I had an interview today. The HR person was going over the medical plans, which were actually quite generous. The lady was somewhat out-of-touch with current issues as she was apologetic that the plan hasn’t gotten as much better over the last couple of years as she would like. These days, a couple years without healthcare coverage getting considerably worse is an improvement!

She was talking about what I would need to do (if hired, if on the high-deductable plan). I would need to be sure to tell them that I was insured, even though I was paying cash. I figured that she meant that it was the only way for it to count towards the deductable. She meant something else: I should do it so that I get the insurance company’s price-breaks.

Here’s the thing: Any time I have had the information to compare how much doctors charge an insurance company versus what they charge a cash-paying consumer, the cash-paying consumer always gets the better deal. I have yet to run across an exception. Some examples:

• I got a mole removed from my face. While at the counter, I saw that they charge the insurance companies $175 for removal while I was only charged $125.
• When I was last unemployed, I was charged $80 for a visit to the clinic to have earwax build-up removed. A couple years earlier I found out that you can’t have two earwax removal sessions in within a year and have it be covered. So I was footed with the bill… for $110.
• In Deseret, I had a check-up that was deemed not-covered. The insurance company’s bill was passed on to me and it was a whopping $165. I’m not sure how much this doctor would charge someone paying cash, but I find it hard to believe that it would be $165 as I have never paid that much in my life for a visit where no procedure was done.
• My ex-roommate had back surgery. They said that if he paid cash, rather than go through the insurance company, they would knock 1/3 off the bill.
• Abel Keough ran into a case where a vaccination cost $50 through the insurance company cost only $11 with cash in hand.

There are a few possible reasons why this is the case:

• The doctor/clinic does not have to worry about whether or not he’s or she’s going to get paid. A lot of places have cash-discount policies for this reason. This is especially true for doctors, though, as insurance companies are notorious for finding reasons not to foot the bill. That means that the bill goes to the patient. At best you have to direct billing resources for a procedure that is by that point at least a few weeks past. Resources have to be dedicated towards notifying the person of the bill they did not think they would have to pay. Collection services often have to get involved.
• The doctor/clinic is paid right away. It will often take the insurance company weeks to pay, assuming that they do at all. In a sense, this is sort of the market at work… doctors and clinics are encouraging behavior they like (cash payment) by providing financial incentives. On the other hand, their ability to publicize this is limited!
• Less paperwork required. It’s always more expensive to go through a third-party. The amount of time and manpower required to satisfy the insurance companies is significant.
• Sympathy. It’s easier to charge a bazillion dollar company than it is someone that is paying for it out-of-pocket. Especially when there’s a good chance that the person paying does not have

Now of course this is backwards of the way it is supposed to be. The supposed advantage of managed care was that insurance companies were supposed to have negotiating power. However, they ultimately created a process so complicated that it’s more expensive to work within the system then outside of it. However, because the insurance companies do not compete for a consumer’s business (they compete through yet another middleman, the employer, and once they’re in they’re locked in) the spiraling health care costs down hurt them. It’s amazing that the American health care system functions as well as it does considering that it has many of the worst aspects of every possible system.

Clancy and I have been out of Deseret for almost a month now. The notably liberal city Santomas has been a wonderful antidote to the straightlaced city of Deseret, it has underscored a number of the things that I did appreciate about America’s most religious state.

1) It’s no secret that the LDS church has a strong emphasis on family. Perhaps because of this emphasis, and the expectation that they will not only have a family but will have it sooner rather than later, I found that the mate-selection criteria of young women in Deseret was quite impressive. As much as I can’t say that I agree with having children at 19, it at least has them thinking about families during the crucial dating years. The “girls only date bad boys” phenomenon was not absent in Deseret, but it was a lot less apparent. In fact, one of the biggest feathers a suitor can have in his cap is being a straight-laced religious boy who just got back from spending two years serving his church. I can really think of no such popular criteria back home that places such a value on responsibility. I say this as one whose very being is antithetical to being a missionary. And aside from being a missionary, the girls actually looked at things such as whether or not a guy would be able to support a family and if he was in a good position to, it would count in his favor.

