Should we not pay rent due to the COVID-19 public health emergency…

by philg

… or should we instead not pay rent due to “Biden administration declares the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency” (CNN):

The declaration follows the World Health Organization announcement last month that monkeypox is a public health emergency of international concern. WHO defines a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC, as “an extraordinary event” that constitutes a “public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease” and “to potentially require a coordinated international response.”

Some cities and states, including New York City, San Francisco, California, Illinois and New York, have already declared monkeypox an emergency, allowing them to free up funding and resources for their responses to the outbreak.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden named Robert Fenton as the White House’s national monkeypox response coordinator. Fenton — a regional Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator who oversees Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada — will coordinate the federal government’s response to the outbreak.

Monkeypox can infect anyone, but the majority of cases in the US outbreak have been among men who have sex with men, including gay and bisexual men and people who identify as transgender. Close contact with an infected individual is required for the spread of the monkeypox virus, experts say.

Concentrating on that last paragraph, now that Science has declared an emergency, should we start wearing protective cloth masks on visits to the local bathhouse?

Separately, one of my most COVID-concerned Facebook friends has been posting images of himself and his wife, fully masked, at a 70,000-person indoor board game convention. Apparently, there was a one-hour process for scrutinizing vaccine papers (Science says that there is no way to transmit a SARS-CoV-2 infection if a person has been injected with proven-by-Science COVID-19 “vaccines”). The same guy posted some rage against convention attendees who did not Follow Science by attending a 70,000-person indoor event while wearing a mask of some sort:

This guy and similar are endlessly fascinating to me. He is concerned enough about COVID-19 to wear a mask and post about others’ mask-wearing. But he is not concerned enough about an aerosol respiratory virus to refrain from attending a 70,000-person indoor event that attracts diseased individuals from all around the world.

Finally, when will the CDC announce a hangar rent moratorium? That’s the kind of COVID-19/monkeypox relief that I feel would be most beneficial.

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Could Novak Djokovic get into the U.S. by saying that he is going to visit a bathhouse?

by philg

“Djokovic likely to miss U.S. Open over COVID-19 vaccine status” (Reuters):

U.S. Open organisers also said that while they do not have a vaccination mandate in place for players, they will respect the U.S. government’s position regarding travel into the country for unvaccinated non-U.S. citizens.

Another post with the same hashtag brought up U.S. President Joe Biden, who is fully vaccinated and twice boosted but tested positive on Saturday just three days after having emerged from isolation after testing positive for the first time on July 21.

“Quadruple-vaxxed Biden tested positive for Covid again. But unvaccinated Covid-recovered Djokovic can’t play in U.S. Open. He is apparently too big a risk to the U.S. healthcare system,” the tweet read.

Monkeypox is a global health emergency. But bathhouses are “essential” from a public health point of view and won’t be shut down despite the potential for monkeypox to thrive in our bathhouses.

Combining the above, could Novak Djokovic be admitted to the U.S. if he says that his reason for travel is to visit a bathhouse?

From today’s Pravda, “We Can Fight Monkeypox Without Hysteria or Homophobia”:

Any successful response to an outbreak needs to be grounded in facts, and the facts are clear. Out of the cases recently reported to the W.H.O., data on sex is available for about three-quarters. Of these, about 99 percent are male. Data on sexual orientation is available for only about 7,500 cases, but of these, 97.5 percent are men who have sex with men.

A two-page leaflet by German health authorities to inform the public about monkeypox does make clear that spread is happening in places like sex clubs. But it does not mention the words “gay” or “men who have sex with men” once.

Even within my own community, some have argued that stating that the disease was mostly affecting men who have sex with men was homophobic. Others were simply afraid of worsening the stigma many gay men already face. On the other end of the spectrum, social media accounts that have gained huge numbers of followers during the coronavirus pandemic are spreading the false information that monkeypox is transmitting widely through handshakes, the food we eat and the air we breathe. The result has been confusion, with some people wrongly thinking they are at high risk and others not knowing about their very real risk or how to lower it.

(When will Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York City close the public schools to protect children from this disease?)

From the Amana Colonies, the passionate Christianity of the 19th and 20th centuries is now passion for 2SLGBTQQIA+ love plus commonsense gun safety laws:

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Are there Ukrainian refugees in your neighborhood?

by philg

Our Florida neighborhood, which has no “immigrants welcome” signs, is now home to at least two groups of Ukrainian refugees (mother-child in both cases). That’s out of a sample of about 200 houses and apartments.

