As many of you know, earlier this year, I was booted off of a United Airlines flight, and after posting this tweet:

Outrage! United Airlines is anti-music: they kicked Greg + full-fare-ticketed cello off because it wasn't first class tckt

Jeremy Olshan of the New York Post ran this article: Musician ordered to fly cello first class and it literally went viral.  I received calls from Inside Edition, CBS Evening News, the Omaha World Herald, WNYC Soundcheck, the Washington Post, and ultimately from Robert Bradford, the managing director of customer solutions at United Airlines.  The NY Post article was reprinted all over the world, and United tried to tamp down the PR problem with this tweet:

"Cellos must fly in First">NOT a rule at UA unless cello likes the fruit 

plate. We'll get facts, talk to customer, let u know. RT @Grund00n

(tweet is here)

This was a lie on their part, probably because the PR wing managing twitter did not check facts first.  So, I posted this tweet with a crufty photograph I took with my iphone  (also attached to this post) of United's instrument policy showing that they do in fact require cellos to be in first class on 757-200 and although it is cut off, the same policy applies on its 767 aircrafts.  Also note that even on aircrafts where a cello is allowed in coach, like the A320, there are still only 2 seats in coach that the airline will allow a cello to fly.

It took United 1 day to call me directly on my cell phone number, which they got by calling the New York Post.  Although Rob Bradford was very nice, and offered me $200 for the cello's ticket, I refused, instead asking that United simply publicly lead the industry in supporting a change of instrument policies that are ludicrous and anti-music, and he was very animated in his enthusiasm for this idea.  Unfortunately, it was all a facade.

Another supervisor in customer relations at United, sent me this email in late August after a long series of exchanges:

Our Airport Operations management has advised me their policies are primarily dictated by our Engineering and Aircraft Interior team who make decisions on musical instrument stowage. After our inquiry they shared with me information received from the Engineering team.  “Our standard is to place oversized musical instruments in seats that face a bulkhead to ensure we meet internal United and FAA requirements.  Another requirement is that oversized instruments cannot be placed in exit rows.  Unfortunately, on several aircraft types the bulkhead seats in Economy are also emergency exit rows.  On these aircraft types there are no additional seats in Economy that meet the bulkhead and non-exit row requirements.  The B757 domestic, B777 2-class, and B767 international aircraft types do not have locations for oversized instruments in the Economy cabin due to these reasons.”   Mr. Beaver, aside from the integration team looking at both United’s and Continental’s policies there are no current plans to change aircraft configurations or policies. 

Airlines are quick to point out that all cellists should simply call when booking a ticket to ensure that the instrument is placed in the correct seat. In practice, this does not work.  Even when one calls ahead to book one of the two flight options on an A320, a significant number of flights are changed, as mine was in August, from an A320 to a 757 at the last minute.  On that flight, the gate agent simply bumped the instrument to first class without charge rather than force me to wait.  In addition, booking flights this way is often significantly more expensive, and most musicians who travel often with their cello rarely have a profit margin large enough to support the additional expense.  Instead, we must be at the mercy of the gate agent, flight attendant and the pilot.  All three have the power to veto a passenger boarding without appeal.  Fun!

For those of you who are wondering what kind of crazy person would buy an extra seat for his or her cello, it's worth noting that some musicians have tried checking their instruments and a large number of them have these instruments destroyed.  One wrote a song about it and posted it on youtube to the tune of 9 million hits (incidentally, according to wikipedia, Rob Bradford also called this guy.  He must be the "United screwed a musician" custom relations specialist).  The repair person I go to in New York told me that a significant portion of her business comes from musicians who have checked their instruments, many with repairs upwards of $20,000 each, and some instruments are destroyed beyond repair.  A great cello is hard to find, I spent several years looking for mine, and it is 290ish years old.  A significant part of my career is defined by the sound I make, which is in turn defined by the sound of my cello.  So, like it or not, the cost of risking destruction of my cello far exceeds the cost of buying an airplane ticket every time my quartet travels.

