12.07.09
Technorati Verification
This post will disappear soon. It is only here for verification purposes.
TDGFS3K68DZA
Permalink Comments off
08.09.09
Fixing Health Care
Fixing Health Care
Note: Because this is such an important message, I release this post into the public domain. Please re-post it elsewhere, print it out, send it to your congressman, your senator, local (and national) groups that you may be involved in, and any public forums, online or not. I ask, but do not insist, that you leave my comments exactly as I wrote them, with your own additions and commentary appended.
Introduction
The recent presidential campaign re-introduced the idea of universal health coverage to the American people and our political system. Sixteen years ago President Clinton tried to pass a health care plan. We were told then that “the free market” would take care of things for us. What nobody considered is that there is no free market in health care. Meanwhile, health (medical, dental, and vision) care insurance costs have skyrocketed, and an unacceptably large percentage of our population continues to be uncovered.
In response to President Obama’s proposal, we again hear cries of “let the free market solve the problem” and “say no to socialized medicine”. There hasn’t been a free market since at least the 1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid were created. Further, I don’t hear anyone rushing to give up their congressional coverage (taxpayer-funded and government-run equals socialized), their Veterans Health Administration coverage, their civil service coverage, or their Medicare coverage. It seems to me that listening to the blathering of the insurance industry is hurting everyone.
The Main Problem: 3PP (Third-Party Payers)
What is the big problem? Why are we having this discussion? Is it because young, healthy workers intentionally choose to skip medical insurance? Is it because a third of our population cannot afford it? Or is it more insidious, possibly a conflict between large insurers (both public, such as Medicare, and private insurers) on one side and consumers and patients on the other?
I believe the facts support the idea that this is a battle between large organizations that pay for medical care and both the individuals covered under their policies and the individuals who have no insurance at all. The stakes are too great to allow those organizations (whether public or private) to shape the debate. We have to get the organizations out of the way, or we’ll never have a viable plan to bring coverage to everyone.
The problem is third-party payers. Their interests are not aligned with those of patients. 3PPs want to eliminate costs, while collecting the largest possible premiums. Patients, on the other hand, want more care, more personal attention, and preventive care, all of which cost money.
Third-party payers are also partly shielded from being directly sued by patients for some of their coverage and payment decisions when the coverage is part of an employer-sponsored plan. Why? Because the patient has no “standing” to sue.
Under some kinds of coverage, federal rules may apply, overruling states’ consumer-protection and insurance regulation activities. Again, this favors corporations and government agencies and potentially harms consumers and patients.
Here’s another way that third-party payers are behind the problem. Everyone talks about the costs of health care increasing, but insurers (remember that this includes government programs like Medicare and Medicaid) typically negotiate discounts off of the medical provider’s fee schedule. Those discounts are sometimes augmented by rebates, too. Now, if you walk in with your VISA card, you pay full price, and that price may even be higher because of discounts that were given to insurers. In effect, the uninsured patient subsidizes everyone else’s care.
Insurers also require all sorts of extra paperwork, typically delay payment, and bring their own auditing and reporting costs to the doctor’s office. Those costs may not be passed back to the insurers, meaning that they are added to the overall price and uninsured patients wind up stuck paying for them.
No Free Market
After 16 years of watching this imbalance between large organizations (public and private) and individuals, how can anyone seriously say, “let the free market solve the insurance crisis”? Seriously? Did you fall on your head? Let me repeat it: THERE IS NO FREE MARKET IN HEALTH COVERAGE. There are some government plans (which cover a significant percentage of the population, particularly the elderly, government employees, military members, government retirees, and many poor children [but not always their parents]) and some private plans (heavily regulated by both federal and state laws). There are high barriers to entry. You and I cannot just decide tomorrow to start our own health insurance company.
There are some things that free markets, true free markets, require. Among those things are competitive markets, markets where neither buyer nor seller has “market power” or pricing power. In our health care market, the insurers have quite a bit of power to set prices (premiums) and the consumer can either take it, leave it, or hope that another health insurer will have a better price for a similar plan. Because they are the payers for patients’ treatments, they also play a very large role in setting the prices that doctors can charge.
