Russ Nelson

I've given up on the Mark XIII keyboard. The problem is that the small PC board plus the brass barrier was too big to position close enough even for MY hands. I've got a Mark XIV keyboard which uses different switches (surface mount SPST very short displacement). Soldered the switches directly to the copper wires I suggested earlier, and ran wires to the bottom, weaving them into a grid holding the keyboard firmly. Got them as I wanted them and put polycapralone on both sides as reinforcement. Have a folding knuckle rest, thumb rest, and palm heel rest. It's by far the smalltest keyboard I've made so far.

I'm using a wired keyboard this time, to see how compatible I can make it. It's based on the Teensy. It's very similar to an Arduino, but it can take on a USB Keyboard flavor.

Folks, I have bad news for you. The Barack Obama Health Care Reform (shepherded through by Nancy Pelosi) will be, as written, an utter and unmitigated disaster. It attempts to do two things which are, in combination, impossible. First, it makes health insurance much more widely available through the mind-boggling deal it made with the insurance companies. To wit: the health insurance companies agree to insure everyone, and the federal government forces everyone to buy health insurance. While that's a huge give-away to health insurance companies of your personal tax dollars, that's not impossible.

No, the impossibility comes when you combine that with: Second, Barack is going to pay for this new plan by reducing costs. There's two problems with this idea. A) if costs could be reduced, insurance companies would have already done it, and pocketed the money. B) when you pay less for something, you get less of it. This is one of the iron laws of economics, which is just as inviolable as the laws of thermodynamics, or the laws of mutual attraction (things fall at 32ft/sec/sec absent wind resistance).

So Obamacare will attempt to 1) increase the amount of medical care needed because you have all these newly insured people, AND 2) decrease the amount of medical care available by paying less for it.

No, really.

Stop laughing.

This is our PRESIDENT, and he deserves the same respect due to any other politician who is ignorant of economics yet tries to regulate markets: zero.

There can be only two results: either we'll have less medical care (think you're having a hard time finding a doctor now??), or we'll pay a lot more for it (think your doctor's visits are expensive now??).

But there is a different way: free market health care. Reduce every possible barrier to health care. First, stop protecting the doctor's union. Let anybody practice medicine, but give the doctor's union a super-trademark on the term "physician", just like the 4-H shamrock and Olympic rings are protected. If you want a graduate of a medical school, you can have one; just go looking for a physician. Second, stop treating us like children, and let anybody buy any medicine they want. Abolish the FDA. Pharmacies will compete to provide the safest and most effective medicines. Abolish the patent system. Drugs are only expensive to develop because of the FDA and don't need patent protection. Testing can be provided by pharmacies. Stop expecting doctors to be medical deities. Greatly reduce the available torts to only those things that doctors have control over, like leaving sponges inside patients after surgery. I'm sure there is more government hampering that I'm just not thinking of right now. Oh, yes, stop the war on (some) drugs. Abolish the ONDCP.

You will, from time to time, see people ask for more regulation of markets. I don't really need to cite any examples, do I? They're all over today's newspapers, claiming that unregulated or deregulated or free markets are responsible for the collapse of various businesses.

There is no such thing as an unregulated market, however. The term "free market" is a bit of misnomer. Participants in a free market are not free to do anything they want. If you fail to make a product that people choose to buy, that is a freedom you will find unavailable in a free market.

Let us be clear: there are markets which are regulated by politicians, and there are markets which are regulated by customers. There are no unregulated markets. There are no free markets. There are only markets in which customers are free to reward or punish businesses, and markets in which customers are prevented from rewarding or punishing businesses.

Which kind of that market do you want? One where you are free to buy or not buy? Or one where you are hampered?

John Kay makes a similar point.

29.99 km 98392.50 feet 18.63 mi 7561.00 seconds 126.02 minutes 2.10 hours 8.87 mi/hr

Today was open studio day for north country artists. We went up to visit Lamar Bliss and Susan Heberling. I bicycled home. It was a beautiful day, and I was on roads I hadn't ridden in many years. I wanted to go for a ride down Ireland Road, but couldn't find the house matching the name on the posted sign. Oh well, perhaps not wise to be riding down backwoods roads (even with permission) during hunting season.

The whole "health care reform" thing totally baffles me. Where do all these idiots (and yes, you ARE idiots) who support health care reform think the money is going to come from for all these improvements? Cost savings?? Sorry, idiots, but if savings were already available, insurance companies would have already gotten them, and kept them for themselves. Is that not completely obvious? It's GONNA cost more, and it's GONNA cover less.

There is a way to get more for less, but it requires that people understand and accept that free markets actually work. And yet there are so many people who are convinced that somehoww health care is some kind of magic market where the laws of economics don't fly, where pigs do fly, and where everyone can get all the health care they want for almost no money.

And a pony.

There is a major flaw in Soros' justification for spending $50m on a new think-tank. He derides "unchecked free markets" when in fact no such thing exists. You either have free markets checked by customer behavior, or you have markets which have been hampered by government action so producers are free to ignore customer behavior. An unchecked free market is an oxymoron.