Profiles in Corporate Courage

by philg

Happy Pride Month! I would love to hear everyone’s plans for celebration. We have a two-car garage here in Maskachusetts and, for compatibility with neighbors’ yard signs, I had thought about painting one door in a rainbow flag and the other in a permanent Black Lives Matter sign, but now that we’ve sold the house (signed P&S) and are moving to Jupiter, Florida I am not 100 percent sure that the new owner shares my commitment to social justice.

I’ve never wanted an Apple Watch (an iPhone in the pocket is embarrassing enough), but the company’s courageous commitment to Pride is tempting me to “celebrate all year long”. From the U.S. site:

A detail page:

Some text underneath:

Weaving together the colors of the Pride flag, the Pride Edition Braided Solo Loop band features a unique, stretchable design that’s ultracomfortable and easy to slip on and off your wrist. Created by weaving 16,000 recycled polyester yarn filaments around ultrathin silicone threads using advanced precision-braiding machinery, then laser cutting the band to an exact length for a custom fit. The band offers a soft, textured feel and is both sweat and water resistant.

Apple is proud to support LGBTQ advocacy organizations working to bring about positive change, including Encircle, Equality North Carolina, Gender Spectrum, GLSEN, the Human Rights Campaign, PFLAG National, the National Center for Transgender Equality, SMYAL, and The Trevor Project in the U.S., and ILGA World internationally.

This Pride Edition watch/band is not available from Apple’s United Arab Emirates page, otherwise a mirror image of the U.S. page. Perhaps folks in UAE don’t need to hear the Good News about Rainbow Flagism? From “LGBT rights in the United Arab Emirates” (Wikipedia): “Male homosexuality is illegal in the UAE, and is punishable by the death penalty under sharia law.”

See also, from Titania McGrath, a comparison of major corporations’ Pride Month displays in non-Muslim versus Muslim regions.

Brush your teeth with pride and shave without toxic masculinity (P&G owns Gillette)….

“We prefer to think of it as the Blue Screen of Pride”:

From diversity.google: “The Gayglers is comprised of LGBTQ+ Googlers and their allies. The group not only leads the way in celebrating Pride around the world, but also informs programs and policies, so that Google remains a workplace that works for everyone.” Apparently, “around the world” does not include Arabia:

Should we ask Melinda Gates to fund a project to help these companies translate their Pride Month messages into Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian, etc.?

Related:

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Biden builds a tunnel to rival the Swiss

by philg

Your tax dollars at work… “At Long Last, a New Rail Tunnel Under the Hudson River Can Be Built” (NYT):

After four years of stalling by the Trump administration, officials in Washington approved the $11.6 billion project for federal funding.

The Biden administration has indicated its support for the project and the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has acknowledged its importance to the economy of the region and the nation. “This is a big step for the Northeast, and for the entire country, as these tunnels connect so many people, jobs and businesses,” Mr. Buttigieg said in a statement announcing the approval.

The existing Hudson River tunnels, e.g., the Lincoln Tunnel, are approximately 1.5 miles long. How then can this project be said to rival the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which is 35.5 miles long and 8,000′ deep through a solid granite mountain in Switzerland? The actual cost of the Swiss tunnel was roughly the same as the best-case estimate of what this NY/NJ tunnel might cost!

Related:

  • “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” (NYT): “The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue subway on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards also cost far above average, at $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion per mile, respectively.”
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Order your backup generator now (36-week waiting list for the part and one year for the install)

by philg

An aviation friend runs a sizable business installing backup generators here in the Northeast. Media coverage of the outage that afflicted Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, has driven demand to an all-time high. That high demand combined with coronapanic-related restrictions at the Generac factory have resulted in a 36-week lead time when he places an order for a whole-house standby generator. “We also have to get permits and install and, like every other business,” he said, “we can’t compete with $600 per week from the government so we can’t hire anybody. I tell people that if they order now we’ll install their generator in a year.”

