A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
March 1, 2021. “Trump” occurs 7 times on the nytimes.com home page.
What’s the relative importance of the person who actually occupies the White House? “Biden” occurs once:
Separately, the paper tells us how much money a U.S. senator can reasonably expect to accumulate via “public service”:
Warren plans to introduce a wealth tax for individuals with a net worth of over $50 million.
Related:
Full post, including commentsI’ve been referring to everything that happened prior to March 2020 as “BC” (Before Corona, not to be confused with “BCE” for years prior to Jesus’s birth). We’re just beginning Year 2 “AC”, therefore. Public sector workers have been mostly relaxing at home for a year, still drawing full paychecks, e.g., Boston Public School teachers. Should one of these folks fall ill due to COVID-19 or any other cause, he/she/ze/they will be paid via disability insurance.
What’s it like in the private sector? A housecleaner I know had to continue working, accepting whatever risk of COVID-19 was entailed, if she wanted to be paid. She’s around 60 years old and therefore has more age-related COIVD-19 risk than the average public sector worker (many of whom are eligible to retire at 50 or younger). She recently suffered a fall on a narrow staircase in a Beacon Hill home (these structures are fully compliant with all building and safety codes… of the early 1800s; see “For $20.5 million, Beacon Hill town house next to John Kerry” for an example) and broke both radius bones in her forearms. She’s unable to work, of course, and won’t be receiving payments from a disability policy. She’s expected to recover and has a lot of support from family (Brazilian immigrants), but the story made me reflect on the precariousness of a lot of folks’ existence.
(The teachers aren’t “relaxing at home,” you say, because they have to be present on Zoom for some hours each week? While down in Florida in January, I met a Massachusetts public school system employee nearing full retirement (early 60s). She didn’t enjoy being on Zoom so she began to use the months of sick leave she’d accumulated over the years. “It will run out by next fall,” she explained, “but the union says that I’ll be able to use days from the sick bank until I’m eligible for maximum retirement benefits in November.” In other words, she will have been paid in full for 1.5 years without having to get closer to the Massachusetts school than Florida and without having to appear on Zoom.)
Now that economic opportunities exist only when governors give permission, is it more important than ever to prepare young people for careers as government workers?
Loosely related, from February 19, 2021 in Waltham, Massachusetts:
We still have plenty of opioids for anyone who is depressed about losing a private sector job!
Full post, including commentsA Floridian’s Facebook post today, updated for her by Facebook’s team of scientific experts:
(Disclaimer: I was not one of the Deplorables who “liked” this post!)
Facebook implies that COVID-19 vaccines are “approved“. As noted in We love our children so much we will give them an investigational vaccine, the manufacturers themselves are careful to disclose that their products are not approved. Moderna, for example, says “The Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine has not been approved or licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) … There is no FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID‑19.” and that the vaccine is “investigational”:
What does Johnson and Johnson say? “The Janssen COVID-19 vaccine has not been approved or licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), … There is no FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19.”
How about Pfizer? “The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has not been approved or licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but has been authorized for emergency use by FDA under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) for use in individuals 16 years of age and older. The emergency use of this product is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of the medical product under Section 564(b)(1) of the FD&C Act unless the declaration is terminated or authorization revoked sooner.”
Related:
Coronapanic has shut down America’s schools and/or turned them into pale online shadows of their former selves. It is now exactly one year since unionized public schools in Maskachusetts shut down, for example, and they’re not back to fully open. Many colleges remain shut.
Our MIT ground school moved from a three-day in-person class to a five-day online class. We have an objective measurement of student learning: the FAA knowledge test and/or the practice tests offered by companies such as King. Educational outcomes as measured by these tests were lower compared to when the class was in person. Apparently it is not compelling to stare at a screen for hour after hours.
Given that nobody can tell who has learned what anymore, could this be the time to develop and market neutral third-party assessments. From “Universities and Economic Growth”:
I once asked a group of professors at Makerere University in Uganda “How come more people fail the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer test than your most advanced computer science course?” It would seem that the answer is that the MCSE, which tests the ability to do basic Windows administration, is graded by an impartial computer system.
For young people who want to prove that, contrary to appearances, they actually learned something during the Age of Panic and Shutdown, why not a test of the stuff that high schools and/or colleges are supposed to teach?
