February 21, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:While I was away. . .
I had a good time away. I worked on my needlepoint, went out every night, and romped with the pooch in the snow. But there were a few things I wanted to blog:
Headline on the paper: "Storm of the Century". Isn't it a little early to be making that call?
Statistic found in a FindLaw article: "And to make the question [of abortion] more difficult, what if the woman and her partner fail to use any birth control, or to use birth control correctly? According to the Guttmacher Institute, this was the case in 93% of abortions performed in 2000 in America. " That threatens to change substantially my view of abortion, though I haven't parsed the logic yet.
Anyone know anything about OpenOffice?
Can I tell you how tired I am of the people in the subway? I don't know where the hell they're from, but if any of you are coming to New York, here's the scoop: walk on the right. Just like driving your car. Yesterday, as I was going up the stairs on the right, exactly where I was supposed to be, some woman came barreling around the corner at seventy mph and nearly knocked me back down the steps. Then she gave ma a snotty look before she flounced off. Sweetheart, I know that walking the extra five feet over to your section of the stairwell would have taken critical time from your search for the cure for cancer, but I'm afraid that that's a sacrifice that we, as a society, have chosen to make in the interests of reducing the number of people who break their necks getting pushed down the stairs. Deal with it.
I saw Chicago and it was great. Great. I'm not going to comment on the tall woman who may or may not have been seen dancing around my living room in her bathrobe singing "Give 'Em the Old Razzle-Dazzle", except to say that we should all remember we're only human.
I spent the entire day in my pajamas Monday, except for walking the dog. Every once in a while, we should all spend the day in our pajamas. It's strangely comforting.
So one of my revenue streams is writing up earnings calls for a web site. Unfortunately, given the nature of the work, I'm not allowed to write "Can't you see he's LYING!!!!" next to the remarks. A particularly abysmal one featured the CFO of a health care company trying to spin their prediction last year that Medicaid funding was going to go up. Since then, two states had cut funding, a dozen others were talking about proposed cut, and a single state had actually raised it. The CFO's reaction? We stand by our prediction of a 2-2.5% rise in funding. Thank god for safe harbor, eh? Of course, it's hard to imagine what else he could say. It's a nursing home company. Nursing homes are almost entirely government funded, largely because middle class people feel it's the duty of the state to pay for their care, so they hollow out their assets to qualify for Medicaid. This is disgusting, yet entirely predictable, and completely unstoppable as long as the government pays for care. Yet the government is not willing to impose the taxes on the children to pay for their parents care, so instead they cut funding. This makes it very hard to operate a nursing home profitably, resulting in said children suing the nursing homes because Mom is tied to a wheelchair 23 hours a day. The resulting verdicts raise costs, which the nursing homes can't recover because most of their rates are set by fiat. Instead they turn to fraudulent billing to recover the money they lose on patient care. And they're still losing money. And people wonder why I'm a libertarian?
Posted by Jane Galt at February 21, 2003 9:13 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksI respectfully disagree about Chicago: I also saw it this week, and was manifestly unimpressed, especially by Richard Gere, whose singing I just could not take seriously.
Nevertheless, It's good to see you back. Be strong, and be well.
We use openoffice at my work. It's great for our purposes. It reads many (most?) of the popular microsoft document formats, or at least, the two I am most concerned with: .doc and .xls. This allows me to deal with our customers (who seem to love MS stuff), on a linux box.
Do you have any more specific questions?
I am curious how the information you refer to is likely to change your views on abortion.
Does the irresponsibility shown, and thus, probable lack of parenting abilities, indicate that abortions are probably for the best?
Or will you take the tack that not using birth control "really" means consent to pregnancy?
Personally, I don't see as it makes a whit of difference. Especially when you consider that many of those people are probably acting strategically. That is, they know that abortion is there as a backstop and so they aren't as careful as they would otherwise be. This undermines both interpretations above.
Jane:
I just downloaded OpenOffice for Windows and Linux. I'm going to try it out on my Linux machine. I use excel on fairly large spreadsheets, and am frequently annoyed at the row limit. Probably, the developers of Excel failed to anticipate its application as a data analysis tool, but it's fairly convenient, if not very efficient. We'll see how OpenOffice does.
Welcome back!
you stoll my name don't you knoe that that is impersonating me ans thats agiast the law read the books
you stole my sis 's name you inconciderate person
What everyone seems to be saying, except I'll modify it some - Thank you for coming back. We missed you.
Jane! Great to see you're back.
What's particularly telling about that number is that it's from the Guttmacher Institute, which is Planned Parenthood's think tank. Presumably, this is a number that reflects negatively on their clientele. It's my opinion that this confirms the conventional wisdom that abortions are happening because people use them as the ultimate birth control. It'd be great to see who in America actually gets abortions -- is it poor college and/or graduate students? High school students? Suburban moms? Who knows.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2765853.stm
I was completely pro-choice until I saw this article.
Now, I don't know anymore.
The entire problem with the abortion "debate" in America is that Roe v. Wade was a disastrous decision, and polarized people in ways they never would have without it.
I'm pro-choice, by the way. But I stand by that statement. Reasonable compromise would long ago have been worked out on this issue had we allowed it to be worked out democratically, rather than by judicial fiat.
The pro-choice New Republic has an article by the pro-choice Jeffrey Rosen which makes the point very well. Although he's kidding himself if he thinks overturning Roe v. Wade would be more than a speed bump for the GOP, his basic logic is sound all the way through.
