Covered California

Big Insurance providers opt to wait and watch. Providers signing up leave out high cost health case provider networks to make plans affordable. 

$300 average premium in california and 40% will be eligible for subsidy and only 16% of California expected to sign up for this. 

[link] No more exclusions based on prior conditions, the mandate to buy insurance even if you're healthy and subsidies to make insurance affordable for lower-income people.  Covered California Executive Director Peter Lee is planning a $236 million marketing campaign -- paid for by the federal government -- to recruit healthy, uninsured people to the exchange. Lee hopes to enroll 1.4 million Californians in 2014 and millions more in succeeding years.

[kqed] When setting an individual's premium, insurance plans in the exchange may look at only three factors: age, where you live and family size. Insurance companies may no longer use your health condition or your health history to set premiums. People may no longer be turned down for pre-existing conditions.

[kqed] fears abound that young people's premiums will skyrocket because the health law limits the difference in price between plans for the young and old.

Steve Jobs - Walter Issacson

Listening to this audio book. Why did Issacson choose this guy to write about. There is zero inspiration to be derived from his life and accomplishments. Smart guy who is rude and throws childlike tantrums - thats all that I got from the book. No subtle lessons to learn from his life - No taste of the impact  of any of his accomplishments - the life of bouazizi would've been so much more interesting. What a bloody waste !! 

Revolution 2.0

Revolution 2.0 

Wael Ghonim's book on the egyptian struggle is inspiring, insightful and fast. He has a good story to tell - his personal and that of his country's. Although there are sections where it seems as if he is not telling the whole truth. But what was interesting to me was that the demands that the protesters in Tahrir square were all problems that India is blighted by as well. Corruption, Poverty, unemployment. Maybe the level of police atrocities was too much in Egypt and the level of unemployment was  higher too. But the way I saw it - if these hadnt been at the levels that they were in Egypt the youth wouldn't have had the balls to come out in protest. Indian youth has no incentive to participate in something like this. Especially after what we see is the long term result of a leader-less revolution that has no constructive plan on the other side of the revolution. Living in a society does mean having strong institutions - if the existing institutions are all rotten it makes sense to tear them down. But then until new ones replace these you have no roof over your head. And then you have people ready to fall back into their old groves making the emergence of newer institutions even more difficult. I dont know if we have examples of societies that have been able to get rid of such major rot in the systems. Would be nice if someone funded studies and experiments on these things instead of investing in enabling farmville. 

 

Gangs of Wasseypur

what  super shitty movie "gangs of wasseypur". Maybe life is like this - but its hard to believe so Much shit happens with such speed. Its as if he took life filtered out any semblance of joy from it and then played the remaining at 5x the speed. No shades of gray in any character. Its all f*ing black. Its so tempting to take a break from the cloyingly sweet SRK and flying chiffons - but this is a bit too bitter a view. 

Cellular computing explained

via NPRs Morning edition  with a super easy to understand graphic

His switch, which he calls a "transcriptor," is a piece of DNA that he can flip on and off, using chemicals called enzymes. Endy put several of these DNA switches inside his bacteria. He could use the switches to build logic circuits that program each cell's behavior. For example, he could tell a cell to change color in the presence of both enzyme A and enzyme B. That's a simple program: IF enzyme A AND enzyme B [are present] THEN turn green. For an in-depth look, checkout Endy's explanation on youtube

Timothy Lu a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also building cellular computers. He can see lots of ways they could be used. For example, you could program cells to automatically scan your bowels for chemical signals of cancer and let you know if they find any.