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A provision of the Affordable Care Act, which is one reason Allegheny Technologies locked out more than 2,000 union workers last week at 12 plants in six states, also could be a stumbling block in negotiations involving two other major steel producers whose contracts covering about 30,000 union workers expire in less than two weeks.

The federal legislation subjects employers to a 40 percent tax if premiums for health care coverage exceed prescribed limits starting in 2018.

The tax was imposed to pay for the premium and cost-sharing subsidies, Medicaid expansion, and other provisions designed to make health care coverage more affordable for more people. It was dubbed the “Cadillac tax” because many believed it would apply only to gold-plated coverage provided to high-paid workers.

However, 48 percent of companies are likely to be subject to the tax in 2018 and 82 percent could be liable by 2023, according to benefits consultant Towers Watson.

“We’ve been calling it the ‘Chevy tax,’” said Anna Fendley, a legislative representative with the United Steelworkers union. “This is a tax that’s really falling on the backs of working people.”

Every government employee ought to be required to recite the definition of ‘unintended consequences’ before receiving a paycheck.

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Researchers at MIT and Samsung have built a battery that eschews the use of liquid electrolytes in favor of a solid state substance that offers some serious benefits.

Most commercial lithium-ion batteries use a liquid electrolyte to transport charged particles and provide power. But there are problems with this – the liquid degrades over time, and if the battery leaks there are serious safety issues.

“All of the fires you’ve seen, with Boeing, Tesla, and others, they are all electrolyte fires,” said Gerbrand Ceder, visiting professor of materials science and engineering at MIT.

“The lithium itself is not flammable in the state it’s in in these batteries. [With a solid electrolyte] there’s no safety problem — you could throw it against the wall, drive a nail through it — there’s nothing there to burn.”

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This is why God gave us cats.

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Your DNA, like that of everything else on the planet, is made of four nucleotides: A, C, G, and T. These are like a blueprint that your body reads to produce 20 different amino acids, which combine to make up the proteins that enable everything your body does, like repairing damaged cells or breaking down food.

Last year, biotech startup Synthorx announced that it had pushed the limits of biology by adding new building blocks to a bacteria’s genetic code. Now they’ve gone a step farther: those engineered bacteria have created a well-studied protein that has an added function, according to a press release the company issued yesterday. This could be the first step towards the discovery of new, more effective drugs and vaccines.

Synthorx added two more nucleotides, X and Y, to a bacteria’s DNA. These combine with the other four to make up to 172 different amino acids—over eight times the 20 commonly found in nature. These can combine to make an enormous number of proteins never before seen on Earth.

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I am not making this up.

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North Korea has developed an elaborate underground missile complex at its Sohae missile and space launch facility near the northwestern border with China, according to U.S. officials. The underground complex includes both facilities for preparing missiles for launch and storage areas that are connected by rail lines, according to officials familiar with intelligence reports of the complex.

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Michigan-based market Meijer is attempting to expand into the state of Wisconsin, and they’re offering food for a steal. Who wouldn’t want Pop Tarts at $1.50 a box or tomatoes for $.79 a pound?

The answer to that question is, of course, protectionist bureaucrats and rival stores within the state of Wisconsin. Meijer is now under investigation for violating the state’s Unfair Sales Act, a depression-era law that forbids selling merchandise at below cost. A law firm in Milwaukee filed complaints on behalf of an unnamed client naming 37 products they believe are being sold below cost.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds (The Instapundit) points out what markets are good — and not good — for.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently tweeted: “The free-market system lets you notice the flaws and hides its benefits. All other systems hide the flaws and show the benefits.”

This drew a response: “The most valuable property of the price mechanism is as a reliable mechanism for delivering bad news.” These two statements explain a lot about why socialist systems fail pretty much everywhere but get pretty good press, while capitalism has delivered truly astounding results but is constantly besieged by detractors.

That’s it, in nutshell.

