Taking the caring out of Affordable Care
It’s truly extraordinary, the lengths modern conservatism will go to to ensure that more members of what Dickens called "the surplus population" will die. First, refuse to set up state-run exchanges, so that the poor and working-class people of your state who are desperate to buy subsidized health insurance have to go to the federal exchange. Next, after your own decision not to set up an exchange has made the existence of the federal exchange necessary, you scour the Affordable Care Act and find one sentence that left out one or two words that could enable you to discredit the federal exchange. Then you sue, claiming that the federally facilitated exchange, which exists because legislators had to plan around what they knew would be your own inaction and hostility, is illegal! Then, you get a couple of aggressively activist judges to agree with you.
Millions of people will be at risk of losing their no-longer-subsidized insurance, or see their rates shoot up to levels they simply can’t afford. And some, or many, will surely die sooner than they would have. What a legacy.
--Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
News that should be but isn't
Too bad we’ll never see this news story: "The U.N. Security Council met today in emergency session to discuss the fact that Madagascar, one the world’s most biodiversity-rich nations, lost another percentage of its plant and animal species." Or this: "Secretary of State John Kerry today broke off his vacation and rushed to Madagascar to try to negotiate a cease-fire between the loggers, poachers, miners and farmers threatening to devour the last fragments of Madagascar’s unique forests and the tiny group of dedicated local environmentalists trying to protect them."
Because that won’t happen, we have to think about how this one-of-a-kind natural world can be protected with the limited resources here. We know the answer in theory -- a well-managed national system of parks and reserves is vital because, given the current trends, anything outside such protected zones would be devoured by development and population growth. For Madagascar, this is particularly vital because, without its forests, neither its amazing plants nor animals will survive -- which are a joy unto themselves and also attract critical tourist income for this incredibly poor country -- and the people won’t survive either. These forests maintain the clean and sustainable water supplies and soils that Madagascar’s exploding population requires.
We have to preserve this natural environment," Hery Rajaonarimampianina, Madagascar’s president, told me in an interview. "One of my major policies is to develop eco-tourism. This can bring a lot of jobs. The problem is the poverty of the people that lead them to destroy the environment. That is very sad."
MADAGASCAR’S ecological challenge parallel’s the Middle East’s political challenge. The struggle here is all about preserving Madagascar’s natural diversity so its people will have the resilience, tools and options to ensure a decent future. A diverse system in nature is much more resilient and adaptable to change. Monocultures are enormously susceptible to disease. They can be wiped out by a single pest or weather event in a way that a poly-culture cannot.
In the Middle East today, though, the last remnants of poly-cultural nation states and communities are being wiped out. Christians are fleeing the Arab-Muslim world. Islamist jihadists in Syria and Iraq are beheading those who won’t convert to their puritanical Islam. Jews and Palestinians, Shiites and Sunnis keep forcing each other into tighter and tighter ghettos. So a human rain forest once rich with ethnic and religious diversity is becoming a collection of disconnected monocultures, enormously susceptible to disease -- diseased ideas.
--Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
Blowing the dog away
Perhaps the most common victim of police militarization is the family dog. About 250 to 300 cop-shoots-dog cases are now recorded in the U.S. media every year, according to Randall Lockwood of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and he estimates that another 1,000 aren’t reported. Some of the shot dogs are dangerous breeds trained to attack, but many are family pets that simply get excited and fearful during raids and bark at police officers. The dead dogs include such breeds as Chihuahuas and golden retrievers, and even a miniature dachshund that made the mistake of growling at a police officer during one SWAT operation. "These guys think that the only solution to a dog that’s yapping or charging is shooting and killing it," says former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper. "It goes with the notion that police officers have to control every situation."
--The Week
Homing in on extraterrestrial life
NASA scientists say they will find proof of life on other planets within 20 years with the help of a new space telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, will be the first space telescope capable of detecting biosignatures--the chemical footprints of life-sustaining compounds--in the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system. The $8.8 billion device will build on the discoveries of its predecessor, the Kepler Space Telescope, which have led to the realization that nearly every one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy has at least one planet orbiting it.
