Why can’t a dual-SIM phone use two mobile data sources simultaneously?

by philg

Whatever we are paying Verizon is not enough to induce them to build a working mobile data network here in Florida. The dead spots are at least as bad as in Maskachusetts despite the flat terrain and lack of skyscrapers that could generate multipath.

Why not switch to another carrier? T-Mobile and AT&T customers report similar unreliable communications.

The worst part of it is that the phone often shows 3 bars of 5G while simultaneously being unable to load a web page for minutes. Upgrading from the iPhone 12 Pro Max (rubbish) to the iPhone 13 Pro Max (a whole new world of greatness) did not help the problem in any way.

If we assume that T-Mobile’s dead spots are not the same as Verizon’s dead spots, the obvious solution is for the phone, which already is capable of dual-SIM operation, to have both SIMs activated simultaneously for mobile data. If the phone can’t get packets out via Verizon it would try T-Mobile and vice versa.

This is not a radical concept. A colocation facility for Web servers can have data links from at least two Internet Service Providers (ISPs) so that the failure of one ISP does not render the servers unreachable. The whole point of packet-switched networking (invented by a 2SLGBTQQIA+ BIPOC American) is that routing can handle network link failures. There is no more common example of a network link failure than in the final segment between mobile tower and mobile device.

Carriers should like this. They can cooperate to get customers’ money for two subscriptions instead of fighting over who gets paid for a single subscription.

Consumers should accept this. Americans cheerfully pay 2X what Europeans pay for mobile service and home broadband. Why not pay 4X and get something that actually works when you need it?

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“Elderly” tag depends on context (73-year-old killed by Comfort Sheep)

by philg

A sad tale from Newsweek, with “elderly” in both the headline and URL… “Elderly Woman Killed by a Sheep While Volunteering at Massachusetts Farm” (12/6):

Kim Taylor, 73, of Wellesley, had been volunteering at Cultivate Care Farms when she was repeatedly rammed by a sheep on Saturday morning, according to NBC Boston, citing Bolton police.

According to police, all the livestock at Cultivate Care Farms are comfort animals and that the site assists people as part of an attempt to improve their mental health.

This post is not about the sad event, but about the choice of language.

Let’s consider a 79-year-old President of the United States? Not “elderly,” according to Newsweek (Google search for “joe biden elderly site:newsweek.com”).

How about a 73-year-old who dies with/from COVID-19? (9 years younger than the median age of a COVID-19 death in Maskachusetts) Would our media characterize this person as “elderly”? Or imply that he/she/ze/they would otherwise have looked forward to decades of health and vigor?

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Why is it still almost impossible to schedule a COVID-19 test? (at least in Maskachusetts)

by philg

A friend woke up this morning with a 102-degree fever. He asked our chat group what the procedure was for getting a COVID-19 test in suburban Boston. Keep in mind that this is one of the epicenters of COVID-19 Karenhood. To minimize deaths tagged to COVID-19, no price is too high to pay in dollars, deaths due to shutdown non-COVID health care, inconvenience, and long-term deaths due to lockdown-related obesity, lack of education, poor mental health, etc. Healthy college and K-12 students are tested weekly, for example. Vaccine papers are checked in numerous situations, e.g., to attend college or a concert (folks say that preventing COVID-19 is their #1 priority and then crowd into a 2,700-person concert hall, relying on proven-ineffective cloth masks for protection). Schools in Boston were closed for more than a year. Certainly a big slice of the $10 trillion that the Feds have spent on coronapanic has been spent in Maskachusetts.

Nobel-winner Barack Obama handed tens of $billions of hard-earned tax dollars and gave them to health care providers who installed computer systems.

If we intersect the above two paragraphs, shouldn’t the result be a computer system that can tell a Massachusetts resident where to get a Covid test today? If not from the government (healthcare.gov was a rough development project!) then from a righteous private company?