At the same time, markets deliver the bad news whether you want to hear it or not, but delivering the bad news is not a sign of failure, it is a characteristic of systems that work. When you stub your toe, the neurons in between your foot and your head don’t try to figure out ways not to send the news to your brain. If they did, you’d trip a lot more often. Likewise, in a market, bad decisions show up pretty rapidly: Build a car that nobody wants, and you’re stuck with a bunch of expensive unsold cars; invest in new technologies that don’t work, and you lose a lot of money and have nothing to show for it. These painful consequences mean that people are pretty careful in their investments, at least so long as they’re investing their own money.

Bureaucrats in government do  the opposite, trying to keep their bosses from discovering their mistakes.

Which is why it’s pretty much always a mistake to put government employees in charge of anything.

Markets make people better off, but they don’t provide sufficient opportunities for politicians to extract bribes and intellectuals to feel better about themselves. This explains why they’re unpopular with politicians and intellectuals. The real question is why anyone else listens to the self-interested claims of politicians and intellectuals. Maybe because the subject of what works and what doesn’t in economics is mostly written by journalists?

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Labor gangsterism—mob-run labor unions that loot pension funds, make back-room deals with both politicians and companies that favor union management over workers, and support crooked big city machines as part of a strategy to keep law enforcement at bay—is one of America’s oldest union traditions. How important has the mob been in labor history? Ask Jimmy Hoffa, if you can find him.

Now, a recent rash of minimum wage laws have created a huge new opportunity for mafia enrichment: laws that hike the minimum wage to utterly unrealistic levels, but allow companies to pay less than the minimum wage—if the low wages are part of a collective bargaining agreement with a labor union.

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Hey, these things happen.

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Touhidur Rahman was arrested along with two other men by Bangladeshi security forces on Tuesday in connection with the beheading of prominent atheist bloggers Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das in separate attacks, according to ITV News.

Oh, yeah, ‘Touhidur Rahman’ says ‘British man’ to me, right enough.

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Eighty years ago this month (on August 14th, 1935, to be precise), Uncle Sam foisted on its subjects a scheme that would make Charles Ponzi green with envy.  And to help hide the hideous nature of this spending-other-people’s-money fraud, Uncle Sam maintains a scam called the “Social Security Trust Fund” – which is simply I.O.U.s written by the government to itself.

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For reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, a promotional video for a University of Alabama sorority that depicts the girls dancing in bikinis—and doing other stereotypical sorority stuff—provoked an internet backlash against its supposedly anti-feminist content. But that’s not all: the backlash itself has also earned its own backlash.

As you might have guessed, Donald Trump is somehow involved.

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Because that’s what ‘progressive’ governments do.

Joseph Rose, the Oregonian reporter who proved that streetcars are slower than walking, has left the paper’s transportation beat. So it took another Oregonian reporter, Andrew Theen, to make the brilliant discover that Portland highways really are at or above capacity.

Of course, that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who lives in the Portland area. According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s latest urban mobility report, Portland has more congestion today (measured by hours of delay per auto commuter) than Los Angeles did 30 years ago, when LA was considered to be about the worst congested city in the world.

…

Speaking of housing, Portlanders are now joining Seattleites in protesting the demolition of single-family homes to be replaced with higher-priced condos. But few of the protesters seem to understand that the real cause of their problems is the urban-growth boundaries that create artificial shortages of land for development, thus forcing builders to redevelop existing neighborhoods to higher densities.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

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This will come as no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention.

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CNN carried an op-ed today in its Opinion section titled, “Hillary Clinton revived America’s reputation in world.” The piece, by Eleni Kounalakis, was a paean to Hillary’s wonderfulness as Secretary of State. It took issue with those who say she has no accomplishments:

…

Kounalakis’s op-ed wouldn’t have had quite the same stature if CNN had disclosed the fact that she was one of Hillary’s top fundraisers, a fundraiser who was paid off with an ambassadorship, and therefore hardly an objective observer of Hillary’s successes (or lack thereof) as Secretary of State.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The industry could be ready for another jolt as a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour nears in the District and as other campaigns to boost wages gain traction around the country. About 30 percent of the restaurant industry’s costs come from salaries, so burger-flipping robots — or at least super-fast ovens that expedite the process — become that much more cost-competitive if the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is doubled.

