Coronalogic in Palm Beach County

by philg

Mostly-Democrat Palm Beach County was one of the local governments ready to fight the governor’s “no mask orders in schools” order (a.k.a. “parental choice order”) with every last dollar of residents’ money. See “Palm Beach County public schools set to hire elite law firm to defend mask mandate” (Palm Beach Post, August 31, 2021), for example:

With the legal battle over masks in schools heating up, Palm Beach County public schools are hiring a high-profile law firm to advise them on their mask mandate and, if needed, defend it in court.

School board members are expected Wednesday to approve spending up to $50,000 for advice and legal representation from the national law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

The vote comes five days a Tallahassee judge ruled Gov. Ron DeSantis exceeded his authority by ordering school boards last month not to impose mask mandates on campus. DeSantis said he will appeal the decision.

Where else on this blog might you have seen mention of Boies Schiller Flexner? They were the law firm that enabled Elizabeth Holmes to silence potential whistleblowers. From Evaluating trustworthiness; lessons from Theranos (based on reading the fascinating book Bad Blood):

Background: Roger Parloff, legal affairs reporter for Fortune, was intrigued by a story about Theranos hiring David Boies to sue a guy who had a patent that they would have needed to license if the blood testing machines had actually worked. Boies was given a fat slice of Theranos equity and a board seat in exchange for doing the company’s legal bidding. The author describes the lawsuit as entirely meritless, alleging that the inventor had somehow gotten hold of proprietary Theranos info because his son was a partner at the same huge law firm that had filed some patents for Theranos. The inventor spent $2 million on legal defense before caving in. (The big multi-office law firm’s records manager investigated the allegation and couldn’t find anything to suggest that the son/partner had ever accessed any Theranos-related information or even knew at the relevant time that the company was a client.)

So… the county is prepared to lose state funding (but they’ll get it all back from Uncle Joe: “Biden Administration Says Federal Funds Can Cover Florida School Board Salaries If DeSantis Defunds Them Over Mask Mandates” (Forbes); how are Presidents Biden and Harris able to write checks for this without Congressional funding?). And the county will happily hire a law firm that enabled one of of America’s most prominent criminal defendants, with its lead name partner actually serving on her corporate board and the firm hoping to benefit from the fraud by holding shares. All of this to ensure that when children sit together in a classroom, kept separated by however many feet the CDC recommends, they are wearing some sort of mask.

Suppose that the kids in the class decide to go to an after-school basketball program run by a different branch of the same enterprise (Palm Beach County). They will then meet on an indoor court and be close enough to actually touch each other, without any masks on. They’ll be breathing much more forcefully, of course, on the basketball court than in the classroom.

I would expect variation in coronapanic level and faith in masks from state to state and from county to county, but I didn’t expect to find this much variation in coronascience between two departments of the same county government!

(Separately, our neighborhood is packed with kids. As soon as they’re out of school, the masks come off and they play with each other outdoors in direct physical contact with no masks. They are also observed to visit each other’s homes and socialize without masks. So even if the county itself didn’t run mask-free kid gatherings, the young people and their parents would do this. Thus, it is a mystery to me how the masks-in-school plan was supposed to be effective.)

Related:

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Vaccine-resisting idiots

by philg

Before departing from Maskachusetts last month in the Cirrus SR20 (ferry trip to her new home in the Florida Free State), I mentioned to a woman in the old neighborhood that I’d be visiting a family at their oceanfront house as my first stop. “The dad is my friend and he’s the only one who is vaccinated,” I volunteered. “The kids are slender, healthy and in their late 20s so I can understand their point of course, but the wife is around 60 and could perhaps benefit, though she also is slender and fit.”

Neighbor: “They’re idiots.”

Me: “As it happens, they’re Black.”

Neighbor: “Oh, well, ….” (the “idiot” statement was walked back to a discourse regarding why it wouldn’t make sense for Black people to listen to anything that scientists say)

The neighbor’s car (Chevy Bolt with Bernie bumper sticker):

(Bernie wanted her to live in a town where a vacant buildable lot costs $1 million (minimum 2-acre zoning).)

