How Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law could harm children’s mental health

by philg

“How Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law could harm children’s mental health” (The Guardian, today):

LGBTQ+ parents and pediatric psychologists say the law stigmatizes being gay or transgender and could harm the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth.

Stella, 10, attends a private school in Atlanta, Georgia, and explains to friends that she has four moms. Two of them are the lesbian couple that adopted her. The other two are her birth parents, one of whom recently came out as a transgender woman.

“I’m so grateful that [Stella] is somewhere that sees” the family “as what it is: her moms just love her”, said Kelsey Hanley, Stella’s birth mother, who lives in Kissimmee, Florida.

But Hanley, 30, worries that children who have multiple moms or dads or are LGBTQ+ themselves won’t get the same acceptance in Florida.

That’s because the state recently approved legislation that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade and prohibits such lessons for older students unless they are “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate”.

(It is unclear how this anecdote relates to Hate in Florida because a 10-year-old with four moms, six moms, or any other quantity of moms would be in 5th grade and the new Florida law prohibits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity only in grades K-3. Also, young Hanley’s four moms have sent her to a private school and the new law does not apply to private schools.)

What I find fascinating about this story is that, in the context of children’s mental health, it shows mentally healthy children outdoors in the baking Florida sun in rated-low-risk-by-the-CDC Hillsborough County… wearing masks:

Note the range of styles from covering face to under-nose to chin diaper and that none are N95 masks that could provide some protection against the unmasked. How can we be sure that these children are mentally healthy? The new law hasn’t taken effect yet, so these masked-outdoors children are among those whose mental health has presumably been maximized by unfettered public school sexual orientation and gender identity instruction starting in kindergarten.

Related:

  • The happiest children in Spain live with two daddies (“children who lived with their two mothers were extremely unhappy”)
  • One reason that Hillsborough County is “low risk” is that the CDC completely changed its standards in March 2022 (NPR: “Critics of CDC’s new approach say the agency seems to have moved the goalposts to justify the political imperative to let people get back to their normal lives.”)
  • CDC gives us a new canonical example of chutzpah? (after locking down children for a substantial percentage of their lives, the CDC now alerts us to poor mental health among children)
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CDC gives us a new canonical example of chutzpah?

by philg

The standard example of chutzpah has been “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”

I wonder if we can replace this with one from a U.S. government agency. “CDC Reports Warn of Teen ‘Mental Health Crisis’ During Pandemic” (MedPage Today, 3/31/2022):

In a nationwide survey, high school students reported experiencing poor mental health and life disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC researchers said.

Among a nationally representative sample of high school students in the U.S., 37% said that they experienced poor mental health, and 44% reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, reported Sherry Everett Jones, PhD, of the CDC, and colleagues.

Furthermore, about 20% of respondents said they seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9% had attempted suicide during the 12 months before the survey, they noted in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

“Our data make it clear that young people experienced significant disruptions during the pandemic, and are experiencing a mental health crisis,” said co-author Kathleen Ethier, PhD, of the CDC, during a conference call with the media. “It is clear right now that young people need all the support we can give them.”

In other words, the agency that enabled state and local school systems to shut down for more than a year (while still ladling out taxpayer-funded salaries at 100%!) under the guise of following Science now says that people should look to them for advice on how to restore the mental health of kids whose schools were thus closed.

Related:

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A young child killed by a new vaccine

by philg

Averros may find this of particular interest… The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (Andrew Roberts):

On 20 August 1782, the King and Queen were devastated to lose their youngest son, ‘dear little Alfred’, who died at Windsor Castle shortly before his second birthday. He had been taken to Deal by the royal governess Lady Charlotte Finch in the hope that he would recover from a fever through fresh sea air and bathing, but to no avail. The Court did not go into formal mourning as Alfred was not fourteen, but the royal couple were utterly grief-stricken. The Queen gave Finch an amethyst and pearl locket, and a lock of blond hair from ‘my dear little Angel Alfred’. She wrote to her brother Charles two days after Alfred’s death, ‘I am very grateful to Providence, that out of a family of fourteen children, it has never struck us except in this one instance, and so I must submit myself without a murmur.’ The cause was probably too high a dosage of the smallpox inoculation. The King and Queen were staunch advocates of this treatment, which was spearheaded by Edward Jenner, although they believed that Providence still played a large part in medicine.