Market Power: Private vs. Public Health Care – Human Nature Still Rules
The GOP/Health Care Lobbyist talking point that the “Government will get between patients and doctors” ignores the reality that under the current system “corporations get between patients and doctors”.
This comment in a blog post exactly summarizes the present situation. The non-existent health care free market is what brought about the current intolerable situation. To appeal to that supposed market as a reason to leave things the way they are is to signal one’s approval of a powerful oligopoly and political contributor. Sixteen years ago, the insurers one and all swore that they would be different from now on. I’m here to tell you that they lied then, and they are lying now.
As long as the government programs and private insurance companies can do so, they will continue to fight against consumers and patients. Any proposal that appeals to the free market without also telling us how to bring back a free market in health care.
Failed Reforms
The state of Massachusetts passed a law that required everyone to purchase health insurance. Implicit in such a law is the idea that the problem is those young whipper-snappers who think they are invincible, and therefore voluntarily go without coverage. Because they aren’t paying into the system while they are less likely to draw from it, they cause rates to increase for older and sicker people.
What kind of ignoramus writes this stuff? Let’s say you work for that big blue retailer that the author mentioned. You’re working 20 to 30 hours per week, so you won’t get any overtime, getting paid up to $9 per hour–$7 after withholding–or about $9100 per year. Most months, that is $700. Out of that $700, you have to pay rent, utility, clothing, food, and transportation costs, plus repay any student loans you piled up in college. If your transportation includes a motor vehicle, you have to buy auto insurance, too.
Any plan which mandates that everyone buys insurance will similarly fail. Why? Because “the free market” only works when customers are free to say no. And because mandatory purchasing means that there is no incentive in the insurance industry to restrict their management and administration costs, prices (and profits) rise steeply. (By the way, this is why mandating auto insurance is such a dismal failure.) In California, for example, mandating auto insurance led to cries for rate regulation. Courts ruled that insurers were entitled to a fair profit percentage. What this meant is that spending extra funds for marketing and administration merely meant a larger pie from which a fixed percentage is allocated to profit. And so it is with mandating the purchase of medical coverage: the incentive is for insurers to pad their administration and marketing costs, so that overall costs rise, and with those rising costs, profits also rise.
A few years ago, California came out with a plan to cover more children in uninsured families. I think this is actually a joint federal-state program. In California, the program is called Healthy Families. The program cannot keep up with the growing numbers of potentially-eligible children. I am not familiar enough with the program to know whether there is some premium involved, but if there is, it must be pretty low. This is a government-funded and subsidized program.
So how is it a failure? Because it is facing an influx larger than it can handle. Why? First of all, resources are not unlimited. There is an absolute limit each year for how many children can be covered. Besides that, the availability of coverage for children of families without employer-provided coverage is always going to have a growing market. Whenever there is free or discounted medical care available, demand for services grows at a rapid clip, while available resources have a smaller growth rate.
Rationing Is A Part Of Every Health Care Plan
This fast-growing demand for services and slow-growing resource allocation results in rationing under every health care system. The Canadian model uses wait time to ration care. It is not uncommon for financially well-off Canadians, from what I have read, to cross the border in order to receive more timely care. The current US system uses money–and access to employer-paid insurance–to ration care. People who can afford to pay for their own care, or who have employer-paid health plans, can get care. People who don’t fit into either group must depend upon the government or just hope they never become sick.
I have not read the bill that is proceeding through Congress. I have, however, heard people discussing how the proposed law chooses to ration care. According to some people, the bill seeks to ration care by subjecting care for elderly patients to strict cost-benefit tests. All health care provision should be subject to cost-benefit testing, I think, but from whose perspective? And who decides whether the same procedure is more valuable when performed on a 20 year-old patient than when it is performed on a 73 year-old patient?
Real Solutions Needed
If we want to fix our national healthcare situation, we have to stop with the halfway measures and look at real solutions.
- Get rid of separate pricing for cash (or more likely credit card) customers vs insurers (including Medicare, other government-sponsored plans, and private plans). This is one of the reasons that a “free market” does not exist and its promised benefits and savings will never happen. Think about it: uninsured patients, through the higher rates they pay, actually subsidize insured patients, enabling insurers to spend less on care and more on advertising. Cost-shifting has to be the first thing that goes, because suddenly, a lot of medical plans will have to face the financial drain that their organizational hierarchies place on their rate-payers. This will also mean that a lot of medical providers will have to become more flexible about how they accept payments from patients. By bringing back equity between direct-pay patients and third-party-pay patients, a lot of the cost distortions inherent in our present system will be revealed and in many cases forced back into line.
