American Healthcare and All You Can Eat Buffet

Healthcare is an issue on everyone's mind these days. Our politicians are talking about it, Americans are complaining about it, Non-Americans are ridiculing it, large overweight media personalities are creating funny documentaries about it. It suffices to say that Healthcare is a topic on everyone's mind.



The issue is in how Healthcare should be managed. The ones who are on the spot, the supposed Healthcare experts generally admit there is a problem. Then you've got the sick and wounded masses who are complaining there isn't enough, that services are inadequate, that profits grossly outweigh deliverables, and that other systems are thriving while ours is dying. While spending an afternoon helping a friend get the doctors, I thought of a good analogy. Americans love a buffet!

So on one end of the spectrum you have public healthcare. These are the systems found in Canada and many parts of Europe. On the other end you have private healthcare providers. America is generally run this way, although private practices have generally died out in the last 50 years. So we have something in between, what I will call The Healthcare Buffet.

In the Healthcare Buffet, you pay one price and take all you want. American's cannot pass a deal like that up, its just too too sweet! But this is not only what Americans value, it is what they are blind to. What is the experience of a buffet like? The food is usually un-nutricious, but perhaps tasty on a very superficial level, the kind of food that makes you want to eat more and more. But you're never satisfied. Finally you stop gorging yourself when your so full you think you're going to keel over. Wow what a great deal.

You look around the buffet dining hall at the other people at the buffet. They are all overweight, the kind of people who never think about what they are putting down their gullet- they are just concerned with how much they can stuff down their throats. They are foolish careless people who are destroying their own digestive systems in the name of eating. This is the type of person that a Buffet attracts.

Meanwhile you consider your other lunch options. There was the fancy gourmet place, you hear the food is good but prices are high. Then there was the company cafeteria, food is terrible but you don't have to pay at all! Hmm... what a dilemma.

This is our Healthcare dilemma. We currently have a buffet. A buffet that attracts the most irresponsible people whose only desire is to consume as much as possible. As supplies run low, the product gets 'greasier' and cheaper. Pretty soon its not a lunch at all, its just a big stomach ache. Much of the problem lies in the problems Americans have with dealing with the sick. It is considered to be unethical to treat a sick person differently than a healthy person. Its a good ethical principle, but its not a good economic principle. It breeds a lack of responsibility. Those who pay in are either clueless healthy young people who haven't discovered any other options (like our lunchgoer above) or unhealthy people who have lost their health due to either misfortune or , even more likely, abuse.




We need to breed the type of Healthcare consumer who is responsible for their own health. Not people who use thousands of dollars in diabetes medication and then drink a gallon of Coca-Cola. Not people who smoke their entire lives and then get lung cancer. Not the type of people who call the ambulance when they stub their toe.

We do want people who are interested in preserving their health, because it is the kind of commodity that is much harder to buy back once you've sold it.

In We We Trust: The Prospect Of Local Currencies

An area that has always absolutely fascinated me is Local Currencies. Local Currencies are alternative currencies not necessarily backed by an official national government. Other terms for Local Currencies are LETS, Community Currency, Alternative Currencies, Barter Currencies, and many more. Their use is far more popular in Europe, Canada, and Australia- although there have been a number of communities here in the US who have adopted their own local monetary system, often with resounding success.

photo by by T.W. Collins

So How Does It Work?

Often people do not understand the theoretical basis of what money is. Money is simply a medium of exchange- a way to keep score amongst a group of people as various actors participate in a society in some way. Credits and Debits are made by members of a society based on their own personal criteria- they can give and take, request and spend the money as they see fit. It is important though that the money retain a level of worth to users- so in order to do this a variety of things must be employed. For one it must be relatively scarce- if I ran off endless units then there would be no value to them. Another it must be reliable- it cannot be easily forged. Yet another is liquidity- it must be easy to use, for instance if US dollars weighed 40 pounds it may pose a liquidity problem because it would be a huge chore to drag it to the marketplace to spend. So that sounds simple enough, so why is money so darned complex?

