Month: July 2013

Ben Crair rails against the growing enthusiasm for standing during work, especially among writers:

Of course the long, stationary workdays of most Americans are unhealthy. The solution should not be to sit less, but to work less. If sitting is as bad as the doctors say—and I’m sure it is!—then why not prescribe longer lunch breaks, shorter hours, and more vacation? You can still be chained to a standing desk. Is it any surprise that its biggest fans are the paternalist creeps of Silicon Valley?

Along similar lines, Trent Wolbe, who suffered severe carpal tunnel syndrome, waged an “ergonomics war” that ended in epiphany:

On a hardware level, I had found nirvana: the Kinesis keyboard, Evoluent mouse (supplemented by an Innovera wrist gel-pad), and my main man FREDERIK are still with me today. But this was all very American-capitalist-consumerist of me: I was trying to buy a way around my problem as opposed to treating it at its source. Although they were drastically diminished, I was still experiencing pangs of discomfort every day. To get my computer habit to a truly sustainable place, I just had to stop being online so much! …

[E]very aspect of my life was mediated by a mouse and keyboard: the internet is a quick and easy medium for working most of the time and chatting with friends or watching YouTube the rest of the time. But my body was sending me an excruciatingly clear signal that being chained to a console wasn’t right for me.

And so I began the process of distancing myself from the console. I cut back drastically on Gchat, stopped casually spending time on Facebook, ceased infinitely scrolling through miles of Twitter trash. I actively avoid broadcasted content: news I’m not close to, products I don’t need to buy, LOLcats that have already harvested their fair share of LOLs. More than anything, just chilling out a little bit online has shown me the true way to ergonomic freedom. I do inefficient stuff like go for walks and call people instead of emailing them. I spend a lot more time with my cat, who is actually pretty LOL if you get to know her well enough.

Usually our health problems have simple answers: eat less, move more, relax. It’s a pervasive truth that I wish I had accepted before I spent all that time and money trying to figure out how to make it not feel like I had juvenile arthritis.

tl;dr: U got carpalz? Stand to type, get vertical mouse and keyboard, chill IRL instead of online.

No, we’re not talking about Egypt. We’re talking about America – and a duly re-elected president who, unlike his predecessor, has not seized total executive branch powers to himself. Alec MacGillis discovers the truly unhinged Ailes-fed paranoia that’s now common on the right:

[I]t’s taken no time for declamations against the administration’s regulatory freelancing on Obamacare to turn into general paranoia about what the administration might conspire to do with an immigration law. Steve Benen noted that this started with a Washington Examiner column by Conn Carroll. Next thing you knew the paranoia was being voiced on the House floor by Louisiana Rep. John Fleming (whom you may recall as the fellow who complained that high taxes left him with only $600,000 each year to feed his family). “One of the biggest fears we have about the Senate amnesty bill … is we can’t trust the president,” Fleming said.

“We can’t trust him…Whatever we pass into law, we know he’s going to cherry-pick. How do we know that? … ObamaCare; he’s picking and choosing the parts of the law that he wants to implement. This president is doing something I have never seen a president do before: in a tripartite government with its checks and balances, we have lost the balances. We have a president that picks and chooses the laws the he wants to obey and enforce. That makes him a ruler. He’s not a president, he’s a ruler.”

So there you have it: by attempting to sabotage a law of the land they reject, Republicans have made it increasingly easy for their more outspoken members to argue against legislation many of their leaders support.

But Alex Altman and Zeke Miller report that the failure of immigration reform could prompt the type of executive actions Republicans fear:

If reform fails, Administration officials are plotting how to keep Obama on the right side of public opinion. They won’t rule out the possibility of further executive actions to circumvent Congress in the event the House fails to act. Congressional gridlock has driven Obama down this path before. He issued a series of executive orders on gun control, and toughened emissions standards on vehicles and power plants when climate legislation faltered. He also used executive authority to halt deportations of so-called DREAMers at the height of last year’s presidential campaign.

But Representative Albio Sires, a New Jersey Democrat, told reporters after a meeting with Obama that the President was wary of taking executive action to further curb deportations now. “He’s afraid that it’s going to harm the overall process of trying to get immigration done,” Sires said, according to Politico.

Chait downplays the importance of delaying various Obamacare components:

The entire Republican case against the law is grounded in erasing the distinction between essential and nonessential pieces of the law. Yuval Levin, in a post titled “Delaying Obamacare” — as if Obama was delaying the entire law — gloats: “The administration’s brazen disregard for and denial of plainly evident problems with Obamacare has been absolutely central to sustaining the morale and dedication of the law’s defenders.” Right, so apparently the only basis for supporting the law was the belief that every single piece of it was perfect! Even though its supporters all argued repeatedly and extensively to the contrary.

But, in an e-mail to McArdle, Yuval Levin argues that the delay of Obamacare’s health status and income verification mechanisms is a major problem. He writes that “system doesn’t make sense without some meaningful prior verification”:

The Obamacare statute really limits the ability of the IRS to sort it out and recover [health insurance subsidy] overpayments at tax time. And this is not only because it can only recover payments by reducing people’s income-tax refunds (which not all people have of course). There’s a more explicit barrier: In section 1401, the statute limits the amount of excess tax credit that any person with an income under 400% of poverty would have to pay back. (That begins at the very bottom of page 116 and into 117 in this final text of the law, under the section “Excess Advance Payments). The original statute limited the amount that could be clawed back to just $400. Then in the Medicare extenders bill they passed at the end of 2010 (see the table at the very end of the statute), Congress increased that amount and made it a graduated amount based on income, so it now ranges from $600 to a maximum of $3,500 for a family (half that for an individual).

CBO projects that the AVERAGE subsidy in the exchange would be worth $5,290. So the amount they’re able to claw back from people who have incomes below 400% of poverty but receive subsidies they shouldn’t (because they report a lower income than they have, falsely claim not to have been offered qualifying coverage by an employer, or report a higher income than they actually have in order to receive subsidies instead of Medicaid coverage) is likely in most cases to be significantly lower than the amount of excess payments.

“Delaying” employer reporting and income verification means more people are likely to do this and the IRS is less likely to know about it (they won’t know about people falsely claiming they don’t have an employer offer, for instance), so that even if the IRS collects back everything it possibly can at tax time, which is unlikely, there would be a major gap, and the risks people take by filing fraudulent applications are fairly limited (as you have noted before, the tools permitted to the IRS to go after excess payments are very limited).

The potential for massively expensive fraud, or even massively expensive confusion, is just enormous.

McArdle adds:

Obviously, the preference of the law’s supporters is to hemorrhage cash.  Just go ahead and hand out subsidies indiscriminately, the better to build political support to block repeal.  But this seems . . . well, I’m struggling for kinder words, but I can’t find any.  It seems wildly irresponsible. Not to mention a fundamental betrayal of the promises that were made to get the law passed in the first place.

Readers continue the popular thread:

I just read your “recent keeper” about Dusty. I am so sorry. It brought back a lot of memories of my beagle, Toby, who left us in July two years ago. She was also experiencing an age-related decline of health (she was 16) and I , too, was challenged on when was the “right time”. Without going into details that may add to your burden, I can only say that Toby, in her way, told me when it was the right time. I had hoped for three more days so our daughter could come home from college, but it wasn’t to be.

Remember you may be crying not only for her but for all the other loves in your life who have passed. When Toby passed, a part of me thought “Whoa, where are all these tears coming from”. But I realized they come from a deep down place where I was grieving for my parents, family members and pets.

Another reader:

During the past 12 months I’ve lost my mom, my dad, and my dog. It’s been the year from hell – so much death, and all at once. We rescued Chewy from a shelter and he instantly became my best friend. He died at age 7 – so fucking soon – due to a rare cancer. In the nine months since then, every day I mutter aloud, “I wish Chewy were here.” Dogs nudge themselves into our lives in such a way that they become family, and even in the wake of my parents’ deaths, my mumbles and daily griefs center on that brown and white friend, which makes me wonder if I’m focusing on him at the expense of grieving for my parents. Were he still here, I just know he’d have silent wisdom to share with me on this godawful year.

Another:

I’ve had to put down several pets who were very dear to me.  Each time, when that day arrived, I knew it was time.  Either my pet was obviously suffering or it was apparent that the body was shutting down (but not quickly enough) and it would be cruel not to intervene. Meanwhile, other than one case of sudden illness, all of my pets have enjoyed lengthy golden years.  My wife and I provided each with extra creature comforts as the various needs of old age presented themselves. I always knew that waiting another day would have brought needless physical discomfort.

I should add that my Christian faith helps soften the blow of a pet’s passing, since I believe the Resurrection and New Creation will, of course, include animals.  And, as long as animals are along for the ride, why wouldn’t that lot include our animals?

I’ll leave you with this:

I was once told a story (a true story, I might add) of a stodgy, old professor at a Christian seminary (think John Houseman’s Kingsfield in The Paper Chase).  Students generally gave the guy a healthy buffer in the hallways, and they avoided asking him questions during lectures, if it could at all be avoided.  However, a student once dared to approach the grumpy theologian and ask him if he thought that our pets would join us in Heaven.  The professor arched his eyebrows and stared at the student as if he were crazy; and then replied: “Of course pets will be there!  It wouldn’t be Heaven if they weren’t!”

Another:

I’m in my mid 20s and went home this year to visit my parents for Easter. They have been tending to their two beagles for a few years, since my youngest sister went off to school. We got the dogs in the late ’90s, so even for beagles they were getting up there. One was a runt we got from a breeder as a Christmas gift, and the other was a severely abused and malnourished rescue dog we got after the local paper did a story about our town’s animal shelter and he was on the front page, cowering in the back of his cage.

This Easter, the beagles weren’t doing too well. Both were over 15 years old. They had been loyal companions but were sick – the rescue, Gramps, had had a tumor on his neck growing at a terrible pace since around Christmas. It was nearing the end for him, and my parents had planned on taking him to be “put down” the following week, as he had begun showing signs of suffering and couldn’t hold down food or water, and his breathing was so impaired that he hadn’t slept in days.

So my parents and I, three nonbelievers, sat down to a little informal Easter breakfast this year, and our Gramps came barreling downstairs into the dining room just as we began to eat our eggs. He was wobbly, like a drunk on his way out of the pub. We were all confused and startled, but Gramps stumbled into the room and fell in a heap under our dining room table. He breathed heavily several times, wagged him tail a bit, and expired as we all knelt at the edges of the table, still in shock to see him moving so quickly. He was gone, just like that.

I am the first to have a laugh at the silly, cheaply sentimental things of our culture. And I think the notion that “everything happens for a reason” is absurd. But that experience made me consider that perhaps these animals have something to teach us, even if they don’t know it. I firmly believe Gramps used the last ounce of strength he had in him to be near us in his final moments.

Another:

We had to put our 15-year-old lab to sleep last year because of internal bleeding. She was so tired she could barely walk. I looked in her eyes and just knew it was time. You will too. I have found that the best way to remember them is to eventually adopt another dog. It takes a while to find a suitable dog, but rescue is the best! These sweet dogs always remember that you saved them … or maybe they save you.

(Top photo from a reader: “One late esteemed hound and his successor”)