Our former neighborhood, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has more than 2,000 homes and perhaps 4,000 “migrants welcome” signs (squeezed in among the rainbow flags, BLM banners, In This House We Believe… laundry lists, and #StopAsianHate memes). The Ukrainian refugee count there? According to friends who still live in Lincoln… zero.

Readers: What’s the story in your own neighborhoods? Have you met any displaced Ukrainians or does the war remain an abstraction for you?

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  • If you’re looking for a way to help Ukrainians and don’t want to copy me by giving money to displaced Ukrainians and/or their hosts (part of my overall offer to pay for food to anyone who says that he/she/ze/they support expanded immigration and are willing to host migrants in their own homes), you can look at The Bond of Sports Foundation (disclosure: I am actually a board member of this 501c3 corporation, the first of whose core values is “empathy” so you know that I am a huge contributor in non-monetary ways)
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The flying-to-Oshkosh part of flying to Oshkosh

by philg

I am back from EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) in the Cirrus SR20. It took only 4 days to get from Wisconsin to South Florida by air, a trip that would have taken 22 hours by minivan. The route as mapped by SkyVector:

With forecast winds, this should be 16 hours of round-trip flight time according to SkyVector. How long did it actually take? 18.3 hours in the air, according to the meter in the plane.

Amazingly, the 2.5-week trip was done entirely VFR and proceeded almost precisely on the originally planned schedule. A student pilot could have flown all of the legs that we did and been challenged only by a 25-knot crosswind landing at Appleton, Wisconsin (simultaneous landings on two intersecting runways for maximum capacity) and a 25-knot crosswind landing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (no runway there is oriented into the wind that we encountered). We delayed our departure from Indianapolis up to Appleton (one airport north of actual Oshkosh (KOSH)) due to a line of thunderstorms, but our friend who came in via Southwest to Chicago was delayed over 3 hours due to the same weather. Our family had a good time at the Indiana State Museum while hoping to avoid a long detour around the cells (we ended up adding about 20 minutes of meandering). Instrument flying skills would have been unhelpful to us, just as they were to Southwest, because flying through a thunderstorm isn’t a practical transportation strategy.

Most of the trip happened between 7,500′ and 11,500′ due to trying to stay over the bumpy cumulus clouds and avoid roasting to death in the unairconditioned Cirrus.

KDNL in Augusta, Georgia is a great stop due to the Morris Museum of Southern art. If you follow Science and are from Massachusetts or California, you’ll like KMWA in Illinois. According to the FBO, the on-field marijuana shop was open every day that the Chicago Public Schools were closed.

I had a 10:30 am brisket breakfast at Rob’s Pit BBQ, which was superb.

The stops that are not self-explanatory are KPDC (Effigy Mounds National Monument; an afternoon hike accessed via the crew car) and KCID (the Amana Colonies; two nights and one full day to tour).

I’ll write more about Indianapolis. There are a lot of great museums, especially for kids. We spent two nights there.

Pilot friends will appreciate that the cheapest fuel purchased was from Signature(!) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where leaded dinosaur blood was dispensed at $6.90 per gallon with the “Oshkosh discount”. On the third hand, though I had reserved a “car” at Cedar Rapids, Hertz delivered a Ford Expedition Max:

What I saved on 100LL I paid out at the local BP station to feed this uncomfortably bumpy monster.

Thanks to all of the jet charter companies having their best years ever (they and their clients all standing under a shower of federal cash), the level of staffing and service at FBOs is high anywhere that a Gulfstream might land. Air Traffic Control was operating smoothly and provided VFR advisories for the entire trip except for the last 40 miles into the Oshkosh area. The rental car crisis seems to have abated as long as you’re willing to pay 100 Bidies per day for a car that used to be $50 per day. Ubers, too, were plentiful (Indianapolis and Chattanooga).

The view out the front approaching our home airport of Stuart, Florida:

Best views on the trip: Mississippi River climbing out of KPDC; crossing the Appalachian Mountains; approaching to land at Chattanooga; the marshes around Amelia Island, Florida (KFHB).

