Jeff "Hemos" Bates, cofounder of Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters and of Everything2, Vice President of Editorial Operations at OSTG, and Executive Editor of Slashdot has joined the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board. He joins luminaries nearly as important as him such as Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Sir Clive W.J. Granger, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics. The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, dedicated to ensuring that humanity adopts the powerful technologies of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics safely as we move towards the Singularity. This humanitarian organization is pursuing all possible options, including relinquishment when feasible (they are against the U.S. government posting the recipe for the 1918 flu virus on the internet), and helping accelerate the development of defensive technologies including anti-biological virus technology, active nanotechnological shields, and self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.

This entry is a ready-made response to the Perl 6 troll that shows up in almost every Perl story. It's almost exactly the same text every time, and it's rather annoying. Here's the cut-and-paste reply:

This troll is getting tiresome. Anyone who cares would have read it the other N times it's been posted:
<ul>
<li><URL: /comments.pl?sid=142723&cid=11959288 >
<li><URL: /comments.pl?sid=69113&cid=6312860 >
<li><URL: /comments.pl?sid=104448&cid=8891825 >
<li><URL: /comments.pl?sid=97487&cid=8334017 >
<li><URL: /comments.pl?sid=157102&cid=13170127 >
<li><URL: /comments.pl?sid=163115&cid=13626486 >
</ul>

This journal entry will serve as a spot to jot down why I have marked someone as Friend or Foe, so that I don't forget. I'll edit it whenever I make changes to my Friends or Foes list.

Here are the Friends:

• 793528: His username matches his UID, and he journals about some cool stuff having to do with UIDs here on Slashdot. Also, his friend's list is pretty sweet.
• AKAImBatman: He seems to write intelligently about tech stuff, and has some opinions that I think are interesting.
• bcrowell: Befriended because this post makes it seem like he is fairly knowledgable about copyrights. Something which is very rare among this site's users.
• Chacham: Found his journal through a comment he made in 793528's journal. Looks interesting.
• CmdrTaco: Mostly so I get messages when he journals, which usually talk about Slashdot itself in some way. I have an interest in the goings on of this site.
• ElleyKitten: Pretty simple; I enjoy her posts.
• FortKnox: His journals are usually interesting. I especially liked the series that he did on a game of Total War.
• kfg: kfg is awesome.
• MBGMorden: This post reveals intelligent thinking regarding the GPL, which is refreshing on this site
• Overly Critical Guy: His comments are entertaining because he calls people on their posturing. And really, there is enough posturing going on around this place.
• UnrefinedLayman: Befriended because this post reveals that he is a critical thinker. I support critical thinking.
• yintercept: I forget why, now. It was long ago. I believe it was something funny that he wrote.

And the Foes:

• bani: This subthread says it all. These people aren't worth wasting time on.
• keesh: Perl 6 Troll
• Tassach: This thread reveals that he willfully ignores points brought up by the person he's arguing against (me, in that case). Overly argumentative to the point of ruining discussion. Does not favor raising the level of communication on Slashdot.

OK, I'm 40 years old and have always had a problem with keeping my weight under control. At certain times in my 20s, I was in decent shape, but it was always a struggle. The last ten years I've been slowly losing the battle, and it doesn't help that my wife is a great cook.

Recently I made the decision that I really had to do something about it, as I've so often done in the past. Zillions of diets, working out, you know the drill -- and then ultimate failure.

My first realization was that my body wanted a certain number of calories, and that number of calories exceeded a healthy maintenance weight. Trying to overcome body chemistry like that is just too damn hard, and you always lose in the end. I can't eat salads rest of my life! I hate them, and it's not sustainable.

OK, step one was being honest with myself that limiting the food supply side would never work. Therefore, the energy demand side had to be increased. Which meant the dreaded exercise. I played a few sports ten years ago, but it's really hard to fit that in with a wife and kids. But I managed to squeeze in some time in the morning before work for the gym.

So I started in on that... but the gym is SOOOO damn boring. That's what pretty much defeated me before, but I was determined to succeed. But I could feel the seeds of failure being planted.

