The new Métiers d’Art Villes Lumières Watch inspired by a bird’s-eye view of central Beijing at night seems to suggest that no one is feeling the growing pressure to court the Chinese market more than Vacheron Constantin.
The article Vacheron Constantin Métiers D’Art Villes Lumières Beijing Watch first appeared on aBlogtoWatch and was written by Zach Pina.
New Zealand-based Magrette watches as a brand is almost akin to a close friend. The brand started around when aBlogtoWatch started, and a Magrette timepiece was one of the first watches I reviewed for aBlogtoWatch, almost 10 years ago.
The article Magrette Moana Pacific Professional Dive Watch Review first appeared on aBlogtoWatch and was written by Ariel Adams.
Electro Funk
Bridging the gap between Electro Pop and Hip Hop, comes Calvin Harris and the first installment of what we hope is an ongoing sequel, Funk Wav Bounces. So far so good, came “Feels” (Big Sean, Pharrell, Katy Perry), “Rollin” (Future, Khalid), “Heatstroke” (Young Thug, Ariana Grande, Pharrell), and the favorite “Slide” (Frank Ocean & Migos). Other guests on board include Nicki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, A-Trak, ScHoolboy Q, PARTYNEXTDOOR, D.R.AM. and more. Ride the wave below and purchase here.
.png)
Hovertext:
Evolution is beautiful in general but a real asshole in particular.
.png)
GEEKS. We have announced our Keynote for BAHFest Houston. BEHOLD
Meet 2015’s unofficial parents of the year: Tanya and Adam Phillips.
Their daughter Honey-Rae was born with a large birthmark on her leg, so to make her feel more comfortable in her skin, the British couple each decided to get matching tattoos that resemble the red marks.
“Most people might think it’s very extreme but to us it was the natural thing to do to ensure our daughter never felt different or alone in the world,” said Tanya.
At first they said would go out of their way to cover her legs up from the public to prevent other kids from staring or making fun of her, but then they decided to take more extreme measures.
Adam received his tattoo last Christmas as a gift from his wife, and she just received hers on her 40th birthday as a gift from her husband.
And now they are one big, happy birth-marked family.
Via: Mirror
The post Parents of the Day: Couple Gets Birthmark Tattoo in Solidarity with Daughter appeared first on The Daily What.
C.R.E.A.M.
It’s like New York’s been soft since Young Thug busted out the bando. Ha! The Kang and the new sensation from the A flourished on this ode to the almighty green. If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.
This post made possible by the Patty Dumpling Endowed Chair for Clean Gas and Clean Coal and Clean Oil Spills and Clean Tar Sands and Word Salad.
In a vote that either killed the economy forever or rescued the environment forever, the U.S. Senate last night fell one vote short of passing a bill calling for immediate approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The bill was supposed to magically make Louisiana Republicans like Sen. Mary Landrieu, although it’s not clear how. But Landrieu was not quite able to round up enough Democrats to support the bill, and now she is reduced to hoping that saying nice things about National Adoption Day will get her reelected.
The only thing that everyone seems to agree on about the Keystone XL pipeline is that it is a very important symbol of either the Republican Party’s commitment to jobs, jobs, jobs, or the Democrats’ commitment to the environment. On the jobs side, it would create several thousand temporary construction jobs, though only 35 permanent jobs to keep the thing running. (Yes, yes, there’d also be spinoff jobs to refine all that oil.) On the environmental side, the case is probably stronger — the tar sands where the oil comes from are incredibly dirty, and just extracting the stuff requires burning more fossil fuels than does conventional oil drilling, and the oil itself is also dirtier and carbonier. But even there, killing XL won’t stop the tar sands from being drilled or scraped or however they muck the stuff out — it’s currently being shipped by rail, which is also far more prone to spills due to derailments than pipelines are to leaks, and there’s no evidence that would change even if the Keystone XL plan vanished forever. We still come down on the side of not building the pipeline, because the poor old world is burning too much fossil fuel already, so why encourage the bastards by making it easier? We’re with Bernie Sanders on this one — we need to be moving in the other direction.
And of course, the entire exercise was kind of pointless, since chances are that Barack Obama would have vetoed the bill — he at least has a realistic view of the actual impact on jobs, telling the New York Times last year that there’s “no evidence” that the pipeline would be the jobs cornucopia the Republicans claim:
“Republicans have said that this would be a big jobs generator … There is no evidence that that’s true. The most realistic estimates are this might create maybe 2,000 jobs during the construction of the pipeline, which might take a year or two, and then after that we’re talking about somewhere between 50 and 100 jobs in an economy of 150 million working people.”
