Let’s go to Brandon (Florida)

by philg

Our 8-year-old ran out of books to read on our recent excursion around the Florida Free State. Google Maps showed us that the most convenient bookstores between Lakeland and Tampa were in… Brandon, where the hated anti-#Science governor recently went to sign an anti-#Science law passed by the anti-#Science legislature.

According to Wikipedia, Brandon, FL is merely an unincorporated part of a county, i.e., not an actual city or town. It is home to a huge shopping mall, a bunch of strip malls, various components of the health care industry, and some car dealers. For the COVID-averse, the Westfield Mall has an outdoor dining area:

If you’re concerned that you’re not sufficiently obese for SARS-CoV-2 to get a good grip on you, you can get an entire pint of Cinnabon frosting inside the mall. Also a hijab, if you’re not satisfied with Is the face mask the Church of Shutdown’s hijab?

(It was much more common to see covered women, including in full burqas, in the Tampa area compared to in Jupiter/Palm Beach.)

The LEGO store in the mall had a huge stack of “Everyone is Awesome” rainbow kits near the register. The web site says “The new LEGO Everyone is Awesome set celebrates positivity and kindness in our families, our communities and our world.” and contains an inspirational story from the designer, Matthew Ashton: “Being LGBTQIA+ myself, I knew I needed to step up to the plate and make a real statement about love and inclusivity, and generally spread some LEGO® love to everybody who needs it. Children are our role models and they welcome everyone, no matter their background. … Being quite an effeminate kid, I was constantly told by different adults around me what I should and shouldn’t play with, that I needed to behave like a ‘real boy’ and to toughen up. I was dissuaded from doing the things that came most naturally to me. … I was actually fine with all the kids at school. … this set is not just for the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s for all of the allies – parents, siblings, friends, schoolmates, colleagues etc. – out there as well.”

If you need some body shape inspiration before hitting the food court, the mall includes a manatee sculpture:

Inconsistent with the town’s status as the World Center of Deplorability (not only in Florida, but also named “Brandon”), there is apparently a high demand for Alfa Romeos:

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The FAA burdened helicopter charter operators with rules to install useless radar altimeters that are now disabled by 5G

by philg

“FAA punches a hole in the U.S. economy today” (2017):

Today is the day that FAR 135.160 goes into effect. This requires a radar altimeter (“radio altimeter” in the FAA’s parlance or “radalt”) for most U.S. helicopters. The device will display the number of feet the aircraft is above the ground. Every airliner that was ever crashed into a mountain had one of these. What stopped the crashes was the terrain awareness and warning system (TAWS).

Radalt was useful in the old days because it could ring a bell for the pilots when the aircraft was, e.g., 200′ above the ground on an instrument landing system approach. If neither the runway lights nor approach lights were in sight at that point it was time to add power and fly back up into the air (“missed approach”).

Even in 2014 when this rule went into effect it was unclear why it would be a good idea to stuff a radalt (cost range: $17,000 to $100,000 depending on aircraft and whether installed new or retrofitted) into a helicopter rather than GPS+database TAWS system that can say “There is a big radio tower ahead!” or “Climb because you are about to crash into the ground.”

The new rule applies even to helicopter operations that are limited to visual flight. The chance that the pilot is looking down at the instrument panel is small (10-20 percent) because the aircraft is being controlled by reference to the natural horizon. Combine that with the chance that the pilot would be looking at the radalt number and I would say that there is a near-zero chance that a pilot in a dangerous situation would ever become aware of the radalt value.

Now it turns out that the FAA won’t allow the use of this mandatory equipment anywhere that there is 5G coverage at similar frequencies: “FAA Issues SAIB on 5G Radio Altimeter Interference”.

“AT&T, Verizon Refuse FAA Request to Delay 5G Launch” (WSJ) says “France is among the countries that have imposed wireless limits near airports while regulators study the effect the signals have on aircraft.” “AT&T and Verizon agree to postpone 5G rollout near airports by 2 weeks” (CNN) indicates that we are on track to copy the French system, but this can’t work for helicopters because the whole point of the machine is to be able to land places other than airports.

