Megan McArdle

The lights went out across the University of California at Berkeley campus the other day, in an incident that included an explosion and fire with two-story flames that injured four and sent one person to the hospital. The probable cause was the theft of a considerable amount of grounding wire from the campus electrical system. (When you do cutting edge physics and so forth, you need a pretty heavy-duty electrical system.)

But Megan, you will say, aren’t grounding wires, well, in the ground? Why yes they are. The thieves may have used heavy machinery to unearth the wire before they stole it. Nor is this the first time that something like this has happened; robbing power substations and similar installations seems to have become nearly epidemic.

The White House has released the most recent numbers on visitors to healthcare.gov -- 4.7 million unique visitors, reported Jake Tapper on Twitter (presumably, he means since the Oct. 1 launch). Other accounts put the number of visitors on the first day at 2.8 million. According to Tapper, the White House claims not to know how many people have enrolled. The cynic in me wonders if that number isn’t in the single digits.

No one I know has managed to create an account on the federal exchanges, as opposed to those operated by the states. Either they’re stopped at a “please wait” page that never does move them onto enrollment, or they get to the enrollment page and are presented with drop-down list of security questions -- an empty drop-down list. I tried putting random words in the boxes and hit "enter;" that brought me to a screen announcing that an account couldn’t be created at this time. Most people, though, got stopped at the security questions. Apparently some folks got through, only to be routed back out to the beginning of the account-creation process.

I am suffering from an incorrigible urge to quote myself at great length. Here I am on the Republicans' push in August 2011 to shut down the government in order to get their way:

A lot of conservatives describe a potential shutdown or default as if it were ripped straight from the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Their explanation of why we need to precipitate a crisis is that it's going to happen eventually, and so better now than later.

The logic of this is dubious -- we're all going to die eventually, but that doesn't mean I'm eager to hasten the day. As Dave Ramsey says, you don't declare bankruptcy until the bailiffs are at the door. As long as you haven't defaulted, you preserve the important option not to default.

But leave that aside. The problem is really with the larger narrative, in which there is no option but to slash spending and readjust to a newer, much smaller government. But, of course, we will not have a friendly author writing the script here. The villains do not have to meekly submit to the comeuppance delivered by our steely-willed heroes. When the government shuts down, the voters will not immediately turn to figuring out how to make a living without their Social Security and disability checks. They will mob their representatives. In the face of this, the steely will of the GOP freshmen may turn out to be artfully folded tinfoil. Or the besieged old guard may cross the floor to cut a deal with Democrats. At last resort, the voters will remove the guys who took away their goodies with no notice. Once the tea partiers have had their asses handed to them at the polls, borrowing and spending resume, albeit at a higher price. But because the Democrats will be firmly in charge, there's a good chance that the higher price is paid with taxes, not less spending.

The problem with the narrative is that it simply writes the people on the other side out as independent actors. They're characters in a drama -- a drama that we know the hero wins, because, after all, he's the hero. So it only remains to figure out exactly how we get the hero to victory. If you assume that there must be some way for the hero to win and slash spending to 1920 levels, then of course, I'm just an obstructionist sellout. But if you acknowledge the possibility that this might not actually be possible in a representative democracy filled with motivated voters who are more numerous than the neo-Coolidge faction, then a whole universe of caveats opens up.

The same thing seems to have happened this time around. Against all evidence, the more ardent Republicans think that they are writing the script, and Democrats have no choice but to go along. Too many people seem never to have pondered the possibility that Democrats care just as much about Obamacare as Republicans do, and are therefore willing to be just as completely intransigent.

I was going to write a review of the Affordable Care Act's health insurance exchanges this afternoon -- go through the process of shopping, and then tell you which exchanges were good, which were bad and so forth. Unfortunately, I couldn’t actually get into most of the exchanges; they wouldn’t load. Or they barfed* at creating a login. Massachusetts let me get almost all the way through, then abruptly melted down when I asked it to show me policies that I might be interested in. (It did let me browse for policies that hadn’t been narrowed down by its nifty-looking, but nonfunctional, wizard.)

