Tag: Premium

The FSM slayer turns to essentialism:

If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is “prior to” the existence of rabbits (whatever “prior to” might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.

Paleontologists will argue passionately about whether a particular fossil is, say, Australopithecus or Homo. But any evolutionist knows there must have existed individuals who were exactly intermediate. It’s essentialist folly to insist on the necessity of shoehorning your fossil into one genus or the other. There never was an Australopithecus mother who gave birth to a Homo child, for every child ever born belonged to the same species as its mother. The whole system of labeling species with discontinuous names is geared to a time slice, the present, in which ancestors have been conveniently expunged from our awareness (and “ring species” tactfully ignored).

Phil Burton-Cartledge wonders if this could mark a new direction for the New Atheist:

Dawkins’ contemplative position sets up an opposition, a rigid distinction between believers of whatever creed, and the godless. Being unbelieving is a matter of personal growth, of intellectual and mental maturity, of possessing reasonable and rational-critical faculties. One might observe that this idealist position lapses into essentialist thinking. It’s not that all religious people are unintelligent, but clearly on some level they’re all stupid, or so the assumption goes.

Regardless of what one thinks of Dawkins, whether one hangs on his every dot and comma or takes a more critical stance, his choice to dump essentialism is an interesting one as binning it means breaking with a component of his own philosophical atheism. Hopefully some fresh, more interesting thinking through of religion and atheism is just around the corner.

In thinking about religion in a non-essentialist fashion, I’ve found myself having to be more nuanced than I once was. I now see more clearly that the forms that religion takes can be as important as the doctrinal content, that there are, yes, varieties of religious experience, and that the distinction between faith as a relationship with doubt as opposed to faith as a relationship with total certainty is a real, if still crude one, and that between a lived faith and a neurotic fundamentalism even more critical to understanding our current world.

If Dawkins’ opposition to essentialism is real, he may begin to accept that treating all religion as the same essential thing is far too crude to add much light, rather than heat, to the conversation. For another nuanced take on the varieties of religious experience in modernity, I highly recommend Ross Douthat’s stimulating blog post here.

Richard Harris highlights a report on the hundreds of thousands of sea mammals that die each year because of fishing practices:

[T]he global tally of marine mammal injuries and deaths … is high: Biologists have estimated that 650,000 are killed or injured each year. Of that, 300,000 are dolphins and related cetaceans, and another 350,000 are seals and sea lions. Casualties happen in all sorts of fisheries, ranging from tuna to squid, shrimp, swordfish and bottom-dwelling fish. At the bottom of the ocean, sea mammals can get trapped in trawls. And it’s hard to connect the dots between fish that has been caught using these techniques and those that end up getting imported to the U.S.

Imported seafood is often less ethical:

Most tragic, according to [report author Zak] Smith, is that the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act bars the importing of fish caught using methods that don’t include mammal protection measures such as release nets and safer hooks. “But unfortunately this law has never been enforced in its 40 years,” said Smith. …

American shrimp fishers, for example, must use bycatch-excluder devices to help marine mammals escape nets, Cooper said. Those devices cost $400 to $500 each, and a typical shrimp boat has three to four of them. “We also lose some of our catch because of them, so it raises our cost,” said Cooper. “They can catch them for a lot cheaper, put them on our market, and drive our prices down,” he said of foreign shrimp fisheries, which are especially prevalent in Southeast Asia. “We can’t continue on this trend.”

Smith said the U.S. government should require foreign fisheries to prove that they are “moving toward zero bycatch tolerance,” just like domestic fisheries.

Peter Lehner has more on the problem:

North American right whales, which rank among the most endangered whales on the planet, are prone to getting tangled in the long ropes of crab and lobster pots, or stuck in nets meant to trap fish like hake and halibut in the North Atlantic. With an estimated 500 individuals left, the untimely loss of even a single whale threatens the survival of the species. Every year, one or two right whales die from encounters with fishing gear. In Maine, lobstermen use special breakaway ropes that can help an entangled whale free itself. Canadian lobstermen, however, are not required to do so. The same whale that escapes a Maine lobsterpot might perish in a Canadian trap set just a few miles away.

