Deja Vu All Over Again? Recession or Depression?

Posted on February 27th, 2008 by adrian.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Our current economic woes might seem all too familiar to some …

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Face the World

Posted on December 25th, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: Uncategorized.

By happenstance I was reading a short article in the NYT this am, which led me to Peter Gabriel’s website and his November video blog in which he describes his idea for giving everyone on the plant their own on-line face. His reasoning follows from the observation that there are more cell phones on the planet than tooth brushes. It’s here if you want to watch it yourself.

What struck me is how close this idea is to the idea of owning your own on-line digital identity. Significantly, Peter makes the point in his blog that suppressive regimes now understand that a crack down on on their citizens means controlling their access to information through the Internet and cell phones. Hence the huge significance of owning your own digital identity.

The technology that I know about that can support this vision is “OpenId” which implements user centric identity management.  I see it as a disruptive technology with the power to change the digital world by putting control, authorship and power back in the hands of the owners of said power - namely you and I. I think this idea jibes nicely with what I think Mr. Gabriel and the world community of “elders” with whom he maintains a close contact is all about.

Putting the strength of both communities together could be world changing event.

I have always admired Peter Gabriel. From the first time I saw him perform Foxtrot - as a member of Genesis in about 1972 at Preston Public hall as the support band to (I think) Van deGraf Generator (who were crap).  To the last time I saw him perform in Oakland about 3 years ago. At the start of the Internet revolution in about 1997 in the course of trying to play mergers and acquisitions for a large database company I was working for, I met Lee Stein - an IP lawyer in San Diego who at one time represented Peter in the US. There is a much longer story here … But I have always regretted not trying to barter that association into actually meeting Peter Gabriel. Someday maybe.

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Pete Stark (naked)

Posted on July 23rd, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: Health care.

I attended a local town hall meeting the other week given by Pete Stark, who is my congressman. I went to hear his position on health care and ask him a question.

He is the democrat’s leader for heath care issues. It’s a real pity. His views are myopic and dated and his agenda will only continue to promulgate the broken mess that passes for health care in the US. He needs to be replaced by someone with some newer ideas and who is better informed about what really needs to be done to fix health care for his constituents.

The audience for his meeting was composed of a cross section of his district. I’d judge them to be old, blue collar, middle class and left leaning. Perhaps in any other state they’d be blue collar, god-fearing republicans.

Pete, started the meeting by making everyone feel comfortable. He has a warm down-to-earth, pragmatic, “aw shucks” style, that buys him instant rapport with his audience. He comes across as a likable, friendly old uncle, not too bright, not fully informed, just doing his best. Judging from the amount of diet coke he swallowed and the gulping he did - he seems to suffer from gastric problems. For someone interested in health care, he sure hasn’t been listening to his doctor.

He said he was here to listen to our issues about health care - and eh, oh well yes - impeachment. He spoke for well over 30 minutes giving his informal report about what he was working on - passage of the SCHIP legislation to fund children’s health care coverage by taxing cigarettes more. Then took questions.

My health care questions were:

  1. What do you think about mandating risk adjusted outcome reporting for providers?
  2. And, the idea of removing all tax incentives to companies who offer health insurance, both as a way to improve health care for consumers.

I deliberately phrased his in a non-partisan way. I feel these issues could be adopted by either political party, and could form part of a progressive agenda.

His answers were: “Yes sure, outcome reporting needs to be mandated, but we have to have computerized medical records first before we report on the care that is delivered.” I interrupted him (which he did not like) and said that computers were not necessary to report outcomes, and that he was describing the reporting of services - not outcomes. He reaffirmed that we were talking about the same thing. I don’t think so.

His answer to the second question was along the lines of “more poor people will not have health care if we take away employer tax incentives.” Either, he was playing to the audience, or did not understand the question and did not understand what effect this might have - in either case I was disappointed.

Impeachment seemed to be a far more important topic for the audience than health care. I’d guess that a huge majority of the 150+ people were in favor of impeaching Bush, and were quite unhappy with Pete for not taking action on their behalf. He was reminded that he is their representative and needs to do what they ask! I love democracy.

