Tourtière around the world

A Tourtière is an old Quebec tradition that long ago spread across Canada. It's basically a flaky crust covering a filling made of ground meat and spices. The meat varies depending where you are; in Montréal it's usually ground pork, in Gaspé it might to be salmon, out in the bush a combination of pork and whatever you can catch locally. (Hares are supposed to be good.)

So I figured, OK, I can do that, although hares seem awfully boring. Turned out pretty good.

What do do about the post office?

The PO has a real problem that it has a lot less business than it used to.  UPS and Fedex have taken away much of the package delivery business, and the number of letters has dropped significantly as people and businesses switch to electronic delivery of bills, checks, and letters that used to be sent by mail.  But they still are required to deliver every day to every address in the country, and have a variety of other requirements put on them by Congress. As a result, their fixed costs are large, their variable costs relatively small, while their revenue is entirely variable, depending on how much mail they handle.

The magic of the health care market

Here is a bill I just got from a medical lab for a throat culture. They charged $55, which seems a little high. But wait! Due to the kind of insurance I have, they send the bill to Blue Cross, BC then adjusts it to their negotiated rate, and I pay that. So they adjust it by, hm, 77% to $11.43. So the $55 is really just the sucker price for people who don't have a large corporation to negotiate on their behalf.

Remind me again why this is better than single payer?

Listen to Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin was both the first best-selling novel in the US, and the book that made the Civil War inevitable. I recently found an excellent public domain recording of it, and can report that despite its reputation as a classic, it's a surprisingly good book, one that every every high school age kid in the US can and should read.

For those of us whose high school education was lacking, and have more spare time in the car than spare time with the Kindle, I unreservedly recommend this recording by John Greenman which you can download and put on your iPod or burn to CD. It is at least as good as many I've paid for at Audible:
http://librivox.org/uncle-toms-cabin-by-harriet-beecher-stowe/

What does the Tea Party Want?

The Tea Party doesn't care about the costs of what they want.  As far as I can tell, belief in arithmetic is a sign of submission to the Devil, like belief in Evolution, or belief that half of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were slave owners.

What is Greece?

Greece isn't a European style welfare state like the major EU countries.  It's an odd little middle eastern country that happens, due to its location on the European side of the Bosporus and the historical accident that it's Christian rather than Muslim (unlike some other countries physically closer to the rest of Europe), to be technically European. This Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis is the best explanation I've seen of the utter dysfunction of Greek society:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010

At the moment I am in southern France, an actual European-style welfare state, where they have been doing whatever the French do for at least 40,000 years and have the art to prove it.  The day to day medical care, 

according to the Americans who own the place we're staying and spend half  of their time in Palo Alto, is so much better than US care that it's not funny.  The food is fabulous, at least if you're not a vegetarian. The roads are paved, the trains run at 200 mph, the schools teach their kids. It's not perfect, but one could do a lot worse.

The 90 - 90 rule of project management

The first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the time.

Then, the other 90% of the work takes the other 90% of the time.