The Idea Blog

I think this particular go-round of healthcare legislative initiatives, yes, is dead. So much misinformation, so much anger, so many threats about government interference and everything else Boehner and McConnell and McCain say from their bully pulpits; so little effective persuasion from Pelosi and Reid and, yes, even the President; so much disgust for Washington and political stagnation and machination drowning out our – the people’s – distaste for the health insurance industry in general and our own health insurance providers in particular.

Hell, even Warren Buffett suggests President Obama start over.

The fact is we have allowed ourselves to become more invested in and critical of the process than we are determined to attain our desired result. We abhor the closed doors, rue the lack of  ”bi-partisanship,” lie to ourselves in a patriotic fog about the U.S.’s having the “best in the world” and disdain the posturing, preening and electioneering, all at the expense of acknowledging, confronting and dispatching the loosely tied bag of snakes that are bundled up in what we call “healthcare.”

So, ok, it’s dead. I’m pissed off about it, but I just can’t watch this show anymore.

But before we leave the topic, let’s not forget what made us mad about healthcare in the first place. I offer this as epilogue to the whole disheartening drama, an outstanding piece in the current issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The End of Life: Lessons of a $618,616 Death.

P.S. Would it be too much to ask members of Congress to give up their benefits and be forced to seek insurance from the vaunted private sector?

Addendum: Christopher Buckley seems to agree with me, coming from a slightly different perspective. Here from The Daily Beast.

Read about this on NPR. An interesting take on a song I already liked very much.

Big day for the golf bug, here at Burris’s regional HQ, at least. But no time, no time. There is time, however, for a bit of golf levity, this courtesy of my friend Darryl Leech, who celebrates his XX birthday today.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Wonder no more. Find the most obscure speech, actor or scene with movieclips.com.

Lately I’ve gone back to using an app for email. We switched to allow Google host burris.com, and in doing so we enabled an Exchange server, which is perfect for the iPhone. By making Google our mail host, we found a couple of problems we’re still trying to work through.

• I found no way to combine my two Gmail accounts to allow viewing in one Gmail web page. Sure, I could dumb down one or the other to POP, but what’s the purpose of that? So eventually I just started using Apple Mail again. Several of the features are lost (I love Gmail’s “reply and archive” option, which combines two functions in one step), but I found no other way.
• There is no easy way to transfer your Google Docs from one account to the other. I can do it a few docs at a time, but with hundreds of documents, spreadsheets and presentations, I simply don’t have the patience. Going forward I’ll attempt to have those including me on their docs use my burris.com address.
• The corporate, or burris.com, Gmail web page doesn’t allow you to employ any of the “labs” features. Some of those – such as the widgets showing photos or Google Voicemails within the body of an email – I really liked. I miss ‘em. And I can’t change the theme of the page either. Note the different look in the top right corner of the browser window for my two Gmail accounts. No beaker!

Very different. One would think the corporate account would feature every feature available to the free account, right?

Anyway, I’ve been going through this process, and as I work through one modest change after another, I’ve also considered returning to Apple’s Safari browser. Problem is, I’ve grown rather fond and accustomed to Google’s Chrome browser for Mac. One nice feature: the universal type-in address window. The same “enter text here” box is usable for either a new url or a search. Convenient. Another nice feature: the cool extensions you can build into your browser. So I’m doing a bit of research – which is better … that kind of stuff – and I come across this comic book expose about Google Chrome in particular and browsers in general. Fascinating, what talent can do. The talent in this case: a guy named Scott McLeod, who, apparently, is available to simplify your complex communication problem as well.

So will I go back to Safari? Tune in to a future episode of the Idea Blog to find out.

Pages 8-9 from Google Chrome comic

Originally posted to “Substitutes,” I offer this as well to readers of the Idea Blog. Want to know the power of a corporate culture based equally on innovation and breeding success? Take a look at this chart originally published in BusinessWeek.

The Berkshire Annual Report for 2009 was posted overnight, and the letter to shareholders is full of Buffett’s insights and wit, as usual.

Excerpt from the first page: “[Berkshire Vice Chairman] Charlie [Munger] and I have believed in having a rational and unbending standard for measuring what we have – or have not – accomplished. That keeps us from the temptation of seeing where the arrow of performance lands and then painting the bull’s eye around it.” It gets better.

To celebrate one good read, I offer another. I came across this insightful piece on The Sage’s leadership style in Bloomberg’s Business Week.

And before I go, two more gems from the letter to shareholders:

Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems. (I can report as well that this inversion approach works on a less lofty level: Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.)

(And later…)

In my view a board of directors of a huge financial institution is derelict if it does not insist that its CEO bear full responsibility for risk control. If he’s incapable of handling that job, he should look for other employment. And if he fails at it – with the government thereupon required to step in with funds or guarantees – the financial consequences for him and his board should be severe.

It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country’s largest financial institutions. Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been “bailed-out” is to make a mockery of the term.

The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style. It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed: If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price – one not reimbursable by the companies they’ve damaged nor by insurance. CEOs and, in many cases, directors have long benefitted from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well.

Betty is featured on Russell & MacKenna’s homepage and in a nice additional feature blurb just one click away from the homepage.

Interesting story.

We at Burris are doing some research, looking for interesting and distinctive consumer-driven furniture catalogs. Russell & Mackenna is one, that’s for sure. Lyn Rollins places an order for three copies (the better to study, of course), a company executive checks out the just who the heck she might be, calls me, and the next thing you know we’re smack in the middle of an avalanche of coincidence.

First, Larry Strassner, father to Russell & Mackenna’s founder, says he likes our website, also the site we did for Young America, which at the time was a feature on our homepage. Next we figure out that he and I share a certain favorite upholstery company down the road a bit on I-40. We agree we’ll meet someday, maybe play golf, then we say our good-bye’s, nice-to-meet-ya’s.

That evening I tell Betty about the nice guy I met and the coincidental connections we shared. “What’s his name?” she asks. “Larry Strassner,” I reply.

“You’re kidding,” Betty says. “He used to live one floor above us when we lived in the condo. And I sold him that condo.”

More coincidence.

I email Larry, thanking him for his call earlier that day, and then I ask him if he might remember my wife, Betty Poore. “Know her?” he says. “She’s the best realtor I ever worked with.”

Next thing I know Larry and daughter Lauren approach Betty with some big idea to make her an ambassador for Russell & Mackenna. And then she’s on their homepage.

Today Larry and Laura visited the Lowcountry, toured Betty’s company’s offices, and I joined them for lunch. Nice people, innovative thinkers and a fascinating, growing business.

Radiolab is such a good program. This week’s podcast is one of the best. Listen to and read the story of Lucy, a chimp who flew too close to the sun.

Lucy from Radiolab on Vimeo.