So one part of the government orders people to spend up to $100,000 on a device that has no practical value and then orders them not to use it because a different part of the government authorized transmissions that generate interference…

(What’s the practical importance of a radar altimeter failing due to 5G interference? The weather has to be pretty ugly before the radalt is essential on a modern airliner. At a typical flatland airport, the minimums for a “CAT I” ILS approach include clouds no lower than 200′ above the runway and visibility of at least 1/2 mile. If the weather is worse than this (think “fog”), there are CAT II and CAT III approaches that can be used by trained and authorized crews. These are the ones that always require a radar altimeter, which is used to inform the crew that it is time to initiate a go-around if the runway is not in sight and, for the highest level of CAT III approach, to cue the automated systems to initiate a power reduction and flare (pitch up).)

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Karen visits a Florida theme park

by philg

This is a quote from a friend’s Facebook post, but I am not going to use the WordPress Quote style because it will be easier to read if not in italics. The names have been changed. The author is a professor who lives in a Biden- and Fauci-supporting town. Any similarities to Confessions are purely coincidental… (and let me just state for the record that the author is a far smarter and nicer person that I have ever been!)

I’ve made what might have been the single worst error of judgment in my 40 years of life. If any good will come of it, it’s only in the confession and warning that I now feel morally compelled to give my friends.

One month ago, my 8-year-old daughter [Alice], who just finished the Harry Potter series, begged to go to Universal Studios in Orlando over Christmas break to see their Harry Potter park. It seemed like a good time: Alice (and her 4-year-old brother [Robert]) hadn’t enjoyed any trip of this kind since before the pandemic, Alice at last would finally be vaccinated, [wife] and I had just gotten our booster shots, Delta was in retreat, and covid numbers were actually extremely low in Florida. Plus we figured it would be mainly outdoors, and we’d mask, and [wife] found a website claiming it wouldn’t be very crowded on the dates we wanted to visit.

So I plunked down a few grand for (non-refundable) tickets. And then, literally the next day, we learned about the Omicron variant from South Africa. And to my eternal shame, I didn’t cancel the trip, despite my understanding of exponential growth. I couldn’t bear to face my daughter and tell her she wasn’t going after all, nor could I bear to face my family and tell them the planning and money were all wasted.

So now we’re here. And the reality is: it’s crowded as hell — one of the most unpleasant, sardine-packed places I’ve ever experienced in my life, before or during covid. The majority of guests (and even many employees) are unmasked. It’s mostly indoors. For every single ride, you stand for more than an hour in cramped, enclosed waiting areas while hordes of unmasked people breathe on you. It’s obviously an Omicron superspreader site. Indeed, the chances that one or more of us caught it today are EXCEEDINGLY high. Plus … it’s not even fun, like Disney World is. It sucks. Just endless lines, crowds, ripoffs, and uninspired rides.

Many of the rides play jokey recorded audio messages about how the ride is so terrifying, how much danger you’re in, phew you survived it, etc. etc. All those messages now take on new, unapproved meanings.

From the minute we arrived, I started saying “we have to leave this place, we have to leave, WE HAVE TO LEAVE NOW” — and yet, I’m ashamed to say, it took us 5+ hours to do so. I kept deferring to the … err … majority vote among my family, that we shouldn’t make a TOTAL loss of this trip, and surely we can find something here that’s relatively covid-safe?

Our mistake did, at least, give me perhaps my first opportunity of this entire pandemic to stare directly into the heart of the half of the country for which the virus might as well not be real — and I found the view absolutely terrifying, and it’s given me a new, visceral understanding for how we managed to lose 800,000+ Americans, and that understanding will stay with me as long as I live.

I’m sorry to everyone for whom I was a bad example. I’m sorry to everyone who my family might have endangered. Please learn from our mistake.

In the meantime, do any of my friends have suggestions for what to do for the rest of this trip? (Where one possibility is, “take the next flight back to [cozy Deplorable-free university town] and never look back”?)

ADDED: [wife] wanted me to emphasize how Universal Studios is endangering lives for greed, by packing people way, WAY more densely than can possibly be safe.

Alice [the 8-year-old], alone among us, actually enjoyed the park (!) and wants to return to it tomorrow.

Thus endeth the Confessions of Karen. The Confessions of Greenspun begins here…

I’ve made what might have been the single worst error of judgment in what feels like nearly 100 years of life. If any good will come of it, it’s only in the confession and warning that I now feel morally compelled to give my friends. I purchased an annual pass to Legoland Florida (Winter Haven, just south of Orlando) and we decided to visit during the beginning of the two-week Florida Christmas school vacation.

The park is nowhere near as crowded as Disney (think suburban shopping mall on a Saturday versus Times Square on a Friday night), but we didn’t know what to expect so I paid up for the $90/day skip-the-lines band ($60/day during non-peak periods). Unlike Professor Karen’s experience at Universal, above, we found that we almost never needed to be indoors to enjoy Legoland. Most of the lines, which we skipped in any case, were outdoors. The park recommends masks when indoors, but the core customer base seems to be Floridians and therefore hardly any of the visitors were masked, indoors or out.

Our 6-year-old loved the water ski show so much that Senior Management needed to sit through two repeats.

If you thought that COVID-19 was bad, it is only because you haven’t been on Mia’s Riding Adventure. “Many of the rides play jokey recorded audio messages about how the ride is so terrifying, how much danger you’re in, phew you survived it, etc.,” said Professor Karen (above). If I could take over as dictator of the U.S. and thus were able to force Legoland to install such a message, it would start with “How much would you enjoy it if your first horse ride were as a jockey in the Kentucky Derby at 37 mph?” and then note that the ride was best suited for those who booked all of their coast-to-coast flights on the Vomit Comet. (Recommendation: Try the Dragon rollercoaster, which is not too violent and which starts with a flat slow tour through some fun LEGO scenery.)

The San Francisco miniature is not consistent with Reading list: San Fransicko. There wasn’t a single homeless encampment on any of the LEGO sidewalks. There was no open-air drug market.

Miami Beach without a traffic jam of Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces, and Ferraris?

If you split your time between 12th Street and Haulover beaches, this might be the souvenir to bring home:

(One of my worst days since moving to Florida was at clothing-optional Haulover beach. Everything was awesome until some wag called Marine Mammal Rescue and they showed up at my blanket with a whale sling.)

Not every visitor was Deplorable. Here is a fully masked family:

They’re walking by a bust of a notorious racist (also known for popularizing Mileva Marić‘s explanations of the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and conversion of matter into energy) made out of 500,000 Duplo bricks.

Short summary of my friend’s theme park experience and our own family’s: I’m not surprised that Floridians, who never entered the Covid Olympics and therefore don’t care which medal they win, show up to parks. But I am surprised that anyone who supported school closures, mask orders, and other Covid-related restrictions will show up (this is about half of Americans, so the parks should be at least half empty!). And I am truly shocked that the federal government allows the parks to remain open (also, the Super Bowl; why?). From Disney World during Code Orange coronapanic (September 2021):

(According to #Science, COVID-19 is a sufficiently serious public health issue that schools have been closed (for 1.5 years in our big cities) and/or children are made to wear masks 7 hours per day while also forgoing normal interaction (American kindergarten is now set up more like high school detention; kids must sit at their individual desks and not get close to other kids… while also wearing masks). If we are losing life years, contrary to Social Security and life insurance financials, the only sensible #Science-informed policy would be a presidential order shutting down all American theme parks. Pulling together 200,000+ people per day at Disney World (all four parks combined) means pulling together people in airliners (most of the folks we met had flown there), in restaurants, in hotels, etc. Even if they don’t get infected while on a roller coaster, they’re a lot more likely to get infected than if they’d stayed home, which remains the best demonstrated method of cutting one’s infection/transmission risk (our best vaccines can cut infection/transmission in half right now?). As a society we’ve determined that it makes sense to deny an education to millions of children if just one life can be saved. Shouldn’t the same logic apply to theme parks? If child can wait 1.5 years to learn, why can’t adults and children wait until the pandemic is over to ride a roller coaster?)

