Month: March 2021

Joe Biden updates the Mahabharata (loyal dogs expelled from the White House)

by philg

Wikipedia on Mahaprasthanika Parva, a book within the Mahabharata:

Indra appears in his chariot with a loud sound, suggesting he doesn’t need to walk all the way, he can jump in and together they can go to heaven. Yudhishthira refuses, says he could not go to heaven with Indra without his brothers and Draupadi. Indra tells Yudhishthira, all of them after their death, entered heaven. Yudhishthira asks if his friend, the dog, can jump into the car first. Indra replies that the dog cannot enter his chariot, only Yudhishthira can. Yudhishthira refuses to leave the dog. He claims the dog is his friend, and for him to betray his friend during his life’s journey would be a great sin. Indra says that after abandoning his brothers and wife, he had acquired great merit, then why be stupefied by a dog, he is renouncing everything. Yudhishthira said that there is neither friendship nor enemity with those that are dead. When his brothers and Draupadi died, he was unable to revive them, hence he abandoned them. However, he cannot abandon the one who is alive beside him. Indra urges him to consider his own happiness, abandon the dog and hop into his chariot. Yudhishthira refuses to go into the chariot, explaining he cannot abandon the dog who is his companion, for his own happiness, while he is alive.

Today, from CNN:

The two German Shepherds belonging to President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden were returned to the Biden family home in Delaware ..,. Major, who is 3 years old, is the younger of the two Biden dogs, and has been known to display agitated behavior on multiple occasions, including jumping, barking, and “charging” at staff and security, according to the people CNN spoke with about the dog’s demeanor at the White House. The older of Biden’s German Shepherds, Champ, is approximately 13 and has slowed down physically due to his advanced age.

So the 13-year-old dog will die without the human companions on whom he has depended for 13 years.

Background enthusiasm from November and contrast to the hated dictator… “Biden to Restore a White House Tradition of Presidential Pets” (NYT):

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is expected to restore a time-honored tradition of having a presidential pet at the White House.

At a February 2019 rally in El Paso, Mr. Trump said that he didn’t have a dog because he didn’t have time, and felt it would be “phony” for him to get one for political reasons. “You do love your dogs, don’t you?” Mr. Trump said. “I wouldn’t mind having one, honestly, but I don’t have any time. How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?”

“Biden tells NASA engineer Indian Americans are ‘taking over the country’” (New York Post):

“It’s amazing. Indian-descent Americans are taking over the country — you, my vice president, my speechwriter,” Biden told Swati Mohan, NASA’s guidance and controls operations lead for the Mars Perseverance rover landing.

In May, Biden walked back comments telling voters they “ain’t black” if they supported a candidate other than him.

He said in August that blacks are less diverse thinkers than Hispanics.

Fair to say that, despite the above sentiments about the impending take-over, President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden, M.D. will not advocate for the Mahabharata to be taught in our schools (should they ever reopen)?

A photo from the reverse journey, starting with a small-scale breeder saying goodbye to an 8-week-old Samoyed:

Leo, now 10 weeks old, has been #MarkedSafe from the Bidens and is receiving all of the love to which white privilege entitles him at a friend’s secure compound.

Related:

  • “In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.” (TIME)
  • “I want a world where Frank junior and all the Frank juniors can sit under a shady tree, breathe the air, swim in the ocean, and go into a 7-11 without an interpreter.” — Lieutenant Frank Drebin, 1991 (video)
  • “Which dog breeds will homeowners insurance not cover?”: The most commonly excluded dog breeds are rottweilers, pit bulls, German shepherds, chow chows, and many wolf breeds.
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What is a good 32-inch 4K monitor?

by philg

Five years ago I purchased two Samsung 32-inch 4K computer monitors for $1300 each. These UD970s boasted “99.5% Adobe RGB and 100% sRGB Color Compliance”, which I thought would make them good for editing photos. They’re also reasonably bright, at 350 nits. Unfortunately, one now has a vertical line permanently stuck to cyan, about 1/3rd of the way in from the left. The other one has a flaky power supply and turns itself on and off at random.

I can’t go with a fashionable curved monitor because I had a treadmill next to a chair and, in theory, want to be able to drive setup from either the left or right side of the desk. So it needs to be a primary and secondary monitor of roughly 32″ in size.

One thing that might be interesting is a monitor with built-in speakers so that I can clear the speakers and amp (optical digital in to speaker-level out) off my desk. It is rare that I listen to anything where high sound quality is required.

Here are some ideas, based on Amazon ranking:

  • LG 32UN500-W (includes built-in speakers), VA panel rather than IPS, $350 (“Amazon’s Choice” but maybe that is based on gaming performance and I am not planning to game). 350 nits. No USB ports! In a world where everyone needs a webcam for Zoom-during-lockdown, how does it make sense to exclude the USB hub function from the monitor?
  • Samsung LS32AM702UNXZA (built-in speakers), which has “Wireless DeX” that promises “a full PC experience, without any PC” (put phone applications on the big screen), $400; see “Mobile Phone As Home Computer” (2005) for why this is close to my personal dream. Possible deal-killer: only 250 nits (also a VA panel). Three USB-A ports and one USB-C for keeping the desktop clutter-free.
  • LG 32UN650-W (built-in speakers), IPS panel, no USB. $500.
  • LG 32UN880-B (built-in speakers), IPS panel. $650. Comes with an “ergo stand” that clamps to the back of the desk, thus freeing up desk space for additional clutter. Has a handful of USB-A and USB-C connectors on the back.

After I get at least one new one, I could maybe have some fun with the kids trying to assemble a single working Samsung out of the two broken ones (panel from one and power supply, etc., from the other?).

Here’s a question for genius readers? Why aren’t there OLED computer monitors? Problems with burn-in, you say? You’d have pixels burned to standard user interface elements? What if the monitor were 10 percent oversized horizontally and vertically? Have the 4K image slowly float among the corners, which would ensure that the pixels along the edges got some completely dark time. (LG already seems to do a weak version of this with its OLED TVs; they call it Screen Shift.) What about central pixels? Have the monitor and/or video card watch for extended periods of constant illumination (maybe it would be white since so many documents have white backgrounds) and do some selective dimming as necessary.

The LG “Ergo: design”:

Update: It wouldn’t have been simple to mount the Ergo on my particular desk, so I got the LG 32UN650-W (a $500 IPS monitor). The built-in speakers far exceeded my expectations… for tinniness. They are unusable for music, YouTube sound tracks, etc. I guess they’re a good emergency backup in case my external amp (Nuforce DIA, purchased in 2012 and now discontinued) or Audioengine P4 speakers fail and I need to be on a Zoom call. I never calibrated the Samsung monitor (the one that still works, but has a stuck line), but photos appear brighter and bluer on it. Comparing to the iPhone 12 Pro Max, on which the photos originated, the LG is a little closer.

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Is coronavirus reading my blog and trying to make me look stupid?

by philg

From February 16, 2021, Is it double-masking or Joe Biden’s presidency that has beaten coronavirus?, which contained the following chart:

I felt confident enough that this strong trend would continue that I wrote:

As promised, Joe Biden has shut down the coronavirus. And, not only has he shut down coronavirus in the U.S., he’s defeated this pathogen on a planetary scale.

How about the same New York Times page today? The global chart:

What if we look locally instead of globally? Cases have continued to fall in the U.S., but at a slower rate of decline than in mid-February.

Other than “Philip is stupid,” how do we explain the recent slight upward trend worldwide?

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A 7-year-old contemplates the government’s $1.9 trillion gift to the American People

by philg

A bedtime scene:

  • 7-year-old: Joe Biden is going to send us money.
  • Mom: No. Joe Biden is going to take money from us and send it to other people. Our income is too high to qualify for the money that Joe Biden is sending out.
  • 7-year-old: You and Dad should stop working then, so that you can get the money instead of paying the money.

Which reminds me… what is actually in this bill? It is supposedly about $1,400 checks for most Americans (do children, retirees, and those already on welfare get checks?)? But if we divide $1.9 trillion by 308 million (Census-estimated population of 330 million minus the 22 million undocumented who presumably won’t qualify for a federal program organized by Social Security number), we get $6,169 per documented American. Plainly, the majority of this $1.9 trillion is going somewhere other than into average Americans’ pockets.

