Teddy's Health Care

My gut reaction to Teddy's passing was unsympathetic. He was a man who, in both his personal and political life, was a bulwark against individual responsibility and accountability. For all his power and influence, his actual achievements were limited. To call someone a Lion of the Senate, is to damn with faint praise.

On the other hand, writing in the Journal, Noonan captures what was great and compelling and fundementally American about Kennedy, even for those repulsed by his political idealogy. Un-, or rather, very softly-, spoken in her column is an implicit compare and contrast extremely unfavorable to our current President.

Another, Journal op-ed reminds us that it wasn't long ago that pro-business conservatives were on the Government Health Care bandwagon, and, so, how badly the Administration has played what once was a winning hand.

The attempt to rebrand Universal Health Insurance as TeddyCare is of conflicting value. On one hand, it may make legislation more palatable to seniors. On the other hand, it risks serious backlash. As the Times delicately reported:

...He chose what he called “prudently aggressive” treatments.

“He always admired people who took risks, like Teddy and Kara did,” Mr. Dodd said, referring to two of Mr. Kennedy’s children, who both beat cancer with bold treatments...

Mr. Kennedy deputized Dr. Horowitz, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, to research all treatment options before deciding on an intensive regimen of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation — hardly a clear-cut choice with an almost inevitably lethal disease and a patient of Mr. Kennedy’s age. Some physicians assembled at Massachusetts General Hospital considered his tumor inoperable — and measured his likely survival time between six weeks and a few months.

Voters can be expected to resent that Teddy, for his own care, ignored the evidence-driven medical care, we are being told he made the cause of his life to impose on others.

Smart Diplomacy

Amongst the campaign promises the President has had difficult living up to was his commitment to smart diplomacy.

If this Drudge post is accurate, he appears about to, in his own way, deliver.

The gist of the four way deal is the US takes a much harsher line on Iran, in particular the promise of meaningful sanctions, Israel agrees to a very limited -- basically in name only -- settlement freeze, Arab states agree to very limited moves towards normalization, Palestinians agree to resume stalled negotiations.

According to the article, both Israel and the Arab States are primarily motivated by a desire to see the current administration grow a pair vis a vis Iran, it is less clear why the Palestinians agreed to play along. The promised shift in Obama's Iran policy is, in fact, the only real commitment in this whole deal. There is no indication of a genuine diplomatic breakthrough between Israel and the Palestinians that might lead to an actual agreement.

In the end, a skeptic might wonder if all this window dressing is entirely for the benefit of allowing our Government to save face as it drops a failing approach. More practically, perhaps the President felt he required the mirage of peace process progress to sell a more aggressive policy towards Iran to his core supporters.

Netanyahu is, perhaps, the biggest political winner. Israelis -- even those who generally oppose settlement construction -- being less aware of American domestic political calculations, will see this deal as being very well bargained by their Prime Minister.

Texas

It is obviously very early, but of prospective GOP 2012 Presidential candidates, Rick Perry has the best story. He is a rock solid conservative, who said no to stimulus money, governs the best state economy and is more telegenic than Bobby Jindal.

His path to the presidency, however, goes through fellow Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is challenging him in the primary for the 2010 gubernatorial election.

This primary well serves republican interests. Perry seems likely to emerge victorious, more battle tested and so more prepared for the 2012 elections. If he proves unable, better to find that out in 2010 then 2012.

A Wonderful Suggestion

A Times op-ed reports that Rhode Island plans a new law requiring health insurance policies be written such that the average person can understand them.

This sounds like a wonderful idea whose utility is not limited to health insurance policies. If only financial derivative contracts had been required to be written that way! Or, more importantly, the Health Care Bill.

Income Inequality

A NY Times article quotes a Harvard economist who makes an almost entirely reasonable argument:

"I think incredibly high incomes can have a pernicious effect on the polity and the economy,"... Much of the growth of high-end incomes stemmed from market forces, like technological innovation... But a significant amount also stemmed from the wealthy’s newfound ability to win favorable government contracts, low tax rates and weak financial regulation, he added.

It is certainly true that income disparity creates serious issues in our society. In particular -- as he notes -- the wealthy have a greater ability to bend government policy towards their economic interests. His latter two examples of such bending, however, are foolish.

The charts included in the article demonstrate that increases in the highest incomes do not lead to tax cuts. (Perhaps one of his students can explain him how to run a regression... )

Secondly, he repeats the oft-heard, but couldn't-be-farther-from-the-truth, cant that Wall Street excess was enabled by "weak" financial regulation. In the context of his argument it is more thoughtless than usual. If the wealthy are able to bend government policy to their interest, why would they modestly settle for weak regulation, when they could get regulation that more affirmatively served their interest? (Do they really call it Government Sachs for nothing?) And as he understands that the wealthy strongly influence government policy, how can he take for granted that strong regulation would, in any way, work against their interest?