When Edward Jenner finally perfected his vaccination technique in the mid-1790s, the King knighted him and became patron of the Jennerian Society which advanced the practice. In his enlightened way he did not allow personal tragedy to affect his rational appreciation of the great benefits of science.

If the U.S. had not traitorously rebelled, Americans might have funded a lot more scientific research during the 19th century.

Early in 1751, Frederick and Augusta settled the twelve-year-old George and eleven-year-old Edward at Savile House, adjoining Leicester House. It was the Hanoverian practice to give princes their own establishments early, and Savile House, built in the 1680s, was to become George’s London home for the next nine years. His mini-Court there consisted of a governor, preceptor (responsible for teaching), sub-governor, sub-preceptor and treasurer, with part-time teachers for languages, fencing, dancing and riding brought in from outside. He studied algebra, geometry and trigonometry. He was the first British monarch to study science, being taught basic physics and chemistry by Scott. He was receiving a good, all-round, enlightened education.

(But maybe not, since the British never taxed anyone in North America to fund government operations in England. Any taxes raised in the 13 colonies were spent in the 13 colonies. On the third hand, a British-governed North America led by a scientifically educated king might have funded local research labs.)

And we might have been spared the partisan politics that are often decried.

Contrary to the Whig imperative of minimizing royal power, The Idea of a Patriot King argued that the role of a constitutionally limited hereditary monarchy was important. Bolingbroke fully accepted that such seventeenth-century notions as the Divine Right of Kings had ‘no foundation in fact or reason’, and he believed ‘a limited monarchy the best of governments’. The limits on the power of the Crown, he maintained, should be ‘carried as far as is necessary to secure the liberties of the people’ and enough to protect the people against an arrogant (by which he meant Old Whig) aristocracy. Bolingbroke’s patriot king would revere the constitution, regard his prerogatives as a sacred trust, ‘espouse no party’ and ‘govern like the common father of his people’. A key message of the book was that government by party inevitably resulted in a factionalism disastrous to the state. ‘Party is a political evil,’ Bolingbroke wrote, ‘and faction is the worst of all parties. The king will aim at ruling a united nation, and in order to govern wisely and successfully he will put himself at the head of his people,’ so that he can deliver them ‘tranquillity, wealth, power and fame’.

Circling back to the vaccine… the situation is not directly comparable, of course. George III and Queen Charlotte were trying to vaccinated their child against a disease that regularly killed children.

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Science: requiring SAT scores both decreases and increases diversity at a university

by philg

From the haters at Fox News… “Top DEI staff at public universities pocket massive salaries as experts question motives of initiatives”:

A review of salary data shows that the universities of Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, plus Virginia Tech, boast some of the highest-paid DEI staffers at public universities, a Fox News review found. These institutions’ top diversity employees earn salaries ranging from $329,000 to $430,000 – vastly eclipsing the average pay for the schools’ full-time tenured professors.

Fox implicitly considers Comparative Victimhood to be simpler than Quantum Electrodynamics and, therefore, it is not reasonable for a diversity bureaucrat to get paid 5X what a young Physics professor earns (see AIP salary calculator).

But what if Fox is wrong(!). From state-sponsored NPR in 2018… “Study: Colleges That Ditch The SAT And ACT Can Enhance Diversity”:

Colleges that have gone “test optional” enroll — and graduate — a higher proportion of low-income and first generation-students, and more students from diverse backgrounds, the researchers found in the study

In short, Science proves that dispensing with the SAT leads to more diversity.

What if we head over to a school where you can’t spit in the hallways without hitting a Scientist? “We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles in order to help us continue to build a diverse and talented MIT” (2022):

Within our office, we have a dedicated research and analysis team that continuously studies our processes, outcomes, and criteria …. not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education,⁠ relative to having them, given these other inequalities

There are some helpful hashtags, including #diversity:

When we combine NPR and MIT we find that Science proves that requiring the SAT reduces diversity and also that requiring the SAT increases diversity. It is therefore not unreasonable for someone tasked with applying this Science to earn $430,000 per year at a taxpayer-funded state university.

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Support for the dedicated COVID-19 treatment center idea

by philg

Exactly two years ago (April 2, 2020), I asked If we could build renal dialysis capacity, why not COVID-19 treatment centers?

On the one hand, the U.S. health care system is kind of lame. It consumes a ton of money. New York State spends $88 billion per year on its Department of Health, $4,400/year for every resident, mostly just for people on welfare in New York; Mexico spends about $1,100/year across all citizens, including those with jobs. The U.S. health care system delivers feeble results. Life expectancy in Mexico is 77 versus 78 in the U.S. Despite this prodigious spending, New York has completely failed to protect its residents from something that isn’t truly new.

On the other hand, the U.S. managed to build enough renal dialysis capacity to keep 468,000 Americans with failed kidneys alive. This is a complex procedure that requires expensive machines, and one that did not exist on a commercial basis until the 1960s.

Should this success story give us some hope that the U.S. will, in fact, be able to deal with the surge of demand for ventilation and life support created by the evil non-Chinese coronavirus?

Of course, one issue is that we had decades to build up all of this renal dialysis capability while we have only about one more month to build COVID-19 treatment capacity. But once we have built it, can we sail through the inevitable next wave or two of COVID-19?

The idea turned out to have some medical merit. “COVID Patients Fared Better at Dedicated Hospitals for It” (MedPage Today, 3/3/2022):

At the two M Health Fairview hospitals converted to treat COVID-19 starting in March and November 2020, overall mortality with COVID-19 was higher than in the health system’s other nine Minnesota hospitals (11.6% vs 8.0%, P<0.001).

But after accounting for the generally sicker patients treated at the dedicated hospitals, in-hospital mortality was a relative 22% to 25% less likely, which was significant in both unmatched and propensity-matched comparisons.

Complications were a relative 19% less likely than at mixed-use hospitals, Elizabeth Lusczek, PhD, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and colleagues reported in JAMA Network Open.

M Health Fairview converted two of its hospitals with building modifications to enhance remote telemetry, create negative airflow rooms with HEPA filters, and update interventional radiology and procedural suites and ensure that the healthcare workers there would have easy access to personal protective equipment (PPE) even in times of general shortage.

We’ve spent $10 trillion over two years in our fight against SARS-CoV-2? How many dedicated COVID-19 treatment centers did we get for this money? I’m thinking that the answer is close to zero, given that every time there is a bump in “cases”, we see media stories about non-specialized hospitals being overwhelmed.

Related:

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New York Science: masks for 2-year-olds, but not in the strip clubs

by philg

Following Science, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City orders 2-year-olds to continue wearing masks while unvaccinated adults are free to party in strip clubs, on Tinder dates, at raves, etc.

(The mayor had a bit of trouble with the courts, but an appeals court ruled in favor of continuing to burden 2-year-olds.)

Florida Realtor of 2022 for Eric Adams? At least for New Yorkers with children under 5, a move to the Sunshine State could be compelling!

And what about the flight to freedom? Can escaping families throw away their masks at JFK or will they have to wait until they’re on the curb at PBI? “Florida is challenging federal mask requirements for travelers” (government-funded WFSU, 3/30/2022):

In Florida’s latest salvo against the Biden administration over COVID-19 restrictions, Attorney General Ashley Moody on Tuesday filed a lawsuit challenging requirements that people wear masks in airports and on planes, trains and buses.

Moody, joined by attorneys general from 20 other states, filed the lawsuit in federal court in Tampa. In part, it contends that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has overstepped its legal authority in requiring masks for travelers.