For high schools, I guess one could argue that we already have AP tests. But not every high school student takes AP classes. The book Academically Adrift describes the use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment. New York State has the Regents exams. Perhaps these could be adapted for nationwide use?
Readers: What do you think? Has the shutdown produced enough uncertainty that this old idea can thrive?
The Southside elementary school in Sarasota, which my local source says is the place that you’d want your kids to go (NYT says Florida schools are generally more effective than the U.S. average).
Will there be a nationwide high school achievement test in place by the time these 5th graders get their diplomas?
Related:
We received a copy of Bowdoin magazine, the official publication of the liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine featured in these aerial photos. I emailed the intended recipient, an alumna of this $72,000/year school:
From reading your alumni magazine and looking at the photos, I learned that Bowdoin has 0% white male students, graduates, and faculty.
The front and back covers:
There is a white person among the illustrator’s conception of students at elite schools, but the gender ID is unclear (big earring in one ear; female fashion model-style legs?):
No better place to learn about Africa than the central Maine coast:
Choosing to live in an all-white state means that you can “fight for [racial inequity] causes” by putting a sign on your lawn (text at top left):
From a student who has some ancestry from India:
(Her parents might be hoping that she isn’t able to deliver on her “progressive” goals, at least with respect to taxation. Indian-Americans have a median household income that is 2X what white Americans earn.)
A professor writes about Willie Horton:
Anthony Walton, Bowdoin professor:
Hide in home bunker from COVID-19. Watch direct deposit paychecks pile up.
His self-designated doppelganger, from Wikipedia:
William R. Horton (born August 12, 1951) is an American convicted felon who, while serving a life sentence for murder (without the possibility of parole), was the beneficiary of a Massachusetts weekend furlough program. He did not return from his furlough, and ultimately committed assault, armed robbery, and rape before being captured and sentenced in Maryland where he remains incarcerated.
What else is in here? Alumni created a “beer celebrating racial justice” (but where does racial justice exist?). “Maine outlawed racial slurs as place names in 1977,” but five Maine islands were only renamed in 2020 (43 years after the law was passed). “In 2019, Maine passed a law banning Native American mascots” (e.g., a school with a sports team named after a tribe).
Full post, including commentsWanting to see what the fuss was about, as soon as the book made it into the news, I reserved the not-banned If I Ran the Zoo from the local public library. A few days later, a librarian called. My reservation would be honored, of course, but the book could not be removed from the library. “You can make a reservation to come in and look at the book here,” she explained. “That’s the guidance we’ve gotten from the Minuteman Library Network.”
(See Fund burning of existing copies of harmful Dr. Seuss books? for some representative pages from this book, courtesy of libgen.)
As the process of evaluating (not banning) older books continues, I wonder if it will make sense for libraries to set up forbidden books rooms, each of which could be named for a generous patron. (The rooms could also be used for viewing works in which Gina Carano appears.)
From McElligot’s Pool (also on libgen):
How is that racist? Here’s the next page, objected to for its use of the word “Eskimo”:
Related:
We’re now at the one-year anniversary of when the governor here in Maskachusetts declared a state of emergency and began to tell healthy young people that they needed to give up what turned out to be at least a year of their lives (education, social activity, building work experience, maintaining fitness via sports/gym, etc.) in hopes of extending the lives of folks with a median age of 82.
The logic of lockdown is that young people are required by law to sacrifice if there is an old person whose life could possibly be extended via that sacrifice.
What if we applied the same logic to organ harvesting? No young person actually needs two kidneys nor a full-size liver. Removing a kidney or part of a liver from a young person wouldn’t cost the young person a full year of life expectancy and it could save the life of an older person.
We were comfortable with taking what has turned out to be a year of life away from the young. Why aren’t we comfortable imposing on them a slight inconvenience (only 4 to 6 days in the hospital) in order to get organs that they don’t need and that could help save lives among the old/sick?
Related (Department of Old v. Young):
Clubhouse users seem to care primarily about three things:
I don’t own any Bitcoin. I am completely unimproved (some might say “a throwback”!). That leaves Topic #2: venture capital. I will interview Alexander Lloyd this evening at 10 pm Eastern on the subject of early-stage investing.