We’re now nearly 2 years into 14 days to flatten the curve. The health care industry is fully computerized. The Internet monopolies such as Google and Facebook devote considerable effort to Karen’s propaganda campaign. Searching for “covid vaccine” in The Google:

Searching for “vaccine” in Facebook:

Facebook corrects vaccine misinformation. A physician friend posted “Flu variants yearly warrant new vax; yet #CDC pushes Covid “booster” -retreads”. A pilot friend posted “Mengele is admitting that these vaccines are not working. He knows something is coming, and he tries to protect his ass.” over a video of Saint Fauci. A physicist posts European data: “I had more than a year ago posted a study by the Italian ISS, published in August 2019, on those recurring peaks of excessive mortality in the previous decade. It showed that the magnitude of excessive deaths, among the same statistical population (over 65) and in most cases even with geographical correlations (areas of northern Italy) were comparable with COVID mortality. In my view, whoever is intellectually honest will admit from these data that lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etcetera, were and are not justified by the numbers.” An attorney: “My wife is a nurse in a hospital here in the Boise area. Not only are they letting nurses go for not having the vax, and bringing in travelling nurses who are not vaxxed, but they are paying the travellers more than twice as much as their full-time nurses. It is freaking insanity”.

Underneath all of these Facebook adds the following:

What if you try to use these titans of information technology to find a Covid test? Searching for “covid test” in Facebook yields instructions to wear a mask and an ad for CVS. Search for “covid test” in Google Maps yields nearby facilities that might do tests, but with no information about whether they have availability, require appointments, charge money, etc.

Since my friend isn’t feeling well, I tried to find him a test appointment. The various CVS stores are prominent in search results. When you follow the link from Google Maps it takes three clicks and typing in a ZIP code to get to a questionnaire:

I type fairly fast, but it took me roughly 2 minutes to get to a page of available locations:

The CVS site showed availability for today at various stores, inviting me to click on “Check for available times” but the result of the click was always “no available times”:

In Florida, it should be a lot simpler for Google and Facebook. They can highlight the government-run drive-through free testing centers that never seem to have a line and that don’t require any appointments. Yet this isn’t done. Instead, Google Maps shows urgent care clinics, pharmacies, etc. that may require appointments, payment, etc.

After $10 trillion has been spent, why should a person with a 102-degree fever have to spend more than 2 minutes on the Web to find a reasonably close and convenient COVID testing option?

Update: After a full day of web-searching and driving around, my friend scored a Binax rapid test kit (one-hour round-trip drive). Verdict: POSITIVE. Another success story for Moderna! (second shot six months ago) I think it is safe to assume that, without the vaccine, my friend would now be dead.

Related:

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Inspiration for sticking to your flying lessons (catch up with canine pilots)

by philg

We’ve hit mid-December, historically a time when a lot of flight students in Maskachusetts would give up, at least until the spring. They wouldn’t schedule lessons due to Christmas parties, Christmas shopping, holiday trips, etc. And then it would be January and the idea of being out on the ramp was not appealing. Perhaps things will be better this year due to coronapanic. There are fewer in-person parties. People who travel internationally risk getting stuck due to a false or true positive COVID-19 test.

Here’s some inspiration for sticking to those flight lessons, whether you’re in a frigid slave state or a sunny free state…

Let’s back up to a flight that I did in the Cirrus with a helicopter student and her boyfriend, a non-pilot business manager. At the end of the day, which I thought would have impressed him with (a) the awesomeness of the Cirrus, (b) the awesomeness of his girlfriend as a fixed-wing pilot, and (c) the awesomeness of me as an instructor (sage advice from the right seat, checklist discipline, etc.), he said “It seems like the goal is to do everything like a robot. If that’s the goal, why not just get a robot to do it all?”

“I taught two dogs to fly a plane” (Guardian):

I have been a pet behaviourist for more than 25 years and have also worked for the film industry, helping animals to “perform” on camera. I have trained a 190kg boar to pretend to attack an actor, a cat to plunge shoulder-deep into water as if catching a fish and a cockatoo to winch up a bucket, take out a coin and drop it into a piggy bank. But when a TV company asked if I could teach a dog to fly a plane, I faced the toughest challenge of my career.

Initially I was hesitant about the project, which involved taking 12 carefully selected rescue dogs through a training regime that would ultimately allow three of them to take the controls of a Cessna light aircraft. I wondered if the idea was in the animals’ best interests, but was won over by the programme’s aim: to prove that an abandoned dog, given enough love and attention, is capable of far more than people might expect.