His excuse was that Bush is digging his own grave and his administration is going to be historically viewed as the worst we have ever had without any need to impeach. He said that if they did try to impeach, the republican senate will stand behind him on principle, and their majority will prevent it happening. He also maintained that it would distract the country and destroy the chance to make some tactical wins. Such as SCHIP where they can score points off the Republicans by getting them to pass legislation by being embarrassed into being seen as cruel and unkind to children. His argument was pretty much roundly rejected by the audience :-)

Pete’s excuse was also that he was following Nancy Pelosis’ lead - she does not want to impeach, and there are many other less liberal representatives whose constituents would not back it. He also said that it was important for him to focus on trying to get one thing passed and not split his attention.

So, I am sorry Pete but, I don’t buy it. Health care is a mess and tinkering at the edges with SCHIP (which is all it is) will make matters worse, and playing tactical games with Bush really don’t cut it. Bush can (and probably will) veto SCHIP since it’ll come with all sorts of riders that have nothing to do with the funding that makes it totally unacceptable. The tobacco lobby is well-funded and tying children’s health care to tobacco funding - come on mate …

Pete - listen to us, please. Impeach the bugger, and take the time to plan a progressive strategy for fixing health care properly. The plan has got to include removing onerous tax distortions, and mandating outcome reporting to create a marketplace that delivers value to the consumer. Then come back to a town hall meeting and use your fatherly skills to sell this to the poor, blue collar, over taxed constituents.

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Globally Warmer

Posted on July 7th, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: Global warming.

Last week’s world wide, freakish weather might be what we are in for in the future. I think that global warming due to a buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere is a reality. It seems intuitively correct that all that fossil fuel that was stored up over aeons in the earth’s crust absorbed carbon dioxide and locked it up in solids. The atmosphere consequently was scrubbed and the plant became a nice place for homosapiens to prosper and not a nice place for big bird-like-lizards.

So by burning this stuff to release its energy we are undoing a process which took billions of years in a couple of hundred years. Eventually there won’t be any more fuel and the climate will be a bit like what it was when we weren’t here. If we keep consuming these fuels, and do not invent processes similar to the naturally occuring ones that consolidated these fuels, we are going to be living in CO2 soup for billions of years and the climate will change.

I suspect the changes will result in the sort of weather we have experienced recently. Blazing hot weather in the US West, drought in the US South East, freakish floods in India and the UK etc. As humans always do, we’ll adapt to these changes, and see them as normal. The adaptations will proably just accelerate the changes by consuming more energy - San Franciscans will buy air conditioners, and Alaskans will buy fridges. It’ll also force a sort of Darwinism, those with “bad genes” who have neither the ways nor means to change their habitat to suit their survivability will perish.

The survivers will be the rich and informed who will gradually migrate to temporate areas of the planet, subject to the least extremes. These might be small geographic locations that have their own micro-climates due to unusual geography. Attractive locations will have to have access to a renewable or long term energy source. Conflict will occur over energy, living space and food supply.

Attractive locations will become crowded and expensive. Immigrants will crowd into high rise buildings close to employment. Food factories will lie on the outskirts, manufacturing a supply of synthetic food. Employment will be concentrated on maintaining the food supply and protecting the energy supply.

I am enough of a cynic to believe that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves - so make the most of it now while it lasts.

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Health Care Consumerism

Posted on July 4th, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: Health care.

Every attempt to fix health care makes it worse. It suffers from meddling by bureaucrats who think they know best about how to treat me and you. The meddling is based on an assumption that the “strict father” government knows best, and the consumer is ill equpped to make hard decisions about treatments without the help of a qualified, “strict father” medical professional.

Practioners are frustrated at having to divert their attention to managing claims and payments, and subjugation to cost controls. Local rules force Providers into forming anti-competetive organizations, which maintains high prices since there is no competition to force cost out of the system.

