White Noise Generator for Your Notebook

My wife needs a white noise generator to sleep well in hotel rooms.  It struck me as we were checking bags on the last trip that one way to reduce the amount of stuff that we have to bring with us (perhaps enough to fit everything into carry-on bags) would be to download a white noise MP3 to play on the notebook PC, which we always have with us.  Sure enough: go here, and download the basic white noise MP3.  (The others are for babies: they include heartbeat noise as well.)

One Million Californians Losing Their Health Insurance

From November 12, 2013 CBS Sacramento:

[State Insurance Commissioner Dave] Jones says more than 1 million cancellation notices have been sent to Californians as the Affordable Care Act begins allowing individuals to buy insurance through exchanges. The federal law requires policies to offer minimum levels of coverage, forcing companies to terminate many existing plans.

I'm sure that most of them will blame Republicans for it.

Idaho Legislator Loses Concealed Carry Permit Because of 1974 Guilty Plea For Rape

This is a disturbing and confusing story.  A member of the lower house of the Idaho legislature had his concealed carry permit revoked by the Ada County sheriff because Patterson had pled guilty to rape in Florida in 1974:

Patterson is mulling an appeal of his permit revocation; the Idaho Statesman reported on Sunday that the Ada County sheriff revoked his permit after discovering that he lied twice, in 2007 and 2012, on his permit application. The form asks if the applicant has ever had a withheld judgment for a felony offense. Patterson didn’t disclose his 1974 guilty plea and withheld judgment for assault with intent to commit rape in Florida. He was acquitted in another, unrelated rape case three years later.

Patterson claims that the woman lied about being raped.  (The woman in Florida, for which he pleaded guilty.) What's with the second charge?  That doesn't look good.

It appears that Florida law treats a withheld judgment as not a conviction, so under 18 USC 921(a)(20), this is not a felony conviction for purposes of the federal ban on convicted felons being in possession. (Idaho law does apparently consider a withheld judgment to be the same as a conviction, which is why the application for a concealed carry permit asks about withheld judgment.)  Even more complex: there is some speculation that Ada County Sheriff Raney pulled Patterson's carry permit because Raney was upset with a bill that Patterson sponsored:

 Patterson authored House Bill 219 in the 2013 Legislature, which would have made it a misdemeanor for Idaho law enforcement officials to help enforce any new federal restrictions on semiautomatic firearms or ammunition or any new registration requirements. The measure was drafted to pre-empt any federal action in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting that killed 26 in December 2012.

Raney opposed the bill, which passed the House and died in the Senate without a hearing.
On May 10, after the Legislature adjourned, Patterson wrote formal complaints against Mike Kane, the lobbyist for the Idaho Sheriffs’ Association, and Vaughn Killeen, the group’s executive director. Raney is president of the association this year. Killeen was Ada County sheriff for 20 years and supported Raney, his undersheriff, to succeed him in 2004. Like Patterson, Raney and Killeen are Republicans.

Patterson said Kane and Killeen lobbied against HB 219 — the association was officially neutral — and failed to comply with the lobbying disclosure laws administered by Secretary of State Ben Ysursa.

Idaho law exempts elected officials from the requirement for a concealed carry permit, so Patterson can apparently still carry concealed until he leaves office.  I somehow can't picture the voters here re-electing someone who pled guilty to rape.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/11/10/2861466/lawmaker-could-lose-weapons-license.html#storylink=cpy

A Major Security Hole in the Medicaid Enrollment Part of HealthCare.gov

David Steinberg at PJMedia points to a serious security flaw that allows persons not even resident in the U.S. to apply for Medicaid and get it for at least 90 days:

While troubling, final approval of fraudulent applications represents a lesser element of the problem regarding non-citizen enrollment. The greater concern is initial approval:

• Applicants attempting to register for Medicaid as non-citizens by using Healthcare.gov will have their identification checked in real-time by the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database. But if SAVE verification fails, the applicant is not prevented from enrolling in Medicaid/CHIP.

• In fact, the opposite occurs: the applicant is likely enrolled in Medicaid immediately.

• The applicant is then given a 90-day period to clear up the identification problem.

• This “enroll first, confirm later” regulation, combined with the ACA’s easing of verification requirements, allows anyone, from a computer anywhere in the world, to successfully auto-enroll for 90 days of Medicaid by entering fraudulent information about being a certain category of legal alien living in the United States.

• There is no guarantee that state governments will take action to cancel these enrollments at the end of each application’s 90-day period if identification is never provided. The cancellation of unverified enrollments is left to each state’s available manpower and political will.

To say that this is troubling does not even begin to describe it.  This does not seem to be intentional -- but think of the Nigerian spammers all doing this at once, and then supplying Medicaid information to Medicaid fraud doctors in the U.S.

Window Shopping Alternative to HealthCare.gov

November 8, 2013 CBS News reports on what happens when three software engineers decide to solve the most obviously stupid part of HealthCare.gov:

In a San Francisco office shared with other tech start-ups, three 20-year-olds saw HealthCare.gov as a challenge.

With a few late nights, Ning Liang, George Kalogeropoulos and Michael Wasser built "thehealthsherpa.com," a two-week-old website that solves one of the biggest problems with the government's site.

"They got it completely backwards in terms of what people want up front," said Liang. He added: "They want prices and benefits, so that they could make the decision."

Liang showed CBS News how it worked. "You come to our website and you put in your zip code -- in this case a California zip code. You hit 'find plans,' and you immediately see the exchange plans that are available for that zip code."

It makes you wonder what might have happened if the federal government hadn't awarded the contract to a company with a vice president who just happened to be a classmate of Michelle Obama.

This Is Not Good News For Obamacare, Or The Nation

November 11, 2013 Reuters is reporting that:

Nov 11 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's healthcare reform has reached only about 3 percent of its enrollment target for 2014 in 12 U.S. states where new online health insurance marketplaces are mostly working smoothly, a report released on Monday said.

States with functioning exchanges have signed up 49,100 people compared with the 1.4 million people expected to be enrolled for 2014, according to the report by healthcare research and consultancy firm Avalere Health.

This is bad news for Obamacare because it means that those who signed up are likely to be ones who are older, with pre-existing conditions -- the ones who are expensive for the insurers to take care of.  The ones who are necessary to make the exchanges financial sound are people who are young people, and those without pre-existing conditions.  The net effect is likely to be a "death spiral" where insurers have to raise rates to cover expenses, which will drive even more prospective customers into deciding to pay the penalty instead.

This is bad news for the country as a whole, because the costs are going to be picked up by the federal government, I am quite sure.  I have given up any hope that the Republicans will be able to do anything useful with this.  The RNC seems more interested in electing Democrats than in electing conservative Republicans, and the TEA Party sorts are pretty much irrelevant to politics as a result.

Changes in the Blog

You may have noticed some changes in the blog.  My daughter, who blogs at Domestic Bliss Squared, has been updating and improving my blog.  In one especially impressive case, she noticed that my AdSense ads were of a smaller size (and smaller advertising revenue potential) than I could use.  I have immediately seen a difference -- about $1.50 per day more revenue.  If that doesn't seem like much -- that's an extra $45 a month.  Small, but every bit helps, and it cost me nothing but a little of her time.