I’m currently taking an evening off from former-house cleaning to sit and chill with my busted shoulder. An old, old injury reared its head when we moved, and my left arm can’t raise more than about 20 degrees from straight down without quite a bit of pain. Lifting is a no-go. I’m very lucky that my right shoulder (also generally wonky) didn’t give way, too.
I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in some disorderly eating to lose weight. It'll be great!"
I totally hadn’t realized that tiny houses are illegal/violate zoning. I knew they were tricky to place, but I figured if you buy a patch of land somewhere, you could put whatever kind of house on it you wanted. Continue reading Weekly Linkage: The Long Edition→
There’s no particular theme to this week’s surfing, but there are some pretty pictures and good reads here.
The problem with waste – Note that the list of not-recommended screenings include things like screening for prostate cancer in men older than 75 or colon cancer in folks above 85. I glanced through the USPSTF's procedure manual, and it looks like they're taking into account a variety of factors (age, gender, race, etc.), but their information is only as good as the studies they're pulling from. How worried should we be about researchers' biases (ageism being the first that comes to mind)?
"So we’re confronted with a set of screening recommendations with excellent evidence that aren’t paid for, and a list of screening tests that are recommended against that are paid for. That’s how you wind up with a system that (1) costs too much and (2) has sub-optimal quality. You pay for stuff that doesn’t clearly work and don’t pay for stuff that does."
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.
The original posting of this was horribly borked. I may be switching link-posting plugins.
Warm and Fuzzy Budgeting – "You have things that matter to you. Hopes, and goals, and dreams. This is going to sound cheesy, but I think it’s true: Your budget is simply your hopes, and goals, and dreams … on paper."