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Low skill migrants make the U.S. richer, but will impoverish Spain

by philg

“‘Come On In, Boys’: A Wave of the Hand Sets Off Spain-Morocco Migrant Fight” (New York Times):

Spanish officials say Morocco increasingly sees migrants as currency for financial and political gains after it let up to 12,000 flood into a Spanish enclave in North Africa over two days.

Normally, Morocco tightly controls the fenced borders around Ceuta, a six-mile-long peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast that Spain has governed since the 1600s. But now its military was allowing migrants into this toehold of Europe. Over the next two days, as many as 12,000 people flowed over the border to Ceuta in hopes of reaching mainland Spain, engulfing the city of 80,000.

The crisis has laid bare the unique pressure point Morocco has over Spain on migration. Spanish government officials and other experts say Morocco increasingly sees the migrants as a kind of currency and is leveraging its control over them to extract financial and political prizes from Spain.

“It’s not acceptable that a government allows for attacks on their borders” because of disagreements over foreign policy, Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, said on Monday.

Hours after the migrants began pouring into Ceuta, Spain approved 30 million euros, about $37 million, in aid to Morocco for border policing. The transaction was reminiscent of Turkey’s deal with the European Union under which it was paid to stem the flood of migrants onto European shores after the Arab Spring and decades of turmoil in Afghanistan.

The same newspaper has informed us for more than five years that low skill migrants make existing Americans vastly wealthier. Yet it runs an article without expert analysis questioning the assumption that Spain will become poorer with every additional low skill migrant (to the point that it is worth paying Morocco and Turkey to keep migrants away). And, if the brightest minds of American academia and politics are correct about the high value of low skill migrants to a modern economy, why isn’t there a bidding war among EU nations for the 6,000 migrants per day coming into Ceuta?

From 2017 Agadir, a beach resort on the Atlantic coast of Morocco (Ceuta is just inside the Mediterranean).

A map for context, which the NYT does not provide:

Separately, if American economists and Democrats are wrong about the value of low skill migrants, would it be smart for Spain to give up this little corner of Africa? If migrants cross at the rate of 6,000 per day and each migrant costs 1 million EUR in lifetime welfare, the Spanish are getting poorer at the rate of $7.3 billion per day because of their ownership of this city of 80,000 people (i.e., the residents of Ceuta would have to pay taxes at the rate of $91,250 per day each in order to make ownership of the chunk of land financially rational). For comparison, the $4 trillion in coronapanic “stimulus” spending by the U.S. government works out to about $10 billion per day.

Related:

  • “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Harvard econ prof shows that low skill migrants actually do make Americans richer… but only those who are already relatively rich, e.g., apartment building owners, restaurant chain owners, government employees, non-profit refugee-industrial complex workers, etc.)

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Memorial for the Paycheck Protection Program

by philg

Yesterday was Memorial Day and also the final application deadline for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans (actually grants, since they don’t have to be paid back). Small business owners who relied on this deadline and focused on completing income taxes, complying with various local COVID-19 restrictions, trying to hire staff, and serving customers, however, were denied loans due to funding having run out on May 5 (source with some history).

So the most successful enterprises might turn out to be those who were most plugged into and aggressive about claiming government bailouts.

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Has the world been more peaceful since coronaplague broke out?

by philg

From a year ago, in Memorial Day thought: Will coronaplague bring us years of peace?

Maybe there won’t be too many more sacrifices among soldiers worldwide for the next few years. Do countries that have shut down their societies, schools, and economies have the will or the wealth to go to war? What would they fight for? To conquer a territory that is also shut down and packed with inhabitants who are entirely dependent on government welfare?

What actually happened? Did the world overall see fewer conflicts and loss of life through war or was conflict intensified due to shutdowns?