We had only six weeks to turn the three finalists into pilots. The Civil Aviation Authority had issued guidelines: the dogs had to be secured while in flight, and we couldn’t make any alterations to the aircraft. I had a simple rig built to mimic the plane’s seat and controls. After making sure the dogs could be seated comfortably, we used a broom handle and a cutout piece of plywood to represent the plane’s steering yoke.

During the flight, they would be sitting in the pilot’s seat, facing forward with their trainers behind them, so we had to come up with a way to give them steering directions. I designed a second rig, which could be placed in front of the dogs and included an arrangement of lights – red to veer right, blue for left and white for straight ahead. Each light also made a distinctive sound. We operated this system from the back seat via a controller.

After six weeks, I was delighted at how far the dogs had come. Their final test was to perform a figure of eight in an airborne Cessna, making banking turns while controlling their altitude. We needed a human co-pilot to take them to 3,000ft before giving control to the dogs (as diligent as our pupils had been, they weren’t able to take off and land safely). [see also “Other instructors who worked with Hazmi and Mihdhar remember them as poor students who focused on learning to control the aircraft in flight but took no interest in takeoffs or landings.”]

All three of them performed admirably, flying the plane for minutes at a time, but it was Shadow who ultimately got the bit between his teeth and successfully completed the final figure of eight.

If the dog could do it, maybe there is hope for us humans!

Separately, ground school is ON for January 3-7. It’s an MIT course, but on Zoom for 2022 as it was in 2021. No need to wear a mask or try to survive Boston winter weather!

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The COVID Booster Gap

by philg

Loyal readers will remember that, ever since January 2021, I’ve considered the Vietnam War to be the best analogy to American efforts in the fight against SARS-CoV-2 (see Lockdown is our Vietnam War so it will end gradually? and Vietnam War analogy for COVID-19 holding up?). As bad an idea as the Vietnam War might have been, from an economic point of view, this comparison is unfair to the folks who supported the Vietnam War for 15 years because coronapanic spending in the U.S. has been roughly 2X the cost of all U.S. wars combined and vastly more than what the U.S. spent on the Vietnam War (the spending on which was blamed for the massive inflation of the 1970s).

“COVID booster gap traps millions of Americans” (Axios) brings in something that I haven’t seen before: Cold War language. From Wikipedia:

In the United States, during the Cold War, the missile gap was the perceived superiority of the number and power of the USSR’s missiles in comparison with those of the U.S. (a lack of military parity). The gap in the ballistic missile arsenals did not exist except in exaggerated estimates, made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and in United States Air Force (USAF) figures. Even the contradictory CIA figures for the USSR’s weaponry, which showed a clear advantage for the US, were far above the actual count. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it was soon demonstrated that the gap was entirely fictional.

John F. Kennedy is credited with inventing the term in 1958 as part of the ongoing election campaign in which a primary plank of his rhetoric was that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense. It was later learned that Kennedy was apprised of the actual situation during the campaign, which has led scholars to question what Kennedy knew and when he knew it. There has been some speculation that he was aware of the illusory nature of the missile gap from the start and that he was using it solely as a political tool, an example of policy by press release.

Look at the suffering reflected in the chart below. Fully 58 million of our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters have had two vaccine shots, but are not eligible for the emergency use authorized sacrament of boosting.

The Axios article quotes someone who seems unsuited to leadership in the American public health priesthood:

“The question is, what is the goal of this vaccine?” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

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Tough week for a Tesla hater like me

by philg

“Naming Elon Musk person of the year is Time’s ‘worst choice ever’, say critics” (Guardian, today) ranks Elon Musk at least one notch below Adolf Hitler (Man of the Year in 1938). My hatred for Tesla isn’t quite that severe, and it is primarily based on the insufferable smugness of early adopters of the cars rather than the company or its founder per se, but this is still a tough week for someone who wakes up every morning to see whether Honda and Toyota (big press conference today, but no cars yet!) are ready to deliver what I just know will be a far superior vehicle to anything that Tesla could make at the same price. I dream of the day when Mindy the Crippler can relax in an all-electric Honda Odyssey set for “Canine in Car” (TM) and I will be reunited with her via a door that slides back rather than one that swings up to hit me in the forehead (Tesla X).