(Does it make sense to pay the same amount to a government worker who has been paid in full to stay home and work a few hours per day as it does to a self-employed Uber driver whose income has been reduced and whose job requires leaving the house and being exposed to COVID-19?)

From the New York Times:

It would inject vast amounts of federal resources into the economy, including one-time direct payments of up to $1,400 for hundreds of millions of Americans, jobless aid of $300 a week to last through the summer, money for distributing coronavirus vaccines and relief for states, cities, schools and small businesses struggling during the pandemic.

Beyond the immediate aid, the bill, titled the American Rescue Plan, is estimated to cut poverty by a third this year and would plant the seeds for what Democrats hope will become an income guarantee for children. It would potentially cut child poverty in half, through a generous expansion of tax credits for Americans with children — which Democrats hope to make permanent — increases in subsidies for child care, a broadening of eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, and an expansion of food stamps and rental assistance.

The last part sounds like a continuation of the trend discussed in When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children? (2015). Going forward, the childless will be mined out even more thoroughly and made to work even longer hours to take over what would have been the costs of rearing children. I also wonder if this will make being a family court entrepreneur more lucrative relative to working. State child support formulae won’t change. Having sex with a dentist, for example, should still yield $1-2 million in Massachusetts. But the plaintiff who collects child support and works a few hours per week will now also be entitled to additional tax credits and taxpayer-funded child care. Instead of building the spending power of a dentist by having sex with three dentists, it might be possible to obtain the spending power of a dentist by having sex with two dentists (especially if income tax rates also go up; remember that child support is not taxable). Going to dental school may not look so smart anymore.

How does this spending compare to the Collapse of 2008?

Its eye-popping cost is just shy of the $2.2 trillion stimulus measure that became law last March … Even with changes, the bill remained more than than double the size of the roughly $800 billion stimulus package that Congress approved in 2009, when Mr. Biden was vice president, to counter the toll of the Great Recession.

So Americans are spending more than 4X at the federal level on coronapanic compared to what we spent cleaning up after our unwise enthusiasm for subprime mortgages.

What about the only enterprise in the U.S. that couldn’t figure out how to reopen?

$130 billion to primary and secondary schools

Rewarding public schools’ lack of effort with $130 billion will certainly not encourage them to repeat their performance during the next wave of coronavariants! (Alternatively, why not give the $130 billion to the schools that actually reopened no later than, say, September 1, 2020?)

Fair to say that this $1.9 trillion spending package will address every bumper sticker on the back of this car? (from January 2020)

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White privilege for canines

by philg

In a group chat, a friend posted a picture of the Samoyed puppy he hopes to adopt. Here’s Alex the puppy, from 1996:

Response from another friend:

I am disturbed by the whiteness of your dog. Not a speck of brown. And that smug look on his face. Gloating in his entitlement. He needs a shock collar so he can experience the life of a BIPOC dog. A shock whenever police are near for example. A shock for social justice.

Another exchange from the same group…

White guy: “Koreans do not like big dogs” I am told.

(immediately following) Immigrant from Korea: Small dogs much more tender.

A participant wrote about taking his teenage son to the Kennedy Space Center. Asked what he’d learned, the lad replied “I learned that the Shuttle was primarily designed by women, black guys, and Asians.” (For the tourists NASA has produced a bunch of reenactment videos with present-day actors pretending to be 1970s engineers.)

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Fauci: not everyone in the military is a hero

by philg

There are more than 2 million members of the U.S. military.

Let’s start out with the heroes… a transient A-10 at our local Air Force base, back in October:

And let’s hope that the pilot has been triply heroic now by agreeing to two vaccine shots!

An inconvenient truth from America’s top scientist: just as not everyone in the military can be a combat pilot, it seems that not everyone in the military can be a hero, contrary to what we’ve been told. “Fauci Says Military Who Refuse Covid-19 Vaccine Are ‘Part Of The Problem’ After High Rate Of Service Members Refuse Jab” (Forbes🙂

… the U.S. military is one of a number of frontline professions reporting startlingly high rates of vaccine refusal, despite clear evidence that the vaccines are safe and effective.