“The problem with the ­minimum-wage offensive is that it throws the accounting of the restaurant industry totally upside down,” said Harold Miller, vice president of franchise development for Persona Pizzeria, who also consults for other chains. “My position is: Pay your people properly, keep them longer, treat them right, and robots are going to be helpful in doing that, because it will help the restaurateur survive.”

…

“The miracle is, the wage increase is driving the interest,” Brewer said. “But the innovation and the automation, they’re going after it even before the wages go up. Why wait?”

Hey, low-information voters! Be careful what you wish for — you might just get it, and it might just cost you your job.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

In order to qualify for federal health insurance subsidies, which covers most or all of premiums for low-income people, one must have at least $11,700 in expected income over a year. According to a report by CNBC, the agent was reportedly instructing low-income individuals to apply for the subsidies with projected income generated from panhandling, selling drugs, and even prostitution.

This unusual activity was brought to the attention of North Carolina officials after an insurance software company in California noticed a high volume of applications with addresses at homeless shelters and expected income listed at the threshold of $11,700. Once brought to light, healthcare company Aetna immediately ceased their relationship with the agent and will investigate the matter fully, as does the administrator of Obamacare and the Healthcare.gov exchange, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Betcha he votes Democrite.

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Like all lies uncorrected, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a religion with evangelists, disciples, heretics, opportunists, and enforcers.

First, the media spread the Word. Those outlets that couldn’t afford to send reporters were helped by Twitter—that blackest of the social networks—and the well-equipped, well-credentialed rioters descended en masse to proclaim it. Some of these “reporters” were child molesters and criminals, but CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Brian Stelter didn’t mind. After all, their network’s ratings increased and postponed the inevitable reckoning all media companies must one day confront in the digital age.

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… which can be summed up in one onomatopoeic sound: Ka-ching!

Steve Sailer has some thoughts:

My prediction: The Obamas will buy a Manhattan penthouse overlooking Central Park on the west end of Central Park North, so they can claim to live in Harlem but basically live on the Upper West Side.

Appearances are, after all, everything to the Democrites.

For a longer answer, Barack might point out that he hasn’t got caught cheating with an intern so he hasn’t had to agree to facilitate an aggrieved wife’s long-term plan for world domination like Bill Clinton had to.

True dat.

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And to continue to wax cynical, I think it would take an indictment of Herself, not merely an investigation that ultimately finds a fall guy in Clinton’s IT team or even among her intimates, to turn Democratic primary voters against Hillary or force her from the race.

Because absent an indictment— or, I suppose, an email showing her deliberately accepting payola from Vladimir Putin — the email affair, no less than the shady Clinton Foundation dealings, looks like the kind of scandal that Clinton supporters have long conditioned themselves to justify: An inappropriate and self-interested episode, clumsily covered over, but at once murky and slow-dripping enough for Democratic partisans to shrug, say, “LOLBenghazi” and move on.

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A Democrite paradise.

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From Business Insider, which (despite its name) is neither from Business nor from Insiders.

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Come to think of it, most bachelors’ degrees these days are a form of microcredential.

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“The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” isn’t living up to its promise. Also known as Proposition 47, the California ballot initiative, which was approved in November 2014 with 60 percent of the vote, downgraded drug possession and many property crimes from a felony to a misdemeanor. Proponents argued that lesser punishment for low-level offenders would enhance public safety. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon was the rare prosecutor who pushed for its approval. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “What we have been doing hasn’t worked, frankly.”

…

In San Francisco, theft from cars is up 47 percent this year over the same period in 2014. Auto theft is up by 17 percent. Robberies are up 23 percent. And aggravated assaults are up 2 percent, according to San Francisco police spokesman Carlos Manfredi. Burglaries are down 5 percent.

The City of Angels saw a 12.7 percent increase in overall crime this year, according to the Los Angeles Times; violent offenses rose 20.6 percent, while property crime rose by 11 percent. Mayor Eric Garcetti says Prop 47 may explain Los Angeles’ change in course from crime reduction to crime increases.

“It used to be that if you were caught in the possession of methamphetamine, you would be arrested; you’d end up in drug court or in some other program, probably in custody receiving some type of treatment,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig told the Daily Democrat. “Well, now the officers on the street just give them a ticket. So they have been arrested for a crime. The case actually gets forwarded to my office. We charge them with a crime, but they never show up to court. They get arrested again and are given another ticket for methamphetamine. And so we’ve seen that.”

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Hint: Probably.

A new report by a progressive think-tank says the astronomically expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is inferior compared to other “near-peer” competitors and will be mismatched against emerging threats.

The study by the National Security Network states the jet, the most expensive weapons system in U.S. history, will not only be outmaneuvered and outgunned by Russian and Chinese aircraft but will also be limited in range and its stealth capabilities will be easily overcome.

They’ve been trying to buy one single plane for all three services since at least the sixties, and it’s never worked.

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“The F-35 is double-inferior,” Stillion and Perdue moaned in their written summary of the war game, later leaked to the press.

The analysts railed against the new plane, which to be fair played only a small role in the overall simulation. “Inferior acceleration, inferior climb [rate], inferior sustained turn capability,” they wrote. “Also has lower top speed. Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.” Once missiles and guns had been fired and avoiding detection was no longer an option—in all but the first few seconds of combat, in other words—the F-35 was unable to keep pace with rival planes.

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Hugo Chavez, deceased President of Venezuela, is still revered on the international left. Chavez was a vicious socialist: The rich are evil! The rich are lazy! Confiscate their money! Now we know what he did with it. Diario las Americas, as translated and reported by the Daily Mail, says that Chavez’s daughter Maria Gabriela Chavez has stashed away a cool $4 billion….

…

If you want a world in which a few obscenely rich jet-setters lord it over a sea of poor people, socialism is the ideology for you.

Lord Ridley hits the nail on the head.

Making dire predictions is what environmental groups do for a living, and it’s a competitive market, so they exaggerate. Virtually every environmental threat of the past few decades has been greatly exaggerated at some point. Pesticides were not causing a cancer epidemic, as Rachel Carson claimed in her 1962 book “Silent Spring”; acid rain was not devastating German forests, as the Green Party in that country said in the 1980s; the ozone hole was not making rabbits and salmon blind, as Al Gore warned in the 1990s. Yet taking precautionary action against pesticides, acid rain and ozone thinning proved manageable, so maybe not much harm was done.

…

But it isn’t just that environmental threats have a habit of turning out less bad than feared; it’s that the remedies sometimes prove worse than the disease.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, draws a distinction.

A Typical Entrepreneur: Someone who, spotting exploitable profit opportunities – that is, spotting currently existing but exploitable failures of the market to operate as productively as possible – puts his or her own money where his or her mouth is to take productive and voluntary actions that make the market operate better than before….

An All-Too-Typical Academic: Someone who, unduly impressed by his or her own academic studies and methods, concludes that the market does not work in reality as well as his or her academic studies and ruminations suggest that it should work.  This academic, however, is both too incompetent and too cowardly to act in the real world by staking something of his or her own.  He or she instead wishes to convince people with guns – government officials – to force other people to take his or her findings seriously….

‘My wife and I listen to a lot of Public Radio, because we’re middle-aged white people living in California.’

— Merlin Mann

Think about that for a bit.

Greycork – Upgrade Your Living Room.

Tactical Can Cooler. One of these babies could save your life.

Picnic Backpack.

GoSun Stove.

Navion. More here.

Meat-Patterned Rug. For when you really hate your spouse’s dog.

True Utility Keyring System.

Taki does the Trump.

What I particularly like about Trump is the way he’s hated by the media. He doesn’t take any of their crap, and when misquoted, which he is a lot, he calls them names not fit to print to their face. This is the way it should be. When Vicky Ward, a Vanity Fair writer who has an acid pen and uses her blond looks as an added attraction, did a hatchet job on him, Trump replied in kind. He called her a bitch, a liar, and ugly to boot. The great and the good were horrified. I thought he hit the nail right on the head. The other thing that has the hacks really peed off is the fact that The Donald tells it like it is when it comes to immigration and crime. Phony writers for the Times and other such tendentious organizations ignore blue-collar workers who have not graduated from Ivy League schools. The latter love Trump, and the less educated they are, the more sense they make in liking him. We can’t all live in ritzy suburbs and slick Park Avenue apartment buildings like Times people, whose only contact with immigrants is during the 6 o’clock news. At the same time, Trump’s outrageous shtick and his camera-hogging antics endear him to those uninvited to chic parties in New York and Washington. The Donald blew it with McCain—what’s a pilot supposed to do when shot down, act Japanese and go down in flames?—but otherwise he’s done a great job annoying the rest of the crowded Republican presidential field.

Read it. And watch the video.

Now that’s comedy.

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In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.

Some things are too gross even for the New York Times.

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An impressive compendium of significant scholarship of the latest expression of Islamic totalitarianism.

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While government bureaucrats are notoriously inefficient at their core missions, such as the EPA polluting the Animus River, the one thing they are consistently efficient at is losing taxpayer dollars. In addition to the EPA’s recent bungles, the U.S. Postal Service this week continued its long tradition of hemorrhaging money.

This week the Postal Service reported a net loss of $586 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2015. The USPS’s ability to lose over half a billion dollars in just three months would almost be impressive if it wasn’t a detriment to American taxpayers. The fact is the USPS receives roughly $18 billion in taxpayer-backed subsidies annually yet is still failing.

Despite this massive multi-billion dollar subsidies crutch, the Postal Service continues to prove incapable of financial accountability. The third quarter losses this week are not only a massive bureaucratic failure but also mean the Postal Service has now posted revenue losses 25 out of the last 27 quarters.

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Police said they are still trying to figure out where the bar comes from and how it got into the Koenigssee lake, a popular tourist destination near Berchtesgaden on the border with Austria.

SECRET NAZI GOLD! Well, it could be….

Steve Sailer celebrates the turning of the seasons.

An annual autumnal tradition here at iSteve is the crops-rotting-in-the-field stories about why we’re all going to die unless farmers get to import more peasants from Latin America to work cheap for them from such farm-savvy outlets as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

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Homeschooling—once thought to be the province of diehard evangelicals, political radicals, and others with ideological reasons to steer clear of public education—is increasingly being embraced by the middle-class city-dwellers who are simply disappointed with the quality of urban schools and helped by the way new technologies are reducing the need for professional teachers.

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If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps, then that shape is said to tile the plane.

Every triangle can tile the plane. Every four-sided shape can also tile the plane.

Things get interesting with pentagons. The regular pentagon cannot tile the plane. (A regular pentagon has equal side lengths and equal angles between sides, like, say, a cross section of okra, or, erm, the Pentagon). But some non-regular pentagons can.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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An Illinois man cuffed for suspected theft of a sex toy, and who told cops he had “no idea” how a pink Euphoria G-Spot Delight vibrator came to be in his boxer shorts, later recalled quite clearly that he didn’t much like the US prez when he “stripped completely naked” in his cell, making “derogatory comments about President Obama”, and signing his Miranda Rights consent form with the phrase “Obama is a criminal”.

Yeah, we’ve all been there.

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And all of it will be subsidized and micromanaged by the government.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Don’t like government dietary guidelines? Wait a year or five and they’ll change.