Follow-up on the Coinbase corporate version of Florida

by philg

A year ago, the CEO of Coinbase paid employees who were the most passionate about social justice and political causes to leave. See “Coinbase is a mission focused company” and also “Taking a Stand Against Social Stances” (NYT, 9/29/2020). (If he’d been a Southerner he might have said “Don’t let the screen door hit you on the butt on your way out.”)

In other words, he was trying to create something like the Florida that we’ve experienced. After nearly two months here, I have seen exactly one Black Lives Matter message (bumper sticker on a black (not “Black”) Toyota Prius as we were on an excursion to Miami (IKEA, Guitar Hotel, and Marlins baseball game)). Supposedly there are a lot of people here who voted for either Trump or Biden, but there is no evidence of that from lawn signs or bumper stickers. Bumper stickers are display at perhaps 1/200th the rate compared to in Maskachusetts and the most common type of bumper sticker is school-related.

What happens at a company without on-the-clock activism? Discrimination against those who identify as Black, according to the NYT… “‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups” (11/27/2020):

One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black.

The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said.

One of the employees was Alysa Butler, 25, who worked in recruiting. During her time at Coinbase, she said, she told her manager several times about how he and others excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible.

“Most people of color working in tech know that there’s a diversity problem,” said Ms. Butler, who resigned in April 2019. “But I’ve never experienced anything like Coinbase.”

(Wikipedia says Coinbase is “remote-first”, so how do employees know anything about the race IDs of other employees? See Achieve college student skin color diversity via image processing? as well)

How did it go for Coinbase from Management’s perspective? The CEO who wanted people to fight their social justice and political battles on their own time followed up with a Twitter thread:

It’s been about a year since my mission-focused blog post. It wasn’t easy to go through at the time, but looking back, it turned out to be one of the most positive changes I’ve made at Coinbase, and I’d recommend it to others.

We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction.

One of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers. Since my post, we’ve grown our headcount about 110%, while our diversity numbers have remained the same, or even improved on some metrics.

Several people told me this would never happen when I circulated the original draft internally. It turns out that there are people from every background who want to work at a mission focused company.

…

If he is putting employees into buckets based on skin color in order to get “diversity numbers”, isn’t he himself engaging in a social justice cause at work? There was no legal requirement for Coinbase to gather these data, right? (Let me guess right now that age is not one of the axes of diversity for which Mr. Armstrong is anxious to get numbers!)

In other diversity news, the guy who stirred up hatred at University of Chicago (see “Geophysical Sciences Grad Students Call on Faculty to Denounce Videos By Department Member” 12/2/2020) got literally canceled at MIT, where he had been scheduled to give a lecture. From the Daily Mail:

…. after outraging ‘totalitarian’ Twitter mob by arguing that academic evaluations should be based on merit not racial ‘equity’

Dorian Abbot was denied the opportunity to give the Carlson Lecture, which is devoted to ‘new results in climate science’ and hosted by MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

The lecture was scheduled to be delivered on October 21, but Abbot learned over the weekend that EAPS would be canceling his talk.

In August, things took a turn when Abbot co-wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek in which he argued that the ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI) initiative embraced on many college campuses nationwide ‘violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.’

DEI, according to Abbot and co-author Professor Ivan Marinovic, ‘treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.’

Abbot and Marinovic instead proposed ‘an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.’

(But who decides “merit”?)

It is kind of exciting for alumni when MIT can share a newspaper with Joe Biden’s $2.5 million granddaughter.

What would Dorian Abbot have talked about? He seems to be at least a little interested in Snowball Earth, one of my favorite geology subjects ever since reading an awesome book on the subject. He’s also interested in exoplanets, which fascinate everyone far more than how their Windows 11 computer or iPhone work. Maybe if Professor Abbot can get Elon Musk to blast him off to Gliese 273b (shouldn’t take that long to go 12.2 light-years in a Plaid Edition rocket), his critics will forget about him?

Related:

  • “Tesla must pay $137 million to a Black employee who sued for racial discrimination” (NPR, 10/5/2021), in which we learn that the article doesn’t match the headline. The now-rich elevator operator worked for a contractor to Tesla and was never directly employed by Tesla. (electrek has a more accurate headline: “Tesla is ordered to pay ex-worker $137 million in racial abuse lawsuit, releases blog about verdict”: Mr. Diaz never worked for Tesla. He was a contract employee who worked for Citistaff and nextSource. Mr. Diaz worked as an elevator operator at the Fremont factory for nine months, from June 2015 to March 2016. There was no witness testimony or other evidence that anyone ever heard the n-word used toward Mr. Diaz. Even though Mr. Diaz now complains about racial harassment at Fremont, at the time he said he was being harassed, he recommended to his son and daughter – while they were all living together in the same home – that they work at Tesla with him.)
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Hospitals are full; doctors and nurses have quit; hospitals advertise for new patients

by philg

Aristotle is the most relevant ancient philosopher for our age (see Coronascientists are the modern Aristotles?) and, as it happens, is credited with documenting the syllogism.

Here’s the Coronasyllogism of the Day:

  1. American hospitals are packed. People are literally dying for want of a hospital bed. (“Americans are dying because no hospital will take them” (Vox, September 14, 2021): The country’s pandemic failures have sometimes led to deadly health care rationing. … America, the richest country in the world, is not supposed to be a place where patients are left at the door to die. Yet that is exactly what’s happening now — 18 months into the pandemic.; “American Hospitals Buckle Under Delta, With I.C.U.s Filling Up” (NYT, August 17, 2021): “Outside some hospitals, officials are erecting large tents to house everyone.”
  2. Doctors and nurses have quit because it is exhausting to work in a hospital overflowing with patients. (“Covid has made it harder to be a health-care worker. Now, many are thinking of quitting” (CNBC, May 30, 2021): According to recent studies, between 20% and 30% of frontline U.S. health-care workers say they are now considering leaving the profession.)
  3. Therefore, it is critical for hospitals to invest heavily in every possible form of advertising for new patients.

If you weren’t familiar with the wisdom of the ancients, you might naively wonder “How is it that hospitals are so anxious for our business if their rooms are packed while their staff has figured out that the U.S. is a work-optional society?”

Do airports and FBOs in South Florida advertise seeking hangar tenants? No. Why not? They’re actually full. If there is a waiting list of 190 people for 300 hangars (F45, truly in the middle of nowhere), why waste money trying to get a 191st aircraft owner to sign up?

One could argue that the billboards and ad spots were purchased prior to COVID-19, but we’re approaching the second anniversary of the disease. Surely that is enough time for hospitals to turn over their ad space to “essential” (in Massachusetts) marijuana and liquor stores and other businesses for which the media hasn’t informed us of any difficulty with worker retention.

Related:

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No, no, no on Windows 11

by philg

Today is the official launch of Microsoft’s Windows 11. How’s my $2,500 state-of-the-art-in-2015 PC doing with the new software? Here’s the report from PC Health Check:

I thought that I had filled out all of my TPS reports, but apparently there is no Trusted Platform Module in my PC. This is because the idea is new? I think it goes back to 1986 when IBM Watson developed ABYSS (1990 paper), in which a secure coprocessor decrypts software before it is run, first checking to see if the user has the right to execute the code (the ultimate copy protection hammer!).

Who here is actually running Windows 11? Is it a whole new world of awesomeness that would justify days of pain to set up a new PC, transfer applications from the old PC, move hard drives, etc.? And how many kidneys would I have to donate to get a GPU? Just one? Or two and then go on dialysis?