He said 2,000 jobs were “a blip relative to the need.”
So, sorry, Mary Landrieu, you probably won’t get Republicans to like you, and sorry, Republicans, even when you take over the Senate and pass your very own Keystone bill in January, it’s still not likely to get signed, probably, unless Barry finds something he thinks he can trade it for. How about confirming some appointees? Ah, yes, and sorry, Midwest: one way or another, you’re probably getting a pipeline and some oil spills.
Hmm… are there some desert tortoises we can go commune with?
[NYT / Newsweek / Daily Beast / Burlington Free Press]
As part of our recent shift in focus , I've been playing (and thus writing) about Civilization even more than usual. And for a while, it seemed every time I did, someone deep in the comments section would be whispering about another game I should try that, *gasp*, might be better than Civ. So I did. And whaddya know, in a lot of ways, they were right.
The New York Times has a huge Pulitzer-bait story about injuries to U.S. military forces from old, unstable chemical weapons in Iraq, and how the Bush administration and the Pentagon covered it all up. It’s big, it’s a jaw-dropping exposé of shoddy treatment of soldiers, and you should read it.
The one thing that it does not do is vindicate George W. Bush’s brilliant decision to invade Iraq to put an end to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s supposedly active program to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. All the chemical weapons that U.S. forces found were old and deteriorating, leftovers from the Iran-Iraq war:
The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.
You’re going to hear a lot of conservatives — like the nine paid staffers of Twitchy, for instance — saying, “See? Bush was right, so shut up, libs!” We especially loved Dead Breitbart’s take on the story, which leaves out a few somewhat important details. They say only that the Times story “details U.S. forces in Iraq finding thousands of chemical weapons during the Iraq war.”
“From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule,” Chivers wrote. “In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”
See? Bush was right! Saddam had WMDs! USA! USA! USA! Suck it, libs!
Funny, though, what U.S. troops found was not those mobile chemical weapons labs that the Bush administration insisted were there but a lot of munitions left over from the 1980s:
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.
Then, during the long occupation, American troops began encountering old chemical munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs. Typically 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets, they were remnants of an arms program Iraq had rushed into production in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.
All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.
In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.
In a pretty brilliant bit of revisionism, the ever-thoughtful American Thinker blog proclaims “NY Times admits Saddam had WMDs” in its headline, and then accuses Chivers and the Times of revisionism:
Chivers, of course, can’t very well say that Bush was right all along: His readers wouldn’t stand for it. So he tosses a bone to them, claiming the Bush administration’s goal in Iraq wasn’t merely to disarm Saddam of his WMDs — but to destroy “an active weapons of mass destruction program.” Instead he claims that American troops only found “remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.” Yet the fact remains that these chemical agents still had military value — a fact that Chivers concedes
Yep, they had “military value”: They could be wired together to create roadside bombs. Remember how Colin Powell went to the UN to warn the world that Saddam had rotting remnants of a weapons stockpile that could be used as components of roadside bombs? They were truly a terrifying international security threat.
The main thing we take away from the story is that the Bush administration did everything it could to not call attention to these old chemical weapons. They were an embarrassment. The were the wrong weapons. They were actually not the droids we were looking for. Worse, they would have raised awkward questions about where they came from:
In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.
To have announced that we were finding these suckers would have required Bush to say that he’d discovered where Saddam got his chemical weapons, and then, presumably, we’d have to bomb some American and European defense contractors. Even when the Pentagon did announce that some weapons had been found, it scrupulously avoided talking about where they came from:
The publicly released information also skirted the fact that most of the chemical artillery shells were traceable to the West, some tied to the United States.
These shells, which the American military calls M110s, had been developed decades ago in the United States. Roughly two feet long and weighing more than 90 pounds, each is an aerodynamic steel vessel with a burster tube in its center …
The United States also exported the shells and the technology behind them. When Iraq went arms shopping in the 1980s, it found manufacturers in Italy and Spain willing to deal their copies. By 1988, these two countries alone had sold Iraq 85,000 empty M110-type shells, according to confidential United Nations documents. Iraq also obtained shells from Belgium.
