Department of First World Problems: the Tile tracker system

by philg

One of the good things about Florida is that you can walk out of your apartment or house without bothering to put on shoes or more clothing than gym shorts and a T-shirt. The downside is that you are often leaving wallets and keys somewhere inside, thus leading to a search challenge a few hours later when it is time to drive to a restaurant. Also, your typical Floridian may have at least three vehicles for which keys are required: car, pickup, golf cart. Putting these all on one huge keyring is cumbersome.

The New York Times/Wirecutter says that the choice of tracker should be limited to Apple AirTag and Tile.

If you’re already paying $1000+ per year to be part of the Apple ecosystem, why not Apple AirTags? They’re great if you lose things outside of the house because there are so many other people paying $1000+ per year to be part of the Apple ecosystem. They’re bad in every other way, though. You can’t put them on an existing keychain because there is no hole in an AirTag. You can’t put them in your wallet because there isn’t a version that is shaped like a credit card. The AirTag’s speaker isn’t as loud. If a heretic in your house decides to use Android, he/she/ze/they won’t be able to locate anything that is attached (using a proprietary Apple keychain that costs $29 to $449) to an AirTag.

The advantages of Tile:

  • thoughtful physical packaging (e.g., a hole for your existing keyrings)
  • no need to buy all new keyrings, wallets, etc.
  • a variety of physical packages (e.g., a “thick credit card” for your wallet, a small cylinder with included adhesive for sticking to TV remotes and similar)
  • there are a lot of devices that are already “tile enabled”. Laptops from HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, for example
  • louder speaker to facilitate finding within the house or yard
  • multi-platform
  • press button on Tile to make your phone sound an alert even when it is on silent (i.e., if you’ve found your keys or wallet it will be easy to find your phone)
  • lifestyle video advertising the product includes a golden retriever on the couch (sadly, lower down on the page is a photo of a hipster)

With Apple there is no subscription service offered. With Tile you can use all of the core services without paying, but if you pay $30 per year (free for the first year) you get more location history, free battery replacements, and some insurance for lost items.

It took me about 5 minutes to download the Tile app for the iPhone, create and verify an account, and activate the the first tile. Additional tiles take about 1 minute to activate. Giving a tile a custom name, e.g., “Awesome Honda Odyssey Keys” instead of “Keys” takes a scroll and an extra press or two (would be nice if this were an option when activating, which it is if you select the “Other” category). The tiles are pretty rugged. I crammed one into the clip of a Stanley FatMax contractor-grade tape measure, which also includes a strong magnet, and it works perfectly. They’re spec’d to handle immersion in water for up to 30 minutes (IP67).

Now that I’ve played with the system one question that jumps out is “Why don’t car keys, all of which already have batteries, come with Tile built in?” Surely Honda, GM, Toyota, and Ford don’t want consumers to lose their keys. The list of Tile partners is extensive so plainly it wouldn’t be tough from a business or technical point of view to integrate Tile.

More: thetileapp.com

Related:

Full post, including comments

The war in Ukraine proves Isoroku Yamamoto right?

by philg

I haven’t written too much about the war in Ukraine because I don’t speak the languages involved, don’t know the history, and don’t know anything about military strategy and tactics. The situation for individuals is horrifying, I’m sure, and that is not pleasant to contemplate.

One feature of the war, as I understand it, is that the Russian military has had a lot of armored vehicles, e.g., tanks and ships, and these have proven vulnerable to inexpensive weapons on the Ukrainian side.

Who could have predicted this? Isoroku Yamamoto, one of the greatest thinkers and strategists of World War II (had Japan followed his advice, it would not have chosen to fight the U.S. to begin with). Admiral Yamamoto was an enthusiast for naval aviation starting in 1924 and correctly predicted that heavy expensive battleships would be almost useless going forward, vulnerable to submarines but especially to swarms of comparatively light and cheap airplanes. (And, of course, the great admiral was ultimately killed by U.S. fighter planes in 1943.)

I’m wondering why the U.S. Army wants to pay to keep 5,000 tanks in its inventory. If we’re fighting a peasant army equipped only with rifles, these tanks are obviously useful, but then we don’t need 5,000 of them. If we’re fighting a big battle in Europe, doesn’t the Russian experience in Ukraine show that the last place anyone would want to be is inside a tank and its illusory protection?