- Get rid of student loan problems for medical students–if a student majors in a medical field, completes his/her classes and internship, and actually enters practice in said field, consider the debt fully-paid after five years of practice. One of the reasons often given for high medical rates is the high cost of repaying medical education loans.
- Get rid of barriers preventing more students from entering the field. That is, stop allowing medical groups to grant quotas to medical colleges. A medical college should decide how many students to admit based on how many it can successfully educate, how many apply, how many are likely to be hired after graduation, and the quality impacts that class size has on the school’s interns and graduates.
- Get rid of barriers preventing patients from suing their insurers, including suing over care decisions and termination of coverage. As with all consumer contracts, the stricter of federal and state consumer-protection laws should apply.
- Rather than force more low-income workers to become lawbreakers (or to live in their cars or eat a diet consisting solely of ramen noodle soup), let us get rid of the whole “you have to buy” idea. This whole concept is so anti-working-poor and so pro-insurance that it makes one wonder why the ultra-liberals are backing it at least as much as the ultra-conservatives. The idea isn’t to enable insurance salespeople and executives to buy boats and vacation at Great Salt Lake every year. The idea is to enable people to obtain medical treatment regardless of their income level.
- Don’t fall for the “illegal immigration” ploy. These people are here, they are working, they get sick too. A lot of agricultural, food processing, and hospitality enterprises completely depend on the ability to underpay (and pay not benefits to) immigrant laborers. This really tells us that we need highly active workplace standards enforcement, so that companies whose business depends upon underpaying staffers will either revamp their price and cost structures or shut down as they deserve. Any decent health plan will not focus on the patient’s immigration status, but on his / her medical condition and what financial resources he / she brings to the table.
When all is said and done, the health care debate is a microcosm of the biggest issues facing our nation today: the power and influence exercised by corporate entities versus that of individuals. Whether those corporate entities are for-profit or non-profit, religious or secular, governmental or private, they tend to vastly distort political and economic debates based solely on their own potential benefit, and not (as it should be) what benefits the overall population of this nation or any of its states. The solution is, at the core, to reduce and restrict corporate influence on political decision-making, government agencies, and on the economic environment we all live in. As I often mention, Greenpeace and MoveOn.org are as much a part of the problem as Exxon and General Electric.
…..
Powered by ScribeFire.
Permalink Comments off
07.11.09
Tired Of Your Job? Why You Might Want To Stay A While
Should You Stay At Your Cushy Job? | MyWifeQuitHerJob.com
I was chatting with a close friend of mine over the weekend about complacency at the workplace. Turns out that he recently quit his job to join a company that builds completely different products than his last firm. While the nature of his work will be fairly similar, the culture and pace of his new company will be a brand new experience. Inevitably, he will have to work longer hours as well.
So I asked him why he changed jobs. After all, he has a wife and child at home whom he loves spending time with. His former job was a 9-5 type job that lent him plenty of time at night to hang out with his family. In addition, he never had to work weekends and the job itself was pretty low stress. Why did he give all of that up for a new job where he’ll have to work many more hours and re-establish himself? Why did he sacrifice the additional family time for a new job that is more demanding?
Steve’s conclusion, not surprisingly, is that staying in your job and working on your own business on the side is the right decision. In general, I would agree, subject to this: working for yourself is not necessarily about establishing a business that you own. It is about taking responsibility for your own career, your own financial future, and your own economic condition. Just as we can never depend upon the government to take care of our needs, we should never depend upon an outside employer. Therefore, your job should always be considered a contract that you are working on for your real employer, yourself.
