Maybe someday

By way of Come and Make It, I have been reading about micarta, which is paper or fabric laminated in a resin. It is often used for knife handles.

Those links above mention fiberglass resin; these guys used a much more expensive epoxy, and their micarta did quite well under stress testing.

How the Democrats will lose in 2020

Or at least, how they richly deserve to lose:  through the continuing slow-motion failure of the Affordable Care Act.  Democrats keep talking about health care and how it needs to be reformed, hoping that no one will remember that they were the ones who shoved that 1000+ page law through in 2009.  People who especially are being screwed by it:  young adults (subsidizing costs of older adults), parents of younger adults (having children staying on their plans until age 26), people getting health insurance through their employers (being ineligible for subsidies), single-income families (paying way more than Obama’s “affordable” 9.5% of income), and lower-income people nearing retirement age (paying far more than they can afford).

Out of curiosity, I looked into health insurance options in the high-unemployment coronavirus economy.  COBRA still exists, and now sucks worse than ever, because the ACA requirements generally raised premiums.  Thanks to Trump, there are now short-term plans available, but they may not count as having had “minimum essential coverage” when you try to get on a better plan later. Christian cost-sharing plans have not yet developed adequate fraud protections, I believe—without any evidence, just based on intuition. Going on Medicaid leaves the possibility open that the program could seek to recover the money it spent on you from your estate after you die, although at present they usually don’t bother to.

That leaves buying insurance yourself, either on or off the exchanges, or self-insuring.  My question was how a change in income would be reflected in a change in premium subsidy, for an exchange plan. It appears from this article that most of the time, an income change earns you a 60-day Special Enrollment Period, with subsidy re-calculation, aside from perhaps being required to report changes in income anyway. But with exceptions and changing rules and state-to-state variations, it just looks like a giant headache...one that could continue into next year with tax return preparation for tax year 2020, since the amounts of subsidies received versus subsidies qualified for have to be reconciled and squared up.

I’m tempted to think that the options presented there would be more understandable if they were presented in flowchart form, but there are too many unknowns. As I have said before, this system was designed to fail. It is simply too complex.

One minor point from near the end of the piece:  changing insurance plans will usually reset your out-of-pocket costs counter to zero. That’s a cost to factor in.

A surprise, yet not entirely a surprise

Christian History magazine* has a new issue out on the role of the Church in the development of science and technology.  One of the articles interviews several scientists on how their faith and research connect...and one of them is physicist and 1997 Nobel Prize winner William Phillips!

He was the keynote speaker at a physics conference that I went to as a graduate student.  Apparently, once you have won a Nobel Prize in physics, you can have conversations like the following:

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:  We would like you to speak at our conference.

PHILLIPS:  Okay, I'd be happy to...but I'm going to need some liquid nitrogen.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:  No problem, how much do you want?

Phillips spent most of his speech (in front of an audience of hundreds of physicists) playing with liquid nitrogen and having a great time.  The joy he showed then makes it less of a surprise for me to see him interviewed in Christian History now.

-------------------------------------
*Christian History has subscriptions, but financially it runs on the basis of donations:  they print and mail out the next issue when they have the money to do so.  They also sell back issues and reprints, which can be helpful for research, as each issue is centered on a historical person or topic.

Pondering

Remembering all the sewing machine needles that have broken while in use, right in front of my face, I am thinking that I should be wearing better eye protection while I’m running it.

Usually a needle will break into two pieces:  one end still held in the clamp, and the other still held by the thread running through the eye, but there have been times when pieces went flying.

I made something

I’m not the first woman to have felt a lower level of creative energy during gestation. I am starting to remember now some of the things that I wanted to make.

One of those things was a toddler dress, using fabric from an old skirt that was among the fabrics that my mother-in-law gave us.

I had a little time, and sat down to figure it out. I decided to use the waistband of the skirt as the neckline, and keep the lower edge with its hem the same. That left the sides and armholes, which I marked with chalk and then sewed, along with joining the necklines at each shoulder.

To finish it, I added a long piece of bias tape around the front waist, leaving the ends loose to be tied at the back. There was a setback at this point, as I was distracted by people running in and out, and caught some of the back of the dress in the seam I was sewing. It took a minute to pick out those stitches and get going again.

The finished dress is loosely draped, and very similar to a “pillowcase dress”, which is traditionally made from a pillowcase.

Joel Rosenberg and the MPD

This was almost a decade ago:  the story of his arrest, and the sad ending before he got his day in court. 

A signal for the sickroom

Sickroom isn’t quite the right word for the bedroom where the newest Baby of Unusual Size and I have been hanging out since his home birth last week. It is at the far end of the house, and can go without attention from the rest of the family for hours at a time...which is sometimes too long.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband looked into why the doorbell, an older wireless model with a button and a chime that communicate by radio, wasn’t working. We had a similar one, new in the box, that had been handed down to us at some point. I’m not sure exactly what he ended up doing, something like replacing the original button with the new one we had, I think. They can work on the same frequency.

Later on, I got the idea of taking one of the buttons and using it to ring the doorbell and summon assistance when needed. He must have given me the only one that worked. Anyway, it works fine from the bedroom, and it has been very helpful more than once.

In other topics, I am finding this pantry/craft space inspiring; it has been a while since I have been able to have a little crafting space of my own.

Kevin Roche looks at Minnesota coronavirus trends. The case numbers have remained fairly flat to slightly declining. The number of long-term care facilities with cases is over 200 now, I read somewhere last week, out of something like 1700 total in the state. While the state has been working to contain this epidemic-within-a-pandemic, I still see a high potential for these facilities to be infected. It will just be spread out over several years, and considering the turnover of residents that can happen over such a time period, it is likely that places that had been cleared before will see fresh outbreaks later on.

So I still expect to see cumulative Minnesota deaths run up into five digits, eventually. They are at about 1300 now. At the same time, I think it is time for Governor Walz to stop twiddling the dials. There is an effort being made now to recall him, but apparently the law requires trying him in the state Supreme Court, and only if that is successful can there be a special election held to try to vote him out.