Conceptually, insurance is basically splitting up a risk cost into small, regular payments over a period of time. So let's say your house would cost you $120,000 to replace if it burned down and there's a 100% likelihood that it will burn down once every 10 years. Your insurance company would be justified in charging you $1000 a month in insurance, plus some sort of fee for saving you from the inconvenience of paying out $120,000 every 10 years. Also, it's hard to budget for $120,000 sometime in the next 10 years, whereas it's very easy to budget for $1000 a month.

Now, let's take it one step further and say that there's a 100% risk that one and only one $120,000 house on your block will burn down in the next 10 years and you have 9 neighbors plus yourself, all with an equal likelihood of losing a house (and nobody can move away.) Then, each of you only has to pay $100 a month plus fees because the insurance company has amortized its risk across multiple houses.

Obviously, health insurance is a good deal more complicated than this in terms of the actual numbers... but let's take mobile homes because they're a lot like individual health. Let's say instead of 10 houses, there were 10 mobile homes, each in various degrees of age and disrepair. Now, let's say that I have the newest $120,000 mobile home and it is a sweet mobile home (for $120,000 it had better be) with a state-of-the-art sprinkler system and 2 nasty dogs to run off would-be burglars. Because of that and because I own my home free and clear, I opt not to have home-owner's insurance. So, now 9 owners have to split the $120,000 ... and that makes an ugly number that is more that $100 a month.

But it gets worse... because Bob has a 25-year-old mobile home with exposed aluminum wiring and a gasoline-soaked cloth roof. His house is pretty likely to burn, so he pays $1000 a month. In fact, Bob's house is so crappy that when it burns, the insurance company refuses to pay on account that Bob claimed he had a no-gasoline-soaked-roof house on the application form when he signed up for his insurance. So he gets nothing and is still out all of his premiums or, if he's lucky, they send his premiums back.

So, Bob buys another house, and this time he complains to his Congressman that it's not fair that he pays a higher premium just because he owns a crappy house and the Congressman is up for re-election in a "mostly gas-soaked rag house" district, so he agrees. He passes legislation that makes everyone pay equally for insurance, regardless of if his or her house has a roof made of gas-soaked rags. So now all of Bob's neighbors hate Bob because the insurance company isn't going to just eat the cost of replacing Bob's house and now everyone pays $900 a month. Yeah, the cost for Bob and his ilk went down $100 a month... but all of the people in good mobile homes (and even good houses) now pay a lot more.

So now everyone on my block starts looking at my sweet mobile home and realizing that I pay $0 a month and am saving all of that money to move out of my mobile home and into a nice house. And they're thinking, "If we could get him to pay insurance, all of us would pay a WHOLE LOT LESS." And they're right... but I don't want to pay for insurance. Unfortunately, they have the Congressman on their side and the Insurance Company promises to charge them all $400 less a month if they can get every owner of a sweet mobile home like mine (or an actual house) to pay in.

But here's where it gets interesting for the benefits of buying insurance. Because Flammable House Insurance Company has a policy with every house in the state, it's in their best interest to get the cheapest rates on gasoline-soaked rag roof trailer homes. So instead of a replacement cost of $120,000 , they can get me that trailer at $80,000 brand new. So in that sense, it makes more sense for me to go to FHIC, assuming I'm forced to buy insurance.

And the best part of all of this is that I'm just scratching the surface of the notion of insurance... there's still the jerks who manage to make it so I can only buy their brand of windows for my gasoline-soaked rag roof trailer home and the people that sue the builders of gasoline-soaked rag roof trailer homes and drive the cost of a new trailer home by an unknowable amount. Oh, and then there are the builders themselves who are required to build a house for anyone, even if they can't afford it and then get the money back from the government. The list goes on.

And the problem is that the system is complicated. And everyone on all sides is convinced of his or her correctness. The one side doesn't like seeing people living on the streets and the other side is convinced that the government can't afford all of these houses and screw the people living on the street. Me? I just want people to have an honest and straightforward conversation. But these are politicians and talking heads and NONE of them wants that.

