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Tuesday, July 3, 2012
The Start to Finish Guide to a Perfect, Stress-Free Vacation
July 3rd, 2012Top StoryThe Start to Finish Guide to a Perfect, Stress-Free VacationBy Whitson Gordon
This post is broken into four parts. If you'd like to skip to a certain section of the guide (maybe, for example, you've already finished your pre-travel prep), you can do so with the links below:
Part One: Pre-Travel PreparationThe key to an easy vacation is planning as much in advance as is practical (though there is something to be said for awesome, last-minute vacations). That means putting together your itinerary for the trip, applying for time off from work, and getting all your reservations in order as soon as possible (and packing, of course). Here are a few tricks for making your preparation easy and cheap. Find Great Deals on Flights, Hotels, and MoreFinding flights and other accommodations cheaply is no different than shopping for anything else: the key is to shop around and find the best price. Figure out the best time to buy—usually on a Tuesday afternoon eight weeks away from your vacation—and then use a travel-oriented search engine to help you find a good deal. Kayak was far and away your favorite when we polled you on the subject, due to its ability to search multiple sites at once and provide you with seriously low prices. It also has a lot of advanced search features, like a "Hacker Fare" checker that will let you know if two one-way tickets is cheaper than a round trip ticket, and things like that.
Lastly, if you're planning your vacation far in advance, you can use a service like Farecast to find out when those tickets will be cheapest, then wait to buy them then. Of course, if you really want to dig your heels into the deal-finding part of the process, be sure to check out our much more detailed ultimate travel hacking guide. Keep Your Trip Information Organized with TripIt
Now, when you forget what time your flight leaves, you can check the TripIt app on your smartphone, or from the browser on your computer. It'll give you all the info you'll need about your reservation, notify you if anything changes, and even sync with your calendar so you always have your flight info right there. You'll never have to search through your inbox for that information again: it's all just a few taps away on your phone. Pack Like a ProAs travel day inches closer, the last thing you'll want to do is pack all your luggage ahead of time. The further ahead you begin preparing, the less likely you are to forget something. I'll usually pull out my suitcase a week or two ahead of time and just start throwing things on top of it as I think of them. That way, they aren't all packed away, but at least they're all in one place so I don't forget them when I zip everything up.
If you have some more formal clothes, like suits, you can pack those like a dry cleaner to keep them wrinkle-free. Lastly, make sure you pack these handy unusual items, and consolidate some of your space with these multitaskers. When you're done, you should have no problem living out of your carry-on. More Hacks for Perfect PreparationIf you want to do a bit of deeper research into the art of travel preparation, here are a few tips and articles we didn't mention above:
Part Two: Travel DayArguably the most stressful part of vacation is the day you spend at the airport. Luckily, part one takes care of a lot of that stress: you're already on top of any delays that may happen, you've got the perfect seat on your flight, and you haven't forgotten to pack anything. Here are a few things you can do on travel day to make sure everything continues going smoothly. Breeze Through Security
Survive the Long Journey
More Hacks for Surviving Travel DayWe've covered a lot of good travel day hacks over the years. Here are a few we didn't mention above, but still warrant a look:
Part Three: Your VacationIf you've done everything right so far, you shouldn't have too much trouble relaxing on your vacation. We've shared a few ways to find things to do in a new city, from smartphone travel guides to strategies for finding interesting places, but chances are you've already planned out a good portion of this vacation ahead of time. That said, here are a few things to remember as you enjoy your trip:
Your vacation is your own, so use it to do whatever you want to do. If your itinerary is stressing you out, skip it and book a spa day instead. The whole point is to relax and recharge from your stressful work life, so don't turn sightseeing into an exercise in getting things done. Photo by Kenny Louie. Part Four: Returning Home
This guide may stress you out on its own with all the information contained within, but remember that this is merely a guide. Your vacation can be anything you want it to be, even if it's just avoiding travel altogether and finding new things to do at home. Find what works for you and don't worry about the rest. If you're starting to burn out from work, you'll no doubt find ways to relax yourself when vacation time kicks in. Title image remixed from Chris Brindley .  |
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Beez in the Capitation: How Nicki Minaj and John Roberts are Both Constructionists at Heart
July 3rd, 2012Top StoryBeez in the Capitation: How Nicki Minaj and John Roberts are Both Constructionists at HeartBy Moe Tkacik
Fourteen days before the Supreme Court announced its decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, the rapper Nicki Minaj prophesied the spirit of its legal argument while conducting an otherwise apolitical round of fan relations with a few of her 13.3 million Twitter followers.
Minaj responded with a brief but trenchant Twitter tirade:
Prior to this moment Minaj had been a subtle champion of the individual mandate, going so far as to mock a theoretical hater for settling for "basic insurance and it don't include dental" in a song released a few months after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. But at the end of the day, she could not in good conscience taunt her rivals with lines like, "As the IRS bitch I'm paying for your healthcare" if beloved childhood television personalities were being reduced to online panhandling for cancer meds. And so, perhaps inspired by her surroundings in Berlin-where half the per capita health care spending affords 1.3 times as many doctors and 2.6 times as many hospital beds per capita as in the United States-more likely simply emboldened by her famously enormous balls, she took her grievance directly to the commander in chief:
There was no answer from the president that night, but somewhere John Roberts was working on the beginning of one. He concurred with Minaj that "too much involved" was the central problem plaguing the Affordable Care Act. Too much tortured language, to begin with. The attorneys charged with arguing the White House's case against the various legal challenges against the bill explained the bill as a "novel exercise of power" to "rely on market mechanisms and efficiency" to harness the "unique nature of this market" to "force individuals into the insurance market" by the rationale that they possessed "a certain pool of actuarial risks that would actually lead to lower premiums"; which is to say:
In a single day's oral arguments the word "market" had been uttered roughly 200 times, to say of the two dozen invocations of "risk", and ten each of "actuary" and "efficiency", moving Justice Scalia to at one point blurt out: "Isn't that a very artificial way of talking about what somebody is doing?" And what about the problematic term "individual mandate"? Wherefore this mania to couch in the rhetoric of rugged individualism such an ancient and decisively cooperative institution as tithing to care for the sick?
After all, Roberts continued, the Constitution's framers were "not metaphysical philosophers" but "practical" men who viewed their task, in the words of a 1905 Supreme Court decision on liquor taxation, as "prescribing in language clear and intelligible the powers that government was to take." And in practical terms, this was a tax. Nicki Minaj knew it, her 13.3 million followers knew it, and the Founding Fathers, wherever they were, knew it:
As it happens Benjamin Franklin was the preeminent health care policy pundit of the age, and an ardent champion of universal health care. But as a practical man of an era before it became common for such men to endow "the market" with metaphysical properties his ideas on the subject are perhaps more illuminating for their practical applications than their philosophical ones. And in the halcyon era when "the market" denoted a physical space at which commerce was transacted it was manifestly clear that the sick and diseased had no place there. Indeed, disease was understood largely to be an unfortunate side effect of freer trade and more grueling labor. The sick did not belong in "the market", nor did they fetch large sums at slave auctions; at best they were "inactive," period; at worse, they infected their inaction throughout the entire enterprise, as founder Benjamin Franklin observed in a 1731 letter to his youngest sister about a smallpox epidemic:
Twenty years later when he was petitioning Pennsylvanians to fund America's first hospital, however, he appealed to their better angels. "Administering comfort and relief to the sick" was, he explained, Christianity's proudest contribution to civilization.
Of the numerous asterisks in this ostensibly sweeping declaration, "well-regulated" presented perhaps the thorniest, as Yvette Wilson learned as the often extortionate American health care system conspired to aggravate her bodily pains with the additional insult of poverty in the months before her death. For today American health care is an extremely active and monstrously inefficient market that has been in numerous ways deliberately rigged to spread poverty like tuberculosis throughout the previously unafflicted classes of the insured and relatively affluent. The particular strain that infected the comedian in all likelihood originated when a somewhat uniquely perverse law called the Medicare Modernization Act went into effect in 2006 that changed the Medicare reimbursement guidelines for pharmaceuticals in various ways that ultimately favored brand name over generic drug manufacturers. An epidemic of rampant cost-cutting among the generic drugmakers ensued, leading quickly to some of the more harrowing FDA inspection reports the industry had produced in recent memory; a few rounds of work stoppages and plant closures followed. By 2009, the system was beset by a medicine famine of unprecedented proportions, with cancer drugs in particularly short supply; of the 300-400 drugs that have experienced shortages in the three years since, 44 are oncology drugs. The market responded: by 2010 hospital purchasing departments were reporting an onslaught of emails and flyers from obscure, newly-formed independent distributors advertising scarce drugs for sale at vastly inflated prices. The most egregious markups were on the drug cytarabine, which raises a late-stage leukemia patient's odds of survival from roughly zero to 50%; last year a two-year-old Miami-based distributor called Allied Medical Supply offered the drug for $995 a vial, a 6,213% markup over its typical price. The shortage most likely to have affected Wilson's case was paclitaxel, the chemotherapy drug