We had this conversation at home recently. MJ left his employer because they refused to work with his college schedule. (I realize that “MJ” these days is usually used to refer to the recently-deceased Michael Jackson, but I have a MJ at home.) He is looking for a replacement job. Anyway, someone sent me an article about a guy who started his own business after employers refused to hire him, but used his ideas (set out during job interviews) in their businesses. I said that MJ needed to read it, and I was instructed that “not everyone should start their own businesses”. This is 100% true. Otherwise all businesses would be sole proprietorships. But no one should be fully-dependent upon his employer’s good will. We must always remain aware that employers’ interest in you is only about their own benefit. It is up to you to provide a way to take care of yourself when your employer decides you are no longer more useful than other alternatives would be.
There is another thing to consider. In job-scarce situations, such as many smaller communities and urban areas right now, leaving because you are bored or because you can get a better deal elsewhere is likely to affect your future prospects. I am not advising that you stay in a bad job situation if there is a better alternative, but I am saying that you have to manage your own career and consider how every move affects your own present and future. No one else can do it for you, nor should you want them to do so. Be wary of any employer, government leader, or paid advisor that wants to manage your affairs for you. No one is as motivated to take care of your needs as you are.
And for those whose ambition is to own your own business, Steve is 100% correct in saying that you need to take advantage of a stable situation to build your own enterprise and support your own future.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Permalink Comments off
07.05.09
On The Importance Of Team-Building
Yesterday, MJ talked to me about a recent training meeting for a Christian retreat-type thing that he is involved with. The most recent meeting was a “team-building” event. Unlike a lot of corporate organizations, this didn’t have people falling backwards into someone else’s arms and they didn’t go whitewater rafting. We did not discuss their activities in any level of detail, but it is the concept that is important here.
In a weekend event, there are weeks of planning, preparation, and practice that go into making it happen. If your dream is to launch your own family-owned business (FOB), do not think that the pre-launch process will be less involved. And team-building, in this case, becomes a synonym for relationship-building.
It starts with understanding that the pressures involved can easily turn one family-member against another. The family’s strength is in the relationships between one another. Not necessarily in blood relationships or common ancestry, because this counts for little in real life. It is in the mesh of individual ties between members, including common memories & history, and in the genuine affection and commitment that fill our relationships.
If you are contemplating a family business, you should start communicating to your family members that you still care for them when you are so busy working that you don’t see one another for days at a time. Your family members should also understand that business is business and family is family, that sometimes you are acting as part of the business and other times as part of the family, and that this separation is necessary and healthy.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Permalink Comments off
02.20.09
Companies Suffer When They Devalue Their Staffers
Well-trained, motivated staff is the key that gives most businesses any value they have. A recovery plan for business that concentrates on getting rid of "productives" will produce at best a temporary reprieve.
I have been a fan of Ford Motor Company and its products since my parents bought a Country Squire station wagon when I was seven years old. And while Ford is not as bad off as GM or Chrysler, it still suffers from the effects of mismanagement.
Over the past several years, while Americans were binge-buying big trucks and SUVs, Ford was doing really well. But we have seen over the years since the late 1970s that there is a periodic oil price spike, which knocks the sales of big vehicles through the floor. The automakers then lay of thousands, close a couple of plants. They announce smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. By the time those vehicles hit the market, the crunch is over and Americans want to buy big vehicles again.
Both Ford and GM have multiple sales divisions with overlapping lines of vehicles. The cheapest way to deal with that is to build a single platform and then use mostly cosmetic differences to distinguish the products. Ford’s moribund Mercury brand tends to sell repackaged versions of the Ford brand's vehicles.
Now, one of the reasons the Detroit automakers focus on big cars is because they lose money on every small car they sell. We are told that this is because of union health and retirement benefits. This may well be partially true. But what we are not told is that the automakers are not suggesting that everyone in the company from the top on down take a drastic cut in their total compensation. They are suggesting that their hourly-wage productives take the deep cut, while the salaried management gets away relatively unscathed. I would like to suggest that if the managers took permanent 50% cuts, the unions would find a way to swallow similarly deep cuts.
Part of the problem with the automakers is that the industry is so concentrated. If there were still 100 separate "major" automakers in this country, there would always have remained some that were not controlled by the United Auto Workers, and the absence of union control would have acted as a brake on union demands, just as it would have acted as a brake on management salaries. In other words, a big reason that our automakers are in trouble is because they are not small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) any more.