Strangely, these details aren’t getting mentioned so much in the rightwing media. Saddam had some WMDs, all right, and they were top-notch American military technology.
Getting beyond the question of whether Bush is vindicated — say, we mentioned that he isn’t, didn’t we? — the story is just amazing. The Pentagon was not about to expose the existence of these old weapons that were injuring soldiers, so the soldiers got inadequate preparation before being sent out to dismantle what they expected to be conventional shells that might be used in IEDs. And then, after they were injured, they were given a gag order, because what they found was TOP SECRET. But at least they got Purple Hearts for their trouble.
At every step, the military leadership did whatever it could to downplay just how many of these old embarrassing weapons were still floating around Iraq. By 2004 the mission had shifted to fighting insurgents, and documenting old chemical weapons and reporting them just slowed things down.
Go read this thing. It’s important, and lord knows the conversation needs to be about the incompetent handling of the chemical weapons that were found, and the shoddy treatment of those who found them, not merely dragging out the “Bush was right!” claims again. Because, as we may have mentioned, he wasn’t.
Baker Mitchell is a politically connected North Carolina businessman who celebrates the power of the free market. Every year, millions of public education dollars flow through Mitchell’s chain of four nonprofit charter schools to for-profit companies he controls.
This is the intro to the almost-out Civilization: Beyond Earth. I hope you weren't expecting a merry jaunt as humanity smiles its way to the stars along a rainbow made of puppies.
Then you'd get Human Resources, an absolutely excellent-looking strategy game from the makers of the very good Planetary Annihilation. Oh, and the kicker? Humans are literally a resource. As in, you harvest them.
We’ve spent all morning talking about crazy people, and yes, that includes anyone willing to birth Ashton Kutcher‘s baby, so for change of scenery even though I have no clue what Party Down South is, here are some hot, sexy bikini ba- *actually looks at more than just the first pic* – Fucking shit.
THE SUPERFICIAL | About • Facebook • Twitter
Photos: Fame/Flynet
The Bomb.
This shit here feels like the whole entire world is about to collapse. Presented by Shaheem Reid, Busta Rhymes and his Conglomerate are it again with their second Catastrophic mixtape. Download or stream below.
Hey, it's LA Cops! When we last saw the game - which my brain registers as the Beastie Boys' Sabotage video vs Syndicate - it was pretty early code. Now things are looking a bit more structured.
Of all the games that have been announced as coming soon, between Freedom Wars and Destiny, the only game that I'm particularly excited over is the reincarnation of Doom. Why? Because the original Doom is still the greatest game I ever played, and while none of the sequels (including Doom 2) captured what I possibly subjectively consider Doom's perfection, they were double-barrels of fun and a hel of a good time. Get it? Because, shotguns, and imps, and... yeah, nevermind.
From the San Antonio Express-News, we have a photo update on the Great Big Militia Border Protection Jamboree, which appears to have actually drawn a few manly men with manly guns, albeit a touch short of the 20,000 that one of our more optimistic deleted commenters predicted. The militia groups claimed to the paper that they have ten “teams” along the border with Mexico, and they have been very busy patrolling with their guns, taking pictures of their guns, pretending to aim their guns at off-camera targets, and crouching in desert scrub with their guns while shouting “Serpentine! Serpentine!”
The paper reports, undoubtedly through the suppressed giggles of reporter Kolten Parker, that
A spokesperson for the group provided the photos under the condition that members’ faces be blurred because of fear of being identified by “cartel and gang members.”
We also suppose they must be worried about the Muslim radicals and their radical soccer-shirt prayer rugs, too — you just know that they probably have some bacon to wrap around their guns in case of Muslim Attack.
The Very Serious Tough Guys have also been posting their fantasies on Facebook, explaining that they are not at all afraid of the filthy tide of immigrants, drug traffickers, and bad guys from B-movies that no doubt are lurking out there and waiting for a chance to attack our American Way Of Life:
“(Rules of Engagement) is if in fear of bodily injury, weapons free, if fired upon, return fire. Real simple,” member KC Massey posted along with a photo on Facebook. “We are not worried about an “International” incident if they shoot at us.”
