Locked-down, pregnant, and stoned is actually a great way to go through life…

by philg

…. in the opinion of American pregnant people.

“Rates of Prenatal Cannabis Use Among Pregnant [People] Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (JAMA):

Considered an essential business in California, cannabis retailers remained open during the pandemic with record sales in 2020. We used data from Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC), a large integrated health care delivery system with universal screening for prenatal cannabis use to test the hypothesis that rates of prenatal cannabis use increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of 100 005 pregnancies (95 412 [people]), 26% were Asian or Pacific Islander; 7%, Black; 28%, Hispanic; 34%, non-Hispanic White; and 5%, other, unknown, or multiracial. The patients were a mean age of 31 years (median, 31 years).

… In the ITS analysis, we found that prenatal cannabis use increased by 25% (95% CI, 12%-40%; Table) during the pandemic over prenatal cannabis use during the 15 months before the pandemic.

Note that I have edited the title and a portion of the text to remove offensive language that is inconsistent with #Science and CDC Guidelines.

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Single image that best summarizes the American spirit?

by philg

Here’s an image that, I think, best summarizes the current American spirit. It is from September 7, 2021 at 5 pm and was taken on the Jupiter campus of Florida Atlantic University. The apparently healthy and reasonably slender student is swaddled like a baby, wearing a hoodie for protection against becoming dangerously chilled in the 90-degree, 90-percent humidity weather. He’s roughly 75′ from any other human and wearing a mask to protect against becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, a notorious killer of 82-year-olds. He’s using a piece of recreation gear (swing set) typically associated with 4-year-olds.

Anyone else have a better candidate single photo for summarizing the spirit of the typical American in 2020/2021?

Camera: iPhone 12 Pro Max on “telephoto” setting.

From 7:17 pm on the same day, Juno Beach Pier, someone who is seriously out of step with our times (though not out of step with the prevailing spirit among young people in Florida!):

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Google Pixel 6 Pro versus iPhone 13 Pro Max camera quality

by philg

Google spec’d a bigger sensor than what Apple uses in the latest iPhones and, therefore, should have been able to crush Apple in image quality. DxOMark says otherwise. In lab conditions, the Pixel 6 Pro scores 143 from the main camera:

The iPhone 13 Pro Max scores 144:

In real-world conditions, I would expect that the Apple camera software yields substantial practical advantages. The autofocus scores, above, already show that the iPhone is likely to be better at capturing kids running around.

As impartially measured by Google DEI employees, the Pixel 6 Pro scores higher in equity. “Image equity: Making image tools more fair for everyone” (blog.google):

As part of Google’s Product Inclusion efforts, our teams are building more equitable camera and imaging products for people of color.

Building better tools for a community works best when they’re built with the community. For the new Pixel 6 Camera, we partnered with a diverse range of renowned image makers who are celebrated for their beautiful and accurate depictions of communities of color—including Kira Kelly, Deun Ivory, Adrienne Raquel, Kristian Mercado, Zuly Garcia, Shayan Asgharnia, Natacha Ikoli and more—to help our teams understand where we needed to do better. With their help, we’ve significantly increased the number of portraits of people of color in the image datasets that train our camera models.

(the bad old days: “Google Photos Tags Two African-Americans As Gorillas Through Facial Recognition Software” (Forbes))

If having accessible “communities of color” is helpful in building a more equitable camera, shouldn’t Samsung have the most equitable camera of all? Nearly all South Koreans are “of color” by our current definition. (See “Michelle Wu is Boston’s first woman and first person of color elected mayor” from state-sponsored NPR, regarding a Chinese-American (apparently this person’s most important characteristics relative to the mayor job are current gender ID and skin color)).

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Stoking coronapanic is a good way to destroy traditional religion?

by philg

The centuries-old struggle of humanism versus traditional religion hasn’t resulted in total victory for humanism, even in thoroughly debauched Western societies. Until March 2020, for example, a lot of Americans would shut down their casual sex apps and drive past the billboards for recreational marijuana on Sunday mornings to attend church.

What if humanists could make traditional religious believers afraid of going to church? Or make churches uncomfortable to attend? Enter the public health battalion in the Army of Humanism!

A friend in Newton, Maskachusetts attends an orthodox synagogue. Attendance In October 2021 was about half what it was pre-coronapanic. “The biggest drop off is among the women,” he said, “for whom going to shul is optional.” Christian churches nationwide seem to have experienced a similar drop in attendance.

Now that most of the COVID-vulnerable are either dead or vaccinated (Maskachusetts would be on page 1 of countries ranked by COVID-19 death rate if it were its own country), why wouldn’t the synagogue be full? Mask-wearing is required by the righteous secular #science-following bureaucrats and politicians who run the City of Newton. This makes sitting together for hours unpleasant for no obvious personal health benefit. If the masks do work their 11 percent magic (closer to 0 percent for cloth masks), all of us remain doomed to eventual infection.