We can see this principle in other areas. Microsoft, which still has nearly 90% share of PCs sold, is having some problems of its own. Its problems, however, are purely the result of its own arrogance, brought on by its rapid ascent to the top of the heap and then the extinguishing of nearly all competitors within that heap. It is hard to believe that stores like Best Buy would still be selling computers with Vista preinstalled if most people were willing to take the best product (where best equals most able to meet their needs) even when it is not Windows / Microsoft Office. Yet, as Netbooks and the rise of Macintosh & iPod / iTouch / iTunes / iPhone have shown, increasingly, end-users are willing to change, something which is a long-term threat to Microsoft's ability to charge higher prices for its products.
How can Detroit recover, then? Well, I think that part of the answer is an all-in reduction in pay. However, it cannot be like the Chrysler reduction that Lee Iacocca took. Remember, he made $1 per year until Chrysler came out of its slump, then got a bonus. That won't work this time. If the automakers want to stay in business, they need to make their employees their partners, reducing or even eliminating the industrial age separation between managers and productives. This is not a complete answer. A part of their problem is in the choice of models they produce, and that cannot be fixed by singing kumbaya around the campfire. And, yes, a big part of the problem is the financial distress that makes lenders reluctant to finance car-buyers. Again, labor and management cannot fix that problem.
Permalink Comments off
01.30.09
Foreign Travel? Research Their Medical Systems First
Foreign Travel? Research Their Medical Systems First
My niece, Sarah, is a recent college graduate. She’s done several short-term missions trips to countries in Africa, including Kenya and Uganda. She also helped with community development and outreach projects on Indian reservations in Oklahoma during her college years. The other thing that is notable about her collegiate period is that she started to have seizures.
Teaching English in China
Sarah’s concern upon graduation was that she really wanted to serve overseas in a capacity that would help people, and hopefully, would enable her to introduce them to relationships with Jesus Christ. Funding for such work is always dicey, so she accepted a position as an English teacher in China. She knows that she cannot discuss religious topics, or political ones, at all. But she can live her life in such a way that her students will take the initiative to find out on their own about the Living Lord who motivates her actions.
In China, she had a few seizures, ran out of her medication ( dilantin), and found a doctor. She found, or her father found for her, a supplier who could get her the medicine she needed. And she has been really doing well and enjoying China immensely.
Medical Crisis
Recently, she traveled to another province for the Chinese new year holiday. This was her first vacation in China, and she was really liking everything. Then, without warning, she started having more-frequent seizures. Her father made an “executive decision” that she should come home for a few months and stabilize. In less than a week’s time, before she could catch a flight home, her condition worsened to the point where she remained hospitalized.
Her sister Deborah, who also has a passport, got a rush visa to head to China and prepare her for the flight home. Deborah was appalled at the level of treatment that was available there, and has asked for prayer to help effect a medical evacuation as quickly as possible.
Currently
At this time, I have no knowledge of the cost involved, except that it is beyond the family’s available resources. Sarah stops breathing during these seizures (something new, as far as I know), and is expected to require nursing care during the flight back to the United States.
We are also requesting that Christian believers join in prayer, asking that the way be provided to get her back to America safely, as well as a way to pay for the medical costs.
No one has informed me as of yet where contributions may be made, but if you are viewing this and wish to be of assistance, send e-mail to huckstech [at] warmmail [dot] com (please use “medical assistance” in the title). I will respond with the information as soon as I have it.
Update: There is now an account at WAMU / JP Morgan Chase. However, the bank forbids us from sharing the number over the Internet. Here is some information from our press release.
WHAT: I am writing to you because our family is desperate for some help. My daughter Sarah Hucks, a Monterey High School and an Oral Roberts University graduate is ill and in a foreign hospital in Chounguing, China. She was transported there after suffering multiple seizures in China and has been in the hospital there for over a week. The care in China is not like US care and we don’t have the extended insurance or the capitol to medically transport Sarah from Chongquing to Hong Kong ($51,000.00) or to Tokyo ($65,000.00). Repatriation to UCSF or Stanford would be upwards to $200,000.00.
We have contacted the State Department and the local Embassy in Cheng Du which will make a health and welfare stop but for some reason can not assist with repatriation for Americans working or in Sarah’s case teaching as a missionary in a foreign school in China.
