Moskie dot Net

… and a bill has passed. While it doesn’t have a public option, it is still a good thing. Insurance reforms to make the current system better. It’s hard for me to understand how that can be viewed as a bad thing.

Some view the fact that one will be forced to buy insurance (and given subsidies if they can’t afford it) as either an infringement on our freedom or as a legislated racket controlled by the insurance companies. But so be it: assuming that in order for healthcare in this country to be effective, it would require that most people have insurance, perhaps it’s irrelevant where that insurance comes from. As long as there are rules and regulations on how healthcare is dolled out, and assuming those rules are enforced in good faith, does it really matter if it comes from the government or from the private sector? It doesn’t to me, to be honest. The end result (effective healthcare) is my chief concern.

So this bill is a good balance. It keeps the basis of our current system in place, while regulating it so that it offers a level of healthcare that approaches what a government-run system would to be. It’s good policy.

I always had faith that Obama and the Democrats would get something passed. It got scary at points, I never gave up hope on it. I hope, and believe, that this isn’t the last major success for President Obama. He keeps this up, this level of expert political jujitsu, and he will not have any problems getting re-elected in 2012. Republicans have got their work cut out for them.

I understand I am most likely just playing into the degenerate rhetoric you find on the internet when it comes to political discussion, but I’ve been thinking about this health reform stuff a little too much, so I needed to write something.

All right, here goes.

You have a public option when it comes to security: the police. If their protection is not sufficient for you, you can go to the free market and hire a private security firm.

You have a public option when it comes to legal defense: a court-appointed attorney. If their defense is not good enough for you, you can go to the free market and hire a lawyer.

You have a public option when it comes to education: the public school system. If you deem that system insufficient for your child, you can go to the free market and find a school that meets your child’s needs and your needs as a parent.

You have a public option when it comes to shipping letters and packages: the U.S. Post Office. If the services they provide don’t meet your needs, you can go to the free market and find a private shipping company that does.

And with a public health insurance option, the same principle would exist. If the public health insurance option meets your needs in terms of cost and effectiveness, you can use it. If it doesn’t, you can go elsewhere in the same manner you can with all the other industries I mentioned above. All of these options help make this country stronger. None of the options (public or private) are perfect, each have their faults, and a public health insurance option would be no different in that regard. But that doesn’t change the fact that having all these options, public ones included, helps to set the bar for what’s considered acceptable for a citizen of the richest country in the world.

And for this plan to get lost in the discussion of a sea of ridiculous claims about how this plan will kill your grandmother or your baby who has Down syndrome is so, so frustrating. It’s like arguing against having a public security option (a.k.a. the police), because it will cause robbery, since allowing it to happen would be cheaper than trying to stop it. But it’s accepted that police can’t stop every crime, and it likewise will have to be accepted that a public health insurance option will be imperfect as well, and won’t be able to save everybody, or make your grandmother immortal. But, again, this goes back to the notion that if it isn’t good enough of a service for you, you can go to the free market and get something else. A public option will merely set the base standard.

And this is why a public health insurance option is the best plan we could possibly have.

One thing that can always irk me about a website’s interface is when the tab order of the site’s login form input elements are not what I expect. Typically, this is the order I want to do things:

1. Click in the Username field.
2. Type my username.
3. Press Tab to go to the password field.
4. Type my password.
5. Press Tab to go to the “Remember Me” check box.
6. Optionally press the spacebar to (un)check “Remember Me.”
7. Press Tab to go to the submit button.
8. Press the spacebar to submit the form.

This process often gets mucked up by extra links in the way, like the “Forgot your username/password?” link, or a “?” help link, which really annoys me. Providing your username and password is (well, should be) a keyboard-centric action, and it’s completely unnecessary to ask the user to go back forth between the keyboard and mouse for this.

I don’t know of any existing standard that might apply in this situation, or where a standard like this could even be defined. Would be appropriate for the W3C to include this in their standards? Whatever the case, it’s about time this became a universal aspect of all web sites.

And I thought it was great. It was a very accurate representation of the original graphic novel, and (keep this a secret) I think I liked the ending they had in the movie over the book. There’s no giant squid, but instead the idea is that explosions occur around the world, killing even more millions than in the novel, but Ozymandias orchestrates events such that it’s perceived by the rest of the world that Dr. Manhattan is the cause of the explosions. This was a great idea, since nothing is lost from the story in terms of theme or message, but it makes the ending more tragic and personal, since one the characters we’ve gotten to know is now blamed for genocide and forced to excommunicate himself.

The casting turned out to be spot on. Pretty much everyone was presented nearly identical to how I interpreted them in the novel. One exception would be Sally Jupiter. She was a little too Joan Rivers for me.

If I had to pick one thing to improve, it would be the pacing of some of the scenes. This is probably the fault of trying to keep as short as they could. But certain scenes didn’t feel right. Towards the beginning, when Rorschach is giving a voice over, some of his lines are strung together too fast, making it seem like his mind is moving from thought to thought incohesively. Putting a couple beats between those lines would have helped. Same goes for some of Laurie’s and Daniel’s exchanges. Some of their interactions happened faster than what seems normal.

Can’t wait for the DVD release, though. Seeing the scenes that didn’t make it, as well as potential pacing fixes, is going to be even better.

We’ve just started to use StyleCop, and the classes I’m currently writing are the first of our project that have to validate correctly before submission. It’s an interesting task, getting my code to be in the exact proper format: the 4 or so classes I’m writing generated over 300 StyleCop errors. I’m amazed at how specific StyleCop is, in regards to what it considers valid. I went into it expecting that it would enforce that certain elements merely have documentation, but it actually goes a step further an enforces that the documentation have specific wording. Kudos the StyleCop on that.

But one (default) rule that I think might be excessive is that a class’ private variables must be documented. While I understand from an idealistic point of view why it should be documented, the typical scenario where I use private variables is one where that documentation seems excessive to me. That scenario is for read-only properties that force me to have a private variable to store the value of the property (if I want to be able to set the property from within the class). In that scenario, I then must document both the private variable and read-only property itself. But documenting that private variable seems just as (ir)relevant as documenting local variable of a method.

I think we’ll be turning that rule off.

At work we are in the process of implementing an ASP.Net MembershipProvider that uses NHibernate for the data access. I’m hoping that once it’s all complete, we’ll be able to post it online (somewhere) for the ASP.Net and NHibernate communities to peruse. It seems like a typical thing that developers out in the wild would make use of. Stay tuned.

Maybe THIS blog will be used.