Government Motors (GM) Is Reckless? You Don’t Say!

Business, Free Markets, Government, Law, Welfare

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.

Will Microsoft’s New CEO Kill Surface?

Aesthetics, Business, Internet, Technology, The Zeitgeist

Forbes’s Gene Marks contends that Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s New CEO—whom Marks thinks is way cool because, wait for this, Nadella is a “decade younger than his predecessor and looks young for his age”—has effectively killed the Microsoft Surface.

Let me unpack Marks’ “logic”:

Even though The Surface is “a powerful little laptop, lightweight with a Windows 8 touchscreen and a long battery life”; and though this product is “both tablet and laptop and integrates tightly with other Microsoft applications”—Cool-Because-He’s-Young Nadella is to be hailed as brilliant too for sabotaging the future of a magnificent product. It is alleged that Nadella wishes to end Microsoft’s foray into hardware (Surface), and take the company back to the business of software.

“A Windows First policy,” argues Marks, “was the reason behind products like the Surface.”

If, as I understood this terribly hip article, The Surface is more than the software it runs—why reduce the best Tablet in the business to its bits? What about the “Big Idea”?

Not being a techie, I have no idea if Forbes’s Gene Marks is being plain silly, or if silly is the new norm in the media’s tech coverage. I suspect the two are not mutually exclusive. (“A silly society is a youth-obsessed society.” Youth-obsessed U.S is silly.)

In its hipness, the Forbes article reminds me of that grating, pretentious Cisco ad, in which a female with a deceptively soft voice waffles about the Internet of All Things (WTF?!).

But I guess I’m still from the Book Age. Behold a throwback: a wall-to-wall library, or half of it, as I could not get the entire thing in the frame. Sean made this solid maple thing to my mid-century American, Heywood-Wakefield design specs (more):

Bookcase I

UPDATED: Haman Hussein’s Healthcare (The Latest)

Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Healthcare, Judaism & Jews

With each exorbitant healthcare bill I pay these days—and have paid since my policy was restructured to comply with Haman’s healthcare edicts—I am reminded to say the thing we Jews say following the name of a force for evil. Let me put it in context:

The last hellcare update you got here was of Ann Coulter struggling mightily to buy insurance after a policy cancellation. That a well-to-do woman would fight to find and purchase a product as essential as healthcare insurance in the USA, tells you all you need to know about those “markets” the moron, “Yimach Sh’mo,” has ruined.

Yimach Sh’mo means “may his name be erased from memory” (or Damnatio memoriae) and it “is commonly uttered by Jews after the mention of Hitler, Stalin and Haman.

A bit of hyperbole, perhaps?

Haman Hussein is hurting my pocket and may hurt my health. He is hurting the health of many less fortunate than I; should Individuals whose healthcare insurance Haman has canceled fall seriously ill—he’ll be the ruin of them. They’ll have to deplete their savings and sell their homes to heal themselves. No, the mention of Haman and Hussein in tandem does not constitute hyperbole.

In short succession, I’ll bring you the latest developments in Haman’s healthcare.

UPDATE (3/31): The facts not finessed:

The administration claims 6 million have “signed up” for Haman’s health care. There is a big difference between selecting a plan and paying for one. Data from state exchanges, says Betsy McCaughey, indicate that up to a third have not paid. Data from the federal exchanges point to 20 percent.

How many of the 6 million insured by Haman are new, paying policy holders, and how many had insurance before Haman, “Yimach Sh’mo,” dispossessed them of their chosen plans and shoved them on to his?

Only about 27 percent of Haman healthcare policy holders were uninsured before, estimate McKinsey & Company.

Given that as many as 5 to 6 million people lost plans they liked and were forced onto exchanges and plans they dislike—there has been “no net increase in the number of insured,” ventures Ms. McCaughey’s

Of course, the CBOafs (The Congressional Budget Oafs)—whose practice it is to “first confirm government predictions of the great savings that will accrue due to this or the other wastrel, welfare program. Later, when it’s safer, they adjust their statistical sleight of hand”—had echoed Haman. They promised that “the vast majority of the people eligible for subsidies on the exchanges would be previously uninsured individuals.”

Instead, says Avik Roy, “the vast majority are previously insured people, many of whom are getting a better deal on the exchanges because they either qualify for subsidies, or because they’re older individuals who benefit from the law’s steep rate hikes on the young.”

This is nothing new to those of us who understood the simple mathematical facts about a $2 trillion government program.

UPDATED: Media’s Rotating Mandarins (Name The Nepotists)

Conservatism, Ethics, Family, Media

Like viral DNA, members of the media-military-congressional-industrial complex replicate themselves. Thus, what’s interesting in the Mediaite non-story about the tedious Juan Williams and his son, who’re “blasting liberals for their ‘Uncle Tom’ treatment of black conservatives”—perennial, impotent whining in such circles—is the fact that son has successfully followed father’s path. Williams senior has, no doubt, greased the skids for sonny-boy.

Protectionism.

Many are the examples of major pundits or newsmen who’ve helped their spawn into the family business. Tim Russert’s son, Luke, is an example. I recall reading that the father of chubby Katie Pavlich, who is ubiquitous in Republican media, was a mover and shaker in same circles, but all evidence of that had been expunged. There are many others.

And it’s a slow news week.

UPDATE (3/30): NAME THE NEPOTISTS. At the Fox News family, “Peter Doocy, son and possible clone of host Steve Doocy,” is another beneficiary of nepotism. As is Juliet Huddy‘s brother, John Huddy, Jr. It’s all in the family at Fox.

Viva corruption in cable.