The slave states have managed to shut down churches and other houses of worship entirely and/or make attending uncomfortable via mask orders. What about in the free states, such as Florida and South Dakota? In those places, the national and local media, generally run by non-believers, can work to instill fear of COVID-19 that will keep people away from church.

Regardless of whether the fight is happening in a slave state or a free state, is it fair to say that SARS-CoV-2 is the best thing that ever happened to humanism? Religion relies heavily on in-person gathering, which people will refrain from doing, either voluntarily or involuntarily, once convinced that avoiding COVID-19 should be their primary life goal.

Separately, as long as we’re talking about religion, here’s the curve of deaths, including the summer Delta variant surge, for the infidels following the Church of Sweden:

(Cumulatively, Sweden has suffered about half the COVID-19 death rate compared to Maskachusetts. On the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard, the give-the-finger-to-the-virus country sits right next to Greece, celebrated by technocrats for its victory over the virus: “Greece has responded swiftly and effectively to the Covid-19 pandemic and has so far managed to contain the spread of infections, but the economy has been hit hard, adding to long-standing challenges, according to a new OECD report.” (oecd.org); “The key to Greece’s success, analysts say, was the government’s early steps to contain the virus ahead of most of Europe.” (TIME); “How Greece is beating coronavirus despite a decade of debt” (Guardian))

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A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system

by philg

I had thought that SABRE, a joint development of IBM and American Airlines, was the first computerized airline reservation system, going live in 1960. However, “The Univac Air Lines Reservations System: a special-purpose application of a general-purpose computer” was published in 1958 and talks about the system being up and running already.

Have a look at the authors’ affiliations at the bottom right. A cautionary tale that success in the computer industry can be fleeting! How powerful was the mainframe?

Transaction processing time wasn’t that different than today’s bloated servers, with their infinite layers of Java, can manage:

The system was up 99.7 percent of the time for its first six weeks and the authors envisioned a future system serving 1,200 travel agents simultaneously.

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How did Zillow become the world’s dumbest buyer of real estate?

by philg

I used to pride myself on being the world’s dumbest buyer of real estate. I like to overpay for a house, overpay for renovations, contract at fictitious prices for non-existent products, fail to account for the risk that a state could revoke residents’ freedoms and necessitate a move, etc. It seems, however, that I’ve been unseated. “Zillow Quits Home-Flipping Business, Cites Inability to Forecast Prices” (WSJ, November 2):

Real-estate firm Zillow Group Inc. is exiting from the home-flipping business, saying Tuesday that its algorithmic+ model to buy and sell homes rapidly doesn’t work as planned.

In a statement Tuesday, Chief Executive Rich Barton said Zillow had failed to predict the pace of home-price appreciation accurately, marking an end to a venture the company once said could generate $20 billion a year. Instead, the company said it now plans to cut 25% of its workforce.

The move represents a big hit to Zillow’s top line. Home-flipping was the company’s largest source of revenue, but it has never turned a profit.

Zillow, which released earnings Tuesday, said its home-flipping business, Zillow Offers, lost $381 million last quarter, as measured by adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. That resulted in a combined adjusted Ebitda loss of $169 million across all of Zillow.

They were using the fraudulent EBITDA measure, which excludes the interest they had to pay to hold onto these houses. So $381 million/quarter would have been the minimum loss.

How is it possible for people who do nothing but real estate all day every day to lose their own money in this spectacular fashion? It isn’t surprising when some big developers go bust. They are in an arrangement where they keep the upside if a high-risk project goes well and stick a bank with the downside if the economy tanks (1990 calling!). But Zillow didn’t have this incentive to take crazy risks. And the real estate market did not tank. To the contrary, we’re in a period of inflation not seen since around 1980. A monkey should have been able to make money buying houses in this market since the cost of borrowing is lower than the rate of inflation in house prices.

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Is 5G a total fraud?

by philg

Mobile phone service back in Maskachusetts was generally terrible, whether the iPhone 12 Pro Max indicated “LTE” or “5G” up at the top right. I attributed this to hills generating multipath and the righteous demanding that cell towers be built in someone else’s town.

We’re living in Florida, though, where a municipal landfill is the only hill, and the government encourages any kind of useful infrastructure. I think that all of the preconditions for awesome mobile data service have been fulfilled:

  • I’m fully vaccinated and so is our golden retriever, Mindy the Crippler
  • The Verizon bill is on autopay
  • the iPhone usually shows 3 or 4 bars of 5G
  • there are no tall buildings or hills around

Yet the service simply doesn’t work. It can take minutes to send a single photo via iMessage, for example. Looking up stuff on Google can be impossible. Navigating via Google Maps results in an “offline” display, even when the phone shows 3 bars of 5G.

Could it be that there is a working LTE service in most locations, but the phone sees 5G and latches onto it even when the 5G radios are simply broken? I’ve experimented with telling the phone to use LTE only, but that didn’t seem to help. Sometimes the Verizon network yields impressive numbers on a Speedtest, comparable to high quality home broadband circa 2010, but for any given request it is unpredictable whether it will take a fraction of a second or minutes.

