Pragmatism guided by reason
Thinking Better
Nourishing that which is most important makes a fulfilling life.
You can choose to look differently at every situation. Don’t operate on your default setting and assume you know how it is.
Instead of continuously focusing on the objects of obsession, turn inward and look at the emotion itself.
Becoming More Powerful
Fake it till you become it
Vulnerability is Courage
“The two most powerful words when we’re in struggle: me too.”
Sensible Education
Not everyone is cut out for traditional college, and not all careers depend on it.
TakePart: Participant Media - Waiting For ‘Superman’ - Infographic from Jr.canest on Vimeo.
Grades are degrading, learning by inspiration, teaching by environment:Schools kill creativity:
Food Distribution
Eating locally, less processed and less meat is the right thing to do.
How to feed the world ? from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.
Will Allen: The Urban Farmer from Spark Project on Vimeo.
Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish:How we can eat our landscapes:
Health Care
David Goldhill’s ideas in The Atlantic nail my thoughts on health care reform. Essentially, the entire Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance industry could be replaced, at greatly reduced cost, with national catastrophic insurance and mandatory health savings accounts. This would enable market forces to drive down the cost of and improve health care, since it would be in the consumer’s interest to spend money wisely.
Health savings accounts
Everyone should be required to contribute a portion of wages to an HSA, which would fund all noncatastrophic care. This money remains the contributor’s property and can be borrowed against and disbursed through inheritance upon death. A credit system would be established for cases when an expenditure exceeds the HSA balance.
National catastrophic insurance program
All citizens should be required to purchase coverage from a single, national program for catastrophic illness. The premium would be based solely on age. Coverage would be provided for expenses in excess of $50,000, and chronic conditions with predictable annual costs above a lower threshold would also be covered. Only a small fraction of those covered should ever need to use the coverage.
There would be no deductible for young people to use this coverage, but as patients age, an increasing deductible would be paid from his or her HSA.
Low income Americans
The government would subsidize payments for those unable to cover all of their catastrophic premiums or minimum HSA contributions. This would cost less than Medicaid currently does, and its functions would already be covered by the above proposals.
Biannual checkup vouchers
The government would cover one checkup every two years to prevent people from delaying since the cost would otherwise be paid from an HSA.
Electoral College
The electoral college should be abolished because it gives low population states undue influence, making it possible for a person to be elected president with less than 22 percent of the vote. Three elections so far resulted in the wrong person being elected, which is about a five percent failure rate.
Further, U.S. citizens who move abroad can still vote absentee via their last residence in the United States. But if you were born in or move to a U.S. territory, joining more than four million citizens, you don’t have a vote for president.
Daylight Saving Time
There is no consensus about whether DST observance saves or costs money, but it is accepted the effect size is very small. Given increasing globalization especially, the hassle of changing clocks twice a year is simply not worthwhile.
