Obamacare isn’t in a death spiral and repeating the claim, and citing markets with one or few carriers in the marketplace as evidence won’t make it so.
As a starting point, the very notion of a singular thing called Obamacare “collapsing” is conceptually flawed. “Obamacare” could collapse as a whole in theory, if it were designed much more haphazardly than it is. But the truth on the ground is nearly the opposite.
Obamacare isn’t one thing at all: It’s dozens and dozens of markets across the country, the compositions of which vary by region. Some of these markets are thriving, others are not; they are not collapsing en masse, and, thus, neither is Obamacare. To the contrary, the design of Obamacare makes it nearly death spiral-proof, because it insulates most consumers from premium increases, by linking subsidy levels to income and premium prices. Thus, even where single companies dominate, costs to consumers can be fairly stable.
The CBO does say that markets under AHCA would eventually stabilize, so it isn’t intellectually honest for people who don’t like Trumpcare to say Trumpcare will destroy insurance markets, just because we don’t want AHCA to pass. But the CBO also says that, under current law, “subsidies to purchase coverage combined with the penalties paid by uninsured people stemming from the individual mandate are anticipated to cause sufficient demand for insurance by people with low health care expenditures for the market to be stable.”
In other words, Obamacare isn’t “collapsing” or in a “death spiral,” and when Ryan, President Donald Trump and other Republicans say otherwise, as they often do unchallenged, they are lying.
John Deere is notorious for arguing that farmers who buy its tractors actually “license” them because Deere still owns the copyright to the tractors’ software; in 2015, the US Copyright Office affirmed that farmers were allowed to jailbreak their tractors to effect repairs and modifications.
But the Copyright Office doesn’t have the legal power to allow anyone to make a tool to make such modifications, which makes the Copyright Office exemption pretty symbolic.
Nevertheless, Deere responded immediately to the Copyright Office ruling by amending the EULA for its tractors to prohibit any such modification, third party repairs, etc, and made farmers click through the EULA and “agree” to it in order to start up their tractors.
Now, farmers find themselves in desperate straits. Not only does Deere gouge them on repairs (“$230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize [a user-swapped] part”), but the repair shops can be far away or busy, and thus a half-million dollar tractor can sit immobilized while a farmer frets about getting his crops in.
To add insult to injury, the new Deere EULA makes farmers indemnify the company against “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.”
But farmers need to get their crops in, and they expect to be able to go on fixing, tuning and modifying their tractors as they’ve done since tractors were invented, and so they are turning to the Ukrainian black market. Breaking DRM is illegal in the Ukraine, but the law is less vigorously enforced, so Ukrainian manufacturers offer downloadable cracks that allow farmers to seize control of their tractors, violating their license agreements but saving their crops and their money.
Motherboard’s Jason Koebler bought his way into the paid, invite-only forums where farmers trade advice and suggestions on fixing, tuning and improving their tractors, and lived to tell the tale, which is a fascinating story of fake parts sold from ag-business websites that used to launder payments for login codes to the illegal tractor underground.
Nebraska and four other states are considering “right to repair” legislation that would do away with this ugly business in favor of just, you know, letting farmers treat their tractors as though they belonged to them. This legislation is being vigorously opposed by an unholy alliance of automotive companies, Apple, and Big Ag, all of whom want to keep their cushy, government-enforced monopolies intact.
America is in a crisis of governance. There is no adult in charge.
Instead, we have as president an unhinged narcissistic child who tweets absurd lies and holds rallies to prop up his fragile ego, whose conflicts of financial interest are ubiquitous, and whose presidency is under a “gray cloud” of suspicion (according to the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) for colluding with Russian agents to obtain office in the 2016 election.
He’s advised by his daughter, his son-in-law, and an oddball who once ran a white supremacist fake-news outlet.
His cabinet is an assortment of billionaires, CEOs, veterans of Wall Street, and ideologues, none of whom has any idea about how to govern and most of whom don’t believe in the laws their departments are in charge of implementing anyway.
