For Some Americans, the End of Obamacare Subsidies Means Falling Off a Financial Cliff

Earning just one dollar more could mean a $10,000 increase in insurance premiums.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/upshot/obamacare-subsidies-financial-cliff.html

Why was the Affordable Care Act created with a cliff back in 2009? The policy achieved a few important goals for the legislators who wrote it. It limited the total cost of the legislation — an important constraint imposed by the Obama White House. And it insulated Democrats from attacks that they were handing out tax credits to wealthy Americans.

In the early years of Obamacare, the cliff meant a cost increase of a few thousand dollars a year for a typical 60-year-old, though prices varied around the country. Younger Americans, whose insurance tends to be cheaper, often experienced even smaller differences. (The numbers in our charts above illustrate incomes and subsidies for a 60-year-old living in the contiguous United States.)

Dan Sacks, an associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described the difference at the time as more of a “kink” than a “cliff.”

“The expectation was that this would not be a hard cutoff for many people,” he said.

In the years since, as insurance costs have risen faster than incomes, that cliff has gotten taller.

Me and My Shadow

https://kevinsmithstory.blogspot.com/2011/02/me-and-my-shadow.html

In 2006, director Kevin Smith told a detailed story about his friend Jason Mewes' drug addiction on his blog in several parts. Here, I have put it all in one post for all to read and including a connected Jason Mewes video christmas gift to Kevin. The copyright is owned by Kevin Smith and this blog has no affiliation with Kevin, Jason or View Askew Productions...but I think they all rock and probably won't mind. It's one of the most beautiful stories ever told. Enjoy

The Silver-Lined Bullet

https://rethinkingprosperity.substack.com/p/the-silver-lined-bullet?triedRedirect=true

Construction inefficiency isn’t just an operational drag—it’s a financial choke point. Every delay or miscommunication translates directly into dollars: idle crews, wasted materials, loan interest accruing day by day. For small developers, these costs can turn a promising infill project into an unviable gamble. Margins evaporate long before walls go up. The result is that only large, capital-heavy projects pencil out, while the kind of modest, human-scale housing our cities need—duplexes, triplexes, courtyard homes—rarely makes it past the pro forma stage. The system, in effect, prices out the middle housing we claim to want.

The Real Reason MAHA Hates Vaccines

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/opinion/maha-vaccines-kennedy-denmark.html\

And what this implies is rather striking, and rarely discussed by those outside of public health: that among their many purposes and benefits, vaccines have served now for decades as a kind of substitute health safety net in America. They are a way of limiting the downside consequences of all of our country’s notorious shortcomings: its lack of universal or free health care, its imperfect health insurance system, its lack of robust disease surveillance and screening, its declining trust in medical institutions and practitioners, its yawning gaps of economic inequality and equally horrifying disparities in morbidity and mortality.

Elsewhere, these problems might be addressed in other ways, through various forms of redistribution, welfare policy and social spending. In the United States, it seems, the best we’ve been able to do is to protect against some of the health manifestations of those problems with a few shots. Give a pregnant mother an R.S.V. vaccine and you can worry less about whether her child will have easy access to care and treatment for respiratory infections. Give a newborn a hepatitis B shot and it matters much less whether someone in the family is an intravenous drug user who might be carrying the disease. Give a full course of M.M.R. protection and you don’t need to worry quite as much about the way measles is much more punishing for those suffering malnutrition. And if you don’t do any of these things, or you make it harder for others to — well, all those problems start to loom a bit larger.

When Are Half Your Members Going to be Dead?

https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/when-are-half-your-members-going

 I cannot emphasize this point enough — we are in a lull right now. While most major denominations have been experiencing decline for a while, their ship has remained seaworthy. Yeah, some water will lap over the sides every once in a while, but there are still enough buckets and enough laborers to toss it back into the ocean.[...]

This should come as a shock to no one who is vaguely aware of American religion — Episcopalians are old. In fact, two-thirds of their adult members have celebrated their 60th birthday. In contrast, just 6% are under the age of thirty. Put simply: for every young adult Episcopalian in the pews this Sunday, there will be about ten retirees. Oof.

Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/01/16/internet-voting-is-insecure-and-should-not-be-used-in-public-elections/

Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology that can make it secure. Still, vendors of internet voting keep claiming that, somehow, their new system is different, or the insecurity doesn’t matter. Bradley Tusk and his Mobile Voting Foundation keep touting internet voting to journalists and election administrators; this whole effort is misleading and dangerous.

Buried Talents: How Elites betray their own potential

https://edankrolewicz.substack.com/p/buried-talents

I believe that to those to whom much is given, much is expected.

This is not a popular position among my peers.

They prefer a morality of non-interference: be kind, don’t hurt anyone, tend your garden. They’ve constructed elaborate philosophical frameworks to justify why people with top-tier cognitive abilities, financial security, social capital, and institutional access have no greater obligations than anyone else.

I think they’re wrong. And I think, deep down, they, too know they’re wrong. The fact that they squirm at the suggestion that maybe they’ve been optimizing for the wrong thing suggests as much.

I’m writing this as someone who is trying to figure it out, in public, and who thinks the figuring out might be useful to others in the same position. I don’t have a clean answer for what elites should do with their lives. I have my own bets—civic technology, participatory democracy, trying to make government work better—and I have no idea if they’ll amount to anything.

What I do have is a clear view of the problem, and I think naming it honestly is worth something, even if the solution remains incomplete.