On a related topic, one Ronald Dworkin (no, not that one) argues in the journal that the upper middle class today is more responsive to marginal disincentives to work then it was in the past, as work is less considered itself a virtue and professionals are increasingly swayed by quality of life concerns.

His argument strengthened another argument that has been bubbling in the back of my head: Progressive taxation increases income disparity. To construct a crude model -- a company with $100 revenue and two employees, one highly silled ("A") making $66 and one not ("B") making $34. If both are taxed at 33%, A takes home $44. If taxes are changed such that A pays 50%, her take home would initially be reduced to $33. A's natural response would be to ask for a $22 raise to restore her take home value. Any raise for her comes out of B's pocket. If A recieves half her request, she is now making $77 and B $23. The increased tax progressiveness producing an increase in income disparity.

This is a rough model by any stretch, but its core contention is strengthened by the argument that A will meaningfully reduce her hours in response to a meaningful reduction in her after-tax wage. In theory, the company could hire an additional person to share A's role. In practice, it will often be more cost effective to pay A more.

IoC

As I am moving from Java to DotNet, i am re-evaluating IoC containers.

I've been naively using Spring for a while, and unfortunately, missed out on Guice, which, best I can tell is the IoC of my dreams (now lost to me forever, or at least as long as I am on DotNet).

That said, I am growing skeptical of the concept of an IoC container. To take an example from the Guice site. Is this:

public class BillingModule extends AbstractModule {
  @Override 
  protected void configure() {
    bind(TransactionLog.class).to(DatabaseTransactionLog.class);
    bind(CreditCardProcessor.class).to(PaypalCreditCardProcessor.class);
    bind(BillingService.class).to(RealBillingService.class);
  }
}

Really so much more awesome than:

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    CreditCardProcessor processor = new PaypalCreditCardProcessor();
    TransactionLog transactionLog = new DatabaseTransactionLog();
    BillingService billingService
        = new RealBillingService(creditCardProcessor, transactionLog);
    ...
  }

?

The primary differences -- best I can tell -- are:

• Without an IoC container, every class ideally announces every dependency via its constructor. This can result in a lot of constructors requiring, e.g.: Loggers, which is, arguably, displeasing aesthetically. This also may not work smoothly with tools that want a no-arg constructor.
• If your object graph changes, w/o the IoC container, you'd have to change constructors forcing changes to your wiring code before you could compile. With an IoC container, things can, but are not guaranteed, to adapt more magically. You may not be notified that your code is now broken until it fails in run-time.

It is not clear to me that these trade-offs arguing for using an IoC container.

SSIS != ETL

I've started to use Microsoft Sql Server Integration Services @ work. On first impression, like many ms products: its purty.

The second impression is less favorable. An ETL tool has two by-definition requirements: The E-L, pulling data from some source(s) and pushing it to some target(s), and the T, meaningful transformations of the data.

SSIS does a service-able job at the E-L. Which is, by itself, no win. DTS, once upon a time also did, and SSIS leverages already existing Microsoft Technologies to do most of the work.

As far as the T goes, SSIS is, at best adequate. Relatively basic and common tasks are difficult even, if, more or less do-able.

The over-arching issue for SSIS is there is little reason to use it. As there are plenty of tools out there providing data transfer between heterogeneous sources, an ETL tool has to provide a reason to embed transformation logic in its platform instead of natively in database procedures, which, for me, SSIS, so far, fails to do:

• A firm seeking database vendor independence wouldn't choose SQL Server Integration Services.
• An ETL developer requiring drag and drop GUIs (and so, unable to code procedures) likely lacks the ability to handle reasonable complicated transformation logic.
• SSIS does not, yet, provide useful few-click implementations of common ETL tasks. For example, while it has a SCD transformation, I've found it does not always behave as one, or at least I, would like. Or, more egregiously: the nightmare that is the pivot transformation.
• Finally, the most frustrating to me is that, at the very least, I expect an ETL tool to give me robust logging and auditing reasonably free. If I write a stored procedure, I have to manually intermingle code capturing and loggic basic metadata (e.g.: How many rows were retrieved from a source, how many were inserted into the various destinations) with my transformation logic. An ETL tool can capture and log that behind the scenes. What makes SSIS' failure in this regard completely fustrating is that MicroSoft understands, exactly the sort of logging a real world project would desire and how clunky and intrusive it is to implement in SSIS.

I have not played yet with huge data sets, it is possible that SSIS offers some advantages over t-sql for those. The general defense of SSIS seems to go: It is a relatively new platform and all its limitations will be addressed as it matures.

As it exists, I suspect the best way to make it useful is to build some template packages, an internal (xml) package definition configuration file and dotnet code which programmatically builds packages, which entails an awfully high start up cost. In my current implementation I am limiting my use of SSIS, mostly, to its E-L ability, and, for the moment, as a stored procedure runner.

In the end, of course, it is unfair to hold to basically free SSIS to the bar set by far more expensive alternative tools.