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The #NRL Ladder after Round 11. Souths and Cronulla march up the table while at the other end, the T...
11 hours ago
Parramatta Eels Head Coach Michael Hagan has named an unchanged squad for the side that defeated the Penrith Panthers last Friday night for the match against the Bulldogs this Sunday at Parramatta Stadium.
In one minor change, prop Fuifui Moimoi will start the match with Aaron Cannings moving back to the bench.
The Eels have three players that will take part in Friday night's test match in Brisbane, Nathan Hindmarsh for Australia and Nathan Cayless and Krisnan Inu for New Zealand. Inu has been named in the Eels Premier League side this week.
Eels coach Michael Hagan says it is tough to prepare for a match with players away on representative duty.
"It does make it more difficult but Nathan Cayless and Nathan Hindmarsh have had plenty of experience in playing and backing up from rep football. We just have to make sure they are looked after and we get them to the game on Sunday," Hagan told www.parraeels.com.au.
"Parramatta and Canterbury games are a bit like last weeks local derby at Penrith. It is going to be nice and physical. I'm sure the fans of both sides are expecting that and that the players are looking forward to it," Hagan added.
NRL vs BULLDOGS Parramatta Stadium Sun 22 April 3pm
1 Luke BURT
2 Jarryd HAYNE 3 Ben SMITH 4 Timana TAHU 5 Eric GROTHE
6 Brett FINCH 7 Tim SMITH
8 Nathan CAYLESS


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Posts tagged 'Dormans'
Blankets & Wine XLII, Mar. 3 2013 @ Carnivore
Pack your picnic baskets, wine, blankets and join us at the Carnivore Gardens Nairobi this March 3rd for the 42nd edition of Blankets & Wine from 1.00pm to 9.00pm.
Come celebrate Kenya with us as we host an all Kenyan lineup comprising of the astounding Mumala Maloba, the charming Nyota Ndogo, the gifted Kato Change and the multifarious Just A Band.
Limited advance tickets will be on sale for Ksh. 1,300 on www.ticketsasa.com before 25th February and for Ksh. 1,500 on ticketsasa and at select Dormans outlets (Mama Ngina, Westgate, Village Market, Yaya, Junction and Karen) thereafter.
Tickets at the door shall be sold at Ksh. 2,000 for adults and Ksh. 500 for children (5-12 yrs). Children below the age of 5 enter free.
BUY TICKETS: http://ticketsasa.com/order.aspx/71ab7f18-4cc9-4632-b6ae-eadfa3ca68d7/blankets-and-wine-xlii
Mumala: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLGV7jzX0UU&feature=youtu.be
Nyota Ndogo: http://ndogonyota.blogspot.com/
Kato Change: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheChangeKato?feature=watch
Just A Band: http://music.just-a-band.com/album/sorry-for-the-delay

subset: commoncrawl


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Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Treasurer Philip Angelides Resolve Lawsuits Protecting Californians from Dangerous Municipal Bond Scheme
San Bernardino Development Project Must Stop Risky Bond Sales
(SACRAMENTO ) – Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Treasurer Philip Angelides today announced the settlement of two lawsuits filed in San Bernardino County Superior Court which challenged illegal municipal bond practices. The lawsuits were filed in order to protect investors, preserve the integrity of the municipal bond market and prevent abuse of the state's bond financing laws.
"This development project was little more than a financial scam which lined the pockets of the financiers at the expense of community residents, bondholders and California taxpayers," Lockyer said. "This settlement will help prevent such abuses in the future."
"Today we achieved our goal of stopping once and for all a Ponzi scheme perpetrated on innocent Californians who unwittingly invested their personal nest eggs in a series of bad deals. We will remain vigilant for, and forcefully pursue, anyone who seeks to defraud the public of their savings," Angelides said.
The two lawsuits, filed in May and December of 2000, sought to invalidate three separate bond sales conducted by the Desert Tortoise Public Financing Authority and the Legends Golf Club Community Association. "Desert Tortoise" and "Legends" were formed in order to generate bond sales ostensibly for the purpose of completing a private golf course and housing development in San Bernardino County known as Rancho Lucerne. In an effort to take advantage of tax-exempt bond laws, the groups lured small city governments with cash payments and invented new private water companies to form assorted "roving" Joint Powers Authorities (JPA's). In one JPA, the group used the small Central Valley cities of Waterford and San Joaquin – despite the fact that these two cities were located more than 300-miles away from the project.
Over the six-year life of the Rancho Lucerne project, more than $75 million in bonds have been authorized. Despite generating this revenue, little progress has been made on the development of the project and not one home has been built. At the same time, project leaders have pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in "fees" from each bond sale, with the majority of the bond proceeds being used to pay back previous bond buyers.
The settlement provides that the assets of both "Desert Tortoise" and "Legends" will be held in trust for the benefit of the bondholders who purchased the bonds. The settlement further provides that neither entity will ever again attempt to issue tax-exempt debt for the San Bernardino County development, thereby protecting California investors. The settlement also provides that any claims that bondholders may have against any of the parties involved in the transactions are not waived or precluded in any way.
In addition to these lawsuits, the Attorney General and Treasurer have worked cooperatively and aggressively to protect the bond-buying public and the municipal bond market. Last year, Lockyer and Angelides sponsored legislation which took effect January 1, 2001 that bars specific abuses and provides better local control over public debt issuances. They also supported a new law which requires that a governmental entity with land use control over a project must approve any bond issued for that project by a Joint Powers Authority.


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The State reports that while the device would run Windows XP, the open source Sugar user interface would still be draped over it. Negroponte also stated to AP that the insistence upon using only open source software had "hampered the XO's usability and scared away potential adopters". He claims that the Sugar UI "grew amorphously" and "didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way".
It is interesting to note that this turn-around on open source also removes the roadblock blocking Apple's offer of releasing a build of Mac OS X specifically for the XO, originally offered by Apple during the start of the project.
The OLPC has sold about 500000 machines, way too short of the millions of devices it expected to sell by this time. This caused the price of the XO to remain far above the USD 100 target is started out with; an XO will currently set you back USD 188.


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Here are a few of the current Kindle eBooks that are being offered for Free. Keep in mind that prices flip fast on Amazon so be sure to check the price before purchasing!
Stir-Fry Yourself Skinny (Low Fat, Stir-Fry Diet Recipes, Lose Weight Healthy Without Diet Pills)
The Breakfast Sandwich Maker Cookbook: 45 Delicious Recipes
Circle of Friends 25 One-Pot Dinners
Best of Grain Free Meal Plans, Volume 1: A cook book for those following grain free diets
Homemade Cheese – The Ultimate Recipe Guide
Smoothie Recipes for Weight Loss – 30 Delicious Detox, Cleanse and Green Smoothie Diet Book
40 Juicing Recipes For Weight Loss and Healthy Living (Juicer Recipes Book)
Things Pondered (Several Beth Moore books for free today!)
Remember, you don't need a Kindle to read them as they have Apps for phones, PCs, Macs, etc.


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- About Us
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Internal Blind to fit The Eight
Easy to operate greenhouse roller blinds. Made from a green hard wearing synthetic material these are well suited for a greenhouse environment. Easily mounted and secured to the generous cedar framework of our greenhouses these blinds offer 60 percent shade helping to prevent the greenhouse, plants and user from getting too hot in the warmer summer months. These blinds are fitted internally and operate on a spring loaded roller allowing greater control of the temperature in your greenhouse.
Buy online today..
If you would like more information about the product please call 0044 1829 271890 or click above to send us an email with any further queries.
Gabriel Ash Reviews
The only timber greenhouse company endorsed by the Royal Horticultural Society


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Looonnng post a-comin...
1) You should seriously investigate WHY the room is so negative before proceeding with this elaborate band-aid. Sounds to me like they need bigger intake dampers, but the control scheme was an easier sell than cutting walls open, and more profitable. Was there just no wall space to do this?
2) If you add a fan, are there going to be other intakes still open to vent the pressure, or will this become the only intake path? If so, you are blocking the airway even worse when the fan is down. Just something else to consider if the fan fails.
3) You are adding a lot of components that can fail to an otherwise simple situation. Yes, liability does factor in.
4) Are these natural or induced draft boilers? Either way, if successful in controlling the room, you will alter the burner stack mixtures by changing the room pressure. The boilers should be checked afterwards to avoid monoxide, flue, or exchanger condensate and damage. Any good boiler man investigating a rotted out exchanger will notice the changes in stack pressure that a controlled fan will cause and point it out to the owner. If you do pressurize, it best not hunt badly, or odd things may result.
5) Are you going to interlock the intake fan with the boilers so it doesn't run unless needed or will it run always? Pros and Cons either way. The drive will have an enable dry contact input point.
6) The pressure sensors will have to be in the 0-0.1 range or lower. If you put a tenth of an inch of static in the room (if at all possible) you will get a door in the face. My guess would be adequate control around 1 hundreth to 5 hundreths (0.050). You are just leaning on the positive side.
7) Best to use proportional control only in this application. This will allow you to tune the thing in to get fast reaction time with minimal hunting when the burners start and change room pressure, or when a door is opened/closed. Stay away from Integral or Derivative unless you are experienced in using them. Then again, this would be a fun application to learn with...
8) Is the motor on the fan rated for drive service? A "B" motor insulation class is a dead ringer for a burnout on drive service. The slower the motor runs for extended periods, the shorter the service life if it's not rated for it. Talk to the drive rep and the motor manufacturer for advice here.
9) Is the motor closeley rated to the application. If the fan is rated to do the "calculated" CFM at 1 or 2 inches of static then you have way too much fan HP for the fraction of an inch static that you desire. This will result in a crawl of motor speed, and may overheat the drive and the motor.
10) Is the drive HP closely rated to the motor HP? Do not oversize motors or drives in an effort to "derate". Derating just doesnt work this way on a drive, it makes things worse.
11) You should have the facility to lock the setpoint of the control from curious hands for the benefit of fan and boilers.
12) Will the owner have facility to run the drive manually or directly on line (bypass contactor) if either the drive or controls fail? This sounds like a pretty sizable fan, does a big building depend on it?
13) What will the pressure sensor reference on the low side connection? (Every sensor has two connections) An adjacent space or outside air? OA would be the most sensible pick but will give you some buffeting from wind effects at such low pressure sensing ranges.
14) If control is un-stable, consider adding a considerable length of poly tubing to buffer the room pressure signal and especially the outside reference. This is detailed in the instructions for the Kele OA pressure sensor probe.
15) The DC power supply? Get the whole works from Kele, They cost less than your time to make the regulated supply that is necessary to operate the transducer accurately.
Good luck.