Chris Davis, the skeezy less-than-honorably-discharged former army man who allegedly commands this full-metal-jacketed clusterfuck, is apparently seen in some of the photos, looking tough (we didn’t look too carefully). He’s the squirrel who told the Express-News in early July that his border protection LARPers would act in a “legal and lawful manner,” which are apparently different and separate things, but had also posted a YouTube video, since removed, suggesting that the proper way to deal with border-crossers would be less legal and less lawful, saying
“You see an illegal. You point your gun dead at him, right between his eyes, and you say, ‘Get back across the border or you will be shot.’”
Spokeskook Barbie Rogers of “Patriots Information Hotline” said that she was glad that Rick Perry will be sending the Texas National Guard to the border to do something or other, but also wants Perry to know that he should send a lot more, and that “if cost is an issue” he should “call the militia. They will come if you call them.” We’d like to think that would make even Rick Perry roll his eyes in disbelief.
The militias, through Ms. Rogers, also provided the paper with a list of the Very Important Operation Names for the ten groups of military roleplayers, many of whom are camping out with permission on border-area ranches:
Bolinas Border Patrol, Central Valley Militia, Independant Citizens Militia, Alpha Team, Bravo Team, FOB Harmony, Operation Secure Our Border: Laredo Sector, O’Shanessy’s Team, the 77′s and Camp Geronimo.
We’re not sure if the [sic] for “Independant Citizens Militia” should be credited to the paper or to the militias, as we don’t have a copy of the cereal-box cardboard the list was written on. We’re hoping these stalwarts will soon be joined by Gandalf’s Army, the 301st Imperial Stormtrooper Battalion, and the brave men of the Eltingville Comic Book, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror & Role-Playing Club.
[San Antonio Express-News via tip from Wonkette Operative "TJ Gonzales" / Photo Credit: Photos provided anonymously to San Antonio Express-News]
Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He likes to hope that this operation is drawing militia dudes out of Idaho
Fifty reservists in the Israeli military—the majority of them women—have written an open letter expressing opposition to the institution’s discriminatory culture and policies, the current operation in Gaza, and the militarization of their society.
“Whenever the Israeli army drafts the reserves—which are made up of ex-soldiers—there are dissenters, resisters, and AWOLers among the troops called to war,” the letter begins. “Now that Israel has sent troops to Gaza again and reserves are being summoned to service, dozens are refusing to take part.”
The current campaign against Gaza, which began July 8, is “inseparable” from the way “militarization affects Israeli society,” they continue. “In Israel, war is not merely politics by other means—it replaces politics. Israel is no longer able to think about a solution to a political conflict except in terms of physical might; no wonder it is prone to never-ending cycles of mortal violence. And when the cannons fire, no criticism may be heard.”
The tone of the letter is that of regret for performing a service that the authors, who held a “wide variety” of positions in the forces, once thought to be relatively harmless. “In truth, the entire military is implicated,” they write. “[I]n our service, we found that troops who operate in the occupied territories aren’t the only ones enforcing the mechanisms of control over Palestinian lives.” Hence, they say they refuse to participate in the current operation.
In one of the letter’s most inspired sections, the authors state:
The Israeli Army, a fundamental part of Israelis’ lives, is also the power that rules over the Palestinians living in the territories occupied in 1967. As long as it exists in its current structure, its language and mindset control us: We divide the world into good and evil according to the military’s categories; the military serves as the leading authority on who is valued more and who less in society—who is more responsible for the occupation, who is allowed to vocalize their resistance to it and who isn’t, and how they are allowed to do it. The military plays a central role in every action plan and proposal discussed in the national conversation, which explains the absence of any real argument about non-military solutions to the conflicts Israel has been locked in with its neighbors.
The Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are deprived of civil rights and human rights. They live under a different legal system from their Jewish neighbors. This is not exclusively the fault of soldiers who operate in these territories. Those troops are, therefore, not the only ones obligated to refuse. Many of us served in logistical and bureaucratic support roles; there, we found that the entire military helps implement the oppression of the Palestinians.
Furthermore, rather than being “an institution that enables social mobility” insisted upon by its leaders, the military “perpetuates segregation”:
We believe it is not accidental that those who come from middle- and high- income families land in elite intelligence units, and from there often go to work for high-paying technology companies. We think it is not accidental that when soldiers from a firearm maintenance or quartermaster unit desert or leave the military, often driven by the need to financially support their families, they are called “draft-dodgers.” The military enshrines an image of the “good Israeli,” who in reality derives his power by subjugating others. The central place of the military in Israeli society, and this ideal image it creates, work together to erase the cultures and struggles of the Mizrachi, Ethiopians, Palestinians, Russians, Druze, the Ultra-Orthodox, Bedouins, and women.