Related:

  • U.S. Army’s official page: The Abrams Main Battle Tank closes with and destroys the enemy using mobility, firepower, and shock effect. The Abrams is a full-tracked, low-profile, land combat assault weapon enabling expeditionary Warfighters to dominate their adversaries through lethal firepower, unparalleled survivability, and audacious maneuver. The Abrams tank sends a message to those who would oppose the United States as to the resolve, capability, and might of the U.S. Army.
Full post, including comments

NYT: It is now women who become pregnant

by philg

From the May 11, 2022 NYT, “Don’t Be Fooled. It’s All About Women and Sex”:

When I was back in high school — a Catholic girls’ school in Cincinnati at the beginning of the sexual revolution — our religion class covered the abortion issue in approximately 45 seconds.

“Abortion is murder,” said the priest who was giving the lesson, before moving on to more controversial topics, like necking and heavy petting.

On Wednesday the Senate failed to pass a Democratic bill supporting women’s right to choose in anticipation of a Supreme Court decision going in the other direction.

The many, many activists who have focused their political careers on constraining women’s sexual activity aren’t going to just declare victory and go home.

All this is basically about punishing women who want to have sex for pleasure.

No mention of pregnant men and their right to choose.

From 2018, same newspaper, “A Family in Transition”:

Two fathers and the baby girl they never expected.

As traditional notions of gender shift and blur, parents and children like these are redefining the concept of family.

Paetyn’s father Tanner, 25, is a trans man: He was born female but began transitioning to male in his teens, and takes the male hormone testosterone.

“I was born a man in a female body,” he said.

His partner and Paetyn’s biological father is David, 35, a gay man.

Their daughter, they agree, is the best thing that ever happened to them.
“She’ll grow up in a very diverse home,” David said. “We surround her with people who are different.”

The first time that they saw the fetal heartbeat on ultrasound, they wept.

“Yeah, I’m a pregnant man,” he told friends and acquaintances. “What? I’m pregnant. I’m still a man. You have questions? Come talk to me. You have a problem with it? Don’t be in my life.”

The journalist and editors regard them as legitimate fathers (i.e., men):

As fathers to be, they got some of their most enthusiastic congratulations from the drag world — the regulars at the club where both men perform, dancing and lip-syncing, Tanner as a drag king and David as a sassy, 6-foot-tall drag queen in a tight skirt and size 12-wide high heels.

Apropos the current debate:

And, David said: “I hope she’s a lesbian. Then we won’t have boys coming to the house and we won’t have to worry about her getting pregnant.”

Also recently from the NYT opinion section, “It’s Time to Rage” (by Roxane Gay):

My wife’s stepfather began raping her when she was 11 years old. The abuse went on for years, and as Debbie got older, she was constantly terrified that she was pregnant. She had no one to talk to and nowhere to turn.

Her stepfather often threatened to kill her younger brother and her mother if Debbie told anyone, so when the fear of pregnancy became too consuming, she told her mother she was assaulted at school. Her mother took Debbie to a doctor, who said that because of her scar tissue, she was sexually active and must have a boyfriend. It was the early 1970s.

A pregnancy would have, in Debbie’s words, ruined her life. Today, she is 60 years old. She is still dealing with the repercussions of that trauma. It is unfathomable to consider how a forced pregnancy would have further altered the trajectory of her life.

This story is supposed to make readers see how misguided conservatives who oppose abortion are, but couldn’t the article support those who advocate for conservative sexual values? Stepfathers did not exist in significant quantities until the 1970s no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce revolution. The author’s wife was unlikely to have been abused by a stepfather in the (mythical?) white picket fence era to which Republicans yearn to return because there were hardly any divorces that left moms free to bring an unrelated adult male into a girl’s household.

Circling back to the first topic, pregnant men only recently won their own emoji but now the mainstream media pretends that they don’t exist?

Full post, including comments

Should we take the neighbor’s 5-year-old in for a COVID-19 vaccine booster?

by philg

From the Journal of Popular Studies: “FDA Grants Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer COVID Booster for Kids 5 to 11.” Children are facing an “emergency”, according to the scientists at the FDA. If there weren’t an emergency, by definition, the shots wouldn’t be available until completely tested and approved via normal procedures.

If a child in the neighborhood is facing an emergency, you’d be morally obligated to take him/her/zir/them to the local hospital, right? You wouldn’t let a 5-year-old bleed out on the sidewalk in front of your apartment when you could simply load the injured kid into the minivan (or Tesla if you’re a douche and/or dog lover!) and zip over to the ED.

Suppose that we suspect some of our neighbors (most of them physicians or dentists) are deplorably failing to respond to the emergency facing their young children. Are we obligated to snatch up the neglected children and rush them to to the nearest healing center for an injection? If not, why not?

