5 Thoughts for July 30, 2017

1. CSRs and Risk Corridor: Distilling the most critical problems of the ACA comes down to the funding of these two programs. Both were written into the ACA, but neither had explicit funding requirements. Republicans blocked risk corridor funding and both Republicans are Donald are threatening to cut off CSR funds. You don't really need to understand either program to understand the effects of GOP actions to block them. The real life consequences of blocking these two programs are observable through Tennessee and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. Following three years of an underfunded risk corridor, BCBST lost $400M. They decided to pull back their geographic coverage following year 3 of the risk corridor program, in order to recover their reserves. For 2018, BCBST is raising rates 21% on average across Tennessee, 14% of which is directly attributable to the uncertainty of being reimbursed for CSRs. Just so you know who to blame and why.
2. Gender: Imagine if you will, a law that stated that marriage was between one man and one woman. Now, imagine a male-female couple getting married but the male was, in fact, a postoperative female and the female was, in fact, a postoperative male. That's perfectly acceptable, right? Or? What? A biological violation? The marriage is perfectly acceptable biologically. Nothing prevents this couple from marrying. What happens if science allows people get to reset the gender of a child at the post-embryonic stage? What if that child grows up to reselect the choice of his/her parents? The point of all this is, we're way too concerned about gender, rather than individual lives; we would rather dispute the gender of someone than to accept their life as intrinsically valuable.
3. Vote Hacking: It is pure fantasy to believe that elections cannot be hacked or that voter rolls are secure. Ohio's voter rolls are not secured; they're obscured but readily accessible to anyone on the internet without zero hacking. You can find full lists of people, their addresses, which elections they voted in, their party registration, age, etc. It is no surprise that they're being sold on the dark web. Last year, they didn't even obscure their voter rolls -- but obscurity is not security. This year's DefCon included a vote-hacking village featuring a variety of voting and voter registration machines. This video breaks down what happened and it's rather sad. But the worst part about all this is the paradox that requires people to leave visible trails of vote hacking before anyone takes the threat seriously, meaning, so long as you do it quietly and without leaving tracks behind, you're free to hack elections in the US all you want.
4. Pussy Riot: Huh. I think they're more popular in the US than in her native Russia, and isn't it just a tad weird how Nadya is giving us advice on how to deal with Donald? But what's even worse is that she's spot on! We need more humans like her on this planet.
   
   
   
   
5. Plastic Bag Ban: This screengrab from the livestream of a monk seal and pup just outside of Waikiki shows why we need to spread the ban on grocery plastic bags. How would you feel if that was your grocery plastic bag in the ocean and it ended up choking this pup to death?