Read the rest of the letter and see the authors’ names at AlterNet.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
Last weekend, Max Temkin, co-creator of the popular card game Cards Against Humanity, wrote a blog post about rape accusation. The post went up somewhat unnoticed, thanks to a combination of EVO, the World Cup, and GaymerX happening all at the same time—but it's something that we, as a gaming community, should talk about.
“We can, thankfully, remove one threat to the future existence of the human male from our worry list,” Alice Shabecoff writes at Environmental Health News via Scientific American. “The male Y chromosome, after dwindling from its original robust size over millions of years, apparently has halted its disappearing act.”
Shabecoff continues:
But don’t start cheering yet. Contrary to cultural assumptions that boys are stronger and sturdier, basic biological weaknesses are built into the male of our species. These frailties leave them more vulnerable than girls to life’s hazards, including environmental pollutants such as insecticides, lead and plasticizers that target their brains or hormones. Several studies suggest that boys are harmed in some ways by these chemical exposures that girls are not. It’s man’s fate, so to speak. First of all, human males are disappearing. Mother Nature has always acknowledged and compensated for the fragility and loss of boys by arranging for more of them: 106 male births to 100 female newborns over the course of human history. (Humans are not unique in this setup: Male piglets, as an example, are conceived in greater proportion to compensate for being more likely than female piglets to die before birth.) But in recent decades, from the United States to Japan, from Canada to northern Europe, wherever researchers have looked, the rate of male newborns has declined. Examining U. S. records of births for the years between 1970 and 1990, they found 1.7 fewer boys per 1,000 than in decades and centuries past; Japan’s loss in the same decades was 3.7 boys.
Boys are also more than two-thirds more likely than girls to be born prematurely – before the 37th week of pregnancy. And, despite advances in public health, boys in the 1970s faced a 30 percent higher chance of death by their first birthday than girls; in contrast, back in the 1750s, they were 10 per cent more likely than girls to die so early in their lives. Once they make it to childhood, boys face other challenges. They are more prone to a range of neurological disorders. Autism is notoriously higher among boys than girls: now nearly five times more likely, as tallied by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are more susceptible than girls to damage from very low-level exposure to lead. Yet another problem: Boys also suffer from asthma at higher rates. There’s also a stronger link between air pollution and autism in boys. What is up here? Why do boys face such a burden of physical challenges?
The answer is that the male’s problems start in the womb: from his more complicated fetal development, to his genetic makeup, to how his hormones work.
Read more here.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
Concept artist Joey Spiotto has an ongoing series where he mixes video game protagonists with the Little Golden Books children's literature series, and this time, he went for Nintendo characters.
    
|
We read a thing. A thing that is so stupid, we literally don’t know where to begin. It is from a sad little newspaper thingie, by Richard Pollock, their “senior watchdog reporter,” and it purports to compare health care plans from Walmart to those offered by Obamacare. So far so good! Except that it is mentally disabled.
The thesis is that Walmart’s employee insurance plan is not terrible — we are not actually a healthcare reporter, so maybe that is even true! And if Richard Pollock, senior watchdog reporter, had stuck with that thesis, he might have even been able to convince us! But watching him struggle through cherrypicked, conflated, and shockingly false data has left us with the teeny impression that since every word out of this guy’s fingers is a lie, we will probably not believe him about the Walmart plan either.
Here is his “nut graf” (journalism!):
But a Washington Examiner comparison of the two health insurance programs found that Walmart’s plan is more affordable and provides significantly better access to high-quality medical care than Obamacare.
Really? Is it more affordable than “zero dollars”? Because that is what a lot of people are paying for their healthcare under Obamacare. This is called “subsidies,” and it is rather a major portion of the act. We will get back to costs later. First, let us skip around and find all Richard Pollock, senior watchdog reporter’s, evidence that Walmart’s plan is of higher medical quality than “Obamacare.” (Hint: one slight problem with this watchdog reporting is that “Obamacare” is not actually just one plan! There’s, like, at least three.)
The retailer’s employees can use eight of the country’s most prestigious medical facilities, including the Mayo Clinic, Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic.