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Europeans implement my dream life-year saving system

by philg

March 2020… Why do we care about COVID-19 deaths more than driving-related deaths?: I point out that we aren’t doing anything about motor vehicle fatalities that are comparable in scale to the feared-at-the-time COVID deaths. I failed to adjust for life-years in this piece, so didn’t capture that fact that motor vehicle accidents have a far higher cost than the COVID-19 epidemic that led us to shut down schools, lock down businesses (except for “essential” marijuana in California and Massachusetts), etc. “We’re willing to invest $trillions to reduce the death toll from coronaplague, but hardly a dime to build centerline dividers on more of our two-lane roads so as to eliminate head-on collisions.”

February 2021… Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph?: … by shutting down for a year we’ve spent way more per life-year in our attempt to reduce coronaplague deaths than I ever could have imagined. If we infer from this how much saving a life-year is worth to us, it would be rational to limit cars and tracks, nearly all of which are electronically controlled, to 35 mph. Consider that most people who die in car accidents had many decades of life expectancy in front of them, unlike the typical 82-year-old victim of COVID-19. … How about insisting that engine control software be updated in order to get an inspection sticker? The update will prevent the car from exceeding 35 mph. New cars, obviously, can be limited via regulation.

It looks as though the lockdown-loving Europeans agree with me, at least to some extent. They’re not willing to put anywhere near as high a price on a life-year lost due to a car accident compared to a life-year lost to COVID-19, but they are going to at least take the basic steps.

“Anti-Speeding Tech Is Now Mandatory in European Union” (Autoweek, July 7):

Mandatory on all new cars sold by 2024, the switchable ISA technology is expected to reduce speeding by 30% and traffic deaths by 20%.

Haptic feedback requires the car to recognize speed signs and, if the driver is in fact speeding, automatically push back against the driver’s accelerator pedal pressure. The speed control function goes one step further by cutting power input from the pedal once the speed limit is reached.

At least in the early years of these systems going in, the driver will have the ability to override the electronically enforced speed limit. Should we take bets on how soon before a public health emergency is declared and the electronic limit because a hard limit?

Here’s a great place for a computer-enforced speed limit, Lion Country Safari:

Speed limit 5 mph and the kids in the back would scream “speeder, speeder!” if the Honda Odyssey’s instruments indicated 6 mph or faster.

A daily-driver Ferrari at the local office park:

You can’t spit in a strip mall parking lot in South Florida without hitting a car that would end up with 400 excess horsepower in the event that this kind of regulation is adopted in the U.S.

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Can we catch up to China in CO2 emissions even if our economy is smaller?

by philg

“Crytopmining Capacity in U.S. Rivals Energy Use of Houston, Findings Show” (New York Times, July 15):

the seven companies alone had set up to tap as much as 1,045 megawatts of power, or enough electricity to power all the residences in a city the size of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city with 2.3 million residents.

Note that the headline contains multiple lies. The population of Houston is roughly 7 million if we include the actual city and ignore arbitrary political boundaries. And there are a lot of industrial users of electricity in Metro Houston, e.g., oil refineries. So the amount of electricity usage implied by the headline could be 20-30X what is described in the body (just residential usage and only for the 2.3 million people who live in the center of the city).

The good news is that we will be rich. Crypto can’t fail, like real estate, because of the old adage “they’re not making any more bits.” Yet the U.S. will be making some more bits while China is eating our dust (literally, after it blows around the world a bit).

People used to complain that we were exporting our pollution to poorer countries. Now it is China that is exporting pollution to the U.S.:

The United States has seen an influx of cryptocurrency miners, who use powerful, energy-intensive computers to create and track the virtual currencies, after China cracked down on the practice last year. Democrats led by Senator Elizabeth Warren are also calling for the companies to report their emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is the main driver of climate change.

I’m a little concerned that I find myself in agreement with Elizabeth Warren!

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Why is COVID-19 still a valid excuse for poor customer service?

by philg

In addition to six wall-mounted TVs, the previous owners of our house left with us a $2,000 Wine Enthusiast wine cooler (there is a compressor inside, not a Peltier cooler). Since this isn’t made by LG or Samsung, of course it quickly failed (it looks brand new, but is presumably at least a year old). An email to the company’s customer service department yielded no response. So I called the company and the robot said that due to COVID-19, people were working from home and therefore wouldn’t be able to answer the phone quickly. I recognize that we’re still in Year 3 of our state of emergency, but how much longer will consumers fail to consider that it is just as easy for someone at home to answer the phone as it is for someone in an office?

Separately, I think this shows what a great business it is to sell stuff to people who drink a lot of wine. The sticker on the back says it is 6 cubic feet in volume and “Made in China”. Home Depot will sell you a 7.3 cu. ft. fridge, not designed for winos, for $275. Maybe the answer is to buy Wine Enthusiast products from Costco and get support from Costco? From the Costco site:

How did the Costco customers enjoy their Wine Enthusiast fridge combined with Costco support?

  • Nice looking but temperature controls and lights don’t work…out of the box!! Tried calling their warranty number but on hold for over an hour and cutoff twice.
  • we ordered one and we couldn’t get it to hold the temps and the blue back lights we not working / we figured well maybe it’s defective we will order a 2nd one. The 2nd one was more trouble than the first!
  • A beautiful, quiet wine refrigerator; however, the controls do not work and the lights do not work. Very disappointed.
  • Beyond junk. Can’t control temperature
  • Very disappointed to get this all set up in the location but then it didn’t cool and neither side got below 66 degrees. Called the manufacturer and after 2-3 minutes on the phone, they said that it was broken beyond repair.
  • Stopped working after 2 weeks.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I need to give a shout-out to Baldwin Hardware. Our front door came with a 19-year-old Baldwin Prestige Pistoria handleset. The latch wasn’t working perfectly anymore so I called them up to see if I could buy a new latch mechanism. Baldwin answered the phone quickly, did not mention their inability to get off their sofas and put down their Xbox controllers due to COVID-19, and decided that the issue would be covered under their lifetime warranty. They sent out a brand new replacement that arrived within a few days of the call.

On the third hand, maybe I should be inspired by companies like Wine Enthusiast. I can say that COVID-19 is responsible for the low quality of my blog ideas!

[What ultimately happened once I got through to Wine Enthusiast (by phone; they never did answer the email)? They said that they couldn’t look up any information regarding the refrigerator based on the serial number. There was no way for them to determine whether the fridge was within warranty, for example, so they would refuse to honor their 1-year warranty. They gave me the name of a local appliance repair service. That company came out, said that the problem was “probably with the sealed system” and that it would cost $500 to do a test of the system, which would take about two hours, and after that another $1,000+ to perform a repair. The ultimate cost to fix the $2,000 fridge would therefore be about $1,700 and they recommended against it. I called Wine Enthusiast and they suggested buying a new one from them at full retail price, plus shipping… $2,200 (no cheaper than switching to a name brand such as LG or Samsung; who sticks with Wine Enthusiast after experiencing a failure like this one?) The good news is that we will be able to free up some space in the living room because we were not passionate about wine to begin with. Because of our Massachusetts heritage, we consider (“essential” during lockdown) cannabis to be far more important. And that raises the question of when we will be able to buy a $2,000+ stainless steel refrigerator to keep cannabis at the ideal temperature for consumption.]

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The true spirit of Oshkosh

by philg

I’ll be writing about EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) over the next few weeks, but today is the last day of the actual gathering. The true spirit of Oshkosh, I think, is best captured by this story from EAA:

Ken Swain, EAA 102241, flew his VariEze, N4ZZ, into Oshkosh for the 45th year in a row this year. From life in the Air Force to flying for United Airlines, and now in retirement, Ken’s aircraft has been a constant.

Ken has proudly owned his VariEze since Burt Rutan first released it, even flying it into Oshkosh just two years after the prototype was shown.

“In 1976, Burt showed up in the homebuilt prototype,” Ken said. “Once, again, he was mobbed. The plans were out there, and a couple of really fast builders showed up in 1977 along with Burt, and in 1978, there were at least 14 … and I was one of them. That was my first time [at Oshkosh].”

“The first three years I stayed [at UW-Oshkosh], and every year since, I’ve stayed in the campground,” Ken said. “I’ve seen the way the campground has evolved …. That’s changed a lot, and yet it hasn’t changed. The society of campers is its own extra convention separate from the daytime convention. It has to be experienced, and not just one or twice, but over a number of years to understand. It’s a whole other vibe.”