(Photo of an entangled sea lion by Lauren Packard)

Reflecting on the new Obamacare numbers, Ezra claims that the “risk of a ‘death spiral’ is over”:

The The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that if the market’s age distribution freezes at its current level — an extremely unlikely scenario — “overall costs in individual market plans would be about 2.4% higher than premium revenues.” So, in theory, premiums costs might rise by a few percentage points. That’s a problem, but it’s nothing even in the neighborhood of a death spiral.

Bernstein, however, wants us to stop “thinking about whether the ACA will ‘succeed’ or ‘fail.'”:

Yes, as Ezra Klein says today, a premium death spiral isn’t going to happen next year (although that doesn’t mean it won’t happen down the road — after all, spirals start slowly!). But that doesn’t mean that health care will indeed be affordable down the road. Or, more precisely, it doesn’t tell us how affordable it will be, and how that will vary for different populations.

Yglesias joins the conversation:

[H]ere’s the problem. The federal Health Insurance Marketplace isn’t a single insurance risk pool.

Because insurance is regulated at the state level, even the “federal” exchange is essentially an administrative mechanism for a couple of dozen separate risk pools. Each state needs a demographically balanced set of clients, it’s not good enough to just be balanced on average. And even though the variance between the different states isn’t huge, it’s not nothing either. The odds that at least one or two states will fall short are much higher than the odds that the federal exchange on the whole will fall short. Now in a sense, a program that works in 48 states is doing a lot of good even if for some reason it doesn’t come together right in North Dakota and Maine (or wherever). But it would be a huge embarrassment for a program that’s already witnessed a lot of embarrassing failures.

Reihan considers other threats to the ACA:

I would emphasize the fact that if the threat of the individual mandate penalty helps keep the risk pool fairly balanced, it will be because there will have been a widespread public information campaign informing people that they are subject to a nontrivial penalty for failing to purchase insurance that at least some people will consider quite expensive (provided that they aren’t among those who’ve had their insurance policies canceled). And if insurers experience significant losses, as seems well within the realm of possibility, taxpayers will be obligated to make up much of the difference. This might be the right policy. It’s not at all obvious, however, that it will be popular. Rigorous enforcement of the mandate and the transitional mechanisms for protecting insurers might both be necessary to get the ACA exchanges up and running and they might endanger the ACA’s political health.

William McNulty blames the high suicide rate among young veterans on the “amorphous nature” of the wars they fought in:

No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause. From this stems despair — from a sense that so much of one’s life was given for so little purpose. Today’s vets do not see themselves as saviors, they cannot identify whom they defeated, they are not certain that they truly liberated anyone, and they fought, at best, a holding action against an ill-defined threat. Progress has been absent.

Joe Klein seconds McNulty:

McNulty makes an important distinction: between depression and despair. Depression is one of the prevalent symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It is a natural reaction to the unimaginable terror that comes with combat, the survivor’s guilt that comes with the loss of friends, the frustration that comes with the loss of a limb or a traumatic brain injury. Despair is more profound: it comes when you’ve experienced any or all of those things–and you come to the conclusion that it was all in vain, that there was no earthly reason to have invaded Iraq in the first place or extended the war in Afghanistan beyond the counter-terrorist effort to snuff out Al Qaeda.

Iraq veteran Elliot Ackerman has a different perspective. He reflects on the fall of Fallujah, where he fought almost ten years ago:

I wear a black bracelet on my wrist. It’s got Dan’s name on it, and the date 10 November 2004. I wear it for him but for others, too. Next to that bracelet is another one, a plastic one threaded with pink hearts and blue stars that my three-year old daughter made for me. If it weren’t for the black bracelet, the plastic one wouldn’t exist.

Does Fallujah falling into the hands of the ISIS make what Dan did for me and for the forty-six of us a waste? I wonder what he’d say.

When I think about my wars, and what happened, I do sometimes ask myself if it was worth it. I’m not thinking about Bush or Obama, or about Iraq or Afghanistan. I’m thinking about Pratt and Ames, and of course Dan, and unfortunately other friends like him. I hope they’d think what we’d did for each other was worth it.