Who shares my outrage and pain? A Native American elder:

(Musk responded that he will pay $15 billion in personal income tax for 2021, then added “Don’t spend it all at once … oh wait you did already.”)

It is a little strange that a U.S. Senator hates Musk this much, considering that SpaceX saves the taxpayers a ton of money (wouldn’t the government missions done via SpaceX cost $billions more if done by NASA employees and the usual contractor suspects?). Also, since Tesla employees earn far above the median U.S. wage, even if Musk never paid a dime of tax himself, the company that he started would be an enormous indirect contributor to the U.S. Treasury (the employees will pay income tax, payroll tax, property tax, sales tax, etc.) in addition to the company’s own direct contributions (employer’s share of payroll tax at least).

Elon Musk does seem deserving in some ways. Tesla is the only car company that enables dogs to spend full days with their humans (“dog mode”).

“Elon Musk Calls Bill Gates a ‘Knucklehead’ After Vaccine Criticism As Billionaire Clash Continues” (Newsweek, October 1, 2020) was a moment of greatness. (Musk predicted failure to achieve salvation through vaccination and was agreeing with Harvard Medical School’s Martin Kulldorff’s April 2020 position:

Note that Bill Gates’s beliefs regarding SARS-CoV-2 that led to the “knucklehead” label proved insignificant compared to his unwise decision to get married (Melinda Gates sued Bill for tens of $billions just a few months after Musk called Bill a “knucklehead”).)

Elon Musk set an example to every American who loves liberty by moving from the slave state of California to the (mostly) free state of Texas. (The majority of Californians who recently voted themselves into slavery are no doubt cheered by the latest governor’s mask order.) A reader emailed me to help regarding a plan to move from the Seattle area to Florida. He was dithering because he wasn’t sure that a public school in Florida would provide everything that his kids could get in Washington State. From October 2021:

As one illustration of where we are going, the next week King County will go to requiring 72 hour old tests or proof of vaccination if you want to go to restaurant or gym etc etc

My response:

Think about what your kids are learning if you DON’T move to a freedom-oriented state (e.g., Florida or South Dakota). They’re learning that when the government orders the sheep to jump through a bunch of new hoops, the correct response is to ask “How high, sir?” We can tell our kids that when Massachusetts shut down their schools, sports, etc., and ordered them to wear masks all the time, we picked them up and moved them to a place where people value freedom and education for all children. I think that might be a more valuable lesson than whatever they might have learned in their old schools.

Musk showed Americans that, while moving is inconvenient, now that government is bigger than ever, the willingness and ability to move is critical. (The same would be true for a Floridian who loves lockdown, mask orders, vaccine papers checks, and essential marijuana. He/she/ze/they should pick up in Palm Beach and move to San Francisco or Boston.)

While Americans trip over each other in a frenzy to buy houses that they’ll have to spend 10-20 hours/week maintaining, burying themselves in debt in the process, Musk unloaded all of his residential property. A great example to young people that the best way to stay creative is not to burden oneself with the job of amateur property manager and handypersonx.

I think it might have been better to give the award to SARS-CoV-2, which is often personified as an enemy. SARS-CoV-2 has achieved more mindshare and influence over human lives than any other person or personified entity.

Readers: If not Musk, who should have been TIME’s Person of the Year?

Related:

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Coronahassle travel site?

by philg

How about this as a business idea: a travel site that answers the question “Where can I go conveniently and safely in the age of COVID-19 and restrictions imposed in the name of preventing COVID-19?”

You go to the site and say roughly what kind of trip you want to take (culture, ski, beach, etc.), where you live, what kind of vaccination papers you are willing and able to show, and whether you’re a Karen or a Deplorable. The site then comes back with proposed trips based on the following:

  • current Covid risk at the destination (map for U.S. states; CDC map for the world (don’t stay home because the U.S. is very high risk))
  • current Covid lockdown situation at the destination (will it be legal to go out and do stuff?)
  • current mask order situation at the destination (if you’re upper-middle-class and wear a mask 15 minutes/day to go into stores (or 0 minutes if you live in FL and choose not to), do you want to take a European vacation where it will be 14 hours/day of indoor and outdoor masks?)
  • quarantine requirements (Australia and some Asian countries would be excluded)
  • ease of meeting outbound and inbound required medical tests (maybe it is smarter to stay domestic depending on what Uncle Joe has ordered; if the U.S. demands an inbound negative test, how challenging is it to get one done at the destination? (Mexican resort hotels are great for this, since they’ll do them at the hotel))
  • are they checking vaccine papers at restaurants and other venues? (a plus for the Karens because #TrustVaccines and a minus for the Deplorables)

Readers: Does anything remotely like this already exist?

