During my absence, I took a road trip up to Manhattan to attend an event in the city.  I arrived in the city about three hours before the event began, so I decided to walk around lower Manhattan for a while.  One of the things I noticed while walking around was how many gold enhancements there were on the old buildings and fixtures.  Much of this was simply small gold leaf effects, but every once in a while there would be a quantity of golf being used (or at least it looked like gold).  One of the buildings was the Manhattan Municipal Building.  The sunlight glistened off of the building like a beacon, and made me think about how gold has such an unusual quality.

Have you ever noticed how glossy gold can be?  Untarnished silver and even some other polished metals can have a mirrored surface, but none of them glow in the matter that gold does.  This quality, along with its rarity, has made it a most sought after mineral in the world.  Countries have been storing it for years, while the everyday individuals can purchase it on their one. You can buy gold online, at market dealers, or even at your local coin, gold, and stamps shops. While I don’t think you’ll ever buy enough to coat the roof of your house with gold leaf like some of the buildings I’ve seen in New York City, you can at least enjoy the reflective quality of the metal in your own home.

Sorry folks, but it is that time of year again. Posting will be limited over the next two weeks as I put together puppets for the church youth group. Since I already have a number of puppets left over from last year, I will primarily be working only on the outfits this time. However, they youth group needs a custom stage this year, so I’m thinking about creating a reusable fabric cover to go over the plastic tubing frame. That will help give it some rigidity as well as make it easier to change the look of the set quickly and easily. Pictures of the completed project to come.

In the mean time, if someone wants to write and/or publish an article on the site during the next two weeks, please leave me a message below.  I will e-mail you a guest account log-in so you can access the site.  All I ask is that you do not post any hate articles and do not use profanity.  Also, I will do the Weekly (Carnival) this weekend, so if you have articles you’d rather just submit, you can do so here.

Back to Health Care Reform.

I have a question for you. Who should have the say over how much an insurance company can raise their rates: the Federal Government, the State Government, or no one? This question comes after President Barack Obama stated that the Federal Government should have the power to reject health insurance rate increases that they deem to be excessive.

If the Federal Government had control, then that means they could have the say over insurance companies that only operate within one state. This would supercede the authority states would have within their own borders, or as Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Joel Ario stated, “It could end up as a ‘who’s on first and what’s on second’ problem.”

In my view, this violates the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 states:

The Congress shall have power to … regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.

This would mean the State Government should have control, but that control would only last until the company expands the state borders. That is no different than any other company who grows and expands their business. But what happens if no one oversees the rate increases? You’ll be left with a handful of local monopolies that are able to increase their rates with consumers having no alternatives to turn to, meaning they either have to pay the higher rates or drop their coverage.

In my view, competition is probably the best way to keep rates in check. If one company starts to increase their rates (for whatever reason), the alternative becomes more appealing. By lowering the artificial barriers to competition, and start allowing companies from across the country to start competing for the business for every resident in the United States, not only will you see the growth in insurance rates slow, you might actually find yourself paying less for the same coverage. And when you start providing tools where rates and benefits of various insurance companies are posted online, customers can do side-by-side comparisons to find the best coverage for their needs and in their price range.

Going through my mail tonight, I receive a flyer from the group Broadband for America. On the cover of the flyer is a picture of Harold Ford, Jr. (the former Representative from Tennessee). Their mission is “to make broadband access to the Internet available to every household in the nation; to provide data transfer speeds to make that broadband experience valuable to users; and to provide the bandwidth necessary for content providers to continue to make the Internet a cultural, societal, and economic engine for growth.” That is a fairly decent goal, and one-day it will happen. But how?

I recall waiting for the cable providers in my area to provide broadband service to my development. Friends and coworkers in neighboring develops were receiving broadband coverage for years before it ever reached me, and the delay was simply a confusion over which hub served our area. (You would think that the hub that provided our cable television was also the hub supplying the internet service.) Since those frustrating times, I have enjoyed 10 years of relatively reliable broadband coverage.

However, there are still some areas in the U.S. that doesn’t have coverage. Many of these locations are in rural areas where it would be just too expensive to lay cable to supply just a handful of potential users. One alternative that the Broadband for America group should consider is broadband delivered via satellite. Satellite internet service providerssuch as Wild Blue, HughesNet, and DirectTV can transmit their service to remote locations with ease the same way as cell phones such as the iPhone can connect to the net through their wireless signal.

I feel that this is the way our internet access will evolve in the near future. Ford should understand this, as Tennessee has many rural towns, which might be why he is an honorary board member. Is it cheaper to transmit signals via satellite than to lay cable all over the United States? I would have to think so, as well as being more environmentally friendly.