I saw this map on reddit:

And noticed that most of these Combined Statistical Areas are richly connected with infrastructure / high-capacity transportation links, or soon will be - most notably: Acela in the northeast, Brightline / Virgin Trains USA in Florida, Texas Central in Texas, and California High Speed Rail in California.

As a lover of cities, and a believer in agglomeration effects, I set out to analyze the CSAs on a connected, aggregated basis, as meta-cities. For reference, because I extend beyond the top 15, here's a more complete but less clear map of the top 30:

As you'll see, there are limited and vastly different prospects for each region, and I expect this to inform an indication of future development.

Note I refer to each CSA by its population rank, in an intentional attempt to separate these narratives from your existing ideas about these cities. I address each aggregate roughly by combined population, and the population numbers below are necessarily imprecise as they engage at the level of the CSA, so do not consider other populations not captured by the CSAs. Finally, when I list a combined population together with a rank, ala #1, the rank refers to the rank of that aggregation relative to the existing CSAs. That is, if two cities combined, how would they compare to the largest existing US cities.

-LA + Vegas

-Capitol Corridor

Great Lakes

The midwest, centered around Chicago has a strange arrangement relative to the other possibilities. Chicago's population dwarfs the others, which perhaps explains why they have not seen cause to invest in high-speed rail improvements to connect the others.

#3 and 33 (combined population 12 million) are linked by Amtrak's Hiawatha at an average of 57 mph (90 minutes).

#3, 16, and 33 (combined population 16 million) are linked by Amtrak's Empire builder at an average speed of 50 mph (8 hours).

There's a proposal to increase frequency but not speed on this route, but for this to qualify as a practical megalopolis, you'd have to run the trains much faster.

#3 and 12 (combined population 15 million) are linked by Amtrak's Wolverine at an average of 48 mph (5 hours 20 minutes)

#3 and 20 (combined population 13 million) are linked by Amtrak's Lincoln Service at an average of 52 mph (5 hours 25 minutes)

Speed improvements seem to be in the works, if stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire. Local leaders would like the Governor to take the lead on this.

Virgin's Hyperloop One has identified #3, 24 and 26 (combined population 15 million) as a winning route for Hyperloop development.

Texas

-The Triangle

Virgin's Hyperloop One has identified #7, 9, and 25 (combined population 18 million) as winning route for Hyperloop development. They are engaged in a feasibility study of the route and have initial engagement with the Texas government.

I think it's remarkable that as a combined megalopolis, Texas would compete directly with Los Angeles and New York City on the level of economic network effects.

Florida

#14 and 19 (combined population 8 million) are served by the Amtrak Cascades route, at an average speed of 50 mph (3 hours 30 minutes)

These also naturally associate with nearby Vancouver, Canada (combined population to 10.5 million, or #3). But the Amtrak Cascades route that serves all 3 does it at an average speed of 40 mph.

Improvement has been incremental and slow, in part due to set-backs like the 2017 derailment due to "gross complacency" that significantly delayed adoption of an improved route pending positive train control.

Deep South

#20 and 27 (combined population 5 million). They are linked by Amtrak's Missouri River Runner at 50 mph (5 hours, 40 minutes).

Virgin's Hyperloop One has identified has completed a feasibility study (video) of the route.

Analysis

A few things jump out at me here:

Few Potential Megalopoli

Many urban areas are relatively isolated which means travel time and/or infrastructure cost would weigh against their incorporation with nearby neighbors. Examples: Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix. After Cascadia, the benefits of aggregation drop of substantially, and according to my own intuition, tend toward depending on broader integration to justify themselves. Similarly, many urban areas are relatively low-population which weighs against their incorporation with nearby neighbors.

That leaves us with only 6 potential near-term megalopoli, which in my mind elevates the significance and urgency of each.

Unbalanced pairs may not support strong connections

Take Chicago, for example. It has many nearby neighbors, but because it's the largest by far, it has relatively little to gain from enhancing rail, presumably because a relatively small satellite primarily draws from the smaller to the larger city. In contrast, Dallas / Houston, Cascadia, have mutually obvious benefit due to relatively balanced travel interest between the pair. I suspect in unbalanced cases, the pride of the larger city may weigh against investing in integration.

Wildly Different Prospects for and Rates of Progress

I think it's quite remarkable that Texas, California, Florida, and the Great Lakes have such dramatically different prospects for progress. California's bold efforts are mired in a failure of management, Chicago is not setting its sights so high, and having difficulty at that, while Texas and Florida are having substantial new high speed rail development thanks to functional, incentives-aligned approaches to this development.

Leaves me glad we have so many different experiments running in this country, as it seems there are many ways to get this grossly wrong.

Conclusions

These assume the expected successful timely completion of the Texas Central and Virgin Trains USA Orlando link.

