In the pre-Elon days, Twitter’s only option for reacting to a tweet was/is a heart (“I love it”).
My son had to wait 3 hours for a negative covid test to be treated for an acute asthma attack, forced to mask. Pulse ox was 91 when he went in, 79 by the time he was allowed oxygen and albuterol nebulizer. Absolute evil.
It doesn’t make sense to “love” a tweet about a person suffering a pulse oxygen decline to 79 (“If it’s below 90, you’re reading your IQ” is the aviation standard). Could Musk give Twitter a usage lift by adding the ability to respond with a range of emotions (Facebook) or a limited-only-by-Unicode range of emojis (Signal)?
Another example, a teacher in Australia fired for refusing the Sacrament of Fauci:
Terminated from my teaching job today after 20 years of teaching. Completely devastated😢
The Covidcrats designed all kinds of systems for humans 2 and up to follow, e.g., Wash Hands, Stay Home, Mask On, Mask Off, Mask On, etc. As evidenced by the rate of plague in countries that applied these systems compared to Sweden, which didn’t bother, either the design was so badly flawed that it wouldn’t have worked even if humans followed the complex instructions perfectly or the designers got an education in human nature.
This came home to me the other day when investigating why there was a light fixture on a closet ceiling (10′ high), but no light was coming out of it. I got up on a ladder and found that the bulb was a burned-out incandescent (i.e., pre-LED age). It is possible that nobody had changed the bulb since the closet was built in 2003. An architect obviously thought that humans would be diligent about maintaining the system (otherwise, put a fluorescent light much lower), but he/she/ze/they was wrong.
The Great Plains are traditionally the best places for doctors to work when salaries offered are compared to house prices and overall cost of living. But not everyone wants to live in the Dakotas, which, presumably is why a dermatologist can get paid $600,000 per year for showing up.
We’ve noticed that it is tough to get an appointment with almost every kind of doctor in Palm Beach County. Concierge medicine, in which people pay $3,000 or $5,000 per year to a primary care doctor to get the kind of service that was standard in the 1950s (pre-Medicare/Medicaid), seems to be much more common here than it was in the Boston area. Getting in to see a dentist can also be tough, with the high-rated providers backed up for 1-2 months. A physician neighbor who moved here less than a year ago and joined a private practice says that he is already busy.
I’m wondering if the Great COVID Migration has opened up a lot of opportunities for young doctors to establish themselves in Florida. The migration to Florida from the lockdown states wasn’t a randomly selected group. The first element of selection was a love of freedom. Doctors get half of their income from the government and nearly all of the other half is heavily regulated by the government. Doctors get paid more when low-skill migrants are admitted to the U.S. (a larger population leads to larger Medicaid payments, if nothing else). The typical doctor, therefore, is not aligned with “small government” state politics in Florida. The second element of selection was an ability to work from home. It was a lot easier for someone in engineering or finance to move than a doctor who sees patients in person. Finally, there is the question of state licensing and regulation. It is illegal for a doctor to move from one state to another and hang out a shingle. He/she/ze/they must first get licensed in the new state. A dentist friend who might otherwise want to escape Massachusetts says “It is very tough to get a license in Florida. They make it next to impossible for dental.” A cardiologist friend said that it would take her six months to get a license in Florida.
If the above list of selection effects is correct, there should be a smaller percentage of physicians in the group that migrated to Florida from California and the Northeast in the past two years than the percentage of doctors in the general population. In other words, the state has been flooded with new patients but hasn’t received too many new doctors.
What do readers think? Is Florida a good place for a doctor finishing residency/fellowship?
I don’t think that the lady who owns this marvelous (other than the severe door ding from our Odyssey) machine will quibble about $5,000 per year for concierge medicine.
Folks: It has come to my attention that Twitter has gone public at a valuation of $18 billion. The company has modest revenue (about $600 million per year) and no profit. Is it a short?
What is the explanation for how this service can make enough profit ($1 billion per year?) to justify an $18 billion valuation? It doesn’t seem like a natural advertising medium. Given the possibility of distributing information for free via Facebook or Google+, Twitter does not seem to offer a unique capability to users.
