Progressive Insurance is Progressive

by philg

I wanted to check on our car insurance, so I went to the progressive.com web site. The #1 priority of the company, as indicated from the position of this information on the page, is a commitment to diversity and inclusion (not actual diversity and inclusion, but a commitment). Measured by screen area and location, this commitment is roughly 100X more important than paying claims:

What do we see on the linked-to page?

Communities of color are #1 in importance (gold medal in the Victimhood Olympics). The LGBTQ community takes silver at #2 (the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is simply left out). Everyone else is “marginalized”.

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New York City attracts refugees from Florida

by philg

In April, Freedom of speech opposite the banner promising freedom of speech shows some of the billboards that New York City had paid to place in Florida, e.g.,

On June 1, the New York Times did a story on two people who moved from Tampa to NYC, just as Eric Adams had hoped. The move was not for the expected reason, however. “New York’s Weed Rush Is Here. They Came to Cash In.”:

For generations, entrepreneurs and dreamers have moved to New York City to strike it big. Now they’re coming to sell a lot of cannabis.

Just as they were getting into a pandemic rhythm of deliveries [of marijuana] and drop-offs, the George Floyd protests took over Tampa’s streets. Every time C. and S. were driving after curfew, they felt as if they might be targeted by police, who were out in greater numbers. During one cannabis delivery, C. noticed a car following him, and he worried it was driven by undercover police officers — either that or counterprotesters; he couldn’t tell. After the unmarked car was joined by five marked police vehicles, he told S., who was in the passenger seat with their delivery of edibles and flower, to throw everything out the window, call their lawyer, call their neighbor. The neighbor told him there were vehicles that looked like unmarked police cars in front of their house.

Concerned about raids and arrests, they decided they had to leave town. … she lobbied hard for New York. They both had relatives there, and a cannabis market was emerging in the city.

In New York, Mayor Eric Adams has proposed that the city invest $4.8 million next year in the local cannabis industry, which is expected to generate nearly $1.3 billion in the first year of legal sales.

This is also an inspiring story about the benefits of immigration:

“My dad’s Ecuadorean,” C. says. “My family’s Ecuadorean. In Miami, there’s not that many Ecuadoreans, so it was nice to be in a neighborhood where things that people talk about or say or the news that might be going on, I can kind of relate to.”

And an inspiring story about hard work:

Once settled, they spent their life savings — thousands of dollars — to buy a package of cannabis from Colorado, hoping that would enable them to establish their New York business. It didn’t. “I’ve been selling marijuana since I was like a teenager in Miami,” C. says. “Every now and then I would do a rookie mistake.” This deal was one of them. They had planned to both sell the cannabis and use some of it for giveaways — which they thought would help them gain a following in Brooklyn — but it was lost in transport. They had to get cannabis on credit in order to have something to sell.

The article informs us that “C” is 32 years old. So he was selling marijuana illegally for at least 10 years (Wikipedia says that Floridians voted to legalize medical marijuana at the end of 2016).

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New York Times discovers that a person cannot be killed twice by COVID-19

by philg

From this morning’s email, “The Covid death rate for white Americans has recently exceeded the rates for Black, Latino and Asian Americans.” by David Leonhardt, one of the New York Times journalists who enjoys covering numbers and economics.

One of the defining characteristics of the pandemic’s early stages was its disproportionate toll on Black and Latino Americans.

During Covid’s early months in the U.S., the per capita death rate for Black Americans was almost twice as high as the white rate and more than twice as high as the Asian rate. The Latino death rate was in between, substantially lower than the Black rate but still above average.

Covid’s racial gaps have narrowed and, more recently, even flipped. Over the past year, the Covid death rate for white Americans has been 14 percent higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72 percent higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.

In other words, the best minds of New York City have figured out that a person cannot be killed twice by COVID-19.

[A friend’s comment on the above: “Democrats previously advocated giving preferential access to COVID medical treatment to People of Color. Now that whites are dying at a higher rate, should whites get preferential access to medicine?”]

