Laptop down

Last week I mailed my laptop to Dell Support. The battery stopped working entirely and suddenlny, and a new replacement battery wouldn't work either. The next step is for Dell to replace the motherboard—a costly circumstance that makes me fortunate my laptop is still covered by the default one-year warranty.

In the meantime, I've been using my old laptop to take care of essential computer tasks. That machine suffered a career-ending injury when it fell three feet onto a hard floor. Its screen, which prior to the fall already suffered from several dozen burnt-out pixels, now intermittently goes into psychodelic mode and displays wrong colors, sometimes covering the whole screen, sometimes as splotchy artifacts. As a result, I've been using the machine mostly in text mode, kinda like the old DOS command prompt days. You can still browse the web this way, in fact, using not just one but several text-only web browsers. My text-only web browser of choice is elinks.

You might think the things you miss out on most by using a text-only browser is not being about to see images or watch videos, but that's not the case. A bigger problem is that these days many, if not most, websites require JavaScript to work fully, and no text-only browser (that I know of) has a JavaScript engine.

What can you do without JavaScript? Here are some web tasks that still work:

• Check email with GMail—basic HTML mode only
• Check the weather—various sites
• Read wikis—Wikipedia, Arch Linux wiki, etc.
• Check sports news—Velonews and Yahoo sports
• Check movie showtimes
• Read posts on Blogspot

And here are some sites and tasks that require JavaScript:

• Google Reader
• Google Maps
• Renew a single book at the Phoenix Public Library—renew all works OK, however
• Post to Blogspot

The second list would be longer if I tried more sites in elinks instead of using my laptop downtime to catch up on sunshine, sleep, and reading real books. And I suppose there's commentary lurking around here somewhere about how the Internet was a remarkably robust set of technologies that's evolving into a glitzy monolith. But that commentary isn't for today.

The sun also sets

Today I finished reading Arthur Koestler's novel, Darkness at Noon. It takes place in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and is about a fictitious top-ranking member of the Communist Party who's arrested as part of the Great Purge, subsequently jailed, tortured, and made to confess to crimes of counterrevolution and sabotage that he didn't commit.

Perhaps in all of history there's never been a quest for utopia that did more harm than the communist revolution of the 1900s and its resulting totalitarian regimes. But I don't know much history, and I know even less about the Soviet Union, so today's post isn't about that. Instead, I'd like to write a few words about the philosophical underpinnings of all beliefs about utopia and why they ultimately result in—if anything at all—more harm than good.

The core problem with utopias isn't just that they're infeasible. Rather, it's that people who act with the belief that what they're doing will cause society to be ushered into a lasting era of widespread happiness are morally free to commit whatever atrocities are necessary in the present in order to make that future certain. This is a logical conclusion of believing in utopia: an infinitely good reward in the future justifies finite suffering—however vast—in the present.

There's only one safe way to believe in a utopia, and that's by believing it's completely off-limits to us here on Earth—as many religions have preached for centuries. Indeed, I've come to think that one of the major benefits religion imparts to humankind is their provision of a safe outlet for utopic dreaming. There's a strong desire within our species to believe that the meaningless suffering of life we observe around us isn't all there is or ever will be, that instead there exists and is achievable something that's wholly good. But the pious man harmlessly projects his Heaven beyond the metaphysics of death, and by doing so frees himself to do actual good Here and Now. Can an irreligious people do as well?

Till death do us part

As many but not all of you know, last week Laura and I got married. This was an unforeseen event, as our plan was—and still is—to have a wedding at the end of next month. But on Tuesday of last week we drove to the courthouse, met up with our two witnesses Nick and Bobby, and paid the J.P. to make everything official ahead of schedule.

Usually when a couple gets married in a rush at a courthouse, there's a fetus involved. That was evidently the case for one of the other couples at the courthouse that day, but not for us. Why else do couples get married in a rush? For legal residence? To piss off a parent? Or maybe just out of impulse? In our case, it's because of health insurance.

A few weeks ago I developed a medical condition that I thought might need moderately expensive medical treatment to fix. We're not talking a break-the-bank amount of money, but rather an amount for which it's worth looking into possible loopholes to exploit. Of course, not being the responsible type who buys individual coverage for himself after quitting his job, I learned the hard way what it means to have a preexisting condition and what that means for getting insurance to pay for preexisting-condition stuff. The short answer is: it's probably easier to buy homeowners insurance for a house that's already on fire than it is to get coverage for a preexisting medical condition. Several hours of detailed research on different health insurance plans revealed to me that health insurance companies have spent a lot of money employing people to think about preexisting conditions and ways irresponsible people like me might exploit the insurance companies. Hence we have health insurance companies that everyone hates.

Anyway, in doing all that research, I learned some interesting facts relating to health insurance and preexisting conditions. Here are some quick points worth knowing.

• Every health insurance company describes preexisting conditions and the subsequent exclusions differently for individual coverage. But they all reduce to the same effect: if you show symptoms of a problem in the months (or years) prior to buying coverage, that preexisting condition won't be covered.

• However, if you've been covered under a plan within the last two months, you're probably OK. Having prior coverage shows that you're not an irresponsible jerk looking to save money after you got sick. Instead, you're a responsible person whose coverage happened to lapse for a short time.

• The two previous facts are about individual health insurance plans. Since the passage of HIPAA in the 1990s, group health insurance plans can't exclude persons because of a preexisting condition—if that person hasn't in the last 12 months gone to a doctor for that condition. This is why chronically sick people need a job with a group health plan (or else they need a spouse with a job with a group health plan)—it's the only way to get insurance once you're sick.

• Starting Jan 1, 2014, ObamaCare—a term now endorsed by the President himself—will force all health insurance companies not to exclude preexisting conditions for individual insurance plans.

• Meanwhile, until that provision of ObamaCare takes effect, there's a government-provided plan called Preexisting Condition Insurance Plan that provides exclusion-free individual health insurance to people with preexisting conditions. But you must have been without coverage for at least six months to qualify.

• Thus, if you've been without insurance for more than two months (i.e., more than the amount of time insurance companies are OK with your benefits having lapsed) but for less than six months (i.e., less than the amount of time that qualifies you to go on government PCIP), you're currently in preexisting condition no man's land and probably won't find coverage for your condition.

I was in no man's land, but I had a way out—marriage. Now newly married, I'm eligible to go on my wife's health insurance plan—should I elect to do so. But that health problem I mentioned at the beginning of this post has mostly cleared up, and I think I'll instead go with the cheaper option of buying individual coverage. So if ever Laura is asked why she married me, she can answer with the honest truth: she was tricked into it.

Riddle #2

Time to get cozy, today's post is another riddle.

The answer has twelve letters. The clue is: Word in a furniture ad?

I've filled in some letters to speed up the guessing process a bit.

_ _ M E _ _ R _ _ _ _ E