Perpetual Innovation

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  • How much should a hip replacement cost? CBS News

    How much should a hip replacement cost? Study raises more questions than answers – CBS News:

    Paying cash for a procedure can get wild in terms of the prices. (They did this for a similar ailment and got similar results.)

    Offering to pay cash, and pay up front will result in serious discounts, say 70%.

    But this is still a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world of medicine.

    What’s missing is transparency. If you can’t figure out how much something is going to cost, how can you plan for it.

    Oh, and here is a case in point on the Hip-to-be-squared problem. If hip is a pre-exiting condition, then you have to pay out-of-pocket. But, if you let your insurance laps, then you can not be denied… BUT in next year, 2014, more of Obamacare will kick in and then it’s no worries (maybe?).

    This whole area of healthcare is fuzzy and morphing, so it really is not sane to try to make rational decisions.

    Maybe the best idea is to go an medical tourism vacation. Trip it up to Canada, down to Costa Rica or drink it up in Spain. It seems that the pain before and after surgery, just might, kinda put a damper on the whole vacation thing though. But the $50-100,000 would be a nice incentive to enjoy the trip.

    It’s going to be hard to bring healthcare costs under control when the mess in pricing and the lack of transparency is out of control.

    It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of medicine.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • Pres Obama steps out to wave down the run-a-way climate train!

    It was a little bit of a surprise that Obama stepped up as forcefully about taking on climate change as he did.

    Check out this post by Peterman at Huffington:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-peterman/state-of-the-union_b_2674448.html

    Many environmentalists are going to complain that this is not enough, but it really is better to start late than even much much later.

    As Peterman shows, it looks like we are aiming for 6+ degrees C, not the 2+C that many people were hoping to achieve. At that rate, sea-level rise would be measured in yards, not feet.

    Not much on details. Federal government can take some action for government buildings and transportation,

    Reduce energy consumption by 50% in 20 years should be, surprisingly, far easier than most people think. 25-30% could be achieved in buildings within a couple years, with a payback of months… And a gigantic Return on investment.

    Easier said then done, though.

    But to continue doing “business as usual” would be, well, irresponsible.

  • Clean Coal Might Really Be a Possibility!!! WOW!

    Energy | Homeland Security News Wire:

    Clean Coal Might Really Be a Possibility!!! WOW!

    It may take me years to take back all the trash talk I have had about Coal.

    Dirty, Dirtier, Dirtiest Coal… But no such think as Clean.

    Dr. Fan at Ohio State has pioneered the technology called Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL). This lab project has contained 99% of the carbon dioxide from coal. 

    Well maybe. This will bear some watching as it moves forward out of the labs and into the power plant.

    Coal, of course, is still not a renewable resource (unless you count charcoal — good for my Kamado grill, but not so much so for mainstream energy production!-)

    Wow, if we could find a cure for coal, that would put us 30-40 years ahead. Of course, it would have to be cheap, or we (China, US and India) wouldn’t use it. And then we’d be back in the same dirty boat, right up to our coal ash.:-(

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  • Electric Fiat 500 rated at 116 mpg

    Electric Fiat 500 rated at 116 mpg

    This is a pretty cool achievement. 87 mile range. More than 100 MPGe, but other cars do that as well.

    Marketed as “environmentally sexy”… !:)

    An issue, of course is how does the electricity get generated?

    Pretty cool though…

  • Raspberry Pi RC Race Car Is Controlled With Cheese | Wired Design | Wired.com

    Raspberry Pi RC Race Car Is Controlled With Cheese | Wired Design | Wired.com:

    Okay. You’ll have to read this by yourself.

    This combines the basics of an RC race care and a little bit of ingenuity in the controller…

    If you are looking for the food to integrate into your controller system, then cheese is the food that aims to please.

    I remember the day when food and drink were not the topic ingredients to integrate into your controller and input devises. Coke in keyboards and pizza in your mouse, for example, have always proved to be ill-fated.

    But you be the judge.

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