2) There is no arms-race to be outrageous. I may not appreciate the general conformity of the religion, but by-and-large it keeps even the “radical” people generally less so than in Colosse or out here in Santomas. If you only have to dye your hair to be “different”, then all you do is dye your hair. It’s unlikely to catch on and become commonplace as it is most other places. This makes people generally more aesthetically pleasing.

3) Deseretian women know modesty in ways that the rest of society has largely forgotten. I’ve seen more bare midriffs by women that should not bear their midriffs in the past month than I saw my last year in Deseret. This sort of relates to #2 in that there isn’t an arms race to be more and more provocative.

4) Cheap milk.

5) Mormon Deseretians are imbued with a sense of purpose that I found lacking back home and a slightly more productive one than here in liberal Santomas. So much of the local politics here is built on tearing down institutions. Tearing down the patriarchy. Tearing down the state. Hating the President and often our whole government and sometimes even our whole country* with ever-increasing passion to the degree that it becomes a spectator sport. The Mormons are believers in institutions. The church, foremost, but there is an earnest patriotism that, in the current political environment, is refreshing. I read somewhere that no state produced more CIA agents per capita, which if true exemplifies both the admirable and frustrating aspects of the state.

6) By-and-large the high school graduates coming out of Deseret High Schools are considerably more articulate than those that come out of the south. This anecdotal observation is reinforced by the large number of call centers here. It’s partly because Deseret is a cheap place to run a business, but it’s also because the person you hire for $7/hr out here will likely be more articulate than the person you hire for $10/hr in the city.

7) The mountains.

Question: This is as more of a customer service role than a technical role. Seeing as how you come from a technical background, does that concern you?

Answer: Well, to be honest, every position that I have held has been different from the previous and I have found each gratifying in its own way. I enjoy the challenge of taking on new and differing responsibilities.

Translation: I will put on a collar and bark for a job at this point. Arf, arf.

—

Question: Would you say that you are looking to stay with a company a while?

Answer: That actually brings up a question I had about advancement opportunities…

Translation: I avoided directly answering your question for a reason.

—

Statement: You have a very impressive resume and skill set.

Translation: You are such a nice guy and you will make some other girl who is not me very happy someday. Now go away, you make me sick.

—

Question: What experience do you have in the shoelace manufacturing business?

Answer: I’m afraid that I don’t have any.

Translation: Seeing as how I am applying for work at a shoelace manufacturing company, you would think that I would mention something about having worked at one on my cover letter. It’s not as though there are vast numbers of people out there that happened to rack up significant experience in such an obscure industry and would for some reason not mention it.

—

Question: I ran across your resume on Monster.com and think that you would be perfect for a business opportunity. When can we come by your house and do an interview? Will your wife be joining us?

Translation: You’ve never heard of “multi-level-marketing”, have you?

Answer: I’m afraid that I just accepted a job elsewhere.

Translation: As it turns out, I have heard of multi-level marketing, thanks for asking.

Not too long ago, whenever I warned Mom that I had bad news for her, she would ask quite fearfully if I had gotten Julie pregnant. Whatever news I had was eclipsed by Julie’s non-pregnant state of affairs. It’s funny how things change, and yet how they stay the same…

1996

Me: Hey Mom, I have some bad news…

Mom: Julie’s not pregnant, is she?

Me: Oh, no… I just heard that terrorists blew up Chicago.*

Mom: But she’s not pregnant, right?

Me: Right.

Mom: Great!

2006:

Me: Hey Mom, I have some good news…

Mom: Is Clancy pregnant?!

Me: Oh, no… I just won six million dollars in the lottery.*

Mom: But she’s not pregnant?

Me: No.

Mom: rats…

* - Okay, maybe not quite that drastic of news… but it could have been and her reaction probably would have been the same.

