Umbral Echoes Blog

As reported by Forbes, there is a provision of the healthcare reform law called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect — 85% for large group insurers — on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

I had thought that this was just a general rule of “we cap your profits at 15-20% overall.”  However, if I am understanding some paperwork my company recently got from BCBS, it seems that this is on a per customer basis.

Let that settle in for a bit, because it’s huge.

So let’s say that I’m on my company plan, and I don’t use my insurance for much of anything. Regardless of what the other people in my company on that plan do, I personally get a rebate check back. The insurance company sends it to my employer, who is then legally required to send it on to me. On first look it’s pretty awesome, but I think there are some side effects to this.

Possible Positive Side Effect

It encourages people to be healthy.  If you’re healthy and don’t need anything other than routine check-ups, you could get a sizable rebate back.

Possible Negative Side Effect

This actually discourages people from getting regular check-ups, and even discourages them from being treated when they are sick — especially people in lower income brackets who stand to gain more proportionally from these rebates.

Debatable Side Effect

A bigger side effect, however, is that I’m pretty sure this will eventually mean the end of private insurance companies, or at the very least it will mean some serious changes to them. Whether this is a good or bad thing is debatable, but let me explain why it is likely.

Insurance companies are only allowed to make 20% profit max off of any one individual, yet the losses they can suffer from someone who costs them money are not currently capped. So one person who needs regular arthritis medication, or a heart surgery, or cancer treatment, will be worth many healthy people. And with the health situation of this country only getting worse, I can’t imagine that insurance companies will be able to stay afloat if this medical loss ratio is on a per-person basis.

Insurance companies can only work around this in two ways, that I see. First, they could severely lower lifetime max benefits — so maybe most plans would only pay out a maximum of $100,000 over your entire life. Second, and more likely, they could jack rates up so high that the 15-20% that they’re getting from healthy people still pays for the less-healthy people.

Example: Let’s say that there are 4 “healthy” (never need anything but routine check-ups) people for every 1 unhealthy person, and that on average the unhealthy person costs the insurance company an average of $600 per month — that’s off the top of my head, but I think that including surgeries, medications, specialist visits, etc. that number isn’t too far off.  To just break even they would have to charge $600/mo for each person on the plan.  And even that would actually cause the insurance company to go under because they couldn’t pay for workers or buildings. So let’s also assume that the insurance company has about a 15% overhead (which I believe is insanely low as far as insurance companies go).  That means $690/mo per person on the plan, and that’s assuming it’s not a large group plan.  If it is, that number jumps to $920/mo per person.

If insurance companies take that “jacking the prices up” route, and there is a government option for healthcare, I think that employers and individuals are all going to opt for the government option. Hence, the eventual end of private insurance.

If we were a healthier country, or had lower medical costs (a huge portion of medical costs go toward medical insurance because of our messed up legal system), those numbers would be much lower. For example, if we have one unhealthy person for every 9 healthy people, it cuts those premiums in half. But this speaks to a different point that I will likely make in another post.

First off, what happened in Japan is horrible. I do not at all mean to downplay any of the tragedy that occurred there. Also, I do not claim to be an expert on nuclear technology. However, I do know a fair amount, and more than enough to be able to distill what others (such as the people at MIT) have written. And I like my friends to be informed, and able to call bullshit on media hype when appropriate.

So with that said, this nuclear reactor stuff has been generating a lot of buzzwords in the media, which I don’t think many people understand. If you don’t want to read all this crap, skip to the TL;DR section at the bottom.

What is nuclear meltdown?

That’s when the reactor goes out of control and there’s a nuclear explosion like in Chernobyl, right? Wrong.

It’s basically when the rods melt themselves, and their surroundings. That’s it. If complete nuclear meltdown is all that occurs, nothing bad happens. Well, except the company that owns the reactor will have to spend a lot of money to reclaim the uranium back out of the soup of melted crud inside the containment unit. And nuclear plants are engineered with multiple redundant levels of fail-safes, and further engineered such that even if all of that goes wrong, the damage will be minimal.

