Date and Location:

November 9–10, 2010

NTSB Conference Center

Short Description:

On November 9–10, 2010, the National Transportation Safety Board is holding a public forum on Safety, Mobility, and Aging Drivers. This forum will be held in the NTSB Board Room at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC. It will be open for public attendance and also available by webcast.

The forum will kick off with a discussion of safety metrics – accidents, injury, and fatalities – to help us understand the transportation risks associated with aging. An occupant protection panel will explore the details of decreased injury tolerance with age and the complications associated from recovery given a crash injury. It will be followed by a highway and vehicle design panel that will discuss the infrastructure and vehicle design efforts to improve the performance of aging drivers.

The second day of the forum will begin with consideration of the ways we can assess driver capability, both in terms of mental and physical abilities. The forum will close with a panel that looks at the variety of State Department of Motor Vehicle licensing approaches that have been enacted by state legislatures in recent years.

The Board recognizes that not all stakeholders were represented in person at the aging driver forum. Because it was not possible to accommodate everyone who wanted to participate, those individuals and organizations who wish to submit written comments may do so until November 30, 2010. Please submit your comments to mailto: agingdriver@ntsb.gov.

The material here is from the NTSB Official Website But if you do submit comments they are mail-bounced as “unknown user” …

Bottom line: The NTSB National Transportation Board is so incompetent they cannot even get a mailto address working on their website. No wonder the public thinks that the federal government is ineffective and that we pay too much for it.

RFC 3463 and RFC 5248

Request for Comments (RFC) 3463 was published in January 2003 and is titled “Enhanced Mail System Status Codes”. This RFC was updated in June 2008 by RFC 5248 which describes current best practices. They were adopted in order to address deficiencies in error messages coming from SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The objective is to produce more informative error messages when mail cannot be delivered. My best estimate of the situation is that someone at NTSB forgot to establish a mailbox for agingdriver. RFC 3463 indicates that there should be a mailbox for postmaster@ntsb.gov … we shall see if there is.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Death Panel Idol

Dog days, mid August. Congress is out, health care reform is a hot topic. This is a great time to scare seniors with talk of death panels and euthanasia. These imaginary death panels seem to be the work of Betsy McCaughey, a thinktanker at the right-leaning Hudson Institute.

There is a provision in one of the health care bills that says doctors may be compensated by Medicare for the time they spend counselling patients on end of life decisions like Living Wills, Advanced Health Care Directives and such. It takes an evil imagination to twist a noncontroversial idea – seniors should make end of life decisions ahead of time – into some sinister plot to have the government pick who gets health care or not.

Your Gypsy Chief blogger will be 73 next month. Procrastination has been a life issue with me. But the bullshit being foisted off on seniors by Betsy McCaughey, Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley and friends didn’t make me scared – it made me mad.

Mad enough to do something about it. First thing is we’re all going to die. Recognize that fact. Make it easier on those you leave behind by making your wishes known now, before you fall into a vegatative state.

Second, I don’t feel that I need counselling by a doctor in order to determine what end of life options are best for me.

For me, a consideration is do I want to live a little longer with tubes sticking out until the money is gone, or would I rather leave something for my kids to inherit.

I am so mad about this death panel stuff that I decided to stop procrasting and make a Living Will. I went to LegalZoom.com . The proces is very easy and straightforward. You can save a partially completed worksheet and return to it later. It took me less than half an hour to get the whole thing done.

That is how I beat the Betsy McCaughey – Sarah Palin – Chuck Grassley death panel.

Two other points to be made. People who deliberately make stuff up like these false death panels should not be considered as having a credible voice in the health care debate. I think that news directors make a huge mistake by allowing folks like Betsy McCaughey to have any air time when they have proved they do not deserve it. News directors do so to ‘present the other side of the story’. But that is just nonsense. The story is do we or do we not want to provide Medicare reimbursement for doctors to consult with patients on end of life decisions like Living Wills.

Final point. People think they can scare seniors by using loaded terms like death panels and forced euthanasia. Not all seniors are dumb enough or so poorly informed as to fall for such tactics.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

Photo Credit: Paula Abdul Death Panel photo is the work of Mike Licht. See http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/

NYSE: MCD 3 Month Chart

There is an Internet spoof going on. Do not fall for it. You get an email promising to add $200 to your account for filling out an eight question survey. As with email like this I turned on full message headers and forwarded it to spoof@mcdonalds.com. Two days later I got an unknown user message from the MAILER DAEMON. There is no email user at mcdonalds dot com known as spoof. Thinking this strange I logged on to McDonaldsto take a look. Buried deep within the site is a notice that McDonald’s is aware of this Internet spoof and is ‘investigating’ . This tells me that McDonald’s does not seek the public’s help in tracking down these criminals.

What Corporate Social Responsibility?

McDonald’s has zero corporate social responsibility for the spoof. This does not mean that they do not have a problem. By not enlisting the public’s help it seems to me that McDonald’s management exhibits a tone deafness to the real world we live in. It sure would not take much action for them to create an email user known as spoof to provide a place for the public to forward spoof emails.

Tracking Down Criminals

Win $200 With McDonald’s
Monday, February 9, 2009 6:31 AM
From McDonald`s Mon Feb 9 14:31:38 2009
Return-Path:
Authentication-Results: mta191.mail.mud.yahoo.com from=McDonalds.com; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=McDonalds.com; dkim=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 222.227.72.67 (EHLO ns.sjc-sendai.co.jp) (222.227.72.67) by mta191.mail.mud.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 09 Feb 2009 06:43:25 -0800
Received: from User (static-70-100-8-246.br1.blu.wv.frontiernet.net [70.100.8.246]) (authenticated) by ns.sjc-sendai.co.jp (8.11.6p2/8.11.6) with ESMTP id n19EfLa15109; Mon, 9 Feb 2009 23:41:21 +0900
Message-Id: <200902091441.n19EfLa15109@ns.sjc-sendai.co.jp>
From:
“McDonald`s”

This is a portion of the full message headers I got.
Here is the actual link. Note that it does not point to McDonalds.
To access the form please click the link below :
“nofollow” href=”http://paupas.com/McDonalds/index.htm” target=”_blank”>http://www.McDonalds.com/online.survey/index.html
Who are they? In any event, I hope someone shuts them down. Sorry to see that McDonalds does not seek our help.

AARP Weighs In
Here is a good story from AARP with some details of this and other scams.
AARP Scam Alert
There are several good links as well.
Posted by The GNUinator