Paul M. Jones

In Indiana’s HSA, the state deposits $2,750 per year into an account controlled by the employee, out of which he pays all his health bills. Indiana covers the premium for the plan. The intent is that participants will become more cost-conscious and careful about overpayment or overutilization.

Unused funds in the account—to date some $30 million or about $2,000 per employee and growing fast—are the worker’s permanent property. For the very small number of employees (about 6% last year) who use their entire account balance, the state shares further health costs up to an out-of-pocket maximum of $8,000, after which the employee is completely protected.

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Most important, we are seeing significant changes in behavior, and consequently lower total costs. In 2009, for example, state workers with the HSA visited emergency rooms and physicians 67% less frequently than co-workers with traditional health care. They were much more likely to use generic drugs than those enrolled in the conventional plan, resulting in an average lower cost per prescription of $18. They were admitted to hospitals less than half as frequently as their colleagues. Differences in health status between the groups account for part of this disparity, but consumer decision-making is, we’ve found, also a major factor.

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It turns out that, when someone is spending his own money alone for routine expenses, he is far more likely to ask the questions he would ask if purchasing any other good or service: “Is there a generic version of that drug?” “Didn’t I take that same test just recently?” “Where can I get the colonoscopy at the best price?”

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Americans can make sound, thrifty decisions about their own health. If national policy trusted and encouraged them to do so, our skyrocketing health-care costs would decelerate.

via Mitch Daniels: Hoosiers and Health Savings Accounts - WSJ.com.

“Given , what reason is there to suppose that Obamacare is a good idea?”

This past Friday, I released verion 1.0.0beta5 of the Solar Framework for PHP. You can read the change notes here.

Overall, most of the work was related to the form helpers and making them even more flexible than they were previously. We’ve also added a new manual chapter on working with models and forms.

It is super-easy to build forms out of model records in Solar. In the controller, once you have a record object, call its newForm() method to get a Solar_Form object. In the view, pass that form object to the form view helper and add a submit-process button:

echo $this->form()
          ->auto($this->form_object)
          ->addProcess('save')
          ->fetch();

Those four lines of code will build a complete form for you based on the model record, including top-level feedback and individual element invaldation messages.

The form helper is smart enough to recognize the column types and validation filters on the model record, and will use the appropriate input types accordingly. For example, booleans get checkboxes, date fields get a series of month/day/year options, and columns using validateInList or validateInKeys become selects.

You can also further customize the form presentation using the fieldset and grouping methods on the form helper. Alternatively, you can the individual form element helpers to build forms by hand.

These features have been present in Solar for years.

Finally, and I’m not making promises, but I think this is the last or next-to-last beta release. I have some tickets about query optimization from the models that I want to complete. Once those are done, I expect to make Solar’s first official stable release.

(Cross-posted from the Solar blog at http://solarphp.com/blog/read/63-solar-100beta5-released.)

…the IPCC's fundamental conclusions, relating to the allegedly unprecedented warming of the past half-century, are based on bad surface temperature data and are contradicted by more-reliable satellite data and by our knowledge of the earth's climate history. We know for a fact, in short, that the computer models that are the only basis for the AGW theory are wrong: …

via Power Line - Global Warming Fraud: The Big Picture.

…to visit DC expecting to find people engaged in serious discussions of economics is like visiting a Star Trek convention expecting to find people engaged in serious discussions of astrophysics.

via To Badly Go.

… there is no civilized right more basic than self-defense; indeed, to make such defense more efficient and wide-ranging is one of the only legitimate reasons for government at all, thus making localities' attempts to bar its citizens from practicing the right effectively particularly pernicious.

via Guns: Not Just for the Home Anymore - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine.

Fabien Potencier released Symfony 2.0.0alpha1 last week, along with some benchmarks showing its performance. I am glad to see that Fabien used my benchmarking system and methodology, and am happy to see that he is paying attention to the performance of his framework. I take this as an acceptance on his part that my methodology is legitimate and valid, and that it has value when comparing framework responsiveness.

However, in attempting to reproduce the published Symfony 2 benchmarking results, I found Fabien’s reporting to be inaccurate (or at least incomplete). Read on for a very, very long post detailing my attempt to replicate his results for the “hello world” basic framework overhead comparison, and my conclusions.

For the impatient, here are my conclusions in advance:

1. Fabien’s benchmark report, as shown at http://symfony-reloaded.org/fast, is inaccurate for the setup he describes. Lithium and Flow3 do not work in Fabien’s benchmark codebase at Github. Also, Symfony 2 is faster than Solar beta 3 by 5%, not 20%, on a “c1.xlarge” instance; to get a relative difference like Fabien describes, one has to use an “m1.large” instance. (It is entirely possible that the process Fabien used for benchmarking is incompletely described, and that the codebase is not fully updated, thus contributing to this disparity in results.)

2. We should use Siege 2.69, not 2.66, for more accurate benchmarking of baseline responsiveness. If we notice that HTML is slower than PHP, it’s a sign that something is wrong.

3. Symfony 2 preloads its foundation and application classes, something no other framework does in the benchmarked code. When we treat Solar and Symfony 2 the same way, by preloading the foundation classes for each, we find that Solar is roughly 28% faster than Symfony 2.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

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The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst. The core belief of the environmental religion is the fundamental uncleanliness of human beings. All forms of human activity are bad for the environment…

via The Greenroom » Forum Archive » The Green Death.

In my regular calls with my dad, he mentioned that it seems Baby Boomers, when unhappy with their jobs, tend to do little but whine about it, whereas Gen-Xers tend to quit. I thought that observation meshed well with this insight from Peter Drucker (”The Essential Drucker“, p. 314):

But increasingly also, knowledge workers, and especially people of advanced knowledge, see the organization as the tool for the accomplishment of their own purposes and, therefore, resent … any attempt to subject them to the organization as a community, that is, to the control of the organization; to the demand of the organization that they commit themselves to lifetime membership and to the demand that they subordinate their own aspirations to the goals and values of the organization. This is inevitable because the possessor of knowledge … owns his or her “tools of production” and has the freedom to move wherever opportunities for effectiveness, for accomplishment, and for advancement seem greatest.

Managers in IT organizations might do well to remember this.

Yesterday I released the beta4 version of the Solar Framework for PHP. You can see the change notes here.

We have also added three new chapters to the manual:

• Working with Models
• Working with Related Models
• Views and Layouts by Jon Elofson
• And some some appendices for more in-depth information about Solar’s underpinnings.

Take Solar for a quick test-drive with the blog demo and see if it suits you.

(Cross-posted from the Solar blog.)