Enforcing orthodoxy among physicians

by philg

From the Federation of State Medical Boards:

The FSMB is closely monitoring troubling legislation that has been introduced in a number of states aimed at limiting state medical boards’ authority to act in the furtherance of public health and patient safety. If enacted, a number of bills would make it more difficult for licensing boards to discipline a licensee for spreading disinformation. The FSMB strongly opposes any effort to restrict a board’s authority to evaluate the standard of care and assess risk for patient harm.

Unless politicians obsessed with free speech intervene, physicians could be canceled, presumably, for saying that schools should stay open while marijuana and alcohol stores should be closed (as evidenced by California and Massachusetts public health experts, who follow the science at all times, #Science proves that marijuana and alcohol are “essential” while education is optional). Certainly we need a system where docs can be stripped of their ability to earn a living if they agree with the World Health Organization (#Science as of early June 2020) that masks for the general public are not effective (archive.org) and cite Peru, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia as examples.

Separately, a friend recently attended a cardiology continuing education class at a luxury resort hotel. COVID-19 is a public health emergency, of course, but not severe enough to prevent doctors from occupying $600/night rooms paid for by employers (well, ultimately by you via your health insurance dollars!) and gathering each morning to spread Omicron to each other. As the class was being held in a free state, only about 60 percent of the docs showed up to the meeting room in masks. Drs. Karen, Karen, and Karen had done enough complaining by the end of the morning session that signs and emails were posted demanding masking for the remainder of the event.

Related:

  • non-COVID specialists in Maskachusetts might not have to work too hard for the next few months… “Elective Procedures Paused at Some Mass. Hospitals Amid COVID Spike, Bed Shortage” (NBC Boston): Gov. Charlie Baker has ordered Massachusetts hospitals with bed shortages to stop non-urgent procedures this week. “Mass General and the Brigham are running most days over 95% capacity. The state is trying to get us to 85% capacity to have that extra elasticity for additional patients, but that is a really big reach for us,” said Dr. Ron Walls, chief operating officer at Mass General Brigham. … As of Tuesday, more than 900 people statewide were hospitalized with COVID. “We’re seeing a pretty big resurgence of delta right now. Our numbers of inpatients in our Mass General Brigham system in the past three and a half, four weeks have almost doubled,” said Walls. [89% of people in Greater Boston, age 5+, are vaccinated.]
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What can my Identity Doppelganger do with a Citi Custom Cash Mastercard in my name?

by philg

Almost time for serious Christmas shopping. Personally, I prefer to pay for everything with someone else’s credit card.

Apparently, this idea is not original because I started getting U.S. mail letters and text messages regarding a Citi Custom Cash Mastercard. This was a little confusing because I was not a Citi customer, as far as I knew.

It took about 10 phone calls and hours on hold to sort out the mystery. Citi doesn’t want to talk to anyone unless he/she/ze/they (a) enters his/her/zir/their credit card number (which I don’t have, since I never applied for a card or received one), and (b) enters his/her/zir/their Social Security Number (which I was initially unwilling to do, since I am not a customer and they shouldn’t need it, but of course I eventually had to provide it).

It requires a huge amount of diligence and time to get through to anyone at Citi to report that one’s identity has been used without authorization. The smart thing to do would have been to give up, but I managed to look at my credit report via chase.com (a much more efficient enterprise, I think!) and it showed a $9,400 credit limit card that had been opened on November 10, 2021.

The would-be smart shopper used my address and cell phone number. Presumably the physical card would have been mailed to my address, but I never got it (we’re in an apartment building with locked mailboxes so unless it was a former tenant or the management company, I don’t see how anyone could have gotten into the mailbox).

This leads to a couple of questions…

  • How did Citi create a Mastercard account without ever mailing out a physical card?
  • How did an identity thief expect to benefit from opening a credit card account if the physical card would simply be mailed to me and not him/her/zir/them?

Somehow I think that my doppelganger was able to at least attempt charges because one Citi letter says “we noticed suspicious activity on your Citi Custom Cash Mastercard account that may have been unauthorized.”

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Inflation harms the elite, the working class, or the poor?

by philg

From page of the New York Times today:

Whom does inflation harm? It has to be bad for someone, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be front page news. In fact, you would have to scroll down five times to reach “Migrant Truck Crash in Mexico: ‘They Were All Cadavers’”, a story about “a horrific crash that killed at least 54 migrants.” The NYT story that was much more important than 54 deaths:

The Consumer Price Index is rising sharply, a concern for Washington policymakers and a sign of the rising costs facing American households.