THEN... I heard about something. A high-end gym had DVD players on their cardio machines. The light went off! Good lord, that was it. I went out and bought a portable DVD player (it was like $150 at Sam's Club -- they're CHEAP these days). It came with a strap system that fit over a cardio machine, slick as you please.

It was beautiful. I'd pop in a video and the 45 minutes passed so easily I decided to increase it to an hour. I now burn 1140 calories in an hour, five days a week. And the weight has been coming off! Of course, you can't go crazy and increase your food intake. I actually managed to eat healthier here and there, but it's so freeing to know that I don't have to. All I have to do is watch movies and I'll get in shape, no thought needed.

I usually use the Elliptical Trainer, which does both your legs and arms at the same time. It's also low stress on your back (I have a bad back).

The other key to the plan was signing up for the Blockbuster $15/month unlimited rental plan, where they send you videos, and then when you send them back, they send out another one (it's like Netflix, except cheaper).

Now I actually look forward to my workout in the morning. It gives me one hour of blissful time to watch all the movies I haven't seen, TV shows (I'm watching the HBO series Deadwood right now -- recommended). It's worked out great.

If you've given up ever being in shape and healthy, give the plan a try. It's tailor made for geeks who have to keep their brains occupied or exercise is just torture.

Guess again.

This announcement comes to quickly on the heels of the Apple -> Intel announcement. Don't you think IBM would have tried to persuade Apple to stay with PowerPC chips?

Well, there they are. The chips Apple wanted: the low power G5 and the dual-core G5. Do you think IBM developed those for other customers?

Get over it, fanboys: this about pricing and profit.

I think Apple is intending to move themselves out of the high-end niche market and go head-to-head with the likes of Dell and HP. Soon we'll see $299 Intel Mac boxes that can run Mac OS X and Windows. Apple may even obtain an Microsoft OEM license for Windows XP (Longhorn?)

It's over. The Apple Mystique is gone. Get over it.

Now that the latest and greatest study on global climate change has pronounced that the deniers are "in the same box as the flat-Earthers and the people who believe smoking doesn't cause cancer"; climate-change denying yahoos have made my Slashdot-moderating shitlist in much the same way that evolution-deniers have (see earlier journal).

I'm not going do downvote climate change deniers regardless, but I will demand an extraordinarily high standard of evidence of you wish to argue that point of view. Just saying "climate change is a myth" or even that it's not proven will rapidly gain a downvote from me, should I have mod points.

Update, Jan 07. Another nail in the coffin of denial, if it was needed, is here.

I'm on the bandwagon!

Evan Hoffman's crappy Xanga!

But there is something to see here .

If you want to know how a little firmware for a little router can become a very big issue, read on. I'll tell you all about it.

First, though, I'll skip to the good part. James Ewing (of Sveasoft), developer of the now famous Linksys WRT54G firmware fork, is engaging in seriously bad acts, of importance to everyone.

As part of a novel scheme to violate the GPL, and to profit from those violations, he lies and threatens people (in a very simple, scary way) so that they will either not understand, or be afraid to exercise, the provisions of the Gnu Public License.

I say it's a novel scheme, although really, it's not especially clever. He's just the first person (that we know of) to have the technical and social skills to pull it off, and yet lack the ordinary moral and emotional health to stop himself.

Here are a set of links with more information, and with copies of "his" GPL firmware. Because of his ongoing efforts to suppress the spread of "his" fork of Linux, these links will frequently change, and may be broken. Please comment if you find a broken link.

• Slashdot journal page by one of James' victims (Let him try to scare Slashdot into taking it down!)
• Forum run by TheIndividual
• Direct link to his site, with a detailed account of his experience!

James Ewing has unfortunately been surprisingly successful, both at profiting (it is apparent from his price and his number of "subscribers" that he has made real money at this), and (thus far) at staying beneath the radar of the community, despite a growing sense of unease, concern, and a number of inquiries from various parties in the community (the FSF, Slashdot, etc).

I am, by the best definition, nobody - just a one-time Linksys user (who was disappointed enough to return the hardware and buy a D-Link, btw) who happened to learn early about what was really happening by watching the strange failure of the GPL source code to propagate, and finally finding the websites of James' victims.