Also, let me side-track a moment to talk about Chernobyl. First off, it wasn’t a nuclear explosion — not in the sense of an atom bomb. Many things went wrong there, not the least of them was that the plant was poorly built. Also, it was not kept up very well. Also, it was understaffed. Also, the people who were on the staff made many bad decisions. What happened was that the core suffered meltdown, containment measures failed, and there was a non-nuclear, regular ol’ hydrogen/oxygen explosion that scattered radioactive crap everywhere. Essentially, it was a dirty bomb.

So what’s going on in Japan?

Okay, to know what’s going on, first you have to know a little about how nuclear reactors work. This will be a simplistic crash course. First, the 4 levels of containment:

1. The uranium resides in little ceramic oxide pellets, about 1cm tall and wide. They have a melting point in the neighborhood of 2800 °C.
2. Those reside in Zircaloy casings, forming fuel rods. Those have a melting point around 1200 °C.
3. Those are put into what is essentially a big steel pressure cooker that operates at around 1000 PSI.
4. The entire main loop of the reactor — the “pressure cooker”, pumps, and pipes that contain water (which is used as a coolant) — is housed in a thick concrete and steel casing.
5. There’s technically a 5th level: the plant itself. But it doesn’t do much as far as containment goes, functionally speaking.

#4 is the big one. It’s made to contain a complete core meltdown indefinitely. So if a meltdown does occur, everything is contained in this (including the radiation), and inside is a soup of the rest of the crap.

When the earthquake started, control rods were dumped into the core to stop the reactions, but there are secondary reactions that take a while to wind down, so the cores will keep producing heat for several days in the meantime. Heat is normally good — nuclear reactors are kind of like big steam engines. They heat up the water, which turns into steam and spins turbines which produce electricity.

The earthquake that hit was several times the power of what it was built to take (the Richter scale is logarithmic, so a 9.0 earthquake is ten times as bad as an 8.0). That wasn’t so bad on its own, but then the tsunami hit.

All right, so what about the explosions?

Long story short, this caused the cooling systems to fail. It was a pretty epic fail, including instances of them bringing in backup power to keep the water pumping, but not having connectors to connect the power where they needed it to go.

So pressure was building — literally and figuratively.  They needed to vent some gas outside of containment to alleviate that.  Unfortunately, at those temperatures, the hydrogen and oxygen tend to break apart, which makes for a nice explosive mix.  This wouldn’t normally be a problem because of the amount of water that is still in the air, but when it hit the cooler roof of the plant, some of the water vapor condensed, tipping the balance in favor of the combustible gases, and a spark somewhere made a boom.  This happened in reactors 1 and 3 at Daiichi, and the boom was outside of containment. The more recent boom at reactor 2 was different, and of greater concern, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Why vent gas from containment though? Isn’t that radioactive?

Well yes, it is… for a few seconds, literally, before it becomes safe. In some of the venting-induced explosions, some more-radioactive material got vented. At 9:37am (JST) the radiation level was around 3130 micro
Sieverts. That’s definitely not good, but to put that into perspective, if you were exposed to 100x that level for an entire day, you might feel nausea and have some damage to bone marrow. However, just an hour later, it had dropped to about 1/10th of that, and continued to drop off (albeit more slowly) after that.

So why the hubbub?

People hear radiation and possible nuclear meltdown, and it’s sensational. Which makes people watch the news. Which allows the news corporations to sell commercial time for much more money. From what I know, at this point there’s really only one thing to be concerned about:

Possible degradation of containment at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2

Remember containment element #4 above; that thick concrete/steel casing? Earlier today (March 15th) it was reported that there was an explosion at unit 2 inside that primary containment unit, damaging the suppression chamber (a doughnut-shaped chamber holding water and meant to depressurize the core). This is more serious than the other 2 explosions. The gas causing the explosion should have been vented, and exploded outside of containment if at all (as with units 1 and 3), but for reasons yet unknown, it wasn’t vented, and it went boom inside of there. If the suppression chamber is damaged badly enough, I presume it means pressure will build again, faster, until there is a bigger boom. Which could end up being like Chernobyl.