Short California, Long Texas & Florida

The long-term prospects for connectivity and relative commercial significance of these areas is substantially connected to their ability to create an arrangement of infrastructure and services conducive to supporting business and quality of life in their areas, which leads to a virtuous cycle of population growth and further agglomeration benefits, such as ability to justify and accrue benefits from large infrastructure projects.

The difficulties apparently experienced most clearly by California, but also by New York and Chicago, augur a future in which other regions gain relative prominence over them, by way of successful infrastructure projects and increased connectivity / agglomeration. Consistent with these signs, population growth in the top CSA of each region is significantly higher in Texas (17%) and Florida (14%) than California (6%), the Northeast (3.7%), or the Great Lakes (1.6%).

Design your Infrastructure incentives well

Texas and Florida are taking substantially different approaches to their high-speed rail than those which have foundered or are otherwise improving quite slowly in other regions, and I expect them to benefit from these differences. In particular, they are following the examples of private rail transit in Asia, and using a combination of fares and real estate development around the station to fund the rail service. This is a variant of land-value capture that aligns incentives, because it creates a material monetary reward for those for fast and efficient construction efforts, accruing to those with the ability to manage construction costs. In the Northeast and California, lacking such incentives alignment has meant that construction projects are seen as a windfall to be exploited by those doling out and receiving construction funds, which then leads to project cost blow-up. This is devastating because there is no upper limit to the cost of construction inefficiency - that is the cost inefficiencies can dwarf the project construction costs.

An alternative to fully-private infrastructure ownership, is to choose a project delivery method which creates a natural incentive to control construction costs, such as through Design-Build-Operate-Maintain contracts.

Expect new technology to further change the game

Nascent technologies such as Hyperloop could significantly improve prospects for agglomeration by making private construction feasible in more cases - smaller city pairs, longer distances.

[1] Dividing the distance (457 miles) by the expected future journey time (5 hours).
[2] Dividing the distance (168 miles) by the average journey time (3.25 hours) listed on Wikipedia. 

Disclaimer: this article is NOT personalized medical advice and I hold no responsibility for what you do to your body. I give no individual medical advice. Schedule a visit with your physician for that.

I realized at a relatively young age that the medical industry has little interest in keeping me well, but rather focuses on identifying and treating malady after it occurs, whereas I've set out (as I think all people should) to avoid malady wherever possible. As I studied and practice engineering, I study and apply that view to my own body as a system. I've personally successfully treated a few symptoms in my own life, and as far as they report, at this point people perceive me to be younger than I am. I offer below a few tips on not growing any older than you must, based on about 10 years of thought and study of the subject.

Arrange your life to include ambient exercise as a daily practice

For example, take more than one stair step at a time. Most are capable of taking at least 2 steps at a time,[1] it may be difficult at first, you may have to strain against your body's limitations, you may even have to do some lunges or squats to develop the strength necessary to do it, but doing so will pay many dividends, as most people will face many more staircases than treadmills in their lives, and climbing more than one step at a time exercises a greater range of motion at less mechanical advantage than a single step. Among other benefits, this will help you maintain more strength than strictly necessary to make it through your daily life, so as to maintain greater mobility for longer when your muscles naturally decline with age. In addition, incidental exercise like this will benefit your cardiovascular system, and your metabolism. Quite a lot of benefit from such a simple change.

This is an example of what I call ambient exercise, and IMO there is no better exercise - it gets you where you are going anyway, but often faster, and with more benefit, at the same time it gets you exercise without dedicated time. Other examples include cycling for transport, and favoring stairs even when escalators or elevators are available. Even walking quickly has significant health benefits over walking slowly.

Pay attention to habits that have cumulative health effects

In risk, it's the things you do daily that will someday go sideways and kill you, and in aging, it's the damage that you accumulate daily that will wear you out. Wear protection from the sun, particularly to protect your face and neck, wear sunglasses to protect your eyes. Being aware of the UV Index can guide when these interventions are most important. Personally I recently switched from a ball-cap to what I call my "adventure hat" for daily life.

If you drink alcohol regularly or enthusiastically, consider cutting down and taking NAC when drinking as a countermeasure. Consider wearing earplugs in loud environments and plugging your ears in the presence of sirens.

For the same reason start your health practices early, before problems manifest, and you’ll reduce the aggregate damage your body sustains over time, thus keeping yourself safer, healthier, and living longer for it. Far better to protect your hearing before it’s noticeably lost. Far easier to avoid injury than recover from it.

But you don't have to take my word for it:

“when it comes to age-related diseases, the medical technologies of the past few decades are just not all that good. Treatments have failed to address the causes of aging, and instead took on the impossible task of trying patch over the consequences in a failing system. The result, with very few exceptions, such as treatments to control blood pressure and blood cholesterol, is therapies offering only marginal, unreliable benefits and little impact to mortality. It remains the case that in the matter of aging, maintaining fitness and slimness is more reliable or even more effective than most of what has been offered by medical science over recent decades.”
— source

Pay attention to the signs of age and do what you can to address their causes

As where there is smoke, there is fire, and to whatever extent possible, it’s important to identify the cause and put that fire out. For example, research has uncovered that gray hair is a consequence of buildup of Hydrogen Peroxide, which bleaches the hair follicle. Hydrogen Peroxide is an example of a harmful Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) that is produced continuously by your metabolic processes, and should be naturally dispatched by your body before building up, if your body is functioning as well as it should. While dyeing your hair will conceal the evidence, treating the cause will prevent those same ROS from wreaking other havoc: DNA damage, etc.