I know you are not medical professionals but we desperately need your help and the help of any others you may know who believe in America, who believe in compassion and have a heart for others. For more information please do not hesitate in calling me, Vince Hucks, at 831-915-7231. Any donations, resources, and help would be greatly appreciated. You can make donations to Vince Hucks with Sarah Hucks in the memo and mailed to P.O. Box 1094 Seaside, CA 93955. Thank you for your prayers and support while we try to get Sarah in a stable conditions with the medical attention she needs and back to the US for the correct treatment.
Summation
There is a lesson to be learned. I do not think that Sarah would change anything. She originally wanted to be a medical missionary back when she went to college. She would rather burn out on the front lines than rust out in the base camp. More believers should live this way.
But, given the choice, learn about the medical system of the nation you intend to visit before you go. What is their care like? If you have a problem, are you going to need to be evacuated because their system cannot provide the needed care? If it is necessary, will it be possible for family members to obtain visas on short notice? Will it be possible to contact an American embassy or consulate from where you expect to be? Are there adequate communication and transportation resources in the area where you will be?
Again, I ask for your prayers, and if you have the ability to assist us with getting Sarah home, please contact me at the above e-mail address. Thank you.
Permalink Comments off
01.09.09
Words Of The Clueless
I recently logged into my e-mail to find some messages from recruiting firms (using the online job boards). These were of this sort:
I just looked over your resume, and I think you’d make the perfect candidate for this position … … commission sales for exciting products and services….
So, was he just unable to read? Or was he intentionally lying to me, trying to get me to apply for something that neither matches my interests, nor my skills, nor my history? In other words, was he clueless, or was he deceptive?
I realize that, in hard times, there is a need for salespeople. I also realize that I am not a salesperson. My resume reflects this. I also realize that recruiters only get paid when they fill the interview list and one of the people they suggested gets hired.
Furthermore, in my limited experience, recruiters are like HR people–not only do they not understand your business, but they do not understand what makes a good candidate for any particular position. Or rather, in the case of recruiters, they have different incentives from yours. They need to get someone in the position, so they get paid, while you need to get someone who will be productive and a good fit with your business and your existing staff.
I ask you this: how can someone who depends on keyword matching determine whether any particular candidate is able to create your new website in PHP, using MySQL and Apache, on Linux or FreeBSD? How can that keyword-matcher determine whether any particular candidate is able to modify an open source content management system (e.g., Drupal or Joomla! or Tikiwiki) and theme it for your needs? The answer is clear: they cannot.
Will the keyword matching system bring you the person who has always wanted to do X, but never had the opportunity, even though he or she has the aptitude and desire? Will it bring you the highly-motivated career-switcher? Will it bring you the recent high school graduate, the person who is putty in your hands for you to shape into the employee you desire? Again, the answer is no, it will not.
A keyword-matching system will miss the subtle cues that can get you that brilliant, but slightly eccentric artistic guy. It will miss the production person who pulls the team together from within the ranks and builds goodwill, motivating increased output and loyalty without any extra work from you. It will instead fill your building with mediocre, look-alike candidates, people who might be okay, but will never be great, employees.
The next time you are contacted by an employment recruiter, either as a job-seeker or as a job-provider, think about these things. You’re probably better off if you let the people who will actually be working with the new hire do the hiring process with appropriate supervision. And if you’re running a small, locally-owned business (SLOB), you should already know that recruitment firms do not understand your business or its needs.
Powered by Bleezer
Permalink Comments off
09.04.08
Online Security: Recovery
Often, those of us who work around computers, particularly support staffers, will give regular computer users the impression that security is about having a good firewall, a good anti-virus program, and a good anti-spyware program, and keeping those programs updated. The fact is, there is no such thing as perfect and unbreachable security. There is only harder to breach and easier to detect when a breach occurs security. Today’s article is a short and non-detailed statement about what to do after your security is breached.
What do you do when your computer is infected with Antivirus XP 2008? What do you do when every time you turn the computer on, it opens up a porn site? What do you do when your computer is sending out spam? When you suspect that your computer is infected with something that may collect your banking or credit card information and send it to someone else?
We have been discussing online security and spam recently. It occurred to me that someone might say “you just do this, this, and this, and you won’t have any problem with security”. And in fact, that is exactly what people tend to say: stop using Internet Explorer and your security problems will go away; do not log in with admin rights, and your security problems will go away; use restrictive “group policy object” settings and your security problems will go away. Each of those actions may reduce the number of potential security holes, but none of these, either by itself or in tandem with other actions, will completely eliminate security problems.
I think we have to compare it to the physical world. We think we are secure in our homes, but from time to time, we read of someone killed in his or her own home by bullets fired from a passing vehicle. We think we are secure in our local cities, but we can all recall hearing about this or that violent crime which took place in those very cities. We think we are secure because we do not carry cash, but many a criminal has stolen credit card information from unsuspecting victims. We think we are secure because of our new sheriff or police chief, our new mayor or governor, because of Senator so-and-so, or even because of our President. But presidents, governors, senators, mayors, and even sheriffs and police chiefs cannot protect us from every possible threat.
We have to accept that some threats are so unlikely to happen, or will do so little damage if they do happen, that we cannot justify taking any action to prevent them. Otherwise, we’ll build ourselves little cages to keep the danger out, never realizing that we are really just keeping ourselves in. It is important to realize that we can never completely eliminate threats to our well-being. The only thing we can do is reduce the likelihood of the most serious and likely threats and the potential damage that could happen as a result.
If your door is unlocked, you have nothing to complain about if your stuff gets stolen. At the same time, you do not need to become so paranoid that you have fifteen different locks on your door. If a serious felon comes after you, the locks will only slow him down a little–they will not stop him from entering your home.
In the same way, if you go to the ATM at midnight, especially in a bad section of town, you have nothing to complain about when you get robbed. But do not let paranoia keep you from ever visiting the bank. If there is money around, it will attract those who want to have money without working for it. You can become a smaller target, but you cannot completely stop thieves and robbers from coming after you.
And so it is in the online world. You can reduce the likelihood of a security breach and make it harder for someone to breach your security, but you can never make it impossible.
What, then, should you do about this? Accept it. Only then will you also accept the need to back up your computer’s contents regularly. Backing up, as I’m using it, means to make a copy that is not on the computer’s hard drive.
One place I worked set up daily, weekly, and monthly backups, after a user on the network accidentally erased a shared folder on a server. Oops! Who hasn’t had a hard drive suddenly fail, instantly shutting down access to everything that was on it? Usually, we have not taken the time to back the data up, so whatever was there is generally lost. This is why we need to always be sure to back up our files regularly. This is even more important in a small, locally-owned business (SLOB).
There are many different kinds of backups, and different kinds of software to make them, but that is beyond the scope of this article. I would suggest that you get a book about data backups (try Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Borders) or that you write down your operating system and hard drive size and take that information to one of the bright young “associates” at your local consumer electronics store. Whatever solution you wind up with is probably better than what you have right now.
I know a family that buys a new computer about once per year. It seems that they have a teen who downloads things and winds up infecting and destroying their computer. I believe that they would benefit from backing up their data, especially since they refuse to follow any of the other security advice.
If they had a fairly recent full-disk backup, they could sledge* the hard drive, install a new hard drive, and do the recovery. In reality, there are some complications to deal with. But certainly, it is better to have your data than it is to lose it.
Please be aware that some potential threats, such as a fire, would really require that your backed-up data be kept off-site, but a home or even a home-based business is not going to have an off-site location to store that data. Also, you should occasionally test to ensure that you can recover a file from the backed-up data. If you cannot retrieve lost information from it, it isn’t really a backup, is it?
*
- sledge
- v.: to break apart with a sledgehammer
Permalink Comments off
08.20.08
You Can Only Know So Many, So Be Choosy
I am “the tech guy” at work, so I get asked pretty regularly how someone can know whether an online merchant is trustworthy. And honestly, I have found that you cannot know that any particular merchant is trustworthy in the absence of someone you trust reporting their experiences with a company.
First, let me tell you what you should not trust, or at least not very much.
- If the site is encrypted and “secure”, all that means is that it will not be easy for someone to steal your information as it transfers to the site–it says nothing about what happens once the information gets there.
