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n2doc's JournalElizabeth Warren: The market is broken
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
Senator Elizabeth Warren says she picked up a lot of her feistiness from reading Nancy Drew novels as a kid. Today she believes the most important mystery to solve is how to get the American economy working for someone other than billionaires.
It's a message she's been taking all over the country, and she isn't afraid to call banks, credit card companies and some employers cheats and tricksters.
"The biggest financial institutions figured out they could make a lot of money by cheating people on mortgages, credit cards and payday loans," she told a packed auditorium at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she spoke alongside New York Times (NYT) columnist Paul Krugman.
The Democrat from Massachusetts even said the market is broken in many regards.
"This is about getting markets to work for real people," she said.
more
http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/05/news/economy/elizabeth-warren-market-broken/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
There are 17 anti-Obamacare ads for every other Obamacare ad
By Aaron Blake September 4 at 5:11 PM
As I wrote earlier today, Obamacare has really faded as an electoral issue this year. What makes the even more striking is the sheer volume of negative ads it has withstood -- with almost nothing to counteract those negative messages.
The below chart from the Wesleyan Media Project shows precisely how big that imbalance has been.
While more than 160,000 ads have aired against Obamacare since Jan. 1 -- more than one-quarter of all political ads -- fewer than 10,000 have mentioned the law in any other context. That means not negative, but not necessarily positive either (many occupy something of a neutral territory). All told, it's more than a 17-to-1 margin.
In that context, the fact the Obamacare has slipped as a priority is even more surprising.
more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/09/04/there-are-17-anti-obamacare-ads-for-every-other-obamacare-ad/?tid=rssfeed
Some big Obamacare news: premiums will fall in seven big cities
In major cities across the country, Obamacare premiums are falling.
That is not normal; health-insurance premiums nearly always go up and up and up. They rarely, if ever, decrease.
But analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation have scoured insurers rate filings and find that premiums for Obamacare's benchmark plan will decrease, on average, by 0.8 percent across 16 large cities. That could be early evidence that a key premise of Obamacare is working: insurers are competing on the marketplaces, and that could be driving health insurance prices down.
Premiums fall 0.8 percent for Obamacare's benchmark plan
The Kaiser Family Foundation published data on what exchange premiums will look like at 2015, using insurers' rate filings in 16 large cities. They looked at the price of the second-lowest cost silver plan in each market.
more
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/5/6107003/obamacare-premiums-falling
Friday Toon Roundup 3: The Rest
NATO
Labor
Travel
Privacy
Fbook
Pot
GOP
Race
The Issue
NSA
The Duck Caliphate Of Phil Robertson
Appearing as a guest on Sean Hannity’s Fox News television program Tuesday evening, Duck Dynasty’s patriarch and chief duck caller, Phil Robertson, shared with us his prescription for dealing with the ISIS threat.
“I’m just saying, convert them or kill them.”
On first hearing Robertson’s strategy, my thoughts turned to wondering what religion Phil had in mind for these sick creeps more interested in murder and money than they are in religion.
Would, say, a conversion to Hinduism do the trick for the quackmeister or, being the committed Christian that he is, did Robertson require that the conversion be to his own Christian faith?
My answer would arrive soon enough as Robertson pronounced, “I’d much rather have a Bible study with all of them and show them the error of their ways and point them to Jesus Christ. ”
Well…gee, Phil. I was kind of hoping that if these brutal murderers were going to see the light and move from their perverse and evil behavior to a more peaceful existence filled with good will toward all men, you might point them towards Judaism. You have to admit it would be a far more dramatic conversion and make one heck of a splash given the thousands of years of bad blood between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East.
more
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2014/09/03/the-duck-caliphate-of-phil-robertson/
Disney goes to battle with Deadmau5 over mouse ears logo
It's going to be Mouse vs. Mau5.
Niagara Falls-born electronic music star Joel Zimmerman, better known as Deadmau5, is locking legal horns with Disney over his famed headgear. The media juggernaut, which also owns the Marvel and Star Wars brands, is attempting to block Zimmerman's efforts to trademark his famous mouse head in the U.S.
According to TMZ, Zimmerman applied through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last year. He already owns the trademark in 30 other countries, including Japan, Italy and the UK.
The headgear depicts a smiling mouse with large circular ears, which Disney claims is too similar to its iconic Mickey Mouse. Disney filed a 171-page trademark opposition proceeding against Deadmau5 on Tuesday.
more
http://www.torontosun.com/2014/09/03/disney-goes-to-battle-with-deadmau5-over-mouse-ears-logo
Army can't track spending on $4.3b system to track spending, IG finds
More than $725 million was spent by the Army on a high-tech network for tracking supplies and expenses that failed to comply with federal financial reporting rules meant to allow auditors to track spending, according to an inspector general’s report issued Wednesday.
The Global Combat Support System-Army, a logistical support system meant to track supplies, spare parts and other equipment, was launched in 1997. In 2003, the program switched from custom software to a web-based commercial software system.
About $95 million was spent before the switch was made, according to the report from the Department of Defense IG.
As of this February, the Army had spent $725.7 million on the system, which is ultimately expected to cost about $4.3 billion.
more
http://washingtonexaminer.com/army-cant-track-spending-on-4.3b-system-to-track-spending-ig-finds/article/2552808
Direct Brain-To-Brain Communication Used in Humans
Tapping directly into someone’s brain in order to share thoughts isn’t just for Spock anymore. An international team of researchers were able to replicate the Vulcan Mind Meld by creating a device that allows two people to share information through thought. The researchers tested the technology by separating the users over 8,000 km (5,000 mi) apart—with one user in France and the other in India. The paper has been published in PLOS ONE.
"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone said in a press release.
"One such pathway is, of course, the internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'"
The device connects directly to the users’ scalps and impulses from the sender were picked up via electroencephalogram (EEG) as well as by image-guided and robot-assisted transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The signal was encoded and sent via the internet to the user on the other end. Once it reached its target destination, the code was then interpreted by a computer interface and delivered to the recipient.
more
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/direct-brain-brain-communication-used-humans
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