What, you might be wondering, can we do to change this situation?  First of all, if you are a traveling musician like me and have a horror story, please contact Hal Ponder, Director of Government Relations at AFM, hponder@afm.org (202) 463-0772 and tell him your stories, he is compiling them to begin the legislative push.

The musician's union also has a petition available at http://afm.org/departments/legislative-office/carrying-instruments-on-airplanes that you can sign to show support for a bill that the next Senate will be considering.  However, the petition is vague on what is actually in the Senate bill, and what would change.  In addition, airlines often tell me that their hands are tied by the FAA when I question why a 14 pound cello would be more dangerous than a 150 pound person.  So, to fully understand this, I took it upon myself to do a little research into the laws of the United States.  Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

The highest law of the land is the U.S. Code, this is what is amended when Congress passes legislation and the president signs it into law.  In addition to this code, which is not fully specific, the FAA passes its own laws by fiat called FARs, or Federal Aviation Regulations.  Then, each airline interprets these FARs and makes their own book of rules, and finally the flight attendants and pilots interpret their airline's rules to handle us individually.

The current regulations on the federal level with regards to cabin baggage are in FAR Part 121.285 and is pretty explicit: all baggage is the same, and must be in a bulkhead.  This text has not changed since 1995.  Currently, there is no law regarding cabin baggage, the FAR is the only thing defining what can and cannot go into an airplane seat.  The Senate bill and its House equivalent (H.R. 915) would change this, inserting language directly into the U.S. Code with a new section, either 41724 or 41725 (this would have to be resolved in conference).

Now, the House bill passed last year, but the Senate bill stalled and will have to be considered this session.  There is a very important difference between the two bills: the House bill leaves the status quo, letting each airline define the rules more specifically.  The Senate bill contains language requested by the musician's union and based upon Delta airlines instrument policy.  The differences between the bills are substantial:

1. the Senate bill explicitly forbids extra charges for instruments in overhead bins, with extra seats, OR as a checked bag.  Currently, air carriers have been known to charge up to $150 for checking a cello.
2. the Senate bill requires instruments to be in a case, be strapped in with a seat belt, and has specific requirements that are taken verbatim from the FAR 121.285.

The Senate bill does not explicitly mention which seats instruments can go in, and that is an omission that can still be corrected.  I have been in direct contact with the CEO of Chamber Music America, Margaret Lioi, and Paul Molloy at the AFM, who is the point person for this specific legislation, and neither had an answer about this question.  So, the ultimate solution would be to amend the language to specifically say that an instrument can go in any window seat that does not violate the other provisions.

Until this happens, we will never be guaranteed the ability to fly to any event, and United will remain unintentionally anti-music in spite of its best efforts not to be.

Since the birth of my daughter, I have not been spending much time coding in PHP, let along writing about it.  Recently, however, the professional necessity of developing a new website for the Chiara Quartet that would allow better workflow pushed me back into the coding arena.  Basically, we realized that we were maintaining several separate calendars, separate contact lists, and having great difficulty sharing any of these things.

I looked into a couple of possibilties for pre-existing solutions, and decided that no existing framework or CMS fully satisfied my tech needs:

1. luddite-friendly.  We are musicians, not programmers
2. full google calendar API-aware
3. full constant contact API-aware
4. federated login through OpenID - no more shared easy-to-remember-insecure logins/passwords
5. fully separated admin interface from website
6. both code and data managed through version control
7. easy installation in both a test location and a live location

Although many components satisfy one or more of these requirements, I decided to handle them all through a combination of existing technologies and cobble them together to make a perfect frankenstein monster.

Choosing my stuff

First, I decided to make a fully RIA application for the administrative backend, so I began to investigate javascript frameworks.  The riches out there are impressive.  Although many people are using the jQuery and Zend Framework has hung its hat on Dojo, I was most impressed by the rigor and flexibility of qooxdoo.  Not, mind you, by the visual appeal of the website, which is by any standard fugly, but by the clever use of an external tool written in Python to make it possible to easily create a debuggable source version, lightning-fast optimized build version, API documentation, and tests all from a single codebase.  In addition, its design from the ground up to be a javascript application rather than a fancy webpage with javascript stuff on it appealed to me.  The choice turned out to be fantastic, I was able to go from zero knowledge of qooxdoo to a fully-functioning administrative backend written with qooxdoo's stuff in just 1 month.  It's taken another 7 to tweak the application to make it more luddite-friendly, but the first iteration was pretty dang good.

