Hang out together at Oshkosh this year?

by philg

Supposedly Sun n Fun was busy in 2021 (see “Sun ‘n Fun Aerospace Expo ticket pre-sales soar to record highs despite COVID”, for example). EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) should also be packed. Folks who love aviation are apparently willing to accept the additional risk of leaving the house.

We’re staying on the field at the Hilton Garden Inn this year (“I know some people that know some people that robbed some people”), attending the Cirrus pilots’ dinner Monday evening (July 26), and bought a full-week pass to the EAA Aviators Club (chairs, A/C, food, phone charging, etc., right on the flight line for airshow viewing).

It would be great to see readers/commenters there! (sign up for the Cirrus dinner and Aviators Club now if you want to join; they both will probably sell out)

Note that EAA AirVenture is currently scheduled as a mask-optional event (EAA coronapanic page).

From 2019…

Related:

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Coronapanic: When does country get “back to normal”?

by philg

A month ago a friend bet me that, due to vaccines, Maskachusetts would be “back to normal” today and that the governor repealing his mask order (from among at least 66 total orders issued under a state of emergency) would be the determinant of normality and who would buy lunch at his favorite COVID-unsafe indoor Thai restaurant.

In taking the “this is normal going forward” side of the bet, I pointed out that a mutual friend had said the same thing back in March, i.e., that the vaccine would get us back to normal soon. He’d been hiding in his suburban bunker for over a year when he said that. I said “You believed them when they told you it would be 14 days to flatten the curve and then you could go back to normal. You believed them when they said if people would wear masks for a couple of months that would end coronaplague. You believed them when they told you we just needed one more shutdown. Now you believe them when they say that the restrictions will end once everyone is vaccinated?”

My primary evidence against residents of Massachusetts wanting to be unlocked is observing rich suburbanites, i.e., the folks who have enough money to support politicians with donations. They’d been fully vaccinated weeks earlier and were still wearing masks when walking outside at least 100′ from the nearest human. When queried (at a masked distance) they expressed a personal fear of contracting COVID-19, since they’d heard that the vaccines are not 100 percent effective. I ran into a (masked) mom who was walking her dog. She’s been a Shutdown and Mask Karen from Day 1, but complained that her son, enrolled in an elite private high school, wasn’t allowed to participate in crew because he is also in drama and the drama teacher did not want him exposed to additional COVID risk.

Maybe young people living in crummy apartments in poor neighborhoods wanted to be unlocked, I argued, but they have no political voice.

Meanwhile, the local economy is plainly very different from what it was. A lot of small businesses remain closed (as of October 2020, 33% of Boston’s small businesses were shut, 42% of those in hospitality; overall number of people employed is down about 15 percent in Boston versus 0 percent in Miami and actually up in Tampa (click on “Metros”)). The ones that are left are usually too short-handed to serve customers in what we would have considered a proper manner. There are no Ubers, something I also noticed in other cities, but only higher-cost Uber XLs. When queried, an Uber XL driver said “a lot of people can make more on unemployment so it isn’t worth driving regular Uber anymore.”

Most of the “experts” quoted by the New York Times and similar have been spectacularly wrong regarding COVID-19. But we make no claim to expert credentials and it is fun to try prophecy. What are folks’ predictions regarding state shutdown and mask levels over the coming 12 months?

I’ll go first: My best guess regarding the future is that it looks like the past. So the states that are masked and shut now will be masked and shut going forward while the states that are unmasked and open now will be unmasked and open going forward. Due to the fact that coronavirus is seasonal (and a med school professor friend reminds me that we don’t know why flu is seasonal so we probably won’t figure out why COVID comes in waves either), I expect variations around this theme. Summer 2020 was a quiet time here in MA (see NYT chart below) so I would expect the virus and restrictions to relax in summer 2021 and both to come back in the late fall.

Masks are advertised as a cost-free intervention, so I’m thinking that Maskachusetts, for example, might have a “mask mandate” (it’s been a year and the Legislature cannot get organized to pass a “law”?) through at least 2022, though the previous statewide unconditional outdoor mask requirement has just recently been relaxed to “when you’re not able to maintain a 6′ distance”. Masks will be sold as a cost-free way to prevent the virus from returning. When the virus actually does return, the Mask Believers will say that the masks delayed the return and/or reduced the peak of the return.

