Month: September 2014

There are now multiple
indicators that Obamacare enrollment may be lower than reported by
the administration—and dropping in the “off season” between sign-up
periods. The latest comes from Florida, where June enrollment in
private plans through the federally run insurance exchange in the
state is about 760,000—or about 220,000-persons lower than the
980,000 total
reported by the administration following the end of open
enrollment, according to an official with the Florida Office of
Insurance Regulation.

If that figure,
reported last week by the South Florida Business
Journal, is correct, it represents a 22 percent decline from
the total reported by the administration’s Department of Health and
Human Services in April. A separate report today indicates that the
decline is just 120,000, to about 866,000, but that refers to
“individual plans under the Affordable Care Act,” which may include
Obamacare-compliant plans not purchased on the exchange.

Either way, it’s a big—perhaps very big—drop from the
administration’s headline number. And it’s not the only figure
we’ve seen indicating that the actual numbers are quite a bit lower
than the administration’s official tallies.

Recall that the administration’s enrollment numbers are based on
people who signed-up for coverage, not steady, paying customers.
Not all of them were going to convert. The question was how many
would decline to pay at all, or drop out of coverage soon after
making an initial premium payment.

For one of the nation’s largest health insurers, the decline
appears to have been pretty steep. Aetna’s 720,000 sign-ups

turned into just 600,000 paying customers by June, according to
an August Investor’s Business Daily report. The company expects
paid enrollment to drop down to close to 500,000 later this year—a
roughly 30 percent decline.

The same IBD report noted that the official enrollment tally in
Washington state dropped from 164,062 in May to 156,155 in
June.

What’s the overall trend here? It’s impossible to say. The
administration, which released monthly reports on sign-ups
throughout the health law’s first open enrollment period, stopped
releasing those reports, and now says it doesn’t know if or when
the reports will continue, or, if they do, what information they
might include.

The best indication we’ve seen so far on overall activity on the
exchanges following the end of open enrollment this year comes from
Pro Publica, which in July reported unexpectedly high
activity—including new sign-ups, dropped plans, and other changes
to enrollment status—on the exchanges. No exact counts were
provided, but less than half of the activity came from new
enrollments, according to an industry source.

All of which suggests, but does not definitively confirm, that
enrollment on the exchanges may not be holding up between sign-up
periods. The administration has always made it hard to know exactly
how many people were enrolled under the law, thanks to its
imprecise sign-ups metric. But those reports at least provided a
rough sense of what was happening within the exchanges. Now,
without regular updates, we don’t even have that. Administration
officials should continue to provide monthly reports and
state-by-state breakdowns, as well as the paid enrollment totals
that have never been provided. Until it does, it’s reasonable to
assume that whatever is happening with enrollment, they don’t want
anyone to know. 

Looking for illicit drugs and other black market
goods? For years the place to go was Silk Road. Now, it’s
Agora.

Late in August, the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), an Internet
safety nonprofit, released a
report detailing various darknet marketplaces.

Wired, which picked up the report earlier today,
notes
that “The analysis counts 16,137 products for sale on [Agora]. …
That’s about 200 more listings than Silk Road 2.0.” And it’s
growing quickly. “the latest numbers for Agora … represent a
dramatic shift from just four months ago, when it had only 7,400
product listings.”

What has pushed Agora to the top? “Just as on the rest of the
internet, users on the dark net are very quick to move on to new
things and move away from those products and websites that seem
stale and old,” Adam Benson, a representative from the DCA tells
Wired.

