Category: News

Opinion: Springfield didn’t reject the convention center; it rejected the process

A new process, more money slopped around, and next time it will pass!

Voters reject proposed tourism tax to fund downtown Springfield Expo and Convention Center:

“We respect the decision of our voters and appreciate the time they took to learn about the proposal and make their voices heard. Our next steps will be to take what we have heard and really focus on the priorities of the City Council as reflected by our residents,” said Springfield Mayor Jeff Schrag.

Hopefully more than the last time, one election ago.

I put the over/under on this reappearing on the ballot at 11 months.

Another day, another push to mandate insurance coverage for obscure treatments.

Ah, gentle reader, I feel for the people who need this, for the family whose child’s name is on the law, and for all the sob stories the media, activists, and politicians will dredge up to appeal to our emotions so that we won’t realize that this, and the drive to ever-more mandate ever-more outflows from the insurance companies will create ever-more increases in premiums to pay for the treatments that most people will not and, indeed, cannot use.

Oh, Brian J., you monster! What would you propose? Well, non-profits can gather funds for “increasing awareness” and “engaging with legislators.” Perhaps some of them could help with the treatment payments instead of employing people with humanities degrees, good hearts, and a taste for the finer things in life.

Ultimately, though, health care costs have spiraled for decades because the government has made it happen through legislation and enforcement and businesses have learned how to make the requirements more profitable for themselves.

Here I am, paying $2800 on health insurance (down, actually, since I was dropped from COBRA due to a software bug and went to an unsubsidized marketplace provider). Which is up $24,000 a year from when I paid my whole health insurance bill as a self-employed computer consultant. So, yeah, I am sensitive to the forces which continue to drive this increase year-over-year. Both government mandates and the big insurance company drives for ever-increasing profits and stock price heights.

In Brian J.’s pseudo-libertarian perfect world, health care costs would go down over time with increasing efficiencies and competition in the marketplace. Like you see for unsubsidized procedures like cosmetic surgery and, in the old days, LASIK surgery (they still do it, I guess, but they certainly don’t advertise for it like they used to). More freestanding health care clinics would spring up along with the diagnostic storefronts you can find if you look for them. And maybe I could go to my barber to set a broken limb or get a tooth extracted. I’m only kinda funnin’ here.

But stories like this, and the legislation they trigger, never talk about the tradeoffs. They only talk about the balm for people who are suffering difficulty or suffer a loss.

EUROPE’S WORST NIGHTMARE Terrifying reality of US pulling out of Nato laid bare as Trump’s chilling threat sends security chiefs into blind panic:

The US has the majority of the pact‘s nuclear weapons, tanks, aircraft and troops meaning if Trump was serious about leaving for good then the battle to replace America’s military might would be nigh-on impossible.

The pact’s? The pact’s?

Fascinating.

Gas prices soar past $4 on average for gallon of regular, the highest in US since 2022

Here locally, gas yesterday was $2.97, which is down two cents from the day before and down thirty cents from a recent peak.

But, hey, your reality is formed only by the television news or Internet, by all means panic.

Highest since 2022, when it was that high without a war going on. And “average national” includes gas prices from states with far higher tax burdens and other considerations, so maybe everyone should just leave their houses once in a while (he says, but only superiorly because he’s going to take a break from doom scrolling and do the tour which takes him to locations in Republic and Nixa and a nice country drive with the windows down, maybe, this morning).

CU electrical bills are expected to be higher this summer. Here’s why (paywalled article, so I didn’t actually read it.

The first sentence, the teaser that Gannett thinks will get me to sign up for its little four-page broadsheet “newspaper”‘s online version, says higher fuel costs.

Note the story below though: Higher population. One reason.

Another reason: Industrialization of the area and those loverly, loverly LLM-building “data centers” going in everywhere.

Another reason: State constitutional amendments that say that X% of energy generation must come from unreliable and expensive sources like wind and solar. Which means that to keep within the guidelines, power companies have to cut fossil fuel production, the denominator, so that the limited top number meets that constitutional mandate.

So why is it? Let a 23-year-old only writing here for a while and hoping to move up to a real city explain it.

Presumably, somewhere below the fold, we get the Trump and War in Iran. Or maybe I am just cynical.

Springfield lodging tax increase once again on the ballot to fund convention center

It has not been six months since the last time rejected this same proposal.

The vested interests who will benefit from this source of public funding will not be denied. And presumably the longer it takes to get the funding improved, the more money they will need to recoup in their investment in getting it passed.

According to The Daily Mail:

The Arsenio Hall Show ran for five years between 1989 and 1994 and featured hundreds of celebrities in what Hall hoped would be a house party on TV every night.

Hall made his show the home of hip-hop and helped break rappers like Snoop Dogg, Tupac and Ice Cube while musical guests included James Brown, Whitney Houston, and Luther Vandross.