The law that Emergency Rooms must treat all-comers, ensures that only community hospitals will operate at a loss in economically depressed areas, effectively susidizing the poor and providing poor care.

The lack of regulation, where it needs to be, in mandatory reporting of outcomes, not services, stymies the ability of individuals to make an informed choice of Provider.

Most who think they know best don’t because it’s a very complex non-linear system. They all need to get out of the way and rig the system to let a consumer marketplace flourish. A marketplace in which individuals are empowered with purchasing power through suitable progressive tax credits, and have unfettered access to quality information about outcomes. Where employers are not allowed to choose Providers, but could offer taxed health care incentives to employees.

A caring, nuturing society would want to ensure that its less-fortunate citizens were looked after by mandating that every consumer carry some form of catastrophic health insurance from a private insurance marketplace that was naturally guarenteed a hugh catchment. The insurance market would be regulated to balance their risk pools to assure viability and protect the consumer.

A consumer would have to find funds from their resources to pay for health care. And as every consumer does right now when they want to satisfy some personal desire - like owning an iPhone (bad example), they would get on the Internet and go shopping for the best deal. Trusted consumer health information providers (Google, Yahoo, Kaiser …) would publish legally mandated information about provider outcomes, monetized through advertizing.

The power of drug companies would be diminished, through widely disseminated information about the outcomes of specific drug treatments. Consumer drug advertzing would continue, but the associated cost would factor into the price of a drug, and an informed consumer paying out of their own pocket would decide whether a well-advertized drug at a higher cost was as effective, as a cheaper drug with similar outcomes.

All popular progressive solutions to the heath care crisis want to adopt some form of socialized medecine, and point to the Canadian and UK models. Both these models assume a “strict father” who puts a mandatory cap on health care spending, which results in care rationing. The rich opt-out and go outside the system - which the UK officially allows and Canada does not - but the people do anyway.

Kaiser in the US has a similar vertically integrated model, which works successfully at delivering a good standard of care at a good price. But it frustrates its users into having to get the system to work for them, its prices rise (just less than the competition) every year by not being subject to real competition and consumer buying power, more members choose high deductible plans, its growth languishes at around 8.5m members and its quality is masked behind laws that do not mandate any outcome reporting.

Kaiser mishaps do creep into the press (the Kidney transplant fiasco) but are not fully aired to improve the process. We are willing to believe that because they say they care and we trust their brand (and a lot of us in the Bay Area know people who work for them …) - they really do look after us. But surely Kaiser would be better off if the sun shone in a bit more and they were forced to compete for the consumer dollar. I am sure it would cause them to have to innovate and become more effective at delivering care. They’d experience growth like they have never known - 85m members? and their prices might stop rising and their services might expand.

The industry is huge, there is much at stake for the entrenched community who are used to the politicians dicking around at the edges, and can control the system through “donations.” But they are going to put it out of business.

Despite having employer health insurance, it’ll be worthless to the consumer since what you’ll be able to buy with it will be not worth having. Corner shops (Walmart) will push quick-fix brand name pills to the poor and uninformed. The FDA will quietly stand aside and let it happen due to drug company “contributions.”

Aware consumers (liberal elite) will exercise, shop organic, try to stay well, educate their children about the issues and form Internet communities to buy and import drugs in unregulated markets. They’ll take “health holidays” in Thailand, India and Mexico to receive better treatment at prices they can afford out of their own resources. Innovative, catastrophic insurance policies will arise and “trusted health care consultants” will exist on the edge of the medical profession to broker a grey market in care. The rich will remain immune. The poor will suffer.

Great - I am looking forward to it - NOT.

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Peddling Open Source To IT

Posted on June 24th, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: IT.

My employer has very kindly provided a ticket to attend the Burton Group Catalyst conference next week. This is where the industry analysts tell big corporate IT about what is going on in the real world that is happening all around them, and tries to get them to wake up to reality. This is reflected in the two tutorials I am signed up for, namely: Web 2.0 and User Centric Identity.

Perhaps if we went to fewer meetings and spent less time talking about doing “it”, we’d actually get on with some work and be able and interested enough in the big bad world to know what is really happening without having to attend a conference.

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Web 2.0 - It’s Serious

Posted on May 31st, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: Web.

Several developments have caught my eye recently that seem to be accelerating the move to a 2.0 Web. They are:

This is starting too look like a disruptive technology, and the list is notably absent one big name - i.e. Microsoft.

The other odd man out is IBM - but judging from their demo they must see themselves as a corporate arms dealer, who want to enable large IT organizations with a mash-up-WiKi-portal-end-user-development technology. Not much new here. But I wonder how they’ll position it against the JSR-168, portal crowd? and pursuade corporate IT to retool in php.
Actually that might not be too hard, since I can not find too many decent java programmers in our organization, and I have latched on to a few Gen-X’er php hackers who are just doing it themselves on Linux boxes with an attention span of 5 secs and an fu-mentality.

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Wireless Network Neutrality

Posted on March 4th, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: Wireless.

After spending a short time in Europe you can not help but noticing that the use and attitude towards mobile phones is far different from the US. Their calling plans are less restrictive, their phones have more features and can usually skip from network provider to network provider, there is a greater variety of phones and some are really inexpensive.

The reasons for this are well explained in this paper on Wireless Net Neutrality. As consumers we need to make a fuss about this and get things changed for the better.

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Untied - I broke my Promise to NEVER travel with United Airlines

Posted on March 3rd, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: travel.

It took me about 24 hours to get home from the UK, mostly because I made the mistake of traveling through Chicago. There is not much I can do about the weather and it would be unfair to blame United Airlines on the mess that it caused, but the whole experience showed up many faults in their system, and suggests some solutions that I’d like to point out.

When I stepped off my flight from Manchester in Chicago the United agent told me my San Francisco connecting flight had been cancelled and I had been rebooked on a flight to Orange County and then on to San Francico. Why had I to wait till I got to Chicago to find this out? The aeroplane has a radio doesn’t it? Using data or voice my flight connections could have been negotiated well before I arrived. There is no reason why my bluetooth-enabled phone should not be able to communicate with the plane’s systems and make arrangements. The British Midland Airbus 330 has a sophisticated mapping and entertainment system in the seat backs, why can’t this display flight schedules? why can’t it interact with my phone? If the plane knows where it is, it knows where I am!

And who or what made the awful decision to route me through OC? Considering that there was a later direct flight to San Francisco, and (as I found out later) a flight to San Francisco through Denver, connecting flights from OC to SFO were few, and despite being ticketed to SFO - I really live in the East Bay and I would have loved to have been routed to Oakland.

Any routing algorithm is by definition bound to be wrong, since it does not have that one bit of customer service information that it needs to satisfy ME - namely my personal preferences. I presume that this is what the mileage plus club is all about - but this kind of information changes minute by minute depending on my situation at the time and I have no way to update this information from my only ubiquitous electronic device, my cell phone.

I argued with the gate agent about the OC flight and was told that the SFO flight was full and that the Oakland flight did not leave till 8pm and that I’d get home sooner by catching the OC flight. So off I went to the gate … At the gate for the OC flight, the flight was showing a delay of 2 hours making its departure time about the same as the direct SFO flight. So my connecting flight from OC to SFO was now impossible, time to talk to customer service and do some haggling. I joined a line of approximately 300 people. I was dead tired but managed to shuffle my feet forward and catch up on a few hundred email messages on my Blackberry.

When I got in sight of the service desk, there were 3 agents, one of whom disappeared at 4:30pm, this was a stark illustration of who’s interests come first at United - THEIRS. Close to the desk an agent blurted out “you can call United’s help line and get similar service - call 1-800-UNITED-1″. Why oh why don’t they have a great big sign plastered over the front of the customer service desk that says just this? So I start to bang out the number on my QWERTY keyboard - and horror - I do not have letter-number conversions on my number keys and I am so dammed tired that for the life of me I’ll never get the conversion right, so easier to just keep queueing…

I queued for 2 hours until I gave up, since the OC flight was being called. I went over to the desk and the gate agent confirmed what I knew - no connection from OC to SFO that night. He suggested I run over to the gate for the SFO flight and see if I could beg a ride. I went to the SFO gate to discover a line of 50 people, who it seemed had the same advice as me. Time for some different tactics. I dug out my ticket envelope put on my glasses and found the United 800 number, and called it, to be confronted with a voice mail system. ARGH. Haven’t these people heard of texting - there is so much that could be transacted by text messaging - or even email.

