The Obama administration decided that, under their health care reform, nearly all health insurance plans are legally required to provide contraceptives like birth control, ella and Plan B.

The Catholic Church objected and asked for an exception for insurance plans provided to employees of Catholic churches, colleges and charities.

The administration did make one strange exception, however. They said that if the religious organization doesn’t serve people of different faiths—if they only serve their own—then they are not covered by this rule.

Set aside your feelings, one way or the other, about birth control. I see no moral issue with it, while others do. Look at the substance of what this decision means: it is the federal government forcing religious institutions to either violate their beliefs, discriminate against people of other faiths, or be unable to operate. There is no other choice.

Ross Douthat commented about the absurdity of this:

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”

The administration’s decision—and health care reform itself—is bizarre in its lack of consideration of ramifications, but it’s also dangerous. If the federal government can mandate that religious organizations violate their own beliefs—force them to provide something to their employees which is squarely immoral for them—why can’t the federal government also mandate that all organizations involved in women’s health also teach a class on abstinence? Or that all private schools must incorporate intelligent design into their biology courses?

That sounds absurd, because it is, but I see no substantive difference between the law requiring one and the law requiring the other. What principle distinguishes them?

Good news: the unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent in January from 8.5 percent in December 2011, and 243,000 jobs were added. Most importantly, the drop in the unemployment rate was not due to people dropping out of the jobs market, as it has been in prior months—it was due to people actually finding jobs.

The economy does seem to be gaining some momentum, and while it’s still not strong (and we have a huge hole to climb out of), that’s absolutely good news. Hopefully Europe can remain stable enough to allow the economy to strengthen.

Matt Gemmell has some tips for designers working with developers:

Traditionally, developers aren’t great designers, and vice versa. There are many exceptions (ahem), but generally the art of one group is a mystery to the other – yet we routinely have to collaborate on projects. As someone who has worked in both areas, I’ve put together a list of tips for designers, on how they can make life easier for the developers who have to bring those designs to life as apps and web sites.

If you’re a designer (or developer, for that matter), and are working on a project or will be, go and read this.

Shawn Blanc, in Stephen Hackett’s interview with him:

There certainly has been a noticeable rise of good writing and broadcasting talent within the tech- and design-centric spheres, and I think part of it has been because the whole scene is begging to mature a bit. Writers like John Gruber and podcasters like Dan Benjamin have gone from being lone wolfs to standard bearers. Because of their commitment to high standards and exceptional work in tech writing and podcasting others have grown to appreciate that type of quality, and have used it as a standard in their own work.

I never thought about it that way, but Shawn’s absolutely right. John Gruber, Dan Benjamin, Marco Arment, Horace Dediu, all of these people are setting a very high standard for this community, and it’s not just in the level of professionalism they show in their work: it’s also how much they care about what they do and take pride in it. If you read Daring Fireball, listen to Dan’s shows on 5by5, or use Instapaper, there’s no doubt they really love to do what they’re doing.

Longform, the website that collects really good articles that are too good to read in the browser, just released Longform for iPad. This app looks awesome.

It not only has the articles they collect, but also a number of great magazines, like Fast Company and Foreign Policy, and it stores articles for offline reading, too.

Déjà Vu is your visual memory. Use the app by taking pictures of things you would like to remember. For example, products you see in a magazine, recipes you read in a cooking book, wine labels in a restaurant, Newspaper article, DVDs, CDs or event flyers. Each picture is a visual memo. A regular camera app doesn’t distinguish those photos of stuff from “regular” photos. Déjà Vu helps people organize and structure their visual memos in an easy and effective way. It does this by a tailored interface for tagging and categorization and integration of image recognition technology.

Features

• Quick shot camera (allows faster picture taking)
• Image recognition integrated
• Syncs with cloud account
• Easy search (find your visual memos by keywords and tags)
• Map location (locate your visual memos on a map)
• Available on iPhone and Web

Free for up to 30 visual memos/month. Learn more at Kooaba.