“You’ve got to think of your own health, which is really very important, but you got to think about your societal obligation,” Fauci said at a virtual town hall for Blue Star Families, a non-profit focused on helping military families.

Out of 2 million, how many have been felled by what science tells us is a pathogen that requires the most dramatic adjustments to human society since the Black Death of 1348?

The U.S. military, which has been deployed around the country to assist with the pandemic response, has struggled with Covid-19 outbreaks, recording 163,574 cases and 24 deaths throughout the pandemic.

(For comparison, NHTSA says that several hundred U.S. military personnel die in traffic accidents each year, an example of the general rule that I articulated a year ago: Why do we care about COVID-19 deaths more than driving-related deaths?)

If U.S. military personnel could cut their driving by 10 percent, therefore, they could save more lives than by taking a vaccine that was 100 percent effective against COVID-19. So maybe the “you’ve got to think of your own health” advice from Dr. Fauci is medically unsound (i.e., better to spend an afternoon coming up with ways to cut driving miles per year than to drive to a vaccine clinic). Fauci adds, however, that it is each service member’s “societal obligation.” Contrary to Dr. Fauci’s own previous statement, COVID-19 isn’t actually dangerous to a healthy 35-year-old enlisted soldier, but, without a vaccine, he/she/ze/they could be a carrier:

Vaccines are the “best and most important intervention we have” to stop the pandemic, he said, together with public health measures like masking and social distancing.

“Because by getting infected, even though you may not know it, you may be inadvertently transmitting the infection to someone else, even though you have no symptoms,” Fauci said, adding: “in reality, like it or not, you’re propagating this outbreak.”

So… vaccines reduce infection and transmission to the point that everyone has a societal obligation to test out an “investigational” pharmaceutical?

I.e., from the same doctor/government official: (a) the vaccine is so effective at preventing transmission that those who face almost no personal risk from the virus must take it, (b) the vaccine is so ineffective at preventing transmission (absent a nasopharynx removal), that Americans should continue to keep their lives on hold until the PCR machines stop giving us numbers that we don’t want to hear.

And don’t forget to wear a mask after you’ve dead… (from our neighborhood, October 25, 2020):

Related:

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Gender studies: Maverique or Nuetrois?

by philg

An applicant for a Vermont state-sponsored job was confronted with the following form:

Note that it is unclear whether Nuetrois is a new gender identity or simply a variant spelling of the familiar gender identity Neutrois.

How about Maverique?

Maverique is a gender identity that is characterized by autonym towards manhood or womanhood, while having the internal conviction that it is unrelated or not derived from none of the binary genders,[1] while this is not a genderlessness or a gender apathy nor a gender neutrality.

That’s from the Simple English Wikipedia.

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Traveling to scold the COVID sinners

by philg

A Maskachusetts resident who has achieved Super Karen status when it comes to advocacy of masks and shutdown (daily Facebook postings for our full year (so far) of “14 days to flatten the curve”) went down to Wicked Florida for the February school break that we have here. He hung his phone out of a car window and made a video of people mixing in various open-to-the-street venues on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale, captioned

Wonder what happens if you party like it’s 1999…you get the highest virus transmission rate in the country. Looks like fun though I think I’ll just keep on driving!

Among the various comments, one from a Floridian:

in your statement above, “because these folks ignore the rules they are going to cause a problem and creat a backlash that will cause shutdowns and restrictions”. Aren’t you also doing that by out of state travel?

My answer to her:

I think [he] is working in an established literary tradition. Devout Christians, for example, used to go to whorehouses, strip clubs, and gay bars so that they could then write about the awful sins that were taking place.

Now that Christianity is on the wane here in the U.S., are posts like this guy’s evidence that Shutdown Karenhood is one of the replacements?

From a club in Miami, end of January:

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The emergency continues on two fronts: insurrection and coronaplague

by philg

The 2,200 members of the Capitol Police and 3,800 officers of the D.C. Police and the FBI and the Secret Service are not sufficient to protect our nation from an ongoing insurrectionmergency. “Capitol Police Call For Extension Of National Guard Help” (NPR):

U.S. Capitol Police requested a 60-day extension for a portion of the National Guard troops currently in Washington, D.C., Thursday as the threat of a possible attack from militia groups looms over the city.