Viagra spam: I have to say that this is by far and away the most pervasive. If I didn't know better, I would have to say that I think that the spammers are trying to insult me. Or perhaps my (admittedly paltry) readership. I don't know... all I know is that the sheer quantity of Viagra spam that I've been getting in comments would be enough to service the entire state of Arizona. My only conclusion is that the targeting algorithm that these spammers use is a little bit crappy.

Gold-buyer spam: I must not have ever gone off on this particular disease for the worthless crock of crap that it is. Seriously... it's like an online pawn-shop without the having to drive through the seedier parts of town to visit it. Well, that last bit isn't exactly true, but it's at least the seedier parts of the internet. And hey, what you do with your spare time on the internet is your business and I don't even WANT to know.

Actually... there's probably a great number of additional categories, but I'm tired of writing about spam and not altogether enthused at encouraging additional groups like porn spammers, random drug spammers and ... well, I take that back. There's one more group I'd like to hit on:

Mail-Order Bride Spammers: Yes, that's right. Apparently my readership is all too short on female companionship but stacked with money and a desire to seek love beyond the America's shores. So our plan is to take those readers with stacks of money and no shot at love in America and purchase passage for a woman from a more exotic locale. At least, I think Russia still qualifies as exotic... I'm not so sure anymore. That said, I don't think that we're discriminating between Russia and, say, Nigeria or Zimbabwe. After all, it's not "Russian Mail-Order Brides" in this modern era. That would be too provincial.

What is remarkable is that the banks aren't really the ones at fault for the shortfall in repaying TARP. This isn't to say that the banks aren't at fault for any one of a dozen different reason or that they aren't scum or that they aren't setting themselves and us up for a repeat performance of the "Great Recession" again in the near future, but let's be fair: they DID repay the money that we loaned their worthless, thieving, child-molesting, murderous, incestuous, lying selves.

And yet, it appears that of the 5 companies that are unlikely to repay TARP: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG, Chrysler and GM ... only ONE of those is on the hook for this tax. Granted, AIG is one of the biggest sources of the financial collapse, but why are we letting Freddie, Fannie, Chrysler and GM off of the hook? It's not like any of these four companies was exactly acting with fiscal responsibility or good business acumen.

Oh... wait, Freddie and Fannie are actually popular pseudo-governmental entities staffed by lots of former political activists, appointees and partisan hacks. In fact, Congress seems pathologically incapable of dealing responsibly with Freddie and Fannie... perhaps it has something to do with all of the bribes.

And really, this is giving unwarranted forgiveness, mercy and kindness to the US Automotive Sector. Yes, the same companies who have been selling us substandard cars at exorbitant prices and ruining their business. Yeah, the same Chrysler and GM that you and I bailed out. We definitely CAN'T tax those guys. I would make a cheap crack about Democrats, US Car Companies, the UAW and Michigan... but everyone knows that I'm morally above cheap cracks.

Of course, this is where the bankers start foaming at the mouth about fairness. And I can't say that I disagree with that at some point or another... it DOES seem admittedly stupid that the same sector that is being encouraged to loan more money is supposed to be doing so while paying more taxes and divert that money from the bonuses that it pays its managers who make it the money rather than diverting it from its customers. Yeah, those same customers that it's already screwing over with wanton abandon. I guess my point is that I have no particular issue with screwing the banks over right back, but I think we're missing out on the pleasures of screwing over GM, Chrysler, Freddie and Fannie.

And we're idiots if we think that in a pissing contest between Congressmen and Banking CEOs that the Congressmen could ever hope to win.

At the beginning of the search engines' relationship with China, there was quite an outcry amongst all of the various US News Agencies, Congressional Representatives. Interestingly, Google and others responded with a request that Congress give them some sort of legal guidance in how to deal with China beyond the prevailing traditional response that a company typically obeys the laws of the various countries that it operates in. No such guidance was ever given.

