Internet Todo List for Enthusiastic Thinkers, S1E1

Possibly stupid idea of the week: an institution devoted to improving the world (reducing corruption, minority rights, etc.), through politics and legislation, but dedicated to playing political hardball, using all the dirty tricks, and putting legislative boots to legislator’s necks.

What I’m all ’bout

Turn the principles of your life or personality into a few words, turn it into a poster. A fun thread on Dribbble, What I’m all ’bout. Not my favorite, but quite clever:

Health care mandate ’sploitz

I haven’t done my homework on this one, but it’s an frame of thought. The irony of the individual mandate:

Under the Affordable Care Act, here’s what happens if you wait until you’re sick to buy health insurance: You can buy health insurance and no insurer can charge you more for walking into their office with a lump the size of a golf ball. The catch is that between now and getting sick, if you can afford insurance — which the law defines as you have access to insurance that costs less than eight percent of your income — you have to pay a penalty of $695 a year (that’s the 2016 number; after 2016, it rises with inflation) or 2.5 percent of your annual income, whichever is greater.

The fact of the matter is that $695 a year or 2.5 percent of your annual income is likely to be a lot less than a decent insurance policy will cost you. In a way, paying the mandate is like buying an option to purchase insurance at some future date, when you need it more, for a price that you could never have gotten before the mandate.

Now that the “Supremes” have ruled in favor of the ACA, this will be an interesting one to watch.

The lolcat operating system

raos is a little experiment by Rasmus Andersson. He wrote a boot loader (like LILO or GRUB) then wrote tiny little programs that run as the operating system. It’s fun to consider, in our days of multicore systems and multitasking operating systems, that an operating system can be as simple as a “hello, world!” program.

Feynman

I just finished, get this, a graphic novel on the life and works of Richard Feynman. I totally love everything about Richard Feynman. If I could end up 50% as awesome as Feynman, I’d be very happy with my life.

Reading this, I was reminded that the core tenants of his life were sort of thus:

• Discovery
• Teaching
• Mischief

Once could do far worse than to build one’s life on those principles. Everyone interested in being smart and awesome should read this.

Louis, season 3, episode 1

I watched the season premiere of Louis C.K.’s show yesterday. There’s a saying, I’ve no idea where I heard it, that the point of fiction is to create really great characters and then do horrible things to them. I’m often reminded of this when I watch Louis CK’s show. It’s some standup or funny situations bookending a very honest take on the curveballs that life can throw at a person.

People have described Louis CK as stark or depressing, but I think his schtick is really honesty. He doesn’t want to sugarcoat how he views life. Sometimes he can make jokes about it, but often he just tells stories that exactly mirror the reality.

That’s a pretty bold approach for TV today.

You might have missed it

• “Surround Yourself With Beautiful Software” - by far the most resonant thing on my website this week
• Too eager to add code - something I wrote to myself, hopefully it will get me out of a rut