So instead I’m going to explore another question: Why aren’t the exchanges loading properly?

(Corrects description of age group in 28th paragraph.)

It’s no exaggeration to say that if young people don’t show up to the insurance exchanges in the next few months, the Affordable Care Act probably won’t survive. Young, healthy people paying more than they have previously -- either because they are buying more expensive insurance or because they are buying insurance for the first time -- are the financing mechanism that makes Obamacare’s insurance markets work. The administration estimates that a little over a third of the people on the exchanges need to be in the 18-to-35 range to hold premiums down to reasonable levels.

This morning brought Eleanor Clift’s reminiscence about 50 years at Newsweek to my Twitter feed. Those words alone seem to tell the story: Newsweek was a phenomenally successful product designed for a world that no longer exists. It was an amazing world for journalists, to hear the great Clift describe it. But it couldn’t survive the new financial realities.

In the Washington Post last week, my friend Tim Lee argued that we shouldn’t mourn the old world; we should celebrate a vibrantly competitive market. Newspapers made so much money in the late 20th century, he points out, because they effectively had a monopoly on most local markets (ironically, because competition for television and radio meant that most markets could support only one newspaper). That allowed them to charge a lot for ads and spend a lot on reporters. Those days are over, he says, precisely because there are now so many ways to get news:

When it comes to the movies I love, I’m kind of a fogey. I like movies with a certain sentimental core -- movies that believe, you might say, in a just and good universe. On the other hand, I hate easy cheer. All of which makes me hard for a director to woo and win.

That isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy lots of movies. When the Official Blog Spouse and I finally get to go to a movie together, I usually enjoy it -- more than the OBS, who sees several movies a week in his alternate incarnation as a movie critic for the Washington Times. This makes him impatient about stepping over sizeable plot holes and plodding through the kind of clunky dialogue b-movie script rooms used to churn out by the yard. Me, I’m happy to be out and about. But that’s like, not love.

One day after J.C. Penney Co. announced it was pleased with the way its turnaround efforts were going, the company offered another piece of news: They’d be selling 84 million shares in the hope of raising almost a billion dollars.

If there’s a way to read this that doesn't ultimately spell “desperate,” I've yet to see it. How desperate? I’ll let Agustino Fontevecchia of Forbes sum up for you:

As we approach the Great Unveiling next week, you’re going to see a lot of these talking points repeated as if they’re facts. Most of them aren’t dead wrong -- they could be true. But they’re considerably more uncertain than most pundits seem to think.

1. Once Obamacare goes into effect, it will be impossible to substantially cut it back. Both sides seem convinced of this -- Republicans in terror, Democrats in glee. Funny thing, though -- the other day, my father mentioned casually that many of his classmates at the Syracuse's Maxwell School of Public Policy in the mid-to-late 1960s had been on Medicaid. And then, suddenly, they weren’t.

I’m rarely speechless, but I’m having trouble putting my emotions into words after reading the latest report on the Detroit pension situation. Now, I admit it: I’m kind of naïve. Usually when I see an underfunded pension, I think to myself “poor pensioners -- undone by a combination of stupid tax rules, volatile stock markets and mismanagement by trustees who tried to restore depleted fund assets with an investment approach you might call ‘desperate optimism’." Thus, I was not entirely prepared for the new revelations about the Detroit trustees’ custom of handing out annual holiday “bonuses” to workers, retirees and the City of Detroit. Between 1985 and 2008, they handed out roughly $1 billion this way. Had they been invested, one estimate says those funds would be worth almost $2 billion today -- or more than half the current shortfall in the funds.

These “bonuses” were used to lower the contribution the city was required to make, to give retirees a little something extra around Christmas time, and to fund individual savings accounts that workers are offered along with their pensions. In 2009, when the financial markets were completely frozen and the automakers were shotgunning through the bankruptcy courts, the pension trust paid 7.5 percent interest into those accounts -- which is about 7.5 percent more than they would have gotten at a bank. This while the pension funds were busy losing about a quarter of their value.