Note that I’m personally staying domestic because the idea of finishing up a vacation with a 14-day hotel quarantine in a foreign land (due to a false or true positive Covid test) is not appealing to me. And I won’t fly commercial for leisure anymore due to to the prison galley atmosphere (people fighting about masks, etc.). But the above-proposed site could work for people who travel by minivan and/or Cirrus. Suggest Orlando and mask-free Universal to a Deplorable in Jacksonville. For the Pennsylvania Karen, suggest injecting the 5-year-old with an experimental non-FDA-approved medicine so as to get around NYC’s new exclusion order for unvaccinated children (effective today) and head to NYC to crowd into a theater with 2,000 other people wearing bandana-grade cloth masks.

Inspiration to go to Marco Island, Florida:

(I was in a small boat and we had encounters with at least 20 friendly dolphins within minutes of leaving the dock (cut the engine to idle and the dolphins approached to within about 5′ at which point, of course, I yelled at them for not wearing surgical masks over their blowholes).)

Oh yes, speaking of Australia and the virtuous life of quarantine, at a local ice cream shop, a kid asked “What’s Australian liquorice?” I responded “That’s liquorice that gets arrested if it tries to leave the house or avoid a COVID-19 vaccine shot.”

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Among the Deplorable anti-vaxxers (doctors and nurses in Florida)

by philg

We were invited to a birthday party for one of the kids in the neighborhood. A slender mom who appeared to be in her early thirties, on finding that we had moved from Massachusetts, said. “I have a close friend up there, but I haven’t been able to visit because she is afraid to be around anyone who is unvaccinated, even though I had Covid back in August.” It turned out that her Covid encounter was similar to what other unvaccinated friends experienced in 2020. She had a low fever, took a nap each day for a few hours, and had some body aches. Per standard, she tested negative several times before testing positive. Why hadn’t she been previously vaccinated? “Covid is not that big a deal and I didn’t trust that the immunity from the vaccine would be good enough or last long enough to be worth the risk of taking a new medicine.” She was not against older people choosing to get Covid vaccine shots, but she was against the government requiring it. #NotHerFrontDoor:

What was the anti-science Deplorable’s job? Nurse practitioner. Some Democrats explain the tendency of married women to vote Republican as due to brainwashing by husbands. Following the same logic, maybe a science-ignorant husband had controlled her mind? I asked about her husband’s job. “He’s an E-R physician,” she responded. “He got one shot and then decided it was mostly hype and never got the second one. I think all of us [in the family] have already had Covid at some point in the last two years.”

It turned out that the father of the birthday girl was a internal medicine doc and therefore more than half of the adults attending were doctors or nurses, all under age 50. Nearly all turned out to be anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-school closure, and anti-forced vaccination. They wanted to save lives, and in fact for most of them that was their day job, but they did not believe that salvation from SARS-CoV-2 infection was achievable via public health orders. (I.e., they might have been willing to fight a war against Covid if they believed that a war was winnable.)

None mentioned Donald Trump or any other political figure, so I don’t think that their Deplorable attitude toward Saint Fauci and the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines is driven by politics. In fact, the young nurse practitioner said, in response to my description of our old neighborhood with the political and social justice sign forest in front of most houses, “I have no interest in politics and these remote issues. I think about our kids, our jobs, and our friends.”