Generally I am a believer in the efficient-market hypothesis but I can’t understand this one.
What if one had shorted Twitter to buy the S&P 500? The following chart isn’t complete because the S&P 500 pays a dividend while Twitter did not. If we use Yahoo! Finance to create a custom chart starting on the date of my post,
The S&P has gone up 134 percent (and paid a dividend of 2 percent per year?) while Twitter is worth 20 percent more than on November 6, 2013. Note the lift in 2020 after the government made most non-screen-based activities illegal, but even that wasn’t enough to bring Twitter’s performance even with the S&P 500.
(I’m wondering if the market cap number I cited in my blog post was inaccurate. Elon Musk is paying $44 billion for the company and the stock price is only barely higher. Either the $18 billion number was wrong (maybe it was the initial pre-bounce IPO target price?) or Twitter has issued a ton more shares since November 2013 (acquisitions? to enrich executives and board members?).)
Rage crying this morning. Two years of isolating and keeping my toddlers safe, and I get infected with #COVID19 at a mandatory team offsite, even while wearing a KN95 mask myself. Now my toddlers are exposed. 🤬 This isn’t over. @US_FDA we need to #ImmunizeUnder5s now! pic.twitter.com/SBTrKpftAe
Rage crying this morning. Two years of isolating and keeping my toddlers safe, and I get infected with #COVID19 at a mandatory team offsite, even while wearing a KN95 mask myself. Now my toddlers are exposed. 🤬 This isn’t over. @US_FDA we need to #ImmunizeUnder5s now!
Think of the children!
His/her/zir/their fellow Karens also got sick, despite practicing the protocol that Science dictated for airline travel:
So far one other team member has tested positive, out of eight of us. Most of us were wearing masks except for when drinking coffee or eating lunch/dinner.
Where does Mx. Nelson work? His/her/zir/their profile:
Program Manager with @Microsoft Philanthropies, leading a $1.15B tech grant program for @msftnonprofits, helping nonprofits leverage technology to do more good.
He/she/ze/they is based in Seattle. In case this tweet is deleted, a screen capture:
You are welcome to follow us, but rest assured—we are already following you.
I’m surprised that Twitter doesn’t down-rate content from anonymous accounts like this and even more surprised that Twitter has held together given how apparently easy it is to set up an anonymous account. I think that one reason Facebook is so successful is that they authenticate most accounts.
An American friend lives in locked-down Shanghai and I recently checked in with her. Below are some of her text messages.
We were locked in apartment for somewhere between two and three weeks (forgot exact dates) and now we are allowed to roam inside the compound courtyard area (which is actually quite nice, and now, with this lockdown, rather social outdoors).
The Western press we read about the Shanghai lockdown seems completely wrong. The lockdown (and management of it) are in some ways rather better than it says, and in some ways worse. But that’s not really the axis…the whole tone of the US and Euro press we see just seems like it is talking about some completely different planet that has nothing to do with the good and bad things we hear/see/think as lived experience here.
[in response to my question about whether you can just get food delivered] At first, no regular delivery services. Those are just starting to be allowed back in very limited ways. The first few days just some government rations (cabbage), but [husband] and I had some food around and also, it’s really not that bad to eat less for a while…the main thing is a lot of people got justifiably worried because the private businesses in the supply and delivery chain weren’t allowed to really do enough, the transport blocks made the supply chain somewhat concerning, and the government rations were completely random and quite unequal in different districts.
After a few days this huge phenomenon called “group buying” came whooshing in, and a lot of people were able to distribute the food through that and the large majority of people supplement the government food with that. Now some individual buying is happening as more business owners get permission…
We were very lucky because our compound is actually more commercial buildings than residential. The analogy in US terms seems to be “commercially zoned”. This makes it vastly more complicated and ambiguous for the building management to figure out how to manage us as residences (lockdown rules, level of lockdown, placement of the testing lines, etc.) but it did allow them to give permission for the proprietor of the office building’s cafeteria to live in the cafeteria with a few employees, and within a few days they got some supply chain and started up a meal service. They made an agreement with the management that the health volunteers (the ones who are allowed to wear hazmat suits and get tested twice a day instead of once and walk around to deliver rations and essentials), that those volunteers were allowed to drop off a hot cooked lunch or dinner outside the apartment doors. At first, the cafeteria didn’t know how much it could source and supply, so it was word of mouth but I heard of it when it was producing for about 70-ish meals and ordered one meal some of the days. They successfully ramped up and since they expose their spreadsheet every day, they now supply meals to about 400 or 500 a day which is as much as 30% of the apartments here. So that’s been really luxurious when we don’t feel like cooking the too-much rice and cabbage supplied by the gummint.
