Johndeppe

I am shocked, shocked to discover that no less than 155 million Americans are forced by employers to take a substantial part of their pay (or the family breadwinner’s pay) in the form of health insurance. Health insurance they have not chosen, but has been forced on them. Republicans cannot be content with the repeal of ACA and the cutting of Medicaid down to size. As Avik Roy points out, Medicare cannot be ignored for long. Nor should the cancer of employer health insurance. The same sound conservative logic points inexorably to its abolition.

The loss of freedom is on a positively Soviet scale. Consider these well-known facts.

• Employer health insurance covers the healthy and the unhealthy alike, and at the same rates. That’s totally unjust. Why should a 25-year-old trainee who runs a mile every morning, never smokes or drinks, and shops entirely at the farmers’ market, hand over part of her hard-earned pay to subsidise the asthmatic 55-year-old chappie in Accounts who smokes, drinks, never takes any exercise and alternates between McDonalds, KFC and Dominos for his daily injection of cholesterol-, sugar-, and additive-laden food? It’s positively un-American, and removes the vital incentive to make good lifestyle choices.
• Male employees have as much deducted from their pay as women, and the single as much as those who have children. Nothing wrong with children of course, but it’s a personal choice just like preferring a new car to a holiday in Tahiti, and people should assume the consequences of their actions. If a woman has a child without previously arranging for a husband, that is likewise her lookout.
• Employer health insurance is a form of bondage that ties the employee to her employer independently of the mutual benefit of a free labour contract. The costs of losing a job include, as they do not in America’s competitors, the loss of health insurance. Many American workers are trapped in jobs they are not suited for, or have gone sour on, through this fear.
• Employers are also faced with a heavy cost their competitors in other countries do not bear. In a world without employer health insurance, cash wages go up of course. But the employer would still gain on balance: from not keeping on the unhappy workers whose main motive for staying on is assured health cover, and the high administrative costs of running the scheme. Danish businesses don’t employ a team of people in Human Resources to look after employee health, what would be the point?
• The public policy win comes from bringing back that vital “skin in the game” when individuals buy insurance for themselves. In employee health insurance, it’s not so much a principal-agent problem as the absence of an identifiable principal. Firms know little about health insurance. They buy it because it’s expected by new hires and valued long-serving core staff alike, and everybody else does. They will buy “good enough” and then stop looking. Unleashing the power of the free market to lower prices implies real competition in every sale. This means each individual or family unit must be an agent in a vigorously contested market.

Employer health insurance must go, with the massive tax break transferred to individuals. Some of my more radical libertarian friends think that’s far from enough. All insurance is morally flawed, as it removes the “skin in the game” by spreading risk across large pools. Insurance breeds carelessness. Beyond that, the whole concept of employer and employee is suspect. The Marxists are right, they say, in condemning the wage relationship as servile and alienating: you are not selling something you have made to another, but selling him your very will, accepting a temporary but still abject bondage under which your master controls what you do. In a truly free society, the only employees are women and children naturally subject to the authority of the male head of the family. Should slavery be reintroduced, an idea on which I offer no opinion, it would complete the salutary restoration of the Roman paterfamilias.

We must reluctantly postpone these fascinating debates to another day. For now, Republicans must use their possibly short-lived control in Congress to strike off the tentacles of employer health insurance slowly strangling American business and American freedom.

The “American Employee Freedom in Health Care Act” would be very short. It only needs two operative articles, leaving aside the changes to the tax code.

Article 1. With effect from 1 January 2019, it shall be prohibited for employers to provide health insurance to employees, under pain of a fine of $5,000 for each employee and year of service for which such insurance is provided.

Article 2. The date of entry into force laid down in Article 1 shall be brought forward to January 1 2018 where the employer is a media organization, registered lobbyist, think tank, political party, or other organization engaging in political advocacy or policy analysis as its principal activity, and the employee is a journalist, columnist, presenter, analyst, or regular commentator.

I remember sitting in a room almost a decade ago when Minster of Transportation at the time Kevin Falcon announced the Provincial Transit Plan. The plan would see transit service expanded throughout communities in BC. Some of the early projects included the Canada Line and RapidBus service along Highway 97 in Kelowna.

By the end of 2020, the provincial government committed to investing to:

-Build rapid transit to UBC
-Double the capacity on the Expo Line with a SkyTrain expansion into Surrey
-Procure new rail car
-Build-out RapidBus Service with seven new routes in Metro Vancouver

Map of rapid transit expansion as envisioned in the 2008 Provincial Transit Plan select map to enlarge.

Map of RapidBus service in Metro Vancouver as envisioned in the 2008 Provincial Transit Plan. Select map to enlarge.

Serious funding for transit was being poured into both BC Transit and TransLink. The province was going to contribute $4.75 billion toward the $11.1 billion Provincial Transit Plan. The province committed to funding 43% of capital cost with the remaining funding coming from the federal and local governments.

I remember talking to someone at the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure who, at the time, half-jokingly said that they would become the Ministry of Transit after the completion of the Port Mann Bridge project.

Boy have times changes. Transit is chronically underfunded in the province, and it looks things aren’t getting better.