Credit: a great innovation

Money gets complex when we introduce the concept of credit. Credit is only possible in money systems where the unit of exchange does not carry a high intrinsic value. So gold pieces have a high intrinsic value, dollar bills do not (they have the same relative intrinsic value as a greeting card). So the issuer of the money (given it does not have a high intrinsic value) has an enormous power- the power to create more money and give that money to whomever they see fit. In some cases this is seen as a great advantage, because I can privilege certain parties instantly without any inhibitors whatsoever. Our modern banking system issues enormous measures of credit to various parties on a regular basis, and many people in our own country do not understand the position of privilege that these banks are in due to this special right. In this system there are haves and have-nots, all determined by fiat decree of these money masters to whom we entrust our most important medium of exchange, the US dollar. It may interest the reader that these people are (generally) not even elected by the people, they are a collection of appointees and stand-in figures from wealthy families, etc. Many, including congressman Ron Paul contend that this entire system is a farce and has been from its inception, and absolutely needs to be rooted out for our country to regain its social and economic health.

photo by Jessica Shannon

The Solution: Local Currencies

So in recognition of the problem of credit and banking and the threat it poses to open societies, many people have made suggestions to counter the effects cited above. Reinstating the gold standard is one (in other words, every dollar in circulation is exchangeable for a specific amount of gold, thus running off new money is impossible without acquiring more gold, and this acts to reduce the ability to generate credit). Another, more compelling solution is the local or community currency. In this schema, a community with common values prints their own currency or script (or in some cases implements a purely virtual schema) in limited supply. At this point they can do a number of things. They can lend them to people. They can grant them to people. It is these kind of decisions that determine the nature of the currency and the values that it represents. This is the tricky business of monetary management, if done correctly a robust medium of exchange is created and through participation and cooperation of community members, more value is created than was there initially. Remember money is a medium, it brings people together. It creates equity and cooperation. The problem doesn't lie in these principles, it is the corruption and intermediation of the money supply that is the source of problems. So a local currency stands as a possible alternatives to the corruption we have seen so much of lately in the news. Perhaps it is our only choice for the future.

A great video: "The Money Masters"...





This article has been featured in Digital Gold Currency Magazine : Community Currency Issue.

Local Currencies are a subject worth of shelves of books. But this article is a start. Here are some good links if you re interested in this subject:

The E.F. Schumacher Society

Ithaca Hours: An Early Local Currency used in Upstate NY

Yootles: A Virtual Currency System From Yahoo!

LETS: Local Exchange Trading Systems

AZ's own Gabrielle Giffords votes to increase foreign work visas

A lot of my readers are in Arizona, I thought I would do a small and brief feature of yet another chapter in the bankrupting of America's technology workers. From CIO magazine:

The Innovation Employment Act, introduced by Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, late Thursday, would increase the cap in H-1B visas from 65,000 a year to 130,000 a year. In addition, there would be no cap on H-1B applications for foreign graduate students attending U.S. colleges and studying science, technology and related fields. Currently, there's a 20,000-a-year cap on visas for graduate students in all fields.

Bill Would Double Cap on H-1B Visas

Gabrielle, how exactly is this bill serving your consituents? I note that her web site does not include any press releases concerning this bill's introduction at the time of writing. There was this item, that shows she discussed the matter several months ago, but her site tends to concentrate on more important matters like press photos and cheerleading solar energy.

Topicle: still doesn't get it.

So it seems we've got a blip at Topicle.com on today's tech PR circuit. Topicle.com is a kind of meta-search engine that allows people to assemble links to their sites and create specialized 'vertical' search engines for particular topics. For instance someone (most likely a paid employee of Topicle.com) created a search engine for Real Estate that includes a bunch of links to reportedly reputable site concerning real estate. It could be said that Topicle addresses the problems outlined in my last post: Rise Of The Linkmeisters, in that it is supposedly less susceptible to outright SEO manipulation.

But Topicle still thrives under the aegis of the collaborative Web 2.0 thesis. As I sat staring at the Topicle homepage one thought came to the fore: Why on earth would I want to spend my time assembling links for some 'vertical search engine' given that those links are public information? I could think of a few reasons:

1) I am working in this industry vertical and I want only my links to show up in a search, so... I just pick out my links and register them as the Official Search Engine of Industry Vertical X. Welcome back to the Linkmeister SEOfest.

2) I like to play around with web sites that look cool. LOL!!!!1!!

3) I'm a kid and this is a great opportunity to look important and help to put my individual POV skew on the universe.

Who did you leave out of this equation Topicle.com? The people who matter: people who are trying to create reputable and valuable sources of information- and require recompense to do so. Because your rule is that my hard earned link collection is instant public property, you rob me of all my return on my hard earned work, and you implicitly prohibit the development of a search engine vertical that actually provides some level of information that's useful. These kind of sites are creating a culture of non-accountability and zero value. If this kind of thinking proliferates, we will certainly have a web not worth surfing.

graffiti is cool. but not very informative.
(photo by Gary Taylor)

Topicle: No thanks- I'll go play with YouTube.com instead. Create a policy where I can have some damn privacy, maybe I'll come back. In the meantime I'll steer clear of Anon's Awesome Vertical Search Engine.