Significantly, Silk Road was
subject to an FBI takedown last year. Although it came back
swinging as Silk Road 2.0, hackers robbed 40 percent of its users
of $2.7 million, undoubtedly leaving many wary of the site. Agora
also happens to sell weapons, which Silk Road had ceased doing
several years ago. The DCA reports notes some other facts about the
online black market:

• Over the last several months Silk Road has been under serious
  and frequent DDOS attack. That, along with a massive hack of
  Bitcoin earlier this year, has not only stymied growth, but led to
  a decrease in listings of 10 percent. Pandora also lost a large
  portion of Bitcoin due to a hack and has seen very little growth
  since our report came out.
• Agora and Evolution Marketplace have been the benefactors of
  the misfortunes of SR 2.0 and Pandora. As the chart above points
  out, both sites have seen tremendous growth and Agora appears
  primed to overtake Silk Road 2.0 as the largest Darknet Marketplace
  based on total number of drugs listed.
• White Rabbit Anonymous Marketplace, which was included in our
  report is now dead.
• Dark Bay shut down and merged with a new site, Andromeda
  Market, which has seen large growth and is now included in our
  large market category.

All Agora transactions are conducted with Bitcoin and are kept
under the radar by The Tor Project’s anonymizing router. You’ll
probably end up on a watchlist for doing it, but here’s
instructions on how to get onto Agora.

In case you want to try the darknet’s
equivalent to Google for easier product searches on Agora,
check
out Grams. 

Remember Doug Wilkey, the grumpy Floridian who

tried to get a lemonade stand that was operating next door to his
house shut down by local authorites? Whelp, looks like he’s
getting
a taste of his own medicine. 

A tipster contacted the city and pointed officials toward
records that show Wilkey, as recently as March, listed his Patricia
Avenue home as the principal business address for Bayport Financial
Services.

Planning director Greg Rice said officials were drafting a
letter notifying Wilkey, 61, that all companies operating in the
city require a business tax license, which costs about $45 a year,
and that home-based-business owners must sign an affidavit agreeing
to follow special rules.

It’s tempting to say “Karma’s a bitch, sucka!” and leave it at
that.

But that’s the wrong response.

Yes, Wilkey, 61, started it by trying to bring in
the government where simple human-to-human interaction should have
sufficed. But is is just as troubling that the local government has
now decided to use its powers to harass this man, simply because
he’s kind of a jerk with unpopular opinions. 

Crotchety old men aren’t as photogenic as entrepreneurial kids,
but they deserve the same rights and protections. All the reasons
why Guerrero deserves to be left alone to make an honest buck apply
equally to Wilkey. In fact, running a financial services company
out of your home likely has even fewer negative externalities than
setting up a lemonade stand.

It seems pretty clear the city is looking into this guy’s
business because he managed to drawn attention to himself in a
negative way. And of course the hypocrisy here is as delicious as a
glass of Country Time on a hot day.

But I guarantee you the there are other home-based businesses on
that block. In a time and place where nearly every human action is
smothered in laws, rules, and regulations, enforcement will
necessarily be arbitrary. Limited resources mean that cops and
licensing bureaus get to choose who they go after, and those
choices will usually be made for reasons that have little to do
with efficiency or justice. 

When I wrote about the lemonade stand, I gave the local Dunedin
authorities “three cheers.” I take them back. When a grumpy tipster
complained about a commercial activity by a cute kid that wasn’t
hurting anyone, they looked into the matter and wisely chose
inaction. Then the same situation presented itself with a less
appealing protagonist, and they did the opposite. Zero cheers.

Over
at the Guardian, Ewan Morrison is pissed off that
young-adult novels don’t preach a left-wing, progressive vision. In
fact, he writes, many of the most popular titles actually undermine
the collectivism at the heart of
so many utopias-gone-bad:

Books such as The Giver, Divergent
and the Hunger
Games trilogy are, whether intentionally or not,
substantial attacks on many of the foundational projects and aims
of the left: big government, the welfare state, progress, social
planning and equality. They support one of the key ideologies that
the left has been battling against for a century: the idea that
human nature, rather than nurture, determines how we act and live.
These books propose a laissez-faire existence, with heroic
individuals who are guided by the innate forces of human nature
against evil social planners….