The Webb is equipped with a 21-foot mirror, the largest ever to be sent into space, and will orbit at an altitude of 930,000 miles, four times the distance between the moon and Earth. The telescope will scan exoplanet atmospheres for signs of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gases produced by living organisms. "Just imagine the moment when we find potential signatures of life," said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Imagine the moment when the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over."
--Los Angeles Times
Why inequality isn’t so bad
Is income inequality really getting worse? It depends on whom you ask. "Yes, the problem has become more acute within most individual nations," but across the globe, income inequality has been falling, not rising, for most of the past 20 years. That’s largely thanks to the economic surges of China and India, which have been "among the most egalitarian developments in history."
This doesn’t mean, of course, that rising inequality shouldn’t be cause for some concern. But it is "not always the most relevant problem," and it’s too often seen through a domestic lens. Free trade might increase inequality within one country, for instance, but decrease inequality on the planet as a whole. The rise of Chinese exports has probably held down some middle-class wages in the U.S. and enriched wealthy Americans who own shares in Chinese companies. But Chinese growth has also "drastically reduced poverty" within China and increased global prosperity. So though we’re told that inequality is up and capitalism is failing us, the truth isn’t so simple. The "more correct and nuanced" appraisal is that "we have been living in equalizing times for the world--a change that has been largely for the good."
--Tyler Cowen, New York Times
Getting up to "speed" in broadband land
U.S. broadband speeds are getting faster, but they still lag behind those in other nations, said Zach Epstein in BGR.com. According to a new report from Akamai, the national connection rate jumped 31 percent to 10.5 megabits per second in the first quarter of 2014. But that growth still only places the U.S. in the No. 12 spot, slower than countries like Ireland and Finland, and far behind international leader South Korea, which claimed the top spot with an average speed of 23.6 Mbps and a whopping year-over-year growth of 145 percent. At home, Virginia, Delaware, and Massachusetts had the highest average speeds, at more than 13 Mbps, while Alaska, Montana, Kentucky, and Arkansas rounded out the list of states with the slowest connections, with average speeds around 7 Mbps.
--The Week
The evils of scheduling software
Unfortunately, the weakness in the labor market has coincided with yet another market development: scheduling software . . . that allows retailers to manage their workforce as another just-in-time input. Workers are asked to input blocks of hours when they will be available; the software then crunches through everyone’s availability and spits out a schedule that takes account of everything from weather forecasts to the danger that a worker will go over the number of hours to still be considered part time.
Obviously, you can’t string together multiple jobs this way, because each job requires that you block out many more available hours than you will actually work. In this situation, no matter how hard you are willing to work, stringing together anything approaching a minimum income becomes impossible. That makes it much more deeply troubling than low pay.
--Megan McArdle, The Atlantic
When TV series are canceled mid-plot . . .
Q: Given the number of TV shows with continuing stories that get canceled every year with no resolution or answers (e.g. "Revolution"), wouldn’t it be nice if the producers released a summary of where the story would have gone if it had continued? This would be minimal work for them and would make viewers much less upset.
A: Usually, when a serialized story ends, a producer is asked what would have come next. And sometimes they have answers. A recent question and answer in this column included what might have been for "Dirty Sexy Money. "You can find a video pitch from "Veronica Mars"for what would have been its fourth season--if it had gotten one. "Deadwood" mastermind David Milch explains some of where his show was headed in an extra in the complete series DVD and Blu-ray sets.
But the painful fact is, the people making television do not always know where they are going. For one thing, unless they are given the luxury of an announced final season, they don’t know exactly how long they will be around. So do they prepare an arc for one more season, or expect to have more than that? "How I Met Your Mother" stayed on the air for so long, it eventually morphed into "How Ted and Robin Ended Up Together"--and had to kill off the “mother” to do that. "Magnum, P.I." seemed to end with Thomas Magnum dead at the end of the seventh season, Then it was renewed for an eighth and had to bring Magnum back to life.
But sometimes producers are just short-sighted. A notorious case is that of Fox’s series "Reunion," which involved a murder mystery. Not only was it canceled during its first season, before solving the mystery, it was reportedly dropped before even the producers had decided who the killer was.
--Rich Heldenfels, Akron Beacon-Journal