Explaining USA Health Care Debate: Repairing Humans and Our Systems

USA Health Care debate is clearly about the allocation and distribution of cost. I keep hearing it expressed as a poor health care. Most instances where USA death tolls are higher could be attributable to relative affluence (affordable illegal drugs, affordable guns, affordable sugar).

Take Cancer. USA's system developed the best responses in the world, and help explain not just the increased rates of survivorship in the USA, but actually floats a lot of other boats as well.

The hypothesis being debated by politicians is not that cancer rates would be lower in a single-payer system, or that treatment of injury would improve, but that costs would be distributed differently. Right now you get very affordable health care if you have Medicare (are over 65) or are eligible for Veterans Administration hospitals, or perhaps are poor enough for Medicaid (I know less about that). But under those systems, you are better off if you have an extremely expensive ailment (like cancer) but not clearly better off (red tape) than if you go to the emergency room of a private hospital.

This blog was developed after a conversation with one of my kids who attended United World College in Bosnia y Herzogovina. All 3 of my kids have lived as ex-pats and wind up trying to explain a system that most people don't even understand in their own countries. If a nation can't even manage its own appliance repairs, how can it manage human bodies?

The answer is as complex as the question is simple. In the USA, people who are the smartest in their class go to Med School or get employed by pharmaceutical research firms. Those people are not available to fix laptops, the money is in fixing hearts and livers. In Ghana, only a slight fraction of smart people have the opportunity to go to med school. I means there are more smart people available to repair laptops.

"That's All I Need to Know" - Confirmation Bias For Sale

"Eighty Percent of  African Eggs are Poisonous"

"If you disagree with me about gun control, that’s all I need to know about your opinion."

"If you disagree with me about abortion, that’s all I need to know about your opinion."

"If you disagree with me about sex, that’s all I need to know about your opinion."

Nine times out of ten, you were probably right, anyway, about them. Because in all probability, you met someone whose opinions are just like yours.

Some things (facts) really are right and wrong. The sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. Lead weighs more than oxygen. There are certain things you really don’t need to listen to alternative opinions about. Most of us know that.

But we are built, or evolved, to take short cuts.

Our brain is efficient. We know to stop listening to false broadcasts. “Bananas are poisonous” fails evolution when believers starve. We evolved to filter out nonsense.  And when we are surrounded by a tribe with the same opinion, we've evolved to agree with it.

But “confirmation bias” also means we prefer simple decisions or explanations to complicated ones. We naturally prefer an opinion that confirms the one we already have, and have less comfort or willingness to accept an opinion that is very different.

"Eighty Percent of African Motorcycles explode in the sunshine"

That is dangerous, because it can filter out NEW information. Diversity of opinions and dialectic and reason around opinions that face conflicting facts, all of this "western philosophy" and "scientific methodology" really beats the heck out of "play theory".

Plato and Aristotle applied mathematical methods and proofs to ideas, and called it logic. The dialectic theory says that the one person out of the ten who disagrees with you is the most valuable opinion you have available.  It gives you something to test out.

The opinions we hear that agree with our own don’t really seem to merit time to challenge. Why double check a lottery ticket you’ve already been paid for?

Confirmation bias is normal. If you have followed a path home every day for ten years, information that says your path home is the fastest, most efficient way, is more welcome than information about a short-cut.

When you are in a tribe, or social group, you benefit from the shared knowledge of your team. And when the team’s bias is correct, you benefit, too.

But realize that confirmation bias means you will amplify groups who give bias to “shared knowledge”....

Opinions snowball.

The most dangerous opinions are those spouted to reinforce doubt about diversity of ideas.  The most dangerous opinions are those which try to get the group to ignore or punish dissent.

"Eighty percent of lug nuts are primitively burned"

And someone who offers to impugn and shiv opponents with sabotaged used electronics, in order to "prove" that the exports were not really repairable (because the one they sabotaged wasn't), are the worst people in the tribe.