- Those seals of approval that say a site is “hacker-proof” mean nothing, because online vandals could suddenly find an undiscovered flaw at any time.
- The green highlighting on the address bar on certain encrypted sites is also deceptive. It means that the site owner went through some additional identity verification. But all identity tells you is whom you are dealing with. It says nothing about whether that individual or organization is honest or deceptive, nor does it tell you how well the site is safeguarded against tricks that could leave you unintentionally sending your information to some organized crime ring.
- Likewise, when an encrypted site doesn’t use a security certificate vendor that your browser company approves of, you’ll get warnings that the certificate is invalid or could not be verified. Sometimes invalid is invalid–perhaps the certificate is expired or revoked–and sometimes invalid is quite valid, such as https://mail.yahoo.com/, which gives an error because the certificate is for https://login.yahoo.com/. Sometimes, you will get an error because the site’s owner signed the site’s certificate themselves. This is similar to people who are born in certain areas or time periods when reliable records are not available, using witness testimony, family Bibles, and church records to verify their identities. (If you don’t see it yet, all that a state issued identification card does is say that the state agrees that the witnesses [such as the doctor that signed your birth certificate] are reliable. Similarly, a certificate signed by one of the major certificate companies merely says that they say your site’s identification documents are reliable based on the testimony of the site owner.)
But this is not intended to scare you. I just do not want you to be deceived that just because your address bar turns gold or green that you can trust that site with your money or your private information.
In a way, it is similar to conducting business over the telephone. Unless you have personally met someone and spoken with them long enough to reliably recognize the person’s voice, conducting any financial transaction over the telephone is inherently dangerous. You really have no way to know whom you are talking to. And so, you should be at least as careful about whom you give financial or personal information to when you are on a telephone call as you are on the Web.
Which brings me to the point. I do not do business with unknown parties without some kind of personal recommendation. I do not buy a lot of things online, because there are very few organizations that I trust with my information. I do not buy anything over the phone for the same reason. In general, I walk into a retail location to purchase whatever I am getting. If I’m in an area long enough, I get to have a feeling about which of the locally-owned business are worthy of trust. Sometimes, I misjudge, as will you. Which why I try to err on the side of caution.
You can only know a certain number of companies, as to whether they are reliable or trustworthy. For others, you can either throw caution to the wind or you can choose to avoid them. We all do both, based on some inner (and probably unconscious) self-preservation system. We do, however, have to choose where the balance lies. In non-personal, electronic transactions, we have no way to “sense” where the balance should be. We have to think about things and try to overrule our emotions in this area.
With online transactions, though, we have a kind of trusted recommender. You do not have to give your credit card information directly to Joe’s Fertilizer Factory–you can conduct the transaction using PayPal, Google’s Checkout, or one of several other payment intermediaries. Many of these have anti-fraud protections built into the service. I recommend that you look for PayPal or Checkout on every site you choose to do business with. In this way, you can have a small number of trusted partners who help you to do business with hundreds of other businesses.
If you operate an online business and you are not using PayPal and Checkout, why not? You are losing out on potential sales. Because both vendors have the trust of the general public, they tend to calm prepurchase anxiety. Also, the offer some protection to your business–no more worries about fraulent credit purchases.
04.15.08
Working On Updating Our Site
It has been over a year since we first established this domain. In that time, I’ve been mostly working out of state or at least out of my home area, so I haven’t had any time to do anything about it. I may be going out again soon, but I’m trying to at least get things started beforehand.
Be patient and we’ll get there.
Our focus is not really on polishing our own site(s), but on making sure that the SLOBs/OMBs/FOBs that we ally ourselves with have the tools they need to better compete with the big corporations that rule our lives and our country. Only in this way will our towns and cities be rebuilt and our state and local governments begin to focus on the smaller businesses that provide the bulk of our employment.
Our toolset is firmly planted in the open camp. FLOSS uses copyrights and licenses to benefit the user, rather than to oppress the user (as EULAs do). Among the freedoms that are inherent in FLOSS is the freedom to use and distribute modifications to the original application. We look forward to using that freedom to make open source software an even better fit and an even better deal for smaller businesses.
Watch this space for news and updates.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Tags: Announcements, coming soon
Permalink Comments off
