Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 50

Florida strips insurance commissioner of power negotiate lower health plan rates

Slick. Refuse to negotiate lower rates or make the health insurance companies compete like in the other exchanges. When ACA exchange rates are announced for Florida, they’ll be crazy high. Prediction: lots of conservatives announcing ‘failure.’

Fuckers.

“Florida lawmakers have left the state vulnerable to unreasonably high insurance premiums in an effort to undermine Obamacare, say the state’s U.S. House Democrats.

Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature cynically stripped Florida of its ability to...

The cult of shareholder value is killing us

Fuck ‘shareholder value.’

The most interesting, innovate companies right now don’t give a shit about their stock price. And here’s the evidence that middling, corporate drones are fucking everything else up with their quarterly obsessions:

“Over the last month, the Financial Times has been doing a great job in cataloguing the problems caused by the shareholder value theory. Now Robin Harding has terrific article pinpointing its role in undermining the US economic recovery.

In his article entitle...

Raising the minimum wage

Truth-out leans left, but that doesn’t mean this section isn’t wrong:

“NOOR: Can you talk more about your response to the conservative position that raising minimum wage will actually hurt the economy? You argue that in fact it actually benefits the economy. Talk more about why you believe so.

BABONES: There’s a theory that make raising the minimum wage will result in fewer jobs. And that theory seems to make intuitive sense, that when wages are higher, you know, people hire fewer people. And i...

A must read: the tipless restaurant

“‘This isn’t about money,’ the man would say.

He’d be the one person in a thousand, or in ten thousand, who’d get angry about our fixed service charge. Angry about his lack of control over the price, angry about not being the final arbiter of our service. You could count on him being male, at least when we’re talking about public scenes.”

and

I began to notice that his hostility was not the frustration of a consumer who’d paid for a faulty product — we would occasionally encounter that kind of f...

Appearances update

So recently some people have found out I’m going to Worldcon and were totally surprised, but I swear, I’ve had the info that I plan on going here on my home page and under the blog page under appearances. Realizing that many people still aren’t noticing that, I’ve added a menu nav bar item for ‘appearances’ as well, hopefully that helps.

Here’s the current schedule:

2013

-August 24-26: AnimeKon Expo (Barbados)

-August 28-Sep 2: Worldcon (San Antonio, Texas)

-Oct. 31-Nov 3rd: World Fantasy Con (Bri...

Wind is cheap

“Anyone who tells you wind power is expensive is bad-shit crazy. Wind power is the cheapest option for new electricity generation in many if not most places in the world, including much of the US. That would indeed help to explain why the US installed more wind power capacity than power capacity from any other source in 2012, 42% (or 43%?) of all new power capacity in the country.

In announcing a recent reportreleased by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and prepared by Lawrence Berkeley Natio...

Europa or bust!

I really think getting a probe on Europa is the next big thing for planetary science:

“Most of what scientists know of Jupiter’s moon Europa they have gleaned from a dozen or so close flybys from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1990s. Even in these fleeting, paparazzi-like encounters, scientists have seen a fractured, ice-covered world with tantalizing signs of a liquid water ocean under its surface. Such an environment could potentially be...

Quantity leading to quality

This anecdote comes from a really interesting article on quantity leading to quality:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.

All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: 50 pounds of pots rated an...

Wind farms paid to be idle: we need better storage

In a nutshell, this is why we need to throw more money at battery technologies.

“Wind farms are being given around £30million a year in compensation to switch off or slow down their turbines because nearly half the electricity they make is not needed.”

(Via Wind farms paid £30 million a year to stand idle because the grid can’t cope with all the energy they produce | Mail Online.)

Ezra Klein on some immigration research

Ezra Klein:

“According to Massey, the rise of America’s large undocumented population is a direct result of the militarization of the border. While undocumented workers once traveled back and forth from Mexico with relative ease, after the border was garrisoned, immigrants from Mexico crossed the border and stayed.

‘Migrants quite rationally responded to the increased costs and risks by minimizing the number of times they crossed the border,’ Massey wrote in his 2007paper‘Understanding America’...