TL;DR

So what does all that mean? The explosion before today were no big deal. The radiation released so far was no big deal. The explosion today could cause the shit to hit the fan, however.

A friend just posted a link to this interview with Suzanne Venker, co-author (along with Phyllis Schlafly) of The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know—and Men Can’t Say. Feminists will probably be familiar with Schlafly already, and this interview with Venker is… well, read it for yourself.

As a note, I do consider myself a feminist; I believe in equal pay for equal work, and that employers should treat women the same as men. I also believe in equal treatment both ways, so for example I think women in the military should be allowed in combat, but should also have equal physical fitness requirements as men.  Physics don’t care whether you’re a man or a woman — if your buddy (who weighs 230 lbs. including gear) gets knocked unconscious by an IED, you’d better damn well be able to pull that buddy to safety, period.

And whatever strides [feminism] made in the workforce have had tremendous ramifications for businesses, so they came at a great cost to businesses and government. It’s a double-edged sword.

The abuse problem is smaller than it’s made out to be, and when you draw attention to something that’s so terrible, it’s like the issue of homosexuality today. The awareness that gays exist, or that terrible men beat their wives, is good to recognize but not to belabor or exaggerate.

Why would you have a whole movement to make women feel better about not choosing to have children?

It is my belief that ultimately nobody, male or female, can be happy with that lifestyle, with having sex with whoever they want, having sex with your friends, or one night stands and all that.

Feminists are not concerned with anybody outside of America.

I understand that there are some valid points in this woman’s philosophy.  Feminism is about equal opportunities, but some feminists disrespect women who choose to be homemakers, and that’s not cool.  And… yeah, I think that’s about the only valid point I see.  People like this disgust me.

Yet still I’m glad that I live in a country where they can spout their nonsense.

Not a new thing, I know. This has been an off-and-on hot topic (pun intended) for a while now. There seem to be two schools of thought:

School 1: Carbon dioxide emissions have been causing global warming, so we need to cut CO2 emissions.
School 2: Global warming is a natural, cyclical phenomenon, so we don’t need to cut CO2 emissions.

Who’s right? Hell if I know. In fact, we’ll never know (probably not in the lifetime of anyone reading this, anyway), so let’s take who’s right out of the equation. “Absurd!” you say? No. Because regardless of who’s right, I really don’t understand why there’s a debate on what we should do.

My logic is thus: we don’t lose much (relatively speaking) by cutting CO2 emissions over time, even if school 2 is right. However, we lose a great deal by not cutting CO2 emissions if school 1 is right.

Let’s take an analogy. There are 2 roads. One of those roads you know to be longer, and one shorter. However, the shorter road might just kill you — you’re not sure, but it might — while the longer road will definitely not. Most who are of the second school of thought are saying that we should take the shorter road. I can’t say that I really understand that philosophy.

I realize that there are some rational people in the 2nd school of thought. They believe the odds are so low that we are causing global warming that it’s silly to overreact, and by implementing stiff regulations the U.S. will lose even more industrial-economic power to China. I can understand that, but I really don’t think the odds are that low, that the loss to our economy outweighs the possibility of pretty much making the planet into a shit-hole. School 2 seems more like wishful thinking to me — like a teenager with no concept of his own mortality, unable to comprehend risks.

With today’s release of iOS 4.2, i would like to comment on a few basic features that are missing from the iPhone experience.

Voice text entry. Anywhere there is a text entry field, I should have the option to press a microphone icon to enter text via voice. I think this feature could actually save lives, and lots of dollars’ worth of car repairs, for people who just can’t seem to stop texting while driving^*, even though it’s illegal in many states now. It seems silly to me that iPhones already have voice recognition for spoken commands (like calling someone, playing a certain song, etc.), but not for general text entry. This would be useful for other things too, like getting directions while you’re already on the road — I actually use Bing’s navigation app sometimes, specifically because I can search and enter addresses via my voice.

Text to speech. Likewise, I would like built-in functionality to have text messages, or other simple things (like emails), read to me. Not necessarily web pages or anything complex like that, though — I know that would be nearly impossible to do well for anything other than very simple web pages.

If this were Android, there could be an app to do both of these things, but apps don’t have access to text messages on the iPhone. Well, actually Android already has voice transcription for most places where you can enter text, from what I’ve seen. Maybe I should install Android on my iPhone. However, come to think of it, the Google Voice app could fairly easily add both of these things (for text messages), if Google wanted.

Better photo management/organization. I would also like the ability to save pictures to something other than the default album, and the ability to move items between albums. I’m not sure why this wasn’t possible from the initial version of the iPhone.

I fully expect all three of these things to be implemented by Apple… eventually. Sooner rather than later would be nice, though. And the speech-to-text feature may indeed be sooner, since there are rumors that Apple recently purchased Nuance, the makers of the voice recognition software Dragon Naturally Speaking (and also the makers of a free voice recognition app for the iPhone).

* Yes, I realize this is still distracted driving, which is also very dangerous, but it’s not quite so dangerous as actually taking your eyes off the road for a few seconds at a time.

This post is in relation to the World of Darkness Online MMO that was recently announced at The Grand Masquerade. I've heard a few gripes that seem to come up a lot in various forms and forums, and I would like to address them here. Most of my thoughts boil down to: stop making assumptions, and have patience.

They aren't adding in X supernatural type, so I'm not going to play this game!

So what have they said?

The top-level points below have been outright stated (mostly at The Grand Masquerade), sub-points are logical extensions that others have drawn.

• It will be a player-driven game with lots of social and political elements.
  • Giving power to the players is a double-edged sword. So while they might not have mechanics to stop someone from talking in netspeak and being a douche, other players will presumably have the power to smack that bitch down¹.
• The themes that the game explores will be: Mystery, Romance, Power, Danger.
• It will be an adult game, that aims to invoke emotion in you.
• Vampires will be the only supernatural player characters, but stuff from the other games will be present in some form. Also, there will be the option to play a human, though no specifics on that were given.
  •  Other supernaturals will most likely be environmental content, NPCs, that sort of thing.
  •  Humans will likely be ghouls or blood dolls, but maybe we could see some human vampire hunter PCs too.
• Character customizability and aesthetics will be big in this game. They have even hired a fashion consultant.
• They want to make the game as accessible as possible, and this is one of their criteria for success. So they want it to be fun for both hardcore and casual gamers.
• They also want to cater to an array of players by having three ways you can play the game: sandbox (open-ended like EVE), theme park (traditional MMOs like WoW), and coffee shop (social). These playstyles will be interconnected, with each one feeding to and from one of the others.
• The game will not be combat-intensive, unless you choose to play it that way.
  •  Being the biggest social/political mover and shaker will garner you far more power than being the strongest fighter.
• Factions and territories will be a big part of the game.
• The game will have gay clubs.
• The game will be fully PvP, but that's not to say that you can be attacked anywhere. If you don't want to get attacked, you might want to hang around Elysium a lot.
  • This will probably be like any LARP. If you go down a dark alleyway, you might get jumped by your enemies, or even some random person. On the other hand, if the person jumping you breaks the Masquerade, they're in for trouble.
• Some Disciplines will not be included because they're impossible to have in an MMO, like Temporis.

There are some other things, mostly other nitty-gritty stuff like they are using Scrum development methodologies, have already spent like 314 man-years (which equals one Shane DeFreest year)  in development, etc. But that's the core of what is publicly known about the game so far.

It seems to me that the vast majority of people have political beliefs that benefit their situation. That seems natural, but then again, isn't selfishness something that we as humans try to work past? Civilization exists for the greater good of everyone, after all.