Implementing the google calendar stuff, I decided to use Zend Framework's code, which worked great.  Constant Contact's API was easily implemented using the docs on their website, and I used PEAR's OpenID code because it is really easily installable using Pyrus.  It turned out to be a bit of a pain because the implementation is not fully maintained, and thus supports neither Google apps OpenID (which is admittedly very complicated and obtuse) or AOL's OpenID implementation, which uses a redirect.  A bit of hackery had that fixed in no time thanks to the OO design of the package.

To enable storing both the code and data in version control, I decided to store all of the data in sqlite3 databases and use PHP's sqlite3 extension to manage it.  This works amazingly well because unlike the old sqlite 2 database (PHP's sqlite extension), an sqlite3 database will work on any operating system.  I chose git to manage the codebase because of its easy cloning and ability to work offline with full revision history and then push to a repository.  Using projectlocker.com, I have a private repository accessible via ssh using GPG public keys, so no password problems.  In addition, using Pyrus's excellent and simple facilities for creating a package.xml, I can publish the codebase to the live site directly from the test site on the server, and easily roll back to a previous version in a pinch.

To facilitate the communication between qooxdoo and PHP, I wrote a new, very small and very fast RPC server based on qooxdoo's internal standard for the things instead of the large and (in my opinion) poorly constructed one that comes by default.  I saw a very large performance increase after this, and the online app responds at nearly the speed of a normal desktop app.

The frontend of the website is handled simply by rendering templates in the format defined by PEAR2_Template_Savant, which is to say PHP-based templates that use closures to reduce overhead and to simplify rendering by mapping objects to templates much like Zend Framework's Views, but with a much simpler codebase or dependency chain.

In addition, I decided to use Yahoo's media player for our audio files, which is a wonderful, free, remotely hosted javascript player that intelligently chooses a flash player, java player, or direct-to-device player based on the browser's capabilities.

Putting it all together

The best thing about all of this was the process of combining these disparate technologies.  None of them were designed to work together, but all of them were designed with some basic principles of extensibility that made it possible.  By publishing a REST-based standard, Constant Contact made it really easy to utilize their lists to add a contact form to our website.  Google's REST-based standards are second-to-none for anything GData-based.  The software I used was also all written with interoperability in mind.  When I first began writing PHP code in the days before PEAR even worked on Windows-based machines, when PHP 4.0.6 was new, there was nothing like this.  XML-RPC was all the rage, and nobody was doing anything that made it easy to use their code remotely in a completely different language.  I love how far we've come, and I'm excited to unveil the new site, stay tuned towards the beginning of February!

I've attached some screenshots of the administrative backend that uses qooxdoo to show its spartan but fantastic functionality.

I recently decided to stop self-hosting, and instead have moved my blog to posterous.com, we'll see how this turns out. Maintaining serendipity was just too much work for the time I have. Let me know if there are any glitches you'd like to see fixed

Yesterday, the article I wrote for PHP Advent went live at http://phpadvent.org/2009/testing-with-phpt-and-xunit-by-greg-beaver.

This is a simple, and potentially controversial article about what makes a good testing framework, and an alternative to PHPUnit for PHP users.  If you have any feedback, feel free to post comments here.

There has been a bit of buzz about the new PHP standards working group (self-named) that has started work on a real cross-framework standard for the naming of classes and namespaces in PHP.  The idea is a wonderful one, and at first things looked like they were nothing but good.  A group of framework developers met at php|tek, whipped up a quick draft, and after returning home, started a new mailing list, http://news.php.net/php.standards to discuss finalizing the draft discussed at php|tek.

At this point, signs of trouble began to crop up, and the good intentions began to result in a chill on the openness with suggestions of reducing input through moderation and discussions of who was a "member" of the standards group.  None other than Rasmus made a plea for more openness, which was answered by a resounding "no thanks" with the creation of the moderated php-standards group at groups.google.com.