[In response to my question about censorship and suppression of dissent] The culture of China is to have vastly more local protesting than I had understood. So there is a ton of that. It helps keep local officials accountable.
Many interesting and rapid local developments happen here to try and deal with this situation. Once we were allowed to roam (courtyard and the three building lobbies, also I think people in one building can visit each other. Not visit apartments in the other buildings, although I have no interest in visiting anyone inside a building at all. I meet people outside. Government gave out some flour, and I traded a lemon (outdoors) to a colleague for a little packet of yeast she had.
[She also described an apartment building lobby swap table where people put out food that they don’t want, including government-supplied canned fish, oranges, etc.]
My gastronomic experience in Shanghai, November 2019, was a little different. Here are some examples:
Top left: a restaurant for locals, about 14 floors up in an office building. Bottom: the breakfast buffet at the Four Seasons.
I’ve been watching a $3+ million house in our own neighborhood (see Open house today in our neighborhood) to see what it finally sells for (this could be an official Florida spectator sport?), but now there is a house on the market for $55 million about two miles away. Here’s a photo/rendering revealing that the house is not on the water and does not have a dock, the two pre-lockdown requirements for anyone to pay more than $10 million for a house in Florida:
The house is listed as used, having been built in 2020 (“Property condition: Resale; New construction: No”). The good news is that, according to Zillow, members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community who have $305,000 per month (estimated) to spend can feel comfortable in this 16,000 square foot home:
There’s a home theater in case you want a wide viewing angle without holding your phone close to your face. The pool looks big enough to host a family of alligators.
Update: Toucan Sam, in a comment below, points out that the house might be largely fictitious! It appears to be 95 percent finished in a satellite view, but definitely not 100 percent, so the Zillow “used” description is probably wrong. Whoever hands over $55 million will find him/her/zir/theirself in a brand new home!
My general rule is that if an activity is dangerous enough to require wearing a mask then it is dangerous enough to avoid altogether. I wouldn’t go to a Broadway show, for example, because they’re telling me that it isn’t safe (masks are required as well as vaccine paper checks) and nothing stops me from staying home to watch Hamiltonover and over and over and over again.
On April 23, 2022, however, my general policy was superseded by a directive from Extremely Senior Management (Mom, almost 88 years old). Off to the Round House Theater in Bethesda, Maryland, for a vaccine-and-mask-resistant SARS-CoV-2 variant spreading event. The show was “We declare you a terrorist…” concerning the Second Chechen War and jihadi takeover of a theater in Moscow. (In the best American tradition, the playwright Tim J. Lord who tackles this complex subject seems to have no background in Russian language, Russian culture, Islamic religion, history of Chechnya, etc.)
Anyone in Bethesda can tell you that checking photo ID for voters is racist. According to the Righteous, People of Color are too stupid to obtain photo IDs. Tending to confirm this theory, the Bethesda theater experience begins with an ID and vaccine paper check and there were no People of Color in the audience (unless Asians count).
Throughout the theater, there are numerous signs demanding mask-wearing:
As with the airlines in the Science-following pre-Mizelle era, COVID-19-suppression is enhanced by filling the lobby with unmasked people who are eating and drinking.
We acknowledge that we’re on land stolen from Native Americans, but we will neither give it back nor pay them rent:
No matter a person’s gender ID, he/she/ze/they will will find bathroom to suit him/her/zir/theirself:
Remember to fight COVID-19 by washing your hands:
This was made more challenging by the fact that the theater staff were too busy checking vaccine papers, photo IDs, and mask compliance to refill the soap dispensers.
