So, just to make sure that I’ve got this down properly: a bunch of overprivileged, racially segregated rich people want their overprivileged, racially segregated children to meet poor non-white people, and want to deprive those same poor non-white people and their communities of much-needed educational funds to do so. (To understand that last part, Connecticut derives the majority of the money to fund its municipal school programs from property taxes — which means that schools are generally funded in proportion to the affluence of their communities.)

I don’t even know what to say about that. If you can’t see something wrong with it, there’s probably something wrong with you.

(Note: Please don’t read this as an endorsement of Governor Malloy. After the Adamowski debacle, I don’t think I’m going to be liking him very much, thank you.)

The first was that he had bought a large amount of classical music using Amazon’s “one click” service, which he had “downloaded to a cloud driver [sic]“. He was able to listen to this music almost immediately following his purchase.

The second was that he had received a call from a local town tax collector, saying that he owed excise tax on a car. He had told the woman that he had sold it already, and she told him that he would have to bring paperwork from the RMV (in Massachusetts they tend to call the “Department of Motor Vehicles” the “Registrar of Motor Vehicles”) indicating that he had, indeed, sold the car. When he questioned why she couldn’t do it herself because “you have a computer in front of you”, the woman told him that it “isn’t my job to help you.”

At face value, these stories seem to confirm the free-market world viewpoint that private enterprise is more efficient than public institutions. However, there are a few problems with this story — namely that we’re really not comparing apples to apples, unless you’re living in the world of The Matrix or (ugh) Hackers, which have about as much to do with modern computing technology as a rock tends to resemble a Star Trek phaser, or a phone booth has the same abilities as the TARDIS (if you prefer a Doctor Who reference instead of a Star Trek reference).

Amazon is a commercial company. They own every part of what they’re doing, and the only “standards” to which they conform (in this instance) is using HTTPS and MPEG Layer 3 audio encoding to deliver content. Everything else is part of their infrastructure. They own the entire thing — and more importantly, they’re just a reseller. They essentially produce nothing — just tack a profit on top for delivering something in an accessible way.

The RMV is a public institution, which means that they most likely have purchased a suite of software to manage their data (and it’s probably ten or twenty years old). If it resembles the software used in other states, it’s pretty useless for anything other than its primary functions, because it was designed by a lowest-bid contractor to conform to a particular set of RFP standards. It probably does what it’s supposed to do pretty well. Interfacing with other software suites, particularly those not written by the same software vendor — not so much. I cut my teeth in the IT industry writing conversion software (back when I was 11 or 12 years old), and believe me, *nothing* speaks to anything easily without a particular set of standards to do so. Most town tax collectors receive a data dump from their motor vehicle registry/department (and vice versa), which is imported into their local software. There isn’t some Hackers-like ability for the two systems to talk to each other. Leave that crap for bad movies and bad TV shows (Horatio from CSI, anyone?) — computers simply don’t work that way.

I’m sure most people with little or no interest in the intricacies of data import/export probably tuned out half-way through that last paragraph. It’s not particularly exciting stuff — yet it’s very important to understand in the context of the initial narrative.

This vaguely resembles the traditional right-wing meme that “poor people caused the economic collapse” which occurred in 2008. It has been debunked repeatedly — and yet the meme lives on. In a recent poll, 42% of Southerners still cling to the notion that the “Civil War” was fought to preserve “States’ Rights” rather than simply being a way to exploit human labor, even though it’s very easy to demonstrably show that the primary motivation, both economic and social/political, was maintaining the status quo of a slave-owning set of states. You can’t simplify a complicated argument, unless you want to lose the meaning which is meant to be present in that argument.

Or, you could argue that this is all the end-result of cognitive bias. Maybe people see the government as broken because they *expect* to see it that way, and ignore evidence which is contradictory to their preconceived notions.

Jeff I’m sorry, I don’t care what is going on outside the school.

That’s pretty myopic. Teaching isn’t a daycare, nor is it a panacea — if you have external positive or negative influences outside of school, it’s going to affect their educational outcome.

If you have a group of 30 kids in your class for say American History and 20 of those kids can’t tell you when the American Revolution took place, then that is a failing teacher. If you think that has anything to do with anything other than a teacher failing to teach the material your fooling yourself.