And now we have this: Google has declared a new approach on China. Apparently Google has decided that China's bad behavior as a government has descended to the level that it can no longer conscion providing services to China and in China. Reading between the lines in Google's statement, it would appear that not only is China using Google to abuse its populace, it is actually surreptitiously sanctioning efforts to compromise Google in order to further its own war on human rights. So, instead of compliance with the desires of China, it will further its own stated agenda of "Do No Evil", even if that act of non-censorship causes it to no longer be able to do business in China.

And even here, it looks like Google is afraid for its own employees, especially as its PR people write, "We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today."

Google realizes that China may very well go above and beyond shutting down Google.cn and actually go after Google's own Chinese employees. And yet, at the same time, it is very well possible that the only currency that a even multi-national corporation like Google can have to impact change in China is shaming them on an international stage.

So I'm not sure where this takes us exactly, but it should be VERY interesting.

An aside: I spent a summer as a temp working for 3 or 4 different companies for different lengths of time. It sucked. The full-time employees are bitter because you take time to train, you're going to be gone soon, and they KNOW that the company is paying more for you than they're making. Also, most temps suck at their jobs.

If you're a temp, I want you to reread that last paragraph and bear in mind that I was a temp and I honestly believe I was pretty damned good at conducting telephone surveys, taking complaints over the phone, contacting seasonal construction workers and whatever other crap jobs I had to do. But not only was I the exception, I was a college student who was under no illusions that this was going to be anything more than a 14-week diversion from school. And even then, I only ended up with about 6 or 7 weeks of low-paying, dismal, menial, degrading work.

Of course, the temporary or contract-to-hire employee for a degree and/or job experience required gig is a completely different kettle of fish. For one thing, there is a certain group of them who do it because the money is good, the responsibility is minimal and the scenery changes every 12-24 months. And for another thing, a simple desire to get paid isn't in and of itself enough to get a job.

Most of the time.

See, big companies have staffing shortages. Precisely because they have these god-awful hiring processes where 2 HR people, 5 managers, 2 upper-level managers, a lawyer and an accountant have to sign off on each hire and you can't use the same 5 managers in any 7-year period. And when some VP of Something Minimally Useful finally got tired of his management chain kvetching about not having any employees and instituted a shortcut of being able to hire temps/contractors. Of course, since they're temporary, HR decided that the process can't cost as much as it does for a Real Employee, so now temps and contractors are interviewed by the person closest to the interested manager's bathroom at the time that the contractor calls. This is, of course, more often than not, the custodial staff or the guy who hides out in the bathroom to avoid work.

And to make things worse, while there IS this cadre of skilled contractors, anyone not interested in spending half of his or her life finding the next gig frequently decides to try to retire from the contracting gig into full-time employment. And what does that mean? It means that during economic downturns, a disproportionate number of good contractors aren't looking for work.

Even more interesting is if you have a company in, say, the hills of West Virginia or some equally remote place that is a long drive from any respectable center of industry, technology or whatever the hell it is that your company does. Because if you were a contract employee who had to find a new job every year or two, would you rather live in an area where there were lots of jobs and you didn't have to move every year or two or would you rather move to the West Virginia when you know that you're going to have to move again in a year? Unless of course, you REALLY wanted to live in West Virginia for a year... in which case, you're dumber than you look.

So yeah, I'm trying to keep my good karma... but I'm pretty sure that I'm losing.

HAPPY DANCE!!

And really, I suspect that if you drilled down to it, I would probably loathe most, if not all of the members of the US Congress for being total shills to some organization. Which is, of course, why I enjoy watching Jon Stewart skewer members of Congress for their utter corruption.

At the same time, who is really to blame if not the people who elected them? Which is another way of saying that the American people get exactly who they deserve to govern them. I was reminded of this again the other morning when I was listening to a thoughtful piece on Afghanistan on NPR and then they switched over to something about Tiger Woods. Yes, Tiger Woods... ON NPR ... and no, they weren't talking about anything newsworthy.