Separately, one attendee was from Martinique (an athletic coach, not a doctor). He talked about how the French government imposed the same rules on Martinique that apply back in France. “They’re supposed to check your vaccine passport and exclude you from a restaurant if you don’t have it,” he said, “but everyone in Martinique knows everyone. Are you going to exclude your brother-in-law from your restaurant? It never made sense because almost everything in Martinique is outdoors. They sent the military police in from France to enforce the rules. It is not a good place to be right now.” (see “France sends police reinforcements to Martinique to quell Covid unrest” from December 1)

Finally, what is the current #Science on immunity via infection versus immunity from vaccines? I personally know at least one person who became seriously ill with Covid 5.5 months into his Moderna protection period. I don’t know anyone who got Covid twice, though. And I haven’t read about people returning to the hospital for treatment of severe Covid 6 or 12 months after their first bad Covid experience. I asked some doctor friends “Do people get welcomed back to the ICU with a second case of Covid and doctors tell them ‘Here’s your old bed and ventilator”?” The answer was that it is vanishingly rare and essentially only the immunocompromised who have gotten Covid more than once.

From May 28, “Why COVID-19 Vaccines Offer Better Protection Than Infection” (Johns Hopkins):

Immunity from natural infection starts to decline after 6 to 8 months. We know that fully vaccinated people still have good immunity after a year—and probably longer.

(Just as 14 days to flatten the curve may take several years, good immunity for longer than a year runs out in 4-5 months.)

From August 25, 2021, “Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections” (Israeli study):

SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, … This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.

In the U.S., in other words, #Science says that the vaccines are way better. In Israel, #Science says that natural infection is much better (previous infection results in 1/13th the reinfection rate compared to those who got vaccines).

Color me confused!

From an immigrant physician friend:

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Reading list: San Fransicko

by philg

A friend, who was forced to abandon his $10 million custom-built house in San Francisco after the wife refused to continue to live in a neighborhood where people injected heroin in their driveway, recommended San Fransicko.

I rejected the recommendation at first because I don’t have any intention of moving to the Bay Area or even visiting. See Working in San Francisco today (2019), in which I quote an understated young colleague:

[the meeting is] inside of WeWork Civic Center on Mission between 7th and 8th wedged between a homeless encampment and emergency heroin detox center. I would recommend picking a hotel in another part of town. … Due to the layout and direction of the one way streets and traffic I’ve found cabs/Uber to work fairly poorly and often take longer than BART. I stopped using cars when junkies started trying to open my door at stop lights.

But the book turns out to be more widely relevant. First, the author proves that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged:

In the 1990s I had worked on a broader set of progressive causes, including advocating for the decriminalization of drugs and alternatives to prison. But for most of the last two decades my research and writing has focused on the environment. And, in the early summer of 2020, I was busy running my nonprofit research organization and preparing for the release of my book on the topic. It was anarchy of a different sort that motivated me to write San Fransicko. During the pandemic, a growing number of people in floridly psychotic states were screaming obscenities at invisible enemies, or at my colleagues and me, on the sidewalks or in the street, as we went to and from our retail office in downtown Berkeley, near the University of California.

Though I have been a progressive and Democrat all of my adult life, I found myself asking a question that sounded rather conservative. What were we getting for our high taxes? And why, after twenty years of voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, had all three gotten worse?

Inspect the lamppost before parking your Tesla Model S Plaid:

Complaints about human waste on San Francisco’s sidewalks and streets were rising. Calls about human feces increased from 10,692 to 20,933 between 2014 and 2018. In 2019, the city spent nearly $100 million on street cleaning—four times more than Chicago, which has 3.5 times as many people and an area that is 4.5 times larger. Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than three hundred lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.

(Car and Driver: “trust us, you don’t want to do 200 mph in [the Tesla S Plaid]. Even 162 mph was terrifying, wandering and nervous to the point that we were concerned about our ability to shepherd it between lane lines. The steering doesn’t firm up enough with speed, making the task more difficult. At similar velocities, a Taycan is resolutely stable. Another reason to fear a 200-mph speed is brakes that got soft during our testing.”)