I still can’t figure out why the people who printed up all of these signs and designed these protocols didn’t ask “Wouldn’t it make more epidemiological sense if we shut down our COVID-spreading theater altogether?”
A typical reaction to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter seems to be that it is easy to toss out a term such as “free speech” but that it is difficult to implement a plan. Internet conversations need moderation, is the theory, especially on platforms where users aren’t authenticated by real name.
Here’s a tweet from a friend back in Boston, a law firm partner:
We need an name other than “free speech” for what Musk et al. are pushing. I’ve been using “bro speech” but maybe it should more reflect the economic element. Key elements are:
Toucan Sam has pointed out here that I myself established a comment moderation policy on photo.net, carried over into this blog. Sam’s tweet got me thinking about whether there was a difference between what Twitter has been doing and the policy that I established. I responded to Sam:
photo.net never tried to do what Twitter tries to do. We moderated out Reader A attacking Reader B. We never deleted content because we believed it to be false and thought that readers needed to be protected from misinformation/disinformation. The antidote to someone saying something false, e.g., “don’t go to France because everyone there is rude”, was other readers posting their own experience and perspective, e.g., “French people were nice to me.”
The most famous Twitter bans have been because Twitter said that it believed information to be false. The New York Post’s stories regarding a laptop allegedly belonging to Joe Biden, for example. A long list of folks saying that COVID-19 vaccines weren’t preventing infection with COVID-19. People saying that children were not experiencing an “emergency” such as they needed to be injected with an emergency use authorized COVID-19 vaccine.
What if Elon Musk simply got Twitter out of the business of figuring out whether tweets were true, false, misinformation, disinformation, etc.? Would that solve most of what irks people regarding Twitter as the public square?
“Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene for 7 days over vaccine misinformation.” (NYT, August 2021): She said there were too many reports of infection and spread of the coronavirus among vaccinated people, and that the vaccines were “failing” and “do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current guidance states, “Covid-19 vaccines are effective at protecting you from getting sick.” In a statement circulated online, Ms. Greene said: “I have vaccinated family who are sick with Covid. Studies and news reports show vaccinated people are still getting Covid and spreading Covid.” Data from the C.D.C. shows that of the so-called breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated, serious cases are extremely rare.
One of the reliable features of non-welfare neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. has been a “migrants welcome” sign in the typical front yard. Now that Texas is sending asylum-seekers directly to D.C., however, it seems that the formerly popular “No Matter, Where You Are From, We’re Glad You’re Our Neighbor” signs are gone. I didn’t see a single one. Some houses still had the Progressive Catechism signs, which include “No Human Being is Illegal,” but not nearly as many as on previous visits:
The alarm system signs are far more numerous than two years ago. BLM signs remain as or more popular than ever. Here’s a variation (“Black Fathers Matter”), presumably from someone who has never been to an American family court:
For those who subscribe to the heresy that white lives might matter, the city has helpfully put up signs from when Northeast D.C. was, apparently, a mostly-white neighborhood:
Some more yards. Note the alarm system signs and the signs calling for D.C. statehood.
Migrants from Spanish-speaking countries might nonetheless feel welcome because a high percentage of signs are presented in Spanish. Example:
Here’s a sign in four languages:
Perhaps because the flow of the undocumented has been reduced during coronapanic, crime in D.C. seems to be up (we are informed by the media that filling a city with low-skill migrants reduces crime). In addition to all of the alarm system signs, I noticed that a Best Buy in suburban Rockville, Maryland, had hired off duty police officers for continuous on-site protection against “smash-and-grab” looting.
The police cruiser was kept parked in front of the doors while the police officer was inside wearing body armor and a gun. This is in Montgomery County, Maryland, mind you, which is one of the richest places in the U.S. (government employment, government contracting, and lobbying are, apparently, lucrative!). A “face coverings are required by government order” sign was out front as well, though I believe that the order has actually expired.
Related:
“Washington D.C. sees recent increase in cases of violent crime” (Capital News Service, 4/19/2022): Total violent crime is on the rise in 2022. By April 19, 2021, all violent crime in Washington D.C. was at 961 cases. By April 19 of this year, violent crime had already surpassed that at 1,230 cases, an almost 28 percent increase.
