Paul M. Jones

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army and Marines found it useful to send a female soldier along on raids, as it was less disruptive to have a woman search the female civilians. There was no shortage of volunteers for this duty. The marines, as is their custom, saw more opportunities in this. Thus the marines began sending a team of women on such missions. ...

... So the marines in Iraq called these all-female teams (3-5 women) Lionesses. Again, no shortage of volunteers, as female marines, even more than their sisters in the army, were eager to get into the fight. But that's not what the lioness teams were created for. What the marines had also noticed was that the female marines tended to get useful information out of the women they searched. Iraqi women were surprised, and often awed, when they encountered these female soldiers and marines. The awe often turned into cooperation. ...

... Iraqi men were also intimidated by female soldiers and marines. In the macho Arab world, an assertive female with an assault rifle is sort of a man's worst nightmare. So many otherwise reticent Iraqi men, opened up to the female troops, and provided information. Women also had an easier time detecting a lie (something husbands often learn the hard way.)

The lioness teams proved capable in combat, as sometimes these peacekeeping missions ran into firefights or ambushes. But the main advantage of having a team of women along was the greater amount of intelligence collected. In addition, the female marines also made it easier to establish friendly relationships in neighborhoods and villages. This provided a more long term source of information.

via Intelligence: Girls With Guns Get It. Just read the whole thing; you gotta love the Marines, and Marine women in particular.

A public option, Shelby added, would "destroy the marketplace for health care."

But the notion that most American consumers enjoy anything like a competitive marketplace for health care is flatly false. And a study issued last month by a pro-reform group makes that strikingly clear.

The report, released by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), uses data compiled by the American Medical Association to show that 94 percent of the country's insurance markets are defined as "highly concentrated," according to Justice Department guidelines. Predictably, that's led to skyrocketing costs for patients, and monster profits for the big health insurers. Premiums have gone up over the past six years by more than 87 percent, on average, while profits at ten of the largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007.

Far from healthy market competition, HCAN describes the situation as "a market failure where a small number of large companies use their concentrated power to control premium levels, benefit packages, and provider payments in the markets they dominate."

So extreme is the level of consolidation, in fact, that one former top Federal Trade Commission official working with HCAN has sent a letter to the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, asking for an investigation into the health insurance marketplace.

via Health-Care Market Characterized By Consolidation, Not Competition | TPMMuckraker.

There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy...Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanism of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.

via Marginal Revolution: Aid Realism for the Idealist.

Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he'd get it and you wouldn't, it's rationing.

It may seem absurd to worry about whether wealthy or well-insured people get every last test and exotic or speculative treatment when millions of Americans have no health insurance and millions more have gaping holes in their coverage. But the well-insured happen to include virtually all the people making the key decisions about health-care reform -- members of Congress and their staffs, the White House staff, Washington journalists, and so on.

via Michael Kinsley - Rationing Health Care Is Our Choice - washingtonpost.com.

In championing health care reform, the President stresses the unsustainability of our current system, while insisting that nothing will change (you can keep your insurance, keep your doctor, etc.).

The pattern that I see is one of following the path of least political resistance, even if it means failing to make any significant contribution to solving the actual public policy problem. I cannot say that I am completely shocked by this. It is sort of Public Choice 101. But there are a lot of bright, highly-educated people in the Obama Administration who, if they were to step back and evaluate what is happening, would see the pattern for what it is. They believe that they inherited such bad policies that they could not possibly do worse. That belief is starting to look shaky.

via The Obama Pattern - The Atlantic Business Channel.

I love it when people who have never managed anything more than a government grant are convinced they can manage one sixth of the economy.

via Fixing the Health Care System, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

The unspoken truth about Mr Obama's ... effort to reach universal coverage is that you may not be able to keep your existing health plan--at least, not at the same price. That is because paying for expanding coverage must involve capping or eliminating the tax exclusion currently favouring employer-based health cover. That single distortion of the tax code costs some $250 billion a year--the biggest kitty of money lying around in Washington. But tapping some of that inevitably means some Americans will see de facto tax increases.

via Health-care reform's dirty little secret | Democracy in America | Economist.com.

The weekly [initial unemployment] claims number can't seem to fall below 600,000. ...

This is bad news for many reasons, not least of which is what is suggests about the structural problems in the economy that are likely to persist for years. But the real danger is the threat joblessness poses to an economy that, at least according to most macroeconomic variables, is stabilising. As unemployed individuals exhaust their available savings they'll find themselves curtailing spending and defaulting on obligations, both of which contribute negatively to economic output. Sustained high unemployment also places a strain on state budgets. Faced with growing demands on unemployment assistance, states are forced to cut spending elsewhere. But this is procyclical behaviour, which may act to increase unemployment further, forcing additional budget cuts, and so on.

via The jobless recovery | Free exchange | Economist.com.

I’m in no mood to keep my mouth shut any longer when I see NASA heading down the wrong path. And that’s exactly what I see today. The ­agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020--a glorified rehash of what we did 40 years ago. Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan is a detour. It will derail our Mars effort, siphoning off money and engineering talent for the next two decades. If we aspire to a long-term human presence on Mars--and I believe that should be our overarching goal for the foreseeable future--we must drastically change our focus.

Here’s my plan, which I call the Unified Space Vision. It’s a blueprint that will maintain U.S. leadership in human spaceflight, avoid a counterproductive space race with China to be second back to the moon, and lead to a permanent American-led presence on Mars by 2035 at the latest. That date happens to be 66 years after Neil Armstrong and I first landed on the moon--just as our landing was 66 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

via Buzz Aldrin’s Plan for NASA - Scrap Ares I, Fast-Track Orion and Colonize Mars - Popular Mechanics.

This is not strictly PHP, but it is about scalability, and every PHP programmer *ought* to be thinking about this stuff.

Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTI (where I work as a web architect) has this slide deck posted about Scalable Internet Architecture:

via http://www.slideshare.net/postwait/scalable-internet-architecture

(Aside: I joke that at OmniTI, my reporting chain looks like this: from God, to Theo, to my director, to me, to my subordinates.)

Developers (PHP and otherwise) should read the whole thing.

Some highlights, with comment and paraphrasing from me:

• Slide 7: "Lack of awareness of the other disciplines is bad." Developers need to be aware of the advantages and constraints presented by everyone else: designers, DBAs, sys admins, network engineers, etc. Not being aware means making your own work more difficult (bad) or their work more difficult (also bad, especially in teams).
• Slide 14: Craftsmanship and discipline: learn it, love it, live it. It's very difficult to be consistently attentive; don't let the fact that you cannot *always* be attentive stop you from *always trying* to be attentive.
• Slide 29: Know the difference between "premature optimization" and "necessary optimization". This is hard.
• Slide 48: The networking architecture is critical to scaling. Everybody forgets about the network because it's "just there" (until it's not).
• Slide 59: "Scaling is hard, performance is easier. Extremely high-performance systems tend to be easier to scale, because they don't have to SCALE as much."
• Slide 63: Combine this with slide 59, and you have the reason why you need to know your application responsiveness (i.e., benchmarks). As part of this you need to know the overhead imposed by your framework of choice, so that you know exactly how far you can optimize your application. This will help you decide where to spend your limited resources: on development to improve application performance, on hardware to improve system performance, or on adding systems for horizontal scaling.