“Faced with a government that displays outright disdain for the limits on its power — especially when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic — plaintiffs seek vacatur of that mask mandate and a permanent injunction against its enforcement,” the lawsuit said.

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Would Hunter Biden have sent his failed hard drive back to Seagate?

by philg

Distilling from the comments on An internal hard disk disappears from Windows, but is still apparently working:

The good news about my $500 9-month-old Seagate (now available for $300) is that it carries a 5-year warranty. So I can send it back to Seagate and they will fix it or send me a new one, rather than spend $300 on a new Seagate or 8X-more-reliable WD (maybe the Western Digital drives are reliable because they are actually designed and engineered by the Hitachi team that WD acquired? WD is still using Hitachi’s old “Ultrastar” brand name to some extent).

Here’s a question for April Fools’ Day… what kind of a fool takes up to 14 TB (formatted capacity of the disk fraudulently marketed as 16 TB) of his/her/zir/their most personal information and sends it to strangers at

Seagate RMA
United States CSO Service Center
Seagate Technology c/o Agility Logistics
21906 Arnold Center Road
Carson, CA 90810

? Who is Agility Logistics, you might ask? Wikipedia says that there is a large Kuwaiti company by this name, but the company’s web site doesn’t show any U.S. facilities. Google says that the Agility Logistics in Carson, CA is a “freight forwarding service”. Where does the failed disk actually go? Asia?

What does the tax-domiciled-in-Ireland Seagate say?

In order to protect your privacy and other interests in data, you should delete all data, or as much as possible, prior to returning any product to Seagate. Seagate realizes, however, that you may not be able to erase certain data on returned products. In any event, Seagate will take the steps described in this statement to protect the physical security of such products and, if applicable, overwrite data as early as possible on products recertified by Seagate.

The first sentence is ironic. If your disk were working well enough that you could delete all data why would you be returning it for warranty repair or replacement?

One argument for trusting Seagate, despite the fact that they won’t tell you anything about where your disk might go after the “freight forwarding” is complete, is that if you tried to dispose of the failed disk yourself and wanted to make sure someone didn’t get hold of your data by sifting through garbage you’d have to take it apart and work to destroy each individual platter. Seagate presumably has some sort of super shredder that they can use.

But, on the other hand, Seagate has the tech skills necessary to recover all of the data if they want to and look at it, post it on the Internet, etc. Who is to say that a rogue worker at Seagate won’t grab personal data and send it to a confederate overseas who will then blackmail the hapless hard drive buyer with messages such as “We need 100 Bitcoin for The Big Guy”?

WWHBD?

(And imagine how much better off Hunter Biden would have been if he’d fed his liquid-damaged MacBook into an industrial shredder rather than tried to recover its $1,000 of residual value. Daily Mail:

Files found in Biden’s personal computer included emails showing shady business dealings by the current US president’s son with foreign officials, and texts that showed him repeatedly using the ‘N-word’ and accidentally overpaying a prostitute $25,000 from an account linked to his dad.

Given that the stripper-turned-plaintiff got $2.5 million after having sex with Hunter Biden in an officially determined family court process, I’m not sure that it is reasonable to characterize $25,000+ to a prostitute as an “overpayment”)

And, even more important than WWHBD, what should I do? Ask one of our neighbors with a pavement-melting Ford Bronco to run over the failed disk 10 times?

Related:

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How did SNOW do versus the S&P 500?

by philg

Happy April Fools’ Day! Today we can celebrate fools who buy stocks (or continue to hold, which amounts to the same thing) at near-historic-peak valuations:

(the insane spike to a P/E ratio of over 100 was in 2009 when corporate earnings went down even more dramatically than stock prices)

Let’s look at my foolish question from a year ago: Short Snowflake? I asked “How can a startup data warehousing company be worth a substantial fraction of Oracle’s $200 billion market cap?”