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Career Planning Inspiration

by philg

This is the time when young people begin looking for their first jobs out of college and/or high school. Where are these jobs likely to lead 40 years down the road? A friend sent me this article from MarketWatch:

My 59-year-old retired girlfriend is well-off. Her lakefront home with an extra buildable lot, her Florida condo, and her residential and commercial rental properties are all paid off, and she has over $3 million in cash and investments. She is also collecting alimony from her ex for a few more years.

I am 62 and employed, and have just under $1 million in cash and investments. I have no debt other than a car lease, I manage my finances prudently, and I’m a man of simple pleasures.

Looks like some career paths pay better than others….

Related:

  • Real World Divorce (the girlfriend’s career as a family court entrepreneur might have yielded a very different profit level in another state)
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Who followed the Elizabeth Holmes trial?

by philg

Who followed the Elizabeth Holmes trial closely? “The Elizabeth Holmes Verdict: Theranos Founder Is Guilty on Four of 11 Charges in Fraud Trial” (WSJ, which is the newspaper primarily responsible for bringing down the company):

At the 15-week trial, Ms. Holmes testified in her own defense, showing regret for missteps and saying she never intended to mislead anyone. She accused her former boyfriend and deputy at Theranos of abusing her, allegations he has denied.

She was found guilty on three of the nine fraud counts and one of two conspiracy counts. She was acquitted on four counts related to defrauding patients—one charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three charges of wire fraud.

The verdict doesn’t make sense to me on its face. If the patients weren’t defrauded with false test results how could the investors have been defrauded? But I didn’t follow the trial, so probably the jury knows a lot that I don’t.

If it were up to me, I would imprison the investors for stupidity in thinking that a young American college dropout knew more about blood testing than the file cabinets full of Ph.D. chemists at Philips, Siemens, and F. Hoffmann-La Roche. I would have been reluctant to find Holmes guilty of anything or sentence this new mom to any prison time.

The man whom Holmes has accused of raping her daily, Ramesh Balwani, goes to trial next. Let’s see if readers, via the comments, can predict the ratio of prison sentence between these two defendants. I am going to guess that the immigrant/accused rapist receives a sentence that is 2X as long as whatever Holmes suffers. This is partly based on “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases” (University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper, 2018), which says, all else being equal, a person whom the jury identifies as a “man” will be sentenced to 1.6X the prison time that a person whom the jury identifies as a “woman” receives. I moved the needle from 1.6X to 2X because Mr. Balwani is an immigrant and I think both the jury and the judge will be angry that someone emigrated to the U.S. to become a criminal.

(If Mr. Balwani enters into a plea bargain, the above prediction should be revised to 1X.)

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Why doesn’t the raging plague in Maskachusetts cause doubt among the true believers in Faucism?

by philg

This post generally falls into the category of “Are humans in charge of SARS-CoV-2 infections or is the virus in charge?” One of the principal heresies of this blog, since March 2020, is the assertion that SARS-CoV-2 would be in charge of how many humans it infects. I’m wondering if Maskachusetts, which has proceeded under the assumption that humans are in charge, definitively answers the question.