And of course, let's not even mention Fox News, whose entire journalistic credibility could be balanced upon the tip of a needle, whilst still leaving room for a rather healthy angel conga line.

I guess my point is that I'm rather disgusted with the state of US news coverage these days and every time the healthcare reform bill comes back up, I want to stab myself in the ears. Because really, are we even talking about the issue of healthcare reform anymore or are we simply generating noise?

And while I'm at the subject of nonsense, is the Republican party helping by all but guaranteeing a filibuster? Of course not. I suppose it could be argued that they're giving moderate Democrats more traction ... but they're also giving liberal Democrats far more sway than if the party of "limited government" and "fiscal responsibility" (*cough* *cough* bull#$@&) would actually engage the issue of healthcare reform. But that party is far too scared that Fox News would accuse them of buddying up with the Democrats. And so we have an admittedly-broken healthcare system that will be "fixed" almost exclusively by more government because the Republicans refuse to be a part of the solution. And the American public will mouth-breathe their way through this and somehow, my broke self will end up paying for it.

Maybe Toad is right... maybe we SHOULD hate all of the involved parties.

For instance... all sorts of murders, serial killings and a variety of other social ills can be lain at the feet of maladjusted 20-something WASP males, and yet I am not given over to any sort of prejudice as a result of that. In fact, this anomaly has been noted, especially by comedians of color who are wont to point out that it generally isn't the African-American and Hispanic-American minorities who snap and shoot up a room full of people, bomb a federal building, or even gain notoriety for being a serial killer. By and large, it's stressed-out, crazy, white dudes.

I'm sure that there's an analysis to be done as far as the treatment of a minority population by a majority population here, and yet, in addition to this, there are certain groups (members of the cloth, for instance) who are equally stigmatized. Obviously, this doesn't negate the fact that American society seems to leap at the opportunity to label groups of people who it doesn't quite understand by means of one or two notable actors, but I don't think that's the whole story. After all, the Virginia Tech killings did not seem to generate a notable reaction to the Asian-American community... but this isn't to say that there have not been abuses of that community.

The only thing that I can really point to is that groups of people from whom there are no representative faces in mainstream American culture tend to be the most susceptible to association with individual bad actors. For instance, the Muslim community has no real presence in mainstream American media and so individual incidents tend to drive the collective consciousness much faster than, say, the Oklahoma City Bombing.

Likewise, televangelists tend to get a much easier treatment than members of the Catholic clergy because, while there have been a number of tarnished individuals in the televangelist community, there are also a large number who are in our collective view. The clergy, on the other hand, is absent except for abuse cases and rare appearances of the pope (who, I might add, is far enough removed from America most of the time so as not to figure in with the typical American assessment of those of the cloth.)

So, in the end, where does this leave us? Frankly, with the notion that Americans are far too stupid to be left to understand groups of people who are ideologically different from themselves. Left with no representative for Islam than the 9/11 hijackers, the typical American will automatically assume that all Muslims are out to get us. Likewise with ethnic minorities, religious minorities and any group of people not regularly in the public view. And thus the argument must be made that the average American will create a crude caricature of any group with whose membership he or she does not regularly meet. And even that will become a caricature if the interacted group is not sufficiently diverse as to introduce the foreign notion that the set is not knowable by any small subset.

Because up until this point, the grand plan has been to create this weak mandate that everyone buy insurance along with some sort of plan that the government will subsidize certain people up to a certain extent of poverty. I really don't understand what the difference is between doing that and taking Medicare, Medicaid, Government Employee Health Insurance and VA Medical and welding it into a single negotiating bloc and then offering insurance at-cost to whomever else wants it.

Because, honestly, if it sucks, people will buy insurance elsewhere.

