Question: What would you get if the pharmacy business all of a sudden had to charge the same price everywhere for an item?
Answer: Better service. The current Medicare Part D system will require just that.
Tonight I saw a Walgreen's ad on the TV and if it is to be believed, the only differentiator of significance between pharmacies will become the service they offer.
A very interesting unintended consequence of forcing them to standardize prices.
My friends know that while I'm a Mac addict, I'm a pretty serious PC gamer. It appeals to my inner geek. I've built my Athlon-based PC on a Barton core, with a Gigabyte motherboard and a 7600 GS graphics card. High end in 2003-2004 but now strictly middle of the road.
It's a very different world from MacLand. Here I muck with jumpers, matched memory, and voltage and overclocking. Total tweaker's paradise, anathema to the MacHead.
I've had problems, it seems forever, with my 3DMark03 graphics test. The 3DMark tests were very sophisticated, next-generation graphics designed to test all aspects of a system to their limit. At the time, if you scored well, you had a very fast system.
I used to consistently score pretty highly (top 100 systems in my class) because I used matched memory, stripped the OS (Windows XPSP2) to the minimum, and used good quality components. But I always had a glitch - the video card would hang up during the test and cease to show the all the frames. It's bugged
me for a good year (first upgraded the video in Baltimore and then encountered it) and I seem to have finally sussed it.
This evening, I turned off a bunch of services and apps, and tweaked some overclocking settings and ran the test without any hangups. And upgraded my 3dMark03 score to something respectable.
Of course, I don't exactly know what setting fixed it - I'm still in the process of figuring that out. But I finally have a stable, repeatable graphics performance to tweak. I can muck with overclocking the card separately or just the motherboard/front side bus. I'll likely try both and see what gives the best results.
So.. my hidden vice, overclocking and gaming, becomes public. :)
A dark, dark weekend.
I came home from visiting my uncle over the weekend. I typically visit him during the "crush" or just before it. He retired from a hedge fund and now has five acres of wine in cultivation and lives the good life in the Central Coast of California.
I used to fly down to the Bay Area and rent a car but no more. Now I just fly through SLC or PHX and he picks me up at the local San Luis Obispo airport. Very civilized and it saves me rental car costs (a wash with the flight cost from SLC) and the hassle of driving south four hours.
Needless to say we drink a fair bit during these weekends. He's converted his large workshop in the guest house into a fine game room. A great Brunswick professional pool table (where I learned to play snooker over the weekend), a very nice foosball table, a pinball machine and a dart board. Oh.. and a 100" home cinema. First-rate fun.
Of course, I remember little of the weekend, save my flight yesterday which took a good eight hours to get me home to Seattle. Ridiculous but I wasn't about to pay the extra $100 to leave SLC two or three hours earlier.
I could say it was good to be home but I do miss the 75F and the sun. I don't think I'll see it for a few months here. Good thing I have this.
I left campus to get some space to do an important presentation doc and dropped into my local Tully's. They are an alternative to Starbucks and serve better coffee, IMO (not as dark/bitter).
What has happened since I left the state and came back is that they've gone to free WiFi! Good and bad. Don't quite have the isolation I wanted for my work - forced to engage the willpower switch - but positive in that I can deal with minor work emergencies (there are many in a day in my job).
Great though - I may never go into another Starbucks - where you have to pay for the privilege of WiFi. They need to catch up. Or maybe it's just a case that number two does try harder.
I think this is very apropos of our current situation. Both domestically and abroad:
The Most Dreaded Enemy of Liberty
by James Madison, 1795
Of all the enemies to liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.
The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war [and] the power of raising armies.
A delegation of such powers [to the president] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.
The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted.
One heck of a match today.
To set the stage, Liverpool is in this year's Champions League. It used to be the Cup Winner's Cup and was the international competition in Europe for the best teams in each domestic league. The winner of each domestic league - no matter the size of country - got to play off against the other best teams in Europe to decide the best overall club team.
Liverpool has been playing well the last couple of years and won one Final and reached the other (last year) against Milan. They lost, in my opinion, because of some very poor refereeing but what can you do?
In this year's pool stage - where you play ever team in your group twice - they have played three games and only have one draw and two losses to show for it. So in order to advance (and then only as second in the group) they would have to win all three remaining matches.
So today they played Besikitas, the Turkish league champion. We had lost to them two weeks ago in Istanbul in a close-fought match. Really, we've been a shadow of what we can be as a team for the last couple of weeks. Some put it down to Rafa's rotation policy. He plays only the players who are fittest, given that we are competing in four cup competitions most season this makes sense.
I do feel, as most others do though, that it causes problems with the fluidity of our game. Well, for the first time in a very long while everyone wearing Liverpool red pretty much played at the limit of their abilities. And they played as a team, nicely anticipating each other, running into space.
They destroyed Besikitas. 8-0. Biggest margin of victory since the Champions league began fifteen or sixteen years ago.
They still have a mountain to climb - they have to beat the other two teams in the group to advance. But after a performance like this, I'm confident that they could beat any team in Europe. I'm just praying it's not a one-off.