Andrew Cuomo as the modern Boethius

by philg

Fortuna’s wheel has spun downward for Andrew Cuomo. Who could have predicted this? Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, for one.

From Wikipedia:

In 522, the same year his two sons were appointed joint consuls, Boethius accepted the appointment to the position of magister officiorum, the head of all the government and court services. … In 523 Boethius fell from power. After a period of imprisonment in Pavia for what was deemed a treasonable offence, he was executed in 524.

He went from being the most powerful official in the world’s most powerful empire to being imprisoned, in other words. While in prison, Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. a book that was required reading for scholars until the Age of Enlightenment began in the 17th century. More than 1,000 years of being a touchstone for every educated person in Europe, in other words.

Here’s a question… what important intellectual work could Andrew Cuomo write during his corresponding period of being on the wrong side of the Rota Fortunae? What would it be titled and what would it be about?

My vote is a work that shows that the 7 elements of the modern catechism are not in conflict. Here they are on a Sign of Justice:

Black Americans are the biggest losers from low-skill immigration (NBER), so “Black Lives Matter” and “No Human is Illegal” are in apparent contradiction. “Love is Love” refers to the full slate of LGBTQIA+ and therefore the next line, “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” doesn’t make sense because the term “Women” is no longer precisely defined. “Science is Real” is the kind of thing that Plato would have liked to consider. Is #Science real like a table is real? Or is #Science more real than a table because #Science is already an ideal form whereas the table is merely an attempted (imperfect) implementation of a real table form? “Water is Life” is confusing without reference to the other elements of belief. Is distilled and UV-sterilized water life? Is it “injustice” when Harvard discriminates against Asians? If so, why doesn’t that threaten justice anywhere, much less everywhere?

I’m not sure what this work would be called.

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Wave of death among the elderly bankrupts Social Security

by philg

COVID-19 is the world’s greatest source of cognitive dissonance. We are informed by the CDC that roughly 640,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. The same agency tells us that deaths are concentrated among those who are old enough to be collecting Social Security:

Roughly 80 percent of the deaths are 65+.

We are informed by our brightest science-following minds in the media that COVID-19 has been killing people whose best years were ahead of them. Maybe the median age of a death in Maskachusetts was 82, but, absent coronavirus, those 82-year-olds being killed would have lived to 92 and, thus, collected an additional 10 more years of Social Security checks.

What happens to a financial enterprise when the obligation to send 10 years of month checks to hundreds of thousands of people goes away? “Social Security trust funds now projected to run out of money sooner than expected due to Covid, Treasury says” (CNBC, August 31, 2021):

The Social Security trust fund most Americans rely on for their retirement will run out of money in 12 years, one year sooner than expected, according to an annual government report.

The circumstances, which were exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, threaten to shrink retirement payments and increase health-care costs for Americans in old age sooner than expected.

So… our minds are supposed to simultaneously hold the following truths:

  1. COVID-19 kills mostly people old enough to be entitled to Social Security.
  2. The average old person killed by COVID-19 was healthy enough to live for at least another 5-10 years.
  3. Social Security will become insolvent as a result of not having to send checks to those killed by COVID-19.

Unless I am missing something obvious, the human mind is a wonderfully supple device!

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Coronapanic is a huge boon for tenured faculty

by philg

A friend gets a guaranteed salary as a tenured professor at M.I.T. If he wants to drive away from his comfortable home, fight through the Boston traffic (back with a vengeance), and work all day in his office, he must comply with all of the procedures laid out at https://covidapps.mit.edu/covid-pass:

He prefers not to deal with this and therefore he has opted out of the system. What’s the consequence to him of failure to comply? He doesn’t have to commute and doesn’t have to work with students except in the rare instances when a student is able to pin him down and demand a Zoom meeting. Excluding infancy, he’s never worked less in his life.

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Cambridge, Maskachusetts back under a mask order

by philg

From August 27, “City of Cambridge Issues Emergency Order Requiring Use of Face Masks in Indoor Public Places, Effective September 3, 2021”:

The City of Cambridge issued an emergency order requiring that face masks or coverings be worn in indoor public places. The order takes effect at 8:00 a.m. on Friday, September 3, 2021. It applies to everyone over the age of two years old, with exceptions in alignment with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health guidelines.

“I am grateful to everyone in Cambridge who has taken our public health guidance seriously, gotten vaccinated, and done their part to help protect themselves and our community,” said City Manager Louis A. DePasquale. “With the rapid rise of the Delta variant, we are issuing this mask order for indoor public places to reduce the spread of the virus and to protect those who live, work, learn, or visit our city. As we have done throughout the pandemic, we will take a data and science-informed approach to our pandemic response.”

“With schools reopening and COVID-19 cases increasing due to the highly infectious Delta variant, instituting this mask mandate for indoor public places is a critical measure to help minimize the spread of the virus,” said Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui.

It’s an emergency situation. COVID-19 is on a rapid (presumably exponential) rise. We have at our disposal a critical measure that we know will save lives. So… let’s wait a week before applying this critical measure!

Separately, my Uber driver in Cambridge on August 27 described what happens in the patchwork coronapanic landscape of Maskachusetts. “They closed the gyms in Boston, so thousands of people started coming to my gym in Quincy,” he said. “It was so packed that I couldn’t use any of the machines.”

Harvard, meanwhile, is #FollowingTheScience by closing the outdoor venue of Harvard Yard to walk-throughs… from 5 pm to 3 am (so everyone who wants to visit Harvard Yard must be sure to crowd in during the limited opening hours!).

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In-person versus virtual learning effectiveness

by philg

Now that the school year is upon us, with periodic coronapanic shutdowns following positive PCR results, it seems like a good time to share the results from our MIT ground school course. We’ve taught this as an in-person class multiple times and once as a Zoom plus prerecorded lectures class (MIT Video Productions recorded the 2019 lectures). Considering only registered MIT students, scores on the FAA practice test were approximately 10 points lower (out of 100) after the virtual class compared to the in-person class.

(Of course, I don’t expect the demonstrated ineffectiveness of virtual instruction to convince the Shutdown Karens to reopen schools! #AbundanceOfCaution and #FollowTheScience)

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Revive the abortion bus idea?

by philg

Top of the front page of CNN.com on a day when New York City was flooded, with multiple fatalities, by the leftovers from Hurricane Ida:

“Biden launches ‘whole of government’ effort to protect abortion rights after Texas ban” is kind of interesting. Leaving aside of whether the “whole of government” effort to fight the unrighteous in Texas will go better than the 20-year “whole of government” effort to permanently establish the rainbow flag over Kabul, why does it take the entire Federal government to deliver abortions to potential birthing persons in Texas?

From Why can’t Michael Bloomberg run a fleet of abortion buses? (October 6, 2020):

The billionaires trying to cleanse American politics from the filth of Republicanism could, for a tiny fraction of what they’re spending to defeat the hated Trumpenfuhrer, purchase and operate a fleet of buses painted with “Bloomberg’s Abortion Caravan” on the side. Have the buses continuously tour the U.S. and anyone who wants an abortion can hop on to be driven to, for example, Maskachusetts. We have abortion on demand up to 24 weeks; abortion of a “fetus” after 24 weeks available in the sole discretion of a single physician concluding that “a continuation of her pregnancy will impose on [the pregnant woman] a substantial risk of grave impairment of her physical or mental health.”

Essentially there is no time limit for an abortion in Massachusetts since almost any child can be a risk to a parent’s mental health (“these kids are driving me crazy” is not merely a figure of speech!).

Rich Democrats could fund abortion buses privately or, now that the executive branch has been purged of sinful Republicans, the abortion buses could be operated by Medicaid with Joe Biden being propped up to sign an order to print money to pay for the buses and then sign another order to operate them. (To get it going faster, maybe the program could be handled by contractors.)

Given the extensive transportation network in the U.S. and the fact that so many states are 100-percent controlled by Democrats and offer unlimited abortion services, why is this such a fraught issue? Why can’t the people who love abortion organize the service as a transportation+procedure package and not worry about what legislatures do in states where citizens are opposed to abortion?

(Along related lines, why can’t well-intentioned folks fund luxury buses to deliver anyone who is homeless to Santa Monica or San Francisco where rich people say that they want to help the vulnerable and unfortunate? Would it be illegal to deliver 50 indigents every hour to downtown Santa Monica? It seems like a win/win for someone who is currently homeless in, say, Chicago and a Californian who says he/she/ze/they wants to help the homeless.)

Related:

  • “As Texans fill up abortion clinics in other states, low-income people get left behind” (Texas Tribune, 9/3/2021): Texas’ near-total ban on abortions is sending patients out of state for the procedure. Advocates say many immigrants and women of color can’t leave, and that’s increasing the inequities their communities suffer. … “There are going to be thousands of individuals who don’t have that wherewithal, and it’s really particularly going to impact women of color, young women, rural women.” … “The folks that went out of state [for abortions in 2020] and came back to have follow-up care tended to be higher-income, tended to be white folks,” said Bhavik Kumar, a doctor at Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston, recalling patients he saw after Abbott’s executive order ended.
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Cancel my order for 200 million COVID-19 vaccine booster shots?

by philg

“Are We Jumping the Gun on COVID Boosters?” (MedPage Today, August 24, 2021):

Diminishing vaccine effectiveness supposedly makes the case for boosters. But there are two big questions here: First, what is current vaccine effectiveness? And second, what justifies boosters? Let’s consider these in turn.

We have to be honest, many vaccine effectiveness studies are poorly done. All studies compare the rate of getting a breakthrough infection among vaccinated people against the rate of infection in unvaccinated people. But there are some issues with this approach. First, as time goes on, more unvaccinated people have had and recovered from COVID-19 (and these individuals may be less likely to go on to get a shot). This means that their risk of getting COVID-19 a second time is far less than the typical unvaccinated person who has never been sick. Even if vaccines “work” as well as before, this factor alone will result in the appearance of diminishing vaccine effectiveness.

Second, the order of vaccination in all nations is non-random. The folks who got vaccinated first are often the oldest and most vulnerable people with frailty and senescent immune systems. Vaccine effectiveness after 6 months, 8 months, and 12 months increasingly compares older, frailer people who got vaccinated first against unvaccinated people. These older people may always have a slightly higher risk of breakthrough infections. This bias will also give the false appearance of diminishing vaccine effectiveness.

Humans are terrible at reasoning from statistics. Will our booster shot mania prove to be another example of this phenomenon?

Separately, I do wish someone would explain to me the mania for trying to coerce all of the unvaccinated into #AcceptingScience. We know that the vaccines we have don’t prevent infection or transmission. Our hospitals have plenty of capacity if we’re willing to do a little geographic load-balancing. Maybe an individual should care whether he/she/ze/they gets vaccinated. But why do his/her/zir/their neighbors care if he/she/ze/they gets vaccinated? We now know that the pandemic would not end even if 100 percent of humans were vaccinated.

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Not everyone in Florida is a Deplorable Neanderthal (children’s section of a Palm Beach County library)

by philg

Folks in Maskachusetts tend to be scornful of Florida, dismissing it as a “Red state” with “stupid” residents. But you won’t see a big difference at our local public library (the Jupiter branch of the Palm Beach County system).

Government workers won’t have their pay cut or jobs eliminated no matter how unpleasant they make the customer experience. Thus, in a generally mask-optional state, the librarians don’t have a problem demanding that customers wear the hijab (so both librarians and patrons can catch coronavirus 15 minutes after leaving when they walk into a mostly-unmasked store or restaurant?):

The librarians also sit behind Plexi screens that the New York Times says #Science now disclaims.

How about the featured books in the children’s section?

What if a child wants to read about a white heterosexual cisgender male? He/she/ze/they will have to dig into the stacks! (Keith Haring, above, may have identified as “white,” but was a member of the LGBTQIA+ community until HIV killed him at age 31.)

Children can learn about the female roots of aeronautical engineering:

(Maybe a book about Kitty Hawk could be featured if titled “The Wright Brothers, Sisters, and Binary-resisters”?)

A featured book in the adult section:

(Another way that Maskachusetts residents insult the idea of Florida is by talking about how old everyone in Florida is. (If the Northern Righteous have such contempt for the elderly, why do they put masks on 7-year-olds in hopes of reducing plague deaths among the 82-year-olds?) In fact, our new neighborhood is about 30 years younger than our old neighborhood. Still, it is tough not to love the fact that the librarians expect their elderly customers to still be running Windows 7 (released in 2009). There were no corresponding books about Windows 10 or 11 available. Speaking of Windows 11, will the main reason to upgrade be the ability to point to our PC and say “this one goes to 11”?)

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Back-to-school anti-racism

by philg

Today it’s back to school for students in Lincoln, Maskachusetts. They’ll be fully masked, of course, by local order (from June 2: “We will follow state guidelines in the fall, which indicate that we will not require distancing between students but will maintain all individuals wearing masks while indoors.”), and sitting in trailers because the nation’s most expensive school building (per-student) isn’t ready.

A friend’s son attends private school. Here’s an excerpt from his course list:

  • English I-Honors
  • World History I -Honors
  • Anti-Racism
  • Algebra II-Honors

While, of course, it is great to see that the academic discipline of Anti-Racism gets equal status with Algebra II, I wonder what fills an entire semester (or year?). A search for “anti-racism high school textbook” does not yield an obvious result. Perhaps there is a lucrative market for a textbook? What collection of school administrators will stand up and say “We don’t need a class on this subject”?

The Lincoln public school’s June 2 email, which announced the “masks now, masks tomorrow, masks forever” policy, devoted a single line (out of three pages) to academics:

  • Continued focus on AIDE (antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity) and deeper learning for all grade levels.

So there should be demand for anti-racism textbooks at all grade levels!

(Separately, private schools in Maskachusetts usually have at least a handful of non-white students, e.g., Asians. Why are they sentenced to take this class? Surely a non-white student does not need to learn from a (white) teacher how to be anti-racist.)

Related:

  • Florida first impressions (white kids in our neighborhood learn about Black people from talking to their Black neighbors, not from a white teacher delivering an anti-racism lesson)
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Florida first impressions

by philg

We’ve been Florida residents since mid-August. Here are a few first impressions…

One of the most important issues to folks in Maskachusetts, at least to judge by lawn signs, emails from school administrators, teacher email signatures, and sincere expressions from politicians and government workers, is Black Lives Matter. After driving all the way from the border with Georgia to South Florida, and driving around neighborhoods (including some mostly-Black ones in North/West Palm Beach), I haven’t seen a single BLM sign. In what folks in Maskachusetts would regard as a poor substitute for putting up a sign, what I have done is interacted with Black people. During our first weekend in Jupiter (Abacoa), I interacted with more Black people than I talked to during the preceding year in Massachusetts. A manager at our apartment complex happens to be Black, some of the neighbors, a woman in front of us on the mini golf course who helped putt back some of the wilder shots by our 6-year-old, a cable/Internet installer from AT&T, cashiers helping me check out at Walmart, Costco, and Target, etc. In our former home, a rich suburb of Boston, Black people are generally objects of pity and charity. A rich friend’s wife is Black and the righteous moms of Lincoln, MA, seeing her at the local school, always started from the assumption that she was a “METCO parent” whose children were being bused out from Boston in a government-run program based on skin color.

It won’t help our kids get jobs in the victimhood industry, but I’m happy that our kids will learn about Black Americans from talking to the Black residents in our apartment complex, rather than from seeing BLM signs, receiving anti-racism training from white teachers, etc. There are no subsidized units in our building, so when the kids meet someone who is Black they are talking to someone who has equal status with the landlord, pays the same rent as us, presumably has a reasonably well-paid job, etc.

A lot of Floridians, including some here in Jupiter, have built elaborate screen structures over their swimming pools and backyards. I was told that summer is the bug season, but we haven’t seen or felt a single mosquito. We’re right next to a golf course with a variety of water features. The no-mosquito situation was the same in a swampy nature trail area near the F45 airport (miles inland). The bug situation is far more annoying in New England.

Driving is much more challenging than in Boston, despite Boston’s reputation for having aggressive, incompetent, and rule-flouting drivers. In Boston, roads are usually either so jammed that traffic is moving at only 10 mph or they are not too busy. If the speed limit is higher than 35 mph, the road is almost surely a limited access one. South Florida is densely populated, packed with commercial strip malls that generate mid-block entries and exits, and wide fast-moving main arteries. Since traffic is moving at 45 mph (the speed limit) on these 6-lane suburban thoroughfares, one needs to be alert. After only about two hours in the state, I was eating barbecue at an intersection near St. Augustine and witnessed a terrifying-sounding crash between a pickup truck and a car (fortunately, nobody seemed to have been hurt).

At least in the summer, car navigation systems should pull in NEXRAD weather radar data. There are quite a few small-ish rain cells in Florida that are dangerous to drive through due to reduced visibility. It would be a huge safety enhancement if Google Maps were smart enough to say “Pull over at the next exit and chill out at McDonald’s for 20 minutes because that way you’ll skip extreme precipitation.”

Speaking of driving, I would expect almost everyone in Florida to drive a Tesla solely due to Dog Mode (my dream from 2003). A parked car heats up very quickly indeed. A golden retriever on the beach heats up and times out sooner than the kids in the water and needs to be put into an air-conditioned environment. Even for those without dogs, it would be a lot more comfortable on a day spent running errands to leave the car’s climate system going during all of the stops.

Mask usage among adults was actually higher among Floridians in August than it had been back in the Boston area, perhaps due to summer being a peak COVID-19 time in Florida and a COVID-19 lull for New England (at least in 2020 and most of summer 2021). There is a lot less anxiety around COVID-19, however, especially among children. The Florida children we’ve met are not afraid to approach other children, adults, etc., and don’t hurry to put on masks. Back in Maskachusetts, my friend’s kids are literally terrified to go into another family’s house, will rush to yank their chin diapers up over their nose and mouth when a non-family member approaches, etc. (This is true even after everyone eligible has been vaccinated.) Children aged 3-5 in our old town display what would have been called a panic response (back in 2019) if you ride a bike within 15-20′ of them (i.e., ride by on the street while they’re in the driveway). By the standards that prevailed in 2019, children in Florida enjoy much better mental health than children in Massachusetts.

In Cambridge, MA, a Comcast Xfinity coax cable delivers, depending on what the neighbors are doing, 200 mbps down and 5 mbps up, plus TV, for $200/month. In Jupiter, AT&T fiber delivers 1 Gbps up and down, plus TV, for $60/month (i.e., 200X faster upload for one third the price, though I think we may be getting a small discount for being part of this apartment complex).

People are far friendlier than in Massachusetts. Nobody says what they rationally should say: “go back to where you came from so that you don’t bid up rents and real estate prices and clog up the highway with your minivan and that Tesla that might show up in 2023 if you order it now.” Instead, the locals say “welcome” and try to help us enjoy everything that they’re enjoying about the area.

I’m not 100% sure that we made the right decision with Abacoa. It’s great if you want to walk to work at Max Planck Institute, Scripps, or the Florida Atlantic University campus here. There are a lot of people to meet, restaurants to visit, etc. It is not super expensive ($2000 to $3000/month for an apartment) and therefore there are a lot of young people, even before factoring in the 200 who live in the FAU dorms. The landscaping and architecture are appealing when walking around. But this neighborhood is a 15-minute drive to the beach and maybe it would be better to live a car-dependent lifestyle in a house that is only a few minutes walk from a dogs-welcome beach. Not so great when the hurricane and storm surge hits, of course!

My quintessential Florida experience thus far has been hearing Mindy the Crippler drinking from her water bowl in the kitchen of our apartment in a massive concrete building while simultaneously seeing her sleeping in the living room. It turned out that a lizard had entered the apartment and taken up residence in the golden retriever’s water bowl:

(I covered the bowl with a Chinet plate, carried the combined system out the front door, and dumped water+lizard into the bushes.)

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