Yes, I know, this puts the already-monopolistic health insurers at a disadvantage because they will have to savage their margins. Let's assume for a minute that I don't care about that (because, really, does anyone feel bad for insurers?) and ask if there's an actual downside here in terms of the tax-payers.

Let's reiterate: I don't want to spend a dime more on subsidies than is already being spent, but we can keep spending all of the money we're currently spending. All we're doing here is offering to let people buy into the negotiating bloc of the already-massive US Government Health Insurance without adding to the amount that the Government is spending.

Is there a hidden evil here that I'm just not seeing?

Here are the two Wired articles that got the whole thing started:

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All
How to Win an Argument About Vaccines

Some more digging around found me a slightly more even-handed article in Newsweek featuring an interview with Paul Offit (mentioned in one of the Wired articles):

Stomping Through A Medical Minefield

In going through this, there was a tangent in the conversation that went towards flu vaccines with an interesting analysis of how the numbers that justify them seem slightly inflated. This article is good stuff but is really tangentially-related at best to the discussion of infant immunizations:

Does The Vaccine Matter?

Let me just say, to those who are on the other side of this issue, I would really like to see some cogent and well-documented, well-researched argumentation. The problem is that I can't find it. I'm not sure if it's not there because the research is expensive and hasn't been done yet or simply because my Google-fu can't slice through 70,000 autism/anti-vaccination conspiracy whacko websites (and, make no bones about it, Jenny McCarthy is a freaking whacko), but if anyone can find me any well-researched argumentation, I'm all-ears.

In the mean-time, I'll toss you this fascinating Wikipedia article in closing. Of particular interest are the half-dozen cases in the last 150 or so years since widespread vaccination where isolated communities stopped vaccinating and the results. And before you start mouthing about Wikipedia, note that all of this article's really interesting and salient points are well-documented with outside reference materials. In fact, I encourage you to look over this article's reference section... it's a real treasure-trove of myth-debunking links.

Vaccine Controversy*

*note: I hard-linked to the Wikipedia entry as posted at time of my posting this so that you don't get there to see "penis" scrawled all over the page and question my sanity. This is STILL Wikipedia after all.

I hear that expression from time to time, mostly from engineers... especially from burned-out engineers to whom things are looking exceptionally dim. The first time I heard it, it took me aback a little bit, though I'm sure by now I've said it myself or something pretty similar at least once to describe a project that I was on when I was feeling especially in need of a vacation.

I was talking with a manager about this sort of thing the other day when one of those overly-simplistic statements joined up with this one in my head. We were talking and he said, "You know, you engineers tend to lose sight of the fact that nobody on this project really wants it to fail." And I guess it took me aback because, with the exception of some really rare Machiavellian schemers, I can't think of a single reason why someone working on a project and investing time, effort and reputation in it would ever want the project to fail.

Of course, that doesn't mean that people will agree on how to make it succeed or even that someone won't make a decision even with the knowledge that certain experts predict that such a decision will lead to failure. But the point is, generally, everyone wants a successful outcome. Also, the road to hell is paved in good intentions.

Of course, nowhere is this more evident than in lowest-cost bidding. Imagine, if you will, that you're trying to solicit bids for the cheapest airplane. Company 1 quotes you a price of $50,000. Company 2 says "oh yeah, well if we make the airplane so that it's exempt from FAA regulations, we could do it for $25,000." Company 1 returns and says, "oh, if those are the rules, we could also go back to fly-by-wire and use some older avionics and get you down to $20,000." And before you know it, your airplane is a bunch of canvas and some bamboo with a cement-mixer motor tied on there with prop attached to the front.

Obviously, there are things that a customer won't accept, but you've just put together a bid to do the bare minimum that someone figured could be done. And the someone who bid it probably just told procurement that they could find parts that don't yet exist for cheaper than the ones that currently do, told the designers to cut their costs in half and told the engineers that historical indices are crap. The guy who bid this didn't want to bid a crappy product, but he wanted to win the contract and in so doing, set himself and his people up for failure.