You can't know much about the open source/free software community and not be moved to outrage over the behavior of people like James Ewing, both for his illegal and immoral affront to the generous hackers whose work he is illegally profiting from, and of the people he victimizes. Being threatened in the way James threatens people is extremely unpleasant, as you can see for yourself. No one should ever have to suffer such evil, vicious behavior.

Now, here is the story in detail.

A few months ago I was experimenting with wireless networks. Linksys, the ubiquitous network hardware maker, had just released their wireless router's Linux-based firmware, source code and all, finally complying with the Free Software (GPL) license of the code they had used to make it.

Cringley had just written a long piece about one of the new forks of that open-source firmware - that it was great, and powerful, and possibly a big deal. The developer running the fork was James Ewing. His "company," Sveasoft.

James, after weathering the incredible surge of traffic and interest from Cringley's favorable coverage of him, and the subsequent Slashdot stories, must have seen dollar signs.

It's really so simple, if you think about it. If he could just manage to charge all these "freeloading" downloaders a little money for each download, he could be rich. He watched that download counter running, and fantasized about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars he would be making if every downloader paid his fee.

The only problem was that his company's "product" is free software - a monumental, towering achievement, the work of tens of thousands of strangers, who all agreed that their software, and everything based on it, should grow by cooperation, and to do that, it should always be free.

Sveasoft's firmware is just a tiny customization of Linux: a free OS kernel, and the mountain of free software components built on top of it.

His "collaborators" don't charge a nickel for it, and neither can he - that is, without breaking the law.

The magnitude of the Free Software world's practical, intelligent generosity is difficult to understand. It is a tremendous, and important thing, and it is hard to appreciate how many problems were solved, how many new opportunities created, how many basic things we rely on every day spring from this community - let alone how all these incredible people share the work and do it "for nothing" - so that we all can benefit.

James Ewing, for some reason, finds it very easy to piss on this system - to dismiss its rules, deceive its architects, and threaten its users - in order to profit. His actions cheat every participant in Free Software, from a developer who sent a 1-line patch, all the way to Linus and Stallman.

By the time I heard about Sveasoft, he was already charging $20 "subscriptions" just to see the source for his GPL firmware.

I once studied this aspect of the GPL, and I immediately thought I understood what he was trying to do. It's subtle, and I apologize if this appears complicated. There are two main things to remember about the GPL: that "distribution isn't required, but freedom is," and "that distribution isn't free, but it needn't cost anything."

James is very smart, and at first blush, it only appears that he's managed to thread these needles.

First of all, anyone can take GPL code and modify it. That's essential to the whole process. And you're not required to share changes you make. The only caveat is, if you do ever share your new work, you have to share the source, and it stays GPL (so anyone you share it with can in turn change it and share it with anyone they like, and so on).

Second of all, when you share your new work (with source code), you actually don't have to do it for free.

It's true! Nowadays, that distribution almost always is free. But, you have to remember that the GPL predates the modern, ubiquitous Internet, where distributing data is so cheap it effectively costs nothing, even for the $20 a month crowd. As a result, the GPL has an ingenious aspect to its design: it creates a market for distribution of free software.

I, too, can charge $20 (or any reasonable fee) for a copy of Linux. Anyone I give "my" code to, however, can also distribute. And they can charge whatever they like. Usually, that's "zero dollars." This ensures that the "market price" of distributing GPL code approaches the actual cost of doing it. Almost always, that cost is effectively "zero."

Unless you rig the market.

Sveasoft still provides an uninteresting, basically useless, very early version of their firmware for nothing. For $20, you "subscribe" and can get access to the current, "interesting" versions. Now, remember: nothing in the GPL stops Sveasoft from doing this. But, unlike other "ordinary" businesses, Sveasoft can't enforce the "rules." The $20 fee is effectively optional, because any "subscriber" has the right to release what they "bought" to the world for free, themselves, thereby taking the "market price" of code distribution from $20 to $0.

As the apparent coup de gras, James promised he would cancel the subscriptions of anyone who did this. He called it "forking" his current firmware versions. His "customers" could indeed exercise their GPL rights, he claimed. But if they did, they wouldn't be getting any more code from him. He had no obligation to continue to distribute to them (directly!) in the future.