Let’s check in on Sweden. Given their horrific heresy, maybe COVID-19 is killing them twice?

The country that gave the finger to SARS-CoV-2 and kept its schools open has a much lower case rate than still-masked Portugal (“In Portugal, There Is Virtually No One Left to Vaccinate” (NYT), 2021) or the U.S. (cases trending up, despite Science-following leadership (TM) since January 20, 2021). Those are just “cases”, though, right? How about deaths? Same pattern…

Reminder: When COVID-19 hit, friends who are medical school professors said that humans would have to co-evolve with SARS-CoV-2 and all of the measures being taken and proposed were going to be counterproductive because they would slow down this co-evolution. (Also, that if they pointed this out publicly they would never get another research grant!)

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Official Lincoln Massachusetts Public School LGBTQ+ Pride Community Celebration

by philg

From back in April, part of an email from the superintendent of the Lincoln Massachusetts Public Schools (K-8 only; high school is shared with another town):

The school-sponsored event (in a town-owned house) is happening today, so I hope that readers in Maskachusetts will attend and perhaps report back to us why some members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community are excluded (it is only for “LGBTQ+”). Here’s a T-shirt to wear:

The same email that reminded us to lump together everyone on the rainbow spectrum into a single category also lumps together all Asians and Pacific Islanders into a common “culture and cuisine” that can be learned about in just over one hour via Zoom:

Happy Pride Month once again!

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British Medical Journal weighs in on forced vaccination

by philg

Me: Should the COVID-19 injections be renamed to something other than “vaccine”?

#Science: “The unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy: why mandates, passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good” (BMJ Global Health)…

… we argue that current mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable and are likely to cause more societal harm than good. Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarisation, and adversely affects health and well-being. Current policies may lead to a widening of health and economic inequalities, detrimental long-term impacts on trust in government and scientific institutions, and reduce the uptake of future public health measures, including COVID-19 vaccines as well as routine immunisations.

The publicly communicated rationale for implementing such policies has shifted over time. Early messaging around COVID-19 vaccination as a public health response measure focused on protecting the most vulnerable. This quickly shifted to vaccination thresholds to reach herd immunity and ‘end the pandemic’ and ‘get back to normal’ once sufficient vaccine supply was available. In late summer of 2021, this pivoted again to a universal vaccination recommendation to reduce hospital/intensive care unit (ICU) burden in Europe and North America, to address the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’.

There are also worrying signs that current vaccine policies, rather than being science-based, are being driven by sociopolitical attitudes that reinforce segregation, stigmatisation and polarisation, further eroding the social contract in many countries.

Two experiments in Germany and the USA found that a new COVID-19 vaccine mandate would likely energise anti-vaccination activism, reduce compliance with other public health measures, and decrease acceptance to future voluntary influenza or varicella (chickenpox) vaccines.

COVID-19 vaccines have also generated at least $100 billion profit for pharmaceutical companies, especially Pfizer.

The authors are from the School of Public Health, University of Washington, University of Edinburgh, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, Oxford, Harvard Medical School (!), and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Related:

  • “The Concept of Classical Herd Immunity May Not Apply to COVID-19” (J Infect Dis, March 2022, by David M Morens, Gregory K Folkers, and Anthony S Fauci (!)): SARS-CoV-2 appears not to substantially engage the systemic immune system, as do viruses such as smallpox, measles, and rubella that consistently have a pronounced viremic phase. Moreover, neither infection nor vaccination appears to induce prolonged protection against SARS-CoV-2 in many or most people. Finally, the public health community has encountered substantial resistance to efforts to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by vaccination, mask wearing, and other interventions.
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Good alternative to Windows File History? (backup tool for Windows that saves every version)

by philg

I’m almost recovered from the failed Seagate drive debacle (solution: buy Western Digital; send the Seagate to the nearest gun range to serve as a target). When I try to get Windows File History going again, however, it chokes on someone else’s vomit within a few minutes. There are some filenames especially within the Dropbox area of the C: drive that it doesn’t like (why can’t it back up anything that NTFS was willing to accept?). I tried excluding the entire (SSD) C: drive so that I could at least get backups of the two big hard disks, but even after “C:\” was excluded it kept trying to back up folders with the C: drive and shutting down (why skip files when you can terminate and leave the entire computer unprotected?).

