Merry Christmas from the Central Planners

by philg

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Loyal readers will know that I love central planning (seen “Citizens for a Planned Economy,” the political group that I formed after watching the 2012 Presidential debate in which candidates from both parties promised federal intervention) and bureaucratically-managed coronapanic. Today, we celebrate the Christmas gifts of the Maskachusetts Pharaohs to the people, in particular the distribution of COVID-19 tests to “more than 100 municipalities with a larger proportion of families facing financial hardship”. These are characterized as “free” so, presumably, the people themselves will not have to pay for them via taxation.

My favorite part of the mass.gov page is the list of the impoverished towns that will receive “free” tests. Weston, Massachusetts is on the list. Back in 2019, the town had a median household income of $207,702 per year (Census; using pre-Biden dollars). What will the good burghers of Weston do with the test kits? After the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency and Massachusetts National Guard drive away,

Each city or town will determine how best to distribute tests within their community, with an emphasis on increasing access for individuals and families who are facing financial hardship.

“Hospitals Scramble as Antibody Treatments Fail Against Omicron” (NYT, 12/21):

In New York, hospital administrators at NewYork-Presbyterian, N.Y.U. Langone and Mount Sinai all said in recent days that they would stop giving patients the two most commonly used antibody treatments, made by Eli Lilly and Regeneron, according to memos obtained by The Times and officials at the health systems.

Federal health officials plan to assess at the end of this week whether to pause shipments of the Eli Lilly and Regeneron products to individual states, based on how dominant Omicron becomes in different regions of the country, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Already in high demand even before Omicron arose, the supply of sotrovimab is very limited for now. But the situation is likely to improve somewhat in the coming weeks. The Biden administration is in talks with GlaxoSmithKline about securing more doses to be delivered by early next year, the administration official said.

The central planners are getting you antibodies for Christmas, but it might be Christmas 2022…

Related:

  • Trouble in public health paradise… “Mass. Medical Society calls for statewide mask mandate for all indoor public settings” (Boston.com, 12/14): The president of the Massachusetts Medical Society is recommending that state officials require the use of masks in all indoor public settings, regardless of vaccination status, in the face of worrying COVID-19 trends in the commonwealth. The call to bring back an indoor mask mandate came a day after Gov. Charlie Baker said he has “no plans to bring back the statewide mask mandate,” despite the urging of health experts to do so. In recent weeks, Massachusetts has seen a sharp increase in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations to levels that have not been seen since the surge last winter, prompting state officials to order hospitals facing capacity constraints to cut elective procedures by 50 percent. Some municipalities, including Boston, have since brought back indoor mask mandates in response to the COVID-19 trends seen in their local communities. Starting Monday, Salem is also requiring all individuals entering a public or municipal building to wear a face covering, regardless of their vaccination status.
  • Merry Christmas to Israelis who celebrate this holiday… “For a growing number of Jews in Israel, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” (Times of Israel): You ask Yaeli Amir, a seven-year-old Jewish girl growing up in a rural town in Israel, what her favorite holiday is, and she won’t name any of the almost countless Jewish ones. Instead, she’ll say, without hesitation, “Christmas!” (Tisha B’Av is a tougher sell to 7-year-olds?)

15 thoughts on “Merry Christmas from the Central Planners”

  1. The lion kingdom expects to be fully inoculated & naturally immunized against omicron before its booster shot, which took months to find within running distance. After 40 years of dating single women, lions refused to sit in Calif* traffic for 2 hours to get one beyond running distance.

    Based on 50% of common cold symptoms now being omicron & already having 5 colds since November, the deed seems to be done. After so many bird flues, chinese flues 30 years ago, millennials have set an impossible standard of protection.

  2. Merry Christmas! While recovering from Christmas meals, perhaps it is a good time to benefit from the insights of your health central planners:

    https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/food-serving-sizes-get-reality-check

    “The serving sizes listed on the Nutrition Facts label are not recommended serving sizes. By law, serving sizes must be based on how much food people actually consume, and not on what they should eat.”

    So what is the point apart from growing the government bureaucracy? Prior to the #NutritionFacts update, even thin people ate more than the ridiculously small sizes, and the require food intake varies from 1,500 to 3,000+ kcal anyway.

    • I was referring to the 2012 debate between Obama and Romney. It made me realize that both Republicans and Democrats have faith in central planning.

  4. This seems to be a “thing” that goes beyond COVID as well! The other day I was listening to National Public Radio while they celebrated new grants that were awarded to provide free WiFi coverage in the downtown area of places like Great Barrington – so that the poor people in Great Barrington have access to the Internet during COVID.

    “The town’s median household income was $95,490, and the median family income was $103,135.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington,_Massachusetts

    Not as wealthy as Weston, but I really wonder how many poor people there are in Great Barrington who will travel downtown to take advantage of the “free” WiFi so their children can ZOOM their lessons? Why not just take the money and instead put free WiFi in the library (which probably already has it) or just pay the internet connection fees for the truly poor in Great Barrington ?? I wondered.

    Well, it’s also going to help tourism, because high-spending people who like to frequent the boutique shops and marijuana dispensary in Great Barrington will undoubtedly appreciate the free WiFi! They won’t have to spend their doobage money on Roaming Data fees, Ahab!

    https://theorywellness.org/ma/great-barrington-recreational-cannabis-dispensary/?