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The concerns of a Massachusetts public school superintendent

by philg

Email last month from the superintendent of schools in a nearly-all-white suburb of Boston:

The Superintendent’s Bulletin can be accessed by clicking on the link below:

Superintendent’s Bulletin – September 23, 2021

In This Week’s Bulletin:

Letter from the Superintendent

Diversity & Dialogue Series 2: Hispanic Heritage Month

Adolescent Mental Health Free Clinic

Webinar: Anxiety in a Time of COVID

Sustainable Food Parent Survey

October Flu Shot Clinics

Free School Lunch Through June 30, 2022

Employee Benefits Open Enrollment

District Calendar of Upcoming Events

————————————–

Quiz for readers: What topic is missing?

Second question… if typical children are not at risk from COVID-19 (other causes of death being much more common), how did they become anxious about it?

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Should investors react to the change in Germany’s government?

by philg

After 16 years of rule by Angela Merkel and the Christian Democrats, the government in Germany is changing. I talked to some European bankers and a former hedge fund manager to find out what, if anything, investors should do about this.

The general consensus was that very little would change in Germany. As in the U.S., grand plans from a party can be derailed by an individual member of parliament who thinks that the grand plan will have a negative impact on his/her/zir/their own little corner of the country. For better or worse, this tends to make the German system stable.

Nobody said that Merkel would be missed. One banker pointed out that Merkel was likely voted out by the low-skill welfare-dependent migrants that she was instrumental in bringing to Germany (welfare in Germany is much less generous than in the U.S., but still leads to a better material lifestyle than trying to work for a living in a lot of countries). “They’re betting that the Social Democrats will increase the handouts,” he said. “The conservatives bring them in saying that they’ll work and they turn around and vote for liberals so that they don’t have to work.” (After five years in Germany, about 51 percent of migrants don’t work, which is considered an improvement and a success story by pro-migration Germans.)

Another banker said that Merkel was responsible for the UK leaving the EU. “The British could have just ignored the EU’s demands to accept migrants, as the Eastern European countries did, but they’re too bound up in being law-abiding,” he said. “The Eastern European countries just refuse and dare the EU to throw them out, but there isn’t really a mechanism for kicking a country out of the EU.”

The former hedge fund manager said that Merkel was an unprincipled follower of public opinion. While she initially told Germans that most would be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and therefore most resistance would be futile (e.g., masks and shutdowns would just slightly delay the inevitable), when people demanded lockdowns she locked them down.

How’s Europe doing? “Euro zone inflation hits highest level in 13 years as energy prices soar” (CNBC, October 1, 2021):

Headline inflation came in at 3.4% last month, according to preliminary data from Europe’s statistics office Eurostat. This was the highest level since September 2008 when inflation stood at 3.6%. It comes after German consumer prices rose by 4.1% in September — the highest level in almost 30 years.

The rise has been driven higher by surging energy prices, deepening concern among policymakers. The front-month gas price at the Dutch TTF hub, a European benchmark, has risen almost 400% since the start of the year.

What’s more, this record run in energy prices is not expected to end any time soon, with energy analysts warning market nervousness is likely to persist throughout winter.

France has become the latest country to step up measures to mitigate the costs for consumers. Prime Minister Jean Castex said Thursday the government would be blocking further natural gas price increases as well as rises in electricity tariffs. However, before these measures kick in, gas prices will rise by 12.6% for French consumers as of Friday.

I.e., France is copying Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls and hoping for a different result. (See also “Nixon Taught Us How Not to Fight Inflation” (WSJ): His price controls led to an exponential increase in demand, which caused a shock when they ended.)

I asked the hedge fund manager if the European inflation numbers were cooked like the U.S. numbers (e.g., food and energy costs are excluded from some measures, the cost of buying a house is excluded from all measures (the government comes up with a fictitious world in which people can rent their houses from themselves for a government-determined price)). “Completely fake of course,” he responded. “However, there is one reality of their own making. To ‘save the world’ (read: tax more) they recently yanked up taxes on natural gas and the such. Together with rising oil prices, this has created quite a bit of inflation as you can imagine.”

