There are two maxims that I strongly believe will solve, or directly lead to solving, all of the world’s issues. Everything can be addressed after you take care of these two issues:

• Provide everyone with affordable (or free) health care.
• Provide education opportunities to everyone who wants them.

How you go about providing those issues is complicated, and involves a better understanding of politics, economics, and big business than I currently have. I don’t think that plan is Democratic or Republican — it’s just smart, and makes everything else petty. Everyone’s worrying about social security and retirement, when the main costs the elderly will have to face involves the super-inflating cost of medical care and prescription drugs. If you remove those costs, suddenly their monthly stipend doesn’t seem so bad.

As for education, I’m always enlightened when I hear about loan incentives or anything good to help people who want higher learning to get schooling. Kalamazoo High School grads will get free in-state tuition. For a pilot study, that’s pretty neat. I hope the school district can cope with the influx of students that’s going to create — it’ll be a shame if the post-high-school opportunities are so great but the primary and secondary schools suffer with too few teachers, resources, libraries, programs, etc.

(The third maxim I didn’t mention above, would greatly help our society, involves penalizing frivolous lawsuits. Hot coffee will be hot. Eating unhealthy food will make you unhealthy. Cigarette smoking will kill you. I don’t know a good defintion for frivolous that would hold up in court, but we need to define one, and then slap the people who cause all these nuisance suits with a you’re-wasting-resources countersuit. You better hope you win your original suit, otherwise there will be stiff penalties (money and/or jailtime) for being irresponsible. Maybe a few years of that program would move society away from its wasteful, litigious habits and let people focus on providing new goods and services without fear of being sued for every harmless stupid thing.)

I’m finally getting the desktop PC at home setup, and I want to make some backup copies of my personal files. I have a DVD burner, but I’ve never bought any media for it. Usually, with CDRs, I keep an eye out for the $1 after rebate spindle of 25 or 50. That might only happen a few times a year, but I don’t go through that many CDs that it’s okay, and the rebate bit doesn’t bother me. If anyone sees any good deals for DVDR (DVD+R or DVD-R) media, please let me know.