But can you help your body dispatch with it? Chemically, there are at least two important antioxidants which reduce it, which are Catalase and Glutathione Peroxidase. Catalase is abundant in wheatgrass, so I take wheatgrass powder in a shake from time to time. Another important element is Superoxide Dismutase (SOD) - if Hydrogen Peroxide is Water + Oxygen, Superoxide is Hydrogen Peroxide + Oxygen, and Superoxide Dismutase reduces it to Hydrogen Peroxide. This combo, of Catalase and Superoxide Dismutase, if it could be applied simultaneously throughout your body, would reduce these two ROS to just water and oxygen.

Support your body’s own restoration and maintenance pathways

A big shift in my understanding of health came with the awareness that your body generates cancerous cells all the time - it’s just that for almost everyone, almost all of the time, inbuilt protections cause the cell to shut down, or the immune system effectively dispatches them. So cancer can be viewed not so much as a specific dysfunction in the cell cycle, but rather a systemic immune failure. This indicates it may be much more helpful to support your own body’s intricate, long-evolved system for protecting itself than to try to do its job for it after it has failed.[2]

For example, not directly related to cancer, your body has its own inborn mechanisms for maintaining and repairing itself on the cellular level. One such category of these is called the Sirtuin pathways. The 7 Sirtuin pathways have been shown to play important roles in aging, metabolic function, and more. For example, just one of these, SIRT3, has been shown to:

• Support energy production
• Prevent cardiac hypertrophy
• Prevent Parkinson’s disease
• Support insulin sensitivity
• Support cell survival
• Suppress tumors
• Prevent DNA damage
• Prevent noise-induced hearing loss

Much of the above is a consequence of SIRT3's effects in producing countermeasures to the ROS mentioned above, as illustrated here:

The trick with the Sirtuins is that they are powered by an energetic molecule call NAD+, and NAD+ declines with age. So, as with avoiding cancer by boosting your immune system, you reduce the acceleration of aging that occurs over time by boosting your own body's ability to restore and maintain itself. Personally I take NMN, the direct precursor to NAD+, sublingually. As with all anti-aging mechanisms, it's difficult to assign direct effect to any given intervention, but this one has given me the most significant subjective benefit, both in terms of energy level, and notably in terms of skin quality (I saw a significant subjecting improvement within the first month or two of use).

Conclusion

There's certainly much more to be said and considered, given that the body is enormously complex and complicated, but the high-level points cover much of what I judge to matter. Will be happy to hear questions, critiques, theories, or queries on any of the above.

Take care, and be well.

"An optimist invents the airplane, a pessimist invents the parachute"

Interesting fact: the two prominent areas of study in which there is an explicit internal divide between "Orthodox" and "Heterodox" perspectives are religion and economics.

Sometimes when looking up artists I like, I spot a certain theme in their parentage:

Bjork: Electrician father, Mother who left him to join a hippy community

Lorde: Civil Engineer father, Poet Mother

Here's to chaos and order, art and collective. Here's to fostering them in ourselves, and in the groups we form.

I ran into this problem with Olark and Turbolinks tonight, and it seems I’m not the only one, so I wrote out how to fix it:

In the current olark configuration code, there’s a script tag, some javascript, then a noscript tag. The javascript is the important part. It starts with “window.olark||”, then a big minified function, and ends with a call to olark.identity.

The window.olark|| is just there to prevent the script from being re-run on the same page, the rest is the initialization. You can extract the initialization function, and give it a name, e.g. init_olark. Then you can rewritethe initialization as:

function init_olark(c) {/*big initialization function*/}           
window.olark||init_olark({/*your initialization hash*/});
olark.identify(/*your identity*/);

You’ll need your identity string to call olark.identity, it’s right there in your js snippet, and you’ll need your initialization hash, which is the argument passed to init_olark, also included in the snippet. My initialization hash should include a loader, name and methods key, so I guess yours should too. Once you’ve done this, all that’s left is to call the init_olark() function with your initialization vars and call olark.identity on every turbolinks page load. With jquery that looks like:

$(document).on('page:load', function(){
  init_olark({
    /*your initialization hash*/
  });
  olark.identify(/*your identity*/);
});

It’s not perfect – there are some js errors in the depths of the olark code, but it doesn’t seem to interfere with the operation of the chat widget or any other JS on the page, so I judge it a success.

Hope that helps!

