Smart money os on the European teams, in my humble opinion. What’s your opinion, humble or otherwise?
Archives for June 2014
Enhancing that Tea Party Reputation
Here is how CNN is covering McDaniel’s unwillingness to concede because he thinks it is wrong the blahs were allowed to vote. At any rate, I love it.
It’s nice to see the media call these tea party tantrums what they are.
Big Ruling on the Privacy Front
This is welcome news:
In a major statement on privacy rights in the digital age, the Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously ruled that the police need warrants to search the cellphones of people they arrest.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the court, said the vast amount of data contained on modern cellphones must be protected from routine inspection.
The old rules, Chief Justice Roberts said, cannot be applied to “modern cellphones, which are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”
The courts have long allowed warrantless searches in connection with arrests, saying they are justified by the need to protect police officers and to prevent the destruction of evidence.
But Chief Justice Roberts said neither justification made much sense in the context of cellphones. On the other side of the balance, he said, is the data contained on the typical cellphone. Ninety percent of Americans have them, he wrote, and they contain “a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives — from the mundane to the intimate.”
Even the word “cellphone” is a misnomer, he said. “They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, Rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps or newspapers,” he wrote.
Chief Justice Roberts acknowledged that the decision would make law enforcement more difficult.
“Cellphones have become important tools in facilitating coordination and communication among members of criminal enterprises, and can provide valuable incriminating information about dangerous criminals,” he wrote. “Privacy comes at a cost.”
Why is it so uncommon for common sense to win? Regardless, this is a great ruling. Now, if we could get the federal government to stop seizing computers and phones at the border, that would be nice, too.
Group F Game Three Open Thread
I’m guessing Argentina and Bosnia are likely to go through. Share your thoughts!
The obvious, it burns
From the Wall Street Journal, a statement of the blindingly obvious:
Among those health-law marketplace enrollees who have seen a doctor or other health-care provider in the first quarter of this year, around 27% have significant health issues such as diabetes, psychiatric conditions, asthma, heart problems or cancer, the data show. That is sharply higher than the rate of 16% for last year’s individual-consumer market over the same time frame, according to the data, which was supplied by Inovalon Inc., a health-technology firm that receives medical claims directly from nearly 200 insurers that are its clients.
It is also more than double the rate among people who held on to their existing individual policies; among those enrollees, the rate was 12%. Those consumers, who kept so-called grandfathered individual plans, are showing by far the lowest rates of use for health-care services such as emergency-room visits, hospital stays and prescriptions.
There are a couple of take-aways.
Open Thread: The Goofening
Is this a goofy-ass dog, or what?
She sleeps like that all the time, with her eyes partially open, her tongue hanging out and snoring like a band-saw. She has an active dream life; quite frequently she’ll start twitching her paws, then begin to flail around wildly, kicking pillows off the sofa and raking any creature within reach with her claws. Stop disturbing the peace, Patsy!
Here’s a story from Gawker (I know, I know) about a failed carjacking. Summary: A group of teenage boys took a 71-year-old woman’s car keys at gunpoint but could not make a getaway because the jacked vehicle had a manual transmission and the stupid shits didn’t know how to drive a stick. They were forced to flee on foot instead.
I learned to drive on a stick and taught my 15-year-old to drive on a stick too. Recently, I traded in my manual transmission car, and the salesperson tried to ding me on the trade-in value by saying he had trouble unloading sticks, which may be the case, but that ain’t my problem.
Anyhoo, my daughter’s first car, a family hand-me-down, will also be a stick, and it gladdens my heart to know that her dumb little friends probably won’t know how to drive it, nor would dim-witted thieves know how to steal it. One less thing!
Please feel free to discuss whatever.
Noise is good
Welcome to the convergence zone. Rates are still being formulated for the 2015 open enrollment/new product period, but initial estimates are being released by state regulators. There are two things to note. The first is that companies seem to be operating reasonably independently in their 2014 rate estimates so the 2015 corrections are all over the place. Some companies were too optimistic in 2014 so they are raising rates to cover costs; other companies were too pessimistic so they are cutting rates to attract membership. Reasonably random error and noise is a good thing, esepcially if we assume that 2014 really could be treated as the Exchange beta testing year.
The second thing of interest is rates will start converging. Companies are operating off of less incomplete information than they did in 2014, so assumptions are being validated or replaced by actual data. Insurance companies are in the business of massive data mining and projection, so more data is usually better. Similar products with similar networks will be priced reasonably close to each other. Information and search costs for individuals should decrease significantly as the products are operating under less adverse information biases.
District of Columbia: 3 of 4 insurance companies either lower rates or keep them stable for 2015
LifeWise has proposed an 8.9 percent rate increase.
Other insurance companies with large chunks of the individual market — Coordinated Care Corp. and Group Health Cooperative — are both proposing rate increases of just over 11 percent.
All four companies had similar monthly rates in 2014 and would likely come even closer together in 2015 if their proposals were approved by the state:
■ Group Health’s average silver plan for 2014 was $280.47 and would be $312.50 in 2015 if its price increase is approved.
■ Premera would go from $300.94 to $328.03 for a similar plan.
■ LifeWise would go from $301.07 to $329.36.