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:

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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?”

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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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Real-world N95 mask test

by philg

As part of our move from Maskachusetts to the Florida Free State I had to spend some time cleaning out a shed attached to the back of our garage. Under the no-squirrel-is-illegal principle, rodents had occupied the fiberglass-insulated attic of said garage, which resulted in a shower of fiberglass fragments and dust into the shed.

To protect my lungs against the fiberglass dust and years of ordinary dust, I donned an N95 mask (March 2020 value: $100!) given to me by a dentist friend (she buys them 3,000 at a time). Ready to enter the variant COVID-19 clinic, right? Within a minute, I began sneezing from the dust that had apparently slipped around the edges of the mask.

Hospitals employ professional mask fitters and make at least 6 different sizes and shapes of N95 masks available to patient-facing staff. Now I know why!

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Why don’t smartphones have PLB capability?

by philg

A friend was recently involved in a helicopter rescue effort described in “‘Not knowing is so hard.’ Hiker rescued after 5 days without food in California forest”:

A hiker was rescued from a canyon in a California forest after going missing for five days without food and little water, officials said.

George “Dave” Null, 58, went missing in the Angeles National Forest May 15, according to a news release from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It took a massive search effort, involving at least five agencies, to find him, the sheriff’s department said.

Null was spotted at creek base Wednesday evening while a helicopter crew searched Bear Creek in the canyon east of Triple Rock, according to the Montrose Search and Rescue Team.

This made me wonder why smartphones don’t have a personal locator beacon capability. Coronapanic has proven that there is no limit to our risk-aversion. Why wouldn’t we engineer slightly thicker phones with a fold-out antenna and a guaranteed dedicated power reserve that can be used as a PLB when we’ve gotten lost, e.g., on the way to or from the vaccine booster clinic or the P100 mask store?

The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that the phone becomes slightly bulkier and heavier. But if we’re willing to wear masks all the time and take non-FDA-approved vaccines why aren’t we willing to carry a slightly heavier phone if it could save just one life?

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What to do with 2000 mostly-classical LP records?

by philg

About 15 years ago a polo-oriented friend was showing a teenage polo champion from Argentina around Cambridge. I invited them for a gathering that would today likely be illegal and the rich teenager happened by shelves holding 2000 mostly classical LP records. She asked “What are these?” I explained that they were “LP records”. She followed up with “What are those?”

I am thinking that our children would not be excited to inherit these, although classical music has been terribly served by the streaming services. The “classical” radio stations play tracks at random from CDs classified as “classical.” So you’ll hear the third track from a string quartet followed by the first track from a three-movement piano sonata followed by the fourth track from a symphony. There are some annoying American NPR classical stations (constant interruptions with chatter even when they’re not fundraising). The European stations are better, but the sound quality is not ideal.

What to do with these? It does not seem that it will make sense to bring them with us when we move from Massachusetts to Florida (August). There are probably 200 jazz, rock, and pop albums mixed in that could conceivably have collector value, but I don’t have time to sort through them.

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Black Lives Matter opposes settler colonialism, but only in Israel?

by philg

From America’s moral compass:

If there are Americans who are upset because some indigenous people do not own all of the real estate within and do not have political control of a region, shouldn’t they devote 99% of their energy to correcting injustice right here in North America? Give their houses to the nearest Native Americans. Stop voting and let the legitimate residents of the U.S. (i.e., Native Americans) be the only voters.

We could perhaps excuse some Black Americans from the requirement of giving back their houses to the rightful (Native) owners on the grounds that the ancestors of these Black Americans were brought here involuntarily. But the co-founder of the BLM movement “is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants.” (Wikipedia) The percentage of Americans who identify as “Black” who are recent immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants (see Kamala Harris, for example) increases every day. From the perspective of a Native American, wouldn’t these “Black lives” parked in North America be examples of “settler colonialism”?

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Is the crypto crash a buying opportunity?

by philg

Bitcoin and Ethereum have been down lately, right?

Could this be the right time to buy for those of us who have mostly missed the cryptocurrency wave?

I recently heard about an alternative to Bitcoin that is also popular with criminals seeking ransom. Here are the characteristics:

  • administered from central server
  • no limit to supply
  • 25 percent of the supply minted in last 6 months
  • 1 percent of holders control 30 percent of the currency
  • 27 trillion units circulating in the system

A good time to jump in?

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Saudi Arabia banned anyone from leaving for 14 months

by philg

I was chatting with a petroleum engineer who has lived for much of his career in Saudi Arabia (and sent three children to the Aramco school there, then on to boarding school in the U.S.). He mentioned that, as an expat, he was allowed to exit the kingdom, but Saudis were not free to leave for fear that they would return with coronaplague. His return to Saudi Arabia won’t be simple. He must spend two weeks in a country that the Saudis consider safe (i.e., not the U.S.!) and then transit only through airline hubs in countries that the Saudis consider safe. Once home in Saudi Arabia he must quarantine for two weeks with COVID-19 tests every five days.

See also “Saudi Arabia Eases Travel Ban for Vaccinated Citizens” (AP in USA Today):

Vaccinated Saudis are being allowed to leave the kingdom for the first time in more than a year as the country eases a ban on international travel aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus and its new variants.

For the past 14 months, Saudi citizens have mostly been banned from traveling abroad out of concerns that international travel could fuel the outbreak of the virus within the country of more than 30 million people. The ban, in place since March 2020, has impacted Saudi students who were studying abroad, among others.

With limited exception, foreigners from 20 countries, including the U.S., U.K, UAE and France, remain banned from directly entering the kingdom.

I mentioned that a friend had been similarly restricted from leaving the U.S. He lost his passport shortly before coronashutdown (a First World Problem… he has three houses and they’re all huge so the passport could be hiding anywhere within about 20,000 square feet). Getting a replacement passport requires an in-person interview, but the federal government shut down all in-person interviews except for family emergencies. As of this month, it looks as though the government has still not developed an alternative procedure (e.g., via videoconference) and appointments are “extremely limited” for “urgent travel” and “limited” for “LIfe-or-death emergencies” (like Ted Cruz going to Cancun?):

Related:

  • “Passports Were a “Temporary” War Measure” (FEE): “In 1914, warring states of France, Germany, and Italy were the first to make passports mandatory, a measure rapidly followed by others, including the neutral states of Spain, Denmark, and Switzerland.”
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