Entries in Life

This past week the pope said protestant churches weren’t “real” because they didn’t have, among other things, apostolic succession. We Orthodox faired better. Our only defect was our failure to acknowlege the Pope’s authority above all others. At least we know where we stand. The Pope is Catholic and isn’t about to change that. Somehow, I’m not surprised. This isn’t much different than this statement about Christian Unity from 50 years ago:

All Christians should seek Unity. On the other hand, we feel that the whole program of the forthcoming discussion has been framed from a point of view which we cannot conscientiously admit. “The Unity we seek” is for us a given Unity which has never been lost, and, as a Divine gift and an essential mark of Christian existence, could not have been lost. This unity in the Church of Christ is for us a Unity in the Historical Church, in the fullness of faith, in the fullness of continuous sacramental life.

To me, getting worked up about these statements seems rather foolish. I’m Orthodox because I don’t accept the primacy of the Pope, but I crave the sacramental life of the Church. My friends and family are Protestant because they see these claims of authority as, at best, un-necessary and, at worst, divisive power grabs. In fact, contrary to what some have claimed, the Pope did not say those outside the Roman Catholic Church aren’t “saved”: In fact the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using [protestants and Orthodox] as instruments of salvation. The Pope is Catholic. I’m impressed.

After having spent the last year without health insurance and having tried an High-Deductible plan with an HSA, I’ve begun to think (with Milton Friedman) that one big reason health care costs are so high because we don’t pay them directly. I haven’t seen Sicko, but the film evidently includes an anecdote of someone losing the tips of their fingers to a table saw.  I almost lost my left thumb and finger the same way, so I’m sympathetic — to an extent.   I was without work at the time and didn’t have health insurance.  Lucky me, I was able to sign up for the (very expensive) COBRA from my old workplace and able to get the surgery.  Otherwise, I would have had to spend a lot more time in Charity Hospital. By the way, when you show up at a hospital dripping blood they don’t ask you for insurance coverage.  They whisk you in and stitch you up.  Then, when they find you don’t have coverage they say “We have to transfer you.”  If you know you’re going to be transfered, and you can make it to the second hospital without dying, you should try to go there first.  I didn’t and, as a result, by the time I got to the second hospital I wasn’t bleeding, so I was triaged differently and had to wait hours to get further help. Still, my cousin lost the tips of her fingers as a child.  I grew up around a man who’s hand lacked a number of fingers.  It looks strange, but it isn’t as if you are incapacitated. If I had to pay $10,000 to get the tip of my ring finger re-attached or $60,000 to get the tip of my middle finger, I’d probably skip the surgery. If I had to spend my money for my health care, I would make different decisions. The other reason I’ve heard for for high health care costs in the U.S. is liability insurance.  On one trip back home from New York, I sat beside someone involved in “finance” for a health care group.  He told me a story of a case that had just been settled after 3 years of legal expenses.  His group was sued by a patient whose hand they had re-attached.  The man’s hand worked, but he sued because his grip strength was cut in half or something.  Dude, you got your hand!  Be thankful! Still, I’m not sure what the whole answer is.  Some people need ongoing medical care and those expenses can be a huge burden.  It doesn’t feel “right” to tell someone whose child suffers from chronic asthma attacks, “Sorry, since you can’t pay, we can’t help you.”  So I see the need for generosity in the system.  I just doubt that Michael Moore has the answer.

Executive Summary: On average, a user on this server sees less than 10% of the email with their address in their Inbox.  The other 90% of email with their address is marked as a virus or spam and rejected or put in their Spam folder. About 90% of delivery attempts are rejected outright as a blatant spam or virus.

Above are the stats for the mail server I run for the past week.  I use a combination of SpamAssassin, sa-exim, ClamAV, and sa-update to block most spam from even getting delivered.  This is the first time I’ve really looked at these numbers (relying, until now on an intuitive “feel” for how well spam blocking was working). Following is a description of the numbers, reading each line from the bottom up. Bad Addresses: Most delivery attempts have bad addresses.  Most of these are opportunistic spammers; spammers who just run through a dictionary of possible email addresses and attempt to send them email.  Some are viruses, too, I’m sure.  Rejecting them without scanning keeps the server load reasonable. Virus: Once a delivery attempt has given us a valid address and the body of the message, sa-exim jumps into action and scans the message.  First it scans for viruses.  ClamAV marked about 20% of the email it scanned as a virus.  We reject these at delivery time in order to (hopefully) minimize delivery failure notifications.  Usually, you are talking directly to the virus (since ISPs scan outgoing email for viruses) so a rejection at delivery time means no annoying NDN messages for mail you didn’t send. Rejected Spam: Next, sa-exim hands the email to SpamAssassin (SA).  Once SA has scanned the message and returned a score, sa-exim makes a delivery decision.  If the SA score is above 15, the mail is rejected.  Again, rejecting spam at delivery time results in fewer bogus NDN messages since spam often uses a forged Envelope Address. By this time, we’ve rejected almost 90% of delivery attempts because of bad addresses, viruses, or really obvious spam attempts. Spam in the Spam folder: Of the remaining 10%, SA has marked 60% of it as spam and it is put in the user’s spam folder. Ham: The remaining email (~40% of accepted email, ~4% of all email) is classified as non-spam (or Ham) email. This is put in the user’s Inbox. This is fairly effective, but for people like myself who have had the same email account for the past 7 years and have posted it everywhere, that still isn’t enough. The short answer is another layer of email filtering client side. I’ll try to write more on what I’ve done there, later.