This is quite a campaign video, from Richard Ojeda, running for Congress in WV-3. It’s a brutal district for Dems. Go hard or go home, I guess. Let me know what you think of the campaign video. I’m going to keep running Democratic campaign videos when I find ones that seem interesting (like the Amy McGrath and Randy Bryce ones I put up earlier).
If Corporations Are People…
Uber plays as a shitty, shitty version of the Snidely Whiplash of corporate persons:
The next step:* A letter from a former Uber security employee, accusing the company of secretly surveilling competitors, is expected to be released, in a redacted form, by the court on Friday.
(From The New York Times Dealbook newsletter.)
What’s the crappiest/dumbest thing you’ve ever seen management do where you worked?
And now, for a moment’s amusement and/or devant le revolution tumbrel reservation list, here’s the tea room at Claridges, in the West End, which I had the pleasure of visiting. And that’s it. I didn’t stay. Don’t even know where it is. Really. Don’t warm up the guillotine…please…
I was actually just across the pond for a quick trip, centered on a memorial trip for a beloved aunt, who is one of my models/mentors in the art of living a life with intention. But I did get to do some publishing/broadcasting work while I was there (hence, Claridges) and, as always, had a chance to drop in on some old friends.
So, in a post that is intended to offer a little change of pace from our usual chronicling of the end of the American century, I’ll just sign off with a nod to some of my all-time favorite bovines. (Excuse the reproduction — that’s me with an iPhone.)
I should note — these are cattle ever ready for their closeup:
How now, Brown Cow?
And with a mite of randomness thus inserted into the day….
Open Thread.
*That’s the next step in the trade-secrets case being fought between Uber and Alphabet (Google).
Image: Aelbert Cuyp, The Large Dort, aka A Distant View of Dordrecht, with a Milkmaid and Four Cows, and Other Figures, c. 1650.
It’s in the newly opened (reopened?) Gallery A in the basement level of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The room is a hoot. It’s huge, and it’s populated by a sample of the Nat’s collection across the full range of periods, medieval to 20th c., one space with hundreds of paintings taking you on a wild journey. The pictures are all good, and the room, on its own, would make a hell of a regional museum for almost any city around the world — and yet most of the work is stuff that didn’t quite make the cut for inclusion upstairs. Totally worth a look.
Not A Puppet!
Today’s essential read on Trump and Russia is in the Washington Post, by Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, and Philip Rucker.
Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.
The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government.
The piece frames Trump’s reaction to Russia as an outcome of his ego needs to believe that he and he alone won the election bigly and his wishful thinking that he and Putin, working together, could solve the world’s problems. That’s fair enough, and those two factors are certainly sufficient to produce the effects reported – the biggest of which is that Presidential daily briefings have to be tailored to avoid irritating the Master on the subject.
But a great many people around Trump, including Donald Junior, who testified another nine hours to Congress yesterday, have had extensive contacts with Russia, so it appears there is more there. The question is “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”
Lots of tidbits in the piece. Trump thought Fiona Hill, one of his competent advisors on Russia, was a clerk and got angry at her when she didn’t act like one, with H.R. McMaster compounding the problem by admonishing her. He took a leak during his pre-briefing for his meeting with Angela Merkel. His obsession with NATO as a protection racket continues.
He’s got it half right – we could do a lot of good if we could work with Russia. But that can’t come at the cost of ignoring the load of bad Russia’s doing now.
Update: Here’s a good companion piece by James Goldgeier about Republicans and Russia.
If Trump were a realist, he would be seeking to deal with Russia from a position of strength, not looking to accommodate Putin from the get-go. If he were a neoconservative, he would be pressing Putin on his abysmal human rights record. Instead, he is praising Putin for being strong and being tough. And it is unimaginable that any other president would have merely accepted Putin’s denial of election interference and moved on.
So why hasn’t the GOP spoken up? Yes, there are occasional remarks by Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey O. Graham suggesting Donald Trump is getting hoodwinked by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose efforts working with the Trump campaign to swing the 2016 presidential race are under daily scrutiny.
For the most part, however, GOP voters and GOP elites have shrugged off behavior that would have led to outrage in the past. Since it is hard to imagine that a Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or even John Kasich would have been this accommodating of Putin, is the party of Ronald Reagan really prepared to become the party of Trump on foreign policy, especially in America’s relations with Russia?
Cost concentration and the challenge of the subsidized insurance model
Researchers at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality updated the the spending distribution graph by population percentile using 2015 data. The findings are always important even though the general thrust is the same from previous updates. Most people barely touch the healthcare system:
95% of the studied population uses less than the mean healthcare expenditures. 5% of the population drives 50% of the spending. This is not a new finding. It is a consistent finding.
The challenge of the insurance model is that in most years, the vast majority of people will spend less than the average medical expenses. If premiums are average expenses plus an administrative load divided by the number of covered lives, then most people in most years retrospectively will have a bad deal. And since health insurance is so expensive, paying a lot and seemingly getting very little pisses people off unlike how I pay $50 every six months for renters insurance and have never used it.
This is why there are subsidies. This is why there is a mandate (for this week at least). This is why there are age bands. This is why there is reinsurance funded through non-premium funds. This is why there are so many policies that aim to either make the total cost of insurance lower (subsidies) or to partially segregate higher cost (reinsurance, high cost risk pools, prospective risk sharing etc). We segregate the highest risk out of the general pool by creating an incredibly well loved high cost risk pool in Medicare. We carve out some more high cost people by using Medicaid for the SSI population. We move end stage renal disease individuals and their high cost months out of the general pool as well. All of these can be viewed as ways of decreasing the amount of claims that have to be paid for out of premium dollars in a general insurance model.
Most people in most years won’t get hit by meteors. Retrospectively, almost any system will be at least adequate for people with low claims. A small number of these individuals who don’t have chronic high cost conditions will need a ten hour brain surgery (hi Mom, hope you’re feeling better today) and then cost-sharing and savings systems and the insurance function of insurance is highly valued. But retrospectively, there are far more people paying in far more than they are receiving. This makes the entire insurance value proposition a hard thing to sell.
Cost concentration and the challenge of the subsidized insurance modelPost + Comments (7)
On the Road and In Your Backyard
Good Morning All,
This is Adam, I’ll be covering for Alain today and tomorrow.
This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.
So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.
You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.
For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.
Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!
Thursday Morning Open Thread
Enjoy the moment ?? pic.twitter.com/44PcdveapO
— Baby Animals (@BabyAnimalPics) December 9, 2017
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Despite the 22F temperature, the biting wind, the unexpectedly heavy light pollution from passing traffic, and the clouds scudding in at great speed, Spousal Unit & I saw at least half a dozen bright Geminid meteors flash across the sky, so we’re satisfied with our expedition.
Apart from resolutely staying positive, what’s on the agenda for the day?
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No more savage tropes that uphold colonialism and imperialism. #goredhawks #notyourmascot pic.twitter.com/j6Lll95vYW
— Dani (@xodanix3) December 13, 2017
Strong contender (in a year full of them) for Best Internet Protest of the Year, as reported by David Roth at Deadspin
… On Wednesday, a number of prominent Native American activists began tweeting a statement purporting to announce that Washington’s NFL team would, next season, be changing its name to the Washington RedHawks…
If you were scrolling through Twitter with your mind in energy-saver mode, which is really the only safe way to do it, this looked like more than just an attempt to hustle a hashtag. It looked for all the world like news, albeit of the unlikeliest kind. Not just in the sense that it was good news, although there’s obviously that, but in the sense that it was being covered everywhere.
Or, more accurately, it was being “covered” “everywhere.” There were what appeared to be links to what appeared to be stories from what appeared to be major sports publications—the Washington Post, Bleacher Report, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated—that reported, in a rough simulacrum of those venues’ house styles, various angles on the story. The team issued no such statement, and the stories were all fakes that appeared on rather shockingly artful spoofs of each of those publications’ pages. Each of the hoax pages had been registered last month, through the French web registrar Gandi SAS by a registrant named Mark Jones. There is a field for “registrant organization” on Gandi’s form, but Jones left it blank…
The ghoulish bile-baiting tone of most Fake Sports News was nowhere to be found in these stories, each of which told the story of a team belatedly doing the right thing at the end of another lost season and of Native American activists belatedly seeing their advocacy turn into a hard-won reality. More than that, these stories told the story well, with quotes from all the appropriate corners…
It is so easy to admire the technical deftness and general craftsmanship behind the RedHawks hoax that it’s worth taking a moment to consider how slashing the satirical intent is, here. It emerges gradually as you click across the various spoof sites, as the realization builds that all this decency and equanimity just sounds wrong coming from the people it’s coming from. There is no more devastating assessment of how Daniel Snyder has handled his team’s shameful name than imagining him saying, as he’s “quoted” in the Sports Illustrated spoof: “[The RedHawks] is a symbol of everything we stand for: strength, courage, pride, and respect—the same values we know guide Native Americans and which are embedded throughout their rich history as the original Americans.” It’s all the more so when you realize that this is an exact quote from an actual statement that Snyder made in 2013, in defense of continuing to call his team the Redskins…
Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: All Hail the Goddess of Consequences
Senior Trump person reminded me earlier that this whole affair started with Sessions getting AG. "Now Trump hates him and a Democrat is in the Senate." https://t.co/0EMyZ8Vg0v
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) December 13, 2017
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Could not have happened to a more deserving Malevolent Leprechaun…
Let this sink in – Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’ Senate seat was taken by a civil rights lawyer who convicted Klansmen. Justice is sweet.
— Lily Adams (@adamslily) December 13, 2017
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It took an extraordinarily unsuccessful series of choices, by Republican leaders, to make the Alabama race competitive even *before* the Moore scandal. Let’s review them in choose-your-adventure form.
— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) December 12, 2017
You’re President-elect Trump. You have to choose an attorney general. Do you:
(1) Reward Jeff Sessions for loyalty, knowing it will prompt a potentially messy special election
(2) Pick one of many non-senators available to the job, at the risk of disappointing your (then-)friend— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) December 12, 2017
(click on either tweet to read the whole thread)
Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: All Hail the Goddess of ConsequencesPost + Comments (34)