A deal that will blow up

The Hill: Congressional Republicans are talking to health insurers about ways to prevent a collapse of the insurance market once they pass an ObamaCare repeal bill.
Republicans are planning to pass repeal legislation as soon as January, but plan to delay it from taking effect for a few years to avoid immediate disruption in people’s coverage. The delay would also buy them time to come up with a replacement.
But industry officials and healthcare experts are warning that insurers might bail out of the system altogether once a repeal bill passes, particularly since many of them have been losing millions of dollars on ObamaCare plans.
An exodus of insurers could dramatically limit the coverage options for the roughly 10 million people enrolled in the system, potentially creating a backlash.
Recognizing the problem, Republican congressional staffers are in talks with insurers about policies they could implement to help improve their financial situation in that interim period and prevent a breakdown in the market, according to three Republican lobbyists.

The insurance companies will want full recovery, they already are losing.  It is ripe for a blow up in the next two years if we get an unemployment rise. Republicans will have contracted to insure losses during a recession, thus making the recession inevitable.  we get another force driving the deficit way up.

Those pesky federales

Last week we reported, that in an unprecedented attempt to breach the personal privacy of users of the largest bitcoin exchange in the US, Coinbase, the IRS filed papers seeking a judicial order to serve a so-called “John Doe” summons on the San Francisco-based Bitcoin platform.

In the iron clad model, Coinbase would not have our identities,. just the identities of the card.  The card has power of attorney for some set of auto trade patterns. If the government wants something, it has to appear as a trade opportunity.
If government tries to short cut the security issue, they lose all control.
Better to keep the technology out out of legal and tax issues. If the government agent cannot find the person they taxed, then why they tax the person?

These folks are part of the core North American economy

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's intervention to stop jobs at a plant in Indiana going to Mexico is typical of what happens in countries that Americans call "banana" republics, a senior Mexican state official said on Thursday.
Carrier, a unit of United Technologies Corp <UTX.N>, said on Thursday that state officials had pledged $7 million in tax breaks to encourage the firm to keep around 1,100 jobs in Indianapolis after Trump stepped in to protect U.S. workers.
A heating and air-conditioning company, Carrier said in February it would cut some 2,100 jobs in closing two Indiana plants and move production near to the city of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon, a state bordering Texas in northern Mexico.
On the campaign trail, Trump criticized Carrier and other U.S. companies investing in Mexico as unpatriotic and threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican-made goods as part of his pledge to put "America first."

We can see the problem right away.
These jobs in Mexico meant pats shipments from Texas, and customer shipments to California.  Mix all the bidurectional remittances, and the Swamp just struck a blow to the North American economy.

The secretaries Trump hired need more than typing skills, dump the Ned Meyerson guy, at least.  What Trump is attempting is a jump start, a fix. The entire economy will nudge those Treasury rates up and up until the secretaries learn better typing skills.

A crypto iron lock, we hope

The private key in ur smart card, it is never revealed.  But a sufficient part of it can be encrypted with a public key, and send to the 'fab bot', which should have another copy of the private key. The fab bot is uuder guard. The fab bot seems a necessity to me, sort of the top cop.

Otherwise, some part of your key, encrypted with the public key, becomes officially gold after verification.  The card identity, likely re-encrypted in transport, can be stored, safely, in any other card.. The card identity does not reveal the card private key. The system, being closed, allows local storage of smart card IDs for local customers, the clerk can check them off with a local data base.

Discovering a key via reverse engineering is an industrial night mare, similar or worse than counterfeiting money.  Card can have built in limits, kind of a loose denomination which allows security to be rationed properly.

The system, then works once the bio-metric is satisfied, and at that point, the card has a unique, unknown private key it can  use in a variety of operations with the user or other cards.  It can use that key in whole or part for shared locks with end points.  The key has a time limit, imprinted as part of the card id, and decodeable.  The fab bot knows the timeouts, it maintains the card flow.

Simple, the hardware vendor, or CardLogix, should just declare it so.  Once we know we have a hardware standard, verifiable, then the microprocessor selected will be the favorite among the hardware wallet vendors. I see a robust industry here.

What about retro fitting all the stores?

Buy a hardware wallet. It uses the wireless, and all the encryption is standard.  The minimum purchase for a complete smart card secure terminal is the price of a smart card, and I think these are worth $150, easily, if they meet all the standard.   But the chip vendor leads the way as the embedded key system makes comm mostly compatible right off the bat, but the common key management immediately implies a common packet layer.

Why are interest rates low

It takes a large number of transactions to generate one surplus transaction. A lotta ducks have to be in a row.

Why so many ducks? We aggregate too much, its a long path across the dollar economy, that is a lotta transactions to step through before we get our goodie. Ask the millennials.

How many? One over rate?
Or a huge chunk of entitlements to squeeze through the corridor.

Producers would say, yes, makes sense it corresponds to yield, as in surplus generated from a process.
Add cause and effect and then everyone goes nuts.

We just got rates hiked, the one year government bill is .77.  For some reason, the market thinks congress can get more yield (or less losses), and thus pay higher rates as supplied by wealthier taxpayers. But,  the ten year still has resistance at 2.5, that would be G pushing back, saying, our yield ain't that high.  There are still a whole lot of expected payments, across many  parts of G , state, federal and local, there is no surplus until those bills are paid.  Hence, it is impossible to make the interest payments on another bulge, we will hut down.

What does Agustin know that we don't?

Mexico City (AFP) - Mexico's central bank chief Agustin Carstens resigned Thursday, officials said, sending the peso on its latest plunge since Donald Trump won the US presidential election last month.
Carstens, who had compared Trump with a maximum Category Five hurricane because of his tough stance toward Mexico, will step down on July 1 next year, the Banco de Mexico said in a statement.
He is leaving to take up the post of general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, the Switzerland-based bank for central banks.
Analysts describe Carstens as a steady and experienced hand at the tiller amid a period of volatility for Latin America's second-largest economy.
A former deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, he became central bank chief in 2010 after serving as finance minister from 2006 to 2009.
The peso fell 1.2 percent Thursday after the news, to 21.05 to the dollar.

Likely a big Pemex scandal coming up.  Mexican politicians usually engage in direct fraud. 
Trump is not any big deal, in spite of some hysteria down there.  Mexico is mostly effected by some major theft, every president, sort of like us.  Something inside Mexico is forcing him out, maybe just the fear of getting murdered.

California's plan for worldwide free healthcare, up in smoke

Fiscal Times: Trump settled that question decisively this week. He appointed Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), a medical doctor and staunch opponent of Obamacare, as the new Secretary of Health and Human Services. As a member and former chair of the Republican Study Committee and the Congressional Health Care Caucus, few Republicans on the front lines have as much insight into the ways in which the Obamacare can and should be dismantled. 

I suppose we could do it alone, but that would require Nancy's little brown people to pay taxes. 

The Chronicle gets it right

SF Chronicle: “A state appeals court in San Francisco ruled in a Marin County case in August that the new laws could be applied to current employees — a potentially major setback for the workers and their unions, and a victory for local governments

Analysts havr failed to understand the issue.  Are local government allowed to make any law that restructures employment contracts with its workers?   If the mayor of Fresno offers me a two year contract, then under current law,that contract automatically becomes an infinitely renewable contract, what is on the printed page is immaterial, there is no time limit in public sector employment contracts.

This is very basic law.  Cities are either under dictatorial control of the unions or they are not.  Federal law is gone, states rights, Obama and Sotomayor removed any federal legal basis.

So, on what basis can the California courts rule? Only  one, Franciscan anarchy.  the court is empowered with divine law,  Whatever they rule, just the fact they ruled at all, is a declaration of freedom to nullify anywhere and everywhere in California/  Jerry Brown created permanent anarchy when he signed the Dills Act; he effectively turned California unions into dictatorial divinities, freeing us all from then law.

Put in other words

The Dills Act specifies that the Court must rule in favor of their own personal pension,it is a direct order by the Dills Act, the law is very specific.

Nancy's little brown people don't like taxes

15% of California construction workers are black market.  I say fine, California has no real law, it is all Sotomayor make shit up. So nullification is a fundamental right.

Reason: California's Governor Jerry Brown signed a law last week threatening punishment for handymen who advertise their services for jobs larger than $500, and giving state enforcers free access to job sites to check on contractors' licenses. As Steven Greenhut noted for Reason, a big push for the law, which prescribes criminal time for unlicensed work that previously drew administrative penalties, came from the state's contracting industry. In a state that continuously ranks toward the bottom of assessments of economic (and social) freedom, contractors seem dead-set on penalizing competitors who flee into the shadow economy to escape burdensome taxes and regulations. That's a lot of competitors, considering that one in six of the state's construction workers labors "informally."

Wilbur Ross,is severely mistaken

Trump's Commerce pick: 

NAFTA likely starting point on Day 1

I have no idea what this guy thinks.  He is a hedge fund manager.  But this act of harassing the economy of the SouthWest is a disaster for Trump and a disaster for the Rust Belt.  We dis-connect you, Mr. Ross, you have it backwards.  Once the volatility costs are driven up, we have the hedge, we just nullify you and Trump.

And the Ned Meyers guy they picked for Treasury, these folks are severe socialists, all of their money made by hedging government price fixes.  These guys are from the economy of the 50s, way out of tune,. they think it is normal for government to price fix in favor of business.