Author: Aaron Weber

Quiver Full

Awhile ago, Becks at Unfogged posted on some contradictions of “natural family planning,” notably that it actually causes more fertilized eggs to be lost than using condoms and backing them up with abortions. She suggested that the religious right ought to come out and admit to wanting a -on Quiver-Full policy toward fertility.

The Savage Love Straight Rights Update from last month has a similar warning: the right wants to take away your right to birth control.

Sure enough, Boston Catholic hardliner Domenico Bettinelli Jr. has begun to advocate exactly that. (He’s also got a rather interesting post about how any depiction of gays that doesn’t involve anal sex and bondage is a lie because we all know that they’re all violent angry unhappy people. Or something like that.)

Next up, a campaign against self-abuse, just like the good old days.

Insurance just isn’t the right model

If there is a one percent chance of any one car being stolen in Somerville, but nobody knows which car it is, the insurance market is good. But if an insurer can know in advance which car will be stolen, they won’t insure it. And if you wait until your car has already been stolen to buy insurance for it, you are committing insurance fraud.

This week I am buying health insurance. Health insurance makes sense if you have 100 people, each with an equal, but low, chance of having a heart attack or getting hit by a car and needing expensive care. But it makes very little sense to sell accident insurance to someone who just got hit by a car.

Nonetheless, that’s just what I’m doing. Because it’s health insurance that I am buying through my employer, I can get insured against chronic conditions I have already developed.

People who don’t have employers with health plans can’t get affordable coverage, and that’s horrible. Insurers, meanwhile, are stuck with freeloaders like me, which is unfortunate for them but deeply satisfying for everyone else. And until we fix the entire model, we seem to be stuck with this kind of situation where nobody is happy.

Work Profanity

I decided today that now that I’m employed I can swear on my blog again, so here is a post involving both work and profanity.

The Top Ten Sources parent company just bought Stylefeeder, which is a of multi-store wishlist, plus a way to share shopping lists, and also works as a way to browse for stuff that other people like. The revenue comes from affiliate programs.

It’s still got some kinks to work out– there’s bugs related to iframes and flash-heavy sites like the Icon Motorsports catalogue, but mostly it’s incredibly neat.

And then there’s the usual risks you run into when you let any random user add content to your site. I added my favorite Threadless shirt to my style feed and tagged it (accurately) as “Threadless t-shirt unicorns fucking.” The site dutifully added “fucking” as a keyword, and then suggested a link to Flickr photos tagged with the same word.

Still, it’s an incredibly neat site, and a lot easier to use than, say, Mugshot.

A family story and three links to the Times

My mother’s father used to read the San Diego local paper, at the time a highly local and highly right-wing rag. He insisted that the New York Times was too influential. My father, ignorant of naval rules, disagreed freely and told him that the Times was influential because it was better, and that he should read it.

Things I have learned in the Times today: There’s an incredible World-Cup billboard in Frankfurt. Frankfurt is a pretty boring town, but it’s going all-out this year. (See also Top 10 Sources for World Cup Soccer). All that new Voice over IP stuff is insecure. It’s vulnerable to brilliant exploits like traditional telephony was in the 70s and 80s. Ohio is replacing Florida as the land of fucked-up electoral politics.

Take that, San Diego Union-Tribune.