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Great distro guys! You take linux one step closer to the Desktop OS world with this. Here are a few suggestions to actually get it there.
1. Multimedia and Games are #1. These apps are king of the "most used" apps in the world today. Currently, this arena is dominated by MS and the Macs and so Game Dev's tailor to them. There are 2 work-arounds - 1) get every major game label in your hip pocket like MS does so they will start writing Games in Linux friendly codes. 2) Tailor Linux to be more friendly to current Games that only run in XP. Since the #1 is not likely, #2 may be the only option. Linux is doing well in the music, cd, dvd, streaming video arena. Its also doing well in the business application area. But its got little to no development in the Gaming arena, and this hits it pretty hard. Google up a few polls to see what are the most used apps today and I think youll find some pretty shocking results! Computer Games top every list, across every market and age group (save the geriatric). So, tailor SL to become more of a multimedia machine is what I think is needed.
2. Sound and Video. My #1 above cant happen if the persistent multi-tasking issue with ALSA cant be worked out. I believe this issue is with Linux itself and therefor, a very large problem to solve. It will probably have to be a collaborative comunity-wide effort... But it must happen. There are work-arounds for average joe user, but they all involve dual-booting up XP or another OS that can actually do multi-tasking with relative ease. This is an issue that should have been worked out 10 or more years ago, but it persists, and the issue will only get worse as time goes on and MS and Apple continue to evolve, while currently only a small handful of Linux Distro's struggle to catch up.
3. While Sabayon leads the pack when it comes to hardware auto-detection and smooth install on a bleeding edge OS, it remains slaved to an outdated linux build such as Gentoo. SL must seek its own path and break away from this seeking new and innovative ways to program, code, and implement the Linux system in ways that will shatter the MS market's. This can be done in a number of ways, but the most "sensible" would be to take source code from Gentoo and then modify what pieces SL needs, perhaps even implementing slices of Debian and RHL to create something new and even more stable, yet easy for "average joe user" to work with on a day to day basis. Sounds easy to me, but then im just mr. business guy who doesnt know much about code. However, others ~are~ doing just that, or trying to. This will also require marketing, but a good product tends to market itself fairly well. SL currently has the product, and a growing fanbase, so I think this very doable.
4. Tutorials!!! This is sorely lacking in nearly all linux distro's save for PCLos. I just cant stress enough how important desktop Tutorials are for the new Linux user and even the old. What we have now is.. User X installs SL and boots up to a beautiful desktop with all kinds of cool toys, but quickly discovers that things dont work here like they do in XP or Vista which is all User X has ever known his whole life, so he then sits around scratching his head wondering what to do to make things work. Unnacceptable! Although this is no fault of SL, rather, its the fault of the Linux community as a whole. MS is simply more user friendly, and far less time consuming than is Linux right now, and in today's "gotta have it now" world, the "RTFM" response and mentality simply will not do!
--Solution: Bring the help User X needs right to his desktop as he boots up the first time, with all the answers right there popping up in his/her face in the form of automated tutorials full of multimedia! It should tell User X precisely what he/she needs to do, when, how, why, etc.. This will also prevent User X from having to jump onto IRC or these and other forums flooding them with questions that will have to be answered usually by the same people over and over. This is simple common sense guys.
Anyway, thats about it for the first round of suggestions lol. I hope you consider them carefully, because I believe they will make SL supreme in the Desktop OS world.


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ERIE, Pa. - Mercyhurst Prep High School is hosting a six-week baseball camp starting Saturday, Jan. 19, 2013.
Mercyhurst Prep head coach Randy Durkoske will direct the program in conjunction with U.S. Baseball Academy. Classes are available for players in grades first through 12th and are limited to six players per coach. Sessions are offered in advanced hitting, pitching, catching, fielding and baserunning at a cost as low as $99 for six weeks. Proceeds from the program benefit amateur baseball in Erie. Space is limited. Registration has begun and will continue until all spots are filled. For more information, visit www.USBaseballAcademy.com, or call toll-free 866-622-4487.


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Qld also putting out their hands to have their arse's handed to them by Pattinson. Gone a long way to confirm his test spot with today's effort.
Qld also putting out their hands to have their arse's handed to them by Pattinson. Gone a long way to confirm his test spot with today's effort.
Must upload the 6/32 from Pattinson!
My Youtube cricket channels, thousands of gold old videos
do you think people will be allowed to make violins?
who's going to make the violins?
forever 63*
should have picked hauritz
to open the batting.
Brad McNamara @bbuzzmc
Will say this once and then nothing else. Defamation laws quite clear in Aus.be careful.
who decides motm in shield games?
Forrest is sorta like Marsh all over again. Except the highs weren't as high and the lows not as low.
Going through the posts I missed
totally agree. scott coyte's return last season was basically our only feel good story for the season. i mean, i legitimately had faith in him in those shield matches at the end of last season. i was pretty surprised he didn't get offered a contract really.
I've got Mitch Marsh marked down as a future Tom Cooper/Luke Butterworth. Basically all his good batting performances have come against nsw/sydney sixers. ****er
Aside from that one time against NSW. ****er.
it hasn't been easy for lyon. when he plays for sa, he doesn't get to bowl against 8-11
i kid i kid
on a related note, lol @ lynn. what a fall from grace.
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TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) - A vehicle search in a Topeka Burger King parking lot netted authorities more than 100 pounds of marijuana.
The Shawnee County Sheriff's Office said deputies made the bust around 10: 30 am Monday outside the restaurant near SW 10th and Wanamaker. Authorities say they made contact with a white Chevy Lumina with an Arizona license place. A search of the vehicle turned up 110 pounds of marijuana.
Five people were arrested on charges of possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and no drug tax stamp. They're identified as:
Nicholas C. Taghipour, 26, of Easton, Maryland
Nicholas M. Verdusco, 18, of Tucson, Arizona
Cameron L. Gentry, 19, of Tucson, Arizona
Raymond S. Doyle, 20, of Easton, Maryland
Aaron P. Doyle, 27, of Laurel, Delaware
The Sheriff's Office says the Drug Enforcement Administration is assisting with the investigation.
It was the second large marijuana bust for the Shawnee County Sheriff's Office within a week. During a DUI saturation patrol early Saturday morning, two men from Phoenix, Arizona were arrested on charges they possessed more than 100 pounds of marijuana.


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Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
New extension educator hired
Jim Hoorman tapped for post in state's No. 1 ag income county
By Nancy Allen
Jim Hoorman started as the new OSU Extension educator for Mercer County on Monda
. . .
A longtime OSU Extension employee has been named the new extension educator for Mercer County on a part-time basis.
Jim Hoorman started work on Monday and replaces Todd Mangen, who left five months ago after learning the full-time position was being cut due to statewide budget concerns. Hoorman will spend 50 percent of his time in Mercer County and the rest working for OSU Extension on various state, regional and national projects.
He will travel between extension offices in Celina and Lima.
In his new post in Mercer County, he will focus on two main areas: agriculture environmental management particularly related to educating farmers about best management practices that help their bottom line and improve water quality, and farm management as it relates to the business side of agriculture.
"I will still do the more common programming like pesticide application updates and other types of programming, but I'm going to specialize mostly on improving nutrient management," Hoorman said. "This is a pretty hot topic here."
Hoorman was an extension agent between 1987 and 1993 in Defiance and Williams counties. He left extension to work for five years in the private sector for Farmers National Company, managing 17,000 acres on 51 mostly livestock farms across Ohio. He went back to the extension in 1997 and worked on water quality issues at Indian Lake for a few years. After that he worked on several special projects funded through grants, many of them involving poultry manure and related research before getting tapped for the Mercer County post.
Hoorman has master's degrees in business and agricultural economics, along with a bachelor's degree in animal science. He currently is working on his doctorate in environmental sciences, studying the use of cover crops to recycle soil nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) and soil compaction.
Hoorman is at the forefront of studies on the agricultural and environmental benefits of using winter cover crops. He routinely speaks on the topic in Ohio and throughout the country. On Wednesday and Thursday he will be the featured speaker at a conference in Pennsylvania talking to state senators, county commissioners, consultants, farmers and agency people. In January he will speak at the national no-till conference in Iowa.
Hoorman has advised and helped farmers in Mercer and Auglaize counties in recent years install cover crops as part of money that came to farmers in the Grand Lake Watershed to help improve water quality. Winter cover crops decrease soil erosion, provide a place to apply manure and reduce nutrient runoff.
"I'll be working on a very simple concept and that is keeping something living and growing on the soil year-round," he said. "The benefits of that include absorption of soil and manure nutrients, improved water infiltration, reduced soil compaction and improved water quality."
In recent months, he applied for two grants totaling almost $1.15 million. The first would help pay farmers to plant winter cover crops to reduce the amount of phosphorous and nitrogen runoff from farmland, and the second would use GPS technology to reduce nutrient loading to the lake. If those grants get approval, he would help implement them and perhaps be able to hire an assistant to help.
Hoorman said due to the state's shrinking budget and a smaller pool of extension educators, counties will have to share employees.
"We are starting to work more as a more specialized team," he said. "If questions are more specialized, I may pass those on to someone else who can better answer them, just like I hope some counties will pass questions on to me."
Hoorman said he doesn't yet have set office hours and many details of his job are still being worked out. He already received two horticulture-related questions on his first day. Hoorman said he eventually hopes to start a master gardeners program in the county to help people with fruit, vegetables and landscaping plant questions. He would need a volunteer willing to head that up.
But his main goal right how is to get out and meet farmers.
"I plan to do a lot of one-on-one teaching and meet farmers and see what their issues are," he said. "I plan to spend a lot of time visiting farmers on their own farms and work with them to solve their problems ... I don't think you can do that in the office."
Archive of August 4th, 2009
Subscriber only stories on this date
Fort Recovery man's death ruled a fatality
Local woman's dahlias dazzle at the Auglaize County fair
Mercer County EQIP money down almost $241,000 from last year
Brindle gets disqualified for failed inspection
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For photos from my recent trip, see
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Wordless Wednesday -- Nantucket's Oldest House
For photos from my recent trip, see
9 comments:
- Carol said...
How wonderful, to have something that old that still is standing.
- October 19, 2011 at 9:37 AM
- Susan D. said...
Great to see these photographs of old Nantucket. I have very happy memories of visitng the island many years ago, whilst working in Boston for a year. I loved the buildings and the setting. Susan.
- October 19, 2011 at 10:56 AM
- Wendy L. Callahan said...
What a lovely house! It makes me miss Massachusetts all the more.
- October 19, 2011 at 11:33 AM
- Dr. Bill (William L.) Smith said...
Neat! Thanks for sharing and bringing this one to our attention! ;-)
- October 19, 2011 at 7:28 PM
- Sherry - Family Tree Writer said...
Great photos!! I hope to find some of my ancestral homes still standing! That would be so awesome! Thanks for sharing.
- October 20, 2011 at 2:11 PM
- Bob Inhoff said...
We were fortunate to visit on a day when the house was open. We had a very informative tour and saw a portrait of Mary Gardner. My wife is also a 1st cousin 9x removed from Jethro Coffin. The second residents were Nathaniel Paddack and Ann Bunker, Ruth's 7th great grand parents. I really enjoyed visiting the Nantucket Historical Association where I found a history of this remarkable house.
- October 21, 2011 at 7:56 PM
- dee-burris said...
Oh wow...I hope you are able to get into it.
What a delight to be able to walk the same floors as one of your long ago relatives...
- October 22, 2011 at 12:00 PM
- Michelle Goodrum said...
Love those really old houses. This one is spectacular especially when you think about how they built that tall, tall roof without today's equipment to make it easier.
- October 22, 2011 at 1:42 PM
- Barbara Poole said...
Thank you everybody for your comments. It was a treat to see the house from the outside, the next time, I hope for a tour.
- October 23, 2011 at 4:50 PM