Statement by Sheriff Powers of Wilkes County, GA on the Monks' passage through

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16t1ZEVnPa/

To those questioning the how, why, or when regarding the Sheriff’s Office’s involvement: I was elected by the people of Wilkes County to serve and protect our citizens and all who pass through our county. There are no exceptions to that responsibility, and there never will be. I do not worship these men, nor will I ever. However, I will ensure they have safe passage through our county, just as I would for anyone else, and that they leave knowing their safety was taken seriously.

I do believe that if each of us put as much effort into our own beliefs or faith as these men are demonstrating right now, our churches would be full and our jails empty. Instead, too often we post negativity about why we do not believe the way others believe, rather than using moments like this as opportunities to teach or to preach.

21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/

3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.

The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve never built. The perfect solution rarely emerges from thought alone - it emerges from contact with reality. AI can in many ways help here.

First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Get the ugly prototype in front of users. Write the messy first draft of the design doc. Ship the MVP that embarrasses you slightly. You’ll learn more from one week of real feedback than a month of theoretical debate.

Momentum creates clarity. Analysis paralysis creates nothing.

No One Wants What The Giver Offers

https://thecurriculum.substack.com/p/02-no-one-wants-what-the-giver-offers

Lois Lowry's classic is the kind of children's book that isn't written anymore

 

All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/all-aboard-the-bureaucracy-train

The United States has the most expensive transportation infrastructure in the world. That’s because we refuse to learn from experts, other countries, and our own history.

A Battle with My Blood

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood

When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.

What an unprocessed photo looks like

https://maurycyz.com/misc/raw_photo/

Here’s a photo of a Christmas tree, as my camera’s sensor sees it

In Conversation with Henry Slack

https://www.letspropelatl.org/in_conversation_with_henry_slack

A recent story in the Economist about the rise of e-bike parents ferrying kids to school observed, “Revolutions begin with a push of the pedal.”

That goes double for Henry Slack, bicycle enthusiast and co-founder of the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign (aka ABC), the organization founded in 1991 that eventually evolved into Propel ATL. A lifelong Atlanta bicyclist and transportation advocate known for commuting by bike from Decatur to downtown, Henry remains a guiding light for Propel ATL’s mission and values.

A Year In, the MAGA Labor Market Story Has Fallen Apart

https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/a-year-in-the-maga-labor-market-story

I wish I could tell you that the reason people in their twenties can’t find jobs and the reason many of us are likely to be poorer over the next few years was more sophisticated than “we’re going to turn all the girlbosses into tradwives once they see all the manly men at the USA iPhone-screwing factory.” But I don’t think it is.

The bleak irony is that even after sacrificing real prosperity to chase this 4chan-level political economy, they still won’t achieve their goal. The jobs aren’t coming back, the wages aren’t rising, and family formation won’t be rescued by trying to rewind the labor market to a world that never existed in the first place.

Learning The Elite Class: my experience at fancy parties

https://aella.substack.com/p/learning-the-elite-class

“I’m thinking of running for office,” says the man in front of me. He has a greying beard and clean glasses. “I have some connections way back from boarding school who are thinking about funding me.”

I know boarding school is a thing, but I’d never heard of anybody I met, or any of their friends, having anything to do with boarding school for the first few decades of my life. Aren’t those gender segregated, or is that just a trope? Is it all year, including the summer? Is that a thing where parents send bad kids? Unclear. I think it probably costs money to go, which is why I never heard anyone mention boarding school when I was growing up.

Boarding school must be fancy, though, if kids who go to boarding school end up rich enough they can fund each other. I try to imagine growing up in a world where my old friends grew up to do something other than running their own gutter-cleaning business or working in middle management at Walmart or becoming a housewife. It must be super cool to have known anyone successful who you met before the short period of time ago that you became successful.

Read Something Wonderful

https://readsomethingwonderful.com/

100 Tips for a Better Life

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life

 29. You do not live in a video game. There are no pop-up warnings if you’re about to do something foolish, or if you’ve been going in the wrong direction for too long. You have to create your own warnings. 

30. If you listen to successful people talk about their methods, remember that all the people who used the same methods and failed did not make videos about it. 

31. The best advice is personal and comes from somebody who knows you well. Take broad-spectrum advice like this as needed, but the best way to get help is to ask honest friends who love you.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time - until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don't make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don't subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

Why One Man Is Fighting for Our Right to Control Our Garage Door Openers

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/technology/personaltech/why-one-man-is-fighting-for-our-right-to-control-our-garage-door-openers.html

Too often, we are losing control of our personal technology, and the list of examples keeps growing. BMW made headlines in 2022 when it began charging subscriptions to use heated seats in some cars — a decision it reversed after a backlash. In 2021, Oura, the maker of a $350 sleep-tracking device, angered customers when it began charging a $6 monthly fee for users to get deeper analysis of their sleep. (Oura is still charging the fee.)

For years, some printer companies have required consumers to buy proprietary ink cartridges, but more recently they began employing more aggressive tactics, like remotely bricking a printer when a payment is missed for an ink subscription.

The activists and tinkerers rebelling against superfluous hardware subscriptions and fighting for device ownership are part of the broader “right to repair” movement, a consumer advocacy campaign that has focused on passing laws nationwide that require tech and appliance manufacturers to provide the tools, instructions and parts necessary for anyone to fix products, from smartphones to refrigerators.