Author: philg

New York Times hires a grandmother-age writer to expound on casual sex

by philg

“I Still Believe in the Power of Sexual Freedom” (New York Times, August 16):

At the tail end of 2016, I ended an eight-year relationship about six years too late. Our marriage was modern and progressive by most standards: We experimented with nonmonogamy; my partner did more laundry than I did. And yet I found myself unable to admit a simple fact: Our sex, it turned out, was bad.

Women’s right to sexual satisfaction is taken as much more of a given

How did I find myself in a marriage filled with bad sex? I was as equipped as anyone could be to seek out real erotic freedom, and yet I still spent my high school and college years feeling uncertain about how to do so. I idolized Samantha from “Sex and the City,” and I also wished my sex was more meaningful. I wanted sex to be meaningful, but I was also turned off by the whole heterosexual dance in which women demand commitment in exchange for sex and men acquiesce. I was turned off by the dance, and yet I clung to the cultural validation offered to married heterosexual couples, staying way too long at the expense of my own happiness.

When I left my marriage … to pursue my true desires, …

I do believe that reaching for more sexual freedom, not less — the freedom to have whatever kind of sex we want, including, yes, casual sex and choking sex and porny sex — is still the only way we can hope to solve the problems of our current sexual landscape.

(NYT: To be “modern and progressive”, a marriage requires that any man involved do most of the laundry while the woman is out having sex with her friends and this arrangement continues until the woman files her divorce lawsuit.)

Wikipedia says that the author, Nona Willis Aronowitz, is 38 years old. In other words, a grandmother for all but a handful of the 300,000 years of human history. And the NYT has enlisted this grandmother-age individual to write about casual sex.

This is not to say that I think there should be an age limit for Tinder and Grindr users. I’m merely surprised that there is a mass market of people who want to read about the sexual exploits of humans who are best suited, biologically, to be grandparents.

Very loosely related… the local Walmart and Hershey’s invite us to celebrate anyone who shows up using “she” as a pronoun. This would, presumably, include elderly Tinder users.

Related:

  • Christmas Cake, a Japanese term for “A woman 26 years+ who is considered to be past her prime, undesirable, used goods and/or no good.”
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A friend’s teenager learns about the American legal system

by philg

A recent chat group discussion:

  • [18-year-old son] got off his second speeding ticket. Had an attorney. His friend has two tickets and got off neither. He learned a valuable lesson. That the Justice system is best if you have money.
  • That lesson does not apply in family court.

Noted.

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How will Earth’s climate be affected by the Inflation Reduction Act?

by philg

“Biden signs sweeping climate, health care, tax bill into law” (state-sponsored NPR):

President Biden signed Democrats’ hallmark spending bill into law on Tuesday…

The sweeping bill allocates more than $300 billion to be invested in energy and climate reform. It’s the largest federal clean energy investment in U.S. history, although it falls short of what progressive Democrats and climate activists had originally called for.

“This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever — ever — and is going to allow us to boldly take additional steps toward meeting my climate goals,” Biden said.

It includes $60 billion for boosting renewable energy infrastructure in manufacturing, like solar panels and wind turbines, and includes tax credits for electric vehicles and measures to make homes more energy efficient.

Democrats say the bill will lower greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, based on 2005 levels, by the end of the decade, which falls short of Biden’s original goal.

It looks like we’ve already cut emissions a bit via the miracle of sending all of our manufacturing to Mexico and China (epa.gov):

By 2030, thanks to just $300 billion in spending (less than a month of coronapanic spending? less than the total fraud that Americans perpetrated against the U.S. Treasury in obtaining COVID-tagged funds?), the U.S. economy will be reconfigured to push only about 4 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere rather than today’s 6 gigatons.

Here’s a question… how will this change the Earth’s climate? Can beachfront property owners now rest easy (and maybe send thank-you cards to working class taxpayers in the Midwest who funded the protection of their $20 million houses)?

Climate modelers love to model. Did anyone in the climate-industrial complex plug Joe Biden’s clean new USA into a model and figure out whether Houston becomes a pleasant place to spend summers?