(From a physician friend: “The flu is gone because everyone is sticking to the rules but COVID is rising because no one is sticking to the rules.”)

Let’s put our predictions here and check them at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from now! Bragging rights for whoever gets closest!

Update: At a Bat Mitzvah today (about 15 people in a room designed to hold 100+), a photographer wanted to get a picture of four 13-year-old healthy slender girls. They refused to take off their masks for an indoor photo. He managed to get them outside. They refused to take off their masks for an outdoor photo.

Related:

  • A Silicon Valley friend: “I am so Woke that I want to change my pronouns to Karen/Karen.”
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To cut interactions between the police and the public, should cars restrict speed to the published speed limit?

by philg

Every time there is an interaction between an American subject and an American police officer or officers there is a chance that the police will shoot and kill or cripple the subject. In addition to the loss of life, other subjects may lose tens of millions of dollars per incident when the city has to pay civil damages to the survivors of the person who was killed.

Our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey (“like a Tesla, but spacious, quiet, and smooth over bumps; lacks Dog Mode”), at least when a phone is plugged in (haven’t checked, but maybe it is getting it from Google Maps?), displays the current speed limit. The engine is controlled electronically. If I mash down the accelerator, it could certainly say “I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave” and accelerate only to, e.g., 55 mph. If nobody can speed, nobody can be pulled over for speeding. This wouldn’t eliminate potentially deadly interactions between the police and the general public, but it certainly would reduce them.

Maybe have a single exception: passing another car that is going more than 10 mph slower than the speed limit on a two-lane road. The Odyssey already has all of the hardware and 99 percent of the software necessary to detect this situation (the adaptive cruise control has a radar to see how fast cars in front are going and the lane-departure and lane-keeping systems (the latter adds some steering inputs) use a camera to see if you’re staying in your lane.

Readers: Stupid or Clever?

Related:

  • Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph? (if we look at what we’ve done out of coronapanic, it is irrational not to eliminate most driving-related deaths, which kill far younger people (more life-years lost) and which are far easier to prevent)
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Economic wisdom from MIT (David Autor)

by philg

Notes from a Zoom talk today by David Autor, an economics professor at MIT. Whenever Democrats are in charge of the economy, I think it is worth listening to the “experts” at Harvard and MIT because that’s where the policy justifications come from.

Inequality is extreme in the U.S. and harmful, according to Autor. He did not explicitly say how he is measuring inequality, though. The charts that he presented seemed to show wages. But a previous slide showed the low and falling rate of labor force participation in the U.S. In other words, a lot of adults live in the U.S. despite $0 in earnings. What if he looked at spending power and lifestyle? Much of the U.S. welfare system is directed toward non-cash benefits, e.g., a free or low-cost apartment in public housing, a $3/month family subscription to MassHealth (Medicaid) that would be $20,000/year at market rates, SNAP (food stamps), Obamaphone, etc.. The non-working folks whom I know here in Massachusetts have a lifestyle that would cost $80-100,000 per year (after tax) to purchase at market rates (apartment in Cambridge or Boston, health insurance, etc.).

[See this Wall Street Journal piece: “The census fails to account for taxes and most welfare payments, painting a distorted picture. … In all, leaving out taxes and most transfers overstates inequality by more than 300%, as measured by the ratio of the top quintile’s income to the bottom quintile’s. More than 80% of all taxes are paid by the top two quintiles, and more than 70% of all government transfer payments go to the bottom two quintiles. … Today government redistributes sufficient resources to elevate the average household in the bottom quintile to a net income, after transfers and taxes, of $50,901—well within the range of American middle-class earnings.” See also the Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off, in which we learn that poor people are not stupid and Fast-food economics in Massachusetts: Higher minimum wage leads to a shorter work week, not fewer people on welfare, in which employees cut their hours to be sure to maintain eligibility for free housing, health care, etc.]