The voice system is a two level deep menu and wanted a Mileage Plus number to get me quickly in to the system - I have one, I don’t use it, it’s just one more number to try and remember. I battled with the voice recognition software that after a few attempts shouting at it “just give me a ***** service agent” finally relented and put me in a queue for a real person. Since my ticket was an international ticket issued by BMI not United I was transferred into another queue. I was finally connected to a Indian gentlemen presumably in some customer service center in Bangalore. I then had to shout (above the ambient noise) the 6 character ticket locator - spelling out the “P as in Peter, the number 9 …” - this took three attempts to get right.

Incidently, there is another identifier - the e-Ticket identifer which is a nice long number that starts with a three digit prefix followed by a 10 digit number. I had only found out about this on the outbound flight check-in, when a United reservation agent took 15 minutes to make some phone calls to get this magic number out of the system, and then write it down on a bit of paper for me - this saved my life later … It seems that United’s and BMI’s reservation systems don’t swap my eTicket number easily.

So many identifiers but none that are useful, memorable or commuicateable. Which idiots thought of this? Have they ever looked at the use cases involving a passenger or gate agent under stress? Why isn’t my cell phone number - the number which presumably can be shown to the customer service agent when my call comes in, good enough to pop up all my relevant information without having to provide other identifiers?

The call center service rep. did his job and put me on another SFO flight, with a connection in Denver, leaving from a “B” gate - the other United concourse on the other side of the tunnel in 15 minutes! I ran like a sprinter and got to the gate where there was a line of 10 people like me, with various tickets in their hands. The gate staff were very stressed, unable to both process a growing standby queue, and close and dispatch the flight. Pressure mounted, the staff member standing at the gate shouted that anyone with a ticket should just come to her. I walked over and she found my reservation, telling me the boarding card would take a few minutes to print. The German couple next to me had less luck - due to a language barrier, and hard to spell last names - they ended up pouring over the screen with the agent trying to locate their own names on the screen. The computer system took several minutes to issue my boarding cards. Which were then immediately optically scanned by the agent to indicate that I was on the flight. Why print them? - all I wanted to do was get on. I ran on to the flight to find 400+ of my closest friends on a 747-400 waiting to leave. When I got to my seat (56a) the whole row was out of servce by duct tape spanning the arm rests, a crew member sat me in a open seat. I expected the doors to close behind me - they didn’t.

We waited several minutes, and then the captain announced we had been delayed 30 minutes, and the auxilliary power unit in the plane was low on oil and we needed ground power. The cabin steward apologised that we’d miss all connecting flights in Denver and if we had a few moments we should call United’s 800 number (or whomever we knew) to book new connecting flights. I dialed United’s 800 number again - twice, and got part way through the voice recognition hell, twice declining to answer a satisfaction survey! My calls were stopped by being told to put away all electronic devices since we were leaving. We moved away from the gate and headed to the runway. Then the captain came on the iintercom and said “sorry folks we have a slight problem, we are unable to start the number 3 engine and must go back to the gate.” This did not look good. What else was wrong with this beat up old 747? I did not feel like finding out …

The plane got back to a C gate, and the intercom told us we’d be here a while. I decide it was time to change horses again. So I called the 800 number at United and after a familiar fight with the VR system got through to a reservation agent. He was a bit confused when I told him I was sat on one flight that he was seeing had already departed, and asked for another reservation. He asked me which gate number I was at, which clinched it for him. He told me that there was a delayed SFO flight with one seat left parked two gates away from our flight. But he could not book me on it because I was already on this flight. So I grabbed my hand bags, walked to the front of the plane and - well simply, got off, leaving 400+ other people sitting there. A nice flight attendant, who looked like she was trying to get home to SFO was also bailing - she was a bit amused and shocked to see me too, she made sure I had a boarding card with me.

