Are all the bugs and kinks worked out?
NOT THOSE kinds of kinks, you perverts.
by John Cole| 95 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Are all the bugs and kinks worked out?
NOT THOSE kinds of kinks, you perverts.
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 56 Comments
This post is in: World Cup
Enjoy today’s games, folks.
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
I was curious. What does $100 more in deductible buy in terms of actuarial value?
It depends but the short answer is not much.
The graph below shows how much a $100 increase in deductible buys in terms of actuarial value. I used the 2019 CMS AV calculator with the Bronze tables. Deductible is combined and embedded with no other cost sharing. This is a bare bones plan.
This is because health care costs are so skewed to the right. Half of the population barely touches the system so the first $100 of deductible captures most of their health care spending and the first $500 of deductible is almost entirely their annual spend. The declining marginal purchase of AV per $100 spent on deductible is real and big.
By the time the deductible is going from $3,000 to $3,100, very few people are actually running up charges to that level. It buys half a point of actuarial value for this jump. By the time the last $100 is added to deductible for the skinniest plan possible with a $7,900 out of pocket maximum, the AV bought is .22 points.
The trade-off to buy an extra AV point at the tail end of the distribution is an extra $400 to $500 in deductible. This implies that a Copper plan with a 50% AV could probably see a $12,000 to $13,000 deductible.
An extra $100 deductible does not buy muchPost + Comments (6)
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 7 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
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!
I found this unpublished set, enjoy folks. Since I worked on the site so much Sunday and have much more to do Monday, I’m pushing back a special super-set from realbtl’s trip to Ireland. It will be next week, beginning next Monday.
It will be grand.
Today, pictures from valued commenter otmar.
As some of the jackals asked for more pictures from Austria, here are some I took during the last few days.
There are three subway lines that cross the Danube river: this is the view from line U2 upstream towards the city. The high-rise buildings on the right are the Donaucity that include the UN buildings. Back when I was a kid, those were dominant there, these days they are almost the smallest buildings in that area.
Just a few miles downstream there is a hydro-electric plant, thus the river is very quiet here.
I recently sent a picture of the Pestsäule in Mödling. This here is the one that was built right in the center of Vienna.
Different angle of the Pestsäule on the Graben. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graben,_Vienna
Just around the corner there is the cathedral of Vienna: St Steven’s church.
This is the courtyard of an old palais on Herrengasse. They found some Roman foundations during renovations a few years back.
These days, this particular building is owned by the federal government and houses offices of a ministry.
Thank you so much otmar, do send us more when you can.
Travel safely everybody, and do share some stories in the comments, even if you’re joining the conversation late. Many folks confide that they go back and read old threads, one reason these are available on the Quick Links menu.
One again, to submit pictures: Use the Form or Send an Email
This post is in: Excellent Links, Immigration, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Trump IS detached from reality and it is no longer funny. https://t.co/TFZHp7CNLk
— Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) June 24, 2018
Let’s hope along with Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire:
… Up until now, all of the #Resistance has contained a barely acknowledged undercurrent of futility. It was not that the opposition was empty. It was that it generally broke like a wave on a seawall when it collided with the immutable fact that the president*’s party controlled every lever of political power at the federal level, as well as a great number of them out in the states, too.
The week just passed has changed the calculations. The images from the border, and the White House’s fatheaded trolling of the situation, seems to have shaken up everyone in Washington to the point at which alliances are more fluid than they have been since January of 2017. There seems little doubt that the Republicans in the House of Representatives are riven with ideological chaos, struck numb by the basic conundrum of modern conservatism: When your whole political identity is defined by the proposition that government is not the solution, but, rather, the problem, you don’t know how to operate it when fortune and gerrymandering hand you the wheel…
You can feel the difference in the air. The members of the governing party, uneasy about the prospects for this year’s midterms anyway, are fairly trembling at the moment, seeing in their mind’s eyes a hundred 30-second spots of weeping toddlers behind chain-link walls. The president* has gone completely incoherent, standing firm until he doesn’t, looking for help in the Congress that he’ll never get, and reversing himself so swiftly on his one signature issue that he’s probably screwed himself up to the ankles in the floor of the Oval Office. By Friday afternoon, he was back on the electric Twitter machine, yapping about the Democrats and “their phony stories of sadness and grief.” And a hundred Republican candidates dive back behind the couch.