That is what a 501 c(3) NGO did to Joseph "Hurricane" Benson.  They slipped a GPS device into a lot of repairable TVs and cut a hidden cord.  Nevermind that Benson could patch the cord in two minutes with electric tape.  The very purpose of "spiking" Joseph Benson (BJ Electronics of Essex) load was to benefit SWEEEP Kuusakoski, according to Benson's friends I interviewed. SWEEP had over-built a shredder in England and wanted more "strategic materials" to run through it.

The "charity" built a false, racial profiling based image of Africa's Tech Sector, invented completely false and fictious "statisitics" about the trade.  The company they got money from abandoned 48M lbs of leaded CRT glass - diverted from buyers like Joe Benson - in a Columbus Ohio warehouse which is likely to wind up a Superfund site.

"Eighty Percent of Muslim Pottery has bombs in it"

Now a charity NGO is offering, for cash, to do the same thing to other recyclers competitors.  Pay them and they will take a used computer that meets the specifications of the repair market and they will sabotage it somehow to pass as a reuse device - as BBC Panorama reporters David Reid and Raphael Rowe did to Joseph Benson, the Nigerian born TV repairman who had zero financial incentive to "externalize" waste (he got rid of bad ones for free, paid for and paid to ship the good ones).  

Ready to help firms with downstream tracking

BAN continues to find that the use of GPS trackers to expose illegal and unethical exports of electronic waste is a powerful tool and motivator. Our first commitment in this regard is to conduct such tracking within our own e-Stewards certification program. But it is our goal also to ensure that the entire industry and all standards respect human rights and the environment and comply fully with the Basel Convention and its decisions.

Responsible recycling companies can be plagued with downstream vendors that cheat on their no-export commitments. For this reason, BAN encourages all electronics recyclers to contact BAN to privately contract for our tracking services. We are ready and willing to help all recyclers and enterprise companies to audit their downstream partners.

The NGO won't hide the GPS in a junky 30 year old expensive to recycle CRT television.  While those are over 50% of the e-waste delivered to USA ewaste drop offs, mysteriously the NGO (working shockingly enough with MIT's Senseable City Lab) didn't put a single GPS tracker in any CRT television.  But, if you pay them to, they have announced they are willing to try to do to any competitor of yours what they did to poor Joe Benson.

"Eighty percent of African Tomatoes are blood-filled"

When I asked the Executive Director why they hadn't put any GPS in any heavy ubiquitously scrapped CRT or projection television, he said that the GPS devices were expensive.  He only recommends putting them in devices that will be exported, and then tells people that the percentage that were (about 1/3 of the selected ones) is representative of e-waste as a whole. 

They are hiding bad eggs in the bushels of the poor, like poison chocolates to scare us from sending children out on Halloween.  They are trying to scare our clients and our friends from selling to geeks of color.  They are selling racial profiling as a litmus test for who can repair a computer.  This must be stopped.

You heard it from me first.  Environmentalists have to stand up to our own bullyboys.  We cannot allow our science hide wolves among the sheep.  We have to call out this atrocious behavior before one of our opponents on the right does so.  And the people who should object first are the professors frum the University of Washington that sit on the Board of Directors of this "hit man" NGO, who describes my pals in the Tech Sector as "primitives" and "informal" and "ghoulish", and describes the laptops and computers they buy as "skeletal" and "toxic" and "debris".

Racism does not belong in the green movement.  Purge this idea of paid tracking.  Now.

Who do you see in Africa's Tech Sector? The next Joe Benson?

State Hate 2: Marshmallow Test, Cognitive Risk of Investment= Tea Party

I like both the story of the Stanford "Marshmallow Test" and this follow up (Cognition, as covered by Maggie Steverns in Slate). In the 1972 experiment, a treat was put in front of kids, and the kids were told that if they didn't eat it, and waited 15 minutes, they'd get another one. The kids who waited grew up to be very successful, those who ate the marshmallow did not tend to do well. I believe that, for sure. What this follow up points out is that kids who don't wait, who eat the marshmallow rather than wait 15 minutes, tend to come from backgrounds or societies where marshmallow-givers (authorities, adults) are liars.