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Inflation is an emergency so I will start cutting back in 2026

by philg

“Passage of Inflation Reduction Act gives Medicare historic new powers over drug prices” (CNBC, August 12) is a headline that matches my understanding of the Inflation Reduction Act that addresses the emergency situation facing Americans. The Federal government will no longer necessarily pay huge $$ for mediocre pharma (or Bad Pharma!) and we’ll have something more like the British system where a committee asks “How much are the additional life-years obtained by use of this patented drug, compared to the effects of cheap generics that are similar, actually worth?”

Digging into the article, however, we find that no government worker need get off the sofa to do any negotiation for a few years. The soonest that taxpayers might spend a little less as a result of negotiations is 2026 and only 10 drugs will be affected.

Individual analogy: “My compulsive spending has resulted in a financial disaster so I’m cutting up my credit cards… four years from now.”

Returning to that CNBC article… What if you’re not old?

Lawmakers on the left such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, have criticized the legislation for leaving out the overwhelming majority of Americans who are not on Medicare.

“If anybody thinks that as a result of this bill we’re suddenly going to see lower prices for Medicare you are mistaken,” Sanders said during a speech in the Senate earlier this week. “If you’re under 65, this bill will not impact you at all and the drug companies will be able to continue on their merry way and raise prices to any level they want.”

Who should do the negotiation on behalf of the beleaguered American taxpayer? The obvious choice: Martin Shkreli!

Related:

  • “The Journalist and the Pharma Bro” (Elle): Over the course of nine months, beginning in July 2018, Smythe quit her job, moved out of the apartment, and divorced her husband. What could cause the sensible Smythe to turn her life upside down? She fell in love with a defendant whose case she covered. In fact, she broke the news of his arrest. It was a scoop that ignited the internet, because her love interest, now life partner, is not just any defendant, but Martin Shkreli, the so-called “Pharma Bro” and online provocateur, who increased the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent overnight and made headlines for buying a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for a reported $2 million. Shkreli, who was convicted of fraud in 2017, is now serving seven years in prison.
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When will Governor Abbott send buses full of migrants to Atherton, Californa?

by philg

“Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his,” said Ronald Reagan. I wonder if there is something similar going on with low-skill immigration. It was a minor, but certainly manageable, problem when millions of migrants walked across the southern border and settled into Texas to wait for the decades-long process of resolving an asylum claim (during which time multiple generations of U.S. citizens might be born to the asylum-seekers and their descendants). Any time that a bus full of migrants arrives in a Progressive neighborhood, on the other hand, it is a crisis. See Welcoming migrants in our nation’s capital and Progressives in Maine want U.S. to admit more low-skill migrants… and, for a more recent example, “Seeking Asylum in Texas; Sent to New York to Make a Political Point” (NYT, August 6, 2022):

Gov. Greg Abbott chartered a bus to send a group of migrants to New York, where Mayor Eric Adams said asylum seekers were overwhelming the city’s homeless shelters.

Since April, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has been shipping newly arrived asylum seekers to immigrant-friendly Democratic cities on the East Coast to try to pressure the Biden administration into cracking down at the border. Mr. Abbott’s press office said the bus that arrived in Manhattan on Friday, which left Eagle Pass, Wednesday afternoon, held “the first group of migrants bused to New York City from Texas.”

Like Washington, New York is “the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement on Friday. “I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.”

Last month, after the city violated the right-to-shelter law by failing to provide rooms for some people who had come to the family intake shelter in the Bronx, Mr. Adams blamed asylum seekers sent from Texas and Arizona.

(If anyone who is human has a legal right to shelter, why is the mayor of New York is “blaming” people for claiming this right?)

The Silicon Valley titans who control public discourse in the U.S. continue to support low-skill immigration into Texas and low-income neighborhoods around the U.S. I wonder what would happen if the rich Progressives were to personally encounter some low-skill migrants. “The billionaire famous for his early investment in Facebook wants America to build again—just not housing in his backyard” (Fortune):

In 2020, when the pandemic was going strong, billionaire Marc Andreessen turned heads by publishing an essay on his company website titled “It’s Time to Build.”