I'm not quite sure what you do about a scenario like this. Obviously, if you're the buyer, you have to be very careful about not creating scenarios where you end up with MacGuyver's Getaway Plane instead of a 747. As to what to do if you've been set up for failure, I've asked older and wiser heads and availed no answers. Any thoughts?

Obviously, members of the Committee would refuse to give scholarships to anyone who would willingly answer the question "What is your favorite color and how does it make you feel?" And beyond the sheer entertainment value of seeking out the next generation of subversives and intellectual malcontents, we get to give money to further the educations of the most remarkable of students.

Of course, there IS the small issue of money. But that, my friends, is where patience and compound interest comes in.

I've availed myself of some small calculations and if we assume (for ease of simplicity) that there are 10 of us, each submits $100 a year and we invest in growth-stock mutual funds with an annual 12% rate of return, 10 years will get our little fund up to $15,000. Obviously we'd need more money than that, but I'd like to think that at some point along the way, members could give more money and perhaps we could recruit some more affluent donors. Also, if we could get this organization some proper tax-exempt status, we could avail ourselves of the possibility of making a nice proper tax shelter for Wilson and Martinez when they both strike it rich as authors.

Honestly, I think the question you have to ask yourselves is "Why wouldn't we want our own scholarship contest?"

It's not healthy.

By way of example, I would point you to a conversation I had recently along with several of my friends with an individual who honestly believes in the Birther Conspiracy. What's more, it is this individual's sincere belief that the news media is completely untrustworthy, except for certain stalwarts of Rupert Murdoch's empire, and these are 100% reliable insofar as they agree with the beliefs that this individual espouses.

How does one get to such an insular "Us vs. Them" mentality where one is able to so easily and readily demonize one's opposition and where straw men and the opposition are one and the same? It's easy if you've never been friends with the opposition.

Same thing goes for Us vs. Those Gay People. I would place a sizeable wager that the vast majority of the Religious Right has never even met a gay persion, much less befriended one and had a long-standing interpersonal relationship. Likewise for just about any other subset of the Left.

I'm not saying this to excuse the Left... far from it. And people like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher are every bit as insiduous on the Left as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are on the right.

The point is this: even the most caricatured individual on the opposite side of the aisle has a mother who probably loved him/her and probably several other people who concur. And by meeting with that someone, breaking bread and honestly getting to know him or her as a person rather than as a set of despised values, one loses the ability to demonize. Further, without the insane screaming and caricature that comes with demonizing the other side, one gets the advantage of a rational discourse with the opposing side and can (hopefully) avoid straw men altogether.

And perhaps even more radically, an important life lesson to me from someone on the other side is this: if you can reduce a complex or long-held disagreement between sizeable parties to a cut-and-dry solution that doesn't appear to brook any rational argument, you don't understand the opposition's viewpoint at all.

Before I do that though, I have a question that I think we need to answer: Is there such a thing as a "Right to Heathcare" ? I'm not sure that I have a right answer for this one.
There are two camps on this. It's pretty hard to advocate for the group that says 'no' on the basis that it doesn't sound very compassionate. At the same time, this sounds like the group that's doing the most thinking on the subject and realizing that there's such a thing as scarcity of resources and the fact that it's impossible to provide every existing healthcare option to every patient. Also, this group tends to be strict Constitutional literalists who don't see "the right to healthcare" written anywhere in the Constitution as guaranteed and thus, there's no such thing.

Before defending its logical basis, the second group would like to point out that a "right to healthcare" is something of a Universal Moral Imperative, regardless of how much it costs. That said, on the logical and Constitutional front, they would like to point out that when the Declaration of Independence advocates for "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness", it's pretty tricky to live or pursue happiness if you're dying of cancer. Also, for those of you who didn't have the benefit of memorizing the preamble to the Constitution, I'd like to print it out for you and see what jumps out. I'll even toss you a bone and highlight the relevant section

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Here's the problem: nobody on the anti-reform side of this is ever going to come out and say "guys, the problem here is scarcity... we can't afford to give healthcare to everyone." Sure, they'll say things approaching that and things in that general neighborhood... but there's no way to say "stop, we can't do that" without sounding like an asshole. That's just the way it is.

