What follows is a small back and forth triggered by an email forward from my family. (which means if you want the timeline read it from bottom to top.)
I reposted it here because I want my friends to fact/sanity check my assertions and provide feedback.

I attached the resolution for ya all if you want to see it. Not much there, just that he wants congress critters to forgo their benefits program and instead enroll in the public option. To me, as Michelle and Thomas said, it kind of misses the point of the public option.

Carol, I can't imagine a situation where your insurance would change because insurance was being covered for others. That's like saying medicare is causing your blue cross rates to rise. They're different entities with their own bank accounts. As I understand it, the worst thing that would happen is your taxes could go up subsidizing the public insurance for people who couldn't pay their own way. A more likely outcome if all goes well. (who knows?) Is that your rates will drop as your insurance company is forced to compete with that public option.

Here's the problem as I see it. Emergency rooms are packed with people that have sniffles. Even worse, emergency rooms are packed with people who have problems that would have been a sniffle if they had access to a doctor, but since they didn't they waited a month and rolled into the ER with full blown pneumonia. Sniffle: $100 visit. Pneumonia treatment: $10,000 Guess which one the doctor, patient, and insurance company would probably prefer to deal with?

So.. If you can get that guy with the sniffle access to a doctor of any kind to take care of his sniffle, you save 9,900 in ER rubber gloves, hose, sheets, and all the other crap hospitals waste. ; ) (can you tell i just spent a week there recently?)

Recently, Obama presented his idea for a network of high-speed rail in America. This has prompted a lot of discussion in the blogotubes, and I would like to toss my two pennies on the already-towering mountain of copper.

I live in Japan, and enjoy having one of the best high speed passenger rail systems in the world. These trains are amazing. On time every time, fast, and the price is the same no matter where you are in the country.

Now let me point out why this has nothing to do with the situation in my home country of the US:

1. Japan is smaller than America.
   The distance between Tokyo and Osaka, for example, is not really that far, even though these are the two biggest cities in the country. This is like if NYC and LA were 250 miles (400km) apart, instead of almost 10 times that far (2444 miles / 3933km). The distances we're talking about in the US are ungodly huge. It is for this reason that we in the US (and our Aussie friends) have standardized on the automobile, not because we're lazy morons (the fact that we are lazy morons is a side issue).

Bruce Schneier is the man. He's a really good, solid voice on current security. I'm 3/4 through his most recent book and there is not a moment reading it when i don't say, holy shit! that is so stupidly logical!

He's rather even handed when it comes to security decisions, he calls the current administration on what they've done right and what they've done wrong. (although there are cases when the wrong greatly outnumbers the right)

At any rate, here's a good example from his blog (of which i have become a daily reader)