Note: updated to call "identify"

Some time ago I picked up a simple system for keeping my bash configuration files organized and sane. It's served me well and doesn't seem widely-known so I suppose it's worth sharing.

What's the problem with bash config? Well it gets to be a mess. Once you start configuring many bits of software, and many projects, it can be rather difficult to parse through the mess of environment variables and other interventions.

Comments can help, but they're easy to overlook. A better solution is a system of organization which is self-enforcing. So what I do is banish all my config from the .bash_profile, and load it from project-specific files in the ~/.bash/ directory.

That is, my .bash_profile looks like this:

function load {
        [ -f $1 ] && . $1
}

function load_dir {
        for path in $( ls $1 ); do
                load "$1$path"
        done
}

load_dir ~/.bash/

And my ~/.bash folder looks like this:

$ ls ~/.bash/
amazon_keys.bash        git.bash                node.bash                r.bash                        rvm.bash                vote_smart.bash
bundler.bash                google.bash                mail_chimp.bash                open_congress.bash        rbenv.bash                sunlight_labs.bash        votereports.bash
campaign_monitor.bash        history.bash                mate.bash                paperlex.bash                recaptch.bash                terminal.bash                yahoo.bash
fixmta.bash                homebrew.bash                meetup.bash                postgres.bash                rpx.bash                twitter.bash

Here's a few examples from that batch:

$ cat ~/.bash/node.bash 
export NODE_PATH="/usr/local/lib/node_modules:$NODE_PATH"
$ cat ~/.bash/rbenv.bash 
export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
$ cat ~/.bash/postgres.bash 
export PGOPTIONS='-c client_min_messages=WARNING'
$ cat ~/.bash/git.bash 
# load completion installed by homebrew
load "/usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash"

All clean and tidy. And if you want to view the entirety of your config settings, you can just use:

$ cat ~/.bash/* 

Files are loaded in the order that they're returned by 'ls', so if you want to override the alphabetical default ordering, you can simply prefix an order number to the files you want to load early.

In any case, I hope this helps. I'd be happy to hear any tips you have.

I've noticed that my emotional states are often much more subtle than the abstract notion that they follow. For example, when I'm depressed I'm not sad, I'm as calm and relaxed as ever, just unmotivated. When I'm anxious, I'm not shifty or shaky or stammering, I just calmly hesitate and reflect a bit more.

Unfortunately, because I didn't identify these states for what they were, I didn't treat them as problems to be solved, but as "just how I feel right now." Only later, when my motivation and agency returned did I diagnose and treat my own light deprivation (SAD), or test an anxiolytic.

If there's a lesson here, perhaps its to always trust that improvement is possible, and to make efforts regardless what we think is "just us".

Is an ideal society entirely filled with rule-abiding characters? It would seem so, but what if every set of rules has necessary, unavoidable breakdowns, which when unattended accumulate back-ups, detritus, or misallocations within the system?

It may be then, that some occaisional creative rule-breaking helps to break-up these back-ups and to disrupt an ossified order to replace it with the more natural and functional after-effects of small episodes of chaos. It may sound dubious, but it's been modeled in traffic studies and argued via simplified versions of society.

If social rules are somehow subject to Gödel's incompleteness theorem as well, then pranksters, jokers, comedians, and creative rule-breakers may be all that's there to save us from an accumulated absurdity.

Setting a firmware password on your Mac laptop makes it much less useful to a thief and much more likely to be recoverable, as they won't be able to easily circumvent "Find my Mac" or Prey. It's also super easy.

On Lion, just restart your computer while holding "comand-R" - you'll boot into the recovery partition and have the Firmware Password utility available from the utility menu dropdown. Enter your password twice, restart, and you're done!

For earlier versions, check this.

This week I indulged my on-going health geekery by getting some routine medical testing done, and because I've been supporting cash-based medicine, I learned a few things:

First, between established lab companies, prices vary significantly. Of the three I checked, LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics, and Hunter Labs, the prices were roughly 1x, 1.5x, and 2x, respectively. That is, for my tests LabCorp was the cheapest by far. It seems it's well worth checking a few locations, as you could save hundreds of dollars in the process.

But you can potentially do even better by going online. There are a number of new direct online lab order systems, such as  http://www.ineedlabs.com/, and http://directlabs.com/, which deal in cash only and thus freely publish their prices. This is a refreshing change from the established companies above, which have to play games of hiding their real cash prices in order to make more money from the insurance companies. And because all their customers are paying cash, they're all cost-conscious, so the prices end up generally being lower.

From the cheapest regular lab, I saved 25% by billing my tests with an online direct labs agency. But, bear in mind that some tests might be more expensive online vs. your lowest-cost local lab, so it may be worth splitting your order to get the best prices all around.

Another great perk for online lab tests is that you can run tests without a doctor's order, so you can avoid that hassle for routine tests whose results you understand. That is, except in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, which have all passed anti-consumer laws requiring you to consult with doctors for every medical test, regardless its simplicity.