If you’re at Disney World in the sexual orientation and gender identification dark ride for kindergarteners and discover that a child in the next car hasn’t received his/her/zir/their booster…

Full post, including comments

How’s the miracle drug Paxlovid doing against COVID-19?

by philg

“Paxlovid is a miracle drug,” says a primary care doc whom I know, “because it is a miracle when I can prescribe it. Anyone who is sufficiently vulnerable to serious consequences from COVID-19 is already on drugs that have interactions with Paxlovid.” The other docs with whom I’ve talked about this drug, especially cardiologists, are generally negative regarding the drug. In their view, it will interact badly with other drugs, have bad side effects, and/or result in SARS-CoV-2 attacking the patient as soon as he/she/ze/they stops taking Paxlovid.

Chinks in the miracle drug’s armor are beginning to be described in our otherwise cheerleading media. Example from the NYT, March 25:

Certain medications or supplements, including painkillers, statins and even St. John’s Wort, may have adverse interactions with Paxlovid. So you may be advised to hold off on taking them for a week while being treated, Dr. Gandhi said. But for some medications, like drugs that regulate heart rhythm, abstaining for a week may not be possible. In those cases, your doctor may recommend molnupiravir for Covid-19 instead.

From Yale, where they understand medicine if not accounting, “13 Things To Know About Paxlovid, the Latest COVID-19 Pill”:

The FDA authorized Paxlovid for people ages 12 and older who weigh at least 88 pounds. But in order to qualify for a prescription, you must also have had a positive COVID-19 test result and be at high risk for developing severe COVID-19.

That means you must either have certain underlying conditions (including cancer, diabetes, obesity, or others) or be 65 or older (more than 81% of COVID-19 deaths occur in in this group). The more underlying medical conditions a person has, the higher their risk for developing a severe case of COVID-19, according to the CDC.

Since Paxlovid is cleared by the kidneys, dose adjustments may be required for patients with mild-to-moderate kidney disease, explains Dr. Topal. “For patients with severe kidney disease—or who are on dialysis—or those with severe liver disease, Paxlovid is not recommended; the levels of the drug can become too high and could cause increased side effects,” he says.

There is a long list of medications Paxlovid may interact with, and in some cases, doctors may not prescribe Paxlovid because these interactions may cause serious complications.

The list of drugs that Paxlovid interacts with includes some organ anti-rejection drugs that transplant patients take, as well as more common drugs like some used to treat heart arrhythmias. Paxlovid also decreases the metabolism of anticoagulants, or blood thinners, that many older adults depend on, driving up levels of those medications in the body to a point where they are unsafe, Dr. Topal explains.

It also interacts with cholesterol-lowering medications like Lipitor, but that’s less challenging for patients to overcome. “If you stop taking your Lipitor for five days, nothing bad is going to happen,” he adds.

If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, the FDA recommends discussing your options and specific situation with your health care provider, since there is no experience using the drug in these populations. If you could become pregnant, it’s recommended that you use effective barrier contraception or do not have sexual activity while taking Paxlovid.

So the ideal Paxlovid patient is morbidly obese with the blood pressure and heart health of a 22-year-old tennis star.

Pfizer wants you to take your Paxlovid every day… “FDA rebukes Pfizer CEO’s suggestion to take more Paxlovid if COVID-19 symptoms return”:

The FDA rebuked Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s proposed solution to reports that some patients experienced a relapse of COVID-19 symptoms after treatment with the company’s antiviral Paxlovid.

After reports said some patients who took Paxlovid rebounded and started feeling symptoms again, the CEO told Bloomberg that patients can take another course, “like you do with antibiotics.”

“There is no evidence of benefit at this time for a longer course of treatment … or repeating a treatment course of Paxlovid in patients with recurrent COVID-19 symptoms following completion of a treatment course,” John Farley, M.D., director of the Office of Infectious Diseases, said in a post.

Science is complex!

Full post, including comments

An easy way for the FBI to ferret out the Deplorables

by philg

From the superintendent of the Lincoln, Maskachusetts public schools:

Subject: Addressing Recent Violation Across Our Country

It saddens me to have to write to acknowledge several more racially motivated shootings that have occurred across our country this weekend. They include a grocery store shooting in Buffalo, New York, the shooting of businesses in Korea Town in Dallas, and the shooting in a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, CA. While the motivation for some of these shootings have not yet been confirmed, they appear to be the result of hateful acts against Black and Asian individuals.

(I wasn’t aware of the ones outside of Buffalo. CNN says that a Chinese person shot some Chinese people in Laguna Woods. How is that “racially motivated”? Nobody seems to know who did the shootings in Dallas or why.)

These acts provide me with the motivation to continue our focus on becoming an antiracist school district that works to ensure that every individual in our schools feels safe, feels seen, and can bring all of their identities with them to school each day. Our students and staff of color, our LGBTQ+ community members, and everyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity, or religious beliefs has the right to be safe at school, in their home and school communities, and in our country.

Noble intentions, but Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended a full course of diversity and tolerance education at the high school in Cambridge, MA and that did not deter him from waging jihad on the infidels at the Boston Marathon. Syed Rizwan Farook presumably got a similar indoctrination at his California public high school and then at Cal State. He was not discouraged from waging jihad in San Bernardino just a few years after completing college.

I know that we are not immune in our small district. We have experienced discriminatory attacks written on bathroom walls in our schools this year. Students and staff have been treated inequitably due to their identities and have been hurt by ignorant comments, questions, and actions towards them. Last week I received a few requests from parents asking to be removed from receiving messages about the LGBTQ+ Pride Community Celebration that will take place next month. This feels like a desire to erase the existence of those who are different than you. But none of us can be erased. We are all here and are members of our community. And, we all deserve to be here and to be able to be who we are without fear of discrimination, harassment, or violence.

I question that last one (“we all deserve to be here”). Why does a young person who supports Donald Trump and, therefore, the January 6 insurrection, deserve to be anywhere other than prison?

I am kind of in love with a person who gets paid $250,000+ by the public education industry complaining about “ignorant questions”. Ordinarily, you might imagine that it was the job of the school to turn ignorance into knowledge. Therefore, an “ignorant question” would be more welcome than a non-ignorant question.

The main point of this post, however, is to consider whether the Biden administration’s FBI could make use of an important information source: the names and addresses of the parents who asked not to hear about the official town-sponsored rituals of the state religion (Rainbow Flagism). They’re probably guilty of something, right, if not the actual insurrection per se?

Here’s the poster for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ gathering that haters didn’t want to hear about:

Speaking of haters:

Ms. Blaire White says that her pronouns are “that/bitch”:

Full post, including comments

Japan’s low birth rate explained by reductions in employment security

by philg

Japanese women have a fertility rate of about 1.4 compared to 1.7 for potentially pregnant American people (some of whom identify as “men”). The Rise of Modern Japan is a lecture series in which Emory University professor Mark Ravina explains his theory that the fall in Japanese fertility is due to the declining number of highly secure jobs. Women in Japan practice sexual selection, in other words, and select against men whose next 20 years of paychecks are not guaranteed. Japan neither valorizes nor financially encourages “single moms” to the extent that we do here in the U.S., so it isn’t practical for 2-5 women to mate with 1 attractive (financially or physically) male.

Separately, the lecture series covers what happened when a lot of guys in their 50s were sent into early retirement in the 1990s following the bursting of the Japanese asset bubble. Their wives referred to these unexpected all-day home-dwellers as “Sodai Gomi” (oversized garbage, requiring a sticker to be hauled away by the city) and “nureochiba” (wet fallen leaves, sticking to one’s shoes and tough to shake off).

(Why don’t the irritated wives avail themselves of no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce and take the house, cash, etc.? “Under the Japanese laws, a spouse cannot divorce at his/her sole discretion. Basically a mutual agreement between spouses are needed to divorce in Japan.” (source))

The lecture series also talks about the long-term effects of “3/11” (the Fukushima nuclear plant failure) on the Japanese psyche. Although the series is new (the professor mentions COVID-19), it might be out of date. Inflation in the price of fossil fuels has finally generated (so to speak) some renewed enthusiasm for nuclear power among the Japanese public. Bloomberg says that only 10 out of 33 possible plants are currently online.

Another interesting observation is that Japanese competence works against political and economic reform. Everything in Japan works reasonably well and therefore it is difficult to motivate voters to demand political change. Japan thus muddles through with its massive conglomerates that are cronies of the ruling parties.

From a 2004 trip to Japan, my rental car (maybe not the best idea if you can’t read kanji) next to a hill that has been concretized and a traditional Japanese garden ornament that I would desperately love to have for our own backyard!

Full post, including comments

New York Times story on the baby formula shortage

by philg

Timed to coincide with the national shortage of baby formula, “The Feminist Case for Breast Reduction” (NYT, May 10):

Over the next 25 years, my breasts drew attention that I would not otherwise have received. Like a sexual beacon, they signaled to men everywhere. I’d always known I was queer and began dating women as a teenager. While I found some refuge in these intimate relationships, I still lived in the world of men, and the size of my breasts meant that my body was theirs for the staring, commenting, grabbing and fetishizing.

