Lobotomized for shopping pleasure

A statuette resembling Aphrodite or Athena, with the top of the head lopped off. Quite common these days, possibly signifying the loss of judgment that is needed when one is to enjoy all that the world has to offer.

Thoughts

Cigna increases premiums while CEO gets more pay

Our medical insurance policy is with Cigna. We’re on the Open Access Plus plan. After I renewed my Cigna policy recently, I got our new insurance cards, and noticed that the premiums and copays increased as follows:

PCP Visit ($20 vs $15)
Specialist ($40 vs $30)
Hospital ER ($100 vs $50)
Urgent Care ($50 vs $25)
Rx ($10/25/50 vs $10/20/45)

Those are some pretty hefty increases, particular for items 2-4 above, so I thought I’d have a look at Cigna’s executive compensation packages, to see if they’re tightening the belt there as well.

Their CEO is H. Edward Hanway. Here’s what he makes [source]:

Current annual compensation: $30.16 million
5-year compensation: $120.51 million
His performance vs. pay rank is 162/175, which means he’s the equivalent of a D/F student

In 2006, two years ago, here’s what he was making [source]:

Annual compensation: $28.82 million
5-year compensation: $78.31 million
Performance vs. pay rank: 166/189, which was slightly better than what he’s averaging now

So what we’ve got here is an overpaid CEO that isn’t pulling his weight, but still paying himself gobs of money off our backs. God knows how much the other executive officers are making, all while we, the customers, get charged more for our premiums and copays. Talk about a rotten deal.

I don’t think that’s fair at all.

Thoughts

Photos back in the site feed

A few weeks ago, I took my Flickr photos out of the site feed [reference]. Last night, I put them back in. Turns out taking them out cut their views by about 60-80%. That taught me two things:

Showed me how few of the hundreds of people who’ve added me as a contact at Flickr actually care about viewing my photos, which was an interesting realization.
Sometimes the desire to keep things organized and neat is trumped by convenience and practicality. Keeping my photos in the feed allows them to be viewed by more people, and for me at least, it’s no fun to share photos if no one looks at them.

The photos are back in the feed for now. We’ll see how long FeedBurner continues to offer the option to do this, or if they improve it to allow daily photo summaries, as they’ve been asked to do by others (including me). FeedBurner’s site has gone strangely silent lately (after their acquisition by Google), and I’m not sure how long they’ll stay in their current iteration. But don’t let that concern you.

Enjoy the photos!

Places

Green heron chicks in the parking lot

Guess what I saw in the parking lot at work? Fledging green heron chicks [reference]. (My thanks to Jorge for identifying them properly.)

I’d noticed the herons flying in and out at times during the past few months, but never even heard or saw the chicks before this, so I didn’t know they’d nested there. Around lunchtime, my colleagues told me they’d seen them, and even showed me photos they took with their cellphones, so I went outside and took a few of my own with my DSLR.

There weren’t just one or two, but six or seven of these little green heron chicks, standing about in the parking lot, unsure of themselves, eyeing me warily, wondering what I wanted to do with them. I guess it was their time to get weaned, so their parents either kicked them out of the nest, or they jumped out by themselves.

According to Wikipedia, they leave the nest at 16 days of age, and can’t fully fend for themselves until they’re 30-35 days of age. This means they’re going to be vulnerable to predators until then, and may even die of starvation if they can’t figure out how to get their food.

Photos taken in McLean, VA. Here’s hoping they’ll make it!

Places

A particularly gloomy night

A night in recent memory featured an almost-full moon and gloomy skies. I took photos. It looked like something out of a scary movie. I used the digital zoom on my camera in order to get closer to the moon, and this means some of the photos aren’t as clear as they should be. Still, I think they’re interesting.