What I’m Reading Online

• How is America going to end? A weeklong thought experiment on the United States' demise. - By Josh Levin - Slate Magazine
  After watching the place where I grew up avert total annihilation, I can't help but wonder what course of events will eventually wipe out New Orleans and America as a whole. When it comes to human civilization, entropy conquers all: Rome fell, the Aztecs were conquered, the British Empire withered, and the Soviet Union cracked apart. America may be exce […]
• Health Insurance “Innovation” « The Baseline Scenario
  The insurers claim that rescission is very rare; at the Congressional hearing, two of three industry representatives said it happens to less than 0.5% of policies per year. But that is a deeply misleading number. That means that if you are in the individual market for twenty years, you have a 10% chance of your policy being rescinded; 30 years, and it goes u […]
• Friends defend officer who arrested black scholar - Yahoo! News
  "If people are looking for a guy who's abusive or arrogant, they got the wrong guy," said Andy Meyer of Natick, Mass., who has vacationed with Crowley, coached youth sports with him and is his teammate on a men's softball team. "This is not a racist, rogue cop. […]
• Calif. Senate passes budget-balancing plan - Yahoo! News
  It eliminates nearly 60 percent of the deficit with spending cuts to core state services such as education, state parks and prisons. The rest is reached by one-time raids on local government funding and accounting maneuvers, such as deferring state employee paychecks by one day for a savings on paper of $1.2 billion. […]