Author Archives: AlyciaHeck

This Fake App Just Summed Up Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley

by AlyciaHeck Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

In Silicon Valley, a group of mostly white, mostly male twentysomethings have built a multibillion-dollar empire of sharing apps: shared housing (AirBnB), shared cars (Uber), shared dog-sitting (DogVacay)…you get the idea. But the so-called “sharing economy” doesn’t actually share equally with everyone. One fake app wants to change that.

WellDeserved is an app that helps you “monetize” your privilege—be it racial, gender-based, or socioeconomic—by sharing it (temporarily, of course) with other people. The fictional app was the winning entry at last month’s Comedy Hack Day in San Francisco, where creative agency Cultivated Wit challenged contestants to come up with a comedic app idea and pitch it to judges, all in 48 hours.

The app’s promo video will make you laugh and cry: A Google employee sells his free Google lunch to a guest for $10, a dude charges a black man $5 to hail a cab on his behalf, and another guy walks a woman home so she won’t get catcalled, asking himself, “Why don’t I walk with them, spare them the harassment, and charge ’em like five bucks?”

The creators’ (fake) plan for making the (fake) app work is summed up perfectly: “Our business plan is that VCs will just give us money. Because this is San Francisco, and we have an idea.”

This post has been updated.

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This Fake App Just Summed Up Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley

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Yuck Factor Aside, Urine Has Surprising Uses

by AlyciaHeck Posted on July 14, 2014

Source – 

Yuck Factor Aside, Urine Has Surprising Uses

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Paul Ryan Goes Small on Medicare Reform

by AlyciaHeck Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you have a good memory, you may recall that a couple of years ago I had an unexpectedly positive reaction to Paul Ryan’s latest Medicare reform plan. His 2013 edition was still based on premium support (i.e., vouchers), but he’d made some changes. Instead of simply capping the vouchers at the rate of overall inflation, which wouldn’t come close to keeping up with medical costs, Ryan proposed that insurers would bid for Medicare business. Vouchers would be set at the cost of the second-lowest bid, and seniors could use their vouchers to buy into traditional Medicare if they preferred.

Not bad. In fact, it was basically Obamacare with a public option. But there were still problems. Ryan kept his inflation-based cap, which suggested he didn’t really believe in the power of competition after all, and seniors would still end up paying more under his plan than they do now.

But over at TPM, Sahil Kapur points out something I missed: Ryan’s 2014 Medicare plan is different still. The voucher is now based on the average bid, not the second-lowest bid, and the inflation cap is gone. The market will either produce savings or it won’t.

That’s good news. But it also goes to show the difficulty of truly reforming Medicare, especially if you don’t tackle the broader problems of health care costs at the same time. The CBO has analyzed the effect of Ryan’s 2014 changes, and they conclude that by 2020 the Ryan plan would save a grand total of $15 billion per year. That’s 2 percent of net Medicare spending.

Now, this is nothing to sneeze at. Savings are savings. However, like the cost containment proposals that are part of Obamacare, this represents a highly speculative estimate. We might get the 2 percent, we might get nothing.

The bottom line is this: Without root-and-branch changes to our health care system, you’re simply not going to get big cost savings. If you make radical changes, as Ryan originally tried to do, it comes out of the pockets of seniors. If you keep seniors whole, you’re going to get small savings at best. Ryan’s 2014 plan might be a good one, but is it worth the experiment for such a small and questionable payback? Hard to say.

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Paul Ryan Goes Small on Medicare Reform

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Banks Won’t Do Business With Legal Marijuana Sellers. Enter PotCoin.

by AlyciaHeck Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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In October 2012, four assailants allegedly kidnapped a California pot dispensary owner and drove him out to the desert, where they believed he was hiding the proceeds of his successful marijuana business. There was no cash to be found, but, in a bid to make the businessman talk, the would-be-robbers burned him with a blow torch and then cut off his penis, driving away with it so that it couldn’t be surgically reattached.

So far 20 states and the District of Columbia have legalized the use of marijuana for medical or recreational purposes, but with the rise of the legal pot business has come a wave of robberies and other crimes targeting pot dispensaries and their owners. The purveyors of legal pot are a major crime magnet, in part because they largely operate on a cash-only basis. And that’s due to the fact that most banks and credit card firms refuse to work with these businesses for fear of being prosecuted under federal law, where the sale of pot remains illegal. Last month, the Obama administration issued new guidelines aimed at making banks feel more at ease in providing services to legal marijuana businesses. But the administration stopped short of promising immunity, so for now most financial firms are steering clear.

That leaves many potrepreneurs to handle large amounts of cash—and fearful for their safety. “Everyone in the industry is having nightmares,” Michael Elliot, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group, recently told NBC. So perhaps it’s fitting then that the idea for PotCoin—a new digital currency, akin to bitcoin, that’s being marketed to legal marijuana businesses—came to “MrJones” in a dream.

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Banks Won’t Do Business With Legal Marijuana Sellers. Enter PotCoin.

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