You picked a purposefully simplistic data point, which doesn’t really reflect the actual situation. Most kids know that 1776 is the year of the American revolution, just like most kids can identify Mickey Mouse — it’s a cultural thing. It probably would have been more effective for you to present an actual situation, rather than a pretty unrealistic hypothetical one.

I’ve talked to kids from Uconn who didn’t know where Canada was on a map. Canada Jeff.

And I know kids who can name the capitals of every country in the world. See, we both can present anecdotal evidence which proves nothing!

That’s a failure and who ever was supposed to be teaching that failed that student. That teacher should be accountable for that. It’s that simple.

So, if students misbehave, skip class, or just don’t care, we should fire the teacher? There is no simple accountability method for teachers, bud. If it were that easy, there wouldn’t be gaming of the system — and the NCLB law, which was supposed to grant merit-based benefits, only further disadvantages poor schools and increases class stratification.

Don’t misunderstand me. I think the majority of teachers are good teachers.

That doesn’t follow from any of your arguments, nor the arguments of the film. If teachers are largely effectual, we wouldn’t require large systemic changes (as the movie suggests) to alter the educational system. If teachers are *not* largely effectual, we would require large system changes (as the movie suggests), which would put your position in line with supporting the movie.

There’s a standard distribution of teaching skills and aptitude, much like with everything else. You’re going to have a large number of “average” teachers (by definition), with diminishing levels of less and more competent teachers as you move away from the average. The movie tries to imply that public schools maintain largely ineffectual and incompetent teachers, which isn’t supported by the data.

I believe they like kids and want to do right by them. They shouldn’t have a problem with accountability. The ones that aren’t teaching I’m sure do.

This smacks of surveillance and diminishing civil liberties under the guise of “they don’t have anything to worry about if they’re not doing anything wrong”.

It only takes one or two bad teachers to ruin a kids education.

Anecdotal, at best. As a counter-example, I had several lousy teachers during my school career, and still did just fine. I would argue that educational outcome is a combination of learning potential, curriculum, teaching skill, and class size / attention per student.

As I said earlier. I didn’t do well in school, because I was never challenged. I can’t be the only person who thinks that.

Define “didn’t do well in school”. My grades were fine, though I was also never challenged in school. I’m a white-collar, decently successful, fairly well-rounded adult. If that’s not the purpose of an educational system, what is?

When my son did poorly in class I talked to his teachers. I told them he is bored give him something more challenging. I was fortunate enough to know many of my sons teachers, because many of them where my teachers and so most where on board with that plan. The ones that didn’t soon got the message as I can be a real bastard especially when dealing with my kid. He did well. Much better than I did.

Are you defining success by scoring well on standardized tests, or by turning out to be a well rounded individual? I would argue that, if your son is not “challenged”, he would be able to easily breeze through the curriculum, with extra time for other activities. Getting bad grades in that case is rather an attention issue.

I think when we classify someone as a slow or average learner we are doing that kid an injustice. We are saying your not as good as these other kids.

No, you’re saying that they learn at a slower rate. Believe it or not, children do not all learn at the same rate. There’s rather a “bell curve” type distribution of learning aptitude and speed. You can’t molly-coddle children and tell them that they all possess equal learning abilities any more than you can tell them that they can all be ballerinas or rock stars.

What’s worse is that the ones that really want to learn are slowed by classes that cater to that attitude.

We have skill level classes in high school (basic, advanced, honors, AP, etc) in most school systems, which separate mostly by learning abilities. It has been that way for a while.

So what do we do. Instead of elevating those kids to the level we expect we lower the standards to make sure they pass.

And if nothing else your statement above proves my point that if things like money where regulated that would only help to improve the system. that way they wouldn’t be “robbed” of funding. And regulating the testing to make it uniform is required. Are you telling me that it’s ok for us to test a kid from Ohio differently than a kid from Alabama. There needs to be a standard to which all schools nation wide apply themselves.

We aren’t allowed to set nationwide curriculum, due to the “states rights” wonks, otherwise we might actually allow the Department of Education to set a nationwide curriculum. I don’t think we can blame that on the public school system, but rather anti-Federalism.

