Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

ObamaCare

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…on the ropes?

The ACA, to put it gently, is already on shaky ground. Just last week, for example, the LA Times reported that UnitedHealth, the nation’s largest insurer, is dropping out of California’s individual market. Similarly, Blue Cross Blue Shield will not participate in the exchanges in Iowa and South Dakota in 2014. And the WSJ puts the delay of the employer mandate in its discouraging context. Along with the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated the Medicaid expansion (28 states haven’t yet agreed to expand) and the refusal by many states (over 30) to set up their own health exchanges, the delay is the third major challenge to the central goal of the law: expanding access to insurance.

“You’ve got three body blows toward expansion of coverage,” said Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, a research unit of Deloitte LLP. “It’s three punches in a row.”

Ultimately, this will be decided in sixteen months. Without RomneyCare to muddy the waters, it will be a much better issue for Republicans.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Lawless Rolling Train Wreck That Is ObamaCare

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…continues:

The Affordable Care Act’s Section 1513 states in black-letter law that “(d) Effective Date.—The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” It does not say the Administration can impose the mandate whenever it feels it is politically convenient.

This selective enforcement of laws has become an Administration habit. From immigration (the Dream Act by fiat) to easing welfare reform’s work requirements to selective waivers for No Child Left Behind, the Obama Administration routinely suspends enforcement of or unilaterally rewrites via regulation the laws it dislikes. Now it is doing it again on health care, without any consultation from, much less the approval of, Congress. President Obama probably figures business and Republicans won’t object because they don’t like the law anyway.

Probably. But it’s a mess, and it’s only going to get worse.

Business, Technology and Society

Testdisk: A Data Miracle Tool

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Some of you may recall that I was having drive problems the other day. I was getting the data off my old drive and moving it to a new one when it started issuing bad sector and impending drive failure warnings. As a result, I failed to get the hidden files in my home Linux directory (the most critical data loss was my much of my sent email for the last three years). It was looking pretty grim. ddrescue, which is supposed to be a very powerful data-recovery tool, couldn’t see anything, and attempting to look at it with fdisk to see if the drive was even there just resulted in an overflow error. I took it to a local data-recovery guy, and he put his diagnostics on it, and told me that it was having a delay after the first 30g (of a 2T drive), and that he couldn’t do anything with it (though I think that he understood Windows much better than he did ext4). I was almost resolved to simply mourning the loss, or sending it to a specialist, with the potential of spending many hundreds of dollars and only getting back individual randomly named files with no file structure. But I tried one more thing.

I ran the program most of yesterday (it took from mid-morning until late evening to go through all two terabytes), but when it was done, the logical volume was restored, and the drive looked like new (it’s even possible that it will boot, though I haven’t tried it, and don’t really have any reason to). But I can’t recommend it more highly.

And yes, I will be backing up religiously, with a cron job every night (possibly also to my remote server).

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Obama’s Five-Year Plan

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…for the climate:

Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Barack Obama outlined his “new national climate action plan,” which amounts to a federal top-down five-year plan—although he has only four years to implement it. Obama’s plan ambitiously seeks to control nearly every aspect of how Americans produce and consume energy. The goal is to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases and thus stop boosting the temperature of the earth. The actual result will be to infect the economy with the same sort of sclerosis seen in other centrally planned nations.

This is doubly hubristic: that he thinks he knows what’s happening with the climate, and that he thinks he know what best to do about and that it will work.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A Sweet Deal

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Not for the taxpayers or sugar consumers, though:

That’s right: The federal government protects the sugar industry, lends it money after promising that the loans wouldn’t cost anything to taxpayers, and after all that still ends up having to buy part of its sugar production because borrowers can’t repay the loans. Customers pay higher prices for sugar, and then they pay again when their tax dollars are used to buy over-priced sugar and bad loans. And yet, lawmakers on the Hill continue to support farm interests in spite of the unfairness and inefficiency of the whole system.

This is the opposite of good government.