“I expect this essay to be the target of criticism,” he wrote while expressing a mindset that has come to be called YIMBY, for “yes in my backyard.”

“You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities,” he wrote. “We can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential — which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future.” Then he expressed dissatisfaction with the state of urban architecture. “We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?”

Andreessen also lives in Atherton, California, America’s richest town,

Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is known for being an early investor in major tech companies including Meta, GitHub, Skype, and Twitter. In June, Andreessen and his wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen wrote an email expressing their opposition to a proposal that would increase zoning capacity for multi-family home construction in Atherton.

“I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” the two wrote in their email, signed by both, as reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.”

Previously, “the venture capitalist said any proposal to “choke off” immigration “makes me sick to my stomach” (from “Asked why he supports Clinton over Trump, Marc Andreessen responds: ‘Is that a serious question?’”). What would happen if a Greg Abbott caravan of migrants showed up in front of Mr. Andreessen’s house and asked for the housing that is their legal and moral right?

Separately, the robot geniuses behind Twitter and Facebook are showing me a lot of information about Beto O’Rourke, running to replace Governor Abbott in Texas. I’m wondering if real estate owners in Florida should be donating to Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign. What could possibly be better for Florida real estate values than a true believer in the tax-and-spend-and-lockdown religion taking power in Texas? Imagine if all of the California businesses that have moved to Austin, Dallas, and Houston (HP!) in the past few years had instead moved to Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. Here’s Mr. O’Rourke promising to spend more money on government programs that are already among the most expensive (Medicaid and unionized public schools) while farcically promising that taxes will be reduced at the same time that spending is increased.

Here’s Mx. O’Rourke’s 2021 demand to Follow Science by keeping Texas locked down:

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The Pfizer CEO gets COVID-19 after four shots

by philg

Here’s a puzzler:

Why does the Pfizer CEO want to tell people that four shots of a purported “vaccine” from his/her/zir/their own company are so ineffective that he/she/ze/they needs to take an emergency use authorized medicine designed to prevent obese elderly unvaccinated people from being killed by COVID-19? He/she/ze/they got four shots and nonetheless faced an “emergency” situation requiring an experimental drug?

The big questions…. First, why wasn’t Dr. Bourla (a veterinarian so he/she/ze/they knows a lot about ivermectin!) smart enough to never take a COVID-19 test that could call into question his/her/zir/their company’s product? Second, assuming that such a test was somehow unavoidable, why disclose the reason for taking a week off? Why not simply say “I prefer not to work for the next five days?” Or “I have read so much about opioid addiction that I need to stay home and consume Pfizer’s own opioid for a week”?

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Zillow’s inflation forecasts

by philg

From February 2022, when we were dumb enough to sign a contract to buy a house:

The market will go up 23%.

In April, when we were dumb enough to close on a house:

The market has gone up a little and will go up 18.3 percent more.

In June, Zillow is busy celebrating Pride Month (from 2020: “They’re bold, bright and one-of-a-kind — they’re the homes we love, Pride-month style. We may not be celebrating together in person, but we’ll never stop celebrating what’s beautiful.”), but the company’s robot still has time to say that the forecast is 14.6 percent:

August 5, 2022, the “typical home value” is up by a staggering amount and the forecast is 7.8 percent more:

August 14, 2022, the “typical home value” is still up (yet houses have seemingly been slow to sell for a few months now and there have been many price cuts) and, with the Inflation Reduction Act nearly signed by the vigorous Vanquisher of Corn Pop, the inflation forecast is down to 5.3 percent:

These forecasts aren’t mutually inconsistent. If we take the starting “typical home value” and inflate it by the forecast 23.1 percent increase we get $647,098 for the expected typical home value in February 2023. If, indeed, the current value is already $627,655, the forecast 5.3 percent inflation rate (to August 2023) will make that happen.

Do we believes these precise forecasts? If so, should Joe Biden ask Zillow to come in and take over the Fed?