(Photo: The remains of three US servicemen, their equipment, and a Humvee lay scattered on a dirt road after a massive IED vaporized their vehicle on August 4, 2007 in Hawr Rajab, Iraq. By Benjamin Lowy/Getty Images)

The new omnibus spending bill is likely to pass:

The lack of dramatic, controversial changes are likely to help smooth the way for the omnibus, which the House and the Senate are expected to take up this week. Outside conservative groups are already railing against the spending bill, but the reaction on the Hill has been more muted as many Republicans are eager to avoid a replay of October’s shutdown. “We’re not going to stop the process mid-year,” GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, who voted against the December budget deal, told the National Journal. Democratic leaders and the White House are lining up behind the agreement.

If the omnibus passes without event this week, legislators and Hill-watchers alike will herald Congress for a return to normalcy. It will certainly be a departure from how members have operated for the past three years, lurching from one manufactured fiscal crisis to the next as they insisted on coming to a long-term deficit reduction deal that never actually happened.

Plumer breaks down the bill. Among the highlights:

Defense: 0.2 percent increase. Military spending basically gets kept at the same levels as last year, once you factor in the effects of the sequestration. And it’s about $29 billion less than the Pentagon wanted. The budget includes $486.9 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget and another $85.2 billion for operations overseas this year. The overseas budget is declining only slightly even as the war in Afghanistan winds down. Another highlight: There’s a 1 percent increase in pay for military personnel.

Benen flags other details:

A few things that jumped out at me:

* As ridiculous as this may sound, a Republican rider survived that would continue the sale of inefficient incandescent light bulbs.

* The school voucher program for the District of Columbia will continue.

* Efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act predictably failed, but at Republicans’ insistence, the package cuts $1 billion from the Prevention and Public Health (PPH) fund.

* The spending bill reverses some of the cuts to retirement pay for medically retired veterans and survivor benefits.

* Detainees still can’t be transferred from Guantanamo Bay to detention facilities on U.S. soil.

Drum expects little effect from the rider that cuts off funding for enforcing the new light bulb efficiency standards:

On the one hand, the lighting industry has completed the transition to newer, more efficient bulbs and has no interest in going back. What’s more, these newer bulbs provide just about all the options anyone could ask for. … At this point, suspending enforcement is mostly a symbolic gesture to please the tea party base of the GOP. It will have a modest effect, but for the most part the market has moved on.

The IRS is also getting its funds cut:

According to the House Appropriations Committee, the funding level would be lower than agency spending in 2009. The agreement would also require the IRS to spend more time and energy reporting to Congress on a range of activities. And, to the surprise of no one, it prohibits the use of any funds to single out groups based on their ideological beliefs or “to target citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Those restrictions, of course, explain what this budget is really about: More political payback for the IRS’s bungled efforts to sort out which non-profits qualify for 501(c)(4) designation.

Bloomberg’s editorial rails against other cuts:

Lawmakers unwisely denied funding increases to financial regulatory agencies, which need more resources to finish and enforce the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. This stinginess is what Wall Street wanted, of course. But it won’t protect the financial industry from regulation; it will only make the process more frustrating. Under the 2014 spending agreement, the Securities and Exchange Commission will get $1.35 billion, which is $324 million below President Barack Obama’s budget request. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees commodities and futures transactions worth $400 trillion in notional value – – up from $40 trillion before Dodd-Frank — gets a mere $215 million, or $100 million less than what the president sought.

This isn’t fiscal prudence. Both agencies return money to the U.S. Treasury in the form of fines and penalties in excess of what they spend. Presumably, better funding would result in more proficient enforcement and even fatter returns to taxpayers. And the penny-pinching can’t stop the agencies from implementing Dodd-Frank. The 2010 law offers no leeway on whether to regulate. Tight budgets just mean the work must be done by fewer staff, making it harder for industry representatives to get appointments to discuss the rules or enforcement cases.

Josh Green’s bottom line:

What’s remarkable is how something as unremarkable as this omnibus bill can pass through Congress (probably) without the headache-inducing, economy-damaging drama of maximal opposition that has accompanied nearly every piece of significant legislation in the past few years.