Jeebus, the sourness runs strong in this one. Morrison is in
such a rush to denounce the neoliberalism of the books that he
manages to misrepresent them. Far from being anti-community, these
books are anti-collectivist, at least when the group is based on
involuntary servitude, perceived mental and physical capacities
(mostly the result of genetics in these books), or accidents of
geography. To the extent that they—like virtually all novels—rely
on individual protagonists, those heroes are all about political
and social equality rather than any sort of elevation of the great
man or woman at the expense of others. None of the books he cites
is against community per se. They are against reactionary states
that rule by dictate rather than democracy (whether in a the voting
booth or the marketplace).

And there’s this:

This generation of YA dystopian novels is really our neoliberal
society dreaming its last nightmares about the threat from
communism, socialism and the planned society. We’ve simplified it
to make it a story we can tell to children and in so doing we’ve
calmed the child inside us….

If you see yourself as a left-leaning progressive parent, you
might want to exercise some of that oppressive parental control and
limit your kids exposure to the “freedom” expressed in YA dystopian
fiction. But let’s not worry about it too much, the good thing
about laissez-faire capitalism is that things come in waves and
pass out of fashion quickly.

More
here. Whatevs, Morrison, whatevs. What is it about
the growing surveillance state in the U.K. and the U.S. that might
freak the kids out a bit and cause them to long for a place beyond
all-seeing adults who get to tell them what jobs they will take?
And while communism and socialism seem pretty well dead (not coming
back in fashion anywhere these days, really, despite coff, coff
“late capitalism”‘s desperate need for novelty), the planned
society really is not a favorite with anybody except the planners
themselves. Don’t blame markets for that one. The 20th century was
chockful of nuts who planned everybody’s life for them. Didn’t work
out too swell.

Morrison would do better to park his cranky post-Marxist
POV for a second and check out Amy Sturgis’ essay about the
changing tenor of young-adult dystopias in the current issue of
Reason. Yes, agrees Sturgis, there’s plenty of
individualism and respect for markets as places of mutually
satisfying exchanges in The Hunger Games,
Divergent, and the like. But there’s also a weird disdain
for technology and the possibilities of life, too:

We’re left with a chicken-and-egg dilemma. As a Gen Xer, I like
to think my generation redefined all things cynical and emo. A
heaping dose of bleakness doesn’t bother me. I toss back dystopias
like vitamins, convinced they will do me good. One of my favorite
novels is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826).
Here’s a quick synopsis: Everybody dies.

That said, I view the changing tides in the YA dystopian sea—the
absence of sensawunda, the technophobia and anti-modernity, the
protagonists’ reduced ambitions—with sober attention. Gen X
pessimism carried with it a healthy disrespect for authority.
Millennials and the fiction they consume manage to be both more
reverent and more resigned, blase about the technological marvels
around them.

I may have known I’d never get my triphibian atomicar, but I
never expected a smartphone, either. Today we all hold more complex
and sophisticated technology in the palms of our hands than sent
humanity to the moon. Yet what giant step for man can the members
of the next generation achieve when the most their heroes can hope
for is to survive?

That’s a nuanced reading not just of three books recently made
into movies but a wider set of young-adult dystopias that, like
most good books, can’t be reduced to a simple political fable.

Read the whole thing.

In 1966 George Hamilton, the
movie star and future proprietor of the George Hamilton Sun Care
System taning salons, started dating President Lyndon Johnson’s
daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson. At that point, the Philadelphia
Inquirer reports,

Johnson enlisted Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to investigate every rumor they could find
about Hamilton, including claims that he was gay and a
draft-dodger, in a bid to dig up dirt on the actor….Rumors cited
in it ranged from scurrilous to outright false, including the
allegation that Lynda Bird Johnson was “running around with a bunch
of homosexuals,” that Hamilton was a draft-dodger, and that the
actor was gay and had been seen with someone described as “little
more than a prostitute.”