One of the first things you read in the wikipedia article about charter schools is that:

Charter schools are primary or secondary schools that receive public money (and like other schools, may also receive private donations) but are not subject to some of the rules, regulations, and statutes that apply to other public schools in exchange for some type of accountability for producing certain results, which are set forth in each school’s charter.

Now, why would such notorious religious privatization and religiously discriminatory asshats such as the Walton family be interested in charter schools? I think the key words are “but are not subject to some of the rules, regulations, and statutes that apply to other public schools“. I would venture a guess that religious charter schools, funded on the public dime, are next up in the “public education debate” — not to mention the ability to perform just about any form of political or ideological indoctrination which they would see fit to offer. Don’t forget, we already have a fair amount of dogma injected into our children, for the sake of maintaining a steady stream of money and human bodies to feed into the grist mill of our sprawling Military-Industrial Complex.

Let’s break it down: some of the major factors involved in the quality of a child’s education are — you guessed it — money (some have systemically more than others) and not simply teaching for targeted tests. NCLB had some serious issues, notably with ESL students, and tended to have incentives which hurt rather than helped students. Sweeping educational reform has been shown, through that particular piece of legislation, to have the capability to hurt our most disadvantaged students, even under the guise of helping them. Unfortunately, in the race to keep school funding, many schools have turned to teaching *for* the NCLB testing guidelines, rather than teaching a well-rounded educational curriculum.

Our education system isn’t very good, but dismantling the “great social equalizer” of public education in favor of selling off yet another piece of the country to privatization interests isn’t going to solve anything, at least not for the least fortunate among us. It only drives the wealth divide deeper, as those in poverty are less likely to follow the Horatio Algers myth out of the prison of their socioeconomic class. Besides, charter schools seem to resemble the logical extension of the “school voucher” programs, designed to funnel public education funds into narrow-minded religious education. (I mean narrow-minded in that religious education is tainted with non-scientific dogma and institutionalized indoctrination in a way that makes the raising of free-thinking adults more and more difficult. “Intelligent design” is a farce, not a valid scientific theory.)

One-liner to expand RRDs:

/etc/init.d/gmetad stop; /etc/init.d/rrdcached stop ; \
  find . | grep rrd | while read X; do fix-rrd.sh "$X"; done ; \
  /etc/init.d/rrdcached start ; /etc/init.d/gmetad restart

fix-rrd.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# fix-rrds.sh
NEWRRDS="0:5856 1:20160 2:20160 3:52704 4:3740"
for RRD in $*; do
        echo -n "Processing $RRD ... "
        for RRA in ${NEWRRDS}; do
                A=$(echo $RRA | cut -d: -f1)
                B=$(echo $RRA | cut -d: -f2)
                echo -n "$RRA "
                rrdtool resize "$RRD" $A GROW $B \
                        mv resize.rrd "$RRD" && \
                        chown nobody "$RRD"
        done
        echo "done."
done

Let’s stop right here, for a brief moment. The idea that an insurance company, being a for-profit entity with a primary obligation to their shareholders, rather than their clients, has an *incentive* not to pay for a procedure — well, it seems pretty awful. It’s one of the primary deficits in a for-profit health insurance scheme that the three primary parties involved (doctor, patient, insurance company) all have different objectives, which jive with each other (doctor wants to receive pay for care given, patient wants to receive care, and insurance company wants to pay as little as possible, if anything). You can see that the insurance company seems to be the party whose goals seem to disagree with the rest, and it’s the reason why I believe that a private insurer system is doomed to ever-rising costs, risk of medical bankruptcy, loss of accountability, pure graft and corruption, higher mortality rates, loss of quality care, as well as an inevitable collapse. But I digress from my primary point.

We can examine the idea of a moral hazard in health insurance by looking at the general purpose it supposedly serves: reducing the demand for profit-draining healthcare payments. The problem with that argument is that patients do not voluntarily seek unnecessary care in quantities which would cause a system of requiring patient payment to be necessary to reduce risk. Patients seek care when they require it, which means that the only care for which it would decrease the demand would be preventative care. If you follow the aforementioned link, you’ll see that the entire focus of most studies is the efficacy of preventative care in *decreasing costs to insurers* rather than decreasing mortality rates or improving quality of life. That follows a pretty common trend of insurers to perform cost/benefit analyses without the benefit of measuring the *benefits* of treatment options on patients.

