3-1-14 Hodgepodge

But Would They Govern Like a Different Party? This Time?

John  Podhoretz offers a rosy forecast for the GOP regarding control of the Senate after this year's elections:

... Republicans are coming on strong in other races no one expected. In Michigan, where another Democratic incumbent is retiring, Republican Terri Lynn Land has shown strength for months, leading her likely Democratic rival, Gary Peters, by a few points in a state Obama carried by eight points in 2012. In New Hampshire, the one-term ex-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen seems to have a formidable foe in Scott Brown, who won the surprising January 2010 special election for Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts that portended the huge GOP wave later that year.

Ugh. Scott Brown? If he's any indicator, my warnings about the GOP failing to make a difference once in power again will look more like accurate predictions.

Weekend Reading

"It isn't often that a doctor is mistaken about how many feet his patient has." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Can You Trust What's in Your Electronic Medical Record?" at Forbes

"I see the aftermath of a lot of breakups, and one thing that stands out is the denial people exhibit about the flaws in their relationships before the end." -- Michael Hurd, in "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" at The Delaware Wave

"[I]nstead of Jim Crow laws, they use public education mandates and taxation, environmental regulation, government health care edicts, and a plethora of other legalized individual rights offences to sacrifice you and your loved ones to their own interests." -- Anders Ingemarson, in "Freeing the Individual from the Conceits of the Collective" at RealClear Markets

In More Detail

I'll briefly throw something out there for each column today: (1) Hsieh offers concrete advice to readers who want to protect their health from government-incentivized errors-carried-forward in their medical records; (2) Hurd brings up a fallacy ("Heaven's Reward") I'd never heard of; and (3) Ingemarson makes lots of good points, despite, as a newletter I follow pointed out, the fact that the column does not mention that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually violated individual rights with its provisions against non-government racial discrimination.

Many Apps Cost Way too Much

A widely-circulated Internet joke lampoons people who complain about the noiminal dollar cost of some smart phone or tablet app, but drop a fiver on coffee without batting an eye. The point about the value of a good app is well-taken, but developer Jeff Atwood notices that the argument doesn't apply to all paid apps:

Imagine you bought your coffee, only to open the lid and find it was only half full, or that it wasn't coffee at all but lemonade. If only 1 in 5 cups of coffee you bought actually contained coffee, a $3.99 price for that coffee starts to seem unreasonably high. When you buy an app, you don't really know what you're going to get. [link and bold in original]

You may have wasted your money, but you will have also paid in time, which is, being irreplaceable, is worse. Mobile phone apps that could be replaced with a decent web site (or mobile version of one) are worse than pointless, as the rest of Atwood's piece shows.

--CAV