Weekly Linkage: Healthcare, Midnight Deployments, and Markov Chaining

I’ve been all over The Incidental Economist lately, and it’s really hard not to link to every one of their posts that I can make heads or tails of. They’re really prolific by my standards, though, which means it’s a struggle to keep their posts from falling off the 30-day cut-off in Google Reader.

• Simply put: Marginal cost/benefit – "You’ll consume as much health care as you think worth it for the transaction price (your copayment if you’re insured). The lower the price, the more you’ll consume. You’ll keep using health services until the marginal benefit falls below the price you pay."

  I'm not sure I agree that people will keep gobbling and gobbling up health care, but I definitely understand that people will use more if it's cheaper.

• Student drowning in debt needs professional help – I think my brain stopped working when I saw the mortgage payment of $1900 a month. That's… what? A $350,000 house? Fer skerious. That’s a whole lotta house.
• TDD/BDD and the lean startup – A nice essay on the value of unit testing or test-first methodologies. It’s supposed to be proving the value to startup companies, but I don’t think it addresses startup concerns strongly enough, so it’s rather general purpose.
• bitquabit – Midnight deploys are for idiots, and other … – I like bee's knees! "Every once and awhile, you have an idea that you totally think is the bee’s knees but which ends up being the bee’s ass."
• Chicken and egg problem – So adorable!
• Simply put: Physician-patient information asymmetry – "This is information asymmetry at work. The doctor has the information. I put my trust in his wisdom and my money in his pocket. It’s just a fact of health care."
• Taxes Done? It’s Time for the Annual Financial Meeting | MintLife Blog – "The primary goal of the financial meeting is to make sure both of us are fully apprised of our current financial situation and to plot out—as best as we can in a messy and unpredictable world—what’s coming up in our financial lives in the next year or two. (And to eat cookies.)"
• Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer – Interactive … – This is really cool and kinda addictive. You can see how the computer is predicting and learning how to play. I think this is using Markov chaining.