So, we have private insurers, attempting to gain a greater profit margin by either denying care to patients for arbitrary reasons, or attempting to bolster profit margins by requiring deductibles and/or co-payments to dissuade patients from seeking care, encourage patients to seek less expensive/less effective methods of treatment, and/or decrease the amount of payout for which they are responsible. It seems as though parties with those motivations would be less-than-ideal candidates for effectively making healthcare and treatment decisions for the public at large, although they do that at the moment, by deciding which treatments to cover, which patients to insure, and how much of a patients’ own money must be spent for healthcare treatment for conditions which may or may not have anything to do with their own action. Not much of a “moral hazard” to avoid there, is there? If a factory worker gets cancer from working in a factory — who pays? Certainly not the factory. Whose fault is the condition? Not the patient. If unsafe drinking water produces parasitic infections or a more hazardous condition — who pays? Not the people responsible. Whose fault is the condition? Not the patient.

I would posit that your opinion of the for-profit healthcare system depends largely on your relationship to it; those who believe that profit is more important than the efficacy of patient care would most likely side with the current system (as well as the unconditional free market leghumpers), whereas those who see healthcare as more of a basic human right or regard the efficacy of care as being the paramount point of importance over the profit of a company would most likely favor a single-payer or socialized healthcare system. (I leave out the uninformed, teabaggers (who also fit in the prior category), and full-on anti-Federalists. There’s no reasoning about human dignity or health with people who believe that some people have the right to do whatever they want to other people due to the size of their wallets — but that’s for another post.)

Here are some of the projects I’ve been working on over 2011, with some links. I’m sure I have left some out.

• FreeMED – opensource electronic medical record/practice management system. Did a fair amount of retooling, including i18n, for the installation in Xela.
• ganglia – opensource metrics aggregation system. Vlad and I managed to get a 3.2.0 release out the door, and are working on 3.3.0
• ganglia web 2.x – updated web interface for ganglia
• haproxy – API work, to allow programmatic manipulation and querying
• nagios/icinga – API patches to allow programmatic manipulation of Nagios/Icinga
• nagios-dash – a jquery-based Nagios replacement dashboard for NOCs. Requires the aforementioned nagios/icinga API patch.
• node-soap – SOAP bindings for node.js. My work mostly involved fixing and expanding authentication methods.
• REMITT – my medical billing engine. Modernized for 5010 transactions.
• statsd-c – C port of etsy’s “statsd” server. Written in C primarily for speed.
• sugarsync-linux – sugarsync linux API client. As Sugarsync isn’t too hot on providing a native Linux client, I took it upon myself to write one in Vala.
• vded – “vector delta engine daemon”. Meant to allow metric collection for ever increasing values over time. (My first foray into “Vala”)

Day One: Sunday November 6, 2011

I’m going to try to chronicle my time this year working with the POP-WUJ Clinic in Xela (Quetzeltenanga), Guatemala, as I did last year. Work circumstances, over-zealous customs officials, and simple bad luck contributed to some of the issues we experienced with the installation last year, so I have traveled back down to attempt to make this work better.

I left home at around 11:30pm the night before, and drove down to meet Irv. We had somewhat over 90 lbs of medical supplies which had to be re-packed and distributed over two body-sized duffel bags so that we could bring them through Guatemalan customs. At some time after 2am, we headed out for Laguardia Airport. The trip was relatively uneventful, and we made the two flights down to Guatemala City without incident.

I was relatively surprised that we didn’t encounter any issues with customs upon entering Guatemala with the two “sea bags” full of medications, equipment, and miscellaneous tools. During the last medical brigade, a fair amount of our donated meds were confiscated, and one of the two servers was held at customs for a week, but they just waived us through this time — and without the benefit of a note from Rotary International this time.