Via Logtar:

Four jobs I wish I had the capabilities of:

1. Police officer
2. Soldier
3. Musician
4. Graphic artist
Bonus: Superhero

Four names I wish I had other than my own:

1. Will/William/Truman (I chose these for my pseudonym largely because they are relevent to me for personal/family reasons, but also because I like them.)
2. Ray/Raymond (or Rayford, for the sake of being unique!)
3. Ted/Edward
4. Craig

Four of my favourite actresses:

1. Penelope Ann Miller
2. Sela Ward
3. Maura Tierney
4. Bonnie Hunt

Four songs I could listen to over and over again:

1. “Down on The River By the Sugar Plant” -M Doughty
2. “The Ballad of Barry Allen” -Jim’s Big Ego
3. “Spiraling Shape” -They Might Be Giants
4. “What a Good Boy” -Barenaked Ladies

Four TV shows I love to watch:

1. The Wire/The Shield (two different shows, but only run for 10-15 episodes instead of the traditional 20-30)
2. Frasier (always more like a theatrical play than a sitcom to me)
3. Boy Meets World (It’s purely a sitcom, but it’s about as good as I can imagine a family sitcom to be, even in reruns)
4. 24

Four places I would like to go to on vacation:

1. Turkey (where the Middle East meets Europe)
2. Eastern Europe
3. Australia (America’s long-lost cousin)
4. Israel

Four of my favourite cuisines:

1. Enchiladas
2. Fettacini Alfredo
3. Crawfish
4. King Ranch Cassarole

Four places I wish I was right now:

1. Back in Colosse
2. As a music show
3. Somewhere that’s not quite so hot
4. Right here

Logtar has a great post about wealth:

The word rich is so inaccurate at times. I have met people that have a lot of money in my short life, but in reality it does not mean as much as most people think. Much like race, there is a lot of preconceived notions about how people are in higher economic levels, but those notions are less accurate than even race stereotypes. My Great Grand Father was the owner of two hotels, several properties and was able to give each one of his kids a house when they got married. My Great uncles drank and partied two hotels down the drain and in the end were left with nothing. If you saw either one of them on the street you would have never even imagined that they came from such wealth, because in the end money did not do much for their lives.

Rich can mean a number of things. Most studies have demonstrated that wealth is in many ways a relative concept. We judge ourselves not by what we have, but by what we have in comparison to what our neighbors have and what our parents had. Though almost every realtor will tell you that it’s better to get the smallest house in the richest neighborhood that you can rather than the biggest house in the smallest, most evidence suggests the opposite. Living among rich people will make you see all the things that you don’t have. Living among poorer people will help you appreciate what you do have.

When I was in high school, I was from a “poor” family in a number of respects. First, though my father was pulling down substantial income, he was pulling down less than a lot of people that went to the high school. Further, we were in some ways poorer than families that made less money.

Being rich, to me, is not about what you make as much as what you spend. My family lived well below its means until recently when they finally discovered that they had quite a bit of money and not but a few decades left to spend it. Now, according to this theory, a $30,000 credit line makes one just as rich as $30,000 in the bank, provided that the latter lives within his means. In some ways that’s how I think. It’s definitely what I think when I harbor a distaste for what I consider “rich people.”

In a wealthy society, wealth is a zero-sum game once you get out of the lowest income bracket. Look around at the wealthiest among us and look at what they spend their money on. You don’t even need to go to the upper classes to see it. I’ve commented before that an economy in which people willingly pay $5 for a cup of coffee, $4 for a pack of cigarettes, and $20 for an SUV that will never drive on dirt is not an economy that is struggling in any meaningful sense. Except when compared to the wealthy, who often flaunt their wealth and then get defensive when it starts to make people angry.

How much money is spent by the middle class to get away from poor people? How much money is spent by the wealthy to differentiate themselves from the middle class? These are the things that, for whatever reason, really bother me. Mostly because, as a society, it seems to do so little good. Individual familes improve their prospects by moving to the tony suburbs and their flush school systems, but most of the improvement is comparative. Zero-sum. Nothing is really improved.