Massachusetts has everything going for it in terms of COVID-19-protection. The population is untainted by Trump supporters, holds a lot of degrees (highly credentialed if not always educated), and is meekly compliant with whatever #Science tells them to do. 95 percent of the subjects, age 12+, have experienced the sacrament of vaccination. Almost any kind of indoor gathering, including attending what’s left of the public schools, requires that everyone wear a multi-layer mask (some private schools are now requiring N95 masks for all-day wear by those aged 2 and over, contrary to “expert” advice in August: “Kids do not need N95, KN95 masks at school amid COVID-19 surge, experts say” (Good Morning America)). Marijuana, which we are informed cures most diseases and is therefore “essential”, has by governor’s order been available at all times since March 2020. Colleges sent students home weeks ago and aren’t inviting them back until February. Unless Karen decides to go on vacation, therefore, Massachusetts is an island guided by Science (capitalized, like “God”).

What does “the curve” look like among this science-following stoned-as-necessary population? NYT:

An uneducated person who was not familiar with nor following The Science might think that the recent trend in cases actually has a steeper slope than prior to universal vaccination. In other words, vaccinating 95 percent of the eligible population has no effect on infection and transmission and, if anything, to the extent that it is causal, actually accelerates the spread. But the faith in forced vaccination remains as powerful as ever. Question for today: Why? Isn’t the example of Massachusetts sufficient to convince even those who put blind faith in Science that vaccines don’t prevent infection/transmission?

(Maybe we can blame the 5 percent? So far Maskachusetts has nearly 1.2 million “cases”. Those are lab-confirmed, so the total cases is probably closer to 2.5 million. Most of the cases seem to have occurred after the vaccines were authorized for emergency use. 5 percent of the population is 350,000. Unless the unvaccinated are getting COVID-19 over and over and over, there simply aren’t enough of these Yankee Deplorables to generate the case numbers reported in the NYT.)

From a reader comment recently, “Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid-19 despite strict measures”:

Two-thirds of the staff currently based in the Princess Elisabeth Polar Station in Antarctica have been infected with Covid-19, even though very strict health measures were put in place.

“All those present have received two doses of vaccine, and one person has even received a booster shot,” said Alain Hubert, the station’s executive operator and head of security measures.

All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. Another test was required when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica and another PCR test had to be undergone five days after arrival.

These are folks who follow the Science so closely that they actually have jobs in Science! And yet, despite not letting any Untouchables into their pristine vaccinated and PCR-tested environment, they are all plagued now.

This is not to say that the vaccines aren’t potentially useful for the old/vulnerable in terms of preventing hospitalization and/or death. But given the above examples, shouldn’t a person of ordinary intelligence doubt the idea that forced universal vaccination will reduce infection/transmission and therefore the breeding of mutations? My quick survey of righteous friends says that the answer is “no”. Their faith is stronger than ever. But none has a coherent explanation of the Maskachusetts “curve”.

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The unvaccinated can upgrade their image by consuming meth and heroin?

by philg

The self-described “progressive” who wrote San Fransicko thinks that one reason homelessness in California is so persistent is that individuals are not held accountable for their choices, e.g., to consume drugs.

Until the early 1980s, many people described the homeless as “bums,” “hobos,” and “vagrants” who chose their lifestyle and were undeserving of help. “It was advocates who coined the phrase, ‘homeless,’” said the University of Pennsylvania’s Dennis Culhane. “They’re the ones who thought ‘homeless’ would be a soft, fluffy term for the public to be sympathetic to.” The term was used as a way to advocate for public subsidies for housing. “The anti-homelessness movement chose the term ‘homelessness,’” wrote Gowan, “as opposed to ‘transient,’ ‘indigent,’ etc., for its implication that the biggest difference between the homeless and the housed was their lack of shelter.”

Words are powerful. The word “homeless” not only makes us think of housing, it also makes us not think of mental illness, drugs, and disaffiliation. The word directs our attention to things perceived as outside of a person’s control, such as the high cost of housing, and away from things perceived as in their control, such as working, parenting, and staying sober.

The news media have framed homelessness as poverty since the 1980s. “It hasn’t been this bad since the Great Depression,” claimed KQED, San Francisco’s main public broadcaster, in 1983. “Yet the stock market is booming. Venture capitalists are making millions of dollars overnight in Silicon Valley video games. For a few, it’s the best of times. For many more, it’s the worst.”

It was a grossly misleading statement. The poor farming families like the Okies who fled to the Bay Area in 1933 were utterly unlike the crack-, heroin-, and alcohol-abusing single homeless men of San Francisco in 1983. The two groups were homeless for completely different reasons and needed completely different things to improve their lives. As for unemployment, it declined dramatically, from nearly 10 percent in 1982, the year when the national news media started to heavily cover homelessness, to just over 5 percent in 1989.

Arresting and prosecuting the homeless for things like defecating in public, injecting fentanyl publicly, and living on the sidewalk is unethical, say a growing number of progressive political candidates and elected officials, because the people doing those things are victims of racism, poverty, and trauma. When he ran for office in 2018, San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin announced, “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted.”68 Enforcing the law contributes to further victimization, says Boudin. “Jails do nothing to treat the root cause of crime,” read his campaign platform. In early 2020 Boudin said, “There are people who are harmed by the addiction crisis in this city, by open-air drug use and drug sales.” But, he added, “those are technically victimless crimes.”

(Living and working in Berkeley, the author may be unfamiliar with the fact that the U.S. actually does have a political party out there for people who think as he does, i.e., that people who use a lot of meth and heroin may have made affirmative choices to use a lot of meth and heroin.)

Is there any class of individuals whose behavior is so outside of cultural norms that progressives are willing to blame them? Let’s look at the official newspaper of the progressive faith. “Doctors and Nurses Are ‘Living in a Constant Crisis’ as Covid Fills Hospitals and Omicron Looms” (New York Times, 12/17/2021). The article itself doesn’t contain anything new or interesting. The NYT reports that Covid is raging in the parts of the U.S. that have the highest vaccination rate. And the reader comments are consistent with this:

The urgent care center on my street has a line snaking around the entire block right now. In Manhattan, in a zip code with vaccination rates in the 85-ish percentile.

Summary of the core article: The folks who collect 20 percent of GDP aren’t happy about having to work extra hard for two Covid waves per year in any given state. What is important for today’s topic is the sentiment expressed in numerous comments. Examples:

I know it sounds cruel, but we need to have a discussion about denying the willfully unvaccinated medical care for Covid – they are keeping it around, helping it mutate and taking up valuable resources that can go to those in real need, to say nothing of destroying our medical systems.

Let the unvaccinated die.

If a person has refused vaccination and a booster, they should NOT be allowed to a hospital. Let Fox News set up Covid-19 hospitals to care for those it continues to mislead for its own profit.

The unvaccinated are destroying our health care system. Time for drastic and draconian steps. If you want to be admitted to a hospital, please provide proof of vaccination. Otherwise you can have a bed at a field hospital that has been set up an an old warehouse, where you will have a bed and a bedpan and no guarantee that anyone will be checking on you.

It may sound cruel, but in all absolute fairness to medical personnel here, people who refuse vaccination and who contract Covid should be treated as attempted suicides. They should be triaged separately and placed in heated tents in available fields or parking lots and treated there by a volunteer or military medical auxiliary, so that hospital personnel can go about their normal duties of handling sane ER cases, strokes, heart surgeries, able to heal those who want and need healing, allowing medical personnel to be preserved themselves from extreme PTSD. If the non-vaxxer patients complain of primitive conditions, they should be reminded of their own primitive behavior in refusing vaccination, when help was available all around them. The medical profession in this country should not be destroyed because of selfish, insane and deliberately suicidal people.

The time to stop accepting people that don’t believe in modern medicine, i.e. vaccines, was 6 months ago.

(from Boston!) Unvaccinated Covid patients can have tent hospitals with their family members taking care of them.

When doing triage, the unvaccinated should go to the bottom of the list! It’s time for insurance companies to refuse to cover treatment for unvaccinated Covid patients, (unless they have a real legitimate reason; not religious, which is almost nobody)

No vaccine should mean no hospital care, no insurance coverage for Covid, and no access to public places.

