Beware the law of unintended consequences

#Obamacare, love it or hate it, was ruled a tax and has been the law of the land for a while now. It enjoys a rare status as being the most partisan law the democrats ever passed since Jim Crow, with Zero republican votes.

Just recently it came before the courts again reguarding subsidies, with one saying the feds can give subsidies to those buying from the federal exchanges and another saying only state exchanges qualify.

It should be noted that one of my favorite sayings is the best way to repeal a bad law is to fully impliment it.

What looks likely to me is that the supreme court will bar the IRS from giving subsidies to people in states without state exchanges, as that was the wording and intent of the law. Those exluded from subsidies would largely be republican states that didn't want anything to do with Obamacare.

But there are two consequences to this.

First, the intended is that the people in these republican states will cry foul and put preasure on the states to comply with DC. This was slated to be a key strategy for the democrats to take control of state governments, and it may just work out as planned if it angers enough poor voters.

But the unintended outcome is that, in those states that rejected obamacare, the employer mandate is also unenforceable, because they have the same language requiring a state exchange. So what is likely to happen is that the states that opted out, largely republican states, will effectively have a $8,000 per employee tax advantage over democrat states that adopted Obamacare. In other words, it will cost A LOT LESS to employ someone in a republican state than a democrat one.

This accidental tax advantage could, single handedly, destroy the economies of every democrat state for decades to come as manufacturing leave by the droves. It will also drive prices up for those businesses that stay, making a gallon of milk or a burger noticeably more expensive in democrat states, where the poor will have healthcare but be unable to afford food. The poor in dem states will have an impossible time finding work, while republican states will be paying well over the minimum wage with full employment for everyone that wants to work.

This would turn a lot of boarderline states into Detroit over night, the rest would fall a few years after that.

In essence Obamacare would become an $8,000 per employee tax that only applied to democrats, signed into law by only democrats, with republicans getting to opt out of the biggest tax in history.

And it wouldn't be the first time a policy backfired.

The dream act and the refusal to enforce dreamer deportations has exploded on our boarder and has directly led to the deaths and rapes of thousands in Texas alone.

The trouble with Lucy

The trouble with Lucy

I am SO TIRED of the old "you only use 10% of your brain" thing.

Yes, it's true... in an irrelevant way.

So there's a new movie where Lucy gets to use 100% of her brain, stop me if you're sure you've seen this before. Me too.

Anyway, the fastest man on earth doesn't even come close to using 100% of his heart. He doesn't even come close to 50%. Half of the heart is at rest at all times, that's how it was designed. If all of your heart was contracting at the same time, you call that a heart attack and you die. You can't use 100% of your muscles at the same time either. You can't use 100% of your lungs. An argument could be made about ears and eyes, but I'd argue against it too.

Wait, I know, you can actually use 100% of your muscles, and hundreds of people do... when they are electrocuted. And the usually break their own bones, rip tendons, and other horrible things.

And you can use 100% of your brain, people do that to... while having seizures.

A Pentium computer chip has billions of transistors on it. When windows reports that it is being used at 100% it doesn't mean every transistor is being used, it means that 0.0001% of the transistors are being used, and 100% of the clock/bus is being used, not all the transistors.

Human minds work along those same lines. You can't/don't ever want to see 100% of the neurons firing at the same time. 1% or so is the Mona Lisa, 100% is black paint covering the entire canvas.

Can you tell it pisses me off?

Paranoid me :)

If I wasn't wearing my tinfoil hat, I'd swear my new Kyocera smartphone was made by the NSA.

I've only been using it for a week now, and already I'm noticing phantom data usage well beyond what I was used to with my old LG phone. According to my AVG anti-virus app, my browser and email apps only used 8 megs of data, yet it tracked over 13.

I suspect some sort of spy agency, NSA specifically, though I wouldn't put it past the IRS either.

Or, it could be the Chinese.

Or... or even more sinister and pure evil... dare I even mention their- yes, yes I dare. Google.

Any what way, whoever it is, they'll be sadly disappointed with the web habits of this obscure author.

Ok, hat off, it's most likely a bunch of Google crap that's trying to update something or synchronize something or the likes. For most people that can afford unlimited data, this is no big deal and, at most, costs them a few seconds of delay on every page load. For me, I can only afford a tiny 200 meg/month plan, so for me this is kinda a big deal.

If it persists, I'll be putting my hacking hat on and start nuking drivers, deleting caches, and all those other things that generally risk ruin.

It promises to be fun.