How are we doing in Year 2 of “14 Days to Flatten the Curve”? “It’s Too Soon to Lift COVID Restrictions: Fauci” (U.S. News):

Coronavirus restrictions should not be lifted until the daily toll of new U.S. cases falls below 10,000, “and maybe even considerably less than that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday.

The last time the United States saw that low a number was almost a year ago. The daily case count hasn’t fallen below 50,000 since mid-October, and the seven-day average on Wednesday was more than 64,000, CNN reported.

Who wants to make a prediction as to when positive PCR tests (“cases”) will fall below 10,000 per day? (let’s say that it needs to be a 7-day moving average of 10,000/day so that we exclude reporting glitches)

Given that Americans love to run PCR tests, even on those who have zero symptoms, my guess is “never”. Example: friends in NYC are trying to sort out a cancer question regarding the mom. A coronaplague test was required before she could get a follow-up cancer test. She tested positive and therefore her cancer appointments were canceled. One of her two children tested positive. (The husband is vaccinated so he refused to participate in the festival of testing.) She never had any Covid-19 symptoms, but the family remembered that both kids had slight sore throats a week or two before the test. As long as we have a lot of checkpoints at state borders (the Maskachusetts travel order, for example), national borders, schools (can’t return without a Covid test), hospitals (can’t get treatment without a Covid test), etc., if we’re still running PCR at the same number of cycles we should still have at least 10,000 positives per day forever.

(Separately, consider this NYC family. They’ve endured a year of lockdown in an apartment. Their kids haven’t seen the inside of a school since March 2020. They’ve avoided gatherings with friends and family. Now the mom and the kids have exactly the same medical status that they would have had if there had never been any kind of shutdown or masquerade. Aside from wars, in all of U.S. history, has there ever been a sacrifice more meaningless and useless?)

From December, approaching the Hudson River Corridor from Teterboro (a VFR interlude in an instrument practice flight in a Cirrus):

Related:

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Wrong again: Chinese-built RVs are not cheaper

by philg

Me in 2005: “Ideas for Building RVs in China”. I figured that the Chinese would be able to build competitive basic motorhomes at prices lower than what American firms charge because so much hand labor is involved.

(On the blog post associated with this, a reader was way ahead of the curve:

I think you are drawing the market too narrowly by saying that your product is “Intended for a married couple with two children to go camping.” What about shooting for a market that includes “a family of four to go camping”, which could include gay and lesbian couples and their kids? I would think they would be equally, if not more, likely to want to camp (a gay friend of mine recently spent a weekend at a “gay” campground in Texas) as straight folk. However, they would not fall within your “married” categtory because they are not married, due to homophobic folk in their home states who fear that to permit that would lead to the demise of the straight marriage. Please excuse the brief political rant, but my main point is, no need to target such a narrow market.

Today she would be considered a hater for not including the trans and other folks within the LGBTQIA+ rainbow?)

Instead of same-but-cheaper, it looks as though the Chinese are innovating in ways that Americans couldn’t have imagined, but the prices are actually higher. See “An Entire Second Floor Pops Out of this Tiny RV, Complete with a Working Elevator to Get Up There” (Gizmodo):

The SAIC Maxus Life Home V90 Villa Edition, designed and built in China, appears to offer the best of both mobile worlds. The vehicle has a relatively small footprint (it’s only slightly larger than what you see most van-lifers driving around in), but it employs slide-out walls to greatly increase the floor space to around 215 square feet inside while the RV is parked. There’s a fairly spacious sleeping berth located above the driver’s cab which leaves more room in the back for a large L-shaped couch and a respectably sized kitchen. … Where the V90 really wows, however, is the sunroom that automatically extends from the roof giving the RV an entire second floor of living space, including a walk-out balcony.

You can potentially convince SAIC Maxus to build one for you if you’re willing to cough up a little over $413,000, and whatever shipping costs are needed to export it outside of China, plus whatever additional upgrades are needed to legally drive it on US roads.

Here’s a photo:

(Should the gal above be a little more, um, robust in order to fit in with the typical American RV traveler?)

A similar-length U.S.-made Winnebago is about $172,000, i.e., less than half as much. So it seems that I have been proven wrong yet again.

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