Science, Technology & Health: June 2012 Archives
The Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, and it strikes me as extremely unlikely to be repealed by Congress. Even if Romney wins the election the Democrats in the Senate will filibuster any attempts at repeal.
It's no surprise that the stock prices for the major health insurance companies are shooting up now that they're guaranteed a bunch of new customers by law.
I think the ruling is likely to be very bad from an employment standpoint, and it's going to be bad for Obama politically.
As a healthcare consumer with (knock on wood) excellent insurance it's hard to see how I and my family won't be hurt by the ruling.
From an analysis standpoint: The four dissenting justices all co-authored a single opinion (as opposed to "joining" an opinion), which is very unusual for a dissent. It seems that the popular theory now is that the dissenting opinion was expected to be in the majority, but that Roberts didn't want to overturn Obamacare with a party-line 5-4 vote because he was concerned about what such a ruling would do to the Supreme Court politically and in the public's eye. So when the conservatives failed to attract even a single liberal justice Roberts decided to flip and write the majority opinion himself (which is his right as the Chief Justice). He wrote it pretty narrowly and upheld the individual mandate as a tax, getting the majority to specifically reject the argument that the mandate was allowable under the Commerce Clause. That alone is very politically significant: none of the supporters of Obamacare wanted to call the individual mandate penalties a "tax", because that makes Obamacare the largest tax increase in American history.
I've long wished that Google Maps would allow you to enter a list of destinations and then optimize a route for you to visit all of them. Only recently did I realize the obvious reason that Google doesn't include this functionality!
Such route/destination optimization is basically a (slight) variant of the travelling salesman problem (TSP), which is NP-hard. This means that every NP-complete problem could be solved in polynomial time if one had access to a TSP oracle.
If Google Maps would solve TSP for you, it wouldn't exactly be an oracle but it would likely be a lot faster than the computer you've got at your desk. People would quickly hack Google Maps' web interface to use Google's vast server farms to solve NP-complete problems. Even a small number of complex TSP problems could bring Google's servers to a crawl and disrupt service for millions of other users.
Hence, Google Maps won't optimize the order that you visit your destinations.
(Note: even if Google limited the number of destinations that could be optimized or put other trivial restrictions on how you could use the algorithm, users could bypass these restrictions by chaining calls in various ways.)