The bus ride across CA-1 to Xela actually took less time than last year, owing to the bus driver skipping the usual dinner stop and a lack of rainy-season mudslides. He was a bit of a cowboy, however, as we were tossed around like rag dolls. We had taken the local bus company, Alamo, rather than a chartered bus, which let us ride with the locals (as well as avoid tourist traps). A little girl, who reminded me of my niece when she was younger, made rollercoaster noises every time we went around a hairpin turn on the road, and was very proud to work up the english to ask me my name. I was surprised that, as we rolled into Xela, I actually had missed seeing some of the sights and people down here. As with any time that I travel, I miss being home with my wife and the dogs, but it’s nice to see that there is a different familiarity here.

We took a cab over to Casa Manen, as there was no reasonable way to transport the two sea bags full of medications and our personal belongings the full mile and a half on foot. I could barely fit in the back seat of the cab, which was a converted Escort wagon (from what I could gather). After arriving at Casa Manen, I ended up having to mess around with their wifi access point, as a combination of terrible reception in the room (the laptop lives next to the door at the moment) and wacky Netgear-sucks-with-WPA-support issues had caused a lack of connectivity issue.

After that, we walked to Park Central, grabbed some Xelapan goodies, a quick bite of “food” at Pollo Comperos, and an expresso-laden hot chocolate at “&” Cafe. Clinic work tomorrow!

Day Two: Monday November 7, 2011

First day waking up in a new timezone, and as our CDMA-network phones don’t work down here, it was interesting getting up a full hour before everyone else. Casa Manen provided us with a delicious breakfast, replete with high-test coffee, my usual egg and black bean dish, fresh fruit and waffles.

We sat in the central park for a while after breakfast, waiting for Banco International to open (which it wouldn’t have done until 10am, so I’m glad we gave up on that), and watched some of the street vendors, taxi drivers and local residents. It was pretty obvious that there is quite an underclass, composed primarily of the people of Mayan ancestry. Those with darker skin and/or traditional Mayan garb seem destined for menial labor, street vending, begging, or other “lower class” occupations. Although, as most are very short, I feel as if I’m a giant in a land of Lilliputians.

While waiting to get into the clinic, I watched a Mayan woman tie her child on her back with two square pieces of cloth. It looked pretty safe and stable — I had always wondered how they did that.

I got the Linksys NSLU2 we brought down with us set up as a terminal server, and it’s now monitoring every step of the boot and execution cycles of the Rackable Systems server we brought down, as well as giving us full power management using Ctrl-6 (thanks, Roamer Port!), although I’m a little less excited about that last part.

The one disheartening part is that I feel as though I’m fighting the technology down here far more than I should. Between some of the people messing with the work I did last year (including resetting admin passwords, then being unavailable when I need them, as well as installing XP on Linux workstations) and virtually every wifi access point giving me trouble (usually due to some obscure setting that was enabled for reasons that are unclear), I’m getting to the point where going the extra mile of effort to be online or get things working feels like it’s not going to pay the dividends that it should.

An aside to the Xela-LUG group: there’s no Debian or Ubuntu mirrors in Guatemala. The nearest one seems to be in Costa Rica or Mexico (or Nicaragua), and the speeds out of Xela aren’t fantastic.

Day Three: Tuesday November 8, 2011

We got a somewhat late start heading out from Casa Manen, and the higher altitudes and pollution were taking a toll on Irv when we were walking to the clinic.

When we got to the Pop-Wuj clinic, it turned out that no one had arrived to perform pharmacy duties, so Irv and I ended up running the pharmacy and filling prescriptions for the majority of the day. Irv also saw a number of feet, and I got a little bit of work done with the NSLU2 before I left, but the majority of the day was spent working in the clinic — so much so, in fact, that we forgot to grab lunch, drinks, or anything else, until we left for afternoon siesta.

We “overslept” for the afternoon siesta — which was actually more like Irv oversleeping as I was messing with code and photos while he was sleeping and lost track of time. We headed back to the clinic, and talked to Isabelle (the clinic manager) and Oscar (from the school). Isabelle got ahold of Freddy, who had contact information for the technician who had changed the router configuration. Things are looking up, in that respect. In another vein, Oscar mentioned that his son is an accomplished trumpeter, and seemed interested in me taking a few portrait shots of him with his instrument.