The country’s head is clearing. The country’s vision is coming back into focus and it can see for the first time the length and breadth of the damage it has done to itself. The country is hearing the voices that the cacophony of fear and anger had drowned out for almost three years. The spell, such as it was, and in most places, may be wearing off at last. The hallucinatory effect of a reality-show presidency* is dispersing like a foul, smoky mist over a muddy battlefield.
The migrant crisis is going to go down through history as one of the most destructive series of own-goals in the history of American politics. The establishment of the “zero-tolerance” policy made the child-nabbing inevitable. The president*’s own rhetoric—indeed, the raison d’etre of his entire campaign—trapped him into at first defending the indefensible and then abandoning what was perhaps the only consistent policy idea he ever had—outside of enriching himself and his family, that is. Then the cameras began to roll, and the nation’s gorge began to rise, and the president* couldn’t stand the pressure that was mounting around him. Of course, because he knows nothing about anything, including how to actually be president*, he bungled even his own abject surrender. He’s spent the days since signing his executive order railing against what he felt compelled to do and arguing against himself and losing anyway…
Monday Morning Open Thread: Keep Up the Good FightPost + Comments (183)
by Adam L Silverman| 293 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Foreign Affairs, Immigration, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, All Too Normal
What a couple of squishes!
Those of us who have the privilege of being white must prepare ourselves in case it becomes necessary to place ourselves between harm and people of color and visible religious minorities in the US. Because the party of Reagan and Bush, from the invertebrates elected to Congress, state houses, and state legislatures who are living in mortal fear of a mean tweet to the ideologically rabid base that is the Republican Party in 2018 and the movement conservatism and politicized white evangelical Christianity* that sustains it, aren’t going to do a damn thing to rein in the President and his appointees. It will not rein them in in their degrading the rule of law. It will not rein them in in their dehumanizing the most vulnerable and desperate seeking safe haven in the US. They have all gone all in on the factually inaccurate belief that they are history’s greatest victims. That they are discriminated against, derided, denigrated, and mocked at every turn. And that they have the right to their bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamaphobia, and nativism because it is part of their sincerely held religious and political beliefs. And that no one has the right to call them out on it because that would be the one true form of discrimination.
The three meter targets are keeping the pressure on to get families separated at the border reunited and then proper hearings on their asylum claims before immigration judges, keeping the House Republican majority from pushing through legislation that reverts US immigration law to what it was in 1924, from defunding Social Security and Medicaire to cover the gaping budgetary hole created by the tax cuts for the uber-wealthy they rammed through, and to completely destroy what’s left of the ACA. The ten meter target is the midterm elections in November. So keep calling your members of Congress and senators. And keep making sure everyone you know is registered to vote and everyone those people know are registered to vote and that everyone you know and everyone those people know do vote!
Stay focused!
Open thread.
* This is neither all of evangelical Christianity, which includes Evangelicals, Charismatics, and/or Fundamentalists, in the US, nor the totality of whites in the US who are evangelicals broadly defined. Rather it refers to both those adherents and their leaders who have completely flipped and flopped on their very publicly, stridently held beliefs about the need for morality and ethics and godliness in politics in order to justify their support for the current President. A president who does not in any, way, shape, and/or form reflects what these folks had been publicly stated were the personal characteristics required to hold any public office, let alone the presidency.
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 125 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Folks,
Something’s wrong with the site and I’m going to try changing the theme to another one to see if it makes a difference in performance.
You have been warned.
If things work speedily then I’ll know it’s the theme and work accordingly (and will return the theme back to the malfunctioning one while I work on repairs).
Actually, either way the current theme will return after a few minutes.
I don’t expect to solve the problem for hours, FYI. But this is necessary diagnostics.
I will consult the post from last night for details folks submitted.
This mostly affects the desktop site and will be fixed. If you need to email me, use the contact form to submit an email.