All in all, a really interesting experience. I hope it helps you get a better deal and keep down your medical costs!

I'm nearing the end of my reading of Anathem, a work of speculative fiction which includes many invented words and concepts, I find 2 particularly relevant to our own society. As language influences culture, perhaps through adopting these we can over time become a society which better-appreciates our great thinkers while maintaining more horizontal governance:

Saunt: honorary title bestowed posthumously on great thinkers - a contraction of "savant".

In my opinion we could do much more to honor our truly great thinkers - current institutions include the "Dr." title and the Nobel prize, but both pale in comparison even to political titles like President or Senator. Saunt evokes Saint, and is IMO an appropriate and meaningful title for those who push us forward intellectually. Saunt Jobs, anyone? 

First Among Equals, FAE: title identifying the principle representative of a non-hierarchical group

In institutions which have representatives ostensibly equal to those they represent, there is a danger over time of the representatives becoming entrenched in their representation and attendant power, and eventually taking on de facto nobility, which is only assisted by the honorific titles they hold. By explicitly including an assertion of equality in the title, one can perhaps undermine this tendency.

Big Bad Brix?

Selling to Whom?

The problem with simply eliminating minimum parking requirements is that developers can still build as much parking as they want—”and that extra $20,000-$30,000 gives them a strong incentive to do just that.

Unintended Consequences

The Real Problems

1. Diamonds are not actually that rare, except that most diamond production is owned by a single cartel (De Beers) which constrains the output to prop up prices and create the appearance of scarcity:

   Natural diamonds aren't particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000 pounds were produced worldwide. A diamond is a precious commodity because everyone thinks it's a precious commodity, the geological equivalent of a bouquet of red roses, elegant and alluring, a symbol of romance, but ultimately pretty ordinary.

   Credit for the modern cult of the diamond goes primarily to South Africa-based De Beers, the world's largest diamond producer. Before the 1940s, diamond rings were rarely given as engagement gifts. But De Beers' marketing campaigns established the idea that the gems are the supreme token of love and affection. Their "A Diamond Is Forever" slogan, first deployed in 1948, is considered one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time. Through a near total control of supply, De Beers held almost complete power over the diamond market for decades, carefully hoarding the gemstones to keep prices—”and profits—”high. While the company has lost some of its power to competitors in Canada and Australia over the past few years, it still controls almost two-thirds of the world's rough diamonds.

2. Diamonds will soon be easily producible in a lab, which will be excellent for industry

   With a cheap, ready supply of diamonds, engineers hope to make everything from higher-powered lasers to more durable power grids. They foresee razor-thin computers, wristwatch-size cellphones and digital recording devices that would let you hold thousands of movies in the palm of your hand. "People associate the word diamond with something singular, a stone or a gem," says Jim Davidson, an electrical engineering professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. "But the real utility is going to be the fact that you can deposit diamond as a layer, making possible mass production and having implications for every technology in electronics.

3. Unlike diamonds that come from the dirt, man-made diamonds aren't socially nor environmentally destructive

   Like most open-pit mines, diamond mines cause erosion, water pollution and habitat loss for wildlife. Even more troubling, African warlords have used diamond caches to buy arms and fund rebel movements, as dramatized in the 2006 movie Blood Diamond. Actor Terrence Howard wears a diamond lapel pin with Apollo stones. He told reporters, "Nobody was harmed in the process of making it."

Ben W. here, back from a long summer, now under the name Empact, which is a handle I use elsewhere online, and which is hopefully less confusing in light of the esteemed Ben Schiendelman.

A syntax makeover

Read-only-ability

Object-tivity

• :attr: an xml attribute on the current node, returned as text
• :text: the contents of a named sub-node, returned as text
• :content: the contents of the current node, returned as text
• Object: Any ROXML object can be provided to declare sub-types, including recursive types (provided recursion terminates)
• [Object], [:text]: Put the type in an Array to declare that there are multiple instances of this type which should be provided in a collection
• {}: A hash type can be populated with sub-nodes and attributes, in various ways

Named args & TAG_what?

• :in: Previously 'wrapper'
• :from: Previously 'name'
• :else: Used to declare a default value in case the entity is missing; previously unavailable
• :as: Previously 'options'. Can be passed as a singly symbol, or multiple in an array

Hash attack!

Blocks, yo

Under the hood

Wrapping up...

Lion Kimbro wrote:

Saturday House!,Brian Rice, John Lynch, and I came up with an informal event lastweek for this Saturday, from 12:00 noon - 2:00 PM, and you areinvited.  Brian Rice had the basic idea, ("let's share ourfavorite books,") and I fleshed out this email.The purpose is to develop a stream of conversation around whathas heart and has meaning for us, with the underlying hypothesis being that it can point us towards the Divine.  But you don't have to see it that way at all, and can substitute in your own purpose.  (Just as long as the intent is basically positive.)

