Good Stuff From the Last Few Weeks

Seven pages of LOL Chairs for your amusement

The weirdest conspiracy theory ever

Look at this for 30 seconds and then look away – Oh my!

Sicko visits Norway, where even the prisons rock

Waterboarding: “I could feel my lungs going tight with fluid and felt like I was drowning. I thrashed in panic as darkness took over. As I passed out, thinking I was dying, I remember thanking God that we had made a stand against this kind of society.”

Better Business Bureau generates surprising number of complaints

Victoria’s Secret’s secret world of imprisonment, beatings and exploitation

Reading Anna Karenina in Zimbabwe: Doris Lessing on the hunger for books

Prince Philip’s greatest foot-in-the-mouth hits

Jack the Ripper speculation refuted by fabulous anagram

The gospel of supply-side Jesus

O Holy Night

I don't believe in God, but I'm a big fan of Christmas. I think my favorite carol is O Holy Night. Here's a touching country-style version by John Berry:

Could the US Learn from the Australian Healthcare System?

The Aussies seem to have a rather brilliant universal healthcare system based upon a few rather simple ideas.

There is a 1.5% flat tax on everyone’s taxable income for healthcare.

Individuals earning (in Australian dollars) over $50,000 per year ($100,000 for couples) are strongly encouraged to purchase private hospital coverage: if they do so they get a 30% premium rebate, but if they don’t they have to pay an additional 1% income tax.

Private health insurance in Australia costs a family between US $539 and US $1,078 per year.

Those who purchase private hospital coverage can lock in low rates for life by purchasing while they are young (this discourages people from waiting until they are old to purchase hospital coverage). Charges go up by 2% each year after the age of 31.

More here, here, and here.

The Future (Some Good Ideas)

Soon the world will be like a physical manifestation of the internet: ordinary people will be able to set up simple-but-comfortable residences in all sort of remote locations and have instant wireless connection that will enable them to communicate with friends and family, make financial transactions, and do business from wherever they are.

I’ve been following some links from Vinay Gupta:

Here’s a good idea: Appropedia--a wiki devoted to sustainable living and international development.

Here’s another good idea: a sun-absorbing coating that can be applied like paint to all kinds of surfaces and transform them into energy sources.

Here’s another good idea: a build-it-yourself two-hundred dollar shelter that can be used for refugees, or for disaster relief, or just for the hell of it.

Here a post with some more promising ideas, like precision agriculture for the developing world that uses GPS technology to track farmers’ cellphones and then provides them with customized farming recommendations, and this:

. . . to develop an integrated set of medical practices (these 24 drugs which don’t require refrigeration, don’t produce overdose easily, and are less than $10 per course) with an expert system which can be accessed both by patients themselves to figure out if their symptoms are problematic or not, and by slightly trained health care workers who would use the systems to figure out what to prescribe from their standard pharmacopoeia.

It’s not much, but for the poorest two or three billion, this could be the only health care service they ever see. None of the problems are particularly intractable, but you better bet there’s a VAST - and I mean VAST - distributed call center application at the core of this. Link.