Much of this story has been told before. Catha DeLoach, the FBI
man who ran the operation with Fortas, wrote about it in his
1995
memoir. And while George Hamilton’s autobiography
does not mention the FBI probe, it does describe the “incredible
scrutiny” he faced at the time, noting that the actor’s brother was
gay and that “‘gay’ was the dirtiest word anyone could have used in
and around the Johnson White House.” (*)

But the bureau’s full file on the investigation has yet to be
released. Two years ago, Tuan Samahon, a law professor at
Villanova, sued to pry the file from the government, hoping it
would shed light on Abe Fortas’ career on the court. Last
week U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno issued an opinion in
the case.

Robreno notes that the full file “is overflowing with
gossip, rumor, and third-level hearsay concerning potentially
embarrassing allegations and personal details about private
citizens,” and that some of this material may thus be exempt from
the Freedom of Information Act. He has ordered the FBI to review
its documents and release any material that does not pose these
potential privacy problems. In the meantime, the judge says the
bureau must produce the unredacted version of DeLoach’s memorandum
on the investigation—that is, a version where Hamilton’s name is
not blotted out.

We may never get to see every page of this story, but what we do
know shows, as Robreno writes, “the ways and means of the
government’s investigation of private citizens in the 1960s.” More
specifically, it shows the particular styles of sleaze that
coagulated in the Johnson White House, the Hoover FBI, and Abe
Fortas’ office at the Supreme Court.

(* I have not read either of those books, but both are cited
in Judge Robreno’s decision.)

Grand Canyon National Park has
unrivaled views, and a steady flood of tourists eager for a look,
and for a place to get a bite and sleep while they’re visiting. So
why can’t the National Park Service (NPS) get companies to bid on
taking over the hotels and restaurants at the rim—facilities that
you think would be gold mines for anybody with a bit of business
sense?

Could it be because the NPS wants the new concessioner to assume
tens of millions of dollars of debt to the last vendor, while
keeping less of the proceeds than its predecessor? You bet.

“We were ignoring a debt that was accruing in the park,” Grand
Canyon Superintendant Dave Uberuaga
told Fronteras. The NPS currently owes Xanterra, a longtime
concessioner descended from the old Fred Harvey company, $157
million. That’s actually an improvement. When the park started

unsuccessfully soliciting bids, the amount of the Leashold
Surrender Interest—the sum owed to Xanterra for capital
improvements it made to aging facilities—was actually $198 million.
DNC Parks & Resorts picked up $41 million of that as part of a

smaller contract at the park, leaving the NPS to figure out
what to do with the rest of the debt it had allowed to
accumulate.

Under a 1998
law, contracts must now (with some exceptions) be put out to
bid every ten years. But if a concessioner loses a contract, it’s
owed the value of capital improvements to be paid by the United
States government or the successor company.

Xanterra has managed facilities
at the park for decades, paying the government 3.8 percent of gross
revenues for the privilege. But it also shouldered the cost for
improving the facilities in anticipation of being
compensated…eventually. The contract is now up for rebidding, and
the company doesn’t seem very interested in continuing its
relationship with the NPS (neither Xanterra nor the National Park
Service responded to questions by press time). In fact, nobody
seems interested in the current terms—none
of the bids received adhered to the NPS’s specified
conditions.

So Grand Canyon National Park sweetened the deal by paying $100
million of the money owed, with
much borrowed from other parks so that the new concessioner
would “only” have to pay $57 million. But the
new solicitation also specifies that the lucky “winner” will
have to pay a minimum franchise fee of 14 percent for the 15 year
life of the contract, making the arrangement rather less lucrative
than the one Xanterra had for so long, unpaid debt aside.

And there just might be some concern that the NPS won’t be any
better in the future about paying debts owed to
concessioners—especially since it just ran up a hefty tab to other
parks that want their money back. The park
estimates annual gross revenue for the contract at $66.1
million, which you’d think would mean a chance at healthy
profits. But if 14 percent of that goes to the government, the
properties have to be maintained and improved, and you’re starting
off with a big bucket of red ink…

The Grand Canyon may be the biggest damn hole in the world, and
a popular one at that. But the federal government has managed to
make a huge tourist draw into a money-loser.