It's more attenuated than that. Employers aren't required to pay for birth control. Insurance companies are. The employers aren't buying birth control for anyone. What they're fighting for is the right to affirmatively put barriers in the way of their employees getting access to birth control through basic health insurance. In fact, by providing contraceptive coverage they would actually REDUCE their costs; so what they're trying to do is the opposite of what they claim. They're not trying to avoid purchasing something. They are trying to actively purchase more specifically to prevent their female employees from having convenient access to birth control. The actuarial tables on this are clear. Providing birth control actually makes an individual woman statistically CHEAPER to insure, since she's less likely to become pregnant and thereby incur pregnancy-related costs (both medical costs and costs to her employer, e.g., from missing work, etc.):

From a review of existing research on HHS's website

That's an objection to the employer mandate generally, though; not to having coverage of specific things. This debate specifically centers around the particulars of coverage. It is not an objection to being required to provide health insurance to their employees.

Also, throwing around the word "fascism" so cavalierly isn't doing your argument any favors.

Fitting, I guess, in light of the fact that they're related to an article about an incredibly useful piece of technology with all kinds of implications for stress monitoring (stress, of course, being a major cause of and/or contributor to all manner of physical and mental health problems) that's being used to ... help keep women skinny.

I can't decide whether to shake my head or hit it repeatedly on a desk.

Hmmm. Any chance you have a handy source I could refer to before I call them to explain that I'm requesting the software because someone on the internet told me I'm entitled to it? ;-) No disrespect whatsoever intended, I certainly do appreciate the well-intentioned info.

My Air is new as of July, updated to Mavericks last week. I assume that isn't new enough, as I have none of the referenced software, and the App store wants to charge me for them.

Aperture was the one I cared about, yeah.

::sadface::

Yeah, because "growing balls" makes it impossible for US-based service providers to impose incoming connection requirements that undercut your "security," and makes it possible for you to build a base of customers who don't care that your service is incompatible with the US-based services they're using alongside yours. Freshly grown balls have all kinds of magical powers!

Dammit -- now I regret deleting the trial version after my trial period expired. Why oh why did I care about the disk space?

Since when does the government ask nicely and offer to pay for people's information?

Don't worry; it already did.

The Greek "u" doesn't look very different from an English "u" anyway. It's just pronounced differently. Fookin' ancient Greeks!

Liz Cheney's husband is a partner at the law firm of Latham & Watkins. He used to be GC for DHS but he's not particularly political. Liz Cheney's father, on the other hand, is the former VPOTUS...

Regardless, I agree with your overall point. Taking swipes at people's looks, whether they're in politics or not, is beyond immature. It has no place in grown-up conversation, and certainly not in politics.

As I understand it, insider trading means having non-public information and using it to gain an unfair advantage on the market. Whoever did this had non-public information -- the fact that it was later made public doesn't erase that. And they used that non-public information to gain an unfair advantage. The technicality of it having been made public just before the trades occurred becomes less convincing when you consider the fact that a human being is literally physically incapable of processing and using the information in question within 2-3 milliseconds. Had they waited five honest seconds, I'd think that could safely bring it outside the realm of insider trading. I know that 5 seconds is the difference between profit and ruin in the financial markets, which is kind of precisely the point. You unfairly benefit from the fact of having had non-public information, you've engaged in insider trading.

Exactly. Trying to tie this to "competition" seems like trying to force it into a preconceived argument when there's a much, much simpler explanation: Google, like all companies, tries to minimize its costs and maximize its revenues, and it's done so while more or less keeping its nose fairly clean vis-a-vis the consumers of its products and services. Having a good image all-around, sure, tends to give you a slight edge in any market with any competition -- including, by the way, the employment market, which, even in an economy as shitty as this one, is by definition ALWAYS competitive absent legalized slavery. But expanding into a relatively less-competitive market doesn't result in a cost-benefit analysis whereby you are suddenly more willing to tarnish your brand; the obvious explanation for the different position on net neutrality is that, as an ISP, Google now has costs that are directly impacted by net neutrality, rather than only benefits. If you change the cost/benefit analysis for a given policy position, hey how about that, you may find that you now come down a different way on it. It's nothing to do with "competition" and everything to do with a completely different type of business. Google wouldn't magically not care about the possible burdens of net neutrality as an ISP if there were many more ISPs out there competing with it.

If anything, your strong and borderline exclusive association of the (presumably, from your phrasing) morally-laudable characteristic of "diversity" with having the ability/means to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world is pretty damned elitist, I'd say.