Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Wait, what?

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

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Archives for 2014

It’s Like LinkedIn, Only For Supervillains

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Republicans leveraging technology, yo.

Republicans and outside groups used anonymous Twitter accounts to share internal polling data ahead of the midterm elections, CNN has learned, a practice that raises questions about whether they violated campaign finance laws that prohibit coordination.

The Twitter accounts were hidden in plain sight. The profiles were publicly available but meaningless without knowledge of how to find them and decode the information, according to a source with knowledge of the activities.

The practice is the latest effort in the quest by political operatives to exploit the murky world of campaign finance laws at a time when limits on spending in politics are eroding and regulators are being defanged.

The law says that outside groups, such as super PACs and non-profits, can spend freely on political causes as long as they don’t coordinate their plans with campaigns. Sharing costly internal polls in private, for instance, could signal to the campaign committees where to focus precious time and resources.

That seems fair and on the level, especially because IOKIYAR.

I really am disappointed that Democrats aren’t the ones doing this, because then we’d have the Tea Party screeching for 501(c) reform and to pass the DISCLOSE Act.

Or, they’d just impeach Twitter or something.

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Where the competition lies

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Paul Michael Cohen is running some interesting data on Exchange competition and premium pricing. He has tested two theories of competition. Does more insurers on a given exchange lead to lower average premiums? Does more insurers on an Exchange lead to lower minimum premiums (ie the Second Silver benchmark?)

My first analytical approach was to plot the mean monthly premium in each state (by coverage level) against the number of unique insurers in each market (see R code on Github). A basic linear regression of premiums by number of unique insurers and by coverage level revealed no significant relationship….

Average premium rates are insensitive to the number of insurers on the Exchange. I am not too surprised.

However, it is possible that the important unit of analysis is not the mean premium in each market, but instead the minimum premium in each market….
There is a significant negative relationship between increased competition and health insurance premiums for all coverage levels in 2014 and 2015. The regression model (collapsing 2014 and 2015 rates) suggests that each incremental market entrant corresponds to a 3% reduction in monthly premiums. Moreover, this trend continued as more entrants entered the market in 2015. However, linear regressions by year suggest that the size of the competition relationship is decreasing: the effect of an incremental insurer on premiums was -3.7% in 2014 and -2.8% in 2015…

This result makes sense to me as the relevant problem that insurers, or at least insurers in my market, have been trying to solve is who offers second lowest priced Silver.

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Monday Morning Open Thread

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Fun profile by David Carr, the NYTimes‘ media critic, of a blog favorite, “John Oliver’s Complicated Fun Connects for HBO“:

… When HBO announced last fall that John Oliver, a British comedian I very much admire, would be hosting a weekly show focused on current events, I remember thinking, “That will never work.”… So what did Mr. Oliver and his colleagues get right, and what did I get so wrong?

I stopped to see Mr. Oliver at his office on West 57th, across the street from the show’s studio. Mr. Oliver is a 37-year-old comedian hardly in the mold of a television star. His teeth are, well, British, and his hair is not something frequently seen on the small screen. And even though he wears nice suits on the show, they look as if they landed on him from a great distance.

With the show on break, he is wearing sneakers, a blue sweatshirt and green pants. I told him what a bad idea I originally thought his show was, which he finds hilarious, not because he has proved me wrong, but because I was probably kind of right…

“When HBO asked, I sort of felt like I had to say yes,” he added. “I was attracted to that dead spot late on Sunday night on HBO, which is the prime-est real estate that there is. I loved the idea that we could build something and that we would live or die by our attempt.”…

If all that sounds like audience kryptonite, it has been anything but. The show already has an average audience — live and repeats — of four million people, equal to “Real Time With Bill Maher” and approaching the numbers that HBO comedies like “Girls” and “Veep” attract…

So, I asked Mr. Oliver: Is he engaging in a kind of new journalism? He muttered an oath, the kind he can say on HBO for comic emphasis, but we don’t say here, adding, “No!”

“We are making jokes about the news and sometimes we need to research things deeply to understand them, but it’s always in service of a joke. If you make jokes about animals, that does not make you a zoologist. We certainly hold ourselves to a high standard and fact-check everything, but the correct term for what we do is ‘comedy.’ ”

A big segment on “Last Week” builds on the reporting of others — The Washington Post, for instance, on civil forfeiture — and finds the comedy by digging into the absurdities that underlie much of the news. The piece on the visa problems of war-zone interpreters was framed by a donkey, befriended by United States troops, who had a much easier time of it…

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Apart from applauding those who fight for truth and justice (especially those using humor as a weapon), what’s on the agenda for the start of the week?

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What a difference a year makes

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This is more of a personal note on the scramble to get the Exchanges up and running which then ran into a brick wall of Healthcare.gov not working at all last year.

Last year, I spent thirty one of the thirty six hours before go-live either at work or online at home.  My major challenge was to get the web directories up and running so that they would reflect the accurate at that moment network that we were offering.

We had “finalized” our networks a week before hand, and the web developpers were still working on a long term solution to reflect the networks as it was a massive discontinuity from our previous practices.  Previously, we had embraced big, broad, everybody who wants to get in can get in networks.  The Exchanges were narrow networks with significant targetting.  The “final” networks were not really final, as we received a contract amendment to opt-in to Mayhew Narrow at Medicare + a smidge from a two hospital chain and its 300 docs at 8:30pm the night before go-live.  Since the long term solution was not in place, I had an ad-hoc solution that was ‘good enough’ to work and that required a four hour rebuild process.  I launched my final good to go web directory at 2:30AM

This year, the web directories entered the production stream three weeks ago.  One doc had the nerve to die on us, so we had to remove her, and another practice bought out a four doc cardiology practice so we had to add them, but that is the normal churn of networks.  It is routine.

I received one call from a co-worker this weekend.  She wanted to know where the financial attribution schema for SNP was stored. This year, I went to a wedding where the brides were beautiful.  I refereed a championship game where I loved that it was 31 and snowing instead of 33 and raining.  I went to the birthday party of a friend’s daughter.

Last year, I had a 110 hour week .

This year, it is business as usual.

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Open ‘First World Problems’ Thread (Anything For A Cookie)

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I just ran across this video on a Bloomberg Politics sidebar. As TechCrunch explained it back in February:

iCPooch… provides a plastic housing for repurposing an Android/iOS smartphone or tablet as a video terminal through which you can see and be seen by your dog when you’re not at home.

So, to be clear, you’re going to have to provide the most expensive chunk of hardware required to power this device yourself, fitting it between iCPooch’s adjustable brackets…

iCPooch holds pet treats (although it’s specifically designed for larger dog biscuits) that the owner can dispense remotely via the ‘drop cookie’ button in the corresponding app… because you’re using a smartphone/tablet, the app can also support placing a videocall (via Skype and piggybacking on your home Wi-Fi network) so you can view your dog while you send a treat, and — crucially — be seen by them…

iCPooch was apparently the brainchild of 14-year-old Brooke Martin, who is credited as inventor and spokesman on the Kickstarter project page, with her dad as founder and COO. The idea came to her after the family dog suffered “separation anxiety” as a result of everyone having less time to spend hanging out at home. Ergo she wanted a way to maintain some contact with the dog, when she was out and about…

Okay, that’s a pretty good project from a 14-year-old, and I fully understand how miserable (even dangerous) separation anxiety can be for both dog and human. But still… the Kickstarter project collected almost thirty thousand dollars, from people hoping to get first dibs on a $129.99 plastic box that will — once equipped with a tablet computer, a household wifi network, and a supply of treats — enable you to yell “Boris, get off the couch!” into your smartphone and have Boris, for once, comply.

As long as you put the treat dispenser far enough from the couch, of course.

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