ARTS & FARCES internet

This morning’s New York Times has a well-done overview of the history of organ transplantation, while avoiding most of the ethical issues involved. In the span of five decades, surgeons have learned how to transplant virtually every organ in the human body. It’s amazing and more than a little frightening. And not just to the antivivisectionists.

The main problem related to organ transplantation has always been, and remains, rejection of the transplanted organ. The body perceives a transplanted organ as a foreign substance and sets about to get rid of it as quickly as possible. As a result, immunosuppressive drugs are required to artificially lower the immune system in order to prevent organ rejection. This, of course, brings on its own set of nasty problems. A human doesn’t stay well for long without a healthy immune system. The medical community discovered, quite accidentally, that they had been overprescribing immunosuppressants for years. Current leading edge research in the area of mixed chimerism—tolerance of the transplanted organ without immunosuppressive drugs—shows some promise, but at this point it’s still trial-and-error, with a small error resulting in a devastating rejection. The risks associated with long-term use of immunosuppressive drugs remains largely unknown.

Another serious problem with organ transplantation is chronic rejection. Nearly half of all cadaveric donor organs wear out and the medical community has so far failed to understand this phenomenon.

Nothing is more indicative of the U.S. healthcare system being off the rails than expecting uninsured patients to pay significantly more for hospitalization than those with private insurance. Such is the case throughout the country and highlighted in the case of Advocate, a Chicago-area non-profit healthcare organization sponsored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church and United Church of Christ. According to Jonathan Cohn’s New York Times Magazine piece last Sunday:

“When the Service Employees International Union, which is trying to organize Advocate workers, analyzed Advocate’s billing in 2001, it found that uninsured patients were being asked to pay 140 percent more than those with private insurance.”

How did non-profit healthcare get to this point? During the late 1800s and early 1900s a veritable boom occurred when churches established hospitals to provide healthcare for America’s burgeoning urban immigrant population, most of which was destitute. While the hospital building boom eased off, hospitals associated with religious orders continued to serve the urban poor through the 1970s by way of a system that could only be called a skim. “Every time a health insurer, whether private or a government provider like Medicare, wrote a check to a hospital for a medical service,” writes Cohn, “it was in effect paying more than the actual cost of that service; hospitals could then use the extra money to finance care for those people who had no way to pay.” By the 1980s healthcare costs began to spiral out of control and the federal government reduced the amount Medicare would pay to these hospitals. In the 1990s healthcare costs broke out of the spiral and soared on a breathtakingly near-vertical trajectory and the federal government put Medicare on a perilous race to the bottom at a nearly as breathtaking path in the other direction.

Yesterday it was the Senate Judiciary Committee approving a legislative bundle that would, in part, mandate the viewing of commercials. Today, PVRblog reports that TiVo has gotten into the act with a plan to display banner ads when the digital video recorder’s fast-forward feature is used.

That button that you use the most on your TiVo? It just got sold out from under you.

My crappy Toshiba TiVo—which is immune to the 30 second skip hack but doesn’t require the paid TiVo service—died within a month of owning it, and we use it less than five hours a week. In fact, when I took it apart to see if I could at least rescue the DVD in the drive, I found that more than a few of the traces on the logic board appeared to be hand-wired.

It looks to me like I’ll be going back to BitTorrent for my West Wing fix.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved H.R. 2391, the Intellectual Property Protection Act, a bundle of pending bills that would eliminate fair use—the bane of the copyright cartel—once and for all. Offering criminal punishments for anyone who “infringes a copyright by… offering for distribution to the public by electronic means, with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement,” the proposed legislation would make users of peer-to-peer networks criminals and, according to some critics, make Apple’s iTunes illegal.

As usual, Wired has a pretty good overview of the situation including this chilling passage:

“The bill would also permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content - like a gory or sexually explicit scene - in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed language, viewers would not be allowed to use software or devices to skip commericals or promotional announcements ‘that would otherwise be performed or displayed before, during or after the performance of the motion picture,’ like the previews on a DVD.”

Whoa. Mandatory viewing of commercials. That’s beyond the cartel’s wildest wet dreams.

Next week we’ll be moving all of the ARTS & FARCES LLC internet services, including our servers and email, to a new service provider. Actually, it’s the same people we’ve been dealing with for quite a while, it’s just a new company. We’re working to make the transition as painless as possible, but there’s always the likelihood of Murphy’s intervention, especially when Qwest is involved. All of the domains and addresses will be the same, and you won’t need to change anything on your end; it’s just that our servers may be unreachable for a time while the following takes place:

• Qwest reconfigures our circuit on Wednesday 27 Oct
• Reconfiguration of our LAN and router
• New IP addresses populate through DNS

The end result will be double the bandwidth (good) and double the latency (bad). But we’ll save a bit of money.

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