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Infer the Meaning of Unknown Words by Sheer Guess or by Clues? – An Exploration on the Clue Use in Chinese EFL Learner's Lexical Inferencing
Lexical inferencing is refered to as guessing the meaning of an unknown word using available linguistic and other clues. It is a primary lexical processing strategy to tackle unknown words while reading. This study aims to explore the clue use of Chinese EFL learners in inferring the meaning of unknown word in reading. Two types of introspective research methods have been used to achieve the research aim. 55 participants of four levels (tertiary final, tertiary middle, tertiary initial and senior secondary) were asked to read a sample text and infer the meaning of target words through thinking aloud. Additional information of their lexical inferencing was elicited through stimulated recalls. The results show that Chinese EFL learners use a variety of clues in their lexical inferencing. The findings also reveal some discrepancies of clue use across different levels learners in lexical inferencing.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v6n11p29
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We see exactly the same reaction today about all the issues that face us (whether personal, local, national or world-wide). The considered, thoughtful and measured responses that would (given a chance) produce equitable solutions with a minimum of fuss get washed away by the ignorant but vocal commentators in the media. These people don't care about the problem, or finding a solution. All they want is the cameras pointing in their direction.
The reporters that had no idea still irritate me to this day when they mention Y2K. I've seen again and again supposedly enlightened reporters whimsically refer to Y2K as a big "myth". It was a serious problem and the reason nothing bad happened was down to the fact people did so much effort in preventing it. The hype (although blown our of proportion) was due to the truth that there was a genuine problem and it required a large amount of man power to fix it (and a large segment of companies waited until the last minute to fix it). And yet reporters go on spouting arrogantly how Y2K was a giant scam, or boogie man spread by IT.
Basically there are fools who only see money down a drain, because people have a tendency to ignore disasters unless they actually happen. Planes dropping out of the sky might of been an exaggeration by rumour mongers, (I'm not sure, anyone care to correct me?), but serious global problems aren't such a dumb idea as a result of a few major systems crashing.
The reporters that had no idea still irritate me to this day when they mention Y2K.
Michael Chrichton (yes, that Michael Chrichton) wrote an excellent essay on Speculation... http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-whyspeculate.html [crichton-official.com]
One of my favorite parts
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
So assume that the quality of coverage is the same on all subjects. I have been doing that for years.
If you want expertise read what an expert has written - for example, if you want to follow economic news, read a few economists blogs.
Then there was a second myth. County employee. "My PC is obsolete, Y2K I need a new one, some of the software isn't complaint, or not certified" These facts weren't necessarily lies, or even inaccurate, in the case of the vast majority of the PCs and replacement electronics I sold the stuff people were replacing was obsolete as hell whether Y2K was a real problem for it or not. Don't forget a lot of still deployed DOS programs and some windows 3.1 stuff was in fact not complaint as well. How much this would have been a real problem for anyone is debatable. So this one wasn't quite a myth, but a vast amount of repairs and upgrades and replacements got assigned to the "Y2K upgrade" when that wasn't really the cause.
Then there was a third GIANT myth somehow, a hundred million times people heard someone say that product X doesn't work after Y2K, and took that at face value. I got into a bit of an argument with a customer, I kept patiently explaining to him that his FAX machine would roll over to show 00 dates, and that the only problem this might cause him was that he might not be able to tell which faxes had arrived in the year 2000 and which had arrived in the year 1900, he was thoroughly convinced it was stop working when the numbers got to 00. In a less than professional moment I told him it didn't have any sort of anti-time travel device. Then I got him to try setting it to 00 and see if would in fact work. (Duh)
See that's the thing, elevators would plunge to the ground, planes would crash machines were going to STOP all these "embedded" systems and hidden devices, the machines we use constantly but don't see. Is our Air Compressor Y2K Complaint? We can't run the plant without air! No matter how many times you explained to people that devices like this were not in fact "certified" or "complaint" if there was in fact any date sensitive function in that equipment it would go on happily believing it was 1900, it was as if they all thought the clock had been set at the current date when these things were built and no one knew what was going to happen when it hit 00, or they had anti-time travel circuits that would shut them down if they found themselves in the years before they were invented.
Your copier, your FAX machine, your air compressor, I liked to point out the really paranoid at the time that their generator wasn't Y2K complaint. A lot of this stuff wasn't date sensitive at all of course, even in the odd case where it happened to know what date it was, the consequences of this thing being "broken" were pretty non-existent. However if you added up the list price of all the embedded equipment that was non-complaint or certified it was a pretty staggering number. This was the number that got snowballed around and was used to scare people who weren't just abjectly stupid into getting worried, then it snowballed from there.
For the record when we came back from the break I had a customer who had an old PC with non-Y2K compliant BIOS and they used it for some forgotten but important application and was somehow date sensitive to them anyway. So I had to write them a batch file to set the date when they started the computer. The day was saved $25 was spent, cabinet parts could still be picked out according to the handy DOS software.
The hype (although blown our of proportion) was due to the truth that there was a genuine problem and it required a large amount of man power to fix it (and a large segment of companies waited until the last minute to fix it). And yet reporters go on spouting arrogantly how Y2K was a giant scam, or boogie man spread by IT.
But the point is that it was blown way out of proportion, not just the critical stuff but all the nice-to-haves were fixed and I'm sure many took the opportunity to shoehorn big upgrades in under guise of the y2k bug. It'd be like discovering that 90% of the SOX-compliance processes you do isn't actually mandated by law but just by control freak bean counters under the guise of SOX, then naturally people feel scammed or scared by a boogie man. Of course companies needed to fix what they needed to have, but
Planes dropping out of the sky might of been an exaggeration by rumour mongers, (I'm not sure, anyone care to correct me?), but serious global problems aren't such a dumb idea as a result of a few major systems crashing.
No planes would have literally dropped out of the sky; the actual aircraft control electronics weren't (hopefully still aren't) date dependent. However I'm not sure if any navigation or ATC systems would have failed had no one addressed the Y2K issue, and that could have been messy. Certai
I'm reminded of Nassim Taleb's alternative-universe story about unsung (or worse, derided) heroes in The Black Swan: A congressperson pushes through legislation mandating reinforced aircraft cockpit doors in 1998: as a consequence, 9/11 never happens, because would-be hijackers know they're not going to be able to break down the cockpit door.
The congressperson loses the next election because, hell, hundreds of millions of dollars were thrown away on a non-existent problem!
The difference is that back then all that hype meant was that a few old school nerds with cobol knowledge got rich quick. Today that hype means a loss of liberty by all.
Personally, I'd prefer the former. Not only because it could make me rich...
Indeed - but unfortunately the hype these days has swung completely the other way, with Y2K viewed as a collosal non-event, and it's the programmers and Government - not the media who overhyped it the first place - who are portrayed as being stupid and worrying over nothing.
The point, AIUI, is that there were some genuine issues that needed fixing. And if nothing happened - well that's because they fixed the problems! But far from being praised, it's now widely assumed that Y2K was entirely a hoax, and that
Hopefully what will happen with the 2038 problem is those of us that caused it will make enough money off it to live happily in retirement.
Part of that hype was deliberate FUD from elements of the USA permanent government.
In the Veterans Administration and presumably a number of other agencies, during the 3 years from 1997 to 2000 there was a major drive to get every computer "Y2K Compliant". And the tests for compliance were made strict enough to ensure that entire operations had to have brand new CPUs (and associated interfaces and so on) across the board. Y2K was quickly seen as an excuse for emergency authority to spend much more on new
Oh, dear. I participated in some of this. It was often _much_ cheaper to invest, up front, in newer hardware and software that would last for 3-5 years with a single massive upgrade now, than to find and fix this component here, find and fix that component there, and roll out one system changed at a time. As one of the engineers dealing with the pain from users and management, the new hardware was partly an efficient use of capital funds, and partly blatant bribes to get people to turn _loose_ of their old
I bought into this line of reasoning at the time, as well. It was only years later that I realized the books were cooked in a rather subtle way.
The comparison of costs between using operating funds to correct Y2K deficiencies in existing systems and expending capital on new systems was an apples and oranges comparison. It was a fiction. More specifically, it ignored the costs of configuration, installation, and retraining staff associated with the new equipment, which was directly comparable with the oper
That idiot CIO's quote makes me livid. I worked in IT in '99 (I mean worked, not blathered or "managed") and as such spent a good couple months on Y2K issues. I was given the task of surveying a large portion of my company's software. I did this. In '99, I knew *exactly* what would happen if not updated down to the line number of broken code. I duly created my report, which listed every damn issue in the software. Most were stupid cosmetic crap like reports that would say "19100". There were two majo
In the couple of years leading up to Y2K, I saw my company pour millions into updating any outdated infrastructure. Since were all techies, I'm betting that we all have similar stories. All the negativity aside, is it also possible that we moved ourselves ahead with this non-existent catastrophe? I mean shoot, I know I at least got a new laptop out of the deal
It did for sure spur people in to updates that really should have been done a long time ago. At the time I was working for a newspaper as a webmaster and the classified ads system there ran on technology so ancient it was amazing. Old computer running on some network connection I'd never see (cables as thick as your thumb, big square connectors). The thing was a disaster waiting to happen, there was no support from IBM (who'd made it back in the day) any more and we'd been warned that if this breaks, you ar
(cables as thick as your thumb, big square connectors). The thing was a disaster waiting to happen, there was no support from IBM (who'd made it back in the day)
Sounds like Token Ring. Really good, until ethernet eclipsed it..
A great many computer systems used two digit dates, and would treat '00' as a date in the past. Changing this fundamental fact would take an awful lot of work; not changing it would mean that all these computer systems break on Jan 1st 2000.
Allot of work was done, and most all important computer systems didn't suffer from any serious problems.
What is being oversold?
I suppose there were 'cowboy' consultants exploiting the problem by offering to come in and look at your recently acquired IT infrastructure, charging huge amounts for a simple thumbs up. That doesn't undermine the severity of the problem though.
Not all two-digit computer systems "break" because of that limitation, mind you. It only becomes an issue for systems which do comparisons between dates on different sides of the discontinuity. Admittedly that's most of the computing tasks that use dates, but it's not universal. And "break" has many different senses: the media often portrayed it as everything Y2K noncompliant keeling over and dying or entering some worst-case-scenario failure mode, when in many cases the errors were benign. That's what was
Of course there were these kinds of consultant. And while they didn't undermine the severity of the problem, they certainly undermined the credibility and seriousness of our profession. So should I ever get a hold of one of these snakeoil peddlers, I'll give them a consultation that they usually see a proctologist for...
Part of the overselling was this idea that the systems would just blow the fuck up when the date rolled over. That was not necessarily the case. In particular I think it was oversold for critical system, like computers that control power plants and the like. I never saw any evidence that these things would go nuts, lock up, set the plant to do something dangerous. Looked more like they'd roll over and nothing much would change since the date was used in terms of "On this date do X," kind of stuff, not a com
A great many computer systems used two digit dates, and would treat '00' as a date in the past. Changing this fundamental fact would take an awful lot of work; not changing it would mean that all these computer systems break on Jan 1st 2000.
Allot of work was done, and most all important computer systems didn't suffer from any serious problems.
What is being oversold?
I suppose there were 'cowboy' consultants exploiting the problem by offering to come in and look at your recently acquired IT infrastructure, charging huge amounts for a simple thumbs up. That doesn't undermine the severity of the problem though.
The problem wasn't with the IT folks... Not even the 'cowboy' consultants who tried to scare up some income. The problem was with the media coverage.
There were reports on how all your money would vanish overnight, trains would derail, nuclear power plants would melt down, missiles would launch themselves, planes would fall out of the air... The same kind of silliness and paranoia we're now seeing in relation to the 2012 thing... Except it was being reported as real, impending, and IT's fault.
If you talk to someone who was working in IT during the whole Y2k thing, they'll probably tell you stories about long hours and stress and frustration.
If you talk to someone who was working in management during the whole Y2k thing, they'll probably tell you similar stories about long hours and stress and frustration.
If you talk to some random person on the street about Y2k they're likely to mention how the world was supposed to end and it was all kinds of hyped up and nothing ever happened. They never saw anyone putting in long hours. They never saw the effort that went into making sure that nothing happened. All they saw were the crazy news stories and docu-dramas about the impending disaster.
The problem is that now, because nothing tragic happened, the IT industry in general has lost credibility with the general public. So when someone suggests that we're running out of IP addresses... Or that GPS may start failing soon... Or that there's some nasty bug on the way and you really ought to update your computer... The general public just rolls their eyes and ignores the warning.
And, of course, it doesn't help that the media continues to report on things they don't understand...
Remember the DST change a little while back? Our local news programs were reporting that you better run Windows Update and patch your computer or you'd lose data. They literally said you'd lose data. Because your computer didn't know that it should automatically change the time by an hour...
And then there was all the paranoia about Conficker. I believe I even saw reports about Conficker on CNN. We had clients who were afraid to turn on their computers, even after we'd assured them a dozen times that they weren't infected.
I think 38 years should be long enough for us to sort things out before Y2K.
Earl decides to make up for #24, "Stole a red 'Take-a-number' machine" from a local Bargain Bag. He brings along Donny Jones and Joy and Darnell to help cross the item off. However, Randy runs into the store and takes the ticket machine from him, not wanting to part with it. Earl remembers back to why Randy did not want to part with it; in Christmas 1999 Earl stole presents from a house while Joy, Donny and Randy distracted the family with carols. They go back to the Crab Shack, where Darnell explains Y2K t
As the timer hit midnight, all the lights in the house went out. They all thought that the Y2K myth was happening, but in fact it just happened because Donny's sister had not paid her electric bill, and her electricity ran out on January 1, 2000.
Which is just dumb, because they don't kill the power at midnight - around here they send a technician around and you can pay him on the spot or else he pulls the meter off the wall. He's not making rounds on new years day!
It was real, but hyped. None of us seriously expected 747s to invert on crossing the International Date Line, as some more fevered commentators speculated, nor did we expect nuclear power stations to destabilize.
The interesting thing is that the international date line really does cause severe code problems. For instance, a squadron of F-22 Raptors [dailytech.com] was taken out [defenseindustrydaily.com] by the date line. [f-22raptor.com]
The 747 has the significant advantage of being a relatively old plane, thus most of its systems were date immune. Also, a 747
It doesn't take Y2K [f-22raptor.com] to screw planes up at the International Date Line.
People wanted to fear it.
I was at Wal-Mart getting an oil change (for the record never go there for that) in 1999 while in the waiting area a conversation was struck up between myself and another person waiting on a vehicle. It came out that I worked for an ISP and had done all kinds of other computer/networking work. The person wanted to know my thoughts on Y2K.
I answered "I think there's going to be a few hiccups and glitches. I don't think they're going to be all that big, we've done a pretty good job of preparing, and many things may fail over to a wrong date, but will continue to work anyways. All in all whatever problems come of it a majority will be fixed in the first couple of days and a few may take longer, but I don't think there will be much impact."
The person became visibly annoyed at my answer. We stopped talking very quickly after that. I had many other conversations with people along these lines, a couple of them even sited Art Bell and how his show was talking about the doom and gloom to come. I listened to Art Bell. He must have made a fortune selling crank radios, flash lights, and other survival gear in preparations for Y2K, not to mention his business model relies on crazies and they were coming out of the woodwork for this.
I was working the night shift during the roll over. I wasn't worried about our equipment failing. I went to work armed, I was worried about crazies who might decide our company was going to be the cause of the downfall of civilization.
The only thing I noticed was the IRC chat room had some sort of a reset, 90% of the people connected dropped off at midnight, that was actually the event that caused me to check the clock. Us other 10% stayed connected, I'm guessing it was one of dial up routers dropping everyone.
People were practically begging for the doom and gloom scenario. It gave me insight into the human condition, I'll say that for sure.
The only thing I noticed was the IRC chat room had some sort of a reset, 90% of the people connected dropped off at midnight, that was actually the event that caused me to check the clock. Us other 10% stayed connected, I'm guessing it was one of dial up routers dropping everyone.
FYI, some of us power-cycled non-critical stuff at midnight, as a prank. (Don't you know someone who hit the circuit breaker at their Y2K party at midnight, just to freak everyone out?)
If more IT professionals would have shared our spirit of comedy, and cut the power at midnight on non-critical systems, we all could have created the illusion that things COULD HAVE been a disaster, but we were prepared - and the remediation efforts were money well spent.
Last year I was advocating the DTV transition should have happened at midnight New Years. I had this vision of 1,000's of people doing the countdown watching the ball in New York on TV, then when they hit 1 STATIC! I would have been so epic.
The so called Y2Kaboom... the reason it was a non-event was that many people had worked to resolve as much of the problem as they could. We had started in around March 1998 so for us this was old news. By the time our management had started freaking out we had already completed a preliminary audit.
I had some people predict all sorts of gloom and doom... they bought extra food and waited for the apocalypse. A lot of magazines were filled with doomsday predictions etc.
For what its worth... if we hadn't fixed
People were practically begging for the doom and gloom scenario.
You've got that right. Especially when there is money to be made, or power to be grabbed/transfered/co-opted. For a great example of this, see Man-made Global Warming (MGW).
Over the years I've seen a number of these panics and I have learned to first consider who benefits from the mitigation. If they are the same ones who are screaming the loudest I become very suspicious. As far as MGW goes, the anti-capitalists and anti-Americans are quit
Yes... People want some how to be part of history, and be That Guy who survived it. Especially being Pre 9/11 at the time Generation X didn't have anything historically that they say that they lived threw. There was World War 1, World War 2, Vietnam... Generation X had the First Iraq War that was relatively small. We wanted something big to happen so we can tell the next generation how easy they have it.
The news must be slow to report on an event that didn't happen 10 years ago.
The one thing I found annoying about the Y2K coverage was most "journalists" going on about how the whole issues, was not an issue.
Did it ever occur to these news "professionals" that many problems were patched, *quietly* before they could break?
Many of the COBOL computer systems with the Y2K issue belonged to large, established, mainstream organizations.....many of them financial institutions. They probably wouldn't want a story in the new about how they bought a defective system that they are still usi
I wonder what happened to those kooks who sold their homes, and bought farms or that stocked up with 2 years worth of spegheti-Os, etc.
They decided it was a good idea to grow tomatoes on their farms to sell to Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee and made their living in a new way?
OK, I know a moment in the sun is one in which you are illuminated, the brightest thing in the room. But let's try another meaning; basking in the sun on a tropical beach. For me, IT's moment in the sun is when everything is working and there's nothing to do but dream up what the future may hold.
I was an analyst for Gartner in the years leading up to Y2K. As usual, the real story is nothing like what is reported in the press.
First of all, the systems failed not because the date itself rolled over to January 1, 2000, but when systems attempted to do a calculation that spanned both centuries and thus did the math wrong. In 1970, 30-year mortgages started having glitches because they calculated into the year 00, and started calculating interest based on 99 years' worth of time. Called, the "Time Horizon to Failure," these types of failures increased on a log scale in the 90s as we approached 1/1/2000. Few if any systems based on microcontrollers (say, elevators) care at all about the date, much less that the year is 2 digits.
The bug was very real. There was literally billions of lines of mainframe code written in the 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s that used two digits for dates. There was actually a 1970 bug, where some systems used only one digit for the date in the 60s. Remember we are talking 80 byte punch cards and memory that was hundreds of dollars per byte. The fixes weren't hard but there was a LOT of code to slog through, much of which was not documented and in some cases they didn't even have the source.
Why weren't there more visible problems? in the early and mid 90s, all the IT departments alerted their managers to the problem, showed where in the code it needed to be fixed, and what the consequences were. But few managers acted, because nobody believed the "hype" and budgets were needed for more pressing initiatives.
Enter the Wall Street Journal, who wrote an article, I think it was in late 1996 or 1997, that said to company executives that their Errors and Omissions insurance would not cover them if their company experienced Y2K failures because the bug was widely publicized and the threat was well known. This means that the executives were personally liable (e.g. they could lose their houses) for Y2K failures that happened in their companies.
The next day, thousands of companies started Y2K projects, and fixed the issues. So, no serious bugs were reported, and those who labeled it hype had all the evidence they needed to support their theory. But it took a legal threat for managers to act.
In 99, a friend of mine was doing a live migration from a mainframe software that was too expensive to fix for Y2K. This was a critical billing system for the business so they had to keep the mainframe working until the migration to the new software was complete. The complex project was scheduled to be over on Dec 15.
What they did not expect was that the end-of-month calculation routine in the old software used a "clever" trick: add one month, remove one day...
So on Dec 1st the software went down in flames (and my friend did not get his Y2K bonus).
They called it the 12/99 bug.
What they did not expect was that the end-of-month calculation routine in the old software used a "clever" trick: add one month, remove one day...
This demonstrates why it is important to document any "clever tricks" used in a software system. Your clever trick might eventually become someone else's holiday bane; especially if the "clever trick" wasn't really necessary in the first place, except to facilitate laziness on the part of the original programmers.
On Y2K day, the website calendar of the US Naval Observatory (our observational time keeping experts; National Bureau of Standards count them, these guys tell us when they start and stop and need readjusting) read JAN 1, 19001.
See if there's still a screen capture of that around, I know several circulated back then. Then if anyone challenges you, simply show it to them and say "We didn't oversell. We got it right. They didn't."
The attack of 9/11/2001 took out the WTC and other buildings near ground zero. This was the heart of the financial district and the IT base of many firms.
In the hours following the attack, the offsite backup sites for many of those firms seamlessly took over. Nobody noticed that.
I firmly believe that without Y2K remediations, 911 would have been a big IT disaster too.
At the successful conclusion of Y2K remediation efforts, the upper and middle level managements treated themselves to celebrations at luxury resorts. Meanwhile, many IT grunts who put in all the extra hours got nothing more than pink slips. In most cases, the companies didn't even offer to buy them a beer as thanks for their long hours.
It was the most ungracious treatment of labor I ever witnessed. Compare it to calling Viet Nam vets baby killers.
I feel your pain.
I graduated in dec 99 to find that there were no job prospects for me in CS at all. I couldn't even get an accounting or low level management position that I was most qualified for because they all assumed that with a fancy computer degree I would find a better job any day. I had to settle for minimum wage manual labor at wal-mart. I went back to school after a while and got a higher degree, entered the CS field and was doing ok for myself. Sept 30 2008, layed off because the stock price to
I worked for a systems reseller/support provider back then. We had 50 to 100 customers out in the field running a particular OS and associated software products.
Our major vendor was extremely slow at getting updates out. The OS definitely had a problem, as account expiry dates were stored using two digit years, so ever user on every system would get locked out come 2000. They managed to devise a fix to the account security system, but it was well into 1999 before this update appeared. Even then the update w
Those articles that mentioned planes and fire and brimstone falling out of the sky should have focused on the positive e.g. guess what, that hardware you bought late this year? The warranty's going to extend itself another 99 years. Heck bring it in even after 12 months, and we'll stick it to The Man.
(And to the OP the reason the damage was minimal was because we DID have people making sure that there wasn't going to *be any damage.)
To write good code is a worthy challenge, and a source of civilized delight. -- stolen and paraphrased from William Safire