If the Europeans are inflating away the value of their currency just we are inflating away the value of ours, what is an investor to do? Move money to China, as BlackRock has recently started to do? That’s a bridge too far for a lot of non-Chinese investors. How about “Mining Stocks Offer a Cheap Play on Growth. Dig In.” (Barrons, September 17, 2021), in which we learn that iron and copper miners have P/E ratios of 5-7 (compare to over 30 for the S&P 500):

We have no idea where the euro and dollar will be after the politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are done with their manipulations of the respective economies. I’ve always hated gold as an investment because it isn’t productive. And, in fact, once you factor in dividends paid (“total return”), gold has underperformed U.S. stocks going back to the beginning of our galloping inflation (1971):

(black is the total return; silver is bumping along on the bottom; the S&P (without considering dividends), the Dow Jones, and gold are clustered in the middle)

Could mining iron and copper be considered a hybrid of gold’s inflation hedge and the return to be expected from investing in a productive activity? People will still need steel even if there is a lot of inflation in one or more currencies. On the third hand, aside from the low P/E ratio, why are raw materials miners better investments than upstream manufacturers? And if the P/E is 5 or 7, is that because a company is heavily indebted and can go bust (rather than simply slim down) in the event that demand is reduced?

Related:

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California versus Florida government workers

by philg

Jesus said “The last shall be first and the first last.” Perhaps he was talking about government workers in Florida and California who swapped jobs?

Searching the Web for teaching examples of strategic plans (private companies’ plans tend not to be available), I found one for the Florida DMV (“Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles”). Pages 11-12 cover the outcomes that Florida considers important to measure. All of them relate to the customer until the last one…

Employee welfare is not even a “value”. Page 4:

What about their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters working for the California DMV? The 2021-2026 strategic plan puts workers #1 on page #1:

This is over a heading mentioning “stakeholders” (i.e., people other than customers). A little more detail on page 4:

Separately, it turns out that a resident of Florida doesn’t interact with “the DMV” to get a license, register a car, etc. County tax collectors are responsible for dealing with the unwashed. Due to coronapanic, the thinly populated counties are refusing to deal with non-residents and the densely populated counties, such as Palm Beach, require appointments. Once there, one finds that the front-line workers are all masked and behind the Plexiglas dividers that #Science first told us to install and now says are useless. What about the management overlords who set up the mask policy? They’re in open cubicles, about 20′ behind the front-liners, next to a bank of windows looking out at the palm trees… unmasked.

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Power of suggestion and wishful thinking (shutdowns and masks preventing the common cold)

by philg

Friends and neighbors in Massachusetts who were Shutdown and Mask Karens (i.e., nearly all of my friends and neighbors who weren’t pilots, doctors, or medical school professors!) reported that, in their personal experience, the shutdowns and masks had beaten the common cold. A full year of school closure (Boston Public) and more than a year of mask orders from the energetic governor had shown the rhinovirus who was boss. Yes, adults were still meeting at bars, on Tinder, and in marijuana and liquor stores (“essential”), but a cold is no match for a full glass of vodka combined with healing marijuana smoke.

Let’s check in with #Science… “Kids’ Colds Didn’t Take a Break During the Pandemic” (MedPage Today, October 1, 2021):

As cases of influenza and other respiratory viruses plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic for kids and adults alike, rhinovirus and enterovirus continued to infect children at typical rates, a multicenter study suggested.

