern turns into a persistent effort and the creation of a community of people interested and willing to take action.

This is the sort of science fiction result I'd like to see coming out of Citizen Intelligence. A lot of pieces need to be built up before that happy use case becomes available in real life.

1. People are going to need to develop and adopt personal dashboards for government oversight
2. Authors are going to need to sign on to a dashboard plug-in feature.
3. News and commentary outlets are going to need to make this available through their outlets much like they use Facebook and Disqus to handle comments today.
4. Standards for doing all of this are going to need to emerge, at least in a de-facto sort of way.

Ultimately, anybody can do this but nobody is doing this and the imbalance in oversight tools vs tools the elite uses to work their wills on the body politic is tearing the advanced world apart.

What I learned from my daughter today

Apparently it is possible to make lipstick from crayon.

Who says women aren't interested in science? She had a blast, got it right in two rounds of experimentation, and impressed me with her initiative.

Embedded Infrastructure Assumptions

Every single major piece of infrastructure that you depend on today has a number of embedded assumptions. We assume population will be at a certain level, or will rise or even fall over the course of the lifetime of a project. Within a certain range of figures, the project makes sense. Go outside that range and the project turns into a bad deal. But how would we know it?

Routinely we make big ticket bets far beyond our ability to realistically project the future. We assume certain items which vary over long periods of time are constants. We can't help it.

This is bad enough when we know that we are doing it but very often we don't know that we're doing it. A century ago the US bet that the population will grow enough and be rich enough that we'll be able to replace our water pipes. We're falling billions short and living on borrowed time with pipes that have long exceeded their design lifetime. We're still using wooden pipes to supply water in some areas but until they break it's an unknown vulnerability. Year after year other projects that were more visible beat out the meat and potatoes issue of replacing leaking pipes.

Because we don't routinely track assumptions of population, income, taxation, debt loads, among others for each infrastructure project, it's not immediately obvious what projects are in trouble when a municipality starts shrinking, and when things are likely to start visibly going downhill. So long as we don't visibly track this sort of thing in a way that is widely distributed, it will be an easy call for politicians to stretch out painting a bridge here, replacing a pipe or a wire there. So long as it's only done occasionally and then made up, maintenance delay is recoverable. But stretch out the delays for decades and lives are put at risk.

Why don't we have dashboards for public affairs?

Ultimately even the big political junkies like me would love to have a dashboard that allowed a quick review of all the things that government is supposed to do so we can pick out what is working well and what is working badly. It might be based on any number of graphic signals. Traffic lights, an analog dial meter, a color spectrum, thumbs up or down, a lot of different systems could be used to graphically measure what is going on. There would be a common ability to drill down to get details and take action buttons to get involved if things are not going well and you want to actually do something about it.

Business intelligence dashboards have been around for well over a decade and offer a functional model for this. You wouldn't need to do more than repurpose existing tools.

So why don't these things already exist? The work to create them might be tedious but it's mostly a one time effort to get public data made available publicly for free. Once that happens, maintaining access is very inexpensive as it is generally an automated process. Yet with a huge non-profit sector devoted to oversight of government, no general purpose dashboard system has emerged and become popular.

Medical price shopping

There seems to be some confusion on the right as to what to do about Obamacare. The political front is stymied at the moment with no clear path to victory. But there is a clear way forward that requires no voting, no majorities, and cannot be stopped. 

Conservatives can collapse the system merely by acting like ordinary americans do on most things and shop for the best price when they are looking to buy medical services. The current system can't handle that in large numbers. It hasn't been able to since the Johnson administration. So let's do it. 

Expose the rot, hunt for the best prices and be ready to rescue the hospitals as they go bankrupt. 

11 days

My write at least once a day streak just busted at 11 days. 

Ugh. 

Time to start over. 

One post a day. 

At least.