Author: philg

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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Happy 27th birthday to the cable modem

by philg

“Big Cable Company to Offer A High-Speed Internet Link” (New York Times, March 9, 1994):

Continental Cablevision Inc., the nation’s third-largest cable television company, said yesterday that it had begun offering a high-speed link to the Internet data network over the same coaxial cables that carry television channels into the home.

The Internet connection is initially available only to Continental customers in Cambridge, Mass., but company officials said it would eventually be offered to nearly three million customers nationwide. Continental, based in Boston, provides cable service to Westchester County, N.Y., and in California, Idaho and Michigan.

However, at a rate of $125 a month for residential customers, and higher for business customers, the service is unlikely to displace the MTV’s and the Home Box Offices at the top of a 500-channel hit parade, even in Cambridge, the sort of academic-technical redoubt where enthusiasts consider Internet access more important than the telephone.

At the same time, telephone and data-communications companies are constantly expanding the capacity of twisted-pair phone lines and speeding the installation of fiber optic lines, which also offer data-transfer speeds fast enough to handle video signals.

“Cable is a kludge,” remarked Mr. Harris of Jupiter Communications, using a computer term for an inelegant solution to a technical problem. “The market is aching to have everything in full motion, and cable is sort of a middle-of-the-road solution.”

Here we are, 27 years later, and Cambridge, thanks to the miracle of government regulation, still doesn’t have fiber to the home!

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Tip from a self-driving car engineer: don’t choose black

by philg

A friend is shopping for a new car. He happens to have been working for the past five years on various Silicon Valley self-driving car efforts. What’s he looking at for a new car for himself? A C8 Corvette! (Why not the product of the finest minds of Silicon Valley? “Can any expensive car have a worse interior than Tesla? Seems impossible. They shaved every possible penny there.”)

What color? “Anything but black,” he replied. “The Zeus Bronze Metallic also might be too close to black.” What’s wrong with black? “It will be invisible to Lidar. The cameras might see it during the daytime, but it will be dangerous to drive at night because self-driving cars won’t see it.”

Readers: What do you think of the C8 in Zeus Bronze?

Compare to the Red Mist Metallic, which is the most popular color:

Some additional thoughts from our deeply embedded source…

When can we expect the promised age of self-driving cars?

Hard to answer as depends on legislation and business. Let’s go backwards and try to guess. What is the long-term future? Is it (a) autonomous cars try to mix into traffic with humans, or (b) human driving is illegal?

To get to (a), are the steps (1) start selling autonomous to fleet operators, (2) start selling autonomous to citizens, (3) stop making new human-driven cars, hence no wheel, and grandfather some human driven cars

For (1) to happen the cars have to get good enough, for (2) to happen the cars have to get cheap enough, for (3) to happen Biden/Harris will need the power to repurpose the roads for the greatest public good/safety (also nice because now the government will know where all of the citizens are going and when)

My guess is that the industry wants (a) for now but the government will want (b), which makes more efficient use of roads, simplifies the software, and also facilitates tracking everyone.

Right now (2021) self-driving car is expensive and dangerous. Reducing expense is possible once more money goes into the ecosystem, but it remains to be seen how safely they operate. Horse/car analogy does not make sense: man-driven flesh vehicle to man-driven ICE vehicle. Self driving is from man-driven vehicle to software-driven.

Why is this challenge so tough for software?

The problem with mixing software-driven and human-driven vehicles is exemplified by “is that guy watching Netflix while driving going to yield to my left turn?” Hard to get that right.

When will a family be able to buy a self-driving car, then, without a steering wheel and mix it up with human-driven contraptions?

Pure guess 25 years

A Tesla 3-owning friend:

Tesla owners think by 2017. Then by 2019. Then by 2020. Now by 2021. They pay $10,000 for “full self driving” software. Tucker Auto was shut down for less of a scam.

An immigrant from Eastern Europe participating in this discussion:

My father had a self-driving car for a decade in the 80s. It was called a company chauffeur. He couldn’t do much in the car because it is still less convenient. If it is a short drive, you won’t accomplish much. Read the news perhaps, or write a few emails. Phone calls you can make now.

The self-driving software engineer saw the biggest competition as coming from Uber and similar human-driven services. As long as low-skill labor in the U.S. remains cheap due to mass immigration, self-driving tech would have to be both inexpensive and nearly perfect to be competitive.

Shifting gears, so to speak, for a moment… what about the fact that cameras are being driven around 24/7 in vehicles that can stream footage up to the cloud? The government can already get footage from doorbell and house-attached cameras (see “Amazon Ring is creating the surveillance complex” by Mark Hurst). Will a police officer in 10 years be able to say “I want to see what was happening at the intersection of 8th and Main at 10:32 pm” and get footage from all of the self-driving cars that happened to be passing that location at the time?

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