Frye and I were the same height, but her breasts were larger than mine, which were a 36D.

How much weight is 36D? Approximately 1.5 lbs. per breast. (source)

Cosmetic surgery is off-limits to the true feminist, but the implication is that working as a prostitute is consistent with feminism:

I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, thumbing through my mother’s issues of Ms. and occasionally attending NOW meetings with her. Despite never having read any feminist writing on cosmetic surgery, I knew that the consensus was, as Kathy Davis, the foremost contemporary feminist theorist on the subject, wrote in a 1991 article in the journal “Hypatia,” that cosmetic surgery was “regarded as an extreme form of medical misogyny, producing and reproducing the pernicious and pervasive cultural themes of deficient femininity.” The woman who yielded to the desire to commit such violence to her body was a “cultural dope,” afflicted by false consciousness, believing she made a personal choice while actually yielding to a system that controls and oppresses women.

Years later, I found plenty of loopholes in my inherited feminism that permitted me to do things I would have thought off limits at 13, but none were big enough to fit cosmetic surgery. Even by my early 20s, the only people I knew who’d done it were friends who worked in the sex industry, for whom it seemed a professional investment rather than a personal one. I would need a more powerful kind of permission that I didn’t yet feel the authority to give myself.

The author has some experience with body modification:

My conception of feminism also permitted me to cover myself in tattoos, pierce just about every flap of skin on my body and stretch inch-wide holes in my earlobes as well as have them sewn back up 10 years later (a permissible “deformity” to have corrected). To change my body through cosmetic surgery, however, would violate the often-conflicting ideologies behind these allowances.

The supposed dichotomy between “medical” and “aesthetic” surgeries is reflected perhaps most starkly in today’s medicalization of sexual transition, the manner in which transgender people seeking surgery must pathologize their experience in order to receive permission from medical gatekeepers. Listening to the experiences of my trans friends and reading the works of trans writers pushed me to think differently about my own dilemma.

The summer before I made the first appointment, my wife and I spent an afternoon in a private room at a bathhouse in Port Townsend, Wash., and that is where I told her about my decades-long struggle with my breasts and my interest in surgery. I had never spoken aloud about it to anyone.

In other words, the NYT gives us a story about two members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community that begins in a bathhouse. The self-described “feminist” chooses a male plastic surgeon and the result is a happy ending:

I had always experienced my body, particularly my breasts, as something I needed to keep hidden or to manage. In the first weeks after my surgery, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror because the sight of the incisions made me woozy. Instead, I asked my wife to look and tell me what she saw. I stood and opened my shirt. It felt like baring myself to the sun for the first time. How warm it was. How quickly I had stopped treating my body like a terrible secret. It was less the physical alteration that made it possible than the conversation we had in that steamy room and the decision that followed. Naming my experience returned my body to me more conclusively than a scalpel ever could.

How bad is the formula shortage right now? Amazon offers some infant formula that they promise to deliver… in June. Most products are shown as simply “unavailable” with no promises regarding restocking.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Happy International Day of Families

by philg

(with somewhat unfortunate timing given the tragedy in Buffalo) … the United Nations says that today is International Day of Families. The site has some statistics:

Maternity leave, which was offered in 89% of countries in 1995, was available in 96% of countries by 2015.

What about birthing persons who don’t identify as “mothers”? Based on the photos, the UN’s site seems to be plagued by cisgender-normative and heteronormative concepts of “family”.

Only 57% of women, who are married, or in a domestic union, are able to make decisions about sexual relations and the use of contraceptives and reproductive health services.

How is the term “women” defined? What about “men” who are capable of giving birth? Isn’t their decision-making power relevant? Also, the implication is that it is bad when people (“women”) can’t decide what medicines to introduce into their bodies. Should women also be able to decide whether to get a COVID-19 vaccine?

Here in the Florida Free State, where vaccine coercion is banned by statute, living together as a family means that we solve problems together… problems that we wouldn’t have if we had been more proactive about using contraception.

Readers: What are you doing to celebrate this day?

From yesterday, home of a future sea turtle’s family is staked out on Juno Beach:

(Performing 84 abortions on human pregnant people would yield nearly $100,000 in revenue for Planned Parenthood or similar. But 84 sea turtle abortions earned Lewis Jackson of Brunswick, Georgia 21 months in prison (justice.gov).)

Full post, including comments