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Maskachusetts unmasked

by philg

We risked death-by-variant-COVID-19 today at the Watertown Mall, meeting friends for dim sum. Although the Massachusetts state of emergency persists at least until June 15, a combination of 69 governor’s orders as of yesterday boiled down to “masks are no longer required indoors”. (Or at least, “you can’t be arrested or fined under state law for not wearing a mask indoors”; maybe a city or town could order you to wear a mask.)

I would have expected an enterprise that makes money from inviting the public to share an indoor space to deemphasize the risk of sharing an indoor space as soon as that deemphasis was legal. To the contrary, however, the shopping mall operator and some individual stores had kept up their sign barrage. We walked by at least 40 COVID-related signs between the door to the small mall and the restaurant itself (waitstaff still fully masked). How does this help their business? Wouldn’t an intelligent person who believed all of these signs decide to stay home and order everything from Amazon rather than take the risk of in-person shopping?

A sampling:

The mall includes a Target and 100 percent of the shoppers whom I observed were masked, both in the Target and in the rest of the mall.

I asked two of our (adult) friends how many COVID signs they’d walked past in getting from their respective cars to the restaurant. Both answered “none”. One was sufficiently mindful of COVID-19 that he arrived in a double-mask (fabric over N95) while the other sported a plain N95 mask. Yet their minds hadn’t registered the signs.

Note that the public health experts who have technocratically managed the Massachusetts plague such that our COVID-19 death rate, adjusted for population over 65, is only 3X that of Florida’s (a Robert S. McNamara-style victory?), still advise subjects to wear masks, especially for those who are not vaccinated.

(A few days ago we went on a bicycle ride with the kids in a quiet exurb. Slender apparently health people aged 10-20 would jump off the sidewalk in order to maintain at least 10′ of distance and if they weren’t already masked would rush to raise up their chin diapers.)

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Intelligent #Science-following Germans versus Swedish Covidiots

by philg

From Twitter, a chart of intensive care utilization by COVID-19 patients in Stockholm versus Hamburg:

Related:

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Bill Gates made one decision worse than Clippy

by philg

Happy National Paperclip Day (apparently popular in the Florida Free State; see this Orlando Sentinel article).

Until recently, as far as anyone knew, the worse decision that Bill Gates ever made was to launch Clippy.

Now we find out that Gates has a family court plaintiff who will be harvesting roughly half of what he earned prior to encountering her.

Consider that Bill Gates beat Xerox and Apple in the desktop computing market. He triumphed over IBM and its technologically superior OS/2 in operating systems. He defeated the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark antitrust case (ran out the clock until George W. Bush took over!). He escaped the Internal Revenue Service and taxation by stuffing every share of stock that he wanted to sell into the Gates Foundation where it could be sold without attracting capital gains tax.

The one enemy that he couldn’t defend against or prevail over was his family court plaintiff.

(What if he’d stayed single, but periodically had sex with cash-motivated individuals seeking to make bank via pregnancy and child support? Washington State family law makes it tough for a plaintiff to obtain more than about $400,000 over 18 years. Suppose that Gates’s current plaintiff collects $60 billion. That would have been sufficient to fund 150,000 child support plaintiffs at the top of the Washington State child support guidelines. Maybe some of them could have moved to Massachusetts or California or Arkansas prior to giving birth and availed themselves of unlimited child support, as Hunter Biden’s plaintiff did (sex in D.C.; lawsuit in Arkansas). But “unlimited” doesn’t necessarily mean that sex partners would have been paid anywhere near $60 billion.

What if the Melinda entanglement was more about sex than procreation? If Melinda took advice from Betsy Salkind (“Men are like linoleum floors. Lay ’em right and you can walk all over them for thirty years.”), there would have been a short period of evening excitement followed by decades of deep freeze. A friend who is “familiar” (as the journalists say) with the rates charged by legal escorts in London and Germany says that the maximum that Bill Gates could possibly have paid for the highest-end all-night companionship is $2000 per woman per evening (London rates; substantially cheaper in Germany). A $60 billion fee to an American plaintiff would translate into 30 million evenings of top-class escort service in London or 82,192 years of every-evening companionship with one woman (more than 40,000 years of every-evening companionship with two women). The same friend says that Jeff Bezos’s situation breaks his heart. “He was the richest guy in the world. What is he doing with a 50-year-old who already had kids with two different men?”)

Maybe the most helpful thing to say to someone considering marriage to a less-wealthy lower-earning potential future plaintiff: “Do you think that you’re smarter than Bill Gates?”

Related:

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Government says employers can require experimental vaccines

by philg

“U.S. agency says employers can mandate COVID-19 vaccination” (Reuters):

U.S. companies can mandate that employees in a workplace must be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said on Friday.

The EEOC, in a statement posted on its website explaining its updated guidance, said employees can be required to be vaccinated as long as employers comply with the reasonable accommodation provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other laws.

In other words, a healthy 25-year-old does not have to agree to take an “investigational” non-FDA-approved vaccine designed to prevent deaths among the unhealthy elderly, but he/she/ze/they will not be receiving a paycheck if he/she/ze/they refuses.

For anyone whose earning potential is near the median, this is another great argument in favor of choosing the welfare lifestyle. The is no vaccine requirement to continue occupying means-tested public housing. There is no vaccine requirement to continue receiving free health insurance via Medicaid. There is no vaccine requirement to continue purchasing food via SNAP/EBT. There is no vaccine requirement to continue chatting on an Obamaphone. Employers can mandate random drug and alcohol tests and transportation-related employers are required to conduct random drug and alcohol tests, but, at least here in Maskachusetts, a resident of public housing can enjoy “essential” alcohol and marijuana every day. In other words, an American with a job is not free to decide what drugs to take and what drugs not to take while an American on welfare is free to choose what drugs and medical treatments to accept and what recreational drugs to consume.

(The American on welfare is, of course, much better situated for avoiding coronavirus infection than the American who goes to work. The American on welfare need not leave his/her/zir/their apartment when variant COVID is raging. The American on welfare need not commute in a bus or subway. The American on welfare need never be in a public indoor environment.)

How about the spending power? From back in 2013, before all of the coronapanic-related enhancements to government programs, The Work versus Welfare Trade-Off (CATO):

Let’s also consider freedom of speech. The First Amendment isn’t useful if your employer disagrees with what you say or write. A recent story from Massachusetts, “An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer” (HuffPost):

But “Sinclair Jenkins,” HuffPost has now confirmed, is really a pseudonym for Benjamin Welton, a 33-year-old Boston University history PhD candidate who, until this week, taught English, social studies and computer science at Star Academy, an elementary school in Massachusetts. When HuffPost contacted the school for comment, Welton was put on leave, and was fired shortly before this article was published.

Like many conservatives, Welton has expressed anger about the teaching of “critical race theory” in American schools. Last August, shortly before he began teaching at the Star Academy, he tweeted under a pseudonym that a return to American greatness “requires defunding critical race theory.” It’s clear from his pseudonymous writings where his real objection lies: criticism of white people.

A group of anti-fascist researchers, the Anonymous Comrades Collective, figured out Welton’s double life and shared the details with HuffPost.

Regardless of the content of his thought, speech, and writing, Mr. Welton (unlikely to become “Dr. Welton” given that his Ph.D. program at Boston University is right next to a Center for Antiracist Research) would have enjoyed a secure spending power and standard of living if he’d chosen welfare rather than work.

Related:

  • “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” (Real World Divorce); the American who has sex with two already-married dentists and harvests the resulting child support can enjoy the same spending power as a dentist without the need to accept non-FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, interact with the COVID-plagued public, or worry about the reaction to what is said or written (alimony also works since family court profits are not conditional on medical decisions or thought/speech/writing content, but collecting alimony requires persuading a future divorce lawsuit defendant to agree to get married rather than a future slam-dunk child support lawsuit defendant to agree to have sex for one night or one hour (see Hunter Biden, for example))
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