I love this idea.

1. Shall we optionally pre-announce our books to the list?
2. Are you opposed to publicizing this event via non-saturday-house-mailing-list methods?  I was thinking about using your description for a facebook event.
   

In exchange for all of this consumer support, the Wyden-Bennett plan would require individuals to have health insurance (an individual mandate), which must be purchased from a state-run purchasing pool that would require health policies to have substantial benefits (rich benefit mandates) and offer a choice of private policies. - source

"Insuring primary care is like insuring lunch. You know you're going to need it. You know you can afford it. Why on earth would you pay a third party to pay the restaurant on your behalf, adding overhead and taking a big chunk out of the money you pay—”and because of the process, have to wait a week to get a table and then have only 10 minutes to eat?" - source

1. A High-deductible health plan, i.e., insurance which only kicks in for catastrophic problems, such as cancer or a bad car accident. The premiums are much lower because the deductible is much higher (on the order of $1.5k).
2. A Health Savings Account, which you and your employer contribute to tax-exempt, and from which you pay most of your medical expenses. You can afford to have money here because your premiums are so much lower.
3. An enrollment with a Direct Primary Care provider, such as Dr. Garrison's Qliance, where you pay a fixed rate (in this case ~$50/month, though it could go lower), and in return get real relationship with, and 24hr access to, a primary care physician, and other services (x-rays, labwork, at-cost pharmacy) which makes your primary care physician much more than just someone who refers you to a specialist after 10 minutes.

• By removing multiple rounds of insurer paperwork from each transaction you save a large portion of the 40-50% currently spent on administrative costs.
• By maintaining a close relationship with a primary care doctor, on an enrollment basis, you greatly reinforce incentives to engage in preventative care, thus in many cases avoiding major health expenses by nipping them in the bud.
• Many lower-level emergencies which might otherwise send you to the (expensive) emergency room can instead be handled by your DPCp.
• As your DPCp is paid on a monthly basis, rather than per-procedure, they have no incentive to cajole you into unnecessary tests or procedures. This cuts down on medical expenses in general, by reducing unnecessary ones.

A few follow-ups to points raised in the comments to the previous post:

said...

You've heard of these groups of more than 2 people called "families", yes?

Yes of course! I was one of 7 myself. First of all, as you might expect, Amtrak maintains discounts for children 15 and younger, fully 1/2 off:

Child 2 - 15 50% Up to two children per paying adult. Children must travel with adult. 1, 2 Infant Under 2 Free One infant per paying adult. Infants must ride on adult's lap.

Also, as Steve points out in the comments, Amtrak maintains an off-season discount program from November to May which offers free companion travel (2 for the price of one) for trips from Seattle to Portland. Fully half the year! This ends on the May 23rd, but is something to keep in mind for your spring travel next year.

But my point extends to any number of people, discounts or no. It all comes down to how much your time, the environment, &c., are worth to you. Some are better off driving and some not, but in order to know who is which, it's necessary to look at the numbers, to help overcome our natural biases.

I've extended the calculator to take these options into account here. Simply adjust the size of your party, the cost of tickets, or the MPG of your car, to get personalized information of what the costs are.

bellevue said...

I wish they would offer a multi person ticket rate, I like taking public transit but I'm never alone so the cost just does not work out.

See the above points about discounts and such. Again, I'm not saying rail makes sense for everyone everywhere. I do think that people (even transit-savvy people) underestimate their options when it comes to Amtrak, though.

So even if you're skeptical, please do check out the updated calculator and fill in your info, to get a real sense of the costs and how it compares to driving.

My question is how did the transition happen. Was it more just a matter of you stopped using the car and started using just public transportation?

Money is not free speech.

Dear [Mr./Mrs. Legislator], I hope you'll consider supporting Instant Runoff Voting, aka Ranked Choice voting, ala [HB 2202/ SB 6000], which I'll refer to as IRV. If you're unfamiliar with IRV, it's a form of voting which allows the voter to rank each of the candidates according to their preference. At the time of tabulating the votes, if no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and their votes are re-alloted to the second-choice candidates of those voters. Candidates are successively eliminated until one of the remaining candidates has a majority of votes. It may not be obvious from my telling, but IRV presents the opportunity to solve several of our problems in Washington at once. First of all it removes the need to limit choice through the restrictions of the pick-a-party primary. This is a problem which has been generating frustration on the local level across Washington, as evidenced by Pierce County's adoption of IRV to solve just this problem. Second, it ensures that all our elected officials must win the support of at least 50% + 1 of the electorate in order to be elected. Not the out-right support mind you, but enough to put them out ahead of their other major opponents. In many local races this makes a significant difference, for example at the Port of Seattle Commissioner election just a few days ago, Place 2 was won with just 33% of the vote! Only a third of voters supported that candidate (Gael Tarleton) and yet she won. Likewise, Redmond's mayor was elected with 39% of the vote, and had strong opponents with 36% and 24% of the vote. It's very possible that more of the electorate actually preferred the candidate who received 36%, but were unable to have there preference heard, because of our limited voting system. The principles of representative democracy suggest we can do a better job of forming a consensus for who to choose as representatives, and IRV can help us do that. I've spoken with a number of people about this, and just about everyone I've spoken to thinks its a great idea once they know about it. It's encouraging that Pierce county has voted to adopt this method, and it shows that there is a grass-roots movement growing up around the issue. I hope you'll be there to work with that movement. I'm looking forward to working with you on this issue, and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. Regards, Ben Woosley P.S. Another alternative to IRV, rather than eliminating the least popular candidate each round, uses the voters' ballots to run a "virtual" runoff between each and every pair of candidates, simultaneously. The candidate who beats each of the other candidates in this "virtual" runoff is the winner. In the rare case there is not a single candidate who wins all run-offs, IRV-style elimination rounds are used. This is known as Condorcet's voting method, and is technically better than IRV. Both are much better than our current system.