Marco Arment talked about the app economy on NPR’s Planet Money. I loved this comment:

When the market is that big of everybody that uses the Internet, any little differentiator can get you enough of a customer base to support yourself and a few other people.

Marco says that the ease of purchasing applications on iOS—and the number of users who do purchase applications—means that running a relatively small business is possible, which wasn’t really true on the web just a few years ago.

It seems obvious, but it’s a very big deal that a multitude of people can create businesses that do very niche things and be successful, without worrying about getting big. They can just focus on making their product better for their very specific customer base, and make enough money to support themselves comfortably.

I argued a year ago that this is important, too, because it allows a number of businesses doing similar things to co-exist. When a market’s economics force businesses to take a majority market share to survive—depend on getting big—they necessarily preclude other businesses from surviving in that market, too. This is true of most advertising-supported businesses, because making decent money from advertising requires significant scale. But for paid-for applications, you don’t need that scale. You just need a loyal group of customers who pay and tell other people about your application.

That allows a much more diverse and unique market to develop, because developers are (relatively) free to experiment. Markets that depend on advertising should become relatively homogeneous while markets where customers pay for the products should be relatively more diverse.

Buzz Andersen:

Awhile back, Jacqui Cheng from Ars Technica contacted a bunch of folks (including me) for a story she was putting together about what iOS devs would most like to see from Apple in 2012. Unfortunately I never got around to responding (sorry Jacqui—the holidays were crazy), but if I had, one item would have stood an order of magnitude above everything else on my list: better rich text formatting support in the middle layers of Apple’s development frameworks.

Now this may sound like a surprisingly mundane request considering the number of whiz bang things people are expecting from Apple in 2012, but if you’ve ever tried to develop a native iOS applications that present textual content downloaded from the Internet, you probably share my frustration.

So, so right.

Esquire’s Daniel Voll has a very good piece on Omar, an Iraqi counterterrorism officer that’s worked with American forces since 2004 to arrest or kill some of the worst terrorists in Iraq:

Amira, an electrical engineer, had done some work for the Americans in the Green Zone when she started getting threats. She was living with her parents, and her family took the threats seriously because her sister, who was also working with the Americans, had already been shot in the chest three times by militants at a roadblock. Army doctors worked fifteen hours and saved her life.

“Friends in the FBI asked me to check up on Amira,” Omar says. “So I went to see her…”

He gave Amira his cell number — and told her to call anytime, day or night.

“I’m on night shift when she calls,” Omar says. “She’s terrified, whispering that men with guns are in her house looking for her.”

Amira had locked herself in the bathroom. The gunmen were ransacking the house and yelling, Which one works for the Americans?

Omar grabbed a vest and an AK-47 and raced to the house in his SUV, lights flashing. There were two cars parked at her front gate, and an armed lookout. Omar crashed straight into the first car.

Incredible story about a guy putting his life at risk to try to make his country a better place.

Nick Bradbury on “frictionless sharing”:

Because in the past the user only had to decide whether to share something they just read, but now they have to think about every single article before they even read it. If I read this article, then everyone will know I read it, and do I really want people to know I read it?

That creates more friction, not less.

And it also highlights a rather profound implication with Facebook’s vision for the world, where we are “open”—allow Facebook to record and broadcast—about most everything we do: when we share everything we do, we don’t decide what we want to do based just on whether we want to do it or not, but also on how it will reflect on us in public. What will reading this article say about me? Listening to this band?

Instead of just doing things, experimenting, discovering, we think about our image. Good luck discovering what it is you like and don’t like—who you are—in public.

(Via Brent Simmons.)

Chris Martucci on United States v. Jones:

So it is unfair to say that Scalia overemphasizes trespassing. His argument is more subtle. To suggest that he overemphasizes physical intrusion would be to make the same mistake the lower court makes, i.e., to assume that a test used in one particular case is the only test.

