Category: Creeping socialism

Obamacare and the Thermocline of Truth

Obamacare and the Thermocline of Truth

| September 26, 2013 | 14 Replies

[This post was written several days prior to the launch of Healthcare.gov on October 1, 2013 — I’d say that most of my predictions have been borne out, particularly in Update #3] For nearly 20 years, my professional focus has been on large-scale IT projects: why they succeed and why they so often fail. One of […]

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<strike>Three</strike> Four must-read Friday links

Three Four must-read Friday links

| September 20, 2013 | Reply

  First, Megan McArdle: “Banking without risk is impossible“: The fundamental fact of a banking crisis, which is different from a crisis in any other industry, is that if people believe a financial institution to be bankrupt, it actually is bankrupt. As Arnold Kling puts it, banks exist to reconcile the desire of households to […]

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FEMA blocks flood mapping effort in Colorado

FEMA blocks flood mapping effort in Colorado

| September 16, 2013 | Reply

Via Slashdot comes this slap-your-forehead story over at TechDirt: As you may have heard, Boulder, Colorado has been hit by massive flooding over the past week, and it’s been something of a mess. A local company, Falcon UAV, makers of special drones which are built for the government, approved by the FAA, and specialize in […]

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Quelle horreur!

Quelle horreur!

| September 12, 2013 | Reply

Hat tip to Reason for pointing to this CBS-2 exposé of illegal underground dinner parties in New York City: Clandestine dinner parties like the one Leitner attended have become more common in New York City. And insiders told Leitner they are completely unregulated. When asked at the dinner, “do you ever worry about getting caught?” […]

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NSA: now gunning for college professors who blog

NSA: now gunning for college professors who blog

| September 11, 2013 | Reply

  Via Michael Swaine (on Facebook) comes this Guardian story about the NSA apparently trying to silence a computer science professor blogging about possible encryption compromises: This actually happened yesterday: A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university’s […]

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“The Government”: a parody of “The Office”

| September 10, 2013 | Reply

Jim Geraghty, in his National Review Morning Jolt e-mail newsletter (a must-read; sign up here), gave a link to this new web series, “The Government”. It’s a parody of “The Office”, except that — as far as I can tell — most of the examples cited in the episode are real. The problems with parodies […]

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Let’s look at the actual impact of Obamacare

Let’s look at the actual impact of Obamacare

| September 3, 2013 | 2 Replies

My wife, age 60, has a high-deductible policy with Humana. She got a letter today from Humana outlining the exact impact of Obamacare on her insurance coverage. In essence, she has a choice of converting over to an ACA-compliant policy now, or continuing with her current policy until the end of 2014 (at which point […]

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Happy Labor Day! ILWU leaves AFL-CIO over Obamacare, immigration reform

Happy Labor Day! ILWU leaves AFL-CIO over Obamacare, immigration reform

| September 2, 2013 | Reply

Breitbart posts this news: In what is being reported as a surprise move, the 40,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) announced that they have formally ended their association with the AFL-CIO, one of the nation’s largest private sector unions. The Longshoremen citied Obamacare and immigration reform as two important causes of […]

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The continuing student loan debacle

The continuing student loan debacle

| August 19, 2013 | Reply

Matt Tabbi at Rolling Stone has a (deservedly) scathing article on the growing student loan bubble, something that Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has been writing about for years. Tabbi takes some cheap shots at the Right, but he’s pretty scathing on Obama as well.: Obama had already set himself up as a great champion of […]

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Quote of the day

Quote of the day

| August 13, 2013 | Reply

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has an editorial in USA Today, talking about the barriers to making the US government work. As someone who lived in and around Washington DC for several years, his penultimate paragraph struck home: And that gets to what I think is the real problem lying behind all of this enthusiasm for […]

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