1. Load up boingboing, one of the more interesting blogs on the internet, to see what they've scared up recently.
2. Notice an article on the holographic projection of sea-life on a recent Diesel fashion show. Sounds interesting...
3. Follow the link over to youtube, to get a look at the effects
4. You're a sucker for distorted vocals and dirty beats (see Vitalic, Battles), so you immediately notice the first song on play in the video, and suddenly you must know the answer to the question: who are these people?
5. Search for some of the lyrics. Nope not good enough. Try again. And again.
6. Bingo
7. You ask yourself, who the heck is this "Walter Meego" guy?
8. Look up "his" wikipedia page.
9. Oh it's actually a them (who thought up that band name?). And they're from Chicago. Independent until recently, only E.P.s so far. The person who wrote the "style" section is laughably amateur, not at all in wikipedia style. This means the page doesn't get much traffic. Not surprising considering the other facts.
10. Hop over to their myspace page, looking for more music to sample. They say they are working on a full-length album, good for them. You're much more impressed with "Romantic," the song from the video, than their other stuff, but that's life. Hopefully the eventual album is more in that style. Not touring much at the moment, unfortunately. You've discovered them just a bit too late to reasonably tip-off your NY-habiting friend about their show there that very night.
11. Check if youtube has any videos of theirs, to get more a feel for their style
12. First up, a video which appears to have been made in a dorm room, and includes a synchronized dance scene ala the macarena. The whole thing is kind of flippant and uninteresting. Okay okay they're independent, you get it. You just have such high expectations after seeing such great stuff from other bands.
13. Second up, for the song which tipped you off, is a video involving ninjas playing in a theme park, playground, rollerskating, and getting rejected by the girls they make advances on. This is, put simply, an abomination. It runs totally counter to the song, trivializing the depth and sorrow of it in again, a flippant way. A commenter captures this in more than one language:

    I don't like this video. I love the song. I'm just so frustrated I'm gonna say this in swedish because I'm way too frustrated to think right now. Videon gör inte låten någon som helst rättvisa! What were you thinking? You've made light of the song and yourself with this video! C'mon u guys got some serious potential! Silly video and so's the other one.

14. Disappointing, yes, but not a deal-breaker, after all, it's just the music you're there for. Still, someone needs to give these guys a talking to. Competition in the music industry is fierce, and videos are one of the best ways to spread the word. If your talent doesn't translate into the visual realm, find someone whose does.
15. Head over to Amazon to pick up an E.P. Think twice and go to the band's website. They probably keep more of the money that way.
16. Hmm... Romantic was the song you liked, but the Romantic EP is stuck together with "Wanna be a star" which is a bit more straightforward in just about every way... beats, lyrics. Definitely a B-side. But the sample remix isn't terrible. Ah well. If you were playing the iTunes game you may wait and purchase by the track, but you're not, so platters it is.
17. Reflect on how awesome it is that you just used a fashion show soundtrack together with a host of internet tools as a music recommendation system to find a promising, yet (deeply?) flawed, relatively unknown band.
18. Write a blog post about it.

One could go further and say that ideas are inherent to reality. That what we do is just pick up the pieces of a story folded all around us. So one can tell you not to think, blow out the brains of the one who does, but they can not destroy the reality which we fight to carry out, to honor, to realize.

I've recently moved to Seattle, and while the trip itself is something I should take the time to write about, since then I've had a really excellent time of getting to know a new place, finding and settling in a house, and meeting new people. Aside from all that, I love the city, but have had trouble explaining why. Today I had an experience which I think conveys the beauty of Urban life.

I've rented a place in a neighborhood called Capitol Hill, an interesting area across the freeway from downtown proper. I've all my things, save any furniture, which didn't make it into the car for the roadtrip up here. Anyhow, no furniture means no bed. It didn't take long to learn that the tile floor would be inhospitable, so after a brief stint sleeping on a mat of some of my clothes, and a longer one on a cot borrowed from a co-worker, as of today, I returned home to find the bed I had ordered over the weekend. Seeing as how I'd never owned a bed larger than a twin, I didn't have the sheets for the new one, so I set off, at 8:20, to get some sheets downtown from a certain store, knowing full well they were closing at 9:00.