Inflation jumped to the highest level in nearly 40 years, fresh data released on Friday showed, as supply chain disruptions, rapid consumer demand and rising housing costs combined to fuel the strongest inflationary burst in a generation.

As housing and other day-to-day costs rise, workers may begin to ask for raises to help offset the financial blow. Employers are competing for laborers at a time when job openings far exceed the number of people actively looking for jobs, and wages are rising at a brisk pace. The Employment Cost Index, a measure the Fed watches closely, picked up notably in the three-month period that ended in September.

Increased pay has not been enough to fully offset inflation for most people: Wage gains are up sharply, especially for low earners, but are not rising quickly enough to keep up with the acceleration in prices.

The language gives the reader the impression that inflation is most detrimental to the American rabble. Let’s look at some of the language:

  • American households
  • laborers
  • people actively looking for jobs
  • low earners

On the other hand, if it is front page news in a newspaper controlled by elite Americans, shouldn’t we suspect that elites are being harmed? Throughout coronapanic, for example, the NYT advocated for public schools to be closed (#AbudanceOfCaution), thus depriving non-elite children of an education even as elite kids continued in their private schools or with home tutors.

Let’s consider someone on the bottom rung of the American income distribution. He/she/ze/they is entitled to free public housing, free health care via Medicaid, free food via SNAP/EBT, and a free smartphone (Obamaphone). If the market value of his/her/zir/their apartment in Cambridge, Maskachusetts, Manhattan, or San Francisco is $3,000 per month and rises to $30,000 per month, what difference does that make to someone who isn’t paying rent? Similarly, if someone on Medicaid had been getting hepatitis meds for $84,000 in pre-Biden money, what does he/she/ze/they care if the price goes up to $840,000?

What about a working-class wage slave who has borrowed up to his/her/zir/their eyeballs, like any true American? The house was bought with a mortgage and then a home equity loan siphoned out the gains due to inflation. The driveway contains three vehicles, all of them purchased with borrowed money. The wage slave was gulled into three years of college and never finished. He/she/ze/they is left with $45,000 in debt from that debacle. Maybe his/her/zir/their wages won’t quite keep pace with galloping inflation, but all of the debt is effectively wiped out.

What if we get to the above-median end of the American income and wealth spectrum? By definition, someone with “wealth” is a saver, at least on net. Savings, especially if kept in bonds, are attacked by inflation. Stocks generally fell during America’s previous experiment with rampant inflation (printing money to finance Lyndon Johnson’s new comprehensive welfare state and also the Vietnam War that JFK and Johnson embroiled us in). Here’s a chart of the S&P in constant dollars (source; the gray regions are recessions). It doesn’t recover its 1972 value until 1987:

How about the government itself? Inflation makes it easy for the government to pay bondholders ($29 trillion in federal debt isn’t so bad if a Diet Coke costs $29 billion). Inflation enhances capital gains tax receipts, since the U.S. taxes capital gains without adjusting the basis price for inflation. An asset bought 50 years earlier, even if it went down slightly in real value, will be taxed at 33 percent (federal plus state in California) on essentially the entire value when sold. As evidenced by their low quit rate, government workers are paid much higher salaries than they would earn for comparable work in the private sector. Inflation, especially when combined with a fraudulent CPI formula, allows the government to quietly cut employees’ wages.

The effects are certainly going to be uneven, but it is fair to say that generally the powerful inflation that our leaders are brewing is a force for redressing the inequality that the same leaders decry?

(Separately, let me remind readers that all of my ideas are stupid. Back in January 2021, I cautioned a friend who had borrowed money to buy a factory new $3 million Cirrus Jet. I lived for so long in New England that I developed a Yankee idea that you shouldn’t borrow for a personal airplane. In nominal dollars, the jet is now worth far more than he paid, of course, so essentially he is being paid by the lender (and bondholders behind the lender?) to fly around in his jet.)

Related:

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Jussie Smollett convicted

by philg

A friend texted me that Jussie Smollett had been convicted. I replied “Racism and homophobia in the U.S. are a lot worse than we thought.”

