Rollouts and websites and redesigns and new versions

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve complained bitterly about the new Yahoo email, and I am not alone:

So many loyal Yahoo users are frustrated with the new interface. They used all possible words you can think of to describe their frustrations and anger: problematic, screwed up, upset, blew it big time, so bad, very frustrated, sucks, flawed, annoyed, absolute OUTRAGE, hate it, a pain in the a_ _, a complete mess, really and truly crap, a giant leap backwards, WORST redesign ever, the worst upgrade, disgusted, fed up, getting worse instead of better, absolutely horrible, terrible, awful, unbelievable, unusable, stupid, Done with yahoo, I am leaving Yahoo, Bye yahoo…

Yahoo has tweaked the redesign over and over, and virtually every single change has made it worse. They took away something that really worked, and “improved” it by taking away all the good features and adding every bad feature of g-mail, and then some that they’ve invented specially for this. If you want some of the awful details, look here.

In light of the Obamacare website debacle, I’ve been thinking about the whole question of designing something like that to be user-friendly, and why things are so likely to go wrong. After all, Yahoo isn’t the Obama administration or the government (it isn’t, is it? Tell me it isn’t). You’d think they could get it right. I realize that the problems inherent in Healthcare.gov are different then in a web email service, but I wonder whether some of the difficulties don’t stem from something about the mindset of the designers themselves.

Don’t want to step on any toes here, but perhaps these amazingly bright people (and I don’t mean that sarcastically) don’t think along the most practical of lines. Do they become entranced with some inside-baseball feature that only the geeky can appreciate, and ignore the way the minds of regular folk work?

Just as an example, I’ve noticed that the latest fad seems to be to hide things. Is it esthetics—do they like this because it gives the page a cleaner look? Or because it’s just plain nifty? You mouse over something and bingo, up pops something to click on as a way to get to something else (don’t even know if I’m using the right terms here, but I assume you know what I mean). But there was nothing about that word you had to mouse over in the first place that indicated the splendors hidden beneath it, so how were you supposed to know?

For example, on Yahoo email, the log-out tab is hidden. Why? Is it fun to have to make people go through an extra step in order to log out? Is that the way the designers get their jollies? It used to be the “sign out” button was right there in plain sight: click on it and you’re out. Now you have to mouse, and wait, and the big reveal doesn’t even work if everything hasn’t already loaded just right (and with new Yahoo email there’s often a long delay before that happens—if it ever happens).

Maybe the folks at Yahoo just have trouble saying good-bye. But my guess is that an awful lot of people have said a permanent goodbye to them. I’m not one of them—yet.

[NOTE: I just want to reiterate that I realize that the problems with the Obamacare website are not just worse, but are of a different order, and more basic. But I still wonder whether there’s something that makes it hard for IT people to understand how the minds of non-IT-people work.

Here’s an interesting piece on whether it’s the IT people or something else.

And according to this, Yahoo’s redesign of its sports site has provoked a similar reaction: rage. Whatever happened to “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? I think that, with the re-design of the email, Yahoo is trying to emulate its competitor, gmail. Apparently, with the redesign of the sports page, it’s trying to emulate something about Apple. So, earth to Yahoo: stop imitating. Build on the unique characteristics that have drawn users to you. Have faith in yourself, Yahoo!]

And in other important news…

The New Neo Posted on by

…car colors continue to be every bit as boring as ever.

C’mon, folks—silver replaced by white? With brown and dark gray gaining?

What a disappointment. I’d been hoping for a break in the dreary monotonous neutrality of it all.

Car color ennui.

Here’s an antidote:

fiftiescar

When I was a child, I wanted to grow up and have a car just like that—except maybe I’d replace the white with pink.

Fixed!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Lots of updates below.]

Oops, never mind, says Emily Litella.

By the way—why didn’t the government site just borrow this calculator, the one I’ve been using in my post-rollout reseach? It seems to work just fine, and gets the right premium figure for the 62-year-old subsidy-ineligible woman featured in the piece.

They’re fools or knaves, probably both, no doubt about it. This is absolutely basic: premiums vary depending on age, even with Obamacare. The only state in which they don’t (as far as I know) is good old Vermont, where everyone is equal, holding hands and singing Kumbaya as they eat their Ben and Jerry’s:

Vermont now has the fifth highest health insurance premiums in the country, in part because of state regulations limiting competition. There’s no reason to believe that will improve, as only two companies are offering plans under the exchange. At this stage, unsubsidized rates in the exchange have increased considerably. Any models showing a decrease in premiums are based on a high percentage of enrollees qualifying for subsidies. In addition, the viability of that model is dependent on a large number of the young and healthy paying into the system.