Is this issue unique to my iPhone 12 and it will be #ProblemSolved when I upgrade to the glorious world of iPhone 13? Or are other folks having similar issues (3 or 4 bars of coverage yet it is tough to download an ordinary web page)?

Waiting for a page to load on 5G:

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Urban/rural divide in Virginia Gubernatorial election

by philg

Readers will recall that one of my pet themes here is the diverging interests of urban/suburban Americans who get richer when government gets bigger and rural Americans for whom a bigger government brings higher taxes and few benefits (since government buildings and programs tend to happen in cities).

The New York Times illustrates this nicely with a per-county map of the Virginia election results:

Virginians near the state capital (Richmond) or the Nation’s Capital (D.C.) just loved hearing about the Democrat’s promises to expand government. Virginians elsewhere were more enthusiastic about the Republican’s expressed dream of eliminating the state’s income tax. The rich folks in Fairfax County (median household income $125,000/year in 2019), bordering D.C., preferred Democrat to Republican by 65:35. Folks in Lee County, at the southwest corner of the state, have a household income of less than 1/3rd that of the government-affiliated people in Fairfax: $33,000/year in 2019. They voted 88:12 in favor of the Republican candidate.

A good illustration of my pet theory?

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How’s the Climate Change summit in Glasgow going?

by philg

For nearly two years, the global elite have been telling the peasantry not to gather across households for fear of spreading deadly SARS-CoV-2. The global elite have closed borders as well (except for the U.S. southern border, which must remain open), because one certainly wouldn’t want to give a variant virus a chance to infect a new area. It is doubly bad when people from different countries mix.

Since at least 2015, when elites gathered in Paris via Gulfstream, elites have been telling the peasants not to emit CO2.

Where are the elite right now? They’ve gathered in Glasgow via Gulfstream, Boeing Business Jet (#WhenAGulfstreamIsTooSmall), and Airbus Corporate Jet for a climate change conference: COP26. And they’re encouraging the rabble to gather and spread coronavirus as well in an indoor “Green Zone”:

From all over the globe, youth activists, Indigenous Peoples, small and large businesses and grass roots communities will be bringing COP26 to life with cultural performances, exhibitions, talks, film screenings and technical demonstrations, all open to the public. Located in the iconic Glasgow Science Centre, on the south bank of the River Clyde, the Green Zone will welcome visitors from 9am – 6pm each day.

Over 200 events will take place in the Green Zone over the 12 days of the summit. Tickets will be available free of charge to the public.

This post is to ask “What news on the Rialto?” Does it look all of our climate dreams will be coming true soon?

Sadly, the G800 was not certified in time for this event…

Related:

A graphic from the Daily Mail that attempts to calculate the carbon emissions from flying four heavy jets (two B747s plus two C-17s with the helicopters, limousines, etc.) across the Atlantic and then driving around.

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How was Karen’s Halloween party?

by philg

How did everyone enjoy Halloween? In our Jupiter, Florida neighborhood, not a single mask was observed (other than costume masks). Substantial gatherings were observed in the next neighborhood over (Jupiter Heights), with candy for the kids and what appeared to be booze for the adults. Children were invited to grab candy from common bowls, thus risking the spread of COVID-19 via surface contamination that the righteous have been fighting for 20 months with obsessive disinfection.

(How is the Coronagod punishing the wicked unmasked partyers of Florida? The state is tied for lowest daily case rate among all U.S. states (NYT), at 9 per 100,000 (compare to 44 in Minnesota, 50 in Colorado, and 89 in Alaska).)

Meanwhile, email addressed to a Bethesda, Maryland neighborhood:

While we can’t have our traditional party in the Bent Branch courtyard …

Trick or Treating: In order to facilitate safe trick or treating for neighborhood kids on Halloween (Sunday, October 31st), we are providing recommendations that allow everyone to maintain distance but still participate in this most favorite tradition. Below please find a list of ideas for neighbors who wish to pass out candy, but using alternatives to doing a candy bowl (that all the children reach into)…

Purchase and pre-stuff Halloween baggies…

“Candy sticking” – purchase popsicle sticks that you can tape the candy to and stick along your front walkway [link to photo below]

With so many people having been at home for 1.5 years, my impression is that many more houses are profusely decorated, both in Maskachusetts and here in Florida. From Newton, MA, last week:

I’m playing around with a Canon EOS R5 camera. Here are a few tests from last night in Jupiter, Florida (RF 50/1.8 STM lens):

Related:

  • “Get the candy bowl ready. Dr. Fauci says Halloween is a go this year” (NPR): “I think that, particularly if you’re vaccinated, you can get out there and enjoy it,” Fauci told CNN’s State of the Union this weekend. … “This is a time that children love. It’s a very important part of the year for children,” he said. HealthyChildren.org recommended that families stick to outdoor trick-or-treating and doing so in small groups. For handing out candy and other goodies, the website recommended sitting outside and lining up individually prepackaged treats for children to take.
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