In a surveillance analysis involving more than 35,000 children who presented to emergency departments or were hospitalized for acute respiratory illness, 29.6% tested positive for enterovirus or rhinovirus in the March 2020 to January 2021 season, similar to rates for two prior seasons (30.4% for 2019-2020 and 29.0% for 2017-2018), reported Danielle Rankin, MPH, CIC, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

And the combined positivity rate of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and other respiratory viruses (39.5%) was significantly lower in 2020-2021 compared to each of the prior three seasons (P<0.001):

  • 2019-2020: 75.4%
  • 2018-2019: 71.3%
  • 2017-2018: 69.4%

“It has been previously shown that mitigation measures, like mask wearing or social distancing, which were introduced to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, also limited the spread of influenza, RSV, and some other respiratory viruses,” Rankin said in a press release. “This study showed rhinovirus/enterovirus slightly decreased in March 2020, but shortly after resumed and persisted.”

Could the confidence of my friends in Maskachusetts that the common cold had been vanquished be an example of wishful thinking/confirmation bias? Or do we think this research result is another example of “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”? I personally have a tough time believing that shutting schools and chaining children to their TVs and computers indoors for a year didn’t reduce transmission of the common cold. One can argue whether it makes sense to deny children an education in order to protect them from a virus that kills 82-year-olds, but I would have been confident in predicting that denying children an education would reduce their likelihood of catching a cold. (On the third hand, we could argue that my shutdown- and mask-advocating friends and neighbors in MA were a non-representative sample. Nearly all were able to work from home, for example, and nearly all lived in spacious suburban houses (see The social justice of coronashutdowns for the shutdown/mask views of a guy who lives in 8,000 square feet).)

Photos from the tiny strip mall at the heart of our former suburb, August 2021, reminding folks that COVID-19 is deadly, but so are leaf blowers (“toxic tornados” [sic]):

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Carousel of Social Progress for Disney World?

by philg

We hid from the afternoon rain at Magic Kingdom’s Carousel of Progress, which covers technological progress fairly well:

Follow an American family over 4 generations of progress and watch technology transform their lives.

During each era, learn how the technological marvels of the day made life more comfortable—and paved the way for unimaginable innovations.

Discover how gas lamps, the hand-cranked washing machine and gramophone made the pre-electric era a breeze.

Watch the advent of electricity give rise to modern conveniences like the electric iron, the radio—and the simple, revolutionary light bulb.

See how the automatic dishwasher and television set transformed the American household.

Today’s high-tech marvels include virtual-reality games, high-definition televisions and voice-activated household appliances. Imagine the wonders the next hundred years may bring!

The period covered by the carousel seems to be roughly 1900 (gas lamps, Wright Brothers experimenting but not yet succeeding) through 2013 (Amazon Alexa plus consumer-priced VR goggles).

The attraction doesn’t cover the changes in American society over this period, however. The narrator is a white cisgender married heterosexual male in every scene, for example. None of the children in the nuclear family identify as LGBTQIA+ in any year. No migrants arrive. Nobody has sex with a politician’s son in order to pocket $2.5 million in child support. What about a companion Carousel of Social Progress ride?

Readers: What would you include to show the changes in American society that aren’t technological?

Here are some ideas for a progression…

Start with a family of Native Americans: dad, one wife (not a “squaw“), and two kids. They talk about how they have so much land and so many resources they are hunting and gathering only a couple of hours per day. Once every 6 months, dad smokes some tobacco as part of a religious or diplomatic ceremony. Illustrate with this stained glass from downtown Key West, in which a non-binary “Calusa Indian” parent tells his/her/zir/their non-binary child about the rainbow of LGBTQIA+ possibilities that the white invasion and occupation will bring:

The above family is shoved aside by some white “settlers”, who guzzle corn liquor from a barrel and chain smoke. They talk about setting up a casino.

Californians in 1969 smoke marijuana and talk about how the new no-fault divorce law (“unilateral divorce”) means they can “do their own thing”.

Lunden Roberts talks about how she made good money at a fully legal strip club, but that having sex with Hunter Biden yielded $2.5 million in tax-free child support (pats animatronic Navy Joan on head and $100 bills come out from under the child’s cap).

