Atrios noted that The Dead Already Pay For Medicaid, which is not precisely true, as in most states they require you to use up all of your assets before you can get on Medicaid for nursing home care, and will do their best to recover their outlays if any assets suddenly appear, like winning the lottery or inheriting money. They will also take proceeds from any insurance you have.

But that’s Medicaid, a Federal/state means-tested program for the poor.

He noted that the “founder” of Friday Cat Blogging has a truly stupid idea that displays an amazing level of ignorance about Medicare in a post titled: Why Not Let the Dead Pay for Medicare?

Medicare is a health insurance program. People have to pay the “premiums” for a minimum of 10 years to be eligible. If Medicare needs more money, the solution is the same as for any insurance program – raise the premium.

Medicaid comes out of the general fund and affects the national deficit. Medicare is paid for by “premiums” in the form of the FICA [note that the “I” stands for “insurance”] withholding taxes, and has nothing to do with the deficit.

Kevin Drum is no longer on my blogroll because he has gone off on these tangents of ignorance all too often.

After only 8 years the current computer that I use on the ‘Net is starting to lose bits and pieces, and act weird, so I’m going to have to put another one together.

At the moment I’m planning on an AMD Phenom II X4 in an ASUS motherboard that supports SATA 6GB, USB 3.0, and DDR3 memory with a couple of 1 terabyte hard drives [one for Win and one for Linux].

The annoying part of this was discovering that the only people who build their own machines anymore are apparently gamers, because everything is directed towards them and over-clocking.

The hardest part was locating a legal XP boot CD for the Windows drive, because my current system had Windows pre-installed and they didn’t include a boot CD. One of the people I do some work for is still using XP, and I can’t be sure that the software they are using will still function on Win 7.

Obviously the Win system won’t be able to use all of the newest stuff, nor will it recognize all of the RAM that will be on the system, but that stuff is for the Linux system.

The really annoying part is that all of the spares I have laying around are worthless with the new connectors,

Position: 18.7N 123.9E [ 9PM CST 0300 UTC 1200 JST].
Movement: North-Northwest [330°] near 12 mph [19 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 150 mph [240 kph].
Wind Gusts: 185 mph [295 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 190 miles [305 km].
Hurricane Wind Radius: 50 miles [ 80 km].

Currently about 310 miles [ 500 km] Northeast of Manila, Philippines.

Songda is still on track for Okinawa on Saturday. It should lose some strength before then as the sea surface temperatures are cooler further North and there is some shear in that area.

Weakened a bit overnight [local time], but still a nasty piece of work.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]