Irv and I sent a Facebook message to our Xela LUG contact (as he hadn’t responded to our emails), and waited at Albabar at Parque Central to see if he’d show. Unfortunately, he didn’t. I also took the opportunity to start posting our walking and bus tracks, which I have been religiously tracking using “MyTracks” on the Android-based HTC handset I usually use. It’s useless down here otherwise, as there are no CDMA networks.

Day Four: Wednesday November 9, 2011

Another very, very tiring day.

After breakfast, one of the ladies who runs Casa Manen had gotten into a discussion about knitting, and was quite impressed with the hoodie that my wife had made me last year.

While at the clinic, I had the chance to reformat one of the donated Thinkpads which were originally destined to be used as workstations. They had been loaded with a copy of XP, replete with a metric ton of crapware. I doubt anyone is going to miss any of that.

We finally got to meet up with Dhaby from the Xela LUG (Linux Users Group). He’s in the process of setting up a meeting with some local doctors who are interested in using FreeMED, and he thinks that some of the people in Xela LUG would be interested in providing local support. This is just the “feet on the ground” sort of thing that we need going here. He also mentioned that local stringed instruments are not easy to come by in Xela, and Chichicastenango or Panajachel would be the closest places to look. So, there’s a possibility that we’ll head down there on one of our “off days”.

The clinic closed early, as it was an “off day”, so we headed back to Casa Manen, and after siesta, we perused the Central Market. I’m still a little disappointed at the lack of local music shops in Zone 1. We were able to find a few small things, but put off buying a substantial quantity of anything until we can visit one of the outlying markets.

We skipped dinner in lieu of Xelapan, and were able to keep a fire going for a little while. Quick tip for anyone doing a network-less install of Ubuntu: use the normal installer. The “alternate installer”, where it might be a little easier not to use a mouse or touchpad, has the downside of making it very difficult to use the local install media as an apt source. (Unetbootin is your friend when blank CDs aren’t handy….)

Day Five: Thursday November 10, 2011

Serendipity is a really strange thing. Dhaby (Daniel), our contact from Xela LUG, turned out to be the same person who had helped Freddy with the clinic and school networking. When he stopped in yesterday, we had assumed that he had gotten our contact information and messages and had come to meet us — whereas he had come because Isabel had contacted him per Freddy’s instructions.

We went to the clinic today, forgetting that the clinic is closed. I’m in the process up upgrading and maintaining the existing laptops, so that there’s a stable platform for the clinic people to use when I’m not here.

Another issue we’ve run into at the clinic is the issue of volunteers, which I will admit, doesn’t sound like much of an issue. However, when you’re dealing with IT work, there isn’t really much “handoff” between volunteers — which means you could be on a Skype call to Germany to get a router password, or relying on someone who is on vacation to find someone else who handled some equipment maintenance.

I finished setting up the workstations, although we found out that the first numbered one seemed to be dead, so the clinic is down to three working stations. Irv had an extension cord fabricated at the electric supply shop down the street (as well as grabbing a replacement box of florescent tubes to replace the ones in the clinic that had gone out), and we moved the electrical supply for the server, etc, to be run from behind the pharmacy area. This allowed the connection to be out of the way of general foot traffic. We ended up electrical taping the remaining connection together to avoid accidental disconnection.

For lunch, we ate at Cafe Arabe, near Parque Central, which had pretty decent food. As we were finishing up our meal, we noticed the time (which was pushing 3:00 pm), so I left for the clinic to train Isabel on using the system, and Irv left for Casa Manen to pick up supplies. I ended up getting about an hour of training in, using the 1/3 completed Spanish translation we have. Thankfully, I was able to use Google Translate to explain more difficult concepts properly. (I understand more Spanish than I can speak at this point — at least enough to get the gist across.)

Oscar (from the Pop-Wuj school) had wanted some pictures taken of his son, but due to a miscommunication, his son hadn’t brought his trumpet, and hadn’t realized that we had been waiting there, so we put it off for tomorrow.

We walked back, stopping at Albamar for dinner. Most of the restaurant was reserved for a single family’s graduation party, but we still were able to be seated on the side, and had a good meal. As we were heading back to Casa Manen, we saw that Parque Central was filled with a film crew and a crowd of onlookers. We hung around for a while to observe, and found out that it was a crane shot for a music video. Irv was delighted to see that their primary and secondary cameras were 7D bodies, although they were outboarding the video to an external monitor and control system on their crane.

