The neo-reactionaries are awesome! Who else will take charge and keep the house-elves in their proper place?

And the cop who keeps making good busts that never seem to have anything to do with informants? There's a conversation with the lieutenant in charge: even the good cops shouldn't be goofing off.

If a cop typically spends a couple hours out of an eight-hour shift courting informants, and it's getting good results, then bravo.

It's like those robo-signed foreclosures: the whole purpose of having a legal instrument is for some individual person to be responsible for saying essentially, "Yup, I checked this all out and it's legit." If you're processing these subpoenae automatically, and the input is overzealous or just wrong, then what?

What's so special about "communication skills" that you can't teach them but you can teach anything else?

Oh NICE. Good to know that's there.

You are correct. Sherpa does not calculate subsidies. It simply says they exist and you should go find out on healthcare.gov.

I think a nice new feature would be to ask a few questions to project your expected subsidy and calculate it for you. That adds complexity, but not as much complexity as the verification that the government site puts you through. (That's where all the IRS stuff comes in.)

Even with the Sherpa team's disclaimers, they've provided a really valuable service. How many people are going to go to the Sherpa site, quickly get information about what's available to them on the exchange, and decide that the exchange is not their best option? It has to be some double-digit percentage of people who would have wasted a lot of time being frustrated on healthcare.gov.

Basically, the Sherpa team has given us a great heuristic optimization, in which part of the load problem is handed off to where it can be handled easier, more effectively, and more cheaply. Nicely done!

...is a marketing term. Thank you for sharing.

Sure, everything is interconnected, so it would be false to say there's no effect, but "Yay for world peace! All credit to fracking!" is a wild reach.

Motivated reasoning. It's a thing.

OS/370.

I can imagine really young people in a chaotic startup texting and messaging in a meeting because it's how the meeting works.

Think "war room" more than "board room."

Seriously, this is the underlying premise of the entire Affordable Care Act. He's a little late to the party.

Did you think your former insurer would send you an offer for the best possible deal? Or did you think they'd try to get you to buy the most expensive thing they've got just in case you don't bother to check for alternatives?

What you said. Let's not bash the people who've actually struggled to learn shit and do better for themselves.