text:
Bonds, Stocks Rally in Response to Larry Summers Withdrawal
Today's financial recap and tomorrow's financial outlook.
Much of the news flow centered around the letter from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in which he withdrew his candidacy for the Fed chairman. Summers was viewed as more hawkish than the other leading candidates Janet Yellen and Donald Kohn. This led to anxiety among many fixed income investors over his potential deviation from current Fed policy. Summers cited the potentially acrimonious confirmation process in the Senate that would be damaging to the integrity of the Federal Reserve, President Obama, and the American people.
The market's response to the news included a rally in gold, Treasuries, and equities, and a sell-off in crude oil. The Treasury curve steepened significantly, indicating that interest rates will likely remain near zero for a longer period of time. Gold staged a number of short-lived rallies throughout the day, but eventually finished near unchanged.
Equities opened up more than 1%, but failed to hold onto those gains as the day progressed. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) fell almost 4% in the day's trading, dragging the Nasdaq-100 (INDEXNASDAQ:NDX) down 0.34%. Other tech laggards included Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Altera (NASDAQ:ALTR), and Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:VRTX).
JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) announced that it would agree to at least $750 million in fines associated with its London Whale credit derivative trades.
Tomorrow's Financial Outlook
Economic data set to be released tomorrow morning includes August's consumer price index, July foreign Treasury flows, and the NAHB's September builder sentiment. August consumer prices are estimated to have risen 1.6% from a year ago. "Core" prices, ex-food and energy costs, are estimated to have risen 1.8%. Last week, producer wholesale prices rose 1.4% from a year ago, down from a 2.1% rate the month prior.
The NAHB's survey is expected to remain at an index reading of 59, unchanged from the month prior. New home sales contracted 13.9% to a 394K annual rate last month.
The UK is scheduled to release its producer and consumer price indexes overnight. Economists expect that UK consumer prices rose 2.7% from a year ago and producer prices rose 1.8%.
The only earnings report on the calendar tomorrow is from Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE).
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Daily Recap Newsletter
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text:
Christine Benz: I'm Christine Benz for Morningstar.
Retirees face a very challenging environment, including low yields and very high stock market volatility.
Joining me to share some tips on how retirees and pre-retirees can navigate is Sue Stevens. She is CEO of Stevens Wealth Management.
Sue, thank you so much for being here.
Sue Stevens: It's my pleasure.
Benz: So Sue I outlined some of the big headwinds that retirees are facing right now. You have got yields very low and a lot of market volatility, also the threat of rising interest rates.
So, one thing I'd like to start with is, the historical prescription for a retiree or pre-retiree portfolio is a lot of fixed income. What's your take on how people should approach that issue? Is fixed income still essential to retiree portfolios, and what should the complexion of it look like?
Stevens: Great question. I think fixed income still needs to be a major component of most people's retirement portfolios. I think things have changed a bit in that rates are incredibly low right now, but the purpose of fixed income hasn't changed, which is stability, some sort of income, something that will keep the portfolio steady and allow people to sleep at night.
So, my approach right now might be to more broadly diversify the types of fixed income that clients are in, maybe pull down what's in Treasuries, push up what's in corporates, maybe some high-yield, maybe some mortgage-backed to try to get a little bit higher yield, not much, 0.5%, maybe 1%, from what we might've done in the past. But I think that helps create more of a constant return that people are looking for.
Benz: So your thought on pulling down Treasuries at this juncture is mainly a concern about their vulnerability in the face of rising interest rates, or what are you responding to there?
Stevens: I think Treasuries are an interesting topic. There are kind of two parts to it that I would say: one is the vulnerability that we have massive challenges ahead of us with debt and health-care costs and those types of things that could again pull down the rating of our government debt. So, I think you have to be a little bit thoughtful about, how is that going to work going forward.
But the other part of Treasuries I think is that, they are safe haven. So, I don't think you can discount them either. I think when we see things happen ... I've heard some people say America's become the new Switzerland. So, people are pushing in to our bonds, in particular, when things go wrong in other places in the world. So, to me, you still want some presence in Treasuries, but maybe just not as much as we had before.
Benz: That was certainly the case in 2008. It was really the only asset class that provided any salvation for anyone. If they had Treasuries, they at least had some of their portfolio that performed reasonably well.
I'd like to follow up with you, Sue, on the role of foreign bonds in a portfolio. That's been a big buzz at this conference. People have been talking about developing-markets bonds in particular as maybe having better characteristics right now than say developed-markets debt.
What's your take on that question and how much, if any, of your client portfolios are invested in foreign and developing-markets debt?
Stevens: I think the answer is, it's an increasing percentage. I think it is important. I think we have to be careful about that home bias that we all come with, and open our minds to the fact that places are growing faster than we are, countries around the world are growing faster than we are.
So, I'm typically targeting between 5% and 10% in foreign debt. That can be a combination of some of the larger countries, but I think there's an education, too, in recognizing the emerging countries have emerged--you are calling it "developing," I think that makes perfect sense, and I have more and more exposure to those areas.
But with it would come an education that they still can be volatile and that we need to understand it's a little bit different animal. So, the chance for growth is there, but also there's a chance for loss, and we need to factor that in, too.
Benz: One other important consideration for anyone approaching retirement or in retirement is this issue of withdrawal rates or distribution rates, and I think when people look at some of the prognostications about what people are forecasting for various asset classes, it's not very encouraging.
How should retirees think about setting their withdrawal rates so that their portfolios can sustain them over whatever period they need them to last?
Stevens: I think there are a couple of ways of looking at this. I think one thing I would want to say is, even though the mood is kind of pessimistic at the moment, we are seeing more encouraging signs out there, and there will come a day when markets turn around, and we start to see better growth.
So, what you're really doing is you're managing in the shorter period for low interest rates, for low rates of return, and I think you need to adjust your expectations to more of a 4% or 5% return on a balanced portfolio, and down the road hopefully that'll get higher.
But as far as withdrawal rates go, I think that the studies that are out there are helpful. I think there are some limitations with them in that I see a lot of clients wanting more in fixed income now, and they don't really fit the underlying assumptions that are in those studies.
So to me, that would just, common sense, mean that maybe instead of a 4% rate, you're looking at a 3% rate. I would probably go a little more on the conservative side to factor in things like taxes and other irregular cash flows that may happen over time, and to just give a little bit more of a cushion. If we get back to more of the strong wind behind our back days, then maybe those rates can go up, and they do go up as someone ages.
Benz: So you would recommend, to some extent, staying flexible to what's going on in the market. Were you pulling in withdrawals during the bear market? Were you encouraging people to take less?
Stevens: Again, great question, and I think I probably had a discussion about budgeting with almost every client that we had. We went through the exercise of rerunning retirement projections to look at things again, and in general, everything was still on track, but people I think are common sense, and they know that when things are tough, they are going to probably tighten the belt a little bit. It doesn't have to be extreme. There are studies out there that show maybe you want to pull it back 25%. I'm not sure it needs to be quite that much, but I think a 10% adjustment most people can weather fairly well, especially if it's four or five years that they have to do something a little bit different with their portfolio.
So, I think everyone took that discussion well. I think a lot of people welcomed that kind of proactive advice, and portfolios have recovered for the most part at this point, but there is going to be something that comes up next, and I think you do have to stay flexible.
Benz: It maybe is psychologically gratifying to some extent--you feel like you're doing something; you're doing your part...
Stevens: That's right.
Benz: ... Even while you have no control over what your investments are doing, if you're pulling in your belt a little, you can do your part.
Stevens: Right.
Benz: So, we have talked about withdrawal rates and approaching fixed income, but I'd think to discuss levers that retirees have if they are looking at what they've managed to save and fearing that they may come up short.
Let's talk about that Social Security lever, which I think there has been so much research recently about what an impactful addition to retirees' plans that can be. What can retirees do to maximize their benefit from the program over their lifetimes?
Stevens: This is definitely something that I think is becoming more conscious for more people--even my mother in the car the other day said, "Why don't you write something on Social Security?"
So, I think what's happening is, people are recognizing that there are more alternatives than maybe they knew about, and there is more software out there that can help people look at those decisions. We've recently started using one of them that's out there, and what we found is, especially for a spouse, they may be able to take benefits at their full retirement age based on their husband's or wife's history and delay their own benefits until 70. And that delaying until 70 seems to be really important, whether it's a single person or a married couple. They can increase the amount that they get from Social Security by up to 80%, which is huge. So, even if you are taking Social Security, potentially you can stop and reset it again later, depending on the circumstances, but I think it's worth really taking a look at that.
The other caveat, I'd say, with Social Security is just that, it's likely that going forward, for some people, they won't be able to rely on it as much, and I think that needs to be factored in, too, and that maybe as you do retirement projections, you pull back a little bit on some people that are in the highest income brackets as far as what they may expect from that. And I think Simpson-Bowles gets at, maybe there will be more means-testing, maybe the age will get raised. There will be things that have to happen to make sure that we're solvent.
Benz: So, that was a question I wanted to ask you. If I am someone in my 40s, if I come into your office and I'm asking you about whether we factor Social Security into the strategy or not, you would say maybe give it a haircut based on the fact that there might be some adjustments to the benefits as we go on.
Stevens: Yes. I think that's a fair statement, especially for somebody in their 40s. I wouldn't say it's not going to be there. I'm just going to say, I think, let's take 20% off of it right now, and see what that does. And really I think the message that will come through with that is, you may need to save more, but that's the message that should come through in most cases, anyway.
Benz: Especially when you're in your 40s, and you have time to maybe achieve something there.
So, for folks who are in there 60s or maybe already taking benefits, do you assume status quo, that you'll be able to rely on benefits as currently configured?
Stevens: I think for the most part that would be true. I think the people that may lose part of their benefits are the ones in highest asset brackets, and those are probably the people that could afford to lose a portion of their benefits. I don't think they'll lose them entirely. I think they are means-tested today in that if you're in a higher bracket, you're going to pay more income tax on it; that's a way of means-testing. So, I think there will be more of that, and for the younger people, I think something will be there, too, but it may be a completely different way of saving for the retirement day than we had.
Benz: OK. Sue it's always great to hear your insights. Thank you so much for being here.
Stevens: Thank you.
Benz: Thanks for watching. I'm Christine Benz for Morningstar.


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CYMS versus Oberon. It's the game the whole Group has been waiting for.
Green and golds' four-time premiership winning coach Mick Sullivan has been looking over his shoulder towards the mountains for the most part of 2017, highlighting Luke Branighan's Tigers as one of the sides to beat this winter.
Well, on Sunday at Wade Park Sullivan's high-flying CYMS get the chance to do just that.
Here's the team lists for every game, including Western's second round clash against Riverina in the league tag country championships. Good luck girls!
Sunday, May 21:
COWRA MAGPIES v BATHURST PANTHERS at Sid Kallas Oval, Cowra:
MAGPIES: 1 Cam Picker, 2 Nick Collett, 3 Caleb Tauwhare, 4 Zac Browne, 5 Caley Mok, 6 Ric Nobes, 7 Cam Breust, 8 Ronny Lawrence, 9 Jack Nobes, 10 Blake Tidswell, 11 Mitch Browne, 12 Toby Nobes, 13 Zac Starr; 14 Blake Duncombe, 15 Tee Tauwhare.
COACH: Rory Brien.
76' | St Pat's get on the board but it looks too late. 24-6 Magpies #Group10— Pete Guthrie (@PeteGuth) May 13, 2017
PANTHERS: 1 Jeremy Gordon, 2 Braydn Cassidy, 3 Kyle Byrnes, 4 Jye Barrow, 5 Kade Barrow, 6 Claude Gordon, 7 Doug Hewitt, 8 Brent Seager, 9 Nick Loader, 10 Todd Barrow, 11 Blake Seager, 12 Jack Siejka, 13 Jake Betts; Bench: 14 Jed Betts, 15 Kara Rotarangi, 16 Joe Bugg, 17 Leigh Monaghan.
COACH: Todd Barrow
REFEREE: Chris Redding.
RELATED: Panthers to bounce on after losing Osborne mid-season, Get around us: Magpies coach calls on Cowra to pack out Sid Kallas
One of the best prop's #Group10 has seen in the last two decades hangs up the boots @WesternRams@CountryRLhttps://t.co/Xz1NjdgRMC— Nick McGrath (@nickmcgrath4) May 16, 2017
BATHURST ST PAT'S v LITHGOW WORKIES at Bathurst Sportsground, Bathurst:
COACH: Kurt Hancock.
WORKIES: 1 Blake Sheppherd, 2 Aaron Kelso, 3 Michael Rennie, 4 Ben Picman, 5 Ben Glasson, 6 Brendon Van Veen, 7 Greg Nankervis, 8 Chris Rhodes, 9 Harry Bender, 10 Jimmy Reinhardt, 11 Jono Van Veen, 12 Corey Willmott, 13 Mitch Case; Bench: 14 Joey Noon, 15 Riley Allan, 16 Brendan West.
77 | TRY! Lithgow have gone in again, Liam Wilson burrows over in the corner. Rhodes put him away too, Jones misses. 44-24. #Group10— Matt Findlay (@MRFindlay24) May 14, 2017
COACH: Chris Rhodes.
REFEREE: Kevin Burke.
BLAYNEY BEARS v MUDGEE DRAGONS at King George Oval, Blayney:
BEARS: 1 Josh Rainbow, 2 Ryan Oborn, 3 Alex Pettit, 4 Josh William, 5 Alex Hanrahan, 6 Lochie Hobby, 7 Jesse Nixon, 8 Will Ingram, 9 Michael Toohey, 10 Travis Winanara, 11 Ricky Scott, 12 Charlie Mortimer, 13 Rakai Tuheke; Bench: 14 Dean Evans.
COACH: Will Ingram.
DRAGONS: 1 Jared Robinson, 2 Joel Bodium, 3 Lee Hicks, 4 Rota Setu, 5 Andrew Laurie, 6 Kurt Thompson, 7 Tim Condon, 8 Nick Harvey, 9 Ben Thompson, 10 Andrew Warwicker, 11 Nathan O'Brien, 12 Aiden Woods, 13 Ethan Butler.
COACH: Peter Hickman.
REFEREE: Dale Harding.
ORANGE CYMS v OBERON TIGERS at Wade Park, Orange:
CYMS: 1 Ben McAlpine, 2 Tom Satterthwaite, 3 Joe Lasagavibau, 4 Bronx Goodwin, 5 Kurt Beahan, 6 Luke Petrie, 7 Mick Sullivan, 8 Chris Bamford, 9 Ryan Griffin, 10 Cam Jones, 11 Rob Mortimer, 12 Brock McGarity, 13 Tim Mortimer; Bench: 14 Lachlan Munro.
COACH: Mick Sullivan.
TIGERS: 1 Matty Ballinger, 2 Tyler Hughes, 3 Tui Oloapu, 4 Jackson Brien, 5 Josh Rivett, 6 Blake Fitzpatrick, 7 Anton Wereta, 8 Abel Faifua-Lefaoseu, 9 Luke Carpenter, 10 Jake Dawe, 11 Mike Ingwerson, 12 Trent Rose, 13 Dave Sellars; Bench: 14 Ryan Verlindin, 15 Wade Judd, 16 Sione Fotu-Moala, 17 Cody Godden.
COACH: Luke Branighan.
REFEREE: Nathan Blanchard.
RELATED: Oberon keen to prove worth on the road: coach, Big Bamford ready to rumble against Tigers' giant pack.
ORANGE HAWKS bye.
Ladies league tag, round two, Saturday May 20.
WESTERN RAMS v RIVERINA at Ron Crowe Oval, West Wyalong:
WESTERN: 1 Sophie Stammers (Blayney Bears), 2 Heidi Regan (Cargo Blue Heelers), 3 Rebecca Ford (Orange Hawks), 4 Claire Woolmington (Bathurst Panthers), 5 Amy Hewitt (Bathurst Panthers), 6 Michelle Somers (Bathurst St Pat's), 7 Jess Hotham (Bathurst Panthers), 8 Demi Wilson (Dubbo CYMS), 9 Ella-J Harris (Orange Hawks), 10 Monique Christie-Johnston (Bathurst Panthers), 11 Emma Gallagher (Dunedoo Swans), 12 Lisa Travis (Cobar Roosters), 13 Chrissie West (Lithgow Workies); Bench: 14 Lauren Sullivan (Dunedoo Swans), 15 Rikka Lamb (Dubbo CYMS).


text:
Meridian, Miss. The city of Meridian is continuing its effort to address the issue of unkept property. A public hearing on the matter is set for next month. According to the Community Development Director for the City of Meridian, John McClure, many of the pieces of property that are creating the most concern have overgrown grass, extensive litter or numerous junk vehicles.
"Ideally, we don't want to have to do any of this," says McClure. "What we want to have happen is if the property owner, if it's a matter of unkept properties, that they come in and clean it; make it attractive so it's not a nuisance or hazard to the neighbors."
However, all too often that doesn't happen, and McClure says after attempting to contact or contacting the owner on several occasions about the problem, the property is ultimately presented to the city council for consideration.
As of this day, eight pieces of property are set to be presented to the city council for consideration in November. McClure says perhaps one of those sites will be removed from the list because allegedly it was recently cleaned.
"This is something that's important. We have budgeted to demolish well over 100; I think the number is higher than that. It could be as many as 200 that we are going to attempt to get taken care of, and that is an even more complex process to tear down a house than it is to cut the grass." says McClure.
According to McClure, the Inspection Division has more employees than any other division within the Community Development Department. He says that demonstrates how serious city officials are about addressing this problem.
In regards to the upcoming public hearing, if the city council calls for city officials to clean the pieces of property that will be discussed, the cost for that will be passed on to the property owners through taxes.
That public hearing will be held November 5th at 9:15 AM. It will take place on the third floor of city hall inside council chambers.


text:
Urologists in Philadelphia
When it comes to incontinence, impotence, male infertility, erectile dysfunciton or any other condition of the male reproductive organ, Philadelphia urologists are some of the best in the business. Whether you're in Port Richmond or Fern Rock, ZocDoc does more than just help you find a urologist in Philadelphia. You can read verified doctor reviews, make sure the physician participates in your insurance, and then book an appointment online instantly. The best part – it's free!


