Thus, when a campus is embroiled in protests (speech) over bigotry or disinvited speakers, the real censorship happens by ripping the debate away from the substance of marginalized students’ concerns and focusing instead on “free speech”—that is, on the sensitivities of those who would rather not have to think about their capacity to hurt or offend. But an intellectually honest free-speech advocate wouldn’t cry censorship; they’d instead address the substance of the speech being censored or marginalized, and argue for why that speech deserves to be heard on a college campus in the first place.
New E.P.A. Rules Could Lead to Big Cuts in Methane Leaks from Oil and Gas Operations →
In a move that environmental campaigners had sought for years (as had I), the Environmental Protection Agency has issued final rules that could substantially cut emissions of heat-trapping methane, smog-forming volatile organic compounds and toxic air pollutants such as benzene from new, rebuilt or modified oil and gas wells and other infrastructure and operations.
The agency also took an overdue step to clarify how to curb emissions of methane from the hundreds of thousands of wells, compressors and other leaky parts of the nation’s sprawling oil and gas industry, issuing an “Information Collection Request” requiring companies, among other things, to describe the types of technologies that could be used to reduce emissions. Existing systems are the source of 90 percent of emissions, so getting moving on this front is essential; it’s also often profitable, as we wrote in 2009.*
The case of the $629 Band-Aid — and what it reveals about American health care →
First, he points out that the Band-Aid didn't cost $629; it was actually just $7. The other $622 was the cost of seeing the doctor and using the emergency department itself.
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"The remainder of the charge," he writes, "was associated with the use of the facility and staff. We staff the emergency department 24-hours a day, every day of the year, and stand ready to treat whoever walks through our door, be it a gunshot victim or a patient with a stroke."
Murphy is explaining something called a "facility fee," the base price of setting foot inside an emergency room. It's something akin to the cover charge you'd pay for going out to a nightclub.
"It's the fixed price, and that's just what you're going to have to pay," says Renee Hsia, a professor at University of California San Francisco who studies emergency billing.
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Hsia says the thing that infuriates her is how common bills like this are; she sees them all the time. The amount is almost impossible to predict, because facility fees vary widely and hospitals rarely make the numbers public. One of her studies on ER bills for common procedures showed that prices can vary from as little to $15 to as much as $17,797. And a lot of that depends on the given hospital's facility fees.
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"Facility fees are very arbitrary," she says. "There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, which can be really frustrating. There are some places where the basic facility fee can be over $1,000."
I asked the communications department at Western Connecticut Health Network to explain to me how facility fees are set at Danbury Hospital, where Colette was seen. Do they count up the number of new purchases they'd need plus the cost of physician salaries, and come up with a number? Did they look at historical trends about how many patients they might see?
Western Connecticut Health Network never answered my question. Instead, four days after my inquiry, they reversed Bird's bill entirely...
Most People in the World Have No Idea How to Manage Their Money →
As financial products become more diverse, complex, and widespread, and more people join the middle class, fighting the world’s financial illiteracy will become even more of a priority. Practical and accessible education programs should be offered to the millions of people whose economic well-being would improve if they only knew more about managing their incomes and savings, however meager they may be.
If people, now, can't answer basic questions, how much can we reasonably expect in a world where finance is increasingly complex? Assuming it's richer, at least, we should be able to afford those extra training classes. But should we bother? (And will it matter? How much longer will money, as currently practiced, still exist? 200 or 300 years?)
Trump and Clinton: Proof that the U.S. Voting System Doesn’t Work →
Clinton and Trump may have won primaries, but are they really representative of what the American people want? In fact, as we will show, it is John Kasich and Bernie Sanders who are first in the nation’s esteem. Trump and Clinton come last.
So how has it come to this? The media has played a big role, of course, but that Trump versus Clinton will almost surely be the choice this November is the result of the totally absurd method of election used in the primaries: majority voting.
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With majority voting (MV), voters tick the name of one candidate, at most, and the numbers of ticks determine the winner and the order of finish. It’s a system that is used across the U.S. (and in many other nations) to elect presidents as well as senators, representatives, and governors.
But it has often failed to elect the candidate preferred by the majority.
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With MV, voters cannot express their opinions on all candidates. Instead, each voter is limited to backing just one candidate, to the exclusion of all others in the running.
Bush defeated Gore because Nader voters were unable to weigh in on the other two. Moreover, as we argue further on, majority voting can go wrong even when there are just two candidates.
The point is that it is essential for voters to be able to express the nuances of their opinions.
The article goes on to describe another system (Majority Judgment) which takes a lot more of this information into account,
We need to rethink party democracy →
There are two other changes in the political culture that I think will make a return to parties especially difficult. One is the way we've come to embrace neutral administration. Rosenblum describes the historical roots of anti-partisanship, which kind of gets at this idea. But now several generations of Americans have grown up with a fairly extensive administrative state and with a Hatch Act that regulates political activity among federal employees.
For people under 40, we've also only ever known a political world with another layer of post-Watergate sunshine reforms. We expect that official party organizations will be neutral in nomination contests and can't accept that the rules might be designed to favor certain types of candidates because the party thinks that's how it can achieve its main goal: winning political office.
If the broad cultural expectation is that broad participation and neutral administration are necessary to make something legitimate, then, as much as it pains to me to say it, those ought to be taken into consideration in how party politics works. This could be a good opportunity to reform the election system, including nominations, in ways that are badly needed. Some uniformity across states and some updated technology would serve us well.
What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life? That’s What We’re About to Test. →
So where do we go from there? The organization that we founded,GiveDirectly, has decided to try to permanently end extreme poverty across dozens of villages and thousands of people in Kenya by guaranteeing them an ongoing income high enough to meet their basic needs—a universal basic income, or basic income guarantee. We’ve spent much of the past decade delivering cash transfers to the extremely poor through GiveDirectly, but have never structured the transfers exactly this way: universal, long-term, and sufficient to meet basic needs. And that’s the point—nobody has and we think now is the time to try.
This idea of a basic income guarantee is being debated around the globe, with pilots being considered by Finland’s center-right government and Canada’s liberal party, and support from across the political landscape, including libertarians from the Cato Institute and liberals from the Brookings Institution. The Swiss will vote in a referendum on June 5 on whether to make a basic income the law of their land. The stakes in these debates are enormous, with trillions of dollars of social spending under review. Should we move from a patchwork system of overlapping poverty-reduction programs, administered separately to address different issues (nutrition, housing, employment) to simply guaranteeing a basic income? What would happen if we did?
The Economy’s Crisis Ended Under Obama, But Its Long-Term Problems Didn’t →
...By virtually any measure, the economy is far better than when Obama took office. (How much credit Obama and his policies deserve for that improvement is a separate debate.)
But Obama has made less progress on a set of deeper, structural problems that began years or even decades before the recession. Among them: slow growth in wages and productivity; rising inequality; falling labor force participation, especially among men; and the decline of manufacturing and the failure to find a new source of middle-class jobs to replace it. The bubble-driven boom of the mid-2000s papered over some of those problems — laid-off manufacturing workers got jobs in construction, families offset reduced incomes by borrowing against their homes — until the housing bust revealed them. The recovery has done little to address these issues; many of them have gotten worse.