But again, it seems that most people are unable to grasp this, or at best they justify selfishness with logic instead of looking at things logically from the get-go. The rich say, "Less taxes on the rich!" The poor and middle class say, "More taxes on the rich!" This is normal, and people who hold selfish political beliefs generally don't interest me. It's expected. Though sometimes their systems of self-justification are interesting, ranging from thought-provoking to absurd.

What really pique my interest are people whose political views don't benefit themselves, or people like themselves. The person who says, "You know, I'd be okay with paying more taxes." The rich woman who says, "I think welfare is a necessary part of our society." The all-American country boy who says, "Shit, let more Mexicans in — they're just takin' the jobs we don't wanna do anyway!" The unemployed man who says, "I think unemployment benefits are too high." The girl eligible for disability who says, "I don't need this." The retired person who says, "I don't think there should be social security."

I personally hold some political beliefs that definitely don't benefit me. I think that taxes need to be higher — though I also think that government spending needs to be more efficient. I'm fine with the near-fact that people in my generation will pay social security but not get anything back from it. Not all of my political beliefs are that way, of course, but a few are. And though I know a few people who are the same, it seems that by and large, such people are very much in the minority.

This would seem to me to lead toward a tyranny of the majority. If 75% of the (voting) people realize that they can take resources from everyone else, and they vote for candidates that enact laws which benefit them (at cost to others), then… well, I think you can see where this is headed.

This line of thought always leads me to this quote, which is often attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler though its origins are still unclear (some attribute it to Alexis de Tocqueville):

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.

Sounds a little scary, huh?

I will start this out by saying that DragonCon was my first convention ever. I went on a lark at the last minute in 2003 thanks to a friend, and had an absolute blast. I met tons of new and completely awesome people (I'm still good friends with my roommates from the first year), saw lots of cool panels, took hundreds of pictures, and got almost no sleep because I was too excited to waste my time sleeping.

Since then, the convention has gotten different for me, and in general. I hardly take any pictures. Yes, it's full of awesome costumes. They'll be there next year too. And the year after. I go to fewer panels. As time goes on, DragonCon is more about hanging out with friends and partying than it is seeing celebs or sitting in on panels. Many of those friends, I only get to see once a year at DragonCon, in fact. So generally I plan one or two panel-type things to do per day, max, and otherwise just fly by the seat of my pants.

Caveat: A lot of this might seem very doom and gloom. My intent here is to prepare you for the worst. Things aren't necessarily this bad, but if you go in prepared for what could happen, you will have a much better con experience.

What you came here for

Okay, enough with the reminiscing. DragonCon, if done improperly, is a torturous thing. Some bits of advice actually come from the pitfalls the poor E experienced in that linked blog post. So here are some tips to get you through the convention:

• Parking: Don't park downtown. For the love of Cthulu, just don't do it. If you're lucky, it will only be absurdly expensive. If you're not lucky, you'll get your car booted. Most of the little lots that seem like they're cheap will "reset" at 6am, so you have to pay again around 6-7am or have your car booted (which will cost you about $75). They are especially bad about doing this on Saturday morning, when the parade is. I speak from experience (see picture to the right). So where do you park? The convention hotels are all right by the Peachtree MARTA rail station, so I highly advise that you park at a MARTA station with long-term parking, and take the train down. Some MARTA stations will charge $5 per day, and some are free. For those of you who have never taken public transportation before: don't panic. It's very easy, and safe, and after you've done it you'll laugh at yourself for being so nervous about it.
• Hotels: Book at one of the convention hotels, in October or November. Whenever they open up, book a room at one of the convention hotels (preferably Marriott, Hyatt, or Hilton). It's well worth it to have your room right there, without having to take a cab or train back. They are expensive though; with taxes, plan on paying around $200 per night.
• Hotel check-in: Do it early, request a low floor. Elevator wait times are absurd. Really, really absurd. At 1am, you seriously might have to wait 30+ minutes to get on an elevator. So if you can get a floor low enough that you can just use the stairs, do it. Also, by "early" I mean, get there around 11am on Thursday. Have a job or something else that prevents you from coming until Friday? Pray that some non-convention-goer left a room on Friday. Otherwise, you're fucked.
• Elevators: Go down to go up (and vice-versa). It's sad that people do this, because it actually slows down the elevators overall. But because so many other people do it, you sort of have to, in order to get anywhere. So no matter which direction you're going, push both buttons, and hop on the first elevator with a spot regardless of which way it's going.
• Badge lines: Bring a book. This year, on-site registration (the people who didn't get one ahead of time) had very short lines, like 30 minutes or less. For those who wanted to save money and pre-registered? 5-6 hour waits. No exaggeration. However, I'm betting that because of that serious dichotomy, more people will pay on-site next year. So either way, plan on staying a while. I suggest getting in line Thursday or Friday morning, about an hour before the lines actually open up. That way you'll only have around 2 hours total waiting, and it won't be in the blistering hot Atlanta sun.
  Edit: Next year they're supposed to be using a barcode scanning system that will speed things up. Cross your fingers and hope that it works; if so, waits should be more like 1-2 hours max.
  • Alternatively, you can do what I did and get an eternal badge. This is if you know you're going to be coming to at least 10 more Dragon*Cons, otherwise it's not worth it. But if you are, you pay 10x the going rate for on-site registration (this last year that meant $1,000), and you get a forever pass. Now, you still have to get a badge each year, you just don't have to pay for it and you get in a special eternals-only line, which has almost no wait.
• Celebrity panels: Watch them on Dragon*Con TV. Seriously. It's either that, or get in line 3 hours before the panel begins. If you only get there an hour early, you won't get in. This also applies to otherwise popular panels, like the Buffy Horror Picture Show, and pretty much anything to do with Firefly. Lines literally wrap around the hotels for these panels. If someone is being organized about it, they'll count and say, "Everyone past here won't get in." That level of organization and thought is a very rare occurrence though.
  Edit: This isn't necessarily true in all cases (mainly for popular celebs/shows, though sometimes even then you'll get lucky), but it's best to plan ahead. If you get there 3 hours early and no one is in line, go do something else for 30-45 minutes then come back.
• Room parties: find where they are, and go to them. DigiTribe usually has an awesome open roomparty all weekend long. They don't charge for booze, but they gladly accept donations, so please toss 'em a few bucks so that they don't run out on Friday night. There are other cool room parties, but sometimes you just have to know someone throwing one, to know where they are.
• Drinking: Know your limits, stick to one type of drink. Trust me, it is Bad News^TM to start off with beer, move to vodka crans, then finish the night off with a Jaeger bomb. Other normal drinking rules apply: know your limits, eat well beforehand, and if you're female don't leave your drink unattended (I've never heard of someone getting slipped something in their drink at DCon, but better safe than sorry). Also, stock up on Saturday. Beer and liquor cannot be sold at bars on Sunday in Georgia (only at bars). Yeah, fuck the Bible Belt and our teetotalling governor. Also, don't buy drinks at Pulse in the Marriott. They're stupid expensive, like $16 for a Grey Goose martini expensive. Rum buckets are the way to go, generally available at the bar on the smoker's deck of the Hyatt. $12 for about 6-8 shots of rum in a tasty mixed drink. Cross the street from Marriott to Hyatt, go up the stairs, and the smoker's deck is the area right before all the glass doors.
• Eating: bring snacks, don't expect to get a seat in the food court. The places in the food court are actually pretty decent at getting people their food quickly. And they are amazingly nice for having to deal with such a horde of people. But there is simply not enough seating for everyone. So be prepared to go back to your hotel room to eat, or to camp out on the floor somewhere. Also, bring snacks. Not only can they help you wait until after the lunch/dinner rush, they come in quite handy at 3am when you're plastered and really need something other than booze to put in your stomach. There's only one good 24-hour food place near the convention, the Metro Café Diner.
• Buying stuff: avoid impulse buys (generally). What I do is take a picture of things I want on Friday (along with the price tag and booth it's at), then on Saturday or Sunday if I still want them, I'll buy. However, if there's only one or two of what you want left, this rule doesn't necessarily apply. This year, I lost out on getting a sweet leather mask because I waited too long.
• Walking around: be careful where you walk. This actually consists of a few parts:
  • Do not, under any circumstances, just stop where you are. Step off to the side, then stop. If you can't find a place outside of traffic in the immediate vicinity, then keep walking until you do. Otherwise the fifty people behind you will keep moving forward while you're trying to stop, and you are the loser in that equation. This applies everywhere with crowds, including the dealer rooms.
  • Don't rush into empty pockets in crowds. If you're in a really crowded area and you see a big empty pocket? Look again; there's someone trying to set up a picture there. They've probably been trying to do so for the past few minutes because dumbasses keep getting in their way. Do not be one of those dumbasses.
  • When you get to the bottom of escalators, keep moving. If there are people not moving in front of you when you get to the bottom, yell at them. If they don't respond immediately, push them the fuck out of the way. Screw politeness; this is safety. People get hurt because of stop-ups at the bottom of the escalator. If you stop, even if it's because someone in front of you is stopped, expect to be pushed. Really, the people behind you have absolutely no choice in the matter — that escalator sure as hell isn't stopping, after all. (Note: usually there will be hotel security staff making sure that people keep moving. Do not be angry at them; they keep things sane.)
    