Well, that was fine. It only takes one $20 subscriber to leak the code each time, and worse, there's no way he can necessarily tell who "leaked" - without violating the GPL, that is. It's tough to "tag" source code.

This interesting setup was raised and debated in the halls of the FSF, and won their stamp of approval. Technically, it complies with the license. James Ewing officially became the man standing the farthest out on the knife's edge of legality. Slashdot ran through a similar debate. But already, there were bad signs. If you listened, you could hear the monster lumbering underneath.

I could appreciate James Ewing's rather pushy way of raising money, but I knew that, because of the GPL and the constant, reliable nature of people and markets, the $20 is "opt-in." I went to google, hunting for other sites that mirrored the Sveasoft firmware. I didn't need even cheap customer support, and I had no obligation to pay anyone for Linux, whatever fairy dust James Ewing had sprinkled on it.

But there were no mirrors. Anywhere.

That was scary. Right away, I knew something was up.

Going to the P2P networks was scarier. I found a large number of fake files, named as if they were firmware releases... evidence of a ("relatively" sophisticated, though unsuccessful) campaign to poison P2P sharing of the firmware. But I also found a smoking gun. I found, in one of the fake files, some startling propaganda.

You really have to see it to believe it.

This propaganda was intended to deceive readers about their rights under the GPL - and to scare them into "buying" James Ewing's version of Linux (remember, his firmware is just a little Linux distro for Linksys routers). If they didn't, they were warned, they'd be "pirates," and they might find that their "stolen" firmware had been back-doored, or worse.

Only you can't "pirate" GPL source code.

Finally, down near the bottom of a Slashdot story, I found a post linking to a struggling website run by a lone, brave soul who was trying to mirror "Sveasoft's" Linksys Linux. It told the story that I had begun to expect, with a terrible sense of foreboding, from the moment google first came up empty. Only it was far worse than I suspected.

James Ewing was applying the same propaganda and lies directly to unknowing Sveasoft subscribers, web hosts, and (I suspect) search engines, to frighten people out of the mirror market.

James Ewing was making sure only he could distribute that firmware, and only at the price he wanted.

And he wasn't just using libel and deceit to scare people off. When that didn't work, he got personal. He actually tried to make GPL users afraid for their safety.

"You really should do some background research on who you are fucking with. I will eventually find out exactly who you are and where you live and then we're gonna have some real fun."

"Well then if I were you I would scamper off and remove any copies of my firmware right quick now."

"I enjoy tracking down scumbags and giving them what they deserve. I used to get paid for it before I changed careers and started a family."

-TheIndividual's account of his experience with James Ewing

The important thing for James right now is results. If he can make it hard enough to find mirrors of that firmware, it puts money in his pocket every day. All he has to do is keep you from exercising your rights under the GPL, by whatever means necessary - lies to you, lies to your service provider, or, if you don't cave, a few threats. It'll probably work, and he can always deny he did it later. So what if he has to get a little tough on somebody in the morning. It pays off by the afternoon.

He is fast - probably aggressively searching the web looking for new mirrors 24/7, and reacting within days or even hours. Most hosts will drop a free or a cheap hosting customer like a hot rock at the first hint of copyright violations; no warnings, no questions asked, no appeals. Most search engines have automatic or streamlined takedown provisions for "illegal" results. Few in the larger community understand the intricacies of the GPL, or have the time and energy to verify James' claims. They see a software "vendor" and "pirated" binaries, and that's all they need to see. Because of the odious DMCA, in the U.S., just taking the time to investigate and handle such a claim properly can subject you to massive liability.

For those few who don't just give up and move on to more rewarding pursuits than fighting with James, "he makes them his new full time hobby."

In a sense, though, all GPL users are James' new full time hobby. He believes he's discovered a way to violate the GPL, selling the work others did for free, and get away with it. And until we stop him, he has.

It's a clever enough scam, I suppose. All he has to do is keep the "market value" for distributions of his firmware artificially high for a while. He'd make most of his money quickly, while there's still a buzz about the product. Even if the Free Software community later found out, organized and fought back, he'd have made a sweet chunk of cash. Just 4000 subscribers paying $20 each adds up to $80,000. Oh, this scam hasn't made him rich, but it's not chump change, either. Right now he's having a nice hearty laugh at us, all the way to the bank.