On arrival, I learned that when you have an oceanfront house it seems that you’re going to be quite popular all summer. The unvaccinated kids (late 20s) had about 6 similar-age friends visiting. All of them, as it turned out, were unvaccinated and resented the government’s attempts to coerce them into getting stuck with a medicine that is extremely unlikely to help them unless the mass vaccination campaign breeds a super deadly version of the coronavirus (see Marek’s Disease). I comforted them at dinner (out on the screen porch and following the CDC guidelines that coronavirus cannot spread when unmasked people sit at restaurant tables): “It probably won’t do you more harm than a week of binge drinking.”

(One of the young people had the idea of running a restaurant where students received music lessons and other kinds of education. “If they’re sitting at a table being served food, they don’t need to wear masks, even if the governor orders students in schools to wear masks.”)

My favorite recent Apple News screen, in which a confused grandfather (of a child who yielded $2.5 million tax-free for the smart plaintiff) has lost patience and scapegoats responsible for all of our woes have been identified:

Separately, it seems that the current crop of vaccines may be worthless from a public health point of view (could still be useful for an at-risk individual who stays in his/her/zir/their bunker 99 percent of the time). “Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature, August 11, 2021):

With very high vaccine efficacy (E = 0.95), substantial benefit is maintained except in situations where there is a very low probability of infection in the population. If the vaccine efficacy decreases to 0.8, the benefit gets eroded easily with modest risk compensation.

Risk compensation needs to be factored carefully when appraising COVID-19 vaccination strategies. The simplified model used here suggests that even negligible risk compensation can eliminate the benefit of a vaccine of low efficacy, and it also takes only 2.5-fold increase in exposures for the benefit of a vaccine of moderate efficacy (E = 0.6) to disappear unless the probability of infection in the population of interest is very high.

(The most familiar example of risk compensation is a person driving 75 mph in a pavement-melting SUV. He/she/ze/they feels invulnerable due to seatbelts, 17 airbags, and 6,000 lbs. of steel. He/she/ze/they would drive only 50 mph, perhaps, in a lighter car without seatbelts or airbags. Since kinetic energy rises as the square of velocity, the risk of death in an accident might end up being roughly the same as if the driver were in a less thoroughly armored vehicle. See “Condoms and seat belts: the parallels and the lessons” (Lancet) for some references.)

In other words, a less-than-perfect vaccine slows down an epidemic only if people don’t change their behavior as a result of being vaccinated. A person who decides that it is okay to travel on commercial airliners once again, for example, is risk compensating. I’ve observed this behavior in New England. The (mostly) vaccinated population ceased wearing masks on the day that the government stopped ordering them to do so (a couple of months later, of course, it was “Simon Says Masks On” and they all complied with that too!). Fauci-following Democrats who refused to meet me outdoors for coffee pre-vaccination would step in for hugs after they’d received the magic elixir.

Let’s combine the above with July 2021 data (i.e., regarding the delta variant) on breakthrough infections. “Resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in a Highly Vaccinated Health System Workforce” (NEJM), Table 1:

Vaccine effectiveness was only 65 percent in July 2021 and therefore risk compensation by those who’ve been told by Drs. Fauci and Biden that vaccines are valuable will wipe out the benefit of the vaccines.

I was on a Zoom meeting with some folks from grad school. A friend’s wife is a Ph.D. biologist. She has gone back into her bunker, despite being vaccinated. “The reason that people think vaccines are helpful,” she said, “is that they’re combining data from pre-Delta and Delta. With Delta, the infection and fatality rates aren’t that different for the vaccinated and unvaccinated.”

Israel and the Delta variant:

In a country that has vaccinated 80 percent of those eligible, deaths are about 3/4 of where they were in the fall of 2020, when nobody in Israel was vaccinated.