SNOW was worth $62 billion then. How would that idea have worked out? More importantly, how did SNOW do against the S&P 500? (since we assume that an investor would have taken the proceeds from shorting SNOW and put it into a default investment such as the S&P 500) The chart from yesterday:

Let’s remember that the S&P would have paid roughly 2 percent dividend yield during this time. If we assume that the inflation rate for anyone with enough money to buy stocks is 15 percent (includes the cost of a house in a decent neighborhood, for example), SNOW was down 11 percent in real terms while the S&P was up by 2 percent (the dividend yield). It would definitely have made sense to sell SNOW and buy the S&P. Shorting SNOW, on the other hand, might not have worked due to the various costs of borrowing the required shares.

Despite SNOW having gone down a bit, I continue to be mystified by its market cap. The company has revenue right now of $360 million per quarter or $1.4 billion per year. The accounting is tough to understand, but it looks as though they’re losing money. Why is a money-losing company, albeit one with growing revenue, worth $70+ billion? That’s 50X revenue and would correspond to a 200X P/E ratio if we created a fantasy world in which the company was as profitable as Oracle (25 percent, which very few companies achieve!). Presumably the answer is “growth” and the example of a company that loses money persistently and then finally becomes profitable is Amazon. But even Amazon, despite the U.S. government ordering its bricks and mortar competitors to shut down (#StopTheSpread), had an operating income of only about 5 percent of revenue in 2021.

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Should I add a Like button to this blog?

by philg

Everyone loves Facebook and Twitter (except those who’ve been banned for heresy!) and the Like button is credited as making those apps addictive (who doesn’t want to be liked?). Is it time to add a Like button for posts and comments on this blog? I’m pretty sure that there are WordPress plugins that will do it (a list of 10 from 2020).

One concern that I have is making sure that a rainbow reaction emoji is available, taking inspiration from Facebook:

(On Facebook, the rainbow reaction is available only during Pride Month, but I would want to offer it to readers all year.)

A comment as the only method of feedback doesn’t seem adequate in this day and age. A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system was clicked on by nearly 6,000 people in the past five months (plus viewed by an additional few thousand who saw it when new as part of the home page), so presumably folks liked it, but only 7 people reacted to it with a comment.

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Women’s History Month at Disney Springs

by philg

Today is the last day of Women’s History Month (does that mean that the other 11 months of the year should be devoted to learning about the historical achievements of people who identify as genders other than “female”?).

Here’s are some photos from Disney Springs:

The “Celebrate Her Story” banners were placed at 30-foot intervals throughout the outdoor shopping mall.

Inside an art store, a person who had a “brief” career in animation, but who nonetheless qualifies for “legend” status:

(I asked a 35-year animation professional if he had heard of Retta Scott, pointing out that she was a “legend” while he was not. He was dimly aware of Mx. Scott, but did not know of any of her legendary achievements.)

Banners remind us that Johanna Pemberton, a pharmacist who identified as “female”, invented Coca Cola:

In other Disney Springs news, House of Blues stays true to its Maskachusetts roots and California headquarters by demanding that Floridians turn over medical records:

Even if you don’t wait in line for an hour to get into the LEGO store, there are LEGO sculptures to see:

The volcano in the background belongs to the Rainforest Cafe, which shows its commitment to the environment by flaring off enough natural gas, every 30 minutes, to power half of Germany:

(apologies for the vertical video, but the primary goal was phone re-play for the kids)

We enjoyed the Cirque du Soleil show (they went bankrupt during coronapanic, but emerged after the shareholders were wiped out in favor of the secured creditors):

Readers: What stories can you share about Women’s History Month now that it is almost over?

Tip for getting food in Disney Springs: the lines are epic almost anywhere near the center of the mall, but the restaurants and counter-serve places on the far west end, near the Cirque du Soleil theater, were comparatively quiet. Another fun to do is book a ride on an Amphicar, wander around for an hour or two, and then come back to take the $125 trip around the lake. Disney owns eight of these German marvels, four that can be scavenged for parts and four in operation.

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