Vermont utilizes the “community rating” method to determine health insurance premiums. The intention of this method is to ensure that rates on particular policies are the same for everyone regardless of age or health. That means that a 57-year-old man will pay the same rate for an individual policy as a 27-year-old woman. Good for the 57-year-old man, not so good for the 27-year-old woman. Cynthia Cox, a health-care economist at the Kaiser Family Foundation, explains, “Younger people will have higher premiums in Vermont than they might if they lived elsewhere, whereas older people might have lower premiums than if they lived elsewhere.”

In other words, without a pool of younger, healthier participants, it’s difficult for any insurance plan to survive.

[Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.]

[ADDENDUM: It seems that another state with community rating re age is New York. Several other states limit how wide the variation between premium prices for young and old can be. Obamacare limits this ratio as well. But all states except New York and Vermont vary premium prices based on age, with younger people paying less, for obvious reasons. New York is better off than Vermont in this regard because its population is younger and Vermont’s older. See this for much more about Vermont’s unique problems.]

[ADDENDUM II: This pending court case has the potential to throw a large monkey wrench into the Obamacare works. I find it hard to believe that it will actually end up doing so, though, even (or especially) if it goes to the Supreme Court.]

[ADDENDUM III: Does this mean they’ll all apologize to Ted Cruz, the terrorist? Nah, not so much:

CNN reporter Dana Bash tweets “new: senior dem source tells me to expect every sen dem running in 2014 to back @JeanneShaheen proposal to delay #ACA enrollment deadline.”

Just a little while back they were refusing to delay the mandate as the Republicans asked. Now they’re begging for it. I wonder what changed :-).

Bryan Preston remarks:

A unified Republican Party could make great use of this turn of events. Let’s see how the actual Republican Party handles it.]

If only, if only, if only…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Stalin knew.

They must calculate that it’s better for Obama to be considered unaware to the point of negligence than to say he was aware of the debacle and let it go ahead anyway. I suppose they think that their rank and file will excuse it because it shows how lofty Obama is, how elevated above the common and petty concerns of lesser mortals.

[NOTE: Those of you who don’t understand the “if only Stalin knew” reference, please see this.]

Canada slides further down the slippery slope…

The New Neo Posted on by

…of death panels. And Adam Goldenberg applauds.

The “experts and wise community members” that make up Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board can overrule a family’s decision about whether to continue life support for an ill member. It’s a cost-benefit ratio analysis in which society has an interest, and Goldenberg points out that Canadians “tend to have more faith in our government and our bureaucratic processes than Americans do in theirs.”

He also notes that at present in Canada and the US, such disputes are decided by judges:

When these family members disagree with a patient’s doctors, and when the doctors are nonetheless determined to act, the dispute generally goes to court, where it can take months or even years to resolve. That is how it works in other Canadian and American jurisdictions, anyway.

But—at least as far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong)—in the US judges decide disputes between family members about end-of-life decisions, a la the Schiavo case. Unlike the Canadian case, the type of disputes that send these cases to courts in the US are not ordinarily between the family and doctors. In the US, the family gets to decide, although the doctors can advise and give their medical opinions about what would be best. As far as I know (and again, please correct me if I’m wrong) the only reason doctors were involved in the Schiavo case was that Schiavo’s husband wanted the tube removed, not kept in place, and since there was a question as to whether her physical state would have warranted that, doctors testified.

But the Canadian case Goldenberg is describing is one in which the dispute is between the family and the patient’s doctors, where it’s the family that is trying to keep the tube in and the doctors who say it should come out. And since the government has an interest in the monetary cost of keeping the patient alive, it gets a say, too, in order to protect its finances, not just as some supposedly impartial arbiter in a dispute. That’s the slippery slope down which conservatives do not wish to slide, and which is a consequence of more government involvement in health care reimbursement.

Goldenberg ends with a swipe at Sarah Palin:

When humanity demands haste, and justice demands expert knowledge, Ontario’s death panels offer a solution””whatever Sarah Palin says.

Ah, but Palin never indicated that death panels don’t offer a solution. She’s well aware that they do, and are an almost inevitable outcome of the liberal mindset and increasing government control of health care. She thinks they are the wrong solution, an unconscionable intrusion by the state into decisions that should be up to the individual and the family.

Of course, that’s an oversimplification too. As I wrote in a previous post:

I agree…that Obamacare would mean that the government will be involved more and more in all sorts of health care decisions about how to allocate scarce resources, and that worries me a lot. I also believe that some entity would have been making more of those decisions as time went on and health care became more and more expensive. That’s been happening anyway, with health insurance companies often being the decision-makers.