Related:

  • “It may take ‘many, many’ more vaccine mandates to end the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci says” (CNN, 9/13): “I believe that’s going to turn this around because I don’t think people are going to want to not go to work or not go to college … They’re going to do it,” Fauci told CNN’s Jen Christensen during an interview at the NLGJA, the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, convention Sunday. “You’d like to have them do it on a totally voluntary basis, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the alternatives.”
  • “Fauci says he supports a vaccine mandate for air travel.” (NYT, 9/13): Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, said … that he would support a vaccine mandate for air travelers. “I would support that if you want to get on a plane and travel with other people, that you should be vaccinated,” Dr. Fauci [said]
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Shut down the U.S. Army now that we know more about our limits?

by philg

Some 9/11 reflections…

U.S. military spending in 2000 was $320 billion. That’s about $520 billion in today’s mini-dollars. The 2021 military spend is about $700 billion (35 percent higher in real terms) plus about $220 billion for veterans (pensions, health care, etc.).

We were recently defeated by a peasant army in Afghanistan. Might it be time to consider investing less in an area where we have a record of ineffectiveness?

My dumbest question: Why spend money on an army (1 million uniformed personnel plus 250,000 civilians)? I can understand why we might want a navy (though maybe we could lose it all in an hour or two? See Robot kamikaze submarines shaped like blue whales render navy ships useless?). I can understand why we want an air force, e.g., for drone attacks on people we don’t like, dropping bombs on the assets of governments we don’t like, etc. I can understand why we might want Navy SEALs and similar special forces. But what is the Army for in our current strategic situation?

We’re not going to invade Poland with tanks, right? We’re not going to occupy Canada (I hope!). We’re not going to try to secure the border with Mexico against unauthorized crossing. Why are we paying 1.25 million people to prepare for a land war and/or to fight unwinnable land wars, such as in Afghanistan?

One argument in favor of the Army is that it can be deployed against domestic enemies, e.g., those who violate lockdown and mask orders (see Australia and Peru) or Trump supporters who might have wanted to come back to the Capitol after January 6. Another argument is that the National Guard part of the Army can help with disaster relief, e.g., picking up people with helicopters after floods. But these roles wouldn’t seem to require 1.25 million people.

Here’s another way to phrase the question: If we had no military forces of any kind today, what would we choose to fund and build? Would a million-soldier land army be part of that?

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Science: opening schools without masks stops a coronaplague (data from Florida)

by philg

Inspired by the official coronascience that I’ve seen in the last 1.5 years, here is an analysis that follows the same logic and methodology….

Florida was suffering from a terrible coronaplague, leading to an exponential rise in hospitalizations of patients tagged with COVID-19, a tweet from the Florida Hospital Association on August 23, 2021:

As a way of fighting this wave of contagious death, public health officials wisely decided to reopen schools on the usual schedule, with the last school district opening on August 23, 2021 (calendar). Mixing students from different households in the same room, oftentimes without masks (due to a governor’s order that parents retain the ultimate decision regarding whether their children would wear masks 7 hours/day), diluted the coronavirus so as to render it harmless. Same chart from the same source, today:

The red curve that was rising inexorably toward infinity is now trending down, having peaked right around the time that schools throughout Florida were back in session.

Because coronanumbers don’t move without government action (see Thomas Aquinas regarding the Prime Mover and First Cause), we can be confident that it was the reopened mask-optional (depending on county) schools that caused the decline in hospitalizations. Thus, it is fair to say that #Science proves that unmasked children in schools, or at least tightly packed children in indoor classrooms (in the counties that defied the governor), are the key to ending an exponential coronaplague.

(Separately, while on a Zoom call with a group of MIT alumni a couple of nights ago, I asked the assembled group whether hospitalizations in Florida were trending up or trending down. All of the folks on the call, based on what they’d read in the media and heard on NPR, believed that COVID-19-tagged hospitalizations in Florida were trending up.)

(On a more serious note, deaths tend to lag hospitalization and therefore there are still quite a few people dying from what seems likely to be an annual summer COVID-19 wave in Florida. The cumulative death rate remains lower than in many states, but it is still painful to confront the fact that we humans cannot escape a determined virus.)

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Should a criminal defendant be required to wear a mask at trial?

by philg

Coronavirus is here to stay, just as the Swedish MD/PhDs said back in February 2020 (“don’t lock down unless you’re willing to keep everyone at home for the next 20 years”). Criminal defendants are also likely to remain plentiful here in the U.S. Where do these phenomena intersect? San Jose!

“At Issue in Theranos Trial: Whether Elizabeth Holmes, Witnesses Will Wear Face Masks” (WSJ, August 16, 2021):

Attorneys for Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes told a federal judge on Monday that she plans to attend her criminal fraud trial with three family members or friends by her side and strongly prefers not to wear a face mask.

Should this be at the discretion of judges? Suppose that Dr. Fauci says that the best way to #StopTheSpread is to cover people in hoods, like Al-Qaeda warriors getting into a CIA-chartered Gulfstream for the trip to Guantanamo. Would it be okay for a jury to convict a defendant whose head they’ve never seen? If not, why is it okay for a jury to convict a defendant whose full face they’ve never seen?

Separately, the Theranos fraud (largely perpetrated, according to Bad Blood, by David Boies (on the Theranos Board) and the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner (now representing Palm Beach County in its fight to keep schoolchildren masked against the Florida governor’s order to allow parental choice)), was vaguely predicted here in 2014:

New Yorker magazine carries an article about a young self-made billionaire whose success was partly due to having put in the effort to learn Mandarin while in high school.

Separately, the article covers the question of whether people will benefit from being able to get blood tests more easily and cheaply, e.g., without having to first visit a physician and without having a vein opened up. A doctor friend says “Never order a test unless you know what you’re going to do with the answer.” If he is correct then generally we will not be healthier if we get more numbers more frequently. The article also covers the question of the extent to which the FDA will regulate vertically integrated blood testing labs differently than labs who buy their machines from third-party vendors.

Regarding the second question, I queried a friend in the pharma industry. Here’s what she had to say…

A couple of things struck me, the first being the powerful friends/supporters that she has on her Board. I really do believe that this has insulated her from some rather obvious scrutiny. The second was the FDA representatives who appear to not have a clue regarding their own regulations.

Who was the first to expose what Elizabeth Holmes and David Boies were up to at Theranos? According to Wikipedia, it was coronaheretic John Ioannidis (excommunicated Stanford professor, author of “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, and colleague of Dr. Jill Biden, M.D., Ph.D.). Dr. Ionnidis, M.D., Ph.D. pointed out the red flags in February 2015 (a little later than this blog!), which was well before the October 2015 Wall Street Journal article that destroyed the company.

Circling back to the main topic… is it acceptable to run criminal trials in which defendants can be forced by judges to wear masks?

Related:

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Express lanes: dumbness with concrete for a country that can’t be intelligent with electronics

by philg

As part of our escape to the Florida Free State, I drove our minivan down I-95 from Maskachusetts. Mindy the Crippler and I hit traffic in Virginia, associated with an I-95 Express Lane extension project (massive traffic jams now with the promise of clear sailing in the future).

A friend who is an expert on these matters told me that the entire concept was a terrible idea. “Adding two express lanes in the middle of a highway requires building two extra shoulders and lots of overpasses for the exits,” he pointed out. “It is spectacularly high cost compared to adding two lanes to the main roadway.”

In other words, instead of having two new express lanes, for the same cost we could build six new lanes on the main road.

What about the congestion and tolling angle? These new express lanes will require a fee to be paid (or an EZ Pass set to “HOV mode”). If we had gotten organized with in-car transponder electronics and a display reading “You’re now being charged 30 cents/mile,” we could just designate the leftmost lanes of a wider main road as toll-required express lanes. It should also be safer and easier to have the HOV mode set automatically by the car, e.g., with weight sensors on the seats or an in-camera camera that can count the number of occupants and subtract for canines. (Our 2021 Honda Odyssey, relying on weight sensor alone, gets upset when Mindy the Crippler sits in the front seat and is not belted.)

We’ll be fueling inflation by printing money to spend on infrastructure (see “Inside Biden’s $4.5 Trillion Infrastructure Plan”). If my friend is right about the off-the-charts dumbness of the highway-inside-the-highways express lane idea, I wonder if most of the $4.5 trillion will be wasted.

