“If we’re not going to war, we’re doing a really good imitation.”
Read more: http://www.hardassetsalliance.com/our-blog/north-korea-is-war-the-inevitable-outcome
“State lawmakers in California and New York voted this year to pass state-run single payer health care plans, despite the fact that both states would need to double their existing tax revenue to pay for the new entitlement. But even if those political hurdles are overcome, and even if the two states figure out how they are going to come up with the necessary tax revenue—about $400 billion in California’s case, and somewhere between $91 billion and $225 billion in New York’s—to make those systems functional, both may run into another problem: The whole thing could be against the law.”
Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2017/06/06/state-run-single-payer-health-care-would
“A rush into haven assets that began during the financial crisis is getting a new lease on life from an upsurge in populist politics and a quickening of inflation. Two firms say they’re planning to open vaults in Europe capable of holding more than 100 million euros ($112 million) in gold, offering customers lower costs than exchange-traded products and protection from rising prices.”
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/the-new-gold-rush-is-all-about-vaults
“The GOP’s dreams have collided with interest-group lobbying and the tax system’s reality. Politicians all profess to hate the tax code, but they don’t agree on exactly what they hate. Voters gripe about complexity but are wary of losing cherished breaks that are woven into the economy.”
Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/05/30/gop-bid-to-rewrite-tax-code-falters.html
“Aetna is saying goodbye to Obamacare. The insurance giant announced Wednesday that it would not offer policies in Nebraska or Delaware next year, completing its exit from the exchanges. Earlier this year, Aetna said it would pull out of Iowa and Virginia in 2018. The company said it expects to lose more than $200 million in its individual business line this year, on top of nearly $700 million in losses between 2014 and 2016. Aetna withdrew from 11 of its 15 markets for 2017. It has 255,000 Obamacare policyholders this year, down from 964,000 at the end of last year.”
Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/10/news/economy/aetna-obamacare/
“The list of states that have tried to go single-payer is still a small sample size, but a fairly wide ranging one. It includes states with large populations and small ones. States with a variety of economies and tax systems. States that are growing quickly and those that aren’t. Despite that range of variables, one thing remains constant: state-level single-payer health plans would require massive increases in tax revenue, equal or larger than the amount of revenue consumed by every other state-level program in a single year.”
Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2017/05/23/california-single-payer-health-care-cost
“A radicalized Libyan whose family fled Gaddafi’s secular Libya, and later trained to be an armed ‘rebel’ in Syria, fighting for the US and UK ‘regime change’ policy toward the secular Assad government, Salman Abedi was the direct product of US and UK interventions in the greater Middle East.”
“Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday said that his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, is deeply involved in ‘terrorist’ activities and the violence that is unfolding in the South American nation with an eye toward ‘taking political control’ there. Maduro said on his weekly radio-television show that his country is facing an ‘attack by violent forces (…) intolerance and generalized destruction,’ and that behind all this turmoil is ‘the imperialist hand of Donald Trump.’ ‘Trump has his hands infected and stuck deeply into this conspiracy and this attack that has as its objective taking political control in Venezuela, recolonizing Venezuela,’ Maduro claimed.”
“UK hospitals have effectively shut down and are turning away non-emergency patients after ransomware ransacked its networks. Doctors have been reduced to using pen and paper, and closing A&E to non-critical patients, amid the tech blackout. The security hole has been patched for modern Windows versions, but not WindowsXP – and the NHS is a massive user of the legacy operating system.”
Read more: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/12/nhs_hospital_shut_down_due_to_cyber_attack/
“Not content with having a fleet of insecure surveillance drones, the state of Connecticut wants a fleet of insecure weaponized drones. What could possibly go wrong?”
Read more: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/04/soon_youll_be_a.html