In the last scene, we find an Afghan migrant family eating goat head soup around the breakfast table in a luxurious apartment building. The father says how happy he is that the town forced the developer to give up 12 percent of the units for public housing so that unemployed migrants like himself could live there. The wife announces that she is suing him for divorce so that she can live in the beautiful apartment with her girlfriend and that he has 48 hours to vacate. The teenage daughter says that seems like a good time to inform the parents about zir transgender identity and says that ze’s going out to pick up some medical marijuana to help treat side-effects of hormone therapy. The younger child says that he hopes to one day open a recreational marijuana dispensary that also sells state lottery tickets.

Exit through the gift shop exclusively stocked with Pride products from the Rainbow Disney Collection, e.g., this Mickey Mouse Intersectional Flag pin:

(not to be confused with the Mickey Transgender Flag pin, the Mickey Lesbian Flag pin, or the Mickey Bisexual Flag pin)

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Coronapanic orders from governors meet the American people

by philg

From California, one of the world centers of optimism regarding the power of government, via shutdown and mask orders, to reduce, not merely delay, coronavirus infections: “The number of babies infected with syphilis was already surging. Then came the pandemic” (Los Angeles Times). If Californians did what Gavin Newsom told them to do, you’d expect a pandemic to reduce sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis. It is tough to catch syphilis while staying home and watching Netflix/playing Xbox for 18+ months. But, with the same logic we use for COVID-19 is sure to kill you, but life insurance rates haven’t changed and Wave of death among the elderly bankrupts Social Security, we can actually blame coronashutdowns for an increase in sexually transmitted diseases. From the LA Times:

More and more babies in L.A. County have been infected with syphilis in the womb, which can lead to stillbirth, neurological problems, blindness, bone abnormalities and other complications. Nine years ago, only six cases were reported across L.A. County, according to a Department of Public Health report. Last year, that number reached 113.

The numbers were already surging before the arrival of COVID-19, but public health officials fear the pandemic exacerbated the problem, closing clinics that screen people for syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections and putting new efforts to battle the disease on ice.

At the time, she said, she feared that going to a clinic could lead to her being jailed for using meth. “You think, ‘I’m going to get in trouble because I’m high,’” she said.

The surge in congenital syphilis has been especially frustrating to experts because the illness can be thwarted if pregnant people are tested and treated in time.

Men who have sex with men have been especially vulnerable, but the accelerating numbers among women and babies have spurred particular alarm for health officials because of the potentially devastating consequences.

Note the use of CDC-approved vocabulary, e.g., “pregnant people” and “men who have sex with men”. But then things break down a bit as the article wears on…

In L.A. County jails, eight cases of syphilis had been confirmed among 170 pregnant patients seen as of late August, said Dr. Noah Nattell, who oversees women’s health for the county‘s Correctional Health Services agency.

The sentence starts with “pregnant patients”, but falls back to the old term “women” towards the end. The inconsistency continues lower down:

Researchers have found that nationally, not all pregnant people are screened for syphilis despite the urgings by health officials. Even when they are diagnosed, nearly a third of pregnant women with syphilis did not get the care they needed, according to an analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The sentence that immediately follows one in which “pregnant people” is used falls back to the discredited term “pregnant women.” There is only one author for this article. Why can’t Emily Alpert Reyes pick one term and stick with it?

One of the key problems is that, unlike marijuana, methamphetamine hasn’t yet been recognized for its medicinal value and therefore remains illegal.

The woman who lost her baby said she started using meth at an overwhelming point in her life, facing the demands of a stressful job, school and a relationship that had grown strained after her earlier struggle to get pregnant.

At the time, the drug felt like “a ticket to freedom.” She quit her unrewarding job. Her boyfriend moved out. Meth made her feel brave, “like I could take a deep breath finally.”

She started seeing a man who told her he didn’t need to use a condom with her, a decision she now sees as naive. After they broke up, she got into a relationship with a friend who would become the father of her baby.

