I wonder how much of the iOS user base would move to Android if Apple went nuclear and booted Facebook from the App Store completely. You know they have to be considering that at this point.

“That’s a good question…” is nearly always a stalling tactic, and I catch myself doing it all the time.

I try not to do too much second-guessing of our school district’s decisions of when to call snow days and delayed starts. I know they have to balance a lot of different factors and will have people yelling at them no matter what decision they make.

Nonetheless, it is really difficult to be sitting here figuring out how I am going to juggle work and meetings while my two kids are home all day, and then to look out the window at the three inches of snow we got overnight and my completely plowed street.

Americans may hate their health insurance, but they don’t hate it as much as not having health insurance.

Kevin Drum:

Are Americans really in love with their health insurers? Given the way health insurers treat people, that’s hard to believe. Americans do seem to be in love with their doctors, but that’s an entirely different thing.

But maybe I’m wrong. If so, what’s needed is a scorched-earth, Republicanesque jihad against health insurers. Blanket the airwaves with horror stories of insurance companies denying claims. Get some telegenic doctors to show off their staff and tell us that these people spend 100 percent of their time arguing with insurance companies to get fair treatment for their patients. “It adds $50 to every visit,” or something like that. Pan over to gravestones of people who died because their insurance company refused treatment.

You get the idea. I truly don’t think it would take much to turn insurance companies into pariahs. People already bitch about them endlessly, after all. At a guess, every single person reading this knows someone who has personally had to spend dozens or hundreds of hours on the phone with an insurance carrier to adjudicate some complicated bit of medical care.

Yes, health insurance companies are uniformly awful, and dealing with them is exhausting and terrible.

However, the problem here is not that Americans love private health insurance companies, but rather that, for people who have private health coverage—especially through their employers—it is a known quantity. Yes, my employer-provided plans are expensive, the paperwork is frustrating, and trying to figure out the right plan and find providers each year when open enrollment rolls around is a huge pain in the ass. I hate all of it, but I mostly know what to expect.

Overall, the private health insurance and healthcare system in the United States sucks, and I think we ought to replace it with a single-payer public system. However, I continue to believe that, while the health insurance and healthcare industries are obviously major obstacles to real reform, a significant and often unacknowledged blocker to any such reform is going to be the segment of the public that currently has health coverage through their employers.

Single-payer advocates are going to have to convince these folks why a public system will be better, and arguments about how bad the health insurance system are will not be terribly effective. We all already know that.

Because I apparently do not have enough notebooks already, I ordered a two-pack of Tomoe River pocket notebooks this morning from Pebble Stationery Company.

It took me a while to come around to pocket notebooks in general, but I am pretty hooked on them now. It is a much better system for me than the index cards I had been carrying around previously.

You should go listen to Temporal by Julia Kent

I ran across Julia Kent’s album Temporal via a random playlist on Apple Music yesterday:

I have been listening to it a bunch, and I really like it—interesting mixture of classical strings and electronic blips and glitches.

If Howard Schultz really thinks we “have a broken political system with both parties basically in business to preserve their own ideology without a recognition and responsibility to represent the interests of the American people,”, he’s even dumber than I thought.

How about we stop with this nonsense about how rich businessmen (and it’s always businessmen) can come in and save the country?

Most weekdays, I go out for a run around 5am so as to get it in before the kids are up and the school/work departure mayhem begins.

It is rather shocking to me how many houses I pass by each morning that already have the TV on that early in the day.

Yes, criminals tend to be stupid, but they also tend to be desperate.

Digby:

Criminals are often dumb.

Let’s be clear. No one with Trump’s financial history and criminal exposure would have ever put himself under this level of scrutiny if he had a brain in his head.

I don’t know… it seems like there is a fair amount of reporting to suggest that Trump and his family of crooks really didn’t think they were going to win.

My guess is that for Trump, running for the White House was a scheme to generate publicity and cash to help prop up his ever-failing business and brand.

Unfortunately for him (and for the rest of us!), he won.

I am trying to convince myself that I probably do not actually need the Diplomat Aero Red that has been sitting in my shopping cart for the last two day. So far, I am not having much luck.