I ran over to the SFO flight’s gate to find a line of 20 people and my heart sank. Time for a Plan B. I knew there was still an Oakland flight (the one I had originally asked about when arriving in Chicago) and it would save a long commute over the Bay, it showed it was delayed till 9:15pm. It was still too early for this flight and there was no agent at the gate to help me. So I ran back to the Denver flight and got in line behind two other people who looked like they were trying to get on the now delayed Denver flight. I wanted to tell them that their chances of getting on were better if they were to let me through to the front of the line.

The gate agent had a fit when she saw my boarding card and asked me how I had got off the flight, at first she did not believe I had a ticket, this changed after I produced my hand-written eTicket number, which she must have managed to correlate with the Denver boarding card in the computer. I asked her for a seat on the Oakland flight, and bingo she put me on it telling me that I was on standby. I asked her to look up my mileage plus number and add that to the record to get me higher up the standby queue. I guess this did not make a difference since despite telling me I was on a standby queue I actually had a boarding card with a aisle seat near the front. I told her she was an angel and trotted off to wait for the Oakland flight.

This flight was delayed till 11:40pm, due to United being unable to find flight attendants for the flight - several passengers said they’d volunteer to serve soft drinks. The best that the United gate agent could offer was that they’d have to know the FAA rules to do the job. But it does beg the question, why even have attendants? Why not let me carry on my own drinks, they don’t serve food anymore - or at least anything worth eating, and if there was a data service on the plane I would get more useful information anyway.

I fell fast asleep and the flight landed at 1:59am PST. I had left the UK almost 24 hours earlier.

So, what conclusions can be drawn from this experience? Well I suppose the first one is that when everything is running according to plan the airlines’ reservation systems and the surrounding processes work flawlessly - for the airline. The customer gets a low form of service that they have been conditioned to expect years and are no longer bothered by it. Airlines do not differentiate themselves by innovative customer service and efficiency and at the bottom end of the market where I fly, competition is based soley on price and other differentiators do not apply. The route structures and industry are so regulated that there is really no competition to force an improvement. The airlines are secretive and do not share much about how they operate their business, a lot can be derived and shared but consumerism armed with information is inhibited by a fundamental lack of choice in the market.

When weather disrupts the system, things fall apart rapidly and the systems do not hold up. They are shown up to be serving the airline badly, and the consumer almost not at all. Getting back to normal after a disruption is hugely difficult and airlines that are not well practised at it suffer worst - see JetBlue’s recent mea culpa. If airline systems were to provide more accurate timely information to all parties, not only would recovery and operation during adversity improve but also the systems would better serve everyones’ interests during smooth operation.

Surely it would be easy to cost justify an improvement? The cost of delays due to adverse events must have significant impact to the bottom line and future business - I am put off United by my experience. I had to be extremely proactive and use all means at my disposal to work my way through several complicated events by using limited amounts of information. I was on my own, the airlines’ information systems did not help me get home. They are inert, distant, static, out-of-date record keeping systems that only recorded what I had to decide for myself. There was nothing equivalent to say a personal service representative who was apraised of my goals and was continuously keeping track of changing events and new data to optimize a path home for me. I had to do this myself. I am sure many people who do not take the initiative, or are simply too tired from their journey remain stuck for hours if not days in one place trying to find a way through the system. They remain lost and effectively pushed to the back of the queue until the system recovers to the point at which they can be accommodated by a smooth running reservation system.

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Real Health Care Refrom

Posted on January 21st, 2007 by adrian.
Categories: Health care.

will not happen until the administration takes to heart the idea that health insurance isn’t an incentive for employment, but a social welfare program that benefits everyone in the United States. Until that happens any new proposal will always pander to some corporate interest in preference to the people.

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