Since then, I have made several pleas, off-list and some on, to open the discussion and move things back to the way open source and specifically PHP works.  The reasoning is simple: open source thrives on contributions from all levels of hierarchy, not just a chosen few people who have developed prestige and karma by working on large-scale popular frameworks.  You don't have to take my word for it.  Immediately after the creation of the list, many non-members found immediate flaws in the standard, some of which were fixed, and many which were ignored and are now causing trouble on the moderated list.  This, ironically, is what led to the moderated list.  All I can conclude is that the people who came up with the standard actually are actively seeking a way to avoid valid input.  Harsh?  Perhaps.  Let's take a look at a recent thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/php-standards/browse_thread/thread/5b85ca398ba90289 epitomizes the closed nature of the standard.  I find it appalling.

If you feel strongly that we need a standard, and want one that will actually be useful, you need to contact the people in the projects and demand that they open the process, or it will not happen, and the standard that they come up with will be hobbled by the lack of openness.  Nothing is worse than a standard that lacks a mandate and the legitimacy of being both open and well thought-out.  Make your voice heard!

One of the perennial problems of travelling with a cello is how to transport it.  I have been flying with my cello since 1993, and have many experiences with both checking the instrument and with buying a seat for it.  This post will answer those burning questions of what to do to transport your instrument safely from one point to another.  First, let's start with the only guaranteed unsuccessful strategy I have encountered:

Don't mail your cello

Although large shops such as Shar can marshall the resources to ship instruments, they do so in very different circumstances from what you will be able to do on your own.  The few people I know who have shipped their instruments wound up with multi-hundred to thousand dollar repair bills, which was actually a lucky position to be in.  The risk of outright destruction is too great.

When to check a cello?

If your instrument is not a very valuable instrument that can be easily replaced if it is utterly destroyed, then it is probably unwise to buy a seat for the instrument.  The hassles of buying a seat are going to outweigh the benefits, I guarantee it.

When not to check a cello?

If your cello is very fine, very valuable, or very difficult to replace with an equivalent instrument either in the value that insurance will pay for it, or in any price range, then you should not check your cello.  Here are a list of things that can and have gone wrong with both flight cases and regular luggage:

1. lost luggage - permanently lost luggage happens more often than you would think
2. destroyed luggage - this speaks for itself, no?
3. a destroyed instrument inside a pristine, undamaged case
4. delayed luggage stored outside in sub-zero temperatures overnight
5. if you're counting on being able to carry the instrument on board because it will fit into the overhead, be aware that the airline can change the type of aircraft with no notice
   

The last point should be enough to dissuade even the most confident traveler from checking a valuable cello.  If you have a flight that transfers, and your flight is canceled due to weather, airlines very rarely allow you to retrieve luggage from the secured area, and it sits in un-climate controlled storage areas for the entire night.  This will render a cello to be far more fragile, and if you survive the night without a heart attack from the stress, your broken cello upon retrieval due to its extra fragility from exposure to the elements will push you over the edge.

OK, I'm going to check my cello, what do I need to know?

Read the rest of this post »

This year, beginning in December, the Chiara Quartet will undertake our first Beethoven cycle.  This comes a year or two before we had planned to do it, but we were offered the chance by Music in Deerfield in Massachusetts, and a quick survey of our repertoire proved that it would be more than possible, as we already have more than half of the quartets solidly in our repertoire.  After little juggling of logistics, we committed to 3 concerts this season, starting in December, and 3 next season.  We will also be performing the complete cycle in Cambridge, MA at Harvard, and in Lincoln, Nebraska as part of our inaugural Chiara String Quartet concert series at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Once we had the dates in place, the first big question is what order to play them in.  Our ordering is as follows:

Concert 1:

Op. 135 in F Major
Op. 18 No. 4 in C Minor
Op. 59 No. 1 in F Major

Concert 2:

Op. 18 No. 3 in D Major
Op. 132 in A Minor
Op. 59 No. 3 in C Major

Concert 3:

Op. 18 No. 1 in F Major
Op. 95 in F Minor
Op. 127 in E Flat Major

and the following season:

Concert 4:

Op. 18 No. 5 in A Major
Op. 59 No. 2 in E Minor
Op. 130 (with revised finale) in B Flat Major

Concert 5:

Op. 74 in E Flat Major
Op. 18 No. 2 in G Major
Op. 131 in C Sharp Minor

Concert 6:

Op. 18 No. 6 in B Flat Major
Op. 130 (with Grosse Fuge) in B Flat Major

There are several obvious choices going on in this ordering.  First is that most concerts contain a quartet from each of the three periods of Beethoven's life. A late quartet sits in every possible concert slot, as does a middle quartet.  We will play Op. 130 twice in its entirety with the two possible finales, and the entire cycle ends with the Grosse Fuge.  Putting together this order also splits up the pieces we don't yet have in our repertoire between the two seasons.  Most concerts mix up major and minor keys as well.

How, you might ask, does one prepare for such a collosal undertaking?

The majority of our preparation for this cycle predates the initial request for us to play one.  We've been a full-time professional quartet since 2000, and so this will coincide with our 10th season.  Individually, we've played a ton of chamber music, and a lot of Beethoven as part of that.

I first heard a Beethoven cycle live when I was 10 years old, and the Juilliard Quartet performed one at the Wharton Center in East Lansing, Michigan.  I had only been playing the cello for 3 years, and so my memory consists of the opening chords of Op. 127, and the hairy legs of the quartet members peeping out between their socks and tuxedo pantlegs.  What?  I was 10 years old, give me a break.  If you haven't heard the Op. 127, its opening is one of the most memorable things Beethoven wrote, so you must come hear us play it live in our final concert this spring.  Becca's father was in the Concord Quartet and she literally grew up listening to live Beethoven cycles.

One of the first quartets I played in the "Shürtzaut" quartet (a group of 4 13-year old boys who refused to tuck in their shirts) was the second movement of Op. 18 No. 4, and this was one of the pieces that I played under the coaching of Rostislav Dubinsky of Borodin Quartet fame the following year in his Quadro-quartet at IU String Academy.  When the Chiara Quartet was formed at Musicorda in 1993, we played Op. 95 and had a chance to play the second movement with Arnold Steinhardt in his masterclass when our original violinist Rachel was sick.  The following year, we coached Op. 59 No. 2 very intensely with Norman Fischer of Concord Quartet fame (and soon to be my teacher at Rice University).  That same year, a group of students decided to practice the late quartets for a week and then to read through them.  While at Rice, Jonah and I learned Op. 59 No. 1 with Paul Katz of Cleveland Quartet fame as our coach.  At Tanglewood in 1999, I played Op. 127 with a group that coached with both Robert Mann and Raphael Hillyer of Juilliard Quartet fame, and this was one of the pieces with which the Chiara Quartet made our Alice Tully debut in 2005.  Op. 59 No. 3 was one of the pieces with which we made our Carnegie Hall debut the following year, and one of the pieces that helped us win a prize at the Borciani Competition the same year.  Op. 18 No. 3 was one of the pieces we played in the year we won first at the Fischoff Competition.  While graduate students at Juilliard, Jonah, Becca, Anna Elashvili and I played the Op. 130 with the Grosse Fuge on her graduation recital after coaching with Robert Mann.

Even with a list this long, the preparation for a cycle is more than just learning the quartets.  I played all of the sonatas and variations for cello in 2000 in New York (and will repeat the performance of all the sonatas this year).  Julie, Noori and I have been listening to Richard Goode's recording of all the piano sonatas, and in my orchestral days, I played all of the symphonies except for Number 8.  We've read biographies of Beethoven, looked at actual manuscripts at Beethovenhaus in Bonn as well as facsimiles online, and heard cycle recordings by the Juilliard, Emerson, Takacs, and many recordings by the Concord, Cleveland, Tokyo as well as performances by Brentano, Borromeo, Biava, Miro, Pacifica and other quartets I'm sure I'm forgetting, as well as student performances of many of the works.