• Waiting in lines: be sociable. You'll be surprised at the awesome people you will meet while waiting in line. Plus, it helps pass the time.

I think that about covers my advice. What do you think; is there anything I left out?

Edits/additions based on feedback

• Bathe. Do this, every day. If you need to, bathe once in the morning and once in the afternoon or evening. Remember the rule of thumb: if you can smell yourself at all, other people smell it ten times worse. And if you really hate the funk on others, carry a small bottle of Febreeze and spritz people who stink around you. Be nice about it, and they'll probably even thank you, since most geeks don't seem to be aware of the statement in bold above. The same goes for bad breath — carry some gum with you and offer it to people with halitosis when having a conversation. If you talk to enough people, this will happen.
• Beggars: ignore them. Whenever you go even a half-block from the hotel, beggars will ask you for money. They all have a story ("I just need a buck or two to pay for a bus ride back to my family in <city>"). These stories are not true. Do not give them money. Do not tell them "no." The only defense is to pretend like they don't exist. Seriously, even if they get in your personal space, just ignore them. Have a conversation with your friend as if the beggar were incorporeal and invisible. This is the only way to get them to go away. If you tell them, "Sorry I don't have cash," or anything else, they will pester you even more, because you have acknowledged their existence.
• Health: beware the con crud. You've got tens of thousands of people packed into a small area. So carry water with you, don't share drinks or food, wash your hands before eating, and bring some vitamin C along. And if you don't like secondhand smoke, avoid all smoking areas at all costs, especially the smoker's deck at the Hyatt (just outside the Hyatt series of glass doors on the way to the Marriott). Also, if you're drunk, beware the stairs down from there to the street — they will test your equilibrium.
• Costumes and clothing: think it through. First off, they don't call it Hotlanta for nothin'. You're going to be walking around in the heat, so keep this in mind when you're planning your costume. And if you're doing body paint, use sealers so it doesn't run everywhere when you start sweating. Also, you're going to be doing a lot of walking. Ladies (and guys), this means wear comfortable shoes. At the very least, have a backup plan for when those sexy 4-inch stilettos get unbearable. If you're making a complex costume, remember that at some point, you're going to need to use the restroom. Make sure your costume can accommodate that.
• Be nice, and have thick skin. This weekend is fun, but also stressful for a lot of people. A lot of the people here are introverts, and don't do well in large crowds. So try to be nice to them. Also treat the convention staff and hotel staff well. They have to put up with a lot of shit. Don't add to it. They might even be short with you; if so, be nice — you'll be surprised how far you can go with that (apparently this doesn't work on the dicktards who boot cars in the parking lots though).