The author points out that Californian taxpayers give “people experiencing homelessness” and “persons with substance use disorder” (CDC preferred terms) everything that is required to survive until death by overdose:

Progressives give homeless people the equipment they need to live on sidewalks. After Occupy Wall Street protests were held in Oakland’s City Center in 2011, protesters gave their tents to the homeless and money to buy more.8 Five years later, a graphic designer in San Francisco purchased and gave away $15,000 worth of camping tents. “Other organizations were giving them out as well,” noted the city’s head of homeless services in 2016, “and now we’ve got 80 encampments.” San Francisco remains significantly more generous in its cash payments to homeless, and other spending to serve them, than other cities. For example, San Francisco’s maximum General Assistance cash welfare monthly benefit for the poor is $588, as compared to $449, $221, and $183 for individuals in San Diego, Los Angeles, and New York City, respectively. While New York City, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Diego spend 3.5, 1.1, 0.9, and 2.5 percent of their budget on homelessness services, San Francisco spends 6 percent. When local, state, and federal funding are accounted for, San Francisco spends $31,985 per homeless person just on housing, not including General Assistance, other cash welfare programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and other services. By contrast, New York City spends $11,662 and Los Angeles spends $5,001.

San Francisco, according to the book, is the nation’s best destination for any would-be “Persons who returned to use” (CDC). The city and its array of homeless industrial-complex non-profit org contractors will supply “Persons who use drugs/people who inject drugs” with clean needles and crack/meth pipes in a location conveniently across the street from an open-air drug market.

For a bunch of rich say-gooders, San Franciscans are awfully stingy:

Mayor Breed said she opposed Proposition C because she feared that spending yet more on homelessness services, without any requirement that people get off the street, would backfire. “We are a magnet for people who are looking for help,” she said. “There are a lot of other cities that are not doing their part, and I find that larger cities end up with more than our fair share.” After San Francisco started offering free hotel rooms to the homeless during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, first responders reported that people had come from across the state. “People are coming from all over the place—Sacramento, Lake County, Bakersfield,” said the city’s fire chief. “We have also heard that people are getting released from jail in other counties and being told to go to San Francisco where you will get a tent and then you will get housing.”

If housing is a human right and health care is a right and clean needles are a right and inequality is bad, why does San Francisco object to caring for the poorest and most addicted of Bakersfield? The San Francisco median household income is 2X what the good citizens (and undocumented!) of Bakersfield enjoy. Californians will cheerfully pay for every American’s abortion. “California plans to be abortion ‘sanctuary’ if Roe v. Wade is overturned”:

With more than two dozen states poised to ban abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court gives them the OK next year, California clinics and their allies in the state Legislature on Wednesday revealed a plan to make the state a “sanctuary” for those seeking reproductive care, including possibly paying for travel, lodging and procedures for people from other states.

Why is it objectionable to pay for housing the nation’s already-born unfortunates?

I’ve long been an advocate that the marginal tax rate should be 100 percent on incomes greater than my own and on wealth greater than my own. It turns out that the unhoused think along the same lines:

Even people who would prefer to live in sober environments say they do not want to quit their addictions. “When we surveyed people in supportive housing in New York,” said University of Pennsylvania homelessness researcher Dennis Culhane, “almost everybody wanted their neighbors to be clean and sober but they didn’t want rules for themselves about being clean.” In 2016, after the city of San Francisco broke up a massive, 350-person homeless encampment, dozens of the homeless refused the city’s offers of help. Of the 150 people moved during a single month of homeless encampment cleanups in 2018, just eight people accepted the city’s offer of shelter. In 2004, just 131 people went into permanent supportive housing after 4,950 contacts made by then-mayor Newsom’s homeless outreach teams.

How about the richest and goodest of the rich say-gooders?

In 2018, a reporter asked Marc Benioff if Prop C would create a magnet effect. “It seems like one of the things that you guys are doing is you’re creating a magnet for people to come to the city and be homeless,” she said, “because it’s not a hostile environment. Everybody has talked about seeing people out on the street openly shooting up.”

“That’s just not true,” said Benioff. “I can tell you that’s clinically not true. Our University of California at San Francisco, we’ve got the clinical studies to show you that when you give homeless people a home, their lifestyle does change.”

According to Benioff, #Science (“clinically”) proves that providing a house is the cure. What is Marc Benioff doing about it, relative to his net worth (estimated by The Google at $10.8 billion)? He could spend $9.8 billion on helping his brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters who are experiencing homelessness and still have “tres commas”. According to the developer that I talked to in Real estate peak near? (cost to buy a crummy old apartment building about the same as to build new), it costs about $130,000 “per door” to build medium-quality apartments. If Benioff spent his way down to “merely three commas” that would work out to 75,000 new apartments and, therefore, assuming a 2BR average size, 150,000 human lives transformed (more than double the entire unhoused population of San Francisco and Los Angeles combined). Where are “The Benioff Towers” in which the nation’s unhoused can be housed in peace and tranquility?

