Under a Gibbous Moon

After several months, I finally got the hospital bill from my car accident way back in November. My car insurance (GEICO) kept up their end and paid. Aetna (my medical insurance) did not.

Various account numbers have been redacted

I called Aetna about this, after 4 minutes on the phone and countless menus, they informed me that they were closed. It would have been nice that if they were going to deny my claim (for yet unknown reasons) that they should have at least told me. No, I have to find out about it when the hospital comes asking for money.

So far, it looks like having Aetna for an insurance company is a very bad idea, well at least for you. Seems like it works out fine for them. Wonder what they’re doing with my premiums?

I’m certain that by now we’ve all heard about the spat between Amazon and Macmillian Publishing over the pricing of eBooks. If not, Macmillian demanded the right to set the price on their eBooks to whatever they felt like and Amazon wanted them capped at $9.99. After an ugly back and forth, Macmillian won.

But this isn’t about that. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Macmillian trying to see what the market will bear with regards to newly published eBooks. What I find far more interesting is how eBooks will bring new life to a different market, low demand and out of print books.

Printing books is an expensive business. There’s the cost of paper and covers, ink and binding. After all that, they have to be shipped to the point of sale. All this means is that for anything to get published, a certain demand must be anticipated. This goes not only for new books but also for older ones. Today’s best seller is tomorrows bargain bin special.

Eventually, and this will vary from title to title, nearly all books will reach the threshold past which it is unprofitable to distribute them in print form. At that point the book falls out of print. It doesn’t mean that there is no longer a demand for this particular title but that merely that there is not enough of it to justify the expense of printing it. This cost is referred to as marginal cost. The beautiful thing about eBooks, though, is that the marginal cost of each eBook is essentially zero dollars.

This means that there is no reason to not have any title on the shelves, since it doesn’t cost money to keep them there. This opens up a whole new world of specialty books, one hit wonders, and former best sellers that would otherwise be difficult to find or would require a very expensive limited run from the publisher.

Detective Rod Tauson of the East Palo Palo Alto (California) Police Department doesn’t like it when other people carry firearms. On his Facebook page, he made threats to shoot those he saw do it, despite the fact that it is legal in his jurisdiction.

I have run into this attitude (not quite this extreme) semi-regularly for the police. That is that they are the only ones who should be given the right to carry a weapon. I have found this odd that, as I have discussed in an earlier post, the police are merely a reactive agency who are not required nor are capable of defending any given individual.

What makes this most repugnant is, in essence, it means that police officers like this consider themselves to be a special class of citizens who are therefore entitled to rights and privileges greater than those given to the rest of us.

This is a dangerous attitude when carried out as part of a larger policing strategy. It leads to a situation where the police stop being protectors and move into the position of keepers, where they define what is and is not allowed and deal with those who disagree with them in any way they feel (look up pretty much anything with the words “Police” and “Brutality”).