We are extremely excited to embark on this monumental journey and hope that you will join us in the first performance at Harvard on Wednesday, December 2 in Paine Hall, or at Smith College in Northampton on Saturday December 5 in Sweeney Concert Hall on the Music in Deerfield chamber music series.  If you're in Nebraska, you can hear us threepeat the performance on Sunday, December 13 in the Sheldon Art Gallery at 7:30 PM

After several years with the old template, I decided it was time to upgrade, and am trying out this new template.  It squishes the entries quite a bit more than the old one, but has a nicer look/feel.  Let me know if you like/dislike it.

I recently remarked on my facebook status that health care reform was doomed in the current intellectual climate, and urged those reading to prove me wrong. Unfortunately, I don't see any evidence that I was wrong yet, perhaps the president's speech on Wednesday will change that view, but I am not holding my breath. There are three excellent articles that capture the essence of my skepticism. Together, they are a whopping 15 pages of prose (that's a lot for news articles). Basically, I have seen three prevailing views on health care reform amongst my friends and my facebook friends:

1. We have an obligation to fix the system, support universal health insurance coverage (i.e. support the various Democratic proposals)
2. You're crazy to believe that government-run health care is anything other than an IRS agent with a scalpel and the efficiency of the post office, plus it's a violation of privacy rights to turn over health care to the government.
3. market-based reforms are the only logical choice (i.e. tax credits for buying insurance, or insurance exchanges, or co-ops, etc.)

Note that I did not include in that list anything about the crazies, because none of my friends are insane. At least not the kind of insanity as represented by Jon Stewart's answer to Barney Frank's question to a constituent at his town hall meeting "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Stewart's answer: "apparently, a planet where a mixed race president and a gay Jew qualify as Nazis."

No, my friends are rational, primarily college-educated, and mostly split between liberal-leaning musicians and conservative-leaning programmers (that split in itself is interesting to me, but is not relevant to this post).  Before I go any further, I should acknowledge that yes, I am a liberal-leaning musician.  In my own defense, I am liberal because of my life experiences.  I am good friends with someone who was formerly homeless, have been screwed by my health insurance companies, and have lived in poverty in a poor neighborhood, as well as benefiting directly from government student loans.  No, I am not a communist, thanks for asking though.

Why is health reform doomed?  Not because the crazies are dominating the dialogue, far from it.  It is not because the Democratic plan is too expensive, too invasive of privacy, or too government-focused and not enough market-focused.  It is because we are asking the wrong questions in order to solve this, and nobody (I'm looking at you, Obama) is correcting us.

I have read large portions of both the contentious H.R. 3200 house bill, as well as nearly the entire H.R. 3400 (a little-known Republican bill that is popular amongst conservatives on facebook as a better way to reform health care).  There are some obvious problems in both.  Neither fully pays for itself (H.R. 3400 flat out doesn't provide any revenue in the bill, instead relying upon the hope that cutting costs will pay for it).  However, the flaws in both bills jump right off of the page when one examines this article by David Goldhill in the September 2009 issue of the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

To summarize the salient points, the health care system does not have any kind of market mechanisms to set prices in place, and this is a direct result of the introduction of comprehensive health insurance in 1954.  Unlike other forms of insurance (car insurance, for example), comprehensive insurance pays for the equivalent of oil changes, which both disguises the true cost and encourages severe inflation.

Thus, Goldhill concludes, the problem is not that not everyone has health insurance, it is that we don't pay for health care, our insurers do, and so we have no say in pricing.  He also goes on to recommend both mandatory health savings accounts to replace health insurance for predictable expenses such as checkups, the occasional equivalent of a fender-bender for health, and costs associated with aging (with some ideas for managing poverty thrown in), and a mandatory single-payer catastrophic insurance with premiums pinned to age with no other factor taken into account.