Simply enough, I walk to the bus stop, hoping my timing will be right, but when I check, the schedule says that a bus had just past 5 minutes ago and another wouldn't come by for 30 more, too late to make it. Undeterred, I walked down the street towards another stop, where I know I can catch other routes downtown. Two blocks later, at an intersection, my bus zooms by, late. The light changes before I have time to cross and, flustered, I cross the other way, thinking the bus would be gone before I made it over to the bus stop.

I'm wrong, so when the light changes again, I'm on the wrong side of the street from where the bus still sits. In a moment, I'm running down the street, hoping to cross and catch it at the next intersection. Then, tradgedy strikes; As I'm running, I suddenly realize my phone is no longer in my pocket! How could this be?!? I'm forced to turn around the find it, as it's quite dear to me. I use it to take my pictures.

It turns out that my shorts, which I'd had for a while but were fine, except for having holey pockets, had gone from bad to worse and my phone could now fall out! Luckily it was an inexpensive lesson, as I found my phone, relatively unharmed a few feet away.

Knowing I'm pressed for time, I run to the next bus stop, where I'm glad to see that I have just a few minutes before the next bus arrives. So I sit and wait, and pretty soon four soccer players walk past. Then, there's a guy posting flyers on utility poles and trying to chat up women. The first one doesn't respond and he lurks behind her angrily for a short while, saying "You could at least smile, I'm never gonna see you again," but a few minutes later he's talking to another girl about cell phones and how mothers are sometimes wrong.

Late again, the bus eventually arrives, but now I'm pressed as ever for time. Less than 10 minutes later, I'm at my intersection, so I exit the bus and run through a crowd of sedentry folks waiting for the bus, over to the store which is due to close in 5 minutes. I make it, and after spending a few minutes comparing the merits of egyptian cotton to regular cotton, and 200 thread count to 350, I pick a few things and head to the counter, where the checkers are surprised to see a customer (and not just any customer, mind you ;-)) is in the store. One of them unlocks the door, and after regaining my bearings, I'm off to catch the bus back to Capitol Hill, carrying a rather large bag of bedding.

Pretty soon I see my bus down the street and, once again, this time with loot in hand, run toward it. I'm too late to catch it, and once again something falls out of my pocket. Luckily I've learned my lesson so it's just 2 dimes. While I pause to collect them, I realize that the bus I've just missed has another stop a block away, where a whole crowd of people are waiting for it.

I line up behind one of the people and notice that I'm not the only one carrying a big bag. Most everyone there had a large bag or suitcase or something. So, with nothing better to do in line, I ask one someone with a bag, "What's with all the suitcases and stuff?," to which she replies, "We're homeless, and we're heading down to a Church." Huh. Homeless people in Seattle seem much more "normal" than homeless people in Austin, which mostly are kooky or lazy (Seriously, ask another Austinite). Anyway, I finally get in the bus thinking that I blend in pretty well with these normal-looking, bag-carrying homeless folks, and I'm wondering if anyone thinks I'm homeless. I have time to reflect on that because one of the homeless ladies, who has a cast on her foot, is using the lift to get in, while another homeless lady yells at her (hollers, really), saying "What're you doing?! You don't need that, why I oughta woop your ass! You're holding up the bus!".

After other sights and sounds on the way back, I finally make it back home, and am glad to have sat by some rather polite people, who may or may not have thought me homeless.

So there you have it. It may not sound glorious, but I promise, it was.

PS. I don't want it to be thought that I'm disrespecting the homeless folks. Personally I think it's rather sad that so many people cloak their disdain by "feeling sorry". I give them the respect of treating them just as I treat everyone else.

After reflecting on my previous post, I now plan to make an effort to write more often when I'm excited than when I'm frustrated.

I've never taken a side in the Middle East conflict, except to say that I codemn the violence perpetrated by both sides. Today we enter a sad new stage of the crisis. Just months ago, with the transfer of the Gaza Strip and the signing of the prisoner's agreement, I had hopes that the Palestineans and Israelis were finally taking the steps necessary to work for peace. Sadly, as evidenced by the Israeli invasion of Gaza and Lebanon, it seems I was mistaken. As before, I don't defend the kidnappings and killings perpetrated by Hezbollah and Palestinean militants, but when the reponse to 5 deaths is the invasion of Lebanon & Palestine, as well as the deaths of more than 80 Palestineans, including women and children, the response clearly excedes the boudaries of justice. Israel will never have the peace it claims to desire until it learns to love justice more than the gun.

My message to the Israelis, Palestineans and Lebanese is the same as it's alway been. Let's not be eager for retribution, let's be eager for peace.