Day Six: Friday November 11, 2011

The last of our clinic days was today. I got a little bit of time to take some photos of the locals while we were heading to the clinic, as we didn’t get a late start this morning. I didn’t manage to get a shot of any of the Mayan women riding “side saddle” on the scooters and motorcycles, which I’ve been told is done to “preserve their virtue” by not straddling the bikes.

We saw a pretty decent number of patients today, and Irv got to do three foot surgeries on two patients (one plantar wart removal and two ingrown toenails), of which I got a few pictures. I filled prescriptions for the majority of the morning, in between setting up an autossh reverse ssh tunnel so that I would have access to the servers, since Dhaby didn’t get back to us concerning access to the router at Pop-Wuj. It was pretty easy to do, since I’m using OpenWRT-Kamikaze on the NSLU2, and installing autossh was as simple as correcting the ipkg source and using the ipkg tool to install the package.

We ate at the “chinese” restaurant across the street from Pop-Wuj for lunch. Their lo mein had a particularly Guatemalan flavor to it, but was quite good. We headed down to Banco Agromercantil at the edge of Zona 1 to change a few more American ducats into Guatemalan quetzals, dodging traffic and stopping to observe the Movistar-sponsored bouncy castle at the edge of the Democracia market. We headed back for 3:00pm to start training the clinic staff on using FreeMED. We started a little late, but after two hours of intensive training, it seems as though there’s a pretty good “buy-in” from the clinic staff, although I already have a laundry list of customizations which I’m going to have to put in place for the clinic. They do things a little differently than FreeMED’s usual target audience, so we’re going to have to make it easy to switch back and forth.

I feel as though we’ve gotten a fair amount of what we’ve set out to accomplish, and the clinic staff seems to think that we can adapt what we have to suit their workflow. I’ve seen a number of places for improvement, but the only way to see these things is to try them in a real-life scenario, so I’m glad that I got the chance to watch them work.

Day Seven: Saturday November 12, 2011

It was our “day off” today, so we went shopping for goods to bring back to the states. We took a minibus, belching clouds of black smoke, to the Terminal Minerva market in the west of Xela. I’ve never been in a more overcrowded place. I almost tripped over a few people while we were walking through there, and I got a few decent pictures. We spent two or three hours walking through the market, which was necessary, as there was no way to move through it any quicker than we did.

After we got out of the Minerva market, we took another minibus back to Parque Central, where Coca-Cola was sponsoring a very large christmas parade (along with whatever Powerade promotion they were doing) from Parque Central to Terminal Minerva, complete with a guy dressed as Santa Claus, the Coca-Cola polar bear, and three marching bands. The entire scene was utter insanity, but Irv got some shots of the whole thing going down. We went through the Parque Central market to find a few last-minute items, then took a cab up to the Alamo bus terminal in the north of the city to purchase tickets to get home. We walked back through the Democracia market down to the back end of Parque Central, and ran into one of the local clinic doctors on the west side of the Theatre Municipal on the way there.

There was a pretty widespread power failure today, and although I’m confident that the server came back online at the clinic, the tunnel which allows me access to update the system did not come back online (as one issue with the NSLU2 is that by default it needs to be manually powered on), so I sent a note to Dr Sullivan asking that it be turned on the next time someone is in the clinic. I do, after all, have a large number of fixes and adjustments for them which I have to push to their server.

Irv bought a tart cake for the nice people running Casa Manen, and we set to packing all of our stuff up for the trip. Long day tomorrow…

For too long, media-created “populists” like the teabaggers have railed against liberal policies, diversity, and government in general to attempt to explain the uncontrolled collapse of the United States’ economy. I’ve heard explainations (discredited, of course), ranging from the Community Reinvestment Act to “too much regulation”, but I find it rather difficult to understand why the Occupy Wall Street protesters seem myopically obsessed with the Bush Tax Cuts and the Citizens United decisions — as if they caused this clusterfuck. Make no mistake, both are odious; one for draining our reserves and forcing us into “emergency” austerity measures for the sake of bolstering the top 1% of Americans (Bush Tax Cuts), and the other for removing the common man’s political power by allowing money, disproportionately held by the top 1% of Americans, to unduly influence the political process (Citizens United).

