Simon Rumble’s blog

The community if abuzz about Hilf's provocative comments. Let's be realistic, comments like "The Free Software movement is dead" are solely designed to get headlines. Nothing more, nothing less, and anyone who quotes it back to you as a way of making a point isn't worth talking to. Too bad I initially read the headline as "MILF says free software is dead".

But he is right on one point: Apache, MySQL and PHP are the "Visual Basic of open source." Yep, it's just as easy to write buggy, shit code with a toy database behind it as with VB and Jet. Perhaps the only difference is that unlike with VB, you probably don't have work around so many bugs in the actual programming environment.

We went out for Matt's bucks night on Saturday night, and a good time had by all. We started in the Australian Youth Hotel in Glebe, then headed to the dogs at Wentworth Park. After the races we had a quick one at the AYH again, then wandered up City Road and King Street.

By 3am the only place that would let a large group of drunken blokes in ended up being The Imperial. I'm not much of a fan of empires, but I've always had a soft spot for this place. Where else can you stagger into at 3am to watch the World's Worst Drag Show (no really they were that bad!) and keep drinking until 5am?

All in all, a great night out. Amazingly, Matt got up at 09:30am to go and play football!

I took some photos

Those of you who are overseas and interstate but know Matt and Maz, get your telegrams into me for the wedding.

I've built a web site for my mate Hanesy's film, The Truth About Weapons of Mass Destruction. Check it out. I'm still working on getting the blog embedded inside the design properly. And Hanesy hasn't yet put the film itself online, but it will be soon.

Telstra's Astroturf campaign has had a bit of a hiccup. When they ran a poll asking "Who do you think is blocking high-speed broadband for Australia?" the result came back an emphatic "Telstra" with 97.1%. Hilarious!

James Hamilton points out that the government has a new site for comparing health funds, kind of on the road to what I described.

The problem is, the information it gives you is extremely limited, and isn't anywhere near comprehensive enough for consumers to make an informed decision. For example, it gives no information about which hospitals you can use with each fund. It's not much point finding a great, cheap health fund that covers everything you want when the only hospitals covered are in Dubbo and you live in Sydney.

The database Choice had (and will have again in July) attempted to resolve this particular problem with some measures of hospital coverage. The problem they have is they're trying to rationalize information from master obfuscators, and in that battle the obfuscators will always win as they have the information advantage.

The government site is a good start, but they need to go much, much further in forcing the insurers to supply information in standardized ways so that direct comparisons can be made.

I'm still waiting on the paperwork from the fund I chose. I suspect they're going to try and give me as little of the one month cooling-off period as possible so that I can't sit down and analyze the fine print. If it hasn't arrived by the end of next week, I'm inclined to cancel it on principle.

Crikey has rendered last night's budget speech as a tag cloud which is a very clever thing to do. Interesting to see that the word "reform" doesn't even make it into the cloud. Nor "environment" or "greenhouse", though "climate" rates six mentions, but he could be talking about the financial climate.

Would be interesting to see the UK's budget speeches done similarly. With Gordon Brown's speeches, I'm sure his good friend Prudence would rate highly.

One of the most jarring points made by smirk-meister Costello in last night's Budget was his comments about part-time workers. It really shows a man out of touch with the real world.

People who are working part-time, most people of $30,000 or less are working part time, to do additional work, to put in some more hours to build the capacity of the Australian workforce. - Source: Budget Lock-up press conference

I suspect you'd find that a very large proportion of people earning $30,000 or less are actually full-time workers with crappy McJobs. Given that those on the minimum wage are earning $484.50 per week, that works out to around $25,194 give or take leave loading. These are full-time workers, though I guess some of the nice Mosman Mums who go back to a few hours of part-time paralegal work might benefit too.

Now here's something you don't see every day. This lost galah poster was spotted on Australia Street in Newtown. So if you see a galah answering to the name "Choppie"...

Holly and I have decided to enter into a lifetime of debt. That's right, we're planning to enter the Sydney housing market. Eek! Scary shit eh?

Now we, too, can bore everyone by talking about real estate. We've evidently settled into the Sydney lifestyle.

Any hints and tips would be appreciated. Spare change too.

I've just signed up for private health insurance. The system has changed so remarkably in Australia that you're effectively forced to sign up to one. If I didn't I'd end up paying an extra 1% income tax, which between the two of us would be more than the cost of the insurance.

The problem is, this is possibly the worst Confusopoly around. Everything about the way the insurance companies provide information is geared towards forcing you to select the wrong options and stopping you from making direct comparisons. There are sneaky weasel words, exclusions and options all over the place. There's just no way for the average consumer to make an informed choice!

What's worse is there aren't any decent consumer tools out there to help you make the right choice. In the UK most confusopoly industries have excellent services like uSwitch and MoneySavingExpert that actually allow ordinary consumers to make an informed decision, cutting through the weasel words and fine print to allow direct comparisons.

Choice did a reasonable job but their information is now out-of-date and won't be fixed until July. Having read some of this fine print, I imagine it's a big job.

If our ruling junta are going to force us into health insurance, there needs to be a way for consumers to make an informed choice. I would suggest a government- or industry-funded independent comparison service, perhaps operated by a trusted third-party like Choice, with all insurers required to submit timely information in a pre-defined format so that cross-industry comparisons can be made. It's the only reasonable way forward.

Of course it was all a lot easier when we had a high quality public healthcare system, but Howard and his cronies seem intent on bleeding that once-great institution until we end up with an American-style healthcare system where the poor just die from treatable health problems.

It should be pointed out that Americans pay twice as much for their healthcare, both through the government and with private insurance. The Economist ran a great graph about a year ago showing comparitive costs separated out by private and government expenditure. America's "government" segment of the graph was as big, per-capita, as the UK's. They then paid as much again in private expenditure, while the UK has a very small private healthcare expenditure. Hardly the cost-effective way to do healthcare!