The David Suzuki Foundation recently released a report called “Breaking gridlock: B.C.’s transit investment deficit and what can be done to fix it.” The following graph from the report shows by how much the provincial government has underfunded transit in the province based on the promises made in the Provincial Transit Plan.

Provincial funding promised under the Provincial Transit Plan compared to actual funding. Select graph to enlarge.

So how do we fix the transit funding problem? With the federal government now committed to funding 50% of transit capital project costs, the Suzuki Foundation is calling on the provincial government to once again commit to contributing 40% of the funding required for transit expansion in BC. Local governments should pick up the remaining 10%. For more details, check out the report.

Not since 1972 has a candidate won the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary but failed to secure the nomination. In 2016 we could see both major parties accomplish this feat.

Now that we're only a few days away from the first actual voting that will take place in the 2016 presidential contest, we're at a good point to stop and think through the possible outcomes that might unfold in the first few bouts, what they might mean for the eventual outcome, and what evidence they might provide to political scientists who geekily see this as a nationwide exercise in hypothesis testing with lots of media coverage.

The Iowa caucuses will be held on Monday, February 1, and for the first time since Americans started getting riled up about this election (in 2013), actual breathing voters will cast actual recorded preferences for candidates. And it will mean something. But what will it mean?

There has been a lot of chatter about how polls may not matter that much, but political science research tells us two important things about polls and predictiveness. First, polls are more predictive the closer they are to Election Day. This means that today's polls are more meaningful than those from last fall.

Second, especially at this late stage, trajectory is significant. A candidate who has been lagging the entire season but is on the upswing late in the game can often be expected to maintain that trajectory and overcome an opponent. With these two findings in mind, let's look at the latest polls from Iowa.

Republican presidential candidate polling trends in Iowa. (HuffPost Pollster)

On the Republican side, Donald Trump has a significant lead (more than 7 percentage points, which is a lot in this game). Both Ben Carson and Ted Cruz appear to have peaked and now have downward trajectories. Marco Rubio is in a far trailing third place but has been slowly and steadily climbing through the season. These numbers suggest that Trump may win Iowa on Monday.

When you add the information that Trump is also now leading in the prediction markets, his victory on Monday seems more likely. When we add in the numbers from New Hampshire, whose primary is on Tuesday, February 9, we see a good chance of Trump winning these first two contests.

Donald Trump leads the polls in New Hampshire. (HuffPost Pollster)

The Democrats show a different story entirely. After having had a strong lead for many months, Hillary Clinton is now in a statistical dead heat with Bernie Sanders in Iowa.

Clinton and Sanders are in a dead heat in Iowa. (HuffPost Pollster)

Looking at Sanders's trajectory suggests that he may come out on top on Monday in Iowa. Add to this the New Hampshire polls, which give Sanders a whopping 14-point lead, and it seems entirely plausible for Sanders to win both of the first two Democratic contests.

Sanders has a massive lead in New Hampshire polls. (HuffPost Pollster)

The first thing to keep in mind about gaming out these scenarios is that much like the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee, the fallout from the event is often more about whether expectations have been met than about the outcome itself. If the economy anticipates that the Fed will raise interest rates, and it does, then it's a non-event because the market has already corrected for this expectation. The actual event of raising rates is anticlimatic. But if the Fed raises rates when the market does not expect it, chaos may ensue, if only briefly.

We can think of the Iowa caucus the same way. The market is expecting Trump to win, and maybe Sanders too (but the latter is much less clear). If this expected outcome does not occur — if Trump, for example, comes in second or even third place on Monday — we can expect a big market adjustment. His numbers in New Hampshire and nationally would likely take a big hit. But if Trump wins on Monday, not much is going to change, and we'll march ahead to the next contest.

What implications can we draw from a Trump/Sanders win in both Iowa and New Hampshire? Trump and Sanders are unusual candidates. Both are populists with elements of ideological extremism. Both have significant institutional barriers to overcome on a path to their party's nomination. Trump has been denounced by leading members of the party whose nomination he seeks. Sanders lags significantly behind Clinton in fundraising, though he may have matched her in organization.

This conundrum left me wondering: Have we ever had a case where a non-incumbent candidate won both the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary but failed to go on to win the nomination? Does winning both of the first two contests, in other words, predict the outcome?

Surprisingly, we have to go all the way back to 1972 to find a case to falsify the above claim (hat tip to professor David Peterson for this gem of data). In 1972, the Democrats who competed for their party's nomination included Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, George Wallace, Edmund Muskie, and Eugene McCarthy (plus some others).

McGovern was the nominee that year, and lost resoundingly to incumbent Richard Nixon in the general election. In the early primaries, though, Muskie won Iowa (January 24), Arizona (January 29), and New Hampshire (March 7). McGovern didn't win a primary until the Wisconsin primary on April 4.

The Democrats had an unusual process in 1972 for a lot of reasons. After the riots that occurred at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the party reformed the nomination process to allow more voices and fewer party elite directives. Ted Kennedy had been the establishment favorite for some time, but his presidential hopes were squandered when the public learned he fled the scene of a single-car crash in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, that resulted in the death of his longtime aide Mary Jo Kopechne. The party struggled in the face of these upsets and bungled its nomination process that year.