When the waves of pain began to roll over her in a hotel room where she was spending time with her boyfriend, another man and his girlfriend, the girlfriend quickly realized she was in labor and urged them to call 911, she said. But the men bristled at the idea, she recalled, because there were drugs there and they didn’t want attention from the police.

Soo… the population that was supposed to be refraining from gathering and using the governor-ordered face masks consistently and correctly is, in fact, spreading sexually transmitted diseases at a higher-than-previous rate, partying in hotel rooms with a miscellaneous collection of potentially infectious humans, etc. Is it fair to say that America’s leading public health experts have never met the American public?

(Separately, how effective have California’s measures been? In the COVID Olympics, California has a higher COVID-19-tagged death rate than do-almost-nothing Sweden. California initially appears to have had some success, if we’re measuring a society’s success by this one number, compared to Florida. Adjusted for population over 65, however, California has actually had a higher death rate than Florida, where adults have enjoyed near-total freedom. Could a failure to consider what Americans are actually like be part of the reason that California’s aggressive lockdowns and mask orders have had no apparent effect?

(And let’s see how the masks and lockdowns worked in California compared to the #Science-denials of the Florida Free State… from a Stanford Med School prof:

Compared to Florida, California may have a lower cumulative death rate tagged to COVID-19, but that is only because the population is younger (free and/or subsidized housing available only to those with children apparently encourages “pregnant people” to have babies and become “lactating people”!). For a given person of a given age, the risk of dying from COVID-19 was actually lower in Florida.)

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Political logic: We can’t pay for the essentials, so let’s spend $1.5 trillion on new stuff

by philg

From West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s official site:

Every Member of Congress has a solemn duty to vote for what they believe is best for the country and the American people, not their party. Respectfully, as I have said for months, I can’t support $3.5 trillion more in spending when we have already spent $5.4 trillion since last March. At some point, all of us, regardless of party must ask the simple question – how much is enough?

What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity. Suggesting that spending trillions more will not have an impact on inflation ignores the everyday reality that America’s families continue pay an unavoidable inflation tax. Proposing a historic expansion of social programs while ignoring the fact we are not in a recession and that millions of jobs remain open will only feed a dysfunction that could weaken our economic recovery. This is the shared reality we all now face, and it is this reality that must shape the future decisions that we, as elected leaders, must make.

We can’t pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and they are “essential” (like marijuana and liquor stores in Massachusetts during coronashutdowns?) so we should probably actually cut spending wherever we can until we can pay for these essentials, right? Certainly, it would be “insane” to spend “trillions”.

Let’s compare the above, from September 29, to “Manchin says $1.5 trillion is his limit on Biden economic agenda amid battle with progressives” (CNN, September 30):

Moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia made clear Thursday that $1.5 trillion was the price tag he was willing to settle on for his party’s plan to expand the social safety net, putting him $2 trillion away from the lowest number progressive Democrats have said they would accept.

I would love it if Senator Manchin came to help us with our household budget: “You haven’t saved enough for retirement, you’re feeding the kids ramen noodles, your supply of essential-for-anyone-from-Massachusetts marijuana and liquor is critically low, and your health insurance bills are past-due, so there is simply no way you can buy Paul Allen’s 414-foot superyacht. That would be fiscal insanity. I recommend that you buy a $15 million Riva 110 instead.”

(The CNN article also has a fun quote from Democratic Party thought leader Ilhan Omar: “We didn’t envision having Republicans in our party”)

Related:

  • Understanding Congress’s solution to the federal deficit problem (2011): “The deal cuts $38 billion from last year’s budget. It’s being called the largest domestic spending cut in U.S. history” … The FY 2011 federal budget is approximately $3.82 trillion (3.82×10^12). Of that, approximately $2.17 trillion will be paid for by taxes collected and the remaining $1.65 trillion will be borrowed from our grandchildren. If we divide everything by 100 million, the numbers begin to make more sense. We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.
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