Has anyone had good luck with a Windows tool that will do what Microsoft’s built-in Backup/File History is advertised as doing, i.e., saving every version of every file, presumably with hooks into NTFS’s journaling mechanism so that it runs shortly after any modification is made. I can just dedicate one disk to be the target of this third-party tool.

I’m already running the Synology Drive Client to push files out to the NAS. Maybe there is a way to tell this program to also copy everything to a local file? (If so, I haven’t found it yet.) Synology actually got stuck as well. It was in an infinite wait for some files on OneDrive that appear in the file system but aren’t actually on the disk, I think.

I’m also already running CrashPlan from Code42, which hasn’t choked on the cloud drives (Dropbox or OneDrive) as far as I know. I think it is possible to tell the Code42 app to write to both the cloud and a local destination (below, the data should go to both the CrashPlan cloud and a local drive).

How well does this work? Here’s the CrashPlan software trying to back up detritus left by the Synology software. The estimate is 1.6 years before the three local hard drives are copied to the new 16 TB internal backup drive. So, assuming a little downtime for Florida hurricanes, now I just need a letter from God promising that there won’t be any drive failures until an 82-year-old Joe Biden is celebrating his/her/zir/their reelection (we don’t know what Dr. Biden’s spouse’s gender ID will be in 2024).

Related:

  • “The best Windows backup software” (PC World) likes R-Drive Image 7 (but I don’t really want to make images of the disk!) and Acronis
  • “The Best Backup Software and Services for 2022” (PC Mag) likes ShadowProtect, which would make a full image of the disks and then store years of incrementals (I guess the 16 TB drive is big enough to hold a second full image of the three other drives on the PC so in theory I could do a full backup every couple of months and the software would throw out the obsolete one after it was complete (but maybe reading 100% of the data off these drives every two months would actually result in their premature death?))
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In the wake of Uvalde, can we abandon the fiction that today’s 18-year-olds are adults?

by philg

When the United States was young, a person had to be 21 years old to be considered an adult. In order to vote, the person generally would have worked for 8 years (a young man would start work at age 13 and become eligible to vote at 21). This changed in the 1970s, according to Wikipedia: “After the voting age was lowered in 1971 from 21 to 18, the age of majority was lowered to 18 in many states.”

At the same time, the no-fault divorce revolution turned the U.S. from a monogamous society into a polygamous one. From H.L. Mencken’s 1922 book:

… the objections to polygamy do not come from women, for the average woman is sensible enough to prefer half or a quarter or even a tenth of a first-rate man to the whole devotion of a third-rate man.

Salvador Ramos may not have been able to calculate child support formula profits in all 50 states, but he was probably smart enough to know that a woman would be better off financially as a “single mom” who had sex with an already-married dental hygienist and harvested the child support than choosing to enter into a long-term partnership with a high-school dropout such as himself. Wikipedia says that Ramos’s mom was using drugs and having sex with at least one guy other than Ramos’s father. ABC reported that Ramos’s grandfather was a convicted criminal. Mr. Ramos was thus, at best, the “third-rate man” of Mencken’s example. See “‘Incel’ Texas school shooter Salvador Ramos’ chilling live streams reveal ‘disturbing threats to girls’” (The Sun) for how his interactions with females had gone.

Compared to the early days of the Republic, therefore, we have “adults” with 0-10% of the years in the workforce and a much higher percentage of the males recognize that they’re never going to be selected for mating.

Is it time to recognize that Americans should neither vote nor buy guns until they’ve shown some sort of evidence of adulthood, e.g., working for 8 years? It is tough to know for sure, but maybe after 8 years of W-2 labor Salvador Ramos would have become accustomed to his low status in society and incel-hood.

I’m reluctant to “fight the last war” by proposing a policy change that would have prevented a particular recent tragedy, but I don’t think Salvador Ramos is the last problem 18-year-old this nation will produce (criminality is heritable, for one thing, and the U.S. is packed with criminals).

(I don’t think it would be sufficient to use a simple age threshold, e.g., 21 or 25, because there are plenty of Americans who never take on what used to be considered adult responsibilities, e.g., by working.)

I’m particularly interested in hearing what the gun owners who read this blog have to say!

Related:

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Supply chain disruptions will end up favoring newcomers in markets

by philg

Our HVAC guy here in South Florida mentioned that he formerly installed Mitsubishi mini-split (“ductless”) air conditioners. Mitsubishi has long been considered the quality leader in this market, which they pioneered in Japan and then in the U.S. Since coronapanic, however, he’s found that most of the Mitsubishi stuff that he used to install went out of stock. “I began putting in GREE, which has a longer warranty and actually seems to have fewer problems and failures.” GREE, a Chinese company founded in 1991 (Wikipedia), isn’t a supplier he would have considered prior to the interruption of his supply from Mitsubishi that was occasioned by the various lockdowns. Now he will default to GREE even when Mitsubishi is available.

I was going to put a UniFi system into our house. This is the brand that I knew and that a friend has had positive experience with. However, everything was out of stock. So I took a reader’s suggestion and purchased TP-Link’s Omada products, which are half the price of UniFi and, more importantly, in stock for 2-day shipping.

Is it fair to say that the “sorry, it’s out of stock” messages from the traditional market leaders are going to turn out to have been the most lasting market disruption of coronapanic?

Related:

  • The pre-coronapanic situation… “Is Lack of Competition Strangling the U.S. Economy?” (Harvard Business Review, 2018): There’s no question that most industries are becoming more concentrated. Big firms account for higher shares of industry revenue and are reaping historically large profits relative to their investment. … incumbent firms in a wide range of industries — airlines, beer, pharmaceuticals, hospitals — are wielding market power in ways that prevent rivals from emerging and thriving. The winners are winning bigger, while the number of new start-ups is falling. With waning competitive pressure, productivity growth slows, wages stagnate, and the gap between winners and losers widens. … Ten years ago, the top four U.S. airlines collected 41% of the industry’s revenue. Today, they collect 65%.
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Kia EV6 is great for everything except transportation (WSJ)

by philg

Readers may recall Tesla Road Trip, in which we spent 10.5 hours on a 7.3-hour drive while saving our beloved Mother Earth.

“I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping.” describes a reporter’s attempt to drive from New Orleans to Chicago and back in a Kia EV6, a seemingly great car except for the lack of dog mode.

Given our battery range of up to 310 miles, I plotted a meticulous route, splitting our days into four chunks of roughly 7½-hours each. We’d need to charge once or twice each day and plug in near our hotel overnight.

Over four days, we spent $175 on charging. We estimated the equivalent cost for gas in a Kia Forte would have been $275, based on the AAA average national gas price for May 19. That $100 savings cost us many hours in waiting time.

The car lost range faster than planned and charged slower than advertised:

But when we tick down 15% over 35 miles? Disconcerting. And the estimated charging time after plugging in? Even more so. This “quick charge” should take 5 minutes, based on our calculations. So why does the dashboard tell us it will take an hour?

They encounter a charger that is supposed to deliver 350 kW and instead it delivers 20, but occasionally one does work.

In the parking lot of a Clarksville, Ind., Walmart, we barely have time for lunch, as the Electrify America charging station fills up our battery in about 25 minutes, as advertised.

The woman charging next to us describes a harrowing recent trip in her Volkswagen ID.4. Deborah Carrico, 65, had to be towed twice while driving between her Louisville, Ky., apartment and Boulder, Colo., where her daughter was getting married.

Load up that Kindle if you’re going to travel with an electric car:

As intense wind and rain whip around us, the car cautions, “Conditions have not been met” for its cruise-control system. Soon the battery starts bleeding life. What began as a 100-mile cushion between Chicago and our planned first stop in Effingham, Ill., has fallen to 30.

“If it gets down to 10, we’re stopping at a Level 2,” Mack says as she frantically searches PlugShare.

We feel defeated pulling into a Nissan Mazda dealership in Mattoon, Ill. “How long could it possibly take to charge the 30 miles we need to make it to the next fast station?” I wonder.

Three hours. It takes 3 hours.

Here’s a map of where they charged:

As part of my plan to be wrong about everything, I would have expected electric cars to become cheaper and more practical than gasoline-powered cars (so many moving parts!) within 10 years of the first practical car (let’s call that the Tesla S, introduced in 2012). Right now, however, they’re both more expensive and less practical (as you can infer from the fact that you almost never encounter an electric-powered Uber).

A reader comment on Toyota pits all of its engineering prowess against Tesla:

The biggest benefit of tesla isn’t even how it’s made, the price etc. It’s the supercharger network. Without anything resembling it (and there’s nothing else really) other manufacturers don’t make cars, they make toys.

Related:

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Safety first in Maskachusetts

by philg

Common sense measures to fight SARS-CoV-2 are back in various parts of Maskachusetts. “Mask Mandates Are Returning to Schools as COVID-19 Cases Surge” (TIME, May 25) says that the good old days never ended in Boston per se:

Boston public schools, for example, have maintained a mask requirement. City health officials said they would recommend lifting the school mask mandate once daily COVID-19 cases in the city fall to 10 new cases per 100,000 residents. The positivity rate currently stands at 54.5 new cases per 100,000 residents.

Neighboring Brookline, however, was briefly mask-free. “Brookline reinstates indoor mask mandate for schools, town buildings” (WCVB, May 23):

The mandate that began Monday requires everyone to wear a face covering over their mouth and nose while inside the library, senior center, all public schools and any other town-owned indoor spaces where the public gathers.

Student Alice Gametchu-Walker said she noticed several of her classmates were absent from Pierce Elementary School.

“I thought it was a good idea because a lot of kids have been out with colds and COVID,” she said. “I decided to keep wearing a mask because I just felt safer wearing it.”

Now that climate change has brought months of brutal heat to Maskachusetts, maybe people could cool off and stay fit to fight off COVID-19 by swimming across Walden Pond? “Massachusetts DCR again restricts open-water swimming at Walden Pond while lifeguards are on duty” (Boston Herald):

Walden Pond State Reservation on Saturday announced that last year’s open-water swimming rules would return, effective Sunday. That means swimming is not allowed outside the area designated by ropes and buoys from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. while lifeguards are on duty.

Open-water swimming is only allowed during park operating hours when lifeguards are not on duty, DCR said in a statement, stressing the policy helps ensure that lifeguards keep their focus on designated swim areas inside the ropes and buoys. The allowed open-water swimming hours are from 5 to 10 a.m. and then from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

“We want visitors to our designated swimming areas to have fun while cooling off from the summer heat, but we also want to stress safety and the importance of taking precautions to keep yourself and your family safe this summer,” said Acting DCR Commissioner Stephanie Cooper. “Our lifeguards are a valuable resource, but we also count on the public to take an active role in watching their children when they are in the water, using caution when swimming at unguarded beaches, and utilizing safe swimming practices to avoid a tragedy.”

In Florida, meanwhile, you can swim in the open ocean when the surf’s up and the lifeguards have put out their red “you’d be an idiot to go out” flags. And, of course, wear a mask at your discretion.

Related:

  • They’re back to masks in Alameda County, California (NYT): “Alameda is the first county in California, and the largest jurisdiction in the United States, to issue a universal indoor mask order since the end of the winter Omicron surge.”
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