(How can I be sure that Mr. Smollett was innocent and, therefore, convicted unanimously by 12 jurors only because of their racism and homophobia? From our leaders…

The top reply to then-candidate Biden’s tweet:

)

Related:

  • Merry Christmas from the iPhone 12 Pro Max (Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing are leaving the courtroom after arguing on behalf of Donald Trump and they get hit by a taxpayer-funded empty city bus. God meets them at the pearly gates and asks if they have any questions. … )
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Life insurance and Covid

by philg

Previous looks at estimating Covid death risk from insurance rates:

From Canada:

Canadian life and health insurers paid $154 million last year in individual and group life insurance claims from deaths related to Covid-19, an industry group says.

The latest statistics published on Tuesday by the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association (CLHIA) include details about benefit payouts related to the pandemic, as well as premium growth in life insurance and annuities.

An additional $150 million in disability claims was paid in 2020 above projections to support recovering workers.

Overall, the insurers paid $14.3 billion in life insurance benefits in 2020, $36.6 billion in health insurance benefits, and $46.2 billion in retirement benefits, the report said.

So the Covid-related death claims were 1 percent of the total in a county that had, in 2020, about 40 percent of the Covid-tagged death rate compared to the U.S.:

What about the overall increase in payouts in Canada? The same publication says that 2019 payments were $12.1 billion. That’s an 18 percent increase and, therefore, payouts went up by 17 percent for non-Covid reasons in 2020. Perhaps simply due to a big sales push 40 or 50 years ago?

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes “Covid Spurs Biggest Rise in Life-Insurance Payouts in a Century”:

Death-benefit payments rose 15.4% in 2020 to $90.43 billion, mostly due to the pandemic, according to the American Council of Life Insurers. In 1918, payments surged 41%.

If we dig a little deeper, the article shows us year-to-year percentage changes. What happened in previous “surge years”? In 2015, payouts were up by 9.5%. In 1994, they were up by 13.1%. What was the great wave of death that swept the U.S. in 1994?

It looks as though 2019 was an unusually great year for life insurance companies (except those that sell a lot of annuities!). Payouts went down 1.7% despite population growth.

If we believe the Canadian data, adjusted for America’s higher Covid-tagged death rate, only about 2.5% percent of the 15.4% bump can be due to Covid. That would leave us with about 13% as the non-Covid increase, similar to the 1994 surge, and less than the 17% non-Covid increase that was experienced by Canadian life insurers.

Related:

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D.C.-based technocrats decide where to park the Afghan migrants

by philg

“For Afghan Refugees, a Choice Between Community and Opportunity” (NYT, 11/24/2021):

In resettling thousands of displaced Afghans, the Biden administration must weigh their need for support against the needs of the U.S. labor market.

That is the difficult question facing President Biden’s administration and the nation’s nonprofit resettlement organizations as they work to find places to live for the newly displaced Afghans. As of Nov. 19, more than 22,500 have been settled, including 3,500 in one week in October, and 42,500 more remain in temporary housing on eight military bases around the country, waiting for their new homes.

Initial agreements between the State Department and the resettlement agencies involved sending 5,255 to California, 4,481 to Texas, 1,800 to Oklahoma, 1,679 to Washington, 1,610 to Arizona, and hundreds more to almost every state. North Dakota will get at least 49 refugees. Mississippi and Alabama will get at least 10.

It seems as though the D.C.-based technocrats have decided that the Afghan migrants will not live in Montgomery County, Maryland, Fairfax County, Virginia, Northwest D.C.. or, indeed, anywhere within a two-day drive of Washington, D.C.

Related:

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What percent of GDP would we have to give to the health care industry in order to have enough Covid care capacity?

by philg

“U.S. Hospitals Feel Strained as Virus Cases Surge Again” (NYT, today):

As the Delta variant fuels hospitalizations in the U.S., health care systems struggle.

Health officials may be bracing for the Omicron variant to sweep through the country, but the Delta variant remains the more imminent threat as it continues to drive an increase in hospitalizations.

Health care workers said their situations had been worsened by staff shortages brought on by burnout, illnesses and resistance to vaccine mandates.

More than 55,000 coronavirus patients are hospitalized nationwide, far fewer than in September, but an increase of more than 15 percent over the past two weeks, according to a New York Times analysis. The United States is averaging about 121,300 coronavirus cases a day, an increase of about 27 percent from two weeks ago, and reported deaths are up 12 percent, to an average of about 1,275 per day.

Americans pay nearly 20 percent of GDP into the health care industry. 1 out of every 6055 Americans is hospitalized with/from Covid. That’s 0.017 percent of us. Nobody liked my April 2020 idea of building strip mall Covid care clinics like renal dialysis centers. Nobody likes the proven-to-work idea of home care for medium-sick Covid patients (NYT). So we’re apparently stuck with the model that everyone who needs supplemental oxygen will get it in a hospital bed (of which we have about 920,000). The NYT informs us that we don’t have enough capacity after paying 20 percent of GDP to the health care industry. So that leads to today’s question: how much would we have to pay in order to fund sufficient capacity?

(A friend is a business executive at a VA hospital. He said that the VA system set up some high-capacity Covid wards with appropriate ventilation systems to protect the rest of the hospital (filtering the exhaust air, unlike at private hospitals that dump Covid aerosols out into the environment!). He said that private hospitals won’t do this because Covid surges don’t happen often enough and therefore, profitable though it might be to treat an actual Covid patients, it wouldn’t be profitable to set up a big section that is usually idle.)

Note that Florida is edging out of the safe zone, according to CovidActNow. But, on the other hand, hardly anyone cares enough to talk about Covid, masks, vaccines, etc. From Marco Island, yesterday:

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Real estate peak near? (cost to buy a crummy old apartment building about the same as to build new)

by philg

I met a real estate developer in Sarasota who said that his specialty of buying “Class B-/C+” apartment buildings on behalf of investors and lightly fixing them up no longer made sense. “A year ago, I was paying $60,000 to $70,000 per door and now it is $130,000 or more,” he said. “I can build something new for about the same price.” (These are buildings with at least 40 units.)

Why didn’t he buy the fanciest buildings? “You don’t want to buy in the ghetto, but these buildings are like a Toyota Camry,” he responded. “Even if the economy turns down, there will always be a market for a Camry.”

If used apartment buildings are about the same cost as building new, doesn’t that suggest that the real estate market is near a peak? I say “Yes” because (a) new is better, and (b) there is still a lot of land in the U.S. The developer, who surely knows more than I do, says “No.” He expects 3-5 more years of 20 percent annual inflation in SW Florida until prices reach parity with California. “People are moving here every day from California and also from Miami,” he said. “They want to get away from taxes in California and from the crazy congestion in Miami.”

Readers: Is there anything special that happens to the real estate market when used buildings being to cost as much or more than new buildings? Am I right in thinking that the curve will flatten? (after only the first 2 years of 14 days!)

The Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium reminded us that invasives will displace a native population.

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Art Basel Miami 2021

by philg

As we remember the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we can look at a recent attack on our shores by the Omicron variant of COVID, arriving inside the bodies of rich art world people from around the globe. Of course, I’m talking about Art Basel Miami, previously covered here in

My journey began at an Art Basel Week party in a Miami Beach house. The host is a refugee from the disorder and filth of San Francisco (wife insisted on a move due to worthy locals shooting up heroin in the driveway of the $10 million house). By the time the party was in full swing, the street looked like the aftermath of flash mobs robbing Ferrari and Mercedes dealers. The dessert table and dock (yacht on order, but delayed due to “supply chain” issues at Volvo for the engines):

I migrated from the party to the vaccine papers check tent, as previously discussed, and then entered the convention center:

In 2018, sponsor UBS was celebrating women. Not this year, however. It is unclear if this is because the term “women” is undefined in our 2SLGBTQQIA+ world, if the “imbalance” that needed rectifying in 2018 was fully addressed, or what. From 2018:

Monica Bonvicini gets my vote for maximum prescience with this 2019 work, titled “Hy$teria” (13′ wide):

John Giorno (1936-2019) should get some credit for this letter from CO2-emitting humans to our beloved Mother Earth (“You Got to Burn to Shine”; also a good tutorial on black-body radiation?):

Speaking of artwork by deceased artists selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars… The gallery owner calls the artist and says “I’ve got some good news and bad news.” Artist: “What’s the good news?” Gallerist: “A collector just came in and bought all of your paintings at list price.” Artist: “That’s fantastic. What could possibly be bad then?” Gallerist: “The collector is your oncologist.

Christine Wang can’t get credit for prescience, but this 60×60″ 2021 painting would be nice to hang right next to an original Hunter Biden.

Fair to say that this artist has never been to Walmart?

If you’re looking for something that you could replicate via a trip to Walmart, this pegboard piece by Theaster Gates seems like a good candidate:

Do you have $220,000 to spend on a pony? (there are almost no price tags, of course, but I was crass enough to ask)

Note that the guy doesn’t have a lot of hair, but if you average with his female companion, there is enough to go around. In Miami, it is not a good assumption to read this scene as a father-daughter excursion. (forgive the assumed gender IDs, which I adopted for brevity)

Torbjørn Rødland shows that Norwegians might be good at pumping oil and buying Teslas, but they are not competent at interior painting (55×40″):

Here is a can’t-lose investment, consistent with established Wall Street wisdom, “they’re not making any more USB sticks”:

The value-added tax on this one is going to be staggering (cost: some wires and hatchets):

Some local color:

Some folks who refuse to #FollowScience:

(Note the Pomeranian whose only visual hint of qualifying as a service dog is the green hair dye.)

Also perhaps suitable to hang next to your Hunter Biden collection, a work by the late Tina Girouard captioned “1992 Immigration Migration 1492”:

Generally the show is geared toward folks who have blank walls that are at least 15′ in width and 12′ in height and/or a lot of empty floor space. Here are some photos showing the scale:

If you missed your chance to buy a 1954 Rothko, come down with your checkbook:

Or just make something kind of like it (Idris Khan, 2020, 100 inches high, no doubt made with far higher quality paint that won’t fade! Apologies for perspective distortion):

My best 2021 dress-to-match picture:

One of the only works with a price tag, a 2007 work by El Anatsui (though actually created by “dozens of assistants”) at $1.65 million:

Camera notes: These are a mixture of iPhone 13 Pro Max and Canon R5 with 50/1.8 STM lens. The iPhone did a much better job with white balance than the Canon.

Worth a special trip to Miami? Not unless you’re connected enough to the art world to get invited to one networking event after another and can expect to know at least 25 percent of the people who are there. Worth fighting through traffic and $65 for a ticket if you’re already in Miami? I think so!

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We are standing up to China by sending $1 billion for broadcast rights to the Beijing Olympics?

by philg

“U.S. Will Not Send Government Officials to Beijing Olympics” (New York Times, today):

American athletes will still be able to compete in the Winter Games, but the diplomatic boycott is a slap at China for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Pressure has been building for months from members of Congress in both parties to hold China accountable for abuses of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region and crackdowns on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Those calls only intensified after the disappearance from public life of the tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a top Communist Party leader of sexual assault.

On the latter point, previously in the NYT: “She said she met Zhang earlier in her career and had a consensual relationship with him. She said he sexually assaulted her shortly after he stepped down as one of China’s top leaders in 2017.” Her story is that she enjoyed having sex with this elderly married guy right up to the day that he no longer had the power to do stuff for her? (He’s 75 now; Peng Shuai is 35)

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said administration officials did not believe it was appropriate to send a delegation of U.S. officials to the Games in February after “genocide and crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang.

“Genocide” is so bad that the word doesn’t appear in the story until after we learn about the young tennis player who was having sex with an old married guy?

But previous attempts to pull athletes out of the Games have fallen flat. The last time the United States pursued a full boycott of the Olympics was in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter rallied against allowing athletes to participate in the Summer Games in Moscow, to protest the Soviet Union’s military presence in Afghanistan.

The New York Times doesn’t mention that, in addition to boycotting the sports event, we poured cash and weapons into the hands of the Mujahideen (“those engaged in jihad”). How did that work out for us? (see also “How Jimmy Carter Started America’s Afghanistan Folly” (Washington Monthly))

So… we won’t send any U.S. politicians or bureaucrats to China, but we will send $1 billion in cash for the host city’s share of the American broadcast rights? How does our family sign up to be boycotted?

Related:

Excitement building in London, May 2012:

“London’s Summer Games in 2012 generated $5.2 billion compared with $18 billion in costs. What’s more, much of the revenue doesn’t go to the host—the IOC keeps more than half of all television revenue, typically the single largest chunk of money generated by the games.” (CFR)

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