Minimum wage should be much higher, according to Autor. What about the fact that employers won’t want to pay people way more than they’re worth? A friend’s Spanish language tutor, sitting at home in Guatemala with only a high school degree, on hearing about the proposed $15/year minimum wage, said “Won’t that mean a lot more unemployment since many people aren’t worth $15/hour?” Autor says that the government will invest in educating Americans to the point that they’re worth more. On a per-pupil basis and as a percentage of GDP, we already spend more than almost any other country on K-12 education; why aren’t American high school graduates already worth a lot to employers? Autor points out that the average American high school graduate is way less skilled than a high school graduate in other developed economies. “We should fix that.” Autor’s big solution for 13 years of government-run education that he says are generally ineffective is to add one more year: “universal pre-K”. With 14 years of pre-K through 12 and maybe another 5 years of taxpayer-funded college, a worker will surely find employers delighted to hire him/her/zir/them at $15/hour. (Autor also notes that many of today’s college graduates are going into personal service jobs at low wages.)

Borrowing is free. Interest rates have never been lower. We will grow our way out of any amount of borrowing that we do and, after paying back whatever we borrowed, be richer than if we hadn’t borrowed.

Apparently contradicting the above point, he says that successful Americans should pay vastly more in taxes than they’re currently paying. (Why does the government need all of this current tax revenue if borrowing is, in fact, free?) The capital gains tax rate should be much higher (but still not adjusted for inflation, so actually it would be more than 100 percent in a lot of situations, as it is already (if you bought an asset for $10,000 in 2000, for example, the BLS says you spent $15,700 in today’s mini-dollars; if you sell it for $15,000 in 2021 you’ve actually suffered a loss, but will owe capital gains tax nonetheless).

Estate taxes should be higher and there should be no step-up basis for the assets inherited.

Everything that Joe Biden is doing and has proposed is awesome and will propel the U.S. forward toward a dreamland of prosperity. “The Biden Administration is right to go all in rather than nibbling around the edges.” Can all of our dreams be achieved via bigger government? Autor would rather the government “create” better quality jobs than address inequality through the tax code. (i.e., what we really need is a planned economy, a point made by an emeritus professor and former senior MIT administrator, who asked whether Capitalism wasn’t the real source of inequality).

Autor was in sync with the folks at New Yorker magazine: “The President, channelling his inner Elizabeth Warren, pitches an American utopia after a dystopian plague year.”

(Trump’s fantasy was that Americans might not be rich enough to afford the work-free utopia that we desire; Biden is grounded enough to realize that utopia can be ours if we tax and borrow a little more.)

Readers: Have you been following Biden’s latest proposals, e.g., in last night’s speech? Are you as excited about bigger government as Professor Autor?

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Will people who get paid in cryptocurrency share with the IRS?

by philg

A friend has been selling NFTs and getting paid in cryptocurrency. He thought that he didn’t have to pay tax on this income until the cryptocurrency was finally cashed in for dollars. I did a bit of searching and told him that the IRS wants him to pay tax in the year that the cryptocoins were received. I directed him to “Virtual Currencies” and an IRS FAQ from 2014:

Q–3: Must a taxpayer who receives virtual currency as payment for goods or services include in computing gross income the fair market value of the virtual currency?

A–3: Yes. A taxpayer who receives virtual currency as payment for goods or services must, in computing gross income, include the fair market value of the virtual currency, measured in U.S. dollars, as of the date that the virtual currency was received. See Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, for more information on miscellaneous income from exchanges involving property or services.

How many people will do this? Maybe there will be a 1099 when coins are exchanged for cash and then the holder will be motivated to declare this as a capital gain (at President Harris’s new 75 percent rate plus 13.3 percent California tax?). But if there is no reporting to the IRS of any of the flows that stay in the crypto world, isn’t there a high likelihood that people won’t pay tax either because they don’t know that they should or because they don’t think they’ll get caught?

What’s the percentage of income received in cash that gets reported to the IRS? If Hunter Biden put a $100 bill into the hands of a hard-working dancer, for example, what is the chance that she reported that $100 and paid income tax on it? (Of course, when a friend said that the Daily Mail figured out that Hunter Biden’s laptop showed epic spending on hookers and booze, I responded “And he wasted the rest of his money?”)

