slightlysilly.com

Sharon Begley at The Daily Beast posted an interesting piece entitled “One Word Can Save Your Life: No!” about the relative ineffectiveness (and expense) of many frequent medical tests and procedures. I think the issues described in the article get to the root of what’s wrong with our health care system: good intentions with bad incentives.

This article by Joe Nocera at the New York Times gives some interesting background information about the bank bailouts. The article is about Sheila Bair, the director of the FDIC at the time.

Excerpt:

As she thinks back on it, Bair views her disagreements with her fellow regulators as a kind of high-stakes philosophical debate about the role of bondholders. Her perspective is that bondholders should take losses when an institution fails. When the F.D.I.C. shuts down a failing bank, the unsecured bondholders always absorb some of the losses. That is the essence of market discipline: if shareholders and bondholders know they are on the hook, they are far more likely to keep a close watch on management’s risk-taking.

This article at the Washington Monthly makes a compelling argument for ending various forms of spending in the tax code (a.k.a. “tax breaks”). This form of indirect spending tends to favor the wealthy and dwarfs direct programs that benefit the poor. Obviously we need to balance our budget, but the article provides some additional interesting reasons for ending tax expenditures. For example, how government intervention in this form is generally not recognized by the beneficiaries, which in turn distorts politics in such a way that individuals become disconnected from government while special interest groups (and their lobbyists) flourish. Definitely worth reading.

In my opinion, many people have very distorted and inaccurate views about how taxes are spent. These distorted views adversely affect political decisions to the extent that those decisions are based on misconceptions rather than reality.

In order to combat these misconceptions, the Obama administration has created a website so one can determine how one’s taxes are allocated to programs. The website can be found here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxreceipt

At the same time, people seem to believe that taxes are higher now than ever before. The reality is that tax rates are currently lower than they have been at any point since World War II. For some historical data, take a look at this page on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States

The game Neverwinter Nights (for which I created the add-on module “The Vethboro Dragon“) is now available at GOG.com for a mere $10.

If you’re unfamiliar with GOG (which stands for “good old games”), they sell digital editions of older games — usually at $10 or less. The games are DRM-free, fully patched, and modified to run on modern computers if necessary. It’s a great place to find classics and games that can run on older, low-end hardware.

I’ve made a subdomain to host my computer conversion of the Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator board game. You can find it here:

ststcs.slightlysilly.com

The Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator Computer Conversion is a 2D turn-based strategy game for the Windows platform in which you take control one or more starships and proceed to attempt to destroy other starships before they destroy you. I programmed it using Visual Basic.

So… Some time ago my previous website at slightlysilly.net was waylaid by pirates. The weather has finally gotten dreary enough that I took the time to bring this site up. Welcome to slightlysilly.com.