Here are just a few of my favorite work-related books:
So, that’s… (in no particular order other than how they look on my shelf :>) …
I read an article this morning that kept stating the Affordable Care Act (ACA) guaranteed health insurance for everyone. Yeah, I guess it does, but you could also say that it forces health insurance on everyone (or you can pay a penalty/tax to opt out).
Look, I’m all for allowing everyone to have insurance. In fact I have a very close family member bitten by the “pre-existing condition” issue where insurance companies want to exclude a certain situation because it almost certain will be an issue again at some point in the future. That’s ridiculous.
Insurance companies (not just health insurance) are structured to get all the benefit but few risks. What happens when you don’t make any claims and the insurance company makes strong profits off you? Normally your rates increase. What happens when you do make claims and the insurance company actually has to pay money for your benefits? Guess what – your rates rise… drastically and in some cases your insurance can be canceled.
What happens though if the ACA goes fully into effect and an unintended side-effect shows up? Maybe way more currently non-insured decide to opt-out and pay the penalty. Maybe because of population age averages in different areas the cost-average benefit where needed most isn’t actually realized. What happens if everyone is allowed insurance (can’t be denied) but the rates are unsustainable? Either unreasonable or unaffordable by the individual, or perhaps the insurance company is forced into a maximum rate that guarantees they’ll lose a ton of money on that “account” (I bet they remove wording about people actually being people in insurance company documents). Guess what – if an insurance company is losing a ton of money on a certain group of accounts, you can be sure they will make that money up somewhere. Either rates across the pool will need to rise or benefits will be cut or they’ll somehow otherwise figure a way to get their money.
As stated before… I don’t have an answer. What really frustrates me though is not understanding why we haven’t already taken some baby steps in the right direction rather than such a huge change in the overall system. Why haven’t we changed the way laws and regulations are here in the USA so that insurance companies can compete more across state lines?* It seems that opening competition alone could potentially have some nice benefits. Obama said in the debate that step wouldn’t solve the problem. Maybe not, but what’s the downside of it? What wasn’t that a no-brainer first step to at least see if it would help some.
*My company provides health insurance, so other than the fact that our rates have gone crazy under the current administration (which is actually a big deal) my own and my staff’s insurance isn’t impacted much by all this. BUT, with our rates climbing at an insane pace, I wanted to get some competitive quotes to make sure we were providing the best insurance value – benefits for the given rates. What I found was that my company is very limited in who we can even get rates from because of the restrictions that exist limiting where clients (business or personal) of insurance companies can reside. So we’re locked into a “best of the worst” situation with a very small handful of options to choose from.
So… I sit and wait and watch, wondering what will happen with all this health insurance non-sense. I look at the extra money I pay annually now over several years ago and wish I could have spent that on staff (yes, it’s THAT much money). I look at family members who need to benefit from health insurance changes but with so many unknowns might actually NOT benefit when everything is enacted and running for a while. I look at the alarming pace that private practice doctors are closing their doors – putting us at the mercy of a smaller pool of providers.
I sure hope I’m wrong, but the signs so far aren’t good. I hope the impending changes don’t raise rates and hurt small businesses. I hope the people who need insurance most can afford it. I hope this all works out because it sure is a lot of work (and drama) if it doesn’t work – or even makes the current situation worse.
I don’t 100% agree with everything that either of the main political parties claim to support. (I’m not even sure THEY agree with everything they support.)
I am a registered republican though.
Why? The main reason is that I’m pro-business. I have a personal bias because I run a private company but I’m a huge fan of private business in general. I love that anyone can start their own business and add value to their lives, the lives of others (staff), and the general population (assuming their business provides a genuine value at sustainable rates, and if it doesn’t, it should be allowed to fail).
Do I agree with everything business-related that comes through the republican party or all laws that currently exist? No.
For one thing, I’m not a fan of bail-outs nor how many bankruptcies seem to work out. Entrepreneurs and investors take risk in hopes for reward. While equal opportunity should be guaranteed, equal outcome shouldn’t. Bad ideas or poorly run businesses should be allowed to fail and the owners/investors should take the hit on that.
Do I think businesses should take care of their employees? Yes, but I don’t think it should be forced on them. My company, OrcsWeb, has provided paid vacation, fully-covered employee health care, and retirement benefits for more than ten years – since we were just a small handful of employees just trying to make a go of the business model. It’s costly. It’s very costly. A business that *doesn’t* have many hundreds or thousands of employees in their benefits plans really get the shaft. It’s a huge expense but my personal feeling is that when a business can afford it, benefits should be provided. Again though, I wouldn’t force it on anyone. If a business doesn’t provide benefits, employees are free to (and perhaps should) change jobs to one that takes better care of them.
How about outsourcing? That seems to be a popular hot-button topic. I’m not a fan. I can’t stand when I call for support on something and I get someone who has no clue how to help me, nor seems to care much (why should they if they’re just bulk out-sourced support). The issue though is that many of those jobs are jobs that non-outsourced people don’t want; at least not at the rates offered. That leads me to unemployment…
It makes me crazy to read articles about people who complain about no work yet the issue seems to be them feeling their “above” the available work. I’ve actually interviewed people who, at the end when I explained how their skills lined up (or didn’t) and what made sense for compensation based on their contribution level to the company, told me they’d rather stay on unemployment. I’m serious. I’m not talking about $8/hour, I’m talking about salaries well above national averages and a fully benefits package, yet they won’t “lower themselves” to accept a job that they feel is beneath them. So…back to the outsourcing point… if I ran a company of thousands and needed to hire bulk for entry-level positions, yet faced this attitude, I might consider an outsource even though I’m generally against the concept.
How about tax breaks for some of these large companies? Think tobacco or oil. I’m not a fan. I can perhaps understand some incentives for new businesses (again, I AM pro-small-business) to encourage and help start-ups, but companies with billions in revenue – and sometimes even in profit – getting tax breaks and other perks? Bad idea. I don’t want to pay for that. Do you?
This is such a vast topic that I could perhaps write all day, but then it would be too long and no one would read it. It might be that no one will read this anyway, and that’s fine. 
Feel free to leave a comment on anything I missed – specifically related to business. I don’t want to get into ACA or personal taxes or other topics like that (in this post) because it’s too far off the base of this post. Also, feel free to slam either party on how they deal with business – I know both have some issues. I may agree, disagree, or ignore. I might even update this post if there are interesting enough comments on a point or two that I feel strongly about but failed to mention.
You’ve probably read by now that Yahoo has been hacked and 400,000 usernames and passwords have been exposed, but you might not understand the technical details. Here’s a little additional background information.
First, the hackers accessed the data by using something called SQL injection. That’s a very basic – and easily avoidable – attack method. Say someone has a search form on there site. I can type in “good books” and the search form might query the site’s database and return the results. Well, for a SQL injection attack I might type in “(select * from ‘users’)” which, when run against the database could potentially execute that subquery and actually show the results. (For you non-SQL people, that simple query literally just says ‘if there is a table named “users” give me all the data from that table’). It’s very easy to protect against something like this and I’m very surprised Yahoo didn’t take more care.
Secondly, once the hackers were able to query the user data, they found that the data was stored in plain text. What does that mean? Well, it means that the data was quite literally just sitting there in plain text. So, it may have had username=’YourUsername’ and password=’YourPassword’. Maybe you’ve always assumed that is the case – it is not! The proper way to store any sensitive information is to encrypt it. Encryption is NOT hard and lack of use is nothing more than laziness. What should the data have looked like? Well, at a minimum the password should have been stored as something like ‘cTVy2XHTJO1INLfunJHOhA==’ which I encrypted using a very simple and common encryption tool. Sure, there is a possibility that some enterprising hacker could still decrypt the password depending on the encryption method used, the key, etc. but it certainly makes the process much more challenging and a rather decent hassle – a hassle that many hackers don’t bother with because there are plenty of other (stupid) sites online (like Yahoo apparently) who don’t bother to secure their data and are easier targets.
Shame on you Yahoo.
If you run a web site (or even a back-end web application) please learn from this mistake on Yahoo’s part and make sure that you are following common security best practices and securing your data at multiple levels. Take steps to make sure hackers can’t get easy access to your systems, but then also take steps that assume the worse-case -> that they get access; so make sure that the data they access is protected in itself, giving yet that additional level of security protection.
Today is job shadow day at my daughter’s school. Just showing here WordPress right now – already covered some marketing, social media, SEO, cost-analysis, and more… much, much, more coming after lunch today!
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