Stop treating the unvaccinated and send them home. They cannot be allowed to continue on this path of destruction.

Stop admitting the unvaccinated for covid-related care, with an obvious exception for those who couldn’t get the shot for true medical reasons.

(from California) in my world it would look like this: field hospitals in tents with bare bones amenities and treatments for the unvaxxed. Pay the doctors and nurses and facilities staffing these places an inflated rate to compensate for the horrors of it all. Allow hospitals to return to normal, and reserve in-hospital care, vents, etc. for those who are vaccinated.

(response to the above) I’d gladly tell their relatives why: Your husband [dad, son, uncle, brother, or whomever] is in this parking lot Covid facility — probably dying and responsible gif the full cost of treatment — away from responsible patients because he refused to behave like an adult, get vaccinated and wear a mask. This was your husband’s choice.

(Minneapolis) Hospitals need to require people to be vaccinated before entry. No vaccination, no hospital.

(Oregon) Why is it a “ choice “ to remain unvaccinated and be fully responsible the strain and toll on our health care workers , not to mention the financial strain and millions of dollars that have been spent in an effort to keep these people alive . … Why can’t we refuse to treat those who make that choice .

(Separately, some brave commenters pointed out that the hospital staff pictured taking care of COVID patients were not wearing PPE that might be effective against an aerosol virus:

It’s alarming to me that none of the staff pictured are wearing n95’s or eye wear while taking care of these patients.

)

How can the unvaccinated shield themselves from blame by progressives and, if present trends toward increased government power continue, internment in Protection Camps? What could an unvaccinated Deplorable do that would make him/her/zir/them immune to criticism and demands to live somewhere other than where he/she/ze/they has chosen to live? The unvaccinated must start taking meth and heroin!

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Success with Wise money transfer

by philg

In Finally a use case for cryptocurrency? (currency conversion fees), Tim suggested Wise as the, um, wise way to transfer dollars to euro-denominated accounts overseas. I recently used this to pay a roughly $700 bill over in Portugal (where what we would call ACH transfer is apparently the standard way to pay) and it was done within hours for a fee of $44 (Bank of America’s hidden fees would have been closer to $200).

If you want to transfer some money away from the galloping inflation of the U.S. dollar, Wise seems like a reasonable option. The euro per se, however, is probably not the best currency to choose for inflation protection. They have the same fraudulent way of computing inflation, in which the cost of buying a house is excluded (Reuters) and their money printing during coronapanic has generated roughly 5 percent annual inflation. Right now Japan and Switzerland are looking good in a ranking of countries (the U.S. is down with Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and Argentina). One thing that I don’t understand is how Germany and France can use the same currency, be right next to each other, and yet have substantially different inflation rates (5.2 percent and 2.8 percent).

Remember, though, that you might have to file some additional IRS forms if you own foreign financial accounts/assets (looks as though real estate is exempt, but not a real estate investment trust, for example).

(A potential inflation hedge in Gruyères, Switzerland. Cheese not included.)

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How far would you go to get your child into college?

by philg

Now that the Harvard College application deadline is behind us, let’s look at a book by Nobel-winner (like Obama!) Kazuo Ishiguro that turns out to be partly on the topic of what a parent would be willing to do to get a child into college. Klara and the Sun was published in 2021, so I’m not sure if the author gets prescience credit for this:

‘Where were we? Ah yes, so the plan was for Rick to be home-tutored by screen professors like all the other smart children. But of course, you probably know, it all became complicated. And here we are. Darling, would you like to tell the tale from here? No? Well, the long and short of it. Even though Rick was never lifted, there still remains one decent option for him. Atlas Brookings takes a small number of unlifted students. The only proper college that will still do so. They believe in the principle and thank heavens for that. Now there are only a few such places available each year, so naturally the competition is savage. But Rick is clever and if he applied himself, and perhaps received just a little expert guidance, the sort I can’t give him, he has a good chance. Oh yes you do, darling! Don’t shake your head! But the long and short of it is we can’t find screen tutors for him. They’re either members of TWE, which forbids its members to take unlifted students, or else they’re bandits demanding ridiculous fees which we of course are in no position to offer. But then we heard you’d arrived next door, and I had a marvelous idea.’

