Saturday, January 4, 2014
First time in the snow!
The Perverse Exemption...
The Perverse Exemption... James Taranto is back from his vacation, and in his first column for the year he analyzes in detail the plight of Edie Sundby, the Stage 4 gall bladder cancer survivor who wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece critical of ObamaCare a while back. Taranto dug for details about the impact that ObamaCare has had on her, and the results are sobering and frightening: she and her husband are paying much more money for much less coverage, contrary to claims of the progressive ObamaCare supporters. There are many parallels between the Sundby's situation and our own, so this was a particularly meaningful read for us. It's also a good crosscheck on my own investigations, which closely parallel what Mr. Taranto found.
When something that so affects our life is at the mercy of our political process at the federal level, it's a good time to be worried...
When something that so affects our life is at the mercy of our political process at the federal level, it's a good time to be worried...
Repealing “ObamaCare”...
Repealing “ObamaCare”... That's the title of an opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal, but it wasn't what I expected. It's about some academics at Lake Superior State University who want to ban the word “ObamaCare”, not the law. I especially liked the concluding paragraph:
Despite the Lake Superior injunction, we'll continue to use ObamaCare for this offense against medicine, not least because the law neither protects patients nor offers affordable care. Ban that.
The U.K.'s NHS leads the way...
The U.K.'s NHS leads the way ... to fewer doctors. The number of doctors per 1,000 citizens is now lower in the U.K. than in all other EU countries except Slovenia, Romania, and Poland. And this is the model the progressives hold forth for the U.S.!
Repeal of ObamaCare can't come fast enough for me...
Repeal of ObamaCare can't come fast enough for me...
Scientists behaving badly...
Scientists behaving badly... NASA scientists, this time. They're silently revising their projections after the fact. As Robert Zimmerman puts it:
Scientists so good they can predict things after they happen...
Friday, January 3, 2014
Bad Web Behavior Alert: FTD Florists...
Bad Web Behavior Alert: FTD Florists... Back in early November, I used the FTD web site to order flowers for my mother-in-law. The flowers were great, no problems there. But what followed was not great at all: a veritable flood of emails, sometimes as many as three a day, urging me to buy more flowers for a variety of contrived reasons. That by itself wouldn't irritate me; this sort of thing happens all the time. That's why there's an “unsubscribe” feature on just about every legitimate commercial web site. So I unsubscribed from FTD.
And, as you've probably guessed, the emails continued unabated. So I tried unsubscribing again – and noticed, in a tiny font, a little sentence under the giant “Unsubscribe” button. This sentence said, basically, that if you really want to unsubscribe, click on this unreadably-small link. What the giant Unsubscribe button is for remains a mystery. So I clicked on the tiny link, and followed the on-screen directions, and still the emails continued. Fewer of them, but still an annoyingly large number. So I went through the rigamarole again, re-entering my email address (twice for verification!), only to be told that this email was already removed, but if I wanted to unsubscribe to everything from FTD, then click on yet another (also tiny) link. This morning, I did that – and I also added a filter to my gmail account to automatically delete any email that comes from ftd.com.
Folks from FTD, should you find your way here: your incredibly rude web behavior just cost you a customer. And don't bother emailing me; it will just be deleted by my quite reliable, and very easy to set up, gmail filter...
And, as you've probably guessed, the emails continued unabated. So I tried unsubscribing again – and noticed, in a tiny font, a little sentence under the giant “Unsubscribe” button. This sentence said, basically, that if you really want to unsubscribe, click on this unreadably-small link. What the giant Unsubscribe button is for remains a mystery. So I clicked on the tiny link, and followed the on-screen directions, and still the emails continued. Fewer of them, but still an annoyingly large number. So I went through the rigamarole again, re-entering my email address (twice for verification!), only to be told that this email was already removed, but if I wanted to unsubscribe to everything from FTD, then click on yet another (also tiny) link. This morning, I did that – and I also added a filter to my gmail account to automatically delete any email that comes from ftd.com.
Folks from FTD, should you find your way here: your incredibly rude web behavior just cost you a customer. And don't bother emailing me; it will just be deleted by my quite reliable, and very easy to set up, gmail filter...
Escalante Staircase...
No bailout!
No bailout! Charles Krauthammer argues that Republicans should force a vote to repeal the parts of ObamaCare that allows the government to bail out insurance companies that lose money paying out ObamaCare claims. As he concludes:
Who can argue with no bailout? Let the Senate Democrats decide: Support the bailout and lose the Senate. Or oppose the bailout and bury Obamacare.I doubt it's quite that easy, as there are plenty of Democrats who understand full well that a bailout is going to be necessary to save ObamaCare. But easy or not, Krauthammer may well be right that the Republicans could leverage public antipathy – present even in uniformed voters – for bailouts of any kind. And this bailout will be ginormous, that's a virtual certainty at this point...
Happy New Year.
2013 was a banner year...
2013 was a banner year ... for science papers about the solar influence on the Earth's climate. Here's a collection of 71 such papers...
Eleven attorneys general say That One is a law-breaker...
Eleven attorneys general say That One is a law-breaker... They point out the obvious: it's a violation of our U.S. Constitution for the executive branch to arbitrarily decide which of our laws they're going to enforce. Nothing new about the observation, but it is news that top state law enforcers are taking action. They've taken the first step: writing a letter to HHS Secretary Sebelius demanding that the existing laws be enforced. I'm sure it will surprise nobody that all eleven of these attorneys general are Republicans...
New baby in the family?
New baby in the family? No ObamaCare coverage for the little one! Yet another “glitch” in the top-down redesign of our healthcare system by Barry's Bozos. It won't be the last, unfortunately...
ObamaCare causing people to forgo needed treatment...
ObamaCare causing people to forgo needed treatment... The first line of this article (from a U.K. newspaper!) says it all:
Hospital staff in Northern Virginia are turning away sick people on a frigid Thursday morning because they can't determine whether their Obamacare insurance plans are in effect.
Indistinguishable from magic...
I want one!
NSA is building a quantum computer to crack encryption...
NSA is building a quantum computer to crack encryption... This is all over the news today, because it's confirmed in the documents Snowden leaked – but I'm pretty sure that basically everyone in the cryptographic community has been assuming this was the case all along (Snowden leaks or not). Why? Because if a quantum computer could actually be made to work, then the NSA could use it to do one of its primary jobs: reading our adversaries' encrypted communications. So actually I'd be quite disappointed if the NSA wasn't working on a quantum computer – unless, that is, they'd proven it was impossible...
Oops! There goes another ObamaCare promise...
Oops! There goes another ObamaCare promise... One of the oft-repeated “selling points” for ObamaCare was that it would reduce the use of emergency rooms for non-emergency medical care. Oregon studied this notion, and the results are in. Emergency room use for non-emergency care goes up when ObamaCare's provisions are exercised. Oopsie! Megan McArdle has the facts and analysis...
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