(Separately, it looks as though Mr. Benioff has not been persuaded by the “Black Girls Code” signs that are attached to the buses that circle his $1 billion office tower.

“Salesforce’s equality struggles burst into the public” (Protocol, 2/8/2021):

In a resignation letter posted to LinkedIn earlier this month, Cynthia Perry wrote a searing take-down of the company’s racial equality efforts, specifically the treatment of Black employees, at the massive software provider.

“I am leaving Salesforce because of countless microaggressions and inequity,” she wrote. “I have been gaslit, manipulated, bullied, neglected, and mostly unsupported … the entire time I’ve been here.”

[Salesforce’s] struggles with race and equality aren’t new. For one, its diversity statistics remain abysmal: Just 3.4% of its 49,000 workers identify as Black.

“Salesforce, for me, is not a safe place to come to work. It’s not a place where i can be my full self. It’s not a place where I have been invested in. It’s not a place full of opportunity. It’s not a place of Equality for All. It’s not a place where well-being matters,” she wrote in the letter posted on LinkedIn.

“Words must be followed up with action. And if they can’t be, then there should be no words,” she wrote. “There is a really big gap between how Salesforce portrays itself and the lived experience I had working at this company.”

Let’s hope that the above highlighted point is incorrect. Otherwise rich Bay Area residents could be in real trouble!)

What’s the story here in Palm Beach County? The median income is only half of San Francisco’s and there is no income tax, but funds are in ample supply due to property taxes on the mega-rich (soon those $80,000/year property tax payments will be 100% deductible from federal taxes!). The 2008 “Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness in Palm Beach County” says that 1,766 people were homeless in 2007. The 2020 count was 1,510 (of whom 480 were sheltered).

Circling back to the opening sentence, what are the rich people who have continued to live in San Francisco doing? “San Francisco residents are hiring private security to patrol their streets in bid to stay safe, amid crime spike that has left many fearful of going outside during the DAY” reports the Daily Mail. And, indeed, my friend confirmed that this was the path his former neighbors were going down.

More: read San Fransicko.

Related:

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Should supermarkets have live music?

by philg

On a recent trip to Naples, Florida, we discovered that the Seed to Table supermarket (across the main road from our Marriott TownePlace Suites hotel; we explained to the kids that this was a double lie because the rooms are not suites and the hotel is not in town) has live music in the evenings. Example:

The first two years of 14 days to flatten the curve have been terrible for musicians, with venues closed by order of Covidcrats, people with money fleeing urban areas, events canceled, etc.

What if other supermarkets adopted the Seed to Table idea, though? Except for the extremely COVID-concerned, people are still going to supermarkets. It is easier to do in Florida because the ceilings are usually so high (the music at Seed to Table happens about 30′ above the main floor), but why not a guitarist in the produce section to encourage people to linger and thereby maximize public health with increased vegetable sales? If I can take over as public health dictator, I will mandate an opera singer performing Wagner in the chips section to discourage sales of Cheetos and Ruffles (also ration coupons for chips and anything including sugar, of course, since obesity is contagious and is an intolerable health risk in the age of COVID).

Readers: dumb idea as usual?

Separately, Seed to Table made the news back in February 2021, e.g., with “Florida grocery store bucks mask mandate; owner says Covid death toll is ‘hogwash'” (NBC):

A video that was taken at a South Florida grocery store shows nearly every customer and employee without a mask.

The footage was filmed this week at Oakes Farms Seed to Table Market in Naples, about 42 miles south of Fort Myers. In it, not a mask is in sight and social distancing is not being followed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly stated that masks and social distancing can help slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Note that Florida state law eventually came around to the owner’s point of view, i.e., that local officials cannot order masks (see “Florida governor signs law preempting local COVID edicts” (AP, May 3, 2021)).

What does the market look like inside? (produce from local farms in abundance; good restaurants, coffee, and an ice cream parlor; wine shop; not the place to go for cleaning supplies and the other non-food stuff that supermarkets carry)

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