At this point, those in the "Obama, get your government out of my [fill-in-the-blank-here]" camp are thinking "single payer?  hell no."  To you, I suggest reading this editorial:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03kristof.html

Again, to summarize: government runs several things better than the privately managed things they replaced.  The examples in the article are fire departments, police departments, post offices, libraries, and health care (outside the U.S.).  I would limit this list to fire fighters and police departments: I doubt that even the most staunch conservative (again, the most staunch sane conservative) would argue that it would be better to outsource firefighting to for-profit corporations.  In fact, apparently "In New York City, according to accounts in The New York Times in the 1850s and 1860s, firefighting often descended into chaos, with drunkenness and looting."  Wow.

Now as for Goldhill's conclusion of how to solve the problems, there is a flaw in his reasoning as well.  To get at the core, we have to examine some of his assertions:

The housing bubble offers some important lessons for health-care policy. The claim that something—whether housing or health care—is an undersupplied social good is commonly used to justify government intervention, and policy makers have long striven to make housing more affordable. But by making housing investments eligible for special tax benefits and subsidized borrowing rates, the government has stimulated not only the construction of more houses but also the willingness of people to borrow and spend more on houses than they otherwise would have. The result is now tragically clear.

This paints a simple cause-and-effect picture that doesn't even begin to capture the problem.  His tidy explanation doesn't explain why lenders such as Wells Fargo singled out poor people illegally to net them into sub-prime loans, or why the market of derivatives caused what should have been a localized collapse to poison the entire economy.  He also states:

Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

I don't doubt that pretty much everyone agrees with the description of how health care pricing works.  The part that I want to emphasize is in bold (my emphasis, not Goldhill's)  In the previous sentence, Goldhill uses this language to describe the doctors/insurers: "They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create."

This language reflects a world view of a businessman who has faith in the power of the free market.  Under ordinary circumstances, this is the right view, our history shows that markets very often set the best price, and everyone wins.  Unfortunately, the so-called Great Recession we are currently in did not result, as Goldhill seems to be claiming, from people making rational decisions, and markets do not solve all problems.  Put on your reading glasses, this next article is the long one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html

This article by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman is by the guy one could argue is the smartest of the three whose articles I've quoted.  Although you absolutely must read the whole article - especially if you have "faith in the market" - I will try to summarize it:

You can't have 100% faith in the market because people are intrinsically irrational, and occasionally the government probably must play a role in stabilizing a market before it spirals into a depression.  In short: Keynesian economics was more right than the stuff we've been using to set public policy since the 1970s.

The solution Goldhill proposes for controlling health care costs makes an assumption that people will rationally choose the best price for health care, and bases this assertion upon evidence in fields such as Lasik vision correction, which has had a price drop as the rest of health care prices have skyrocketed.  This is a compelling argument, and one I believe is a very good one, but it is flawed for handling all kinds of health care.

People who are under physical or emotional stress very rarely make rational decisions, and when you are having severe chest pains, you are going to do whatever the doctor tells you to do.  If the doc says get angioplasty, you get it.  If the doc says we're going to open up the chest right now, you do it.  Very few people will whip out the "could I see your competitor's prices?" line while clutching their chests in pain.  Put simply, emergency care cannot be rationally priced by the consumers of the care.  Perhaps emergency care simply cannot have a free market to set prices.  This greatly complicates the issue unless one simply decides that the catastrophic insurance would have to cover certain emergency procedures with a deductible, much like what we have now (those of us with insurance, of course).

The non-emergency care portion of health care would respond quite well to a free market, but I would question whether certain procedures wouldn't suffer from the effects of things like positional monopolies (really sick people can't travel to get lower prices).

A bigger flaw is that there is no way to transition from our current system into the new one without horribly disrupting health care for at least some people.  The potential for unintended consequences is horrendous, and this will be impossible to navigate politically.

So what kind of questions should we be asking?  For one, how can we transform our comprehensive health insurance system into one that does is not comprehensive?  After changing this, how do we provide a safety net for people who get too sick to work, for people who are too poor to pay premiums or contributes to HSAs?  How can we use government to manage the market breakdowns that will occur with our irrational behavior in things like emergency health care pricing in a market-based health care economy?

As long as the question being asked is simply "How do we provide the existing insurance to everyone?" health care reform doesn't stand a chance.

