Free Republic

The Senate on Wednesday defeated a Democratic measure to overrule President Trump’s expansion of non-ObamaCare insurance plans as Democrats seek to highlight health care ahead of the midterm elections. The Democratic measure would have overruled Trump’s expansion of short-term health insurance plans, which do not have to cover people with pre-existing conditions or cover a range of health services like mental health or prescription drugs. It was defeated on an extremely narrow, mostly party line 50-50 vote, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voting with Democrats in favor of overturning the short-term plans. Republicans argue the short-term plans simply provide a...

There's no doubt about it: President Donald J. Trump has breathed new life into the American economy! With record-breaking 4.1% growth in GDP, what anti-Trump critics said was impossible during the 2016 campaign just became reality. Unemployment is low, business is booming, and billions of dollars that were sitting offshore are now re-entering our borders. Why were so many so-called expert commentators in 2016 wrong about President Trump? We were told that Trump's tough Queens, New York style and relentless counter-punching tweets would harm markets on a global scale. Even I had concerns. But as we now see, President...

Six Kentucky community banks that could be competing for business have agreed to work together as charter members of the specialty $150 million Commonwealth Infrastructure Fund to finance public-private partnerships (P3) in Kentucky.In the next few months, CIF is expected to reveal one or more inaugural deals.“We are looking at five to 10 potential projects that should start sometime in 2018. We expect to make loans to two or three projects in 2018 after the underwriting process has been completed,” said John Farris, who manages CIF. “We believe we will lend out all $150 million over three to five years...

Over the last decade, short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, HomeAway, and VRBO have expanded and provided an economic boom to many communities. Yet several localities are pursuing onerous zoning rules and other regulations that would restrict short-term rental activity. For many homeowners, short-term rental provides a critical source of additional income to help them pay their mortgages and to meet other financial obligations. States can protect their residents from overzealous, local bureaucrats with state pre-emption. Short-term rental helps local communities by growing the number of tourists that visit the area. A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic...

Merriam-Webster has just announced its “word of the year” for 2017. Drum roll, please…it’s feminism! The word peaked as an online search after various events occurred this past year, beginning with the Women’s March in January, then again when the film “Wonder Woman” was released, and now it has spiked yet again as a result of the #MeToo movement, which Time magazine has recognized as its “Person of the Year.” The word feminism was simply “in the air” this year, notes Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large. Except it kind of wasn’t. For instance, nobody marched in the Feminist March...

Over in one corner sat Alice, a strong-minded 27-year-old who always said what she thought, regardless of how much it might hurt someone else. In the other corner was Sarah, a thirtysomething high-flier who would stand up for herself momentarily - then burst into tears and run for the ladies. Their simmering fight lasted hours, egged on by spectators taking sides and fuelling the anger. Sometimes other girls would join in, either heckling aggressively or huddling defensively in the toilets. It might sound like a scene from a tawdry reality show such as Big Brother, but the truth is a...

When pollsters survey Americans' views about specific companies, cable television providers -- both large conglomerates and smaller regional players -- compose the absolute dregs of the results. Comcast, in particular, has frequently been dubbed America's "most hated company" from the results of these surveys.It's not so hard to understand why this is: lack of competition. Thanks to government deals, most people have one or maybe two options for cable TV and Internet. From a purely profit-driven perspective, there's not a lot of incentive to spend money ensuring the customer experience is fantastic. We’re all familiar with the “4-hour service window”...

The economic argument for free international trade is basically that people produce in order to consume, not the other way around, so the economic system should be geared to the benefit of the consumer, not the producer. In the economic sense, producers include workers and owners of capital or land, who often join in associations called "firms." There are more consumers than producers, as everybody is a consumer but not everybody is a producer; some live off the production of parents, donors, or taxpayers. So there are more consumers than producers; but this is not the important point. Free Trade...

In 2007, David Hansen was a recent college graduate with an architect's degree trying to make some money. He and his business partner, who was a licensed architect in Washington, started an architectural firm there. At the time, the economy was still sluggish and there was not a lot of construction. So, to earn some extra cash and to get the business going, they agreed to do marketing work for a property development company in Oregon. Cognizant that they weren't licensed architects in Oregon, they limited their work to creating drawings of potential developments for the sole purpose of attracting...

“Microsoft this week replaced a toy gun emoji with a real revolver in an apparent need to conform to universal emoji standards.,” Nick Statt reports for The Verge. “The change, which arrived with the company’s Windows 10 Anniversary Update on Tuesday, is part of a larger emoji redesign project Microsoft embarked on months ago to refresh its library with new designs,” Statt reports. “‘It’s unclear why Microsoft felt the need to replace its old toy gun, which resembled a sci-fi space blaster, with a real firearm. It does, however, put the company at philosophical odds with Apple.”“Both companies are part...

I have always been a pistol shooter. Even the first time I was out on the range, I loved everything about shooting, from the smell of the gunpowder to the sound the steel makes when it is hit by a bullet. I think that’s what got me hooked on competitive shooting. I was 9 years old when I attended and watched my first Glock Sport Shooting Foundation (GSSF) match in Columbia, S.C., and my whole family attended to see what it was all about. MY FIRST USPSA MATCH was the North Carolina Sectional in 2012. I had never even been...

DEBRECEN, Hungary (AP) -- Digging their way to the top, 18 two-man teams of Hungarian gravediggers displayed their skills Friday for a place in a regional championship to be held in Slovakia later this year. Participants in the contest held in plot 37A of the public cemetery of the eastern Hungarian city of Debrecen were being judged on their speed but also getting points for style - the look of the finished grave mounds.

A recent competition hosted in part by the U.S. Army and designed to test core tank crew skills saw European crews take the top honors, while crews from the U.S. Army failed to place. The results raise the question of whether the Army—after more than a decade of focusing on guerrilla warfare—has devoted adequate training to address "big war" skills. Held from May 10 to 12 and jointly hosted by the U.S. Army and the German Bundeswehr at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany, the the Strong Europe Tank Challenge included challengers from six NATO countries: Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland,...

Six NATO countries squared off last week in the Strong Europe Tank Challenge, a two-day competition that pitted some of the alliance’s best tank crews against each another in a series of events centered on armored warfare. The challeng was the first of its kind there since 1991. The challenge featured seven tank platoons in total. Denmark, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Poland all competed with one platoon, while the United States sent two. Each platoon included four tanks manned by four men. Germany took the gold in its Leopard 2A6 tanks, followed by Denmark and Poland in second place and...

vAmazon giveth, and Amazon taketh. The giant internet retailer said on April 27 that it will create 2,000 full-time jobs by opening two more fulfillment centers in New Jersey. One will be a 600,000-square-foot facility in Florence, Burlington County, generating 500 new jobs. The other will be an 800,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Carteret, Middlesex County, that will generate about 1,500 jobs. Together, the two facilities will bring Amazon's total physical footprint in the Garden State to 2.5 million square feet of space, if you count three existing centers. The irony is that Amazon made the announcement the day after a...

European Competition Commissioner Margarethe Vestager addresses a news conferenceBrussels, Belgium, January 11, 2016. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir - The European competition commission is gearing up to charge Google with giving unfair prominence to its own apps like search and maps in supplementary software licensing deals it strikes with mobile phone makers running its Android operating system, four sources familiar with the process said on Monday. Google generated an estimated $11 billion (9.73 billion euros) last year from sales of ads running on Android phones featuring Google apps. Android has become the dominant software in recent years, running most of the world's smartphones....

On Friday, President Barack Obama announced he would sign an Executive Order directing every relevant agency of the Federal government to take steps in identifying bottlenecks to competition and to create new ways to increase competition in the economy. The Executive Order puts agencies on a fast-track path to, within 60 days, identify the steps they’ll take. “Competition is good for consumers,” Obama told Yahoo Finance in an interview at the White House on Thursday. “And ultimately it's good for business. That's the way the free market works. The more competition we have, the more products, services, innovation takes place.”...

Apple may be celebrating the release of the iPhone SE and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, but the company likely isn’t nearly as thrilled with recent allegations made by France’s competition, consumer, and fraud agency, la Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation, et de la Répression des Fraudes (DGCCRF), reports BFM TV. The DGCCRF filed a lawsuit against Apple through the Commercial Court of Paris. According to the suit, Apple’s contracts with carriers were set up to benefit the Cupertino-based company in ways that violated France’s competition laws. More specifically, there were 10 clauses in the contracts that the agency objected...

AMERICA used to be the land of opportunity and optimism. Now opportunity is seen as the preserve of the elite: two-thirds of Americans believe the economy is rigged in favour of vested interests. And optimism has turned to anger. Voters’ fury fuels the insurgencies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and weakens insiders like Hillary Clinton. The campaigns have found plenty of things to blame, from free-trade deals to the recklessness of Wall Street. But one problem with American capitalism has been overlooked: a corrosive lack of competition. -snip- The second step is to make life easier for startups and...

[This is from a famous scifi writer. He argues that rather than being scared of the danger of artificial intelligence in the future and trying to have government regulate it, more competition, not restricting competition, is best!] Official Statement to the TNC Convention 02016 by David BrinIt is, of course, wise and beneficial to peer ahead for potential dangers and problems — one of the central tasks of high-end science fiction. Alas, detecting that a danger lurks is easier than prescribing solutions that can prevent it. Take the plausibility of malignant AI, remarked-upon recently by luminaries ranging from Stephen Hawking...