The House of Representatives just passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent, year around. The Washington Post responded with an article saying, “We’ve tried permanent daylight saving time before. It didn’t go well.” That was in the 1970s and also in the 1940s. People supposedly hated it. There is an enormous amount of support in Congress for stopping the clock switch twice a year. The problem is nobody can agree on whether to keep standard time or daylight saving time.
Thursday Links – 16 July 2026
- “21st-century Democrats have been extraordinarily unwilling to raise taxes on anyone other than the super rich.”
- Poorer countries tend to have more occupational licensing. Denmark, Sweden and France have relatively little.
- A large body of research finds that biofuels made with food crops (e.g., corn and soy beans) are just as bad, and perhaps even worse, for the climate than conventional fossil fuels.
- “We now have just under one in three working age men who have left the labor force, mainly due to disability, the rates of which have skyrocketed by an additional seven million people since 2021.”
- Millionaires are leaving New York.
Wednesday Links – 15 July 2026
- The downside of some “health foods.”
- What markets were like 4,000 years ago.
- The cost of an ambulance ride.
- Obamacare fraud cut in half this year.
- “Claude connects CarePath directly to underlying claims and care systems, turning fragmented health data into recommended next steps for care teams.”
- Provider taxes generate roughly $37 billion annually for states — about 18% of the nonfederal share of Medicaid spending nationwide.
More Bad News from Britain’s NHS
- The UK’s maternal mortality rates are 20% higher than in 2010, despite a 2015 government target to halve maternal, stillborn and neonatal death rates by 2025.
- There are stark inequalities in outcomes, with Black women having a risk of maternal death nearly three times higher than that of White women, and women from minority backgrounds being less likely to receive certain medical treatments.
Source: “UK Maternity Care Is a Disaster — and Getting Worse,” Bloomberg