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Wednesday’s Forum
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17 responses to “Wednesday’s Forum”
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Data point:
66%: Probability that Democrats will sweep both House and Senate.
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Yesterday for the drive home, Waze kept picking weird routes. Two involved a long, very steep road which gets slippery when it rains (t was drizzling), the third was a massive detour that added like 1/3 the distance. It refused to show the more conventional routes.
Usually when this happens, it means the normal routes are completely effed up. So using them may add considerable time to the drive. I decided to take a chance on one anyway.
When I’d killed enough routes by getting too far from them, it finally showed one of the regular routes. It marked it at “3 minutes slower.”
All of that for three effing minutes?
I suppose it’s possible conditions changed in the meantime. More likely it was a five minute heavy traffic snarl in one turn. Or perhaps the latest Waze algorithms now use LLMs.
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I have a personal vendetta against Waze in particular. I lived in a neighborhood with one road out to the main road (an old two lane highway paralleling the newer Interstate), except for an alternate way that went through a remote neighborhood with a winding, hilly, narrow road with lots of decreasing radius blind turns. When it said slow down to 15 mph you really had to slow down that much, and if it was raining you might want to go even slower. When the Interstate backed up, all the apps would divert to the old highway, but that would quickly back up too, and Waze would then send hundreds of cars through that narrow road, hopelessly snarling that neighborhood and then ours, with no chance of an emergency vehicle getting through for an hour or more. And in the time before the road got hopelessly jammed, unfamiliar drivers would take those “Slow Down to 15mph” as mere suggestions and end up taking out mailboxes or the side of their car.
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I’ve heard many stories of quiet streets turned into traffic snarled thoroughfares thanks to traffic apps like Waze.
Usually my commute routes are pretty much the same every day. Waze does help mostly when there’s something in particular slowing one route down, like an accident or construction.
In one route, there’s a point where Waze often tells me I can save 2-5 minutes by leaving the avenue temporarily and taking a side road. It is usually right. However, there are times when I see lots of cars turn to the side road. I assume Waze is telling them the same thing, and therefore filling up the detour. I will then stay on the avenue.
It helps I’m usually listening to an audiobook or a podcast, so the traffic jam time still gets put to good use.
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One way or another Trump will go eventually go away. And when he does, the GOPs will claim they got rid of him, the party cleaned itself up, and it’s all good now. But as I’ve said often in these threads, it ain’t just Trump. This morning Dr. K offers a nice succinct summary of how the GOPs built this.
There is a straight line from Koch Brothers money, allied with segregationists and religious fundamentalists, that runs through the Federalist Society and the Roberts Supreme Court, through the MAGA-fied Republican Party, through the crypto-industry and the tech-broligarchy, that leads to Trump. And it will take a single-minded, fearless and incorruptible new generation of Democrats to defeat this many-headed hydra.
I usually date it back to Goldwater and his businessman backers deciding they could sell a flawed candidate just like they sold breakfast cereal and cars, with TV ads. (META is running an ad constantly now. Very high production values and all the meaningful content of a corporate mission statement.) But it really goes back to the Grant administration.
But Trump won’t go away easily, and like me, Dr. K sees the possibility of a Trumperdammerung.
We should also recognize that Mad King Donald will still retain a great deal of power even with a Democratic Congress. He won’t feel that he has failed America, he will believe that America has failed him and try to punish the nation accordingly. Thus he will use his remaining power vindictively not just against the victorious Democrats, but also against the American people.
I’m really worried that after the midterms a weakened Trump will pop a nuke on Iran. Or possibly before. Trump may try an October surprise to influence the midterms. And being Trump, it’s likely to be something really stupid.
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Trump may try an October surprise to influence the midterms. And being Trump, it’s likely to be something really stupid.
I’m hoping there is someone in his inner circle who is just there for the insider trading, giving him mostly harmless stupid ideas.
Seems like a good time to bring back the USFL, as a football league for red blooded Americans. Hershel Walker as commissioner, one team for each of our beautiful states, with 50 new stadiums in Real America, a big show of Republicans getting something done. The Idaho 3% vs. the Montana Pride, coming soon!
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Well, I saw a fair bit of Trump’s UN speech from yesterday evening on the BBC.
It was something.
I’m not quite sure what, but something.
…Iran can be a great country; or I may annihilate it…
…artificial intelligence now here and after officially called superintelligence, changing the name…
…To the victor belong the spoils – you’ve all heard that.
…”Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”Rest of planet to America: “Guys, could you please just try to be sober for the next election, OK?”
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Well, if such are the consequences of sobriety, maybe they should try drinking more!
I’m reminded of Herodotus on the Persians:
“If an important decision is to be made, the Persians discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober.
If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned.
Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”
Seems reasonable. 😉
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I meet a lot of blue collar people in my line of work. I believe I am seeing them starting to realize this stuff isn’t a game. Can’t just pick a side and root for it. You empty your own pocket for entertainers, but politicians will empty your pocket for you. Have to pay attention, and unlike pro wrestling character matters.
Our news has been presenting politics as entertainment for many decades and it did seem like no matter who “won” it didn’t affect their lives, specifically the condition of getting a little poorer in general every year, in any meaningful way. The schools they went to taught ABCs and math, not civics.
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I wish I could believe it but then look at Mississippi, Alabama, Idaho and realize that as long as someone under a Neo-feudal regime is given someone to shit on and someone to despise, they will bow to the master even while complaining about him. And the Republicans have seemingly turned the whole country into the Jim Crow South
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From the AP:
Vice President JD Vance and other Trump administration officials said Tuesday they plan to remove 760,000 Affordable Care Act enrollees from public healthcare exchanges, alleging that the individuals were fraudulently enrolled in the program, or simply do not exist.
Vance said the discovery and canceled subsidy payments for hundreds of thousands of people from the exchanges, part of an administration-wide crackdown on fraud, would result in $2.2 billion in cost savings.
“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” said Vance, who leads a government task force to eliminate fraud. He was flanked by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, and other administration officials.
Of course JD ‘forgot’ to say that those eliminated enrollees will have an opportunity to show there has been no fraud. Due process is reserved for big donors, ya know. Vance said that some of the targeted folks didn’t have SSA numbers or immigration documentation on their appliations, and apparently he equates what could prove to be clerical errors with fraud. This is another version of the Trump administration using a hammer to swat flies.
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There are allegedly a large number who are enrolled with subsidies who do not use their health insurance at all. If there were insurance brokers, navigators or insurance companies committing fraud, it would look a lot like that.
Or it’s mostly-healthy people who just can’t afford to use their insurance for routine things.
We should probably get Rick Scott onto this, as he knows a lot about MediCare fraud, and it’s likely applicable.
(The subsidies are also calculated based on last year’s income, and some people have a nasty surprise when they earn more this year and have to pay it back (some or all). If they were detecting those people early, that might actually be good for all involved — although since that might be good, I assume this has nothing to do with it)
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