Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Irrational “Liberal” Hate

4 Comments

Dissecting the anti-Keystone nonsense:

So what is going on here? Rich liberals hire kids–recent college graduates, or maybe college or high school students–to produce idiotic “research reports” that can be dismantled by anyone familiar with arithmetic, let alone the oil and gas industry, of which these kids obviously know nothing at all. The claims these reports make are completely divorced from reality, but liberals don’t seem to care. The Huffington Post headlines: “Keystone XL Pipeline Could Yield $100 Billion For Koch Brothers.” PolicyMic: “Actually, You Probably WILL Guess Who Stands to Make $100 Billion Off the Keystone XL Pipeline.” TruthDig: “Koch Brothers Stand to Make $100 Billion From Keystone Pipeline.” And, of course, the Kos Kidz are all over it.

Imbecility.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Technology Is Killing ObamaCare

13 Comments

…but it may be able to save us from it:

Over time, I think we’ll see a lot more intelligence moving into medical devices covering a wide range of subjects. (And, in some cases, it may do the job better than a human doctor: When my wife had a heart attack at the age of 37, the EKG machine at the hospital flagged her reading as indicating a possible myocardial infarction, but the doctors dismissed that because she was a young, thin, athletic woman. The machine was right, and they were wrong.)

While we’re a long way from the “autodocs” featured in some science fiction stories, the proliferation of devices that can do extensive blood tests and diagnostic workups doesn’t seem that far away. Neither does the creation of freestanding gadgets that can diagnose things such as strep throat and other staples of doc-in-a-box or nurse-in-a-box practices now.

While such devices will be expensive at first, they’re likely to get steadily cheaper and more capable because, as electronic gadgets, they’ll benefit from Moore’s Law, the steady increase in computing power.

But only if we don’t tax them out of existence, or punish those developing them.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Teaching History

17 Comments

It isn’t happening:

Questioner: What was the Holocaust?
American College Student: Um…I’m on the spot.

Questioner: Which country was Adolf Hitler the leader of?
American College Student: I think it’s Amsterdam?

Questioner: What was Auschwitz?
American College Student: I don’t know.

Questioner: What were the Nuremburg Trials?
American College Student: I don’t know.

Questioner: How many Jews were killed?
American College Student: Hundreds of thousands.

We’re doomed.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

ObamaCare’s Million-Dollar Question

86 Comments

It’s actually a trillion-dollar question: Will enough young people sign up?

There’s another self-inflicted wound that could prove fatal. Since the ACA allows young people to stay on their parents’ health plans until they turn 26, the law dramatically shrinks the pool of healthy young customers whose overpayments on insurance are supposed to subsidize the middle aged beneficiaries of the law.

…All told, we wonder if Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and President Obama are as happy today about Obamacare as they were on the day the law was passed. Beyond that, everything that has happened since passage has confirmed our view that far from solving the problems facing American health care, this poorly drafted, poorly executed system makes the problem of health care reform both more urgent and more difficult.

One of the myriad idiocies about the law is that they let people stay on their parents’ plans until they’re twenty six. Why did these morons imagine that those people that they needed to sign up for their own insurance would do so? It was just part of an incoherent grab bag of goodies they stuffed into the bill to try to sell it to low-infos.

[Update a while later]

Don’t worry, GOP. ObamaCare will defund itself:

With only a small penalty for abstaining, the numbers for signing up not only don’t add up — they’re absurd. Here’s one of the supposedly attractive deals: “One option available only to people under 30 is a so-called catastrophic policy that kicks in after a $6,350 annual deductible. In Monroe County, you can buy that policy on the New York State of Health exchange for as low as $131 a month for single coverage.”

Over fifteen hundred a year for a sixty-three hundred plus deductible? What healthy thirty year old would waste his or her money?

Who invented this plan? Certainly not Obama or Pelosi, neither of whom was paying close attention, I would bet. (Pelosi admitted she wasn’t. All Obama wanted was something to put his name next to, something that sounded vaguely “progressive.”)

Neither Obama or Pelosi is smart enough to even understand the problem.