Nuclear Monster

Vox: “The Senate GOP health bill in one sentence: poor people pay more for worse insurance”

Jun 23, 2017

—

by

Jack Slater

in politics

This is the single most important issue for many Americans today. The Russian interference into our elections is bad, but this could be imminently devastating to anyone who needs their health care to actually function. Ezra Klein:

If all this sounds a bit in the weeds, here’s the bottom line: Low-income Americans get less money to buy crummier insurance. In the GOP bill, the measure of what is affordable has gone up and the definition of what counts as decent insurance has gone down.

Gene B. Sperling and Michael Shapiro go over how this version of the health bill could destroy coverage for pre-existing conditions in The Atlantic:

As they argue for the bill, Republicans are going to claim that it will not allow insurance plans to discriminate against people because they have a pre-existing condition. But that just isn’t the case. The Republican plan may not allow insurers to discriminate against a pre-existing condition through the front door, but they’ve created a backdoor way in.

Call your senators.
The Times’ Catalog of Dear Leader’s Lies

Jun 23, 2017

—

by

Jack Slater

in politics

David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson:

Many Americans have become accustomed to President Trump’s lies. But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them. So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office.

[…]

There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths. Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president — of either party — has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant.

Great work, I’d love to see everything from the campaign as well but I’m very happy to see a major news organization calling the Liar-in-Chief a liar instead of using mealy-mouthed words to pretend that it isn’t intentional.
The Hitman That Owned Himself

Jun 16, 2017

—

by

Jack Slater

in video games

Square-Enix recently decided to drop IO Interactive from their portfolio of development studios, which left IO’s series of Hitman (and other games) up in the air. Good news. IO is now the company that owns themselves and also owns the Hitman “Intellectual Property” according to the CEO’s statement. I have a few questions as to who owns the previous games and the right to publish those, and what this means for the remaining staff at IO after they recently had to lay off some, but I’ll be looking forward to playing the next elusive target.
Inside a Ukrainian Nuclear Missile Base

Jun 16, 2017

—

by

Jack Slater

in war

Drew Scanlon of Cloth Map, and my favorite podcast about speedy race cars, Shift+F1, has this great video from his recent tour of a decommissioned nuclear missile base in the Ukraine. In the video Scanlon actually gets to use the launch controls.

Here’s the location on Google’s mapping service:

And here is the museum’s English Wikipedia article.
Metroid: Samus Returns on September 15th

Jun 13, 2017

—

by

Jack Slater

in video games

You wouldn’t have been wrong to think that Nintendo doesn’t care much about Metroid when it gets largely ignored by Nintendo, until today. Nintendo has a fresh team developing a new game in the Metroid Prime series and this 3DS remake of the Game Boy’s Metroid II: Return of Samus due on September 15th.

Very surprising to see Nintendo’s commitment to the 3DS platform continue. Here’s a longer video with Nintendo revealing the game on their Treehouse stream, interviewing the developers, and showing off about 40 minutes of gameplay: