Surface Pro 3: It is perfection. Congratulation to my pepes on the project—they must remain anonymous as only the Big Dogs get the credit. First and foremost is the spouse, Sean. Next is The Other Oracle, sage of the antenna. Especially ingenious is the Surface Pen, which sports a tiny clip into which an even tinier antenna has been fitted. So spectacular is Surface Pro 3, that one can pardon Mr. Panay’s perversion of the English language to describe its ergonomic functionality: “Lapability.” Speaking of biotechnology: Kudos too to “Tigger” on keyboards.
Category Archives: Business
It’s Official: Obama Care To End Employer-Based Health Care
In “The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology,” I worried that, “Perhaps, like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself.”
Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It had already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.
A year has gone by, and the New York Times is pleased to bring tidings of these very developments, agreeing for the most with the researchers, S&P Capital IQ, that pushing people like me off coverage we like and want to keep, and onto the Idiot’s exchanges will make us gormless fools “more autonom[y] around [the] management of [our] own health care.”
The NYT is correct in that the third-payer system has turned the employer into “a social service agency.” The answer, however, is not more government, but a free-market in medicine where nothing comes between doctor and patient.
Statists Collude In Sundering Honourable Swiss Tradition
Business, Economy, English, EU, Europe, Law, Taxation, The State
If the law applied equally to the state and not only to its subjects, the colluding governments—a cartel, really—participating in the concerted action against Switzerland would be prosecuted under anti-trust laws, for the creation of a global tax monopoly.
In 2010, it was reported that the US was putting pressure on Switzerland to end that country’s venerated tradition of “helping private property owners shield their assets against legalized theft (taxation).” Uncle Sam was meddling in the financial sector of an ostensibly sovereign state, siccing its legal footsoldiers on UBS AG, a Zurich and Basel-based financial establishment (and its American clients), because of tax evasion.
When they are not bailing out failed financial institutions, our statists are bankrupting viable ones.
Fast forward to 2014, and it transpires that the statists have succeeded—and not only semantically: banking privacy is now referred to as “tax secrecy.”
No secrets should be kept from The State.
At a ministerial meeting in Paris on Tuesday, Switzerland agreed to sign up to a new global standard on automatic information exchange, representing a decisive break with its centuries-old commitment to protecting the privacy of banking clients.
The move is a big step forward for governments that have mounted a concerted attack on evasion in the wake of the global financial crisis and a series of tax scandals.
Swiss co-operation is pivotal to the struggle to prise open taxpayers’ hidden accounts because of its long tradition of bank secrecy and its dominant wealth management sector, which has $2.2tn of offshore assets.
The declaration, which was signed at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, requires countries to collect and exchange information on bank accounts and the beneficial ownership of companies and other legal structures such as trusts. …
“European governments expect billions of euros to be repatriated as a result of the evasion crackdown.” “Repatriate” is yet another bit of semantic casuistry intended to whitewash these governments’ global property grab.
MORE Via FT.
Back to the post’s opening salvo: Sadly, even if a fair adjudicator were able to prosecute the colluding cartel on the grounds stated—the taxpayers would end up paying for the crimes.
Government Motors (GM) Is Reckless? You Don’t Say!
The greater the incursion of government into markets, the less quality control consumers are able to exert over the products they purchase.
GM (Government Motors) has been propped up by “government-backed guarantees,” on the backs of taxpayers. That’s government’s SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).
Government Motors was further inoculated against legal liability by filing for Chapter 11 protection, or bankruptcy.
“Immunity is pure cowardice,” complained a plaintiff. “They are hiding behind bankruptcy.”
You got it. That’s what government-supported bankruptcy did for Government Motors. It conferred “legal immunity from liability for deaths or injuries in accidents that happened before the current company was created out of the government-supported bankruptcy in July 2009. It was left free of old claims and lawsuits and those remained with ‘old GM,’ which holds assets and liabilities that did not go with the ‘new GM.'”
People have to make up their minds, for once and for all. Do they wish to rely on the benevolence of market forces or the malevolence of government force.