At these institutions, which Walmart calls “Centers of Excellence,” Walmart employees and their dependents can get free heart or spinal surgery. They can also get free knee and hip replacements at four hospitals nationwide.
Many top-rated Walmart hospitals — such as the Mayo and Cleveland clinics — are left out of most Obamacare exchange plans.
Let’s parse. If you are within a reasonable distance of the Mayo Clinic, you can use the Mayo Clinic. That is awesome! Good job, Walmart! There are a total of 12 hospitals, including eight “centers of excellence” — in the nation — where Walmart employees can get free heart surgeries or hip replacements. Great! We are sure the distance and travel costs to these excellence centers is totally negligible for all Walmart employees. And did you catch that last line? Here, we’ll repeat it: “Many top-rated Walmart hospitals — such as the Mayo and Cleveland clinics are left out of most Obamacare exchange plans.” Not all Obamacare exchange plans, but “most.” We live in California. We do not believe our Obamacare exchange plan comes with benefits at the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota. THANKS OBAMA.
Here, let us read more evidence from Richard Pollock, senior watchdog reporter.
Robert Slayton, a practicing Chicago independent insurance agent for 11 years and the former president of the Illinois State Association of Health Underwriters, described to the Examiner the differences between Walmart and Obamacare provider networks.
Slayton said the BlueChoice exchange network for President Obama’s hometown has very limited hospital participation. “In downtown Chicago, the key is the number of hospitals: 28,” he said.
“Now we’re going to the national network — this is what the Walmart network would most likely be — and you have 54 hospitals. That’s a big difference,” he said.
So their expert picked one network in Chicago (one), and compared it to what the Walmart network would “most likely be.” Cool expert! (Also, is it just us, or is having a choice of 28 hospitals in one city a pretty good spread of choices? Eh, it is probably just us.)
Walmart also offers a free preventive health plan that mirrors the Obamacare plan. Its employees can take advantage of a wide range of free exams and counseling, including screenings for colorectal cancer, cervical cancer, chlamydia, diabetes, depression and special counseling for diet and obesity.
“Mirrors Obamacare” = “is better than Obamacare,” obvs.
Very excellent evidence for why Walmart’s medical care is better than “Obamacare’s,” Richard Pollock, senior watchdog reporter. Now let us move on to costs.
Unlike Obamacare, there are no income eligibility requirements.
Nope.
Age and gender do not alter premium rates. The company plan is the same for all of Walmart’s 1.1 million enrolled employees and their dependents, from its cashiers to its CEO.
Hey, you know where else gender doesn’t alter premium rates? Obamacare! That is another rather large portion of the act! Of course, it does alter by age, with rates for the oldest and sickest among us capped at three times the rate paid by young invincibles. (The GOP finally has a “replace” to its “repeal” that caps the rate paid by the eldest as five times that of the kidz.)
A Journal of the American Medical Association analysis from September showed that unsubsidized Obamacare enrollees will face monthly premiums that are five to nine times higher than Walmart premiums.
The medical journal reported a 30-year-old smoker would pay up to $428 per month, in contrast to roughly $70 each month for a Walmart employee.
You know whose Obamacare is unsubsidized? Ours! And we are a 40-year-old smoker, paying $300 a month, because we chose the Gold Plan, because we are rich and fancy and also tend to get hospitalized a lot for stupid things like “our ovary exploded” and “what the fuck is going on in our breast oh sweet jesus christ,” so we went with the ZERO DOLLAR DEDUCTIBLE. (Thanks Wonkers, for all the muneez. We appreciate you!)
Todd looked at a 30-year-old woman who could qualify for the government subsidy. “The nonsubsidized premium is $205 a month for this 30-year-old. If they get a subsidy, then the premium is zero. But that person has to come up with $6,300 if something catastrophic happened,” he said.
Gold Plan, dudes. Go for the Gold Plan.
The Walmart monthly premium for the same 30-year-old woman would be about $40. Her deductible would be $2,750, minus $250 in cash advance, for a total net deductible of $2,500.
Hmmm, surely healthcare for that 30-year-old woman wouldn’t actually cost only $40 per month. Perhaps someone — maybe even Walmart — is paying for a hefty portion of it! Good on you, Walmart!
In conclusion, Washington Examiner, you are bad at your job of being a newspaper, Richard Pollock, you are bad at being a senior watchdog reporter, and all of you also too go fuck yourself.
[WashEx]