The root causes of the economic downturn are far, far simpler. We can explain some of it through the greed of multinational corporations, who choose to outsource labor, decrease benefits, and shunt money away from their labor pool to benefit investors and the parasite investor class to an onerous degree. We can explain it through a systematic dismantling of financial system regulations which have been in place since the aftermath of the Great Depression, including, but not limited to: the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (Carter), the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 (Reagan), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (Clinton) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (Clinton). Let’s not forget our ol’ pal Dubya, with his OCC tricks and gutting the regulatory system. Make no mistake, the primary causes of this clusterfuck are the greed of the banks and the fact that our leadership has been making it much easier for banks to have their way with you, virtually regulation-free. And they’ve been working at it for at least thirty years.

Putting aside greed and deregulation — banks (being considered the hypothetical sociopathic “persons”) — are bastards. Real bastards. Let’s take the example of Bank of America, which is (at the moment) one of the most hated financial institutions in the United States, with the possible exception of Goldman Sachs. I was listening to the radio this morning, and a spokesman for some shill PR group for the consumer banking industry was railing on about “regulations from Washington” and “that Dick Durbin” forcing the poor, helpless banks to institute five dollar a month ATM/debit card usage fees. I think that my rage culminated in his line about how he thought government regulations were hurting banks, evidenced by the mass layoffs at Bank of America. Let’s remember that those layoffs aren’t going to touch the parasite investor class’s ROI, and definitely not the CEO-level compensation or bonus package structure. Nope, not at all. Also, the shills for the banking industry don’t want us to remember that they don’t really make their money off of ATM or usage fees — they’re just a byproduct of suckering you into giving them your money.

Banks make money off of “fractional reserve lending/banking“. They essentially loan money into existence, but it requires a certain fraction of the money they’re loaning out to be “on hand”. This is where *your* money comes into play. You give them your paycheck, and see a nice dollar amount show up on your ATM screen or bank statement — but that money was just fed into the grist mill of short term, long term and mortgage loans. And if you have a home loan through BofA as well, they’re basically charging you to loan your own money back to you. (And they wonder why they’re some of the most hated institutions on the planet.)

That complete disconnection from reality is what, I believe, is fueling public anger — and their insistence in blaming “the gub’mint” for regulating them *too much* (I know, I know, it’s insane to even try to digest that, only a few years after deregulating their derivative trading, commodity trading, and general shaft-up-the-backside to the consumer, that they would consider blaming *too much* government intervention for them sucking, but I digress…) isn’t going to fly.

I hope the protests stay peacefully and spread. The protesters may not be unified (or completely informed), but they have the right idea — and their anger is finally directed at the right group of people.

There is a pretty substantial inverse relationship between the DJIA and unemployment rates. By “unemployment rates”, we’re not talking about the Bureau of Labor Statistics U-6 numbers, indicating our entire workforce, but rather the more limited U-3 numbers, which indicate “Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force”. Let’s face it, it’s in the best interest of the ruling parties to keep the official unemployment rate low, to boost perception.

Shit, if I were to take a quick look at the DOL page on unemployment, it paints a bleaker picture than the rally in the DJIA which Bloomberg reports is tied to an “increase in job openings”. (Their “live ticker” for official unemployment numbers is here.)

What does this have to do with the “Masters of the Universe”? They’re going to be making a *killing* in the order of billions of dollars as stock prices predictably rise, of course. Doesn’t matter that we are losing manufacturing jobs due to globalization efforts and increased mechanization, or that stagnant wages and rising income disparity means you’ll die poorer and your upward mobility in terms of income is, for all intents and purposes, stalled. Even Ben Bernanke, money printer extraordinaire, says that we’re creating two separate societies this way.

So, why cut off extended unemployment benefits? I mean, unless you’re a brain-dead deficit hawk or a “I’ve got mine so fuck the rest of you” Libertarian, they actually have a pretty positive economic stimulus effect. More so than the pointless tax “cuts” that we’re going to extend until we’re ass-broke, at any rate. The only reason I can think of involves pumping up the stock market, which currently out-earns our manufacturing industry as a percentage of GDP.