Having a Serious Geekgasm

Taking a leisurely drive to NYC, and we stopped at the Roebling Museum.

Roebling, as in the company that built the Brooklyn and San Francisco bridges.

History and engineering bliss.

Pix to follow.

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Btw

I just got carded.

Heading to the bar at the club.

Seriously serious carding.

First time on my life.

At age 50.

I have a dull life.

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Road Trip!

In Philly.   Will be heading to the City (NYC) tomorrow.

Currently at a concert with my wife & kids, The Maine and A Rocket to the Moon.

On the way down, we passed the Philadelphia Naval shipyard, and saw a bunch of mothballed ships, including some Aegis class cruisers, including the Ticonderoga (CG-47).

Pix to follow.

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It's Like a Slow Motion Car Wreck

So, the little people will be required to buy health insurance under the PPACA (Obamacare), but the requirement for big employers has been pushed back a year:

Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they fail to provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its signature 2010 health-care law.

The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, the administration said today. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

The move addresses complaints from employer groups to President Barack Obama’s administration about the burden of the law’s reporting requirements. The decision pushes the issue past the 2014 midterm congressional elections, as Republicans have sought to make the health law a symbol of government overreach.

“In our ongoing discussions with businesses we have heard that you need the time to get this right,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, said in a White House blog post announcing the decision. “We are listening.”

The move may lead some employers to delay providing coverage to workers. The law’s individual mandate remains in effect, a provision that requires most Americans to carry health insurance.

You knew that this was coming.

When big business talks, they, "Are listening."

When it's civil libertarians, , the poor and elderly, advocates for financial reform, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, etc., it's, "talk to the hand".



H/t to my Dad, who sent me a link to a (subscription only) WSJ article.

What the F%$#?

This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.

Authorities, forced down Bolivian President Evo Morales' plane because he was suspected to be carrying Edward Snowden to Bolivia:

The plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales home from Russia was rerouted to Austria on Tuesday after France and Portugal refused to let it cross their airspace because of suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board, the country’s foreign minister said.

Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca denied that Snowden was on the plane, which landed in Vienna, and said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorization for the plane.

“We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales,” Choquehuanca said from Vienna, where the plane landed.

………

“This is a hostile act by the United States State Department which has used various European governments,” said Bolivian Defense Minister Ruben Saavedra, who was on the flight.

Choquehuanca said in a statement that after France and Portugal canceled authorization for the flight, Spain’s government allowed the plane to be refueled in its territory. From there the Falcon plane flew on to Vienna.

He said the decision by France and Portugal “put at risk the life of the president.”

They f%$#ing interfered with the f%$#ing flight of a f%$#ing diplomatic f%$#ing flight carrying a f%$#ing President of a f%$#ing sovereign f%$#ing nation, almost certainly as the result of a fairly explicit request from the United States.

This is insane.  I'm beginning to think that Snowden knows a lot more than just the fact that the NSA spies on Americans and ignores the law and/or uses a completely obedient FISA court as a fig leaf, because this level of pressure is a clear disaster for both the reputation and the foreign policy of the United States.

Seriously.  What ……… the ……… f%$#?

When you are making Vladimir Putin, who is saying that Snowden has to stop leaking if he wants asylum in Russia, seem like the only sensible person with an ounce of compassion in this entire affair.

Seriously.  Vladimir Putin?  What ……… the ……… Oh, never mind.

Light Posting this Week

We have a week long plant shutdown where I work, so we are going on a road trip.

We will hit Philly on Wednesday and catch part of A Rocket to the Moon's Farewell Tour, and then we head to New York City to catch some museums.

Oh, Crap

Have you heard about MERS?

I don't mean the fraudulent legal figleaf known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System that is a plague upon home-owners, I am instead referring an actual plague to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a SARS like infectious disease with a 55% fatality rate centered in Saudi Arabia.

Discussions of this disease have been bouncing around the epidemiology world for a while, there have only been about 80 confirmed cases, but in a couple of months millions of pilgrims will be going to Saudi Arabia as a part of the Hajj:

When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.

Although the numbers -- so far -- are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia's holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means "to visit a populated place," and it's the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent -- a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.

All this is going on while a Dutch lab is claiming rights to the species genome, which is crippling research on the disease.

This has all the hallmarks of a public health catastrophe.