This is a long story, but the ending should be obvious.

James Ewing should be:

• Investigated, and if necessary, prosecuted, by law enforcement in his nation of residence for his frightening, threatening behavior towards others.
• Sued in civil courts around the world. I'm not an attorney, but at the very least, his violations of the GPL, and his libels against members of the community (as he gets mirror sites shut down again and again for "pirating" Linux) seem clearly actionable.

If it becomes clear that anyone can easily profit from abusing the Free Software community as James Ewing has, then we are in for some dark times ahead.

The only happy ending to this is if James Ewing loses all his ill-gotten gains, and faces the music for his threatening behavior towards others.

If Free Software were a corporation, he would have heard from our lawyers a week into his scam. But since we are a community, we have to take action like one - rallied by our spokesmen and standard-bearers, and powered by the many small actions of the great, well-meaning crowd that we are.

I call upon those with legal and financial resources: The Free Software Foundation, Linus Torvalds, IBM, and Linksys, among others, to investigate James Ewing's practices, discover for yourselves what's really been going on, and help us take swift, firm, and fair actions to protect the community and the GPL.

Addenda:

• We think the GPL is pretty good, but regardless of what happens to James Ewing, the FSF should seriously consider any possible ways it can amend the GPL in order to make abuses more difficult.
• In order to frighten people into believing there may be backdoors in binary releases other than his own, James has a problem: he has to stop checksums. Any one of his users may checksum their "legitimate" firmware, and that checksum can be used to determine the authenticity of other firmware files - eliminating one of his sources of fear and doubt about other mirrors. His efforts to stamp out checksumming are straightforward: cut off the subscriptions of any user who posts a checksum. Unfortunately for James, while he must feel compelled to do it, such actions are prima-facie evidence of his conspiracy. Read about one Sveasoft user's experience here.

  It would also be interesting to see about James's small-claims liability for arbitrarily canceling the subscriptions of those who post checksums or criticism...

  Regardless, relatively soon after this mess started, James decided to try a new tactic to beat both checksummers and subscribers careful enough to conceal their identity when crossing him: binary tagging...

• In order to more reliably catch subscribers who distribute the firmware, James has begun uniquely tagging binaries for each user. Of course, this is only effective unless he also stops people from getting the source code. So, he split up his binaries and source releases - and has reportedly taken various measures to prevent or discourage his users from getting the source at all (i.e. refusing electronic distribution, charging exhorbitant fees, and who knows what else). To the extent that the source is not readily available, or that a binary release differs from the source, this appears to be a direct GPL violation.

  Undaunted, James Ewing has spiced up this illegal behavior with a bold new justification. Perhaps the boldest possible, given all the foregoing. Are you ready?

  According to him, the GPL now no longer applies to his firmware.

• I know, it sounds amazing, but it's true - as you can see here, in his own words. The GPL is the only reason he had source code to start his little business with in the first place, but now, according to James, it doesn't really apply after all.

  This should come as a surprise to people on Slashdot and at the FSF, where he just previously tried to justify his behavior as GPL-compliant.

  He now appers to be claiming that because he put proprietary, non-GPL code in the firmware's "user space" (interesting concept for a firmware), the whole firmware is poisoned, and is no longer free and open.

  (Still no word on how this new idea affects his source releases.)

  Of course, none of this would have happened if that argument were really true; Linksys would (probably did) claim the same thing during their fight with the FSF, and all the sources James Ewing used never would have been released in the first place.

  Linksys had to follow the rules, but for some reason, he thinks he doesn't. The mind boggles.

  All of this is really academic. The whole Sveasoft firmware ("user space" and all) was GPL and on his website just a little while ago. And now some of it is not anymore?

  Odds are extremely good that his newly proprietary "user space" (wland, web pages, etc.) are those same GPL materials with a few changes and a new license stampted on top.

  Nice try.

Lost my job in April, it's now almost August and I got nothin. Funny how the days run together when you have nothing to do all day. Hard to get out of bed in the morning really.

