Author: davidkirkpatrick

Good news for the unemployed who qualify.

The IRS release:

COBRA Subsidy Eligibility Period Extended Through February; 15-Months Subsidy Now Available to Those Who Qualify

Revised Jan. 21, 2010, to add HCTC information WASHINGTON — Workers who lose their jobs during January and February may qualify for a 65-percent subsidy on their COBRA health insurance premiums, and these newly-eligible individuals, along with those already receiving the subsidy, can now receive it for up to 15 months, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the COBRA subsidy eligibility period was originally scheduled to expire at the end of 2009, and eligible individuals only qualified for the subsidy for nine months. But the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010, enacted on Dec. 19, extended the eligibility period and the maximum duration of COBRA premium assistance. As a result, workers who are involuntarily terminated from employment between Sept. 1, 2008, and Feb. 28, 2010, may be eligible for a 65-percent subsidy of their COBRA premiums for a period of up to 15 months. Involuntarily terminated employees who meet certain other requirements, and certain family members of those individuals, are referred to as “assistance-eligible individuals.” Employers must provide COBRA coverage to assistance-eligible individuals who pay 35 percent of the COBRA premium. Employers are reimbursed for the other 65 percent by claiming a credit for the subsidy on their payroll tax returns: Form 941, Employers QUARTERLY Federal Tax Return, Form 944, Employer’s ANNUAL Federal Tax Return, or Form 943, Employer’s Annual Federal Tax Return for Agricultural Employees. Employers must maintain supporting documentation for the claimed credit. The administrator of a group health plan or other entity must notify certain assistance-eligible individuals of the extension by Feb. 17, 2010. For assistance-eligible individuals whose nine months of subsidy had already ended, the new law also provides an extended period for the retroactive payment of their 35 percent share during a transition period. There is much more information about the COBRA subsidy, including questions and answers for employers, and for employees or former employees, on the COBRA pages of IRS.gov. Some people who are eligible for the COBRA subsidy also qualify for the health coverage tax credit (HCTC) and may want to choose this more generous benefit, instead. The HCTC pays 80 percent of health insurance premiums for those who qualify. Eligible individuals must be receiving Trade Adjustment Assistance benefits or be between the ages fo 55 and 65 and receiving pension payments from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Individuals must also be enrolled in a qualified health plan. See more at HCTC: Eligibility Requirements and How to Receive the HCTC. Related Items: U.S. Department of Labor’s COBRA Web site The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: Information Center

Via KurzweilAI.net — An impressive milestone in solar power efficiency.

Oerlikon Promises 30% Lower Solar Module Production Costs in 2010

Renewable Energy World, Jan. 20, 2009 Oerlikon Solar plans to reach production costs at grid parity by the end of this year, meaning the company is on track to offer its customers an advanced fab design capable of producing solar modules for 70 cents per watt by that time. Oerlikon Solar said that it has driven down module costs by around 25 percent, raising efficiency and improving the productivity of its lines from 60 MW in 2008 to 100 MW in 2009 without additional equipment. The company also said that it is on track to deliver another 30% cost reduction by end of 2010, enabling customers to offer solar electricity at grid-competitive prices in many parts of the world. Read Original Article>>

… and promptly shoots foot.

Back when I used a browser with a “home page” the New York Times website was that starting block. The Old Grey Lady offered a nice slice of news across a huge swath of topics. On the heels of Rupert Murdoch announcing taking all his products behind a paywall by the middle of this year, the NYT is going on a limited free use model that will take its content behind a paywall for all except the most casual reader going into effect a year from now.

There’s no decent answer for content on the internet, but this move will absolutely kill the NYT’s traffic. I pay for Wall Street Journal content and have for years as a business expense. In this market I can’t afford another online subscription, so the result will be I’ll no longer use the NYT for linking or for getting a pulse of the day’s news. I’m betting I won’t be alone in that decision.

From the first link:

Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.

Executives of  The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.

I’m not a global warming skeptic — the science on post-industrial CO2 levels and overall global temperature is very clear — but, I have a real problem with the politics of anthropogenic climate change and how science is being regularly twisted into something of a policy battering ram that demands ideological purity and a lack of continued rigor on what is going on. With that, it should go without saying I question the extreme doomsday predictions coming from those ideologically pure AGW cassandras.

News like this does nothing to make me feel any better about the complete lack of real science behind a lot of AGW claims, and it does nothing to help brush back those idiotic total global warming deniers who point at every record cold temperature and snow storm across the middle of the U.S. to “prove” their point.

Realistically we have some very bad science and bullying politics on one side, fingers-in-the-ears yahoos on the other, and an actual issue that deserves and needs addressing stuck in the middle. You know, if you think about it the entire AGW debate is a pretty good summation of politics in the U.S. right now.

From the second link:

One of the most alarming conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a widely respected organization established by the United Nations, is that glaciers in the Himalayas could be gone 25 years from now, eliminating a primary source of water for hundreds of millions of people. But a number of glaciologists have argued that this conclusion is wrong, and now the IPCC admits that the conclusion is largely unsubstantiated, based on news reports rather than published, peer-reviewed scientific studies.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the IPCC admitted that the Working Group II report, “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” published in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007), contains a claim that “refers to poorly substantiated estimates. ” The statement also said “the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedure, were not applied properly.” The statement did not quote the error, but it did cite the section of the report that refers to Himalayan glaciers. Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, who is now in charge of Working Group II, confirms that the error was related to the claim that the glaciers could disappear by 2035.

The disappearance of the glaciers would require temperatures far higher than those predicted in even the most dire global warming scenarios, says Georg Kaser, professor at the Institut für Geographie der Universität, Innsbruck. The Himalayas would have to heat up by 18 degrees Celsius and stay there for the highest glaciers to melt–most climate change scenarios expect only a few degrees of warming over the next century.

Short version: YouTube, change your tracking metrics so our label (EMI) will let our fans embed our videos again. Long version (after reading through the lines): the industry is completely broken, but we’re in too deep to walk away.

From the link:

We’ve been flooded with complaints recently because our YouTube videos can’t be embedded on websites, and in certain countries can’t be seen at all. And we want you to know: we hear you, and we’re sorry. We wish there was something we could do. Believe us, we want you to pass our videos around more than you do, but, crazy as it may seem, it’s now far harder for bands to make videos accessible online than it was four years ago.

See, here’s the deal. The recordings and the videos we make are owned by a record label, EMI. The label fronts the money for us to make recordings – for this album they paid for us to spend a few months with one of the world’s best producers in a converted barn in Amish country wringing our souls and playing tympani and twiddling knobs – and they put up most of the cash that it takes to distribute and promote our albums, including the costs of pressing CDs, advertising, and making videos. We make our videos ourselves, and we keep them dirt cheap, but still, it all adds up, and it adds up to a great deal more than we have in our bank account, which is why we have a record label in the first place.

(Hat tip: boing boing)

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

(Update — bold emphasis added because it seems it takes a sledgehammer to make a fiscal point right now.)

I’m sure there’s a lot of both going on behind the Democratic Party scenes. There’s a lot of both going on publicly along with plenty of finger pointing, blaming and dissembling among the left blogosphere. The simple fact is health care reform in its current Congressional form has not, and almost certainly will not, pass because of Democratic ham-fisted policy making. But the GOP is behaving shamefully and shamelessly as an opposition party with no alternative ideas and zero compromise on a very necessary evil.

Yes, health care reform is a very necessary evil. Honest libertarians can be excused from the argument, but fiscal conservatives are lying to themselves or everyone else when they deny health care reform must occur at some point in the near future. Health care as a percentage of income is becoming unmanageable and health insurance costs are killing businesses both large and small.

Without reform health care in the United States will continue to bankrupt people at higher and higher levels of income, and cause untold suffering and early death for the uninsured. And at a point in time looming very soon it will simply bankrupt the entire nation. I’m no fan of too much government influence anywhere, but after looking over the arguments (and sorting through the hyperventilated crap from both the left and the right) I am convinced reform at the federal level is now a necessary evil. Any fiscal conservative who looks at the numbers honestly will come to the same conclusion.

Some funny (interesting, not hah hah) facts about the situation on the ground now that Brown has taken over Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat: the oft pointed out irony that Kennedy’s old seat will end his signature legislation; the fact the Massachusetts electorate already has a state run plan along the lines of federal health care reform so scuttling the current reform efforts causes them no significant pain; that the new GOP senator voted for the Massachusetts plan, but has declared opposition to essentially the same plan on the federal level; the heaviest opposition to health care reform is found amongst voters who either are already in, or soon will be, the massive federal subsidy of Medicare or Medicaid and basically fear their benefits being harmed in some way. Talk about wanting to selfishly eat your children. No health care reform equals a potentially very bleak future for everyone middle aged on down.

… not malfeasance.

Not likely.

From the first link:

China on Tuesday denied any role in alleged cyberattacks on Indian government offices, calling China itself the biggest victim of hackers.When asked about Google’s (GOOG) allegation that cyberattacks launched from China hit the U.S. search giant, foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Chinese companies were also often hit by cyberattacks.

“China is the biggest victim of hacking attacks,” Ma said, citing the example of top Chinese search engine Baidu.com being hacked last week.