On the other side, you have the pro-reform side, and they're never going to explain how exactly we're going to pay for this. Because the other side is right... scarcity is a problem and you can't give everyone the option of all non-elective medicine without it costing you something. The numbers I've been hearing price it at somewhere around $1 trillion over 10 years for a really cut-rate plan and some estimates north of $2 trillion for the plans currently on the table.

And that's the part about this debate that really drives me ape. Because neither side will admit to the inherent issues of their debate, people are arguing past each other. And then Sarah Palin showed up along with the lynch mobs.

Actually, let's forget Sarah Palin for a minute* and focus on these morons screaming at the "town hall meetings"? Seriously? Is this the best we can do for a reasoned response? And the people supporting this nonsense want me to vote for them next year? Let's just take a pass on "un-American" as far as the screaming at politicians in town-hall meetings goes (though, really, I expect better from the 'Party of Lincoln') and go straight to "mouth-breathing, rabid moron with an IQ surpassed by some of the goo growing on the floor of a public rest-room." Have I sufficiently communicated my contempt? Good.

The thing that infuriates me the most about this whole "debate" is that the only people interested in having an honest and forthright discussion about health-care are the academics. The "loyal opposition" is far too busy talking about "pulling the plug on grandma," "death panels" and attempting to defend the patriotism of the aforementioned restroom stains. And, of course, the advocates of health-care reform want to breeze over the exponential expansion in the annual federal budget and do some magic hand-waving to explain away legitimate concerns about the costs.

Now, it actually appears that I've run out of space... so I'm just going to call this a rant and go back to the drawing-board, content that I've defined the beginnings of this debate, if only for myself.

*Because, really, she's an idiot... can we all just agree that she's an idiot and ignore her forever? Let's just pretend that John McCain found someone with a 3-digit IQ to be his VP Candidate and forget this ever happened. Is it honestly that hard to forget a VP Candidate who lost?)

Oddly enough, we're getting on to that year-end review point ourselves any I've been going over my current accomplishments while, at the same time, trying to make a decision regarding my own placement at the company.

You see, right now, my manager is in charge of 30-ish people who are on, at last count, 8 different projects. And while some of them are similar, these are projects of at least 10 and as many as 50 people that encompass a VAST array of functionality, goals, development processes, development philosophies and even locations in the development life-cycle. To make a long story short, my boss is in charge of a team that would be hell to keep track of even if we were all doing the same thing with half of the people, and we're doing nothing of the sort.

And really, who wants a micro-managing boss? I love my hands-off manager... it helps me get things done, there's minimal interference and really, he's like artillery... he's there to provide heavy-duty support, but generally he leaves me alone until someone calls for him. But there's this problem of hands-off, and it generally involves a careful balancing act that, if ignored, leads one's boss having a very low-resolution understanding of all of the good things one is doing. Now, you hope that other people are calling in for support from time to time and he's getting a complete picture... but I really would prefer that my feedback come from time spent directly interacting with the guy who is my face to the people who are giving me raises and cutting my checks.

Setting aside the whole raft of political realities and re-orgs, the real question on something like this is to what extent I've been attempting to solicit verbal feedback in advance of something like a year-end or mid-year review. And in my case, the answer is that I've been too busy working. Which is just a terrible answer, because it means that this lack of communication thing is failing on my end. So without communication, in marketing-speak, my message is getting lost.

And, even worse, written reviews are political, no matter where you are... especially where one's career is involved. And if you don't understand the politics and aren't playing the politics, you're losing. And by not getting involved earlier and more often, I'm shooting myself in the foot. Because even if your manager is benevolent and favorably-inclined (as mine is, fortunately), your political game ties into a bigger political game and again, if you're not playing, you're losing.