He has downgraded or eviscerated groups responsible for giving presidents professional advice on foreign policy, foreign intelligence, economics, science, and domestic policy. He gets most of what he learns from television.
Meanwhile, Congress is in the hands of Republicans who for years have only said “no,” who have become expert at stopping whatever a president wants to do but don’t have a clue how to initiate policy, most of whom have never passed a budget into law, and, more generally, don’t much like government and have not shared responsibility for governing the nation.
As a result of all this, the most powerful nation in the world with the largest economy in the world is rudderless and leaderless.
Where we need thoughtful resolve we have thoughtless name-calling. Where we need democratic deliberation we have authoritarian rants and rallies. Where we need vision we have myopia.
The only way out of this crisis of governance is for us – the vast majority of Americans who deserve and know better – to take charge. Your country needs you desperately.
Some Context: one of my fellow players in a game is a rock golemn named Scoria. This exchange happened when the GM asked us on skype if we were available to play over the upcoming weekend:
GM: what’s the weekend plans guys?
Scoria: I am ready to roll.
GM: But are you ready to rock?
Scoria: You’re a real gem, GM
Player: stfu
Scoria: I’m sorry, shale we talk about this later?
Player: How dare you
Scoria: I got a bit boulder
Player: I s2g
Me: I think the puns rock. Perhaps you’re just too impatient to wait for a really nice one to crystallize. In the meantime you’ll just be losing your marbles over some lime jokes
Player: Why do you do this to me?
GM: Because we love you. Granite, we’re not very nice people.
Me: I wanted to throw out more puns in response, but I’ve hit a wall. They’re really too hard. Player is right, we should all some back down to Earth and start over, you know, with a clean slate. No more forced rock puns to stalagnate our conversations
Player: F***ING
Me: Uh oh, I’ve sent your and my relationship down a rocky road. Maybe if I’m gneiss you’ll be willing to drop all this grit and work with my based on sediment alone.
Player: z;ldkfjgn;zkjb
Me: I suppose I have norite to ask for forgiveness. Of quartz, I’ve earned your skarn. If you can’t forgive me I’ll just have to boulder on without you.
Player: why do you hate me?
Me: I don’t, I just love puns. But I’m done. I spent a solid 10 minutes reading up on names of rocks. It’s too much effort and I’m not even the rock golemn who should be making these puns.
Player: I’ll just silt over here and be quiet then
Scoria: I was driving!
Me: I’ve put more effort into thinking of rock puns in the last hour then I think you’ve done in entirety of the time you’ve played as Scoria. Not that I’m really keeping Scor(ia).
The U.S. Secret Service requested $60 million in additional funding for the next year, offering the most precise estimate yet of the escalating costs for travel and protection resulting from the unusually complicated lifestyle of the Trump family, according to internal agency documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
Nearly half of the additional money, $26.8 million, would pay to protect President Trump’s family and private home in New York’s Trump Tower, the documents show, while $33 million would be spent on travel costs incurred by “the president, vice president and other visiting heads of state.”
The documents, part of the Secret Service’s request for the fiscal 2018 budget, reflect the costly surprise facing Secret Service agents tasked with guarding the president’s large and far-flung family, accommodating their ambitious travel schedules and fortifying the three-floor Manhattan penthouse where first lady Melania Trump and son Barron live.
Trump has spent most of his weekends since the inauguration at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and his sons have traveled the world to promote Trump properties with Secret Service agents in tow.
The latest figures on government-backed student loans are in, and with them, the news that the US government took $176 million out of ex-students paychecks and Social Security in the last three months of 2015.
That’s up $6M from the previous three months.
In addition, ex-students who’d gotten behind on their payments coughed up $1.7B in “rehabilitation” payments and $82.9 in “voluntary” payments.
2015 saw more than a million student borrowers enter “delinquency” on their debts, and most of these borrowers had entered delinquency at least once before.
It paints a picture of millions of Americans struggling with debts from the most expensive post-secondary system in the world, a system whose costs have ballooned even as payments to teaching staff and job prospects for grads have shrunk.
