cited in the most recent Economist, and i didn't know it was still the case and still blows my mind:

Slovenia has a yacht week I'm pretty sure

Slovenia is far closer to GOAT than dispensable.

What is its per capita number of rooftop pools?

Did Slovenia ever pay its bill to NATO? Asking for a friend.

I mean this is just silly. If literally every molecule located within the Slovenian border somehow instantly vanished it would make no difference whatsoever to any of our lives .

You mean if at least half of future emperor kim jong barron vanishes in an instant, we won't have serious repercussions?

Wooders0n meets The Leftovers and says to get the **** over it

This just says that they were the least valuable Balkan country that wasn't worth fighting over, not a point in their favor. I should have remembered the Dragic bros though

Slovenian checking in! (like 15% maybe?)

**** landon donovan

My life is better for knowing this fact.

It's good to know that I'm not the only schlub who got the two confused. Who knew?

That is a truly amazing fact

Also their flags are similar:

Slovak language in Slovak:
Slovenčina

Slovenian language in Slovenian:
Slovenščina

I enjoy stupid people advising liberals on how to win over stupid people

House GOP plans to vote on ZombieCare v. 3™ tomorrow. I'm not sure what I hope happens.

Background

For background, this stunningly idiotic bill is now actually worse-conceived than the previous amalgamation of incompetence, racism, classism and greed that died an ugly death before it even came to a vote. It will still punish the GOP's (stupid) base, seemingly directly, but it is also even better designed to cause death spirals than the previous version. You may recall that the previous version was guaranteed to cause death spirals.

The change is essentially that this version allows states to opt-out of requiring preexisting condition coverage as long as they have a reason - pretty much any reason that can be expressed with words (seriously).

But this bothered "moderate Republicans," i.e. racist-****ing-imbeciles-who-hate-everyone-who-isn't-wealthy-and-white-but-who-happen-to-represent-exactly-those-people, because it makes them look terrible to their constituents (who they openly hate and harm at every opportunity). They need something to show constituents in 2018 to prove how BRAVELY they defended their constituents.

So the fix to THAT problem is an $8,000,000,000 (billi) fund, payable over 5 years, that is meant to augment high risk pools that people with preexisting conditions will be shoved into by insurers once red states opt to allow insurers to deny coverage for preexisting conditions.

But, in order to make THAT proxy-single-payer okay with the Freedom Caucus (and most of the rest of the GOP), the GOP had to somehow ensure that insurers could still charge those high-risk sick people (who from the GOP perspective totally deserve to be sick and got what was coming to them, the inconvenient ****s) whatever the insurers want. Solution: explicitly allow insurers to charge high risk pools whatever they want for coverage, then augment the insurance payments owed by those sick individuals with money from the $8 billi fund. In other words, use the $8 billi to DIRECTLY PAY INSURERS FOR OVERCHARGING SICK PEOPLE. Thus, the fund is set aside in order to directly pay insurers more money BECAUSE the insurers are being allowed to CHARGE more money to sick people. This is so that GOP house members in 2018 can say "look at all the money we set aside to help people in high risk pools," a decidedly non-Republican thing to say. But it's better than saying "we allowed sick people to be denied insurance and did nothing at all to help them."

The problem with THAT solution, among other things, is that $8 billion over 5 years is functionally nothing. It is an irrevevancy. It is, in fact, such an irrelevancy that the GOP is totally fine with the expenditure even though it is literally government-funded healthcare for the sick, something the GOP LOATHES.

Reasons I Can't Decide What I Think

On the one hand, this is terrible for America and nearly everyone in America and, as I have said so many times before, people are going to die because of this policy if it is enacted.

On the other hand, it will never be enacted. It cannot pass the Senate. No one will actually die under this legislation because it will never be law.

You may have noticed that though GOP Senators are equally immoral pieces of human trash sucking all optimism and joy from every human being's life as a matter of course, they are not also legitimately stupid. That identifier is, mostly, reserved for the House - which makes you wonder which is the more culpable and therefore more evil, but I digress.

The question: do we, "we" being right-thinking non-morons, want this bill to pass in the House, or not?

The answer: yes, I think? Once it passes in the House, Democrats get to hang it like a millstone around the necks of every "moderate Republican" Representative who voted for killing people off by forcing them into a designed-to-fail-high-risk-insurance-scam-that-directly-enriches-insurers-as-people-die-and-that-taxpayers-pay-the-insurers-for. Once it fails in the Senate and needs to be rewritten by (malfeasant and soulless) grown-ups, the drama between the GOP Senate and Trump will be even better than all the gnashing of teeth, rending of garments and cuckolded gapery of the House majority meltdown over Obamacare reform, which cannot possibly help the GOP. The Democrats need this slow-motion seppuku to continue literally every single day through the midterm elections, or they'll never prevail (because they are utterly incompetent in virtually all ways).

A counter-argument: It passing appears to be AN ACHIEVEMENT™, the keeping of a PROMISE to harm those who begged most loudly to be directly harmed. So I mean, that will play and play quite well. I think the damage of passing this crap and watching it fail in the Senate is slightly greater than the damage of it outright failing now, so I prefer that, but on this topic debate can EASILY be had from both sides.

Hoya,

If this can pass in the Senate with 51, I am pretty sure that we don't want it to pass the House. I heard they could do this with 51, perhaps just because they are skipping the whole CBO thing or something.

Bear in mind that the essential problem for the GOP continues to be that they spent two entire election cycles screaming about the horrors of Obamacare, and they now have to preserve exactly that while appearing to get rid of it because actually getting rid of it is political suicide and the only feasible "better" legislation would be single-payer.

There's absolutely no way this proposal can be passed through reconciliation, though they'll probably try to pull the whole "the CBO didn't have time so it's time for an up or down vote" thing again.

I still think raising the cap on HSA investing and letting people use HSA funds on OTC drugs would be really awesome

How much does it dying in the senate help Dem chances when the spin is almost certain to be that obstructionist Dems are letting the death spiral happen and fiddling all the way home?

Also Obama apparently donating 2 million to programs in Chicago. So 1.5x what he got off that Wall Street speech people were ****ting on him for doing.

Hoya,

You don't want this bill to pass the House. This is like liberals cheering for Trump in the primary because of how bad it would make the Republicans look if he won and it would mean slam dunk general election victory. Even if that was correct 80% of the time, 20% chances come in 20% of the time. So your post incorrectly assumes that the Democratic Party is 1. competent enough to capitalize on this bill passing the House but not the Senate and that 2. the chances of it passing the Senate are 0%. Even a 1% chance of this bill becoming law isn't worth whatever +EV political capital you think the Democrats will score(and they probably won't) the other 99% of the time.

I don't want anything like that even close to passing in either chamber.

I can't decide if it would be any sort of progress or not if the people who constantly rag on Obama for pretty much everything simply came out and said, "Look, I just don't like black people, so I don't like him." Maybe it'd be some kind of breakthrough that would be easier to work with going forward?