On the other hand, in 2000 Al Gore won the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary and went on to be the nominee, and in 2004 John Kerry did it. Both of these candidates were certainly more "establishment" than Trump or Sanders, and the 1972 case may be a closer historical guide to current events.

If Trump and Sanders win Iowa and New Hampshire, 2016 may be like what Democrats experienced in 2000 and 2004, and we may see these candidates as the nominees. But that outcome is far from certain and still seems unlikely in the face of the enormous institutional obstacles they face in their own parties. It's historically unusual to observe the scenario where a candidate wins Iowa and New Hampshire but does not secure the nomination; it's therefore astonishing that we may see exactly this in both of the major parties this year.

If the polls are wrong (and they are more likely to be wrong in Trump's case than in Sanders's), we may see big adjustments happen quickly, and the tides may change (I'm looking at you, Marco). If Trump becomes the Republican nominee, it's likely to upset an already tumultuous party.

This is all still hypothesis testing for many of us, and most evidence still points to the parties pulling together and deciding this thing for more established candidates, but prognosticating is still fun. I expect we'll see Trump and Sanders do well in the early contests in the end not be the candidates who cross the finish line first.

*An earlier version of this post incorrectly described Sanders's lead in NH as 7 points (updated 1/29/2016 2:35pm)

This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. See more Mischiefs of Faction posts here.

By last January, people in Flint, Michigan, knew something was wrong with their water. It smelled and tasted bad. It was the color of rust. And they'd already been told it was contaminated with chemicals that can cause cancer.

Publicly, the state insisted all this was nothing to worry about. Privately, they made sure their own employees wouldn't have to drink Flint's water.

After a notice went out informing Flint residents that their water had unacceptable levels of total trihalomethanes — a chlorine byproduct that can cause cancer — the Flint office of the Department of Technology, Management, and Budget installed water coolers, according to an email obtained by Progress Michigan.

"While the City of Flint states that corrective actions are not necessary, [the department] is in the process of providing a water cooler on each occupied floor, positioned near the water fountain, so you can choose which water to drink," the department's facilities team wrote on January 7, 2015.

But the Department of Environmental Quality, which was notified about the budget department's decision to buy bottled water (and noted that "certain departments" seemed concerned about the water quality notice), was still insisting that the contaminated water was perfectly safe to drink.

"It's not like an eminent [sic] threat to public health," a briefing the department sent to Gov. Rick Snyder on February 1, 2015, reads in part. The DEQ went on to suggest that city officials were exaggerating the threat so they could get more money out of the state for infrastructure improvements.

It would take eight more months for the state to admit that the water in Flint really was unsafe. The budget department might have had clean drinking water provided by the state, but ordinary people in Flint did not.

DTMB Facility Notification

(credit: Davide D'Amico)

On Thursday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that requires police get a warrant to use a stingray during investigations. The devices, which are also known as cell-site simulators, are usually used to locate a phone but can also in some cases intercept calls and text messages.

The law, known as the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, imposes other sweeping new requirements to enhance digital privacy, and imposes a warrant requirement before police can access nearly any type of digital data produced by or contained within a device or service.

"Governor Brown just signed a law that says ‘no’ to warrantless government snooping in our digital information. This is a landmark win for digital privacy and all Californians," Nicole Ozer, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of California ACLU, said in a statement. "We hope this is a model for the rest of the nation in protecting our digital privacy rights."

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Topology of a covert mesh network that connects air-gapped computers to the Internet.

Hanspach and Goetz

Computer scientists have developed a malware prototype that uses inaudible audio signals to communicate, a capability that allows the malware to covertly transmit keystrokes and other sensitive data even when infected machines have no network connection.

The proof-of-concept software—or malicious trojans that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods—could prove especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that routinely place an "air gap" between computers and the outside world. Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet. The software can transfer data at much greater distances by employing an acoustical mesh network made up of attacker-controlled devices that repeat the audio signals.

The researchers, from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics, recently disclosed their findings in a paper published in the Journal of Communications. It came a few weeks after a security researcher said his computers were infected with a mysterious piece of malware that used high-frequency transmissions to jump air gaps. The new research neither confirms nor disproves Dragos Ruiu's claims of the so-called badBIOS infections, but it does show that high-frequency networking is easily within the grasp of today's malware.

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Over the past few days, Google, Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, Twitter, yeah all the big players have come forth and stated that they have never heard of PRISM, and that the NSA certainly has no backdoors to their servers and blah blah blah.

We would like to go on record and say this: We*, Synthetic Remarks, have been licking PRISM’s ass since the early days of ARPANET. Every single reader who has visited this page since the mid ’60s has his or her devices forever infected with an undetectable trojan so sophisticated that Stuxnet is a joke in comparison.

Not only do we share your data with everyone who requests it; we proactively collect and forward all your info (including a live stream of your webcam) to all governments and royal courts worldwide. On top of that, we do our best to sell your bank logins on Deep Web forums.

We sincerely hope you don’t mind.

* Majestic plural, again.