    I’ll try to find the link to the NPR story celebrating the tech. grants, which were announced by Polito to great extravaganzic glee. One town has recently hired a permanent CIO to oversee the development, so the grant money has created a new job! Oh, here it is:

    https://www.wamc.org/news/2021-12-22/polito-announces-3-5-million-in-it-grant-allocations-during-pittsfield-visit

    Everyone should also notice that WAMC is the radio station whose CEO is Dr. Alan Chartock, who basically reacted to the Great Barrington Declaration as being the fiendish work product of murderous miscreants.

    So these kinds of grants to help the needy are, as our now-President once whispered into the ear of his boss: “…a big f*****g deal” and it ain’t just COVID.

    • Update: Great Barrington doesn’t have one library, it has two! and at least one of them is open from 1-4 PM on Sundays. So why not take the grant money and just add a room to the library for poor people and their children so they can study in the library, which is presumably a very nice, quiet space conducive to learning, instead of putting “free” grant-funded WiFi in the downtown shopping area for the recreational marijuana and boutique shoppers?

      https://gblibraries.org/visit/

    • And sorry for the multiple posts, but if they added a nice, well-ventilated room for the Poor to the library, they could then select the carrier routes in Great Barrington where the poor people with no internet access live, and send them a nice postcard:

      “If you do not have Internet access in your home, we would like you to know that you are always welcome to use our free studying resources, including WiFi and computers you can use to access all of our free online resources, at the LIBRARY.”

      That would cost about $1,500, maybe (there can’t be that many poor people in Great Barrington) and the Librarians would love the company, I’m quite sure.

  5. Alex: If I could take over as Chief Central Planner for the U.S., one of the first things I would do is fund a free mobile data service where any device could get on and consume a small amount of bandwidth (not enough for Zooming into a shut-down school, but enough to stop the death-by-paper-cuts data subscriptions that we would need for all of the devices, e.g., automobiles, that really should have mobile data service, e.g., for maintenance info and software updates). So I think there is a place for government-funded wireless Internet!

    • @Philg: That’s actually not a bad idea. Roaming Data is the insidious killer that actually causes the hardship for people who get cheap smartphones. Verizon is a monster with it. On my semi-new Galaxy A425G (which I still cannot get any 5G on where I live) it comes preloaded with so many apps that deplete the roaming data on your plan, causing you to pay $15/GB for all the extra stuff they try to shove down the pipe. Unless you turn it OFF, application by application, and uninstall the ones you don’t want.

      I appoint you Chief Wireless Roaming Data Czar! Verizon supplies this phone for $5/month but for the average unsophisticated user they will manage to suck probably $500 more out of them in roaming fees in a year. So we need some good enforcement there and a reasonable plan for things like updates and maintenance that’s necessary.

      Good idea, you have my full blessing and I’ll vote for you.

    • Alex: It wouldn’t be targeted at devices actively used by humans (though maybe it would turn out to be so cheap that the bandwidth could be pushed up to support this). I was thinking more like 10,000 bits per second. Enough for every bicycle to say where it was taken after being stolen, for aircraft avionics to download database changes, for a boat or lawnmower to email “my battery is getting low”, etc.

    • @Philg: That’s a good idea also, and it would be much closer to the spirit of a true “public utility” that is supposed to be supplied at low cost as a shared expense, but with a modest scope and reach, to benefit everyone. I would go for that. Also revisit your ideas for a portable and private way for individuals to keep their entire health record history and make it so that different hospital systems can all interoperate with it.

      By the time the bill makes it through reconciliation how long do you think it will be? Lol.

      You’re going to need a very well-disciplined team there, and the lobbyists are going to be all over you like a cheap suit. But I wish you success! You know that I’ve always thought you had a second career in your later life as a public servant in some capacity, and I mean that no snark!

    • @Philg: Actually, I was wondering about navigation system updates the other day. I paid $149 to update the Microsoft SYNC/NAV system on my 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid. You visit a website and buy four DVDs while supplying a serial number from your head unit in the car. A couple of weeks later you get the four DVDs that are product-keyed to your head unit. Then you wait three or four hours while the maps update. Now my NAV system is current as of 2019 and I bought the last edition that is ever going to be available for my car.

      https://ford.navigation.com/home/en_US/FordNA/USD

      Well, the whole thing struck me as extortionary and dumb. The NAV system should be able to update itself and all its maps in a piecemeal fashion because they don’t change that quickly. The main thing I wanted was for new roads that didn’t exist in 2010 or were still “unimproved” to show up on my NAV system in the semi-rural area where I live, but it’s beyond my comprehension why the system cannot “talk” at a relatively low bandwidth and update the maps on a continuous basis, a little piece at a time, so that the whole system stays current but the owner basically never has to do anything.

      THAT would be a real public utility: everyone’s maps stay current automatically.

      Somewhat related: I was in Boston at the end of last summer attending a wedding. In the downtown area I was stuck in a traffic snarl, and the cars were: BMW, Mercedes, Tesla, Tesla, Ford Escape Hybrid, BMW, Mercedes, Tesla. Everyone was honking and yelling because their NAV systems were confused by all the new detours and so forth going on in the downtown area. Nobody knew where they were going! It was hilarious to see all the high dollar hardware brought to its knees by some detour signs and road construction.

    • But the government would know where all its subjects are without any warrant. I’m not so sure this is a good idea.

  6. @Alex
    ” everyone’s maps stay current automatically”
    That’s what the map on your phone is for.

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