Topicle.com link

The Rise Of The Linkmeisters : A look at the culture of SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization and its partners in crime; SEM ( Search Engine Marketing ), etc. Are those disciplines dedicated to the art of manipulating and coercing search engines to do the bidding of paying clients. SEO was more or less an outpost of traditional marketing disciplines and is typically populated and run by 'non-technical' types. SEO never really appealed much to the technical crowd, primarily because technical people are far less enthusiastic about the prospect of a search engine being a fully-qualified source of information on a topic. So somewhere between web development and marketing lies the magical land of Search Engine Optimization. If you run a website or work in the realm of Internet development you have doubtlessly run into a 'SEO professional'. They are typically very shady and unsavory characters, statistically more so than web developers!

(photo by Antonio Manfredonio)

The discipline of SEO relies on a grab-bag of tricks and techniques and is usually divided into two areas: Black Hat and White Hat. Black hat is SEO using techniques considered nefarious, obnoxious, exploitative and the like. Google doesn't take kindly to Black Hat SEO. White Hat SEO generally plays by the rules, albiet intelligently but not altogether kindly (after all marketing is a kind of war to gain relevance). Something to keep in mind is that SEO is not a difficult or complex process, and many SEO companies totally oversell their services.

I'm not going to cover various SEO techniques here, but what I am going to consider are the broad trends. Google is the #1 thing to consider in SEO as Google gets an enormous share of search engine queries. There are a variety of things to consider as Google's engine is complex and ever evolving. 'Page Rank' is Google's way of rating the quality of your site as an information source and this rank is determined by a number of factors (mainly external links to your site from other highly ranked sources). Understanding these factors, their history and their likely evolution is the job of the Linkmeister.

As the SEO services world grows, Google will become less reliable. So in a sense, Google and the SEO world have an antagonistic relationship. Google generally doesn't acknowledge the SEO world primarily because it nullifies their entire value proposition: that the search engine is a dependable and secure source of information. Most SEO people will contest that what they do is not exploitative at all- but the fact is their role in the process of web promotion is to unnaturally distort and otherwise affect how a search engine would operate naturally. Google is constantly working to stay one step ahead of this group.

Personally, I think the world of the Linkmeisters is going to turn over drastically in coming years- its seems the world is being overrun by a particular species of SEO Expert who suffers from tunnel vision and at night dreams of high Page Rank and maximum page impressions. The real numbers behind these services show high traffic but low overall sales (which is the unspoken goal here). What must be considered is the quality of the traffic. Sure you suckered the user into clicking on your site... but are they interested in what you have to offer? People are trusting the search engine less and less- and looking to alternative sources for their information- they are moving to more personal and accountable sources of information- like JoshuaZeidner.com.

Lets face it, the experience of using the web is like having your eyeballs grabbed and pulled right out of your eye sockets and nailed to the computer screen. And the SEOs are to blame, and most likely Google agrees with me. So in that sense, Google will employ a steady program of downgrading any web source that is susceptible to SEO activity. So I'm going short on the SEOs for the time being. There are some areas that do show promise however, perhaps you may catch a glimpse of these areas in coming articles. Stay tuned dear reader!

Great Video re. Net Neutrality, must watch!

a very provocative and poignant video about a very serious issue affecting us all: Net Neutrality. If the telcos get their way, you won't be reading great blogs like JoshuaZeidner.com anymore. They would put you on a strict diet of Gigaom.com for the rest of your life. And that would be a serious tragedy. I caught this video virus from Isen.com.



sorry folks, looks like that video link broke for some reason. it's fixed now.

A Discerning Look At Microsoft Singularity License

Opening up my newsreader today and being exposed to cacophony of news bits about Microsoft's Singularity platform, and seeing all the likely PR mouthpieces like Om Malik blogging about it, I decided to take a closer look at their license agreement.

At this point in time I accept the authority of the Open Source Initiative for approval of various open source licenses. Let it be known that two licenses of Microsoft origin have been approved by the OSI (Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) ). Microsoft's Singularity project does not fall under the licensing schema of either of these approved licenses. For all intents and purposes, this project is not approved open source by any credible officiating body.

A very quick look at the Microsoft Research License Agreement.

a few things stand out:

"You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes."

"You may create derivative works of the Software source code and distribute the modified Software solely for non-commercial academic purposes"

In other words, you can spend days or weeks analyzing and hacking this code, but if you try to turn it into a commercial enterprise, you have to buy a license. What kind of Open Source is that? Who wants to learn a platform that isn't free? Who wants to invest time learning APIs, etc. for an inferior, proprietary product?

Verdict: Yet another Marketing Ploy from Redmond. Hackers beware!

Microsoft, why have you forsaken me?
( click here for CC photo attribution )

note to readers : looks like we have a Wikipedia PR war!

Ohloh + Om Malik starts an Open Source Blog

Malik is on the right holding a 'mobile device' the person on the left appears to have his startup swerve on.

Recently Om Malik decided to make his mark (or mark his territory) on the Open Source world by launching his new blog Ostatic, with typical Silly Con Valley fanfare.



What do I expect from this blog? the same payola pay-per-post droning I expect from all the other pure crap Om Malik produces. If there's money and the internet involved you can be damn sure that Om Malik will claim to be an expert in it. I assume that Malik does what other blogs like TechCrunch.com do, take PR payouts from various Silicon Valley chieftans and then act as if they're excited about technology X.

I promised a friend that every time I say something negative about something I have to say something positive about something else :) . So I'd like to direct my readers to a very cool site called OhLoh. Ohloh is a social network for OSS developers that has excellent reporting and communcations facilities, it also has some nice embeddable widgets you can drop into your blog or website that gives accurate stats about OSS projects. If you're into OSS, Ohloh is worth a look.

link: Ohloh.com

Night of the Living Marketing Blogs: a closer look at Web x.0

The word is out on the street: Web 2.0 is the next big thing! or is it Web 3.0? Needless to say, Web something point 'oh' is up to bat and sure to hit a home run.



In the past few years weve seen the proliferation of what is called in the common parlance 'Web 2.0' sites, that is a somewhat ambiguous catch phrase for web sites that rely on user participation for content. The business model works thusly: build the infrastructure, the happy end users arrive, and sell ads to your hearts content. YouTube and many more loosely follow this model.

At first it seemed like a great idea. Build superior functionality and you're in the money, 'people will actually add content for you!' so said the experts... and sure enough the rabbits reproduced like crazy and now weve got Web 2.0 sites that cater to just about everything. "Welcome to the New Hampshire Social Network of Kundalini Yoga Practitioners" : please enter in all your friends and relatives names at once!

So what relevance does this have for the average JoshuaZeidner.com reader? The fact is that we currently have an enormous bloat of these 'media service' companies, few of which offer any substantial service to the average user. Their user agreements include all sorts of thorny offensive legal tactics that the average Joe completely overlooks such as signing away all copyright to all submitted works. Right now what were seeing is a bit more sophistication in attitudes towards these kinds of sites, for instance Wikipedia. So the creamier of the crop of potential submitters are migrating away from these 'user communties' and we're left with the passive end users who never really submit anything of value beyond videos of their cat chasing a vacuum cleaner. The inevitable moral to that story is that all interesting content will wash out by the next lunar cycle. In this case content will be taking precedence over medium for the time being. As a blogger or content producer of some kind, its a sellers market.

So, back to the title of this post: Night of the Living Marketing Blogs. Anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time on the net has no doubt noticed the plethora of blogs and social networks dedicated to, you guessed it: blogging and social networking! And this says a few things, most importantly that these technologies are beneficial to the owners, not the users. These marketing people are giddy about social networking not because its going to save humanity, but the potential to gain marketing information on these social networks is unprecendented. That is of course, if everyone plays along nicely. And given the short history of Wikipedia I would wager that this is not the way things will progress. So lets just say: thats a big 'if'. The kind of 'if' that bespeaks of every utopian project in human history.



So here, standing just west of Tower of Babel 2.0 a new discipline is likely to arise: Web 2.0 analysis. Most of what is being said about these brands of sites amounts to boosterism and stock churning (ala TechCrunch.com). What is lacking is real hard-core analysis of these sites for people who are curious about them and perhaps rely on them for their business. Stay tuned for a closer look at popular Web 2.0 sites aimed at power users.

Wikipedia Watch

Facebook Watch

Web 2.0, do the Numbers Add Up?

a Blog Post: Thoughts on Measuring User Generated Content