critical thinking

If you didn’t see The Daily Show last night (Monday, Aug 10), please remedy with a quickness. His panel on health reform was nothing short of brilliant.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Healther Skelter – Obama Death Panel Debate
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Yes, this is getting ridiculous.

It’s like the longer the debate about health care in the States goes on, the less people have any idea what they’re talking about. And it worries me how many people maintain their belief that Fox has anything to do with news. Especially when those same people question the validity of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as valid counterpoint. At least Jon & Stephen don’t make stuff up. They remain the only ones asking the hard questions.

Look, children, the only people with anything to lose under the new government regulated health system are the insurance companies that have been vampires on the lifeblood of Americans since Day One. And the crooked quacks in collusion. You’d think this would be a no brainer.

Isn’t this the same nation that wanted to lynch Wall Street for the exact same thing? Exact, mind you?

Is anyone listening to themselves?

Don’t you have to ask yourself what Obama has to gain by socializing health care? At least when Bush launched his War on Terror in Iraq (of all places) he was creating mountains of money for his family’s associates. Simple greed and a casual disregard for soldiers lives. But Obama? What does he get?

How about being lauded for the next hundred years as a revolutionary for The People? How about the man who finally brought a measure of protection for The People against exploitive corporations?

What this debate does, more than anything else, is reveal how easily the mob is swayed by the media. How willing the mob is to swallow their sound bites and avoid actual information at all cost. Pure laziness and dumb aggression. The facts are out there in abundance for anyone willing to open their eyes.

Losing your choice of provider? Communal standards? Wait times? Euthanasia? Death Panels? Death Panels? Are you for real? How ludicrous does the right wing have to get before you question anything? Doesn’t Palin deserve to be that line? Never let the facts get in the way of a good lynching? Is that the idea?

Canada is being closely examined by the American media as a model of responsible socialized health care. Critics point to “wait times”. Tragically uninformed American citizens think this means “two hours” because their doctor overbooks the three days a week he actually shows up. What it actually means is that sometimes people in Canada have to wait days or weeks or even months for non-emergency treatment for non-life threatening conditions. This is because there is a shortage of medical personnel in Canada. This is because they stay for the medical training, then hustle down to the States where they can work half as hard for twice the money. Facts.

Yet despite the shortage of personnel, Canadians live longer. Hmm.

That actually has less to do with manpower than it does with environment and lifestyle choices. But anyway…

Obama has said that if you are happy with your provider you do not have to change anything. What he doesn’t say is that if you can get the exact same coverage for nothing then you’d be a little silly to continue paying through the nose for it. Right?

Obama has said, and really it’s nothing but pointing out the obvious, that socialized health care means more money in American pockets. I say obvious because just look at all the money that’s no longer going to be vanishing into insurance companies, never to be seen again. Duh.

I don’t know if this health care reform will mean a tax hike for Americans. I haven’t read the bill and I don’t recall specifically what Obama has said on the matter. I’m willing to bet it doesn’t, I’m playing safe and not claiming anything I don’t know as fact. But let’s say the bill does mean an exorbitant, outlandish and completely impossible gouge of 1% per year across the board. Wouldn’t that be a pittance for the sake of every man, woman and child having access to world-class American health care? Wouldn’t THAT make America The Greatest Country In The World ™? Then we’d just have to tackle those education levels.

And how about those insurance companies? Insurance companies are businesses for profit. Their model is built around paying out as little as possible of the most they can charge. That’s business. So you tell me… how does it make any kind of sense at all to keep giving all your money to them, when you could give it to the government, which we all know is notorious for spending like mad?

But let’s look at this issue realistically– what Obama is proposing is the same thing he proposed with Wall Street. Responsible regulation in the interest of protecting the American people and economy. Keep American money in American pockets. Let American investment be honest, and free from fraud. In this case, Americans also get the added bonus of accessible health care for all.

As I said, it seems like a no brainer.

But what do I know. Silly Canadian.

Considering that, effectively, you could push one button and normalize volume across the board, one has to assume you punch up the volume during the ads just to piss me off. Gotta make sure we can hear your message while we’re doing anything we’ve been putting off during the brief intermission between ad breaks, right?

But common sense says that if you crank the volume during the ad breaks, your audience will just hit mute. I know I do. You think we will not do this because we don’t want to miss our show when it comes back, or we will end up paying even closer attention than we would otherwise, but the fact is we just miss the first few seconds and hate you even more.

My point is that, rather than placating your advertisers, you are merely digging yourself deeper. A short-term solution that was dead at birth.

You need to be far, far more acutely aware that you are competing with Tivo & the Interwebs. We don’t have to watch your ads at all.

So play nice. Or we will stop showing up at game time.

The ISP business in North America is all kinds of shady. They half-ass the upgrades and paint all sorts of floweriness in advertising and generally piss all over us. The fact is that they are not meeting demand, and really hope we won’t notice.

So when they offer us super-mega fast connection speeds, all it takes is a swing through Speedtest.net to see that a bronzed piece of shit is still a piece of shit. My biggest complaint is that when Shaw advertises up to 25 Mbps downstream, they aren’t mentioning that to get that speed you would have to be the only one using your shared pipe, which is normally shared by seventy-five or so other connections. I rarely see more than 800 kbps on my 7.5 Mbps line. I’ve certainly never seen 2 Mbps. Telus lines are not shared the same way, but they still suffer from a lot of noise that slows you down anyway.

If I had a lot of scratch, I would contract with cities and municipalities to build the infrastructure for a fibre network and lease it to the ISPs. And yes, with all that bandwidth, I would work with cities to offer free wi-fi (at a throttled rate to protect the nicely co-operative ISPs).

Fibre is the future (and has been since 1986), and they should stop fucking around.