This guy hits every note. He built his own airplane from plans. The plane is a Rutan design. He camps with his plane. Let’s just hope that he came in on Sunday rather than a day early. The weather for the event was perfect, sunny with highs around 80 degrees every day. Saturday, July 23 was a different story:

What it looked like in the Garmin Pilot app around 7 pm Central:

I’m not sure when they arrived, but here are a couple of guys who got two tents and two full-size bicycles into an A36 Bonanza:

Also a candidate for the True Spirit of Oshkosh award, a family that rebuilt a 1938 Staggerwing… twice (second rebuild necessitated by a hangar fire):

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Mighty brains of academia and non-profit figure out why Americans are homeless

by philg

There is a new book from some of America’s smartest people. First, the credentials…

GREGG COLBURN is an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. … Gregg holds a PhD and an MSW from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Northwestern University. … Gregg is also a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Family Homelessness Evaluation Committee and co-chair of the University of Washington’s Homelessness Research Initiative.

CLAYTON PAGE ALDERN is a neuroscientist turned journalist and data scientist based in Seattle. … A Rhodes scholar and a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, he holds a master’s in neuroscience and a master’s in public policy from the University of Oxford. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington.

What have these mighty brains learned? From Homelessness is a Housing Problem:

the researchers illustrate how absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates are associated with regional rates of homelessness.

The higher the rent, the higher the rate of people who can’t afford the rent:

In other words, we aren’t wealthy enough to build and maintain the housing to which we believe ourselves entitled.

Meanwhile, more than 200,000 people come over the southern border every month to claim asylum (US CBP stats) and common decency demands that, regardless of whether any can or do work, all be provided with reasonable quality housing. According to a book that I recently finished, The Swamp, there may be a limit to how many of these newcomers can come to South Florida. From a legal point of view, we can’t keep robbing the federally-protected Everglades of water. Our abuse of the animals who live there has some limits.

From a newspaper that passionately advocates for expanded low-skill immigration… “The Housing Shortage Isn’t Just a Coastal Crisis Anymore” (NYT, July 14):

What once seemed a blue-state coastal problem has increasingly become a national one, with consequences for the quality of life of American families, the health of the national economy and the politics of housing construction.

Freddie Mac has estimated that the nation is short 3.8 million housing units to keep up with household formation.

It is not an expanding population due to immigration that drives up prices in an Econ 101 supply and demand curve intersection, but rather inequality:

Other forces like widening income inequality also worsen housing affordability, said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. That’s because more higher-income households compete for limited housing (prompting builders to build high-end homes).

Our brightest minds are working on this:

The Biden administration also released a long list of ideas this spring for boosting housing supply.

The word “immigration” does not occur in this article.

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Boston builds a ghetto for the 2SLGBTQQIA+

by philg

From state-sponsored media… “Community unites after an LGBTQ+ senior housing project in Boston was defaced” (NPR, July 14, 2022):

The road to building The Pryde, a Boston housing development aimed at LGBTQ+ seniors, has been surprisingly smooth. That’s what made last weekend’s homophobic vandalism all the more shocking.

Among the slurs and death threats covering the perimeter of the construction site, which takes up nearly an entire city block of the Hyde Park neighborhood, were messages saying, “We will burn this,” “die slow,” and “die by fire.”

Meanwhile, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu also responded on Twitter, writing, “Hate & acts of vandalism will not be tolerated at the Pryde — or anywhere in Boston.”

“This affordable, LGBTQ+ senior housing development has been led by local residents, boosted by neighborhood voices & fueled by united support. We will move even faster to get it done,” Wu said.

Intolerance will not be tolerated by the tolerant!

From the developers:

Pennrose, in partnership with LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc., has been selected by the City of Boston to develop 74 new apartments for seniors 62 and older in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. Construction has begun on the 120 year old former William Barton Rogers School that will undergo a historic rehabilitation. Rent-restricted studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments will be available to households and individuals at various income tiers (30%, 50%, 60%, 80% and 100% of Area Median Income). Several apartments will be set aside for homeless individuals. A housing lottery will be conducted, and 70% of the apartments will carry a City of Boston resident preference during the initial lease up of the community.

So many questions! First, why aren’t all of the apartments set aside for those who are currently homeless? (who has a greater need for a home than a homeless individual?) Massachusetts needs to catch up to California with its 160,000+ unhoused residents? Second, if Maskachusetts is Tolerance Central, why do members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community have to live apart from those who do not identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+? Would it be okay to build rent-restricted housing for Black people? For Asian American and Pacific Islander people? If discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is forbidden under Massachusetts law, how can this new government-sponsored development discriminate against cisgender heterosexuals who want to live rent-free?

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