Gosh, I have a /. journal? This Must Be Important. Stand by for serious and Extremely Big thoughts (but be warned that I only have these three times per decade) but time is nothing really, isn't it? If I had any big thoughts they'd be
here but mostly I don't.

Just curious: do you have a citation for that quote?

Yep... Joel Stein in the April 18, 2003 issue of Entertainment Weekly.

The full quote is:

"I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs," said Valenti of the PSA, "the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that," he said, vastly overestimating the U.S. poverty level and what I get paid for this column.

Funny part is, when they started actually showing the PSAs before movies, apparently they dropped the ones starring Ben Affleck, and only went with the "working stiffs."

When you learned to drive a car, you probably knew a little about it. There's an engine, it burns gas, that causes the wheels to go around. The gas pedal must have something to do with that burn rate. The brake makes the wheels stop.

Now, imagine that we all treated that "under the hood" as a black box, and that typical people commonly confused the engine with the carburetor. Some cars would even come with holographic stickers closing the hood shut, so you couldn't open it without voiding the warranty. When someone teaches you to drive a car, they say:

"Turn that key. Now, press in this button and move this lever until it clicks four times. Turn the wheel about 60 degrees, and slowly press on the right pedal. Turn the wheel back 60 degrees, but slowly... SLOWLY! See, you almost ran into that car! Now give it a little more gas... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to fall into jargon. Press harder on that right pedal. Use the big one on the left when we get to that white line on the pavement up there."

This is how people are taught to use computers. Click this, press that, drag here, type there. Meanwhile, when the computer tells them it's running out of memory, they start deleting stuff from their hard drive to free up space, because they don't know the difference between RAM and the C: drive.

If we (meaning, those of us who know this stuff) all took a different tack, instead of teaching people procedurally how to get through a particular function or application, we might have a much easier time educating folks about not running trojans. But as long as we (again, speaking to the community that has the knowledge) keep acting like people can't and shouldn't be taught this stuff in the way that we learn EVERYTHING ELSE, we'll keep having this problem.

So I came up with an idea to fiscalize the dispersed demand for open source alternatives to proprietary software packages. (That's economist-speak for a way for folks to put their money where their mouth is.)

The idea is this: create a bounty program for particular projects. The best way would be to tack this onto an existing, respected OS organization, such as OSDN, but could be a free-standing non-profit entity. People would be able to:

- Create a bounty for production of a particular OS project
- Contribute to bounty funds for existing projects
- Place specific restrictions on their bounty contribution (i.e. must support a particular platform, needs to be distributed under a particular license, etc.)
- Suggest and vote on criteria for evaluating applications submitted for bounty consideration
- Review and vote on whether a particular package meets criteria and will be awarded the bounty

Funds would be collected from contributors at the time they decide to contribute. Lower bounds on contributions would be set by transaction costs; upper bounds don't seem necessary. Funds would be collected into a semi-liquid investment account (like a money market account) so that the money would accrue interest while the bounty is out. Costs to run the program would be collected from interest earnings on accounts, and the remainder of interest would be proportionally divided among the various projects.

Built from the ground up to be a flexible, communal framework, it would be possible to have fairly complicated reward schema. For example, if a particular submission met many of the criteria but not all (for example, had a great engine and lots of good features, but a lousy UI) the contributors to the bounty could elect to award a percentage to the project, and reserve the remainder for necessary improvements.

Since contributors have already put their money in the pot, there's less incentive to "hold back" awards if a good project comes along. If contributors merely pledge, but don't actually cough up the money until they've got the project in hand, they can say "Well, nah, this doesn't really qualify" and keep their money, while using the product.

Contributors and submitters could be any entity, including individuals, groups of people, academic institutions, or private companies.

So far I'm not seeing a drawback to this solution. People who want to see an OS port of a particular application could put up however much it's worth to them, and the projects that have the greatest demand and value to the community would get the most attention. OS developers would receive some financial reward for contributing their time and code. Small developers might decide to release a product as OS just because of the publicity they'd get from garnering the bounty, especially if they're trying to compete directly with an established proprietary product.

Not that this has anything to do with technology, but whatever.

So the health insurance thing has been nagging me a bit lately, as I walk 1.5 miles to connect from the Santa Monica bus to the LA Department of Transportation DASH service, which are both unaffected by the transit strike, and also as I pay 20% more for the same products at Gelson's that I would normally buy from Von's. Whose responsibility is it to make sure that people get good health care? Why is the cost of health insurance skyrocketing? What can be done to stabilize the situation?

Well, it's obvious that health care is in several ways a market failure. It's an industry with a very distorted demand curve, because the demand for health, for *life*, is extremely inelastic. People will pay what it costs, to the extent that they have the money. This means that the price at which total revenue starts to decrease due to drop in demand is much higher than for other types of goods.

Further distorting the demand curve is the disconnect between prices and consumers created by the insurance industry. I was on a particular medication for a year and a half before I learned that the $10 I paid every other month for my bottle was less than 1/50th of the cost to my provider. I found this out entirely by accident; one day, a computer glitch left me without coverage, and I happened to go refill my perscription that day. When I got to the counter and they said "That'll be $558" I nearly had a heart attack.

If I had had to pay for that medication out of pocket, would I still have gone on it? It's hard to say. At the time I started on it, I probably could have afforded it, if I lived in a cheaper apartment and cut other expenses. Would I have stayed on it as long? I don't know. But what is certain is that the price never entered into my decision as a consumer, because I didn't have to pay for it.

So as we gain new technologies that allow us to live longer, healthier lives, and to survive or completely avoid an increasing array of diseases (my kids will be vaccinated against chicken pox... seems like they're missing out on a rite of passage), the insurance system leaves those who are covered feeling entitled to the best medical care money can buy... so long as it's not *their* money. So why is this?

We come to our second big problem... the value of life. Though civil courts every day put dollar figures on the lives of children and parents and community leaders and gang members, we all admit that life, generally speaking, is priceless. When I insure a house, two things go into calculating the premium: risk, and value. A $1 million house in the same environment as a $500k house will have a higher premium, because it will cost more to replace. A $500k house in a wildfire zone will cost more to insure than the same house in a boring urban area.

But when it comes to insuring our health, only risk can be taken into account, because there is no replacement for health. If we could value lives in the same manner as other goods, we might take into account the number of years the person can normally expect to live, the amount of education and natural talent they have, the number of people who depend on them, and so on. This would mean that my mother, a retired 60-year-old breast-cancer survivor and former smoker (38 years), with only one 29-year-old daughter, is less "valuable" than myself, a relatively healthy youngish person who will, if all goes well, have a master's degree and a heck of a career in transportation planning, along with a very young child in the next year or so. Yet it costs *more* to insure people who, in the most callous sense, are "less valuable," because the very things that make one valuable lower their risk of disease.

There is no simple resolution to the issue, as far as I can tell. We will not suddenly start "valuing" people's lives differently, nor will individuals stop demanding the best health care available at a price they can afford. But we can recognize that health care *is* a market failure, and regulate prices in new ways. Perscription drugs are a good place to start. It's true that it costs a great deal of money to develop these drugs, and there is a certain amount of risk involved. But how much of the resulting price does it take to repay that investment, with appropriate interest? Drug companies should be accountable for their pricing. Part of the FDA screening process should include an accounting of what the company's costs to develop the drug were, and a pricing system based on expected demand, production costs, initial investment, and appropriate profit should be devised. Sure, they should make money, even good money. But there should be a limit to how much they can make. The market won't limit it naturally, so this limit has to be imposed.

This model could potentially be extended to doctor's fees, lab tests, and many other areas, but in all cases would require careful analysis to ensure that the prices still yield quality coverage with low potential for fraud.

It's not enough to say that people should have access to good health care. Something has to be done to actually ensure that access. While 60,000 low-income children are wait-listed for health insurance in Florida, 700 retired MTA mechanics hold the entire transit system hostage with a strike that doesn't affect them, so that they can retain their practically free health coverage. The cheapest and potentially most rewarding people to keep healthy are left by the wayside over those who are the most expensive and offer the lowest return on investment. It's clear that something has failed, and we need to fix this soon.