I don’t know whom I trust less””the government or the health insurance companies. No, actually I do: it’s the government, sadly enough.

When health care is incredibly expensive and families can’t pay out of pocket, the person holding the funds has a say or the whole system goes kaput and becomes unworkable. That’s the sad reality.

Again with the hat: donation time!

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP—last day for this appeal, although feel free to donate any old time.]

passhat

Yes, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Time passes so quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves.

But yes, it’s been a while since I asked you to donate to a semi-worthy cause: this blog. And so I’m going to ask you again to use the “donate” button on the right sidebar beside the photo of the hat, and give whatever you see fit.

Every single donation— large or small—adds up, and helps me a great deal in continuing the blog. If each and every reader gave even a few dollars, it would be a glorious thing. But whether you decide to donate or not, please keep visiting and keep commenting. I appreciate all of you. Comments and readers are a very big part of what makes this blog work.

I thank you all in advance. I’ll probably repeat this notice every now and then for the next week, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat. But I’ll be discreet about it. And it’s a lot better than those fund-raising drives they have on TV, isn’t it? No interruption of the scheduled programming.

Popular baby names, state by state

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems odd to me (although perhaps it shouldn’t) that the most popular baby names have a strong regional component.

Take a look:

girlsNames2012

boysNames2012

The most popular girls’ names (Emma, Sophia) are all names that, in my youth, were considered hopelessly old-fashioned and completely passé. Superlative teasing material. But everything old is new again.

None of the recent girls’ name favorites are the traditional and previously-stable choices such as Mary, either. But boys’ most popular names show a mix of the new and the traditional. Tried-and-true names such as William and James and Alexander are still hanging in there, for example—in the South for William, Alaska the lone holdout for James, and a weird NY/NJ/Nevada axis for Alexander.

Florida is an outlier, standing proudly alone with Isabella for girls and Jayden for boys.

But what’s up with Mason? I’d hardly even heard of it as a first name before, except for the guy who wrote “Classical Gas,” and 70s kid ad-star Mason Reese (I know, I know; I’m old). So why has Mason completely conquered most of New England and the midwest, as well as the far-flung states of Washington and Louisiana?

Aha! It’s those super-duper trendsetters, the Kardashians.

Obamacare: intended to fail?

The New Neo Posted on by

A popular argument on the right is that single payer was the goal of Obamacare all along. That certainly makes some sense, especially since quite a few Democrats (and even Obama, some years ago) are on record as supporting single payer.

But as Rick Moran (quoting Jim Geraghty) has pointed out:

This is where you say, “It’s designed to fail! It’s designed to collapse the existing health-care system!” That’s a really compelling theory, but the catch is that it’s got Obama’s name on it and the Democratic party has built just about all of their political capital on the idea that it would work. Democrats would be betting that after completely fouling up their signature domestic policy and one-sixth of the American economy, the voters would trust them to give it another shot, this time making even bigger, more radical, expensive, and complicated changes.

Moran adds:

Besides, for the conspiracy to work, a single-payer system would have to get through the GOP House, not to mention needing 60 votes in the Senate. Does anyone believe that after the internal bloodletting over defunding Obamacare there are any Republicans who would vote for their own electoral execution and help pass a single-payer system?

No, this is sheer incompetence, coupled with typical dishonesty from the administration. They may pay for it by owning the biggest boondoggle in American history ”” the failure of a government entitlement that could discredit the idea of big government for a long time.

Good points. But Moran is forgetting the way Cloward-Piven works: overload a system, collapse it, and then take advantage of the crisis to ride to the rescue with something more leftward, because the original Humpty-Dumpty (in this case, the private health insurance system) can’t be put back together again. Who would people be more likely to turn to in such a crisis, mean old Republicans or the kindly Democrats who mean well and wanted single payer in the first place?

Alternate theory: that the Democrats thought the problems with Obamacare would be smaller and more controllable, and that the general reaction to covering more people would be good—good enough that Democrats would gain seats in Congress. Then the case could be made later that a switch to single payer would make a somewhat-good-but-still-flawed thing even better.

But perhaps Obamacare versus single payer wasn’t and isn’t the big issue. Perhaps the Democrats don’t care so very much which it is because the real goal isn’t what sort of health insurance system we have. The real goal is solidifying political power for their side. Anything that makes more people see government as rescuer can accomplish this, as well as anything that controls more people. They probably figure that either system would increase Democratic power. Although single payer would be better for this, either would do.