Ishiguro tries to inhabit the mind of an android (lowercase) that is solar-powered and was designed to be a child’s artificial friend (“AF”). What comes naturally to the artificial intelligence is personification/deification of the Sun. From the AF’s point of view:

The most important thing I observed during my second time was what happened to Beggar Man and his dog. It was on the fourth day – on an afternoon so gray some taxis had on their small lights – that I noticed Beggar Man wasn’t at his usual place greeting passers-by from the blank doorway between the RPO and Fire Escapes buildings. I didn’t think much about it at first because Beggar Man often wandered away, sometimes for long periods. But then once I looked over to the opposite side and realized he was there after all, and so was his dog, and that I hadn’t seen them because they were lying on the ground. They’d pushed themselves right against the blank doorway to keep out of the way of the passers-by, so that from our side you could have mistaken them for the bags the city workers sometimes left behind. But now I kept looking at them through the gaps in the passers-by, and I saw that Beggar Man never moved, and neither did the dog in his arms. Sometimes a passer-by would notice and pause, but then start walking again. Eventually the Sun was almost behind the RPO Building, and Beggar Man and the dog were exactly as they had been all day, and it was obvious they had died, even though the passers-by didn’t know it. I felt sadness then, despite it being a good thing they’d died together, holding each other and trying to help one another. I wished someone would notice, so they could be taken somewhere better, and quieter, and I thought about saying something to Manager. But when it was time for me to step down from the window for the night, she looked so tired and serious I decided to say nothing.

The next morning the grid went up and it was a most splendid day. The Sun was pouring his nourishment onto the street and into the buildings, and when I looked over to the spot where Beggar Man and the dog had died, I saw they weren’t dead at all – that a special kind of nourishment from the Sun had saved them. Beggar Man wasn’t yet on his feet, but he was smiling and sitting up, his back against the blank doorway, one leg stretched out, the other bent so he could rest his arm on its knee. And with his free hand, he was fondling the neck of the dog, who had also come back to life and was looking from side to side at the people going by. They were both hungrily absorbing the Sun’s special nourishment and becoming stronger by the minute, and I saw that before long, perhaps even by that afternoon, Beggar Man would be on his feet again, cheerfully exchanging remarks as always from the blank doorway.

I don’t want to spoil the book, a reasonably quick read, and I do recommend it, so I’ll stop here.

More: Klara and the Sun

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COVID-22 for those renouncing U.S. citizenship

by philg

“Americans seeking to renounce their citizenship are stuck with it for now” (Guardian):

For almost two years, since the pandemic struck in March 2020, most US consular missions around the world have suspended their expatriation services for those wishing to give up US citizenship. The US embassy in London, the largest of its sort in western Europe, announces on its website that it is “currently unable to accept appointments for loss of nationality applications” and is unable to say when services will resume.

My friend who lost his passport circa March 2020 remains stuck in the U.S. His COVID-22 situation is that replacing a passport requires an in-person interview, but no in-person interviews have been available for the past two years.

One thing that coronapanic has demonstrated is that government is the least adaptable of enterprises. Friends’ kids who were in private school back in Maskachusetts left their in-person school on a Thursday afternoon in March 2020 and on Monday morning they started back up in Zoom-based school, with teachers working their regular 6 hours per day and delivering the planned curriculum to the planned standards. Maskachusetts public school children, on the other hand, did not begin to receive any education until September 2020, unless you count teachers hosting one or two hours per week of Zoom chat with no required assignments or grades. Similarly, the government hasn’t been able to develop any alternative processes for passport replacement or citizenship renunciation. Yet half of Americans vote enthusiastically for a bigger government that will be responsible for more aspects of American life.

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