Separately, speaking of house price inflation, it occurs to me that the capital gains tax applied to homeowners does not make any sense. Suppose that Dana Dentist, a gender-neutral driller of teeth, purchased a 4BR house for $500,000 fifteen years ago. Dana falls in love with someone he/she/ze/they met at a Pride March in another city. Dana sells his/her/zir/their house for $1.5 million (in 2022 mini-dollars) and buys an identical size/quality house in the new sweetheart’s city, which just so happens to cost $1.5 million. Dana is no better off. He/she/ze/they has exactly the same size and quality of house. Yet the IRS now hits him/her/zir/them for capital gains and Obamacare investment income tax on $750,000 (the first $250,000 of gain on a primary residence is exempt). There may be state capital gains taxes to pay as well if Dana did not live in Texas, Florida, or a similar state.

Note that this wouldn’t happen to a commercial property owner. If he/she/ze/they sold House 1, which had been rented out, and bought House 2 in order to rent it out, the sale/purchase would be done in a 1031 exchange and there would be no tax on the fictitious capital gain until, perhaps, House 2 was sold and not replaced.

What’s the downside of the Feds and states taxing fictitious capital gains? By making moving more expensive, the policy discourages people from moving for better career opportunities and, thus, reduces the overall growth rate of the U.S. economy (not as much as our family law system does, but at least to some extent).

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The laptop class migrates from chronic Lyme to Long COVID

by philg

“Willed Helplessness Is the American Condition” (The Atlantic, August 4, 2022, by Meghan O’Rourke, the editor of The Yale Review):

If a pandemic is a lens onto how we understand our moral responsibility to the community, this moment of risk discourse is revealing that we don’t care about one another very much. … On the day last spring that a federal judge ruled against the CDC’s mask mandates on public transportation, I got tangled up trying to adjust my son’s mask before entering his kindergarten, the chill air biting my fingers.

Deplorable behavior is everywhere, even in states that are free of Deplorables:

In the third year of the coronavirus pandemic, we as a nation have largely resumed life as normal: We’ve dropped mask mandates, made information about case rates harder to access, adopted the sunny view that Omicron is “mild.”

I have noticed this as well. Facebookers who spent more than two years demanding that others wear masks, hate Trump, accept the Sacrament of Fauci (4 shots minimum!), etc. now post pictures of themselves, unmasked, in jammed airliners on the way to domestic and international vacations (i.e., purely optional trips). Why didn’t they stay home or take a car-based trip with contactless hotel check-in and drive-through food if they consider stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to be a moral duty?

This is not the Yale-based laptopper’s first encounter with a debilitating long-term mysterious ailment:

I had a condition that closely resembled long COVID for more than a decade, a result of untreated Lyme disease. It manifested as brain fog, fatigue, dizziness, and the kind of dysfunction of the nervous system that COVID-19 can trigger.

How many of us are the walking wounded?

In May, the CDC released a study suggesting that nearly one in five people ages 18 to 64 who contract COVID-19 may develop long COVID. That suggests that currently 7.5 percent of American adults are living with ongoing effects of COVID. A March report from the Government Accountability Office found that up to 23 million Americans had developed long COVID.

(Maybe the answer is to move to Florida? All of our neighbors, when asked, report having had COVID-19. None complain of any symptoms that lasted beyond 10 days.)

What is the solution to a terrible situation that has developed in states that lived under mask and vaccine orders for more than two years? More mask orders and vaccine shots:

At the very least, we could implement mask mandates when cases rise and prioritize safer air in public buildings and public transportation. (Personally, I think we should all be wearing masks on public transportation until we’ve got a firmer grasp on long COVID.) We could put more resources into booster campaigns and help people stay informed about caseloads so that they can make informed decisions about risk. As a nation, we ought to acknowledge the scope of long COVID and grapple with the social consequences of a mass-disabling or mass-deterioration event, as Ben Mazer has called it in this magazine.

Let’s have a look at the author’s Twitter feed. She seems to have traveled to France recently. The best way to avoid COVID-19 is to be one of 350 people crammed into an Airbus fuselage?