Related:

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Relative importance of getting a ride from Uber versus helping the Afghan refugees

by philg

A follow-up to We care more about Afghan migrants than about homegrown indigent? …

To celebrate the company’s plan to provide 86 cents per Afghan refugee (see below), the Uber app now has a “Help Afghan Families” button that is approximately 8X the size of the “Request a ride” button:

From this can we infer that it is approximately 8X more important to help the Afghan refugees (with 86 cents each!) than to get a ride? Why is it only 8X? If Uber is truly passionate about the refugees, shouldn’t the “help” button be at least half of the screen? (Or maybe all of the screen and then users would scroll down to get a ride?)

What if a person doesn’t need a ride from Uber? How can Uber remind them regarding what it implies is its core mission? My inbox today, under a subject line of “Help Aghan refugees today”:

It looks as though Uber is going to give $2 million in cash to non-profit organizations in the Refugee-Industrial Complex. How much would you give if you wanted to be equally virtuous? Uber has a market cap of $76 billion. So you’d multiply your net worth by 0.00002631578 in order to be just as generous as Uber. For example, a millionaire would donate $26.

What if we were to divide the $2 million in cash by the number of refugees who’ve already left Afghanistan? The BBC story below says that there should be roughly 2.32 million Afghans who either were already refugees or who were newly airlifted out. Uber is thus alerting us to a program in which 86 cents per refugee has been committed.

(Separately, since corporations could distribute profits to shareholders and let the shareholders donate to charity, corporate charitable donations are typically considered a form of management stealing from shareholders. The Uber executives who donate $millions that would have belonged to shareholders, for example, will get the benefits of being charitable donors: invitations to elaborate dinners, connections to other rich people (or other managerial thieves!), etc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi got paid $42 million in 2019 while his buddies near the top got an additional $82 million. Together they could certainly give 86 cents to each Afghan refugee, but why not keep the money to spend on luxury consumption if instead the shareholders’ money can be donated?)

Related:

  • “Afghanistan: How many refugees are there and where will they go?” (BBC): The United Nations has warned that up to half a million Afghans could flee the country by the end of the year and has called on neighbouring countries to keep their borders open. The current crisis comes on top of the 2.2 million Afghan refugees already in neighbouring countries and 3.5 million people forced to flee their homes within Afghanistan’s borders. More than 123,000 civilians were evacuated by US forces and its coalition partners after the Taliban took control of the capital on 14 August …As many as 300,000 Afghans have been affiliated with US operations in the country since 2001, according to the International Rescue Committee …
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A little more support for my ventilation system upgrade idea

by philg

Build downdraft paint booths for K-12 schools? (July 2020, here on this blog):

The technology for downdraft paint booths is highly advanced … Why not a system for schools in which (a) each classroom has its own HVAC system, (b) there are 8-12 outlets in the ceiling, and (c) there are 8-12 exhaust outlets in the floor? For maximum safety, the system would have no recirculation.

More than a year later, in Atlantic, “The Plan to Stop Every Respiratory Virus at Once” (9/7/2021):

The original dogma, you might remember, was that the novel coronavirus spread like the flu, through droplets that quickly fell out of the air.

A virus that lingers in the air is an uncomfortable and inconvenient revelation. Scientists who had pushed the WHO to recognize airborne transmission of COVID-19 last year told me they were baffled by the resistance they encountered, but they could see why their ideas were unwelcome. In those early days when masks were scarce, admitting that a virus was airborne meant admitting that our antivirus measures were not very effective. “We want to feel we’re in control. If something is transmitted through your contaminated hands touching your face, you control that,” Noakes said. “But if something’s transmitted through breathing the same air, that is very, very hard for an individual to manage.”

The WHO took until July 2020 to acknowledge that the coronavirus could spread through aerosols in the air. Even now, Morawska says, many public-health guidelines are stuck in a pre-airborne world. Where she lives in Australia, people are wearing face masks to walk down the street and then taking them off as soon as they sit down at restaurants, which are operating at full capacity. It’s like some kind of medieval ritual, she says, with no regard for how the virus actually spreads. In the restaurants, “there’s no ventilation,” she adds, which she knows because she’s the type of scientist who takes an air-quality meter to the restaurant.

