One of its chief architects has said, on the record, that the law was deliberately made as convoluted as possible so as to fool Americans. If it had been obvious that Obamacare was a tax, the people would not have accepted it.
The obfuscation was useful to Democrats when the taxation part of Obamacare had to be defended from a legal challenge; the Supreme Court ruled that it wasn't a tax (not incidentally making some folks wonder what skeletons the deciding vote had in his closet).
Anyway, it's a tax, and it's nothing but a tax, as I've been saying all along. Anyone who is shocked or surprised that the government lied about it not being a tax is either stupid or not paying attention.
* * *
Related: enrollment in Obamacare is 30% lower than "expected". Further, we can expect premiums to jump in 2015.
Again.
* * *
How bad do economic conditions have to be for a gold mine to go bankrupt? Look: if it costs more to dig an ounce of gold out of the ground than you can sell it for, you can't make money by mining it.
The basics of economics demonstrate that if a commodity is inexpensive, the people who cannot make a profit at that price will be forced out of the market in favor of more efficient producers. The real problem arises when very few people can make a profit at a particular price; usually such conditions are the result of a cartel or monopoly, and they usually are acting to limit competition.
By definition, though, someone who produces gold ought to be able to make a profit on mining the stuff regardless of its price--assuming, of course, that they are working an economically viable deposit. That's the hard part; there's plenty of gold all over the place, but if it costs $20,000 per ounce to extract it when the price of gold is around $1,200 per ounce, no one can make any money getting at it, and no one is going to sell the products of his labor at a loss. (Not for long, in any case.)
The real issue here is why is gold undervalued? Is it? Has there been manipulation of the price of gold? The article doesn't say; it merely hints that there may be some shenanigans (or unwise activity) taking place in the commodities market.
I don't know, and I'm not smart enough to understand high finance.
* * *
Not even remotely surprising. This is Apple we're talking about. "Where there's smoke, there's fire," and Apple runs under a "walled garden" paradigm that tries to force people to use Apple as much as possible. The people who think Apple deliberately avoided fixing the technical glitch that kept former Apple customers from getting their text messages are probably right.
* * *
The f-ing scary double whammy: Christopher Walken, age 12, in clown makeup. If you do not shit your pants at the sight of a Christopher Walken Clown From Hell you are either a Terminator or a hero.
The sheer pants-wetting terror of these images is muted only by the fact that he's twelve. If this were adult Christopher Walken no one would survive.
The only thing I can think of that would be more horrifying than this would be John Malkovich.
...excuse me. I think I need to go change my underwear.