The great problem with the abortion debate in America is that we have allowed loudmouthed extremists and rigid ideologues to frame the debate--even though the extremists on both sides are a minority, even when you add them together.
Oh, it might help if I included a link to the TNR article. Here ya go.
It's worth a read.
Roe v. Wade was a lousy decision, in every sense. And no, if it's overturned, abortion will not immediately become illegal, despite what the shrieking harpies at NARAL and NOW would like you to believe.
Jesus H. Christ. I'm happily married, but my wife knows I have a crush on your mind. Please don't tell me about dancing in your bathrobe and spending the day in your pajamas. It's like the time Homer rolls over to Marge and tells her he had been watching women's beach volleyball all day.
;)
I tried OpenOffice on my Mac, and it felt just like using Office 95 on Windows.
I washed my hands, and went back to OS X Office as my 'other people's documents' opening application.
David, JMP is great for data analysis. http://jmpdiscovery.com
I made all the charts in my Power Laws and Blogs paper wiht it - it's wonderful for working on really big data series (I have used it to analyse 2 days worth of logs that fire 30 times a second, so I know it scales up well)
Isn't the real issue for abortion the point at which we consider that the embryo/fetus/child can be considered human and have rights? Who the impregnated party is and what their reasons are for being impregnated shouldn't have anything to do with the legality of abortion.
Dean,
I'm surprised you think overturning Roe v Wade would be but a speed bump for the GOP. What do you base that on?
I'm just a hacker, not an office suite poweruser, but I find OpenOffice to be suprisingly complete. I switch to it whenever one of the younger Open Source office apps I have installed chokes, and I've yet to find a needed function missing from OpenOffice. It ain't MS Office, but it's far, far better than you would expect for the price.
BTW, welcome back.
Ughhhhh, the subway and assholes! There is nothing worse in this world than having to start your day in the NYC Subway. What I find even worse than the people that piss you off are the morons who insist on standing right next to the doors. One jackass on each side of the door only allowing one person in or out at a time, and when you are talking about rush hour and 50 people moving in and out of the doors at a time it is total hell. Total lack of consideration. Transit cops should pull those people off the train and make them wait for the next one.
The abortion thing really bothers me. I am pro-choice, but I have a major problem with abortion being used as birth control, it is just sick to think about.
Oh, welcome back Jane.
whats with the mccardles??
weird..
thought the key element was "not using correctly"... that covers a lot of stuff (like forgetting and such) that can happen to responsible normal people...
as for the not using.. can see lots of situations (i.e. family breakdown) where the child was wanted but now there's no good base anymore...
and yeah, rvw was badly decided,and it probably should be up to the states... although not sure how you then deal with the situation where state lawws conflict drastically, especially in light of the internet and its cross border reach (solicitng murder for hire, etc)
lots of problems on this no matter how it gets solved
GT,
I'm with Dean on this: overruling Roe would totally deflate the issue. NARAL, etc., would have the wind taken out of their sails by the fact that only a few states would ban abortion, and their equally extreme counterparts on the other side of the other side wouldn't have Roe as a fetish to rail against. Considering abortion a federal issue is quite simply incomprehensible, and makes an ass of the federal constitution.
Something that also should be pointed out is that overruling Roe would not leave the state legislatures totally unfettered. Many state constitutions contain an explicit right to privacy, rather than the ethereal federal one judicially conjured out of the "penumbras" and "emanations." If state courts read those provisions to encompass abortion rights (which many already have), that'd be far more credible than Roe.
Libertarian uber Alles,
I think the problems you pose are significantly less than you believe. Leaving this as a matter of state law would not prevent people from crossing state lines to get abortions; the "dormant" federal commerce power and the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment both protect interstate travel. Moreover, while some states (fewer than most people think) would ban abortion, I highly doubt any of them would actually classify abortion as murder.
Does anybody know the cite on that abortion statistic? I've been searching, to no avail.
Good to have you back!
I have been using Open Office on Windows and Linux since it was in late beta. I've found it is a good replacement for MS Office and will read most MS Office documents. It does choke on the 100 slide Powerpoint things I have to do for work from time to time but I have eliminated the use of MS Office for all my personal usage.
...Added a bunch to my Trackback'd post, in case anyone's interested.
OO works just fine for me, but I am not a power user.
It handles M$ XP .doc files better than my word 95 w/the word97 converter.
One thing that does not work is the regular expression search. This means that you cannot conviently remove line breaks from an e-mail or ng posting. that function may work in Star office 6 the sun pay version.
I'll leave the abortion stuff to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Scalia can assign the opinion to Justice Estrada. I want to know what the Libertarians are gong to do about the nursing homes. Every technological advance makes more subhumans superfluous, and the advances are exponential. Without demand for our labor, most of us, in Randian terms, are superfluous. Supercomputers? Robots? No governmental interference in creating demand for labor? Let them pay for their own nursing homes? It would be an interesting world.
Lou,
This is part of why I consider myself a conservative with libertarian tendencies, not a libertarian per se and certainly not an objectivist. Many if not most of them are just as much utopian zealots--more concerned with theoretical/ideological purity than with the messy details of practical reality--than our statist adversaries.
Hello, Jane:
Glad to hear that your time off was pleasant, and VERY glad to see you back.
The thought of you dancing around your apartment...
What was I saying?
Oh,yeah. So, it isn't the thought of Chicago that has me worried (I'm a big fan of musicals from way back), it's just...
please, Please, PLEASE tell me that you are NOT a Richard Gere fan. Please?
Fearing the worst in Philadelphia
JBoyle
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