(See “Australia has almost eliminated the coronavirus — by putting faith in science” (Washington Post, 11/5/2020)_

I guess Professor Morawska wouldn’t like the simplest science-based way to get schools back to normal operations:

(some responses to the above:

  • “If they hold classes in a Walmart then schools can stay open”
  • “The hardest part of 14 days to flatten the curve is the first 18 months.”
  • “Possibly have the teacher come to their table to collect homework , so they can ask “menu ” questions….”

; Why is Kimberly’s idea “science-based”? The orders from governors that have reshaped U.S. society are purportedly science-based, including orders that restaurants can reopen at up to full capacity so long as masks are worn between the front door and the table. Therefore, by transitivity, Kimberly’s proposal for schools is equally science-based.)

If we have $trillions to spend fighting COVID-19, which we apparently do (though it is unclear why we wouldn’t instead spend the money on CO2 vacuums to deal with what our leading intellectual has called a “code red” threat to all of humanity from climate change), why wouldn’t we invest in ventilation?

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Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) was itself the cause of loss of pressure…

by philg

The idea of indirect monitoring of tire pressure with sensors already on the car, e.g., wheel speed from the ABS system (just look to see if wheels are spinning at different speeds and/or look at GPS distance traveled versus wheel rotations), seems to be unpopular. In trying to clean up our 2007 Infiniti M35x so that the hulk could be sold (rather than moved to the Florida Free State where one gets no points for being a frugal Yankee driving an old car into the ground), it turned out that the slow leak in one tire was actually being caused by the TPMS sensor itself. Also, the shop said that the systems in older cars usually accumulated programming mistakes that led to the display being inaccurate regarding which tire was at what pressure. An indirect system wouldn’t be subject to these human errors.

A good example of how a system that is great in theory is weak in practice? Direct TPMS is presumably engineered to work well for the three-year standard new car warranty. But the service life of a car is closer to 20 years (average age of a car on a U.S. road right now is 12.1 years).

Would it have been smarter if we’d insisted on indirect sensing that couldn’t be a new source of leaks?

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The governments that preserved us from coronavirus now start giving us the bill

by philg

“National insurance hike sets UK on path to record level of taxes” (CNN):

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plan to hike payroll taxes to raise billions in funding for health and social care will raise Britain’s tax burden to its highest ever level, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Johnson described the plan as “the biggest catch-up program in the history of the [National Health Service],” which is grappling with a chronic backlog of non-essential treatments that has been made worse by the coronavirus pandemic.

UK government spending coming out of the pandemic is set to reach a record peacetime level, according to the IFS.

What are folks in the UK paying for? In the COVID Olympics, the country has suffered 1,992 deaths per million tagged to COVID-19, a somewhat higher rate than the U.S. and 1.4X the rate in give-the-finger-to-the-virus Sweden.

Proof that “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have”?

Where does this end? Now that most people in most countries have begged for salvation at any price (and simply decided, without any precedent and contrary to W.H.O. pandemic advice through 2019, that muscular government action actually could prevent us from contracting a respiratory virus), are we going to enter a new era of much bigger government?

OECD data show that the UK government was previously spending a somewhat higher percentage of GDP than the U.S.:

Note that most countries include health care in “government spending” and some include nearly all higher education costs. If we add 10 percent of GDP to the headline U.S. number to adjust for these factors (i.e., the money that we have to spend on health care and higher ed privately that would be included via our tax bill, e.g., in Denmark), the U.S. government spending is about the same as in Sweden or Italy (and a larger proportion of the economy than in the U.K., even after Boris Johnson’s latest raid on the residents).

Same story, WSJ:

Related:

  • Wave of death among the elderly bankrupts Social Security (if governments and media are telling us the truth about COVID-19 killing reasonably healthy people, governments with big social insurance obligations, such as the UK and the US, should actually be flush with unexpected cash (due to beneficiaries having died 5-10 years prematurely))
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