From Tampa, 2014:

Disclaimer: I own no cryptocurrency and am bitterly envious of all of the people who were smarter than I!

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Massachusetts Democrat: the government arresting the political opposition is a step forward for the U.S.

by philg

I’ve been mostly in a news vacuum for the past couple of weeks (family trip to D.C. (grandma), Atlanta (aquarium, zoo, botanical garden, World of Coca Cola), Jupiter, Florida (beach, mini golf), and Asheville (Biltmore mansion)). I returned to my labors at the local flight school today and a Massachusetts Democrat related his elation regarding the F.B.I. search and seizure of Rudy Giuliani’s office and computer gear (see “F.B.I. Searches Giuliani’s Home and Office, Seizing Phones and Computers”).

Typically when we read about a government that arrests the political opposition we don’t see that as a positive step for a country, but this guy didn’t see any downside to an affiliate of the former president being prosecuted by the current one.

On the plus side, nobody can take away our big flags (from Chimney Rock State Park, North Carolina):

And another photo for scale:

Related:

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Software ideas for a Web archive?

by philg

A friend’s daughter is tasked with developing a Web-accessible archive for a multi-year collection of material that has been generated by an organization within a university. All of the material will be public, so there are no security issues and everything can be indexed by search engines. Ideally all of this can be maintained by non-programmers from Web browsers and minimal technical effort will be required for setup (though perhaps some programming would be useful/needed for an ingestion step).

The material is a mixture of PDFs, images, text, etc. She found some interesting software targeted at this very problem. Examples:

All of these provide for comprehensive tagging of each item, boolean searches, etc. But I wonder/worry that these are overkill. The collection is not especially valuable and I don’t know if people want to take the trouble to craft elaborate queries.

I was thinking that she might be better off using standard WordPress. Every item that is in the archive can become a WordPress post dated whenever the item was created (maybe this can be done via a batch process inserting things into the WordPress tables). She and anyone else involved in the project can tag items with however many tags make sense. At that point users can

  1. search with Google
  2. search by date (WordPress lets you go back and look at posts by date)
  3. search by tag

One advantage for WordPress over the above systems that are built for archiving is that WordPress is much more popular and constantly being improved (changed, anyway!). There are plugin modules available, e.g., to improve full-text searching through PDFs. For those who already have a museum collection organized, there is even a “Culture Object” plugin that is designed to import a collection into WordPress.

Readers: Better ideas?

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New York Times: Experts as prophets

by philg

“Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’” (NYT, April 11, 2021) contains 7 occurrences of the word “experts”

Teenagers and tweens will be fine, experts say — if adults model resilience.

Experts say some of their worries are justified — but only up to a point. There’s no doubt that the pandemic has taken a major toll on many adolescents’ emotional well-being. According to a much-cited report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the proportion of emergency room visits that were mental health-related for 12 to 17 year olds increased by 31 percent from April to October 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. And there’s no question that witnessing their loneliness, difficulties with online learning and seemingly endless hours on social media has been enormously stressful for the adults who care about them the most.

Yet, as the nation begins to pivot from trauma to recovery, many mental-health experts and educators are trying to spread the message that parents, too, need a reset. If adults want to guide their children toward resilience, these experts say, then they need to get their own minds out of crisis mode.

Despite all of this, Ms. Fagell, much like the dozen-plus other experts in adolescent development who were interviewed for this article, was adamant that parents should not panic — and that, furthermore, the spread of the “lost year” narrative needed to stop. Getting a full picture of what’s going on with middle schoolers — and being ready to help them — they agreed, requires holding two seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously in mind: The past year has been terrible. And most middle schoolers will be fine.

What factors keep adolescents from tipping from one state to the other? Mental health experts point to a few: their connection to at least one good friend; any underlying vulnerabilities like mood disorders;the adversity in their daily lives; the availability of adults to help them cope with hardship — and whether their parents are keeping it together.

“Social media is mitigating some of the effects of isolation,” he said.

That message, frequently repeated by experts and educators, should offