Happy Birthday to Amanda Pays, 54.
Just a little good stuff:
1. Jeremy Pressman on the anniversary of war in the Middle East.
2. Excellent Josh Barro post about the Affordable Care Act.
3. And Americans talk funny; Walter Hickey has maps from Joshua Katz.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
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Barro makes interesting points, but I have to note that any insurance scheme, public or private, involves transfers from the healthy to the sick, etc. Otherwise, they wouldn't work.
ReplyDeleteHealth insurance is not about a transfer from the healthy to the sick. It's a contract where people who don't know whether future medical expenses will surpass their abilities to pay, agree to pay for a policy that they may never need. One of the things that makes Opapacare into a transfer from the young to the old is that it doesn't allow young people and companies to contract at the rates that actuaries recommend. It makes it illegal for companies to charge the elderly more than three times (I think) what the young are charged, even though the young should probably be charged about 1/6 what the elderly are for equivalent plans.
Delete"It's a contract where people who don't know whether future medical expenses will surpass their abilities to pay, agree to pay for a policy that they may never need."
DeleteYes, and the money to pay for those expenses comes from the people who turned out never to need the policy.
The Barrow piece makes clear that "transfers" refer to gov redistribution. Opapacare specifically targets the equilibrium that the semi-free-market for medical insurance has reached, then institutes price controls (something that most progs seem to love) at gunpoint.
DeleteIn this context, "transfer" does not mean "movement of money from A to B." Barrow seems pretty clear about the distinction.
In New England a sub is called a grinder.
ReplyDeleteBut I have to say there are very small countries in Europe where the regional linguistic differences are much greater than they are here. Perhaps it's because we're the result of fairly recent settlement and considerable internal migration.
New England expatriate here: I'll tend to say "Sub" most of the time. I did work at a place called "Granite City Grinders" for a summer, but sub seems to be probably a bit more common in my experience (might be mostly recent). I've also heard Grinder here in Southern Ohio. Likewise, down in Maine, we'll sometimes call them "Italians," but then those don't have lettuce or mayo so they might not count.
DeleteItalians? That's a new one for me.
DeleteI remember "grinder" from my 6 years in Western Mass. I think "sub" got used, too.
DeleteThe "Maine Italian" is it's own little regional variant. Meat and cheese on a non-squishy, soft long roll, tomato, onion, green pepper, and oil. No lettuce, no mayo. Olives and pickles are fairly common. Common meats are ham and salami, but turkey, roast beef, or fancier Italian cold cuts (capicola, prosciutto) aren't uncommon. Cheese is typically either white American or Provolone. Veggie Italians are common, but you wouldn't however get a meatball Italian or chicken parm Italian. That'd be a meatball sub or meatball grinder.
DeleteThe two largest chain-like places to buy them are Amato's (which claims to have invented the style and name) and Sam's, but smaller local pizza places tend to sell "Ham Italians, 3 for $10" or such.
3 is excellent. Makes me think about various Cohen Bros movies.
ReplyDeleteThere are places where Mary, merry, and marry aren't different?
ReplyDeleteThe one map is deeply flawed by the lack of a "yinz" option.
ReplyDelete@ Anonymous -
ReplyDeleteYes there's even a Merger named after such accents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/#Mary.E2.80.93marry.E2.80.93merry_merger
I'd like to see Language Log get to work on some of the other claims in that link though.
The eye-dialect is also weird: '[aː] as in "father" ' - well that's really begging the question. In most places the first vowel of 'father' is not pronounced [aː]... that's kind of why IPA is needed in the first place. If you're going to use eye-dialect, in an article about regional accents, at least put 'like "father" is pronounced in Australia' or whatever.
And what American uses [ɒ] in 'saw'? Even in England that vowel is barely used anymore, and I'm not sure any US dialects have it.
The writer of that article is a mathematics graduate, and seems to be using IPA without really understanding what the symbols mean.