summarizing linkage bonanza

Economics of mandates

Left unsaid there is that there's a non-compliance rate with mandatory insurance (such as automobile coverage) that's roughly comparable with the current rates of uninsured on health care anyway. Basically we'd just be transferring a few poor people out of the ability to flexibly deal with basic health problems at their own expense, which carries a number of risks that they're perhaps not properly valuing but forcing them to pay for that risk at a rate much higher than they'd actually be willing to pay. Worse, by making it an employer mandate rather an individual one (and paying for it with a tax on health care benefits to fund a tax subsidy for poor people), there's still no transparent market that would actually work to reduce raw health care costs.

accidents are rare

But news coverage still isn't. Obviously I have said much on the relative safety of public transit, but really that one statistic that leaps off the page that went totally unreported was the ZERO US commercial fatalities from 2007-08 on airplanes. ZERO? What the fuck media? There's always more wonder in considering how rarely our inventions and institutions actually are as terrible as they are portrayed, but that sort of information borders on miraculous or unbelievable for the average person, and should have been distributed as a news story, or at least as a tidbit when in fact we did have another a tragic plane crash.

Jedi can't marry in Virginia

I already said my piece on this one in the comment I left by the link. "Jedi religion" is greatly amusing. And the practice does seem like a business monopoly toward religion on what is ultimately a secular contract.

Iran is still going on,
despite mourning Michael Jackson

Maybe they can have a rally to mourn MJ to stage support for Mousavi. But it's getting interesting at the top levels of Iranian politics as the crackdown on the street level continues.

I, Pencil. Idiot

Funny, but pointless. There isn't a way to do that without the institutions and operations of the market. You can complain about the social institution of consumerism that drives it (or is driven by it), but the mechanisms of the price system and market economy are wonderful to behold when you step back a second. It's amazing that anyone makes any sense at all of its millions of permutations for a single product.

Autistics win again

I'm not sure what I am as a sort of para-rational entity (I say figuring things out and doing things are equally important, so I obviously have too much of something preventing one or the other in my rational tendencies), but the use of narrative in memory does strike me as sort of strange.

Gays aren't going anywhere either

Because when you see a multiple choice question like this and know the most probable answer is the least useful and most consistently heard on the issue of civil rights, we're not progressing as a country. At least India removed its sodomy ban this week.