most commonly used in late-stage breast, ovarian and cervical cancer cases. A seven-year-old Colorado distributor called Superior Health Care emailed hospitals last year offering that drug for $500 a vial, a more modest 669% markup over its regular price of $65. Last year a consortium of 42 nonprofit acute care hospitals spent two weeks tracking every sales pitch it received for drugs on the FDA shortage list, reporting 1,745 pitches from 18 distributors in all and an average markup of 650%. An estimated 550,000 cancer patients missed or postponed a chemotherapy session due to the shortages in 2011. The hoarding of potentially lifesaving drugs and information about medical advancements was among the innumerable grievances that drove the Founding Fathers away from Britain, as the Boston lawyer Benjamin Kent lamented wryly in a 1766 letter to Franklin about a promising new gout remedy:
But the unhappy creatures had considerably less to extort away from them in those days, and entrepreneurs like Allied founder Anthony Minnuto and Superior CEO Mark Snyder had yet to hone their sales pitches and multiply their miserable impact on the American economy as they have today. Minnuto was not even in the medical supply business before he founded Allied in 2008; he was a real estate speculator and evangelist of something he called the "PASSIVE INCOME FOR LIFE" system, which claimed to empower followers to build enough wealth to retire on within a single month by learning the fine art of acquiring apartment buildings with no money down. Thousands of South Floridians were flooding into the more dubious corners of the pharmaceutical business that same year, as state attorney Michael Satz observed in a report on the sudden surge in organized prescription painkiller "tourism" to south Florida between late 2007 and 2009, a period during which the number of strip mall "pain clinics" in Broward County county surged from four to 115. Supplying the sprawling "pill mill" network that fuels that other unprecedented health care crisis, opiate addiction, is a huge and profitable source of business for most independent drug wholesalers, and until recently the industry has barely been policed. Superior was a rare exception: in October 2008 the DEA fined the company $200,000 and suspended its controlled substances license for maintaining "inaccurate and incomplete records" of its hydrocodone (Vicodin) business "on at least 58 separate occasions" in 2007; then in 2009 the Colorado and California Boards of Pharmacy both filed suit against Superior alleging that the company had resold drugs purchased from unlicensed proprietors, shipped controlled substances without a license during the DEA investigation and a host of other infractions. This censure did not exactly put the fear of God into Myers et al; when House Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings launched an investigation into drug price gouging last fall, the company's attorney simply ignored his phone calls and requests for information. Price gouging on medication is only illegal in three states, and Cummings is, as a member of the minority, for all intents and purposes powerless to do anything. Meanwhile Oversight chairman Darrell Issa got to work on a report pinning blame for the shortage crisis on overzealous FDA inspectors and the insufficiently profitable reimbursement guidelines set by the Medicare Modernization Act. Without mentioning the role of wholesalers like Superior and Allied, the report essentially defended their virtue, liberally referencing the analysis of former Obama health care adviser Dr. Ezekiel (brother of Rahm) Emanuel along with the natural infallibility of the metaphysical Market to do so:
But there is an old saying about "normal market forces": they consist of greed and fear; the rest is bullshit. What men like Issa and Emanuel are ultimately laboring to sustain is a magnitude of greed commensurate with the average Joe's fear of death. As Minaj contemporary Lady Gaga's own crusade against the conditions that led one of her fans to commit suicide demonstrates, that fear is falling precipitously among young people: a veteran now kills himself every 80 minutes. Drug overdose deaths, mostly from prescription painkillers, now number some 40,000 annually. And you and I and Nicki Minaj are paying for it: nearly half the overdose victims in many states are Medicaid recipients. And that is by design: Medicaid patients were a primary target market for Oxycontin when Purdue Pharma originally introduced the drug in 1996, and the company has settled Medicaid fraud lawsuits with numerous states, most famously Virginia, where three Purdue executives pled guilty to felony mislabeling in 2007. Less famously, one of the first states to sue was West Virginia, which remains today the nation's leader in prescription drug overdose deaths. But the company retained< a well-connected attorney named Eric Holder to negotiate with the state, and ended up settling for only $10 million, a pittance next to the $630 million Virginia managed to squeeze out. Perhaps with this great shame in mind, West Virginia senator Jay Rockefeller, who chairs the commerce committee, is now leading the campaign to outlaw pharmaceutical price gouging and end the drug shortage crisis, which is estimated to be delaying or depriving treatment for as many as 40% of the state's cancer patients. Whatever the case, though: as oblivious as the Beltway's corporate speechmakers generally sound when congratulating themselves over how satisfied we all are with the health care system, it is an international embarrassment verging on a Philip K. Dick novel. What is so heartening about Nicki Minaj and a lot of her contemporaries is that they have refused to follow their lame president's example by resigning themselves to this dystopian status quo, and they won't let their fans lose hope either:
There has been talk that an official White House invitation might be in store for Minaj to air her views on health care directly to @BarackObama the person, and certainly the cursed generation could use a decent lobbyist on the issue. But surely until last week some shrewd member of the campaign bro-taucracy would have taken the opportunity to brief the young thought leader on the critical messaging importance of referring to Obamacare as an "individual mandate" and not a "tax." Thanks to John Roberts, they will now at least be forced to speak to Nicki Minaj and her 13.3 million followers in their own language, as the Founders intended.  |
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Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: The Kotaku Review
July 3rd, 2012Top StoryTheatrhythm Final Fantasy: The Kotaku ReviewBy Jason Schreier
"Hmm, that's a difficult one," Hazama said. "I suppose I'd say it's basically a Final Fantasy music game." Can't put it much better than that. Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, which Square Enix releases today for 3DS, is indeed a Final Fantasy music game. To play, you tap along to the beat on the system's bottom touchscreen, doing your best to keep up with the frenetic pulse of horizontally-scrolling buttons. Some you hold; some you swipe; some you just tap. It's not unlike Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, or, for the more hardened gamers out there, Elite Beat Agents. The big difference here is that the songs are all from Final Fantasy games, which means Theatrhythm will reach into the back of your mind and tickle the part that fondly dreams about traveling to the moon to kill Golbez or scouring the Planet for clues in a futile attempt to bring Aeris back to life. Theatrhythm's tagline is "Play Your Memories," and indeed, it makes no bones about wanting only to appeal to your old-school sensibilities. The intro screen tells you to "see the nostalgic worlds of Final Fantasy revived." This is a game that assumes you've played at least two or three installments in Square's seminal role-playing game series. If you haven't, Theatrhythm doesn't care about you.  WHY: It's an addictive, challenging rhythm game that's sublime in small doses. Theatrhythm Final FantasyDeveloper: indieszero/Square Enix Type of game: Rhythm Two Things I Loved
Two Things I Hated
Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes
And hey, if you've never so much as touched a Final Fantasy, you probably shouldn't care about this one either. Theatrhythm is divided into three main sections. There's the Series mode, which lets you pick one of the first 13 (!) main Final Fantasy titles and play through a few of its tracks. There's the Challenge mode, which gives you access to tougher versions of each of these tracks, including a hair-raising Ultimate difficulty that came very close to giving me carpal tunnel. And there's the Chaos Shrine, the closest Theatrhythm comes to a dungeon, which hands you 99 levels of rhythmic battling and exploring through random series of tracks. There are also three types of musical gameplay: Battle mode, which pits you against cartoony enemies as your four party members stand in a line, Final Fantasy-style, each waiting for his or her turn to attack. Field mode, in which you walk across the gurgling volcanos and disaster-ravaged plains from various Final Fantasy games, sliding your stylus up and down to the infectious beat. And then there's Event mode, an attempt to make you feel even more wistful by setting Theatrhythm's tracks to background montages from old Final Fantasy games. And while some hardcore fans might appreciate the fact that these scenes are presented in Japanese, I did not. I'm not going to feel wistful for times past by reminiscing about those times in a different language. Sadly, there's no real single-player campaign or storyline in the game, something that feels very apparent once you've played through the same song twenty or thirty times. Note that not all of your favorite Final Fantasy tracks are in this game. Each title's selection is rather limited, and they range from the intensely memorable (Final Fantasy VII's "Aerith's Theme") to the thoroughly dull (Final Fantasy XII's "Giza Plains"). Some of my favorite songs are actually reserved for the menus, like a banging remix of Final Fantasy VII's "Highwind Takes to the Skies." Others will be available later as downloadable content. What's really special about Theatrhythm, and what makes playing it really worthwhile, is that it challenges you to beat yourself rather than some arbitrary set of designer-instituted difficulties. When you fail, you know you failed because you couldn't master the timing. And to get better, you won't have to grind for levels or get better pixels: you'll have to practice over and over again until your timing is right. It's this type of challenge that kept me saying things like "just one more try" until suddenly it was 2am and my 3DS was out of batteries and I'd just played Theatrhythm for half of the night. Click to view In many ways Theatrhythm feels like a mini-game collection, the type of accessory that might have been fully included as a sidequest one of Square's old Final Fantasy games. It's best played in short sessions, due to the lack of unifying campaign or story mode. But it's frenetic and addictive, designed as the perfect diversion for a certain type of person: the nostalgia-embracing, rhythm-loving Final Fantasy superfan. P.S. If you're trying to ask for this game at a store, you should know that it's pronounced "THEATER-RHYTHM." I think.  |
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