Speaking of killing Hollywood, Moonbot Studios, the group which made The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, was nominated for an Oscar for the short film.

The Atlantic had a great profile piece about them last November.

I love Moonbot, because they’re not only taking advantage of new mediums, but they’re making beautiful art and telling great stories. It’s inspiring to see a group doing such incredible work.

Paul Graham wants to hasten Hollywood’s demise:

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

While it’s almost certain Hollywood’s relevance will decline, I don’t think it’s going to be any one thing that replaces it. It’s going to be a lot of little things—games, amalgamations of books and videos, small shows and movies created by small groups and distributed online—that end up doing it.

What’s fascinating is how wide-open everything is. It wasn’t long ago that television and movies held most of people’s attention, but that’s no longer true. The web broke down that wall, and I don’t think it’ll ever go up again. Now our attention is spread over a wider range of things, and that’s an opportunity for smaller scale projects to be successful.

You don’t need to have the resources of a movie studio to make a great film (and Hollywood is doing a very poor job of making good films with the resources they have, anyway), and what I hope we see is a better way for small groups to make films, distribute them online, and make money doing so.

Jason Snell wrote a terrific piece about why iBooks Author is a big deal for publishers, and if you haven’t, you should read it. He pointed something out that hadn’t occurred to me about iBooks Author. He wrote:

I look at iBooks Author and wonder if it might be, even now, an alternative for publications that don’t want to build an app—or feel that the app they can afford to build won’t be very good. What if periodical publishers could get access to Newsstand by publishing issues using a tool more like iBooks Author, to a standardized format? What if people could buy subscriptions to magazines and newspapers in the iBookstore? Instead of building an expensive container, we could spend our money on the stuff we put inside that container.

I think it’d be better if new editions showed up in the Newsstand folder, but that’s not the point: this is a really, really good idea. Publishing on the iPad right now is not very nice; magazines tend to be static images, even for text, and as you’d expect, the experience is terrible for readers. Creating a full-fledged application for their publication is prohibitively expensive and very difficult, so they haven’t done it. They’ve chosen a route which largely fits their existing workflow but results in a poor experience for readers.

iBooks Author could help eliminate that. Publications can create new issues that are really nice to read and are tailored to fit their own identity, without ever creating their own application. Publications would get the convenience and the unique design for their own publication, and readers would get a good reading experience.

Apple has to be thinking about something like this, because it makes too much sense not to. Building an application isn’t the solution for publishing on the iPad, because it’s not something everyone can do. Creating a workflow that is largely similar to a publication’s current one is. Working with iBooks Author, or whatever the application becomes, would be an addition to their work—additional work for sure—but it also largely fits what they’re already doing.

The Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman:

The multinationals’ minimum tax would be entirely unworkable. Even if Congress passed the levy, which it won’t, those firms will find ways around it. Minimum taxes are Band-Aides for a flawed tax system. The solution is not to create a new penalty for firms that learn to manipulate the law, it is to fix the basic law in the first place.

If Obama wants to prevent companies from gaming the system, he could lower the corporate rate and eliminate tax preferences. He raised this in last year’s state of the union address but did nothing about it. That’s too bad. With a low enough domestic tax rate, companies would have less incentive to shuffle income overseas.

This proposal in particular was bewildering. Obama (rightly) acknowledges that American companies face one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and it hurts our competitiveness. His solution, perplexingly, is to tax multinational companies a minimum tax rate, while using it (apparently) to lower the tax rate on companies which hire more people in the U.S.

This proposal symbolizes the administration’s general approach: use law to punish people. Instead of lowering our corporate tax rate to be more competitive, Obama wants to increase taxes on companies that don’t repatriate income, and then provide deductions or tax credits (“tax loopholes,” as the president is wont to call them) to companies that stay here to make the too-high corporate tax rate more palatable.

He needs to think through this a bit more. He derides a complex tax system which allows individuals and companies to pay “too low” of an effective tax rate, yet here he is trying to make the problem worse.