Back in June, the author noted that the best way to avoid COVID-19 is to be the subject of abortion care at 24 weeks:

(Why is it “women” who receive abortion care?)

Mx. O’Rourke demonstrates a keen grasp of Constitutional law:

(The commenters do not point out that there is nothing in the Constitution corresponding to the Second Amendment that has been such a bitter disappointment to those who follow Science and, therefore, gun ownership and the provision of abortion care to pregnant people are not comparably situated in the split between federal and state law.)

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Why was Hadi Matar wearing a mask at his arraignment?

by philg

A photo from “Hadi Matar, suspect in Salman Rushdie stabbing, pleads not guilty to attempted murder, assault” (New York Post):

The article gives some additional detail regarding this attendee of a mostly peaceful literary event:

Hadi Matar, 24, was charged with attempted murder and assault and entered the plea during a proceeding at the Chautauqua County Courthouse…

He’s 24 years old and charged with attempted murder, according to the newspaper. Shouldn’t a potential SARS-CoV-2 infection be the least of his worries? (And isn’t that a proven-useless cloth mask, in any case?)

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NASA at Oshkosh

by philg

I hate to be the person who says that government should be smaller except when it comes to spending on his/her/zir/their personal passion. On the other hand, research is an area where Econ 101 says that companies will inevitably underinvest and, therefore, society will underinvest unless government steps in. Any fundamental breakthrough is going to be copied by competitors, which means that the developer of a breakthrough is not going to get the full benefit of the investment.

Much of aviation today is based on research done by NACA, the predecessor to NASA. For example, the airfoil on a typical wing will be a NACA-developed shape. NASA is still in the business of helping the aviation industry, albeit as a pimple on the butt of the womanned space program, as measured by funding.

NASA had its own pavilion at EAA AirVenture. The front neatly illustrates America’s progression from a slender 1960s spacefaring nation to an obese scooter-dependent one:

Unique among exhibitors at Oshkosh, NASA keeps the coronapanic flame alive. #Science says that a simple surgical mask is ample protection against 100,000 daily visitors spewing out aerosol Omicron:

At first glance, NASA is seemingly working on one of my pet ideas: ADS-B should sequence airplanes at nontowered airports? (2018) In talking to the folks at the pavilion, however, I learned that the goals of their Data & Reasoning Fabric and DANTi are far more grand and nebulous. Instead of solving the near-term problem of ADS-B being useless at preventing the mid-air collisions that are actually likely, NASA will solve the problem of a Jetsons-like flight environment in which the number of aircraft is 100X what we have today.

One NASA program that struck me as valuable is Fit2Fly. All of the people making heavy super drones for package delivery, etc., are working on certification and sales. NASA asks “What about maintenance? What happens after a few months when these things start to break and there is no pilot on board to hear and feel an abnormal vibration?”

How about reducing fuel consumption for commercial air travel? NASA promises a more extended timeline than the companies that have been harvesting $billions via SPACs. A hybrid turboprop airliner will fly in about 3 years and will be commercially available… in 2035(!). The electric motor is just for takeoff and climb and the fuel savings come from having smaller dinosaur blood-powered engines that suffice only for cruise. The result, assuming that the next 13 years pan out as hoped, will be a 10% savings in fuel.

NASA is also bringing back the biplane. The airliner wing will be made long and thin, like a glider’s, and then braced with a strut, like a Cessna 172, so that the long/thin wing doesn’t snap off. The strut itself provides some lift. This will cut fuel consumption by 8-10%.

The most substantial fuel reduction that NASA is hoping to achieve is via SUSAN, a single engine turbofan project with electric motors on the wings that will yield a 25% improvement.

If the agency were returned to its NACA roots, NASA could truly revolutionize general aviation by funding open-source medium-cost low-power turbofan engines, fly-by-wire flight control systems, etc. What’s the agency doing instead? A $1 trillion project to put a golden retriever on Mars. Here’s a poster that was being handed out at Oshkosh:

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