As time goes on, the debate over gay marriage makes less and less sense to me. Why is it even a question? There is no moral, legal, or even religious argument for why gay marriage should not be allowed within the law.

Here are some reasons why people argue against gay marriage, followed by why those reasons are not valid concerns.

• Gay marriage is against the Bible
  Well that’s fine. No one is trying to force your church to hold a marriage ceremony for two people that it doesn’t agree with. If your argument is that gay marriage should be illegal because the Christian church (mostly) disagrees with it, I point you toward one of the founding principles of our country: the separation of church and state.
• Gay marriage is wrong because it can’t produce offspring
  If a woman is incapable of bearing children, should she be disallowed from getting married? I doubt you’d agree to that. Oh, but the barren woman could adopt, you say? Well then why not a gay couple? The argument for/against gay people being allowed to adopt is, I feel, a separate issue. However, undoubtedly you’ll say…
• Gay people shouldn’t have kids because there is no father/mother figure
  Then if a child’s father dies, and the mother doesn’t immediately re-marry, you absolutely must be in favor of taking the child away from the mother into protective services. What, you’re not in favor of that? That’s not the same? Yes it is. In fact, it’s an even worse situation for the child, if anything — at least with a gay couple, it is not a single-parent situation.
• If we allow gay marriage, then what’s to stop us from allowing a man and his dog to get married?
  Really? Does anyone seriously think that this argument holds water? They must, because I’ve seen it in so many places. Marriage is a legal contract between two people of age. Two people. If you can’t enter into a contract with something (which you can’t, with an animal), then you can’t marry it. Why is that so hard to understand?

The exact same arguments being made against gay marriage today were made against interracial marriage many years ago — it’s against the Bible, it’s immoral, it’s not good for the kids, most people are against it. Decades from now when gay marriage is allowed (I firmly believe it’s inevitable that it will be), the people who are giving those arguments against gay marriage will be looked upon the same way that we now look upon the people who gave those arguments against interracial marriage.

Honestly, I think the term “marriage” should be removed altogether from the law, in favor of civil unions for everyone. If John and Jane want to get married, that’s fine — the law recognizes it as a civil union, the same as if John and Dick want to do the same thing. Again, let’s remember that one of the concepts that this nation was founded on is the separation of church and state. Christianity should be treated no differently, where the government is concerned, than any other religion.

Let it never be said that I’m not willing to try new things, and change my opinions.

Many moons ago, before I discovered this magical nugget called the iPhone, I thought that texting was pretty silly.  Why take 30 seconds writing something out when you could call someone and say it in a fraction of that time?  The phone companies charge extra money to add text messaging to your plan (though I’ll be damned if I know why, other than “because we can”), it’s cumbersome, and impersonal.

Well, recently I’ve discovered that text messaging does have a few good uses.

• At work — When at work, or other places you can’t have a voice conversation, text messaging lets you keep in touch with people.
• Noisy environments — When you’re at a concert, it’s sort of a pain to yell into the phone to tell your friend to shave and queue up the porn for some dirty fun later on.
• Low signal areas — I’ve been in several places where you can’t get enough reception to talk, but there’s still enough of that magical digital bandwidth to push a few characters through.
• When you don’t want to interrupt — Need to ask someone something, but it’s not really that high priority, and they might be in the middle of something more important?  A text works nicely.

I find that I articulate myself better in writing than in speaking anyway — or at least, I think I do.  And as much of an IM junkie as I’ve been over the years, it feels pretty natural to communicate in that way.

However, after exchanging 3 or 4 texts with the same person, I’ll generally just dial their ass.  At that point, you’re both just wasting time typing things out.  Texting is also impersonal, which in some cases is appropriate.  But I find that people over-use it as a means of communication.  Which I’m sure the phone companies are loving.  Damn you Apple!  Come out with your push IM service faster, so I can ditch this damn texting plan and just use AIM or Yahoo to text people.  Biggest annoyance with this phone is that when the screen goes off, you’re also signed off instant messengers and don’t get notified of new messages.

And now I’ll stop this before it becomes any more of a tech rant.