The same applies in a deeper sense in the world of fashion. Much of what we spend when we buy better clothes really does affect the quality of the clothing. Wrangler Jeans cost twice as much as Faded Glory, but they look good for three times as long. But once you go above Wrangler, you’re spending money just so that you’re not wearing Wranglers like everyone else. Nobody’s life is improved. Your prospects got better by making someone else’s worse (cause they’re stuck in Wranglers). People buy huge houses on huge lots with huge yards that they don’t their kids play in.

There’s a suburb of Santomas that is apparently banning basketball hoops that are visible from the street because the hoops betray property values. As do environmentally-friendly clotheslines. In some ways people aren’t buying their houses as much as they are merely renting against the property values thereof. Things that would actually improve our lives are passed over for the sake of maintaining the wealth that is supposed to improve our lives.

Wealth becomes its own happiness… at the expense of the real thing.

I have a job interview today.

There is a 50/50 chance that it will be one of the most uncomfortable and embarassing hours of my life. Every red flag in the back of my head says that I am a bad fit for this position.

But… there’s a 10% chance that I am wrong. And it’s a good job. So I gotta take my chances.

I can’t remember the last time I went into a job interview merely hoping that I am not humiliated.

You ever meet those people that see some illness on TV and are sure that they’ve got it? It’s become almost cliche, but only because it’s so familiar.

Clancy and I have been watching HBO’s crime drama The Wire. If you’ve never seen it, and have a taste for cop shows and a stomach for violence and sex, I hardily recommend it. It follows a case squad’s pursuit of a rather organized and efficient drug cartel in west Baltimore. It’s written by a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun and a former cop, giving it a sense of realism cop shows often lack. On the other hand, its gritty realism at time borders on a startling relativism between police officers and drug kingpins. On the other hand, the moral indifference and cold neutrality provide a straight investigative and analytical tone that reminds me a little bit of Thucydides’s records of the war he was ousted from. Anyway, enough about the show for a moment.

Clancy and I moved into a neighborhood that is “in transition”, so to speak, from a poor minority neighborhood to a professional-class white one. We’re the minority in the neighborhood, but I suspect that wouldn’t be the case in ten years. We’ve been warned about ordering shipments to be left on the porch and leaving anything of value in our cars. But we’re within spitting distance of University Hospital, where she will be working. Other than Stan The Neighborhood Homeless Guy (a story for another time), we’ve not really gotten to know anyone in the neighborhood, but we find most of them to be cordial enough.

With one exception. The Junkyard House on the corner. I call it the Junkyard House because they have a rather large backyard with almost as many “NO TRESPASSING” and “BEWARE OF DOG” signs as they have stuff back there. They’re more-or-less set up to be outdoors at all times, which is an odd choice for an unsocial group living in a place where the temperature rarely tops out at less than 100 degrees. But it’s just as well that they are outdoors a lot because they get a constant stream of visitors. An interesting array of folks from poor-looking to working class and one soccer-mom-looking kind of lady.

Maybe we’ve been watching too much of The Wire lately, but the more we see them, the more apparent it is that they are a bunch of drug dealers. I’ve never seen drugs or money change hands, but then I’ve made a point not to keep an eye on them for any prolonged period of time. I saw the police over there at some point, and aforementioned Stan the Homeless Guy said that the DEA was at the place a couple weeks ago. Now, Stan may well have made it up, but it’s unlikely that he picked that house at random. He spends enough time going up and down the streets that he probably has as good a feel for the community than anyone. And we’re not the only ones suspicious. I’ve caught our neighbors (the ones living between us and The Jankyard House) looking through the crack of their fence when the Junkyard folks have a guest.

But… no proof of anything. And whatever I learn, the police almost certainly no more. It’s unlikely any turf battles will arise that would cause gunfire. It’s harmless, albeit a little disconcerting.

The LA Times has an interesting article on the resurgence of manufacturing jobs:

Manufacturing, long known for plant closings and layoffs, is now clamoring for workers to fill high-paying, skilled jobs. While millions of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or automated out of existence during the past decade, many of the remaining jobs require higher skills and pay well — $50,000 to $80,000 a year for workers with the necessary math, computer and mechanical abilities.

Some manufacturers are so desperate for workers who can program, run or repair the computers and robots that now dominate the factory floor that they are offering recruitment bonuses, relocation packages and other incentives more common to white-collar jobs.

In Ohio, American Micro Products Inc., an electrical parts maker, is offering $1,000 bonuses to workers who recruit technicians, and it is covering moving costs for the new employees. In San Antonio, Toyota cannot find enough qualified applicants for skilled positions at its new plant, even after the state sponsored a training program. In Fontana, California Steel Industries Inc. found it so hard to fill five mechanical and technical positions, some paying $28 an hour, that managers started paying employees to train for the unfilled jobs.

About 90% of manufacturers say they are having trouble filling skilled jobs such as machinists and technicians, according to a survey released in December by the National Assn. of Manufacturers, the leading industry group representing 12,000 manufacturers.

This is actually somewhat in-line with my second-hand experience. I worked for a couple years as the IT person for an equipment manufacturing plant back in Colosse. There were some in the workshop that made considerably more than most of us in the office made. Some made even more than the engineers that designed the parts they were making. That was a handful of the employees, though, as most made considerably less. There was a pretty linear relationship between how complicated a machine was to work and how much the person working got paid for it.

On the other hand, though the money wasn’t bad you were still in a blue collar atmosphere. They didn’t have the luxuries that many of us in the office had such as flexible hours or, for that matter, a whole lot of respect outside the moneyt. It’s not a career path that I would choose, but it’s right for some. Not right for enough, though, apparently.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling against the expectation of privacy in the workplace.

In United States v. Simons, the case upon which the district court relied, the Fourth Circuit reasoned that an employer’s Internet-usage policy—which required that employees use the Internet only for official business and informed employees that the employer would “conduct electronic audits to ensure compliance,” including the use of a firewall— defeated any expectation of privacy in “the record or fruits of [one’s] Internet use.” 206 F.3d at 395, 398. A supervisor had reviewed “hits” originating from Simons’s computer via the firewall, had viewed one of the websites listed, and copied all of the files from the hard drive. Id. at 396. Despite that the computer was located in Simons’s office, the court held that the “policy placed employees on notice that they could not reasonably expect that their Internet activity would be private.” Id. at 398.

This sounds almost like a no-brainer to me. If I am doing something on company property, I don’t believe that I should have the expectation of privacy. This includes not only what is on my computer, but also what is inside my desk — even if I am given a lock and key. The fact that there was an established policy is icing on the cake. Unnecessary, but it makes the case a slam dunk. It doesn’t make a difference, in my mind, whether they are looking as “agents” of law enforcement. Consent for search, or the search on behalf of someone else, ought to be at the discretion of the company’s owner.

Apparently, I don’t know a whole lot about caselaw as this is apparently a sort of reversal from the past, according to Orin Kerr:

The rules for government employment are totally different, thanks to the Supreme Court’s somewhat odd decision in O’Connor v. Ortega. In that case, the Supreme Court created a sui generis, split-the-baby-in-half regime for government employee Fourth Amendment rights (announced in a plurality opinion by, you guessed it, Justice O’Connor). Under the O’Connor framework for government employee privacy, Fourth Amendment protections in the government workplace hinge on whether the workspace is shared with other employees, or whether the employer has enacted legitimate workplace policies that define privacy rights. The result is that government employees have much less Fourth Amendment protection than private sector employees, with the caveat that government employers cannot consent to a search while private sector employers can. (For more on this, and all the relevant case citations, see the chapter on it in the Justice Department manual on Searching and Seizing Computers that I wrote in ‘99-’01.)