I observed this in Africa. When a government or business management is corrupt, the cynicism "trickles down" and undermines saving and achievement throughout society. The people not involved directly in the corruption still develop unsuccessful habits.

Yesterday's post was obnoxiously cross-referential (pedantic obfuscation is tautologous).   Today, marshmallow analogies.

"State hate" issues pan the political spectrum.   Anti-war protests, or anti-environmental-regulation...  Those who believe in active government (to either curb abortion, or to provide it) may dislike the current office holder immensely. But perhaps they don't actually hate the "state" itself. 

What if you invested, really sacrificed, stayed late moving TVs until 2AM, without pay, risking your family's savings, risking your good name (that you would do what you said you would do with the material), and someone in the government ate your @#$ing marshmallow?  That's where tea parties and anarchists find followers.

Does the Sun Orbit Our Compassion?

Guiyu, China is a polluted place.  Part of it is polluted by the textile industry.  But these burn-houses for circuit boards are real, and no one is saying they are good.  Not much "e-waste" recycling is done by the river, there is no CRT business in Guiyu, and the sophistication of the chip sorting and reuse business really deserves more credit.   But there is pollution there, enough pollution for children to have high levels of lead in their blood samples.  Without question, we can see it.  Guiyu deserves our help.

My fair trade recycling campaign is not about making excuses for the sale of circuit boards to places like Guiyu.  What we propose is that trade can be used as a lever to incentivize reforms.   Just as we lowered the price of SKD monitors sold to Malaysia in return for ISO14001 certification and glass-to-glass recycling of residuals, we believe that Guiyu's economics can be used to negotiate improvements to the standards for children.  This is a math problem.

My African Neighbors, 1985

Agbogbloshie, Ghana is really the same story.   There's no denying that its sad to see a kid busting a CRT tube with a rock.  I'm not sure why someone does that... there's not much inside a CRT tube but a metal shadow mask.  But I've seen it on film, and even if the TV was  used in Ghana for years, I'm not heartless.  Lead in children's blood bothers me a lot.

My fair trade recycling campaign is not intended to make excuses to send "toxics along for the ride" to Ghana or Nigeria.   It's intended to reform the trade, so that people keep their jobs, their repair jobs, their reuse jobs - even their recycling jobs, if we eliminate the burning. But most of all, it's about observing the constellation of the recycling trade more closely, listening, doing Q-sort, and not selling the conclusion that the sun orbits the earth.

Bait and Switch: Gag Video Issue

File under Bandwidth, Blogrank, and Rank-poison...

Video, like "widget fever", reduces blog readership.  I noticed last year that putting new "widgets" onto the blog reduced views.  That, I believe, is a bandwidth issue.  Since a small but important part of the readership is coming from Africa, I think the widgets and video additions are slowing the page load.

I've enjoyed reading and writing posts with video and music embedded.  Like the one at bottom... hilarious "switch gag" video.  But the post it had been embedded in was one of the most important I wrote that quarter.  I was looking for a reference, and found that the post was 25% lower in readership, despite being important.  So I had to switch out the video to improve the pagerank / SEO of the profound-er post.

Speaking of SEO and tricks...  Someone is posting "spam" comments which have links to google-statistic red flag targets.  That link, even in the comments field, might reduce google page rank to this blog.  I've chosen to leave some up, because Google is aware of this use of comments to link to negative-page-link farms.    I'm taking the chance that loss of page rank is worth preserving the evidence of the activity.  Google is aware that comments to blogs can trigger the "nofollow" algorithm.   The people leaving the "punish host" comments are trying to say very bland things so that they cannot be tracked.

The "red flags" are innocuous approvable comments, with a link back to a site with zero (google-nuked) pagerank.  Not just to low ranking, but to one already tagged as pagerank poison.

"Interesting site.  Your blog is thoughtful.  I will watch this important issue"