Lately, there have been many well-intentioned but I would contend misguided ideas proposed to handle noise on public programmer mailing lists.  The premise is that in fact there are very important messages being drowned out in a chorus of irrelevant messages from ill-informed developers.  Warnings of inefficiencies have been tossed about quite a bit as the curse of "bike shedding."

To understand what they mean by "bike shedding," one must know the bike shed parable.  Once upon a time, a group of people got together to build a nuclear reactor to power the city.  Everyone in the town said "great, we need more power," and so they got to work designing the plant.  Everything was going great, the design of the reactor sailed by until one day, one of the citizens said "hey, let's build a bike shed for the workers so they don't have to come to work in cars and can get exercise."  Everyone agreed until an argument broke out over whether to paint the shed blue or red.  Eventually, the whole process broke down, and the plant was never built because they couldn't choose a color to paint the bike shed.  The moral of the story: everyone agrees on the complex important things, but the process breaks down over arguments about irrelevant details.

I think we can all agree that this is a tragic parable, illustrating what happens when the process for decision-making breaks down.

When there is a problem of signal-to-noise ratio on a mailing list, the problem has to do with the process for accepting public input, I completely agree with this.  However, I am troubled by the implication that having unmoderated mailing lists is the intrinsic problem with open source that must be solved.  There is a crucial balance between rewarding quality and being open to the outsider that is the life blood of open source.  You could even think of it as the "affirmative action" of the programming world: we recognize that amateur programmers who do not come from the establishment of the temples of programming in academic computer science departments or even computing careers, may have ideas that are better than the most learned highest karma achiever.

For my musician reader: Open source thrives on meritocracy: the idea that those who can do junk have more influence than those who can't do as much junk.  Karma is the thing with which these individuals are rewarded.  Only those with karma are able to actually make changes to the source code.  It doesn't matter who you are, or what your background is, if you demonstrate good coding and community, you get karma.

String quartet rehearsal is similar, the best ideas get more weight regardless of whether the person who has them is playing the melody.

Why am I talking about string quartet rehearsal in a post about moderated programmer mailing lists?  I come from a profession (professional chamber music) where "karma" is a fluid object, and unlike the programming world tends to break down when we attempt to nail it down.  My string quartet has found that rather than try to decide who will be "the decider" for tough decisions, it's not just friendlier, but is also far more efficient to devote our individual energies to two essential things:

1. always try to find the bigger picture
2. always try to understand and respect everyone else's crackpot stupid ideas

Sometimes they are crackpot, but most of the time, the reason they just seemed crackpot because they were outside the boundaries of our collective imaginations.

An example: in our first years together, we occasionally would get into endless arguments in my quartet about whether to play a particular musical section faster or slower (PHP developers: think endless namespace separator arguments).  After a long time of arguing about this, it usually turned out that we were asking the wrong question, until one day we would find the right question, which was something like "how long are the phrases?" (PHP developers: the right question turned out to be "how do we solve the ambiguity between static methods and namespaced functions?").  After finding the right question, we stopped arguing nearly as much, and the music sounded much better after we all re-adjusted our thinking.

This illustrates an important distinction: the question of how fast to play was not an irrelevant "bike shedding" detail, it was a crucial part of the solution.  We still had to choose a speed to play, just as the nuclear power plant people still would need a place to put their bikes.  By changing the question from "How fast?" to "How long is the phrase?" we were actually solving the question of what color to paint the bike shed at the same time we solved the question of how to design access to the nuclear reactor, not ignoring it.

The best solution is for those with the most karma to use this power to redirect unfruitful arguments towards larger questions that can lead to a more natural solution to the problem, not to limit external input and even conflict.

Perhaps the principal designers of the ill-fated hypothetical nuclear power plant would have done better to instead suggest that the bike shed be integrated into the reactor building.  This would protect the bikes from the elements, and also require any bike thieves to go through security to get to the bikes - and eliminated the question of what color to paint the shed entirely without ignoring it.

It takes hard work and more than a little gut-wrenching conflict to resolve a truly important, difficult problem, and I for one, am willing to tolerate a little noise to find that gem which would otherwise be missed.