If you have an iPhone or iPad, but aren’t a Clubhouse member, text me from your Apple device at +1 617-864-6832 with your full name. I’ll add you to my contacts list and then invite you (one can invite only those who are in one’s contact list and it all seems to be based on phone number).
https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/PQbKzGq8
Full post, including commentsA tale of a recent trip from Boston to Washington-Dulles on United Airlines… (my first on an airliner since the BC epoch (“Before Coronapanic”))
The good news is that all of our post-9/11 security fears have been resolved. I don’t remember hearing any announcements about “if you see something, say something”, leaving cars unattended at the curb, or calling the authorities after spotting unattended bags.
The not-so-good news is that our security fears have been replaced by COVID-19 fears. The best news, though, as anyone in California or Spain can attest, is coronavirus can never succeed amongst masked humans, no matter how primitive the mask technology. Combining these two, the airport authorities and the airlines have cooperated to bombard passengers with literally hundreds of signs and announcements regarding masks: (1) wear them, (2) don’t wear them under your nose, (3) don’t worry about COVID-19 if you’re masked, etc. I stopped counting at 200 exposures (signs+audio) after less than 30 minutes in Logan airport.
After being educated literally hundreds of time on this topic, did I wear a mask in the terminal? No. I sat down at a Legal Sea Foods restaurant across from the gate, ordered a salad and an ice tea, and timed the completion of my meal to coincide with the final boarding call.
One improvement is that the gate agents no longer do “hurry up so that you can wait in the jet bridge.” I was handed a disinfecting wipe as soon as I walked onto the plane. But if I were worried enough about getting COVID-19 from surface contamination to use the wipe, why would I have been on the plane to begin with? (see Does disinfectant theater contribute to coronaplague?)
Unlike Delta, United does not block the middle seats. They’ve cut so many flights that, despite the minimal demand, most people on my BOS-IAD leg were jammed into completely occupied rows. I’m a “Silver” member so I ended up towards the front in a row with an empty middle seat between myself and a slender young guy who seemed completely uninterested in the Festival of Corona.
The United app delivers this message if you open it up in flight:
The lead flight attendant on the plane delivered the same message multiple times over the PA as well. He took care to say that he’d seen passengers wearing masks improperly and that this would not be tolerated.
As soon as we took off, though, the Cart of Demaskification was brought out. People like me who hadn’t asked for a drink were offered one. I responded to the offer with “Coke please” and was given an entire can… which takes about as long to drink as the flight time from Boston to D.C. The fine print above says that people are supposed to put on a mask “between bites and sips”, but I didn’t see anyone doing that. So masks are like face seatbelts: required for takeoff and landing.
On arrival at Dulles, the messaging regarding masks resumed. Here’s a big electronic sign that presumably used to promote all of the great things going on in Virginia. Now it is “Mask Up Virginia” over a Dunkin’ Donuts sign:
(see also Public health, American-style: Donuts at the vaccine clinic and “90 percent of COVID deaths occur in countries with high obesity levels: study” (New York Post, March 5, 2021))
The only other message that the airport authorities seemed interested in delivering was a hearty rainbow flag welcome:
The return trip was similar, right down to the full can of soda served shortly after takeoff (45-minute cruise segment). Although the flight was not crowded, the terminal was jammed. Perhaps large sections have been shut down, which means passengers are now on top of each other near the gates that remain in use. The sit-down restaurants are, as at Logan, highly sought-after locations for those who want to relax unmasked, and there were (socially distanced) lines forming in front of some.
I joined the connoisseurs at the forbidden-in-Boston Chick-fil-A, which meant that I was unmasked for almost my entire wait. (One doesn’t want to wolf down a delicious meal that is denied to most residents of Maskachusetts.)
If anyone in the gate area actually did have coronavirus, there was a sufficiently dense crowd for spreading it:
I wouldn’t recommended the experience for those who are anxious about COVID-19. While you’re constantly being reminded about how hazardous COVID-19 is, there isn’t enough room in the airport to be truly distant from those who are potentially infected. People sit glumly with their masks on, waiting to see how the Russian roulette game that they’ve chosen to play will turn out. Unless you believe in the effectiveness of crude non-N95 masks, it’s the same risk level as being in a crowded Miami club, but a lot less fun.
Update 3/18: “Climate czar John Kerry caught going maskless on flight” (New York Post); Kerry’s response on Twitter: “If I dropped my mask to one ear on a flight, it was momentary. I wear my mask because it saves lives and stops the spread. It’s what the science tells us to do.“
Full post, including comments“You Were Duped Into Saying Yes. Is That Still Consent?” (New York Times, March 5):
Imagine the following hypothetical situation: Frank and Ellen meet at a night course and end up getting drinks together after class several times. The drinks start to feel like dates, so Ellen asks Frank if he is married, making it clear that adultery is a deal-breaker for her. Frank is married, but he lies and says he is single. The two go to bed. Is Frank guilty of rape?
To many feminist legal scholars, the law’s failure to regard sexual fraud as a crime — when fraud elsewhere, such as fraud in business transactions, is taken to invalidate legal consent — shows that we are still beholden to an antiquated notion that rape is primarily a crime of force committed against a chaste, protesting victim, rather than primarily a violation of the right to control access to one’s body on one’s own terms.
The author, Roseanna Sommers, is a law professor and she essentially concludes that Frank did rape Ellen.
If the goal of “feminist legal scholars” is to help those who identify as “women”, I wonder if lying = rape will actually be helpful. Perhaps the theory is that this will be good for those who identify as “women” eager to file rape lawsuits because it is almost exclusively those who identify as “men” who lie to obtain consent. But the hypothetical example isn’t comprehensive. If Ellen is having sex in order to turn a profit via child support, for example, Frank being married actually improves her chances of getting consistently paid for 23 years (if Frank can’t pay, his beleaguered spouse will work and pay). What if Ellen were to say “It’s okay because I’m on the Pill”? She still has a good claim for $2 million in tax-free child support, but now Frank can file a civil lawsuit against her for rape and receive some of that money back (and then Ellen can file a child support modification lawsuit saying that Frank’s new wealth entitles her to higher monthly checks?).
Let’s tweak the story a little, to align it with a common lie…
Frank asks Ellen if she has previously slept with more than 100 sex partners, making it clear that being a Tinder super user is a deal-breaker for him. Ellen is Tinderlicious, but she lies and says she hasn’t had sex with anyone since the Obama years. The two go to bed. Is Ellen guilty of rape?
Would it be a positive, from a feminist perspective, for Ellen to face a lawsuit in which sexual history is a legitimate subject for cross-examination?
How about financial matters? “Do Americans marry for love or money?” (MarketWatch):
Some 56% of Americans say they want a partner who provides financial security more than “head over heels” love (44%), a recent survey released by Merrill Edge, an online discount brokerage and division of Bank of America Merrill Lynch BAC, +1.18%, found. This sentiment is held in almost equal measure by both men and women (54% and 57%).
Should someone who identifies as a “woman” be exposed to a rape lawsuit because she purportedly told someone at a club that she expected to be promoted to a lucrative executive position that, in fact, did not materialize and that a reasonable person should not have expected? After a year of sex without the promotion materializing, the “duped-at-the-club” person now has a rape claim?
What about people who have difficulty remembering what they said years ago? “New state law extends the statute of limitations for rape in New York” (CNN):
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation Wednesday that extends the statute of limitations for certain cases of rape and other sex crimes. He was joined at the signing by actresses… And under the law, victims now have 20 years in which to bring a civil suit for the offenses.
(and maybe Governor Cuomo was joined by some of those actresses after the signing as well?)
Suppose that a plaintiff sues Dianne Feinstein, alleging that the 87-year-old senator committed rape by lying in 2000, when she was 67 years old. That’s within the statute of limitations for rape, but are 20-year-old statements within the likely memory of an 87-year-old? Unless Feinstein is much sharper than the average 87-year-old and can testify convincingly, the $88 million that she acquired via marriage can be mined out by the plaintiff?
The good news is that the taxpayers of Michigan paid Professor Sommers to think about these issues! (or, if $billions for universities is buried somewhere in the latest $1.9 trillion spending package, perhaps taxpayers nationwide paid for this idea)
The scales of Justice, Gainesville, Florida, January 2021:
