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‘I Can Do Whatever I Want’


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i-can-do-whatever-i-want_781540.html?nopager=1The Weekly Standard:

WILLIAM KRISTOL

Feb 24, 2014

 

On February 11, writing for the Washington Post, Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers ably summarized the latest “bad week for Obamacare.” The Congressional Budget Office concluded that Obamacare will cause “a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.” The CBO also found that Obamacare would—after all the spending and disruption and coercion—still leave about 31 million Americans uninsured a decade after implementation. Then the White House disregarded the plain text of the law to carve out another delay in one of the law’s mandates, this time for businesses with between 50 and 99 employees.

 

What’s more, as Rogers explained, the Obama administration decided that employers who fall below 100 employees “must certify to the IRS—under the threat of perjury—that the reasons for your employee head count have nothing to do with your opposition to or avoidance of Obamacare. .  .  . It’s jaw-dropping that if you fall below 100 employees, the burden will be on you to prove that you meant no disrespect to Obamacare.”

 

Showing commendable disrespect to Obamacare (that’s still legal for commentators, isn’t it?), Rogers concluded: “Obamacare is failing in its original purpose of providing insurance for the uninsured, it unnecessarily burdens American families and businesses, and now the White House has opened the door to prosecuting those they deem to be insufficiently committed to Obamacare. When will the nightmare end?”

 

It’s a good question. It’s perhaps the central question of American politics today. But the “nightmare” image can be misleading. After all, we know how nightmares end. We wake up. But when we wake up each morning, Obamacare is still here.

 

(Snip)

 

 

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http://youtu.be/VxcmaEfVUTI


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Fox News this morning had Alberto Gonzales former A.G. under G.W. Bush and like some other positions he has taken Sounded like he thinks Obama not breaking the law when he postpones some of the A.C.A.

wallbash.gif

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Fox News this morning had Alberto Gonzales former A.G. under G.W. Bush and like some other positions he has taken Sounded like he thinks Obama not breaking the law when he postpones some of the A.C.A.

wallbash.gif

 

 

Link? Thanks.

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Fox News this morning had Alberto Gonzales former A.G. under G.W. Bush and like some other positions he has taken Sounded like he thinks Obama not breaking the law when he postpones some of the A.C.A.

wallbash.gif

 

 

Link? Thanks.

 

I could not find a link

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Fox News this morning had Alberto Gonzales former A.G. under G.W. Bush and like some other positions he has taken Sounded like he thinks Obama not breaking the law when he postpones some of the A.C.A.

wallbash.gif

 

 

Link? Thanks.

 

I could not find a link

 

 

 

This?

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Seems like a good place for this:

 

Spite At the Heart of Fairness

 

1420305-1017745_spite_super.jpg

 

Link: http://www.livescience.com/43300-fairness-evolution-spite.html

Fairness may have darker roots than previously believed, according to new research that finds spiteful behavior can lead others to act fairly.

 

The study is based on a theoretical model, not human experiments, but it opens up the possibility that fairness evolved not out of Kumbaya-style cooperation, but out of a need to get by when others act spiteful. In an economic game, the study found, fair behavior evolved in order to survive in an environment where spiteful players thrived.

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Playing ultimatums

 

Spite is the opposite of altruism. An altruistic person pays a personal price to do something nice for others. A spiteful person pays that price to do something to hurt someone else. [The 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

Forber and his co-researcher, Rory Smead of Northeastern University in Boston, wanted to understand why spite might evolve. They used a famous economics game, called the Ultimate Game, to find out.

 

In the Ultimatum Game, there are two players. The first is given a resource — say, $10 — and told to offer part of that resource to the second player. If player two refuses the offer, neither player gets anything. If player one accepts, both get the amounts proposed by player one.

 

If a person is playing to maximize his or her profits in the Ultimatum Game, the rational thing to do is to offer as little as possible to player two and accept anything offered when in player two's shoes. That's not how people work, however; they regularly make fair, even offers and reject unfair offers. That rejection is an example of spite, because the player refuses a reward in order to punish someone who gave an unfair offer.

 

Easy riders and spiteful bots

 

Forber and his colleagues set up a model (essentially computers playing the Ultimatum game against one another) to see what kind of players would evolve. They created a situation in which the players could make fair or unfair offers when in the player one position and could choose to accept or reject offers when in the player two position.

 

The setup resulted in four possible player types: The "rational" player, who makes unfair offers and accepts any offer that comes his way; the "fair" player, who makes fair offers and rejects unfair offers; the "easy rider," who makes fair offers but accepts any offers; and finally, the "spiteful" player, who makes unfair offers but also rejects unfair offers.

The model was set up so that the most successful players would multiply, mimicking evolutionary dynamics.

 

When types of players are matched randomly, the result is either a population of rational players or some mix of fair players and easy riders, Forber said. But when the game was designed to allow players to mix with types unlike themselves, another pattern emerged.

 

Under these mixed-up conditions, spite evolved — much to the researchers' surprise, Forber said. And with spite in play, strange things started happening. First, rational and fair players disappeared. Spiteful players rejected rational players' unfair offers, essentially spiting them out of the game. Fair players got duped by spiteful players, who always took their nice offers, but never returned the favor.

 

Only one type of player could survive the onslaught of spite: the easy rider. These players made fair offers, so spiteful players had no cause to punish them. But they also accepted what they could get from the spiteful, which kept them in the game.

Scissors-32x32.png

 

 

Via iOTW

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Fox News this morning had Alberto Gonzales former A.G. under G.W. Bush and like some other positions he has taken Sounded like he thinks Obama not breaking the law when he postpones some of the A.C.A.

wallbash.gif

 

 

Link? Thanks.

 

I could not find a link

 

 

 

This?

 

yes

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