You learn something new every day. On the other hand, the way I thought it was it now is and what I didn’t know no longer applies…

Introduction:

In January, my employer had its annual meeting in which the future of the company was so bright that the company was going to have to buy us shades. Instead, they bought about 25% of the team pink slips. I work for a small company in the west that provides software solutions to meet HR-related needs for a particular industry that has fallen on hard times.

Bandwidth costs money, so it’s fully justified to take those using excessive bandwidths to task. The goal here, however, is to go beyond what’s reasonable. So if you can get them on something that is reasonable, you should try to make it sound as unreasonable as possible. For instance, let’s say that they’re listening to streaming audio. Since you work at a company that has a lot of computer-oriented people, they might understand that the bandwidth is costing the company money and choose to listen to music another way. But if you tell them that the problem is that they’re connecting to an Internet site every couple of minutes (because every new song is a new connection), they will wonder if you’re stupid or mean.

Jeff wasn’t sure about the legal compliance of a report that the company was working for. He was tempted to go on to the Internet and track down the government’s standards so that he could check them against the report. He’s encouraged to do so, but the last time he did that he got in trouble. It takes 50 connections or more to get management attention. Even though he had over 50 work-related connections that day, he had 10 that were not and was verbally reprimanded. That wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’tdouble-checked some of the reports in fact, had he not done that it would have allowed for more surfing.

Jane has always worked 50-hour weeks. She’s salary, but she cares about her job and the company. One of the ways that she was able to work longer was by taking a break at 5:00, checking her email and voice-mail, and if there wasn’t some pressing reason that she needed to go home she would stick around for a while. However, since the company declared war on webmail (because of the refresh rates creating connections), she can’t check her email. Now she leaves promptly at 5.

The topic of the discussion: How do they get employees to care more about their jobs and to care about the company? How do they get employees to “buy in” to the company and its vision?

Becky has a couple of posts up about the feeling she gets when men oogle her. First:

On the friend flipside, even though it doesn’t bother me nearly as much, I would still honestly prefer to receive a compliment for my eyes, smile or wit. Perhaps these are my insecurities coming into play, but it’s almost as if they’re saying “while I like your breasts, the rest of you isn’t good enough” because these aren’t people that want to date me. The irony is that these are mostly just balls of fat, so it’s interesting that oftentimes men want large breasts with a tiny body (surgical help not included, of course).

It’s a long story worth sharing in its entirety at some point, but once upon a time I was involved with a girl named Brady that was physically stunning. She was everything I was attracted to at the time down to a T (though my tastes changed after… and maybe because… of her). Anyway, she would fly off the handle just about any time I complimented her appearence. I mean, she would just lose it. One day we finally got to talking about it, and she explained that she hated it because she put very little effort in to her appearance and she hated that the one thing that guys appreciated most about her was the one thing that she had absolutely nothing to do with.

Looking back, it is perhaps the only thing the girl ever said that actually made logical sense. And that’s gotta be at least part of what is offputting about compliments about breasts. It also makes sense that Becky would prefer compliments about smile and wit, which are strengths that are cultivated. Even the eyes get a pass because they are often marked as the windows to the soul.

As far as I go, I have unusually dark blue eyes that various women have complimented in the past. It didn’t mean much to me when they did compliment them for the same reason that breast compliments meant little to the Brady because she didn’t really cultivate her appearance so much as simply inherited it. But I will always appreciate those that did compliment my eyes because it was one of the two physical strengths that I realized I had when it came to women (the other being my height, which is major points with tall ladies such as my wife). I made a point to look women in the eyes and I think that even if they didn’t care about my eyes’ color, it gave me an appearance of confidence.

There are other physical compliments that I guess could be considered valuable. For instance I have an expressive face, which would be on par with Becky’s smile as far as compliment acceptability rationale is concerned. Beyond that, there isn’t that much to compliment (note: I am just considering above the waste assessments here!), so I suppose that I take whatever I can get, but if it’s not something that I created or cultivated, my reaction will have more to do with who is complimenting rather than what the compliment is.