text:
November 30, 2006
The economic analysis of cosmetic medicine.
17 comments:
- Bruce Hayden said...
I do emphathise with these docs. The leverage on docs anymore is scary, with them having to pay for offices, a lot of staff, huge malpractice, etc., while having managed care providers slam them from the other side. The primary care providers do well, but not that well anymore, and they see the brunt of the vise that they have been put in.
I esp. emphathise with Ob/Gyn's, whose malpractice costs for delivering babies has gone trough the roof thanks to my profession, and esp. thanks to the John Edwards's of the field.
I am sure that malpractice in these areas is going to go up, thanks to lack of experience. But I would guess that most botched Botox treatments are less costly than paying for the lifetime costs of a botched delivery. First, the Botox ultimately wears off, and secondly, the patients are a lot older, and many will soon be elgible for Medicare.
So, why not have these non-cosmetic docs do the lower risk, non-invasive, beauty procedures?
- MD said...
This happens in other areas besides cosmetic medicine. Ask the cardiologists and cardiovascular surgeons. Or the pathologists and radiologists and, and... well, everyone wants in on procedures that pay well. It's completely natural, and also, partly a side effect of the way in which prices are set by the government, insurers, etc. The 'market' is weirdly and irregulary regulated; sometimes you get paid less than what it costs to produce a particular test in the lab (as one example). So, everyone is looking for that growth opportunity. You gotta pay the bills somehow.
The sooner we jump on the Netherlands' bandwagon and offer socialized healthcare the sooner those doctors can stop worrying so much about the bottom line. I'm perfectly happy helping foot the bill for it.
- Dave said...
Blame, as always, lays at the feet of lawyers, as Bruce Hayden alluded to.
Society ought to do a better job of restraining its lawyers, and lawyers ought to do a better job of understanding the economic costs of acting merely because law or precedent or whatever other contrivance says you can.
I blame the lawprofs.
There is, incidentally, a big argument going on right now among various financial regulators in the United States which argues, in essence, US capital markets have become less competitive over the past couple of years because of burdensome regulations put forth by--you guessed it--lawyers.
- Maxine Weiss said...
Bruce: The Malpractice Laws exclude 'elective' surgery.
Cosmetic Surgery is a growth (no pun) industry for deep-pockets lawsuits.
With the exception of...celebrities!
Surpising isn't it? With all the butchered, botched work out there, not a single celebrity has been willing to sue.
But, then again, celebrities don't need the money.
It's the general public who has, increasingly shown a tendency to sue on bad result.
There are thousands of Botox lawsuits winding their way through California Courts, right this minute. I don't know if it's all class-action or not.
Informed consent won't prevent lawsuits from going from going forward, either.
Not when these are elective procedures.
Peace, Maxine
- R C Dean said...
The sooner we jump on the Netherlands' bandwagon and offer socialized healthcare the sooner those doctors can stop worrying so much about the bottom line.
The docs will only stop worrying about the bottome line if we go full bore and make them all employees of the state and prohibit them from having any private practice.
Otherwise, they will still have a financial incentive to provide lucrative elective procedures, just as they do now.
I, for one, am opposed to subjecting anyone to indentured servitude, including doctors.
- Pogo said...
Despite 43 centuries of repeated attempts, government price control has never ever worked to achieve the desired ends of price stability, reduced costs, or greater availability.
Medicare and Medicaid currently offer reimbursement set below the actual expenses of providing medical care. So, not surprisingly, doctors are getting out of the business of giving away their services for free.
As a result, there are increasing shortages of certain kinds of providers, including neurosurgeons and obstetricians. In trying to force a service to be cheap, the government has instead succeeded in making it scarce.
But Botox can be had, so, if you're not having a baby, or in need of trauma surgery, and seek only a few wrinkles to be erased, you're good.
- Balfegor said...
Re: Dave:
Society ought to do a better job of restraining its lawyers,
Or, more specifically, Judges. Lawyers, after all, are obliged (for good or ill) to be "zealous" in their promotion of their clients' interests, whether that means doctors, other patients, hospitals, the body politic, etc. get hurt or not (within reason, of course). Judges are the ones who are supposed to be judicious about the whole thing.
That said, it does occur to me that lawyers are not the only problem here.
One of the great problems people (including me) point to in socialised medical system is the long waiting lines. Under our system, most of those ridiculously long lines are eliminated, but they're eliminated through market mechanisms, whereby the people who can't afford to pay simply don't bother to wait in line. And sometimes don't get the medical care at all. Which, as far as certain classes of medical care goes, is a non-ideal result -- it just transforms the idiotic lines issue into a distributional issue. Doctors do a lot for the indigent, all the same, but that's because they -- the doctors -- are there.
Popular and lucrative practices like cosmetic surgery simply distort the supply even more, because doctors go where the money is, and where the money is is not in providing care to people in desparate need of medical attention, but in catering to the whims of the wealthy. Which means that some long lines may not exist because there are simply no doctors to be seen.
A lot of this is, of course, remedied by the market. Apparently in places where doctors are needed and unavailable, like the more rural bits of the country, starting salaries for physicians can be in the mid six-figures -- someone mentioned this to me recently. It's a bit staggering, considering I come out of a medical family, and our perception is that doctors' income has been decreasing in real terms from my grandfather's day down to my father's. But perhaps it is correct -- we're out by the country's metropolitan conurbations, after all. Anyhow, that's a lot of money, even if it isn't the millions a cosmetic surgeon might be making. So market mechanisms correct for this distributional problem in some respects. But they can only correct to a certain degree -- according to poorer peoples' ability to pay for a scarce resource the supply of which is controlled by state medical boards and medical schools.
Responding to Pogo's point, it is true that having the government drive down the costs by fiat just drives people out of the industry (unless you make like the late Roman Empire, and convert them into serfs). But I think that the problem is not just that the costs are driven low, possibly below the cost of service itself (expensive machinery, facilities, maintenance, techs, nurses, etc.); it's also that the opportunity cost of providing certain sorts of medical care, in terms of abandoning the chance to practice in more lucrative areas, is going up. You see this in law too, actually.
I suppose if I were a libertarian, this wouldn't particularly bother me. But I'm not -- I'm a conservative. And it does. Not so much now, where the problem is really quite mild (there's plenty of doctors to go round, and while there's a big salary differential, it's not really that bad). But looking towards the future, I think this may be more of a problem.
The solution usually proposed -- socialised medicine, whether Hillarycare or something more moderate -- looks like a flat out disaster to me. American government and government-created corporations have not, as far as I can see, proven particularly competent at anything, whether it's state level stuff like school districts or the DMV, or federal stuff like the Post Office, Amtrak, or Fannie Mae. Or rather, they do decently, but are bloated with corruption and incompetence. So I don't think injecting even more government into the healthcare market is a solution likely to end in anything but catastrophe for millions of patients.
But I still think there is a problem here.
- Pogo said...
Well said, Balfegor.
I also approach this from the conservative rather than libertarian perspective, so these trends worry me quite a bit.
- Bruce Hayden said...
Hey, you learn something every day, that malpractice laws don't cover elective surgery, but not quite sure what that means as far as some of the other comments made here.
Does that mean that a doctor can't commit malpractice by screwing up this sort of elective surgery?
The reason I ask is that there do seem to be some negligence claims for botched procedures, and malpractice is a form of negligence.
Are you suggesting that you can't sue for a botched elective procedure under a theory of negligence? Or just not as malpractice?
As you can tell, I have never worked anywhere close to this area, and so am quite naive here.
- Bruce Hayden said...
Rereading your post, it seems that you seem to be saying that the exposure for the docs may be more, not less, because the procedures are elective - in other words, since malpractice lawsuits are not available, all the safeguards we have put into the law to protect the docs are not there, and thus, they are even more vulnerable to being sued for (possibly) screwing up.
Or am I still missing your point.
- Bruce Hayden said...
With the comment that ob's are becoming scarce, esp. in some areas, this whole trend is a bit scarier, since several of the docs profiled were ob/gyns. Apparently, they already had a nice list of female patients to which they could sell these new services. Kinda like getting wrinkles erased at the same time you are having a pelvic exam.
Actually though, the ob/gyns seemed to be moving away from delivering babies into this sort of cosmetic procedures. And I don't think that that is good - I think that delivering babies has more social utility than does freezing wrinkles.
- Rusty said...
Bruce: The Malpractice Laws exclude 'elective' surgery.
Not in any state I am familiar with. The vast majority of surgeries are technically "elective".
- Rusty said...
There are a great many financial pressures on physicians from different directions.
This is no reason for physicians to be working far out of their specialty training.
Always look for a physician who is eitehr board certifed or who is board-eligible and working in a group of board certified phsyicians.
And only use a physician for procedures in their area of residency and certification.
- Pogo said...
Re: "And only use a physician for procedures in their area of residency and certification."
That certainly applies to Oncology and Neurosurgery, but less so to other areas.
There is really no current residency and certification for giving Botox. (But just you wait!)An Ob-Gyn can learn the principles of the procedure rather quickly, and they do far more dangerous stuff in pelvic surgery, so I don't see the harm here.
Instead, you are describing how medical care is still operating under the guild system, and that this keeps costs high. It's not the major cause for expensive health care, but it contributes. Certainly, training needs to be high, but Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners actually do pretty good work, I think, even though quality of care was cited by MDs obstructing their entry.
It's a way of having a gov't.-sanctioned monopoly. If doctors had their way, giving tattoos would be considered a medical procedure.
- knoxgirl said...
The sooner we jump on the Netherlands' bandwagon and offer socialized healthcare the sooner those doctors can stop worrying so much about the bottom line.
You are not allowed to sue the government in Canada if you are a victim of medical malpractice. This has all sorts of awful, unintended consequences. Imagine a government bureaucracy with absolutely no accountability... with your life in their hands. Do not wish it.
Do some research on universal healthcare. It is not a solution to the problems we have here.
- Bruce Hayden said...
re: Malpractice laws - I was not talking from experience, but rather trying to interpret what a previous poster said.
I thought that this whole thing was somewhat speculative until my father told me yesterday about getting a flyer from an eye surgeon that we know selling this sort of cosmetic medicine.
My take is that this opthemologist had made a lot of money on laser eye surgery, but that had become a commodity business. This was a way to boost the doc's income back up a bit.
But we were laughing about how long it would take an ob/gyn we know to join in, as he had a reputation of maximizing income through, for example, weekly ultrasounds (according to his patients who were paying for this, so that they could see their babies).


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The Tradition Golf Club at Royal New Kent
Providence Forge, Va. • August 18 - 21
PROVIDENCE FORGE, Va. — On a course where players faced challenging terrain and strong winds, victory came down to the final putt as Bo Andrews, 18, of Raleigh, N.C., carded a final-round 80 for a tournament total 6-over-par 222 to hold on to his lead and win the Boys Division by one stroke Friday at the CNL Lifestyle Company Junior Championship. Annie Park, 13, of Levittown, N.Y., shot a 2-over-par 74 final round to top the Girls Division.
Conducted by the American Junior Golf Association, the CNL Lifestyle Company Junior Championship featured 99 players from 16 states and two foreign countries. The field consisted of 75 boys and 24 girls, ages 12-18. The Boys Division played The Tradition Golf Club at Royal New Kent as a par-72 at 6,983 yards while the Girls Division played the course at 6,058 yards.
Andrews, who missed the original application deadline for the tournament gained entry as an alternate, was determined to take full advantage of the opportunity.
"It's weird how it happened, but I took the whole situation as motivation and told myself, let's get in and just play," Andrews said.
It was that same positive attitude that seemed to carry him through the final round.
"Today was a big struggle. The course was playing difficult," Andrews said. "I shot six over [par] on the front side, but then I just told myself to play like I know how to because I am lucky to be out here. It's not everyday you get to be in the final group."
Rounding out the leaderboard, tied for second place at 7-over-par 223, was Robert Register of Burlington, N.C., Allan Day of Midlothian, Va., and Wilson Day of Raleigh, N.C. Brandon Squier of Advance, N.C., rounded out the top five at 9-over-par 225.
In the Girls Division, Park carded a final-round 74 — including birdies on Nos. 2 and 9 — and came from three shots back to win by two strokes.
"I thought I got fourth and then I looked up [at the scoreboard] and was like, wow I won the tournament." Park said. "I tried to keep it steady but with all the wind, today was harder than the other days."
Taking into account all of the factors that went into the day's round, Park said this win was a brutal one.
"I feel amazing," Park said.
Kelly Shon of Port Washington, N.Y., carded a 9-over-par 225 to finish in second place and Casey Ann Kennedy of Venice, Fla., carded a 10-over-par to round out the top three.
The American Junior Golf Association is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to the overall growth and development of young men and women who aspire to earn college golf scholarships through competitive junior golf.
The largest Association of its kind, the AJGA has an annual junior membership — boys and girls ages 12-18 — of more than 5,000 junior golfers from 49 states and more than 25 foreign countries.
Titleist, the AJGA's National Sponsor, has been the catalyst and driving force behind the Association's success since 1989. Rolex Watch USA, which is in its third decade of AJGA support, became the inaugural AJGA Premier Partner in 2004. In 2007, after 12 years of support, Polo Ralph Lauren became the AJGA's second Premier Partner.
AJGA alumni have risen to the top of amateur, collegiate and professional golf. More than 160 former AJGA juniors currently play on the PGA and LPGA Tours and have compiled more than 300 wins. AJGA alumni include Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk, Stewart Cink, Davis Love III, Cristie Kerr, Pat Hurst, Paula Creamer, Brittany Lincicome, Morgan Pressel and Julieta Granada.
For more information about the CNL Lifestyle Company Junior Championship, please contact National Headquarters at (770) 868-4200.