Dinhternet

… then you haven’t got anything.

One of the worst things about my job right now is my lack of health insur­ance. Just another perk of being a stu­dent that I didn’t take advan­tage of while I could have.

Some times, it’s lit­tle things, like tummy aches as I switched to veg­e­tar­i­an­ism or when I got the snif­fles right as Joe M was get­ting over his swine flu. Some­times, it’s a lit­tle more seri­ous, like when I fell while snow­board­ing and my ribs hurt for nearly a solid month. Most of the time, I self-diagnose like so:

(From Basic Instruc­tions.)

For seri­ous cases, I might enlist my par­ents or the inter­net for advice.

I know there are peo­ple out there worse off than me. While my job isn’t the high­est pay­ing, it’s still above min­i­mum wage. I don’t have depen­dents to worry about. And I’m still rel­a­tively young. It’s actu­ally a safe bet for me to skimp on health insur­ance. There are a lot of peo­ple who can­not say the same.

Would I pre­fer to health insur­ance? Of course, but I don’t because I can’t afford it. I’ve been fol­low­ing news about the health care bill pretty care­fully because of this. Manda­tory cov­er­age is scary. Hope­fully the reduced costs get real­ized simul­ta­ne­ously and not “soon after.”

So Leg­ends of Zork just opened out of closed beta yes­ter­day. It’s a browser-based adven­ture game based on the old Zork series.

For you young folks who don’t know, Infocom’s Zork games were a series of text-based adven­ture games from back in the day of DOS boxes with no graph­ics or “win­dows.” The screen would print out a descrip­tion of your envi­ron­ment, and then you would type in what you wanted to do. (Here’s a mod­ern exam­ple with a polit­i­cal slant.)

Any­way, Leg­ends of Zork is fun so far, but I feel like 30 AP/day is so slow and I’m too cheap to buy coconuts to get more AP. You should check it out! Takes maybe 10 min­utes a day to play.

The nos­tal­gia is mak­ing me want to play through the orig­i­nal games again. Time to hit up the aban­don­ware sites!

So there’s been a lot of anger about the AIG bonuses lately. Some­one I know recently Tweeted “AIG = Arro­gance, Incom­pe­tence, and Greed.” The Huff­in­g­ton Post put up this satir­i­cal post about why these bonuses were well-deserved. If you didn’t know, AIG used bailout money to pay “reten­tion bonuses” to mem­bers of its Finan­cial Prod­ucts Divi­sion, which got them into their cur­rent dire circumstances.

AIG has stated that they must pay the bonuses for two rea­sons. First, because they are con­trac­tu­ally oblig­ated to pay. Sec­ond, because the peo­ple who got them into this sit­u­a­tion are the only ones who can get them out again, by unwind­ing their own mess. Yes­ter­day, NPR tore both of these argu­ments apart. First, the con­tract to pay bonuses was shady from the start. Deals to assure bonuses to an entire divi­sion are unheard of. Also, the lan­guage sug­gests that it was signed know­ing that the FP Divi­sion was in trou­ble and they were needed to unwind the prob­lems. As for the sec­ond argu­ment, indi­vid­u­als who have left the com­pany were still paid the bonuses, which seems to negate that defense.

Now, dif­fer­ent parts of the gov­ern­ment are falling over each other to be the ones to fix the prob­lem for the Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers. Obama told his staff to use every legal means to get the money back. AIG CEO Liddy asked his employ­ees to return “at least half” of the bonuses. The New York Attor­ney Gen­eral and the Con­necti­cut Gov­er­nor are both pur­su­ing cases to get the money back. And now, Con­gress is vot­ing to put a 90% tax on all bonuses paid by com­pa­nies sup­ported by bailout money as well as sub­tract­ing the bonuses from AIG’s next install­ment of bailout money.

Wouldn’t this have been a lot eas­ier if we hadn’t bailed out the banks in the first place? If only we had taken more bold action instead of try­ing to put a band-aid on the trauma.