The show would win two Emmys and lead Hall to star in hit movies like 1988 comedy, Coming to America, alongside Murphy.

Incredible! His show from 1989-1994 lead him to star in a hit movie in 1988! Time travel is real, sheeple!

Also, this photo caption should have alt-text that says, “Explain to me how you’re 23 years old and never say Delirous or Raw“:

Hall became known for his on-screen collaboration with Eddie Murphy, but recalls a boozy, drug-fueled night with the comedian despite the star’s clean-cut image at the time

Ay, child. Explain to me how it was in times I lived in and you did not.

(Link via Ed Driscoll on Instapundit.)

Sword yoga is the hot, new fitness trend turning NYC women into swashbuckling fighters — with the help of a double-edged blade

Pretty girls in movie poses with swords. Okay. Feeling empowered because they move like action heroes do in the movies.

I’m no EMEA expert, but I have fenced a little bit in my time, and I’ve fought in some broadsword bouts, and they were over pretty quick and did not involve spinning the blade. Or moving it far out of a guard position.

Chuck Norris has passed away after MfBJN has mentioned him twice this year: Someone’s Trying To Be A Chuck Norris Superfan in January and a review of Way of the Dragon, the Bruce Lee film that got Chuck Norris, 7 time American Karate champion, into films, earlier this month. The film still from the above article is from Way of the Dragon. The eulogies all mention that he was in Walker, Texas Ranger most likely because those were in syndication when the journalists were growing up two years ago.

Don’t let MfBJN happen to you.

As a reminder, actor Robert Blake and author Larry McMurtry passed away after a mention on this blog. Someone stay with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who costarred in Lee’s Game of Death and maybe Dick Van Dyke since I read a Diagnosis Murder book recently.

And let it be known it was Friar who mentioned Susanna Hoffs in a comment; I did not mention her by name on the blog. Oh, no. What have I done?

‘It’s not safe’: Neighbors raise speeding concerns after car crashes into South St. Louis County home:

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — Neighbors along Kingston Drive are calling for changes after a crash sent a car into a front porch, marking the latest in a series of crashes along the busy stretch.

St. Louis County Police said since 2025, there have been 22 crashes on Kingston Drive. Of those, nine involved injuries, totaling 14 people hurt, and one crash was fatal.

That deadly crash happened last month when a man was killed, and police said it was the result of speeding.

In 2023, one woman was killed after her car crashed into a home near the intersection of Kingston Drive and Telegraph Road. At the time, police said the vehicle was traveling southbound on Kingston Drive toward Telegraph Road at an “extremely high rate of speed.” However, police explained that it may have been due to a medical emergency.

That’s just down the road from here because Telegraph Road ran between Jefferson Barracks (and beyond) in the St. Louis area and Fort Smith, Arkansas. However, down here, it’s called Old Wire Road, and when it was a contiguous route beside the telegraph wire poles, it ran through my neighbor’s yard.

I used to live up there in Lemay, where this story takes place. My sainted mother died in a house a couple of blocks away. And my favorite aunt owned two different houses in the area, including the one I lived in with my mother for a time.

The roads have been what they are for a long time. What’s different now is the people driving on them.

US drivers see gas prices jump to their highest level since 2023 as Iran conflict drags on

Oh, I see. So: Gas prices are climbing to a level not seen since the last administration, where they got there somehow on their own without a conflict, and as the conflict drags on which means the conflict has lasted longer than the TikTok videos AP journalists train themselves on, I guess.

What we should think: Trump bad. Never mind that in 2023, gas prices were high for some reason which was not Trump. Maybe the threat of Trump? Go with that.

Two articles about the wonders of the MU Health Care saving lives right next to each other? Mmm hmmm.

I am probably slow to discover this, but newspaper stories about death announcements, especially on the front/home page, come in to flavors.

“Neil Sedaka dies” (and for or five news items about it), and “Iconic Folk Singer and Woodstock Legend dead at 84”:

It’s Country Joe MacDonald who passed away. Have I heard his name? Probably. Would I consider him some sort of legend or icon? Eh….

It’s all about the click-through rates, no doubt. When the name is known, people will click to learn more. When the name is kinda known, maybe, the key is to hype up the person’s fame to get us to click through to find out more.

I wonder if there’s a scoring algorithm for the dividing line, or if it’s still a gut feeling by an editor somewhere.

But, hey, it worked on me. Not often, and mostly in this case because I wanted to write this post.

It’s better than looking at crime stories and finding someone I know, which happens, but I watched this story expecting to see someone I knew: Nixa, Mo., Dungeons & Dragons event raises awareness for multiple sclerosis

And I did, sorta: Christopher Wilson, author of The Wards of Iasos Book 1: The Leftovers, makes an appearance.

This story was easier: On Your Side: Conduent Data Breach: What to do if you got a letter–my oldest son makes an appearance, and he was very excited and told me so.

Walmart switching to digital shelf labels nationwide:

Walmart said the digital shelf labels are controlled through a centralized system and will allow for faster price changes.

The digital labels will also help employees stock shelves and fulfill online orders more quickly.

It’s not about the stocking, and it’s not about the picking.

Hey, did you notice that the aisles in Walmart are wider these days? Remember when they narrowed a few years back, which made it hard for us to get through them, but now they’re wider? I don’t suppose that has anything to do with the giant carts that the online ordering employees have started wheeling around? Of course it has. For your convenience.

You know, an aunt of mine by marriage got a promotion out of being a checker at Walgreens in the 1990s into being a Price Administrator. It was her full-time job, in a Walgreens (not a large department store), to adjust the prices of sales items for the week and to audit the prices on the shelves to make sure that they showed the actual price for the item. A full-time job. The electronic tags would eliminate that position, if it hasn’t already been eliminated.

Equifax accused of price gouging Medicaid programs

Equifax is being accused of price gouging regarding Medicaid programs.

Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote a letter to the company’s chief executive asking for answers regarding its business practices.

* * * *

Many states use an Equifax program called The Work Number, which quickly verifies a Medicaid applicant’s work hours and wages.

According to a probe by The New York Times quoted in the senators’ letter, Equifax often raises the price for The Work Number.

So Equifax raises prices, gouging all customers (it follows the shake-every-nickel-from-clients philosophy so prevalent in big tech, after all), and some of the clients happen to be states, who happen to use it to distribute Fedbux…..

Yeah, some senators want to Do Something, which is likely to extract a settlement of some sort, on behalf of their constituents, which are people who receive Fedbux.

Full disclosure: I used to work for the company that made The Work Number for Everyone, which Equifax bought. That company’s stock endowed a scholarship with my father-in-law’s name on it, and Equifax stock which I received in exchange for my old company’s stock has been instrumental in funding my current Travis-McGeelike “retirement.”

Missouri families push senators to support diabetes treatment bill:

Missourians are asking the state’s two senators to help pass what they call a life-changing bill. Supporters say it would make long-term treatment for diabetics more accessible.

Senator Ted Budd from North Carolina and Mike Lee from Utah introduced the Islet Act in November 2025. This would change the wording on pancreatic cell transplants.

* * * *

However, currently, those transplants are categorized as a drug instead of an organ, which affects insurance coverage.

“It’s not done as much here in the United States because of this issue of categorizing the islets as drugs rather than as an organ, which that’s what they are,” Yosten said.

Making everyone pay for this treatment will make insurance rates go up.

I mean, I hope everyone who wants, needs, or gets this treatment is healed, but this bill is about making everyone pay more so they can get it. Not making the treatment available.

So I expect it to pass; Schmitt, as you know, was proud of similar efforts he led in the past.

Jeff at Coffee and Covid today quotes an enthusiastic Tesla supporter:

“Two Sundays ago, I went to Tesla with Elon and visited the Optimus lab,” Calicanis said. “There were a large number of people working on a Sunday,” he continued, “and I saw Optimus. I can tell you now, nobody will remember that Tesla ever made a car. They will only remember the Optimus.”

At the time, most folks dismissed Jason’s remarks as overheated investor hype. But now that Elon put Tesla’s money where its robots are, the comments seem strangely prescient. “He is going to make a billion of those robots,” Calicanis told the hosts. “And it is going to be the most transformative technology product ever made in the history of humanity.”

You know what would make that even better? Put the robots on the Segway Human Transporter.

Remember those? Not long after the turn of the century, luminaries in the tech field and tech press told us that cities would be designed around them (little did we know that a quarter century later, the “fifteen minute cities” would be designed, but not around the SHT, but around controlling the population) and that everyone would have them and blah blah blah.

In reality: In 2026, you can hardly even find them in tourist attractions for “Segway Tours” because they’ve been eclipsed by the far simpler electric bikes and, heaven help up, rentable electric scooters.

But the people who got paid got paid. And whether the humanoid robots transform the world or are a flashy toy replaced by simpler machines later, the people who will get paid will get paid.

All the phones (and “smart” devices) are listening to you:

Google has agreed to pay $68m (£51m) to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people’s private conversations through their phones.

Users accused Google Assistant – a virtual assistant present on many Android devices – of recording private conversations after it was inadvertently triggered on their devices.

They claimed the recordings were then shared with advertisers in order to send them targeted advertising.

Among other things. The recordings were probably parsed and scored in various ways and were used to train various LLMs as well.

(Link via Pixy’s Daily Tech News today.