Wednesday Links -- WSJ Links, USPS To Stop Saturday Letter Delivery; ObamaScare

Wow, this is quite a post from the RBN Energy folks today: an update of crude-by-rail. A must read; must-bookmark.

One note: the RBN folks say BNSF is #1 in crude-by-rail, but I believe Union Pacific Railroad is #1 in moving fracking sand. I could be wrong on that, but that was noted in a recent presentation.

Finally: USPS to stop Saturday letter delivery; packages will still be delivered on Saturday. The end of Saturday service is scheduled to "begin" in August. This will Congress and postal employees plenty of time to muster their forces and prevent this from happening. If we see the end of Saturday letter mail delivery by August, 2013, I will shut down the blog.

An ObamaScare note: this is a very interesting headline -- 7 million folks will lose their job-related health benefits under ObamaCare. This is a big deal. An argument in support of ObamaCare was the oft-cited figure that 34 million Americans did not have health insurance. The number may or may not have been accurate but everyone agrees it included many young adults between the ages of 18 and 26 who do not need health care insurance for the most part in the first place; it included a lot of folks "in-between" jobs; it included a lot of folks who did not want health insurance; it may have included illegal aliens, depending on who was doing the counting. But this new wrinkle will be devastating to many who are employed: some employers have done the number crunching and it will be cheaper to pay the fine for not providing health care insurance than it would be for covering it. And so, these employers will dispense with their health care insurance programs. The government had predicted that some employers would do this, but 7 million is more than double the original estimates according to the linked story. So, before ObamaCare 34 million people did not have health care insurance, but the "actual" people changed from month to month, depending on their status. But, starting some time this year, employees who were happy with their job-related health insurance programs will find they no longer have that insurance. Very, very interesting.

WSJ Links

Section D (Personal Journal):
The headline says it all: Surface Pro -- Hefty tablet is a laptop lightweight -- Walt Mossberg. KOD. Zune. I will come back to this. "Microsoft's latest device is something of a tweener -- a compromised tablet and a compromised laptop."

Section C (Money & Investing): nothing. The Microsoft-Dell story was there, but it's also linked at the Yahoo!Finance page, I see, earlier this morning.

Section B (Marketplace):
Duke to close troubled nuclear plant in Florida

Microsoft takes a side in PC war -- Dell holders wanted more

Section A:
Rising murder rate in Chicago is quite ... well, getting out of control ... when it's worse than Afghanistan... photograph on front page; story on page A4;

Page 3, and we've talked about page 3 before: city gun laws hit roadblock; Arizona tightens law; Tucson says "no way, Jose"; wow, can you imagine the bad guys coming up from Mexico knowing that no one in Tucson is allowed to have guns... of course, that would not be true, but that would be the "lost in translation" bit...perception is huge... the president knows that very well... perception more important than facts...

Finally, same-sex military spouses to get some benefits ...

I guess the administration hasn't completely killed the coal industry --- White House weighs emission rules; state of the union could signal effort to curb greenhouse gases from existing coal-powered facilities;

Op-ed: Apple's new normal; the smartphone has become too interesting a product for one company to dominate; compares Apple to Ford; "Apple's accomplishments during its heyday boiled down to a single accomplishment. Its design and engineering teams were leaps ahead of all others in incorporating the latest technological possibilities into a package could fit in your hand." Of course, regular readers will know I disagree completely with this observation. One could argue Steve's big insight was the "i." He couldn't get rid of the floppy discs soon enough. Number one problem for system operators back in the 80s and 90s" viruses. And the viruses proliferated with high school and college kids sharing infected disks.

Op-ed: Shakespeare has a (parking) lot to answer for; Richard III may be fairer treatment than the spin-doctoring playwright offered 420 years ago. It is much easier to understand Richard III and all the Shakespearian plays when one knows the "real" Shakespeare. Thank you, Brenda James.

Op-ed: The stock rally that isn't. The publisher of Forbes posits two observations -- a) the "rally" in the stock market is fake; it is simply money rushing from commodities and money market funds; and, b) the stock market could be doing a lot better if America's tax, regulatory, and monetary policies were shaped to provide a 1982- 2000 tailwind. I see the editorial as only good news. The rally can really only go "up" from here based on Karlgaard's analysis.