And if free money were a more common thing, why, then you’d hear it said a whole lot more, but it ain’t (because, you know, TANSTAAFL and if-it-looks-too-good-to-be-true and such) so you don’t.

But free money does in fact exist here and there.

The classic case of free money in our modern world is the 401k match that many employers provide to their employees. With a 401k match, the employer agrees that, to the extent a given employee contributes part of his or her compensation to a 401k plan, then the employer will throw in some new money on top, no strings attached (well . . . mostly no strings attached).

A typical Silicon Valley 401k match goes like this: …more ►

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Batkid and Stephanie Sautter: A Tale of Two Different Pre-Existing Conditions

Tuesday, November 19, 2013 at 5pm
By John Friedman

Batkid is in the news. Big time.

Miles Scott, aka Batkid, is a 5-year-old Northern Californian with leukemia. Last week, via the goodworks of the Make-a-Wish Foundation and apparently very much to his surprise, Miles got to live out his most heart-felt dream of being Batman, and then, once be-caped, to foil crime, to put the Joker and the Riddler in the hoosgow, etc.

The media lapped it up, and so did we all, for obvious reasons:

Information about Miles’s health and medical care over the years is sparse. Pretty much all we know from the news accounts I’ve been able to find is that Miles was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 18 months old, that he is now 5 and in remission, and that he just finished a course of treatment for his disease.

We can guess, though, that Miles and his family were part of a group health insurance plan, which would mean that, as a result of one or both of his parents being employed by a company that provides medical insurance to some or all of its employees, Miles would have had insurance to cover his medical problems.

That guess seems about right because, in the past, present and future — but only until the ball drops at the end of 12/31/2013 and Obamacare simultaneously fully blossoms — Miles, had he not been covered by a group medical insurance plan, might well have not lived to see his recent crime-fighting victories.

And I mean that quite literally: his life might well have ended years ago.

* * *

There are lots of ways to slice and dice the medical insurance marketplace. One great way to do the divvy is to put employer-provided insurance policies on one side and all other policies on the other. The former is often called the “group” market and the latter is often called the “individual” market.

Those two markets are about as different from one another as night is from day.

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A Vote-Count Scale Tale: In the Virginia Attorney General Vote, How Small is Small, and Should Tied Votes be Do-Overs?

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 at 12pm
By John Friedman

The initial official vote tally for Virginia’s Attorney General race is in, and here it is:


	Candidate		Votes
	Obenshain		1,103,613
	Herring		1,103,777
	Write-In		4,926
	Total		2,212,316

The difference between the two candidates is 164 votes. Out of the total votes cast, that amounts to a difference of .0074130%.

That percentage is hard to grasp, isn’t it? So how about we state this as parts per million? In those terms, the difference is 74 parts per million. And that makes sense, right? Because, out of something a bit larger than 10% more than two times a million votes, the difference is something a bit larger than 10% more than two times 74.

We can also think of this in terms of cities. The population of Houston, for instance, is pretty close to the number of votes cast; its population, according to the 2010 census, was 2,100,263 — a smidgen less than the votes cast (if a “smidgen” can be 112,053).

Imagine, then, that the entire population of Houston casts a vote, and manages to split itself right down the middle except for the votes of 82 people. That’s what happened in Virginia.

What’s that you say? Why 82? Why not 164?

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The 20th Anniversary of the Mosaic Browser and the Beginning of the Mass Commercialization of the Internet: How It Has Affected All of Our Financial Lives

Monday, November 11, 2013 at 5pm
By John Friedman

It was twenty years ago today that Sgt. Pep . . . per . . . um . . . Marc Andreesen taught the Internet to play.

That’s right: on 11/11/1993, Mosaic 1.0 was set free from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, located within the beautiful confines of the University of Illinois, located within that twin-town that some people call Chambana, located mid-state’ish within Illinois (please, do not pronounce the S at all, let alone like a Z, and do have it rhyme with boy and coy and goy and joy), thereby putting one of its creators, Marc Andreesen, on the map bigtime (a perch upon which he still, deservedly so I think, sits to this day).

And when I say “set free” I mean it, because Mosaic was free, as in it’s-yours-and-you-don’t-even-have-to-pay-for-it.

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The Twitter IPO: Are We Partying Like It’s 1999?

Thursday, November 7, 2013 at 2pm
By John Friedman

Today, at roughly 9:45 a.m., I’m walking in Ess Eff Sea Eh on 2nd Street at Mission, heading towards Market, and my cool-car detector fires off, as I see a red Ferrari convertible going through the intersection, headed towards 1st Street.

This is the car:

That’s it, right down to the color of the interior (though that is not at all what the corner of Mission and 2nd Street looks like!).

Since it’s a convertible, and since the top is down, I can totally see the driver well and I can totally see what he’s doing and what he’s not doing. He’s a relatively young fellow — 35 at most I’d say, and these days that’s what I call “young” — and as he drives by, the dozens of us waiting for the light to change cannot help but see that he is looking down at his iPhone the whole time. The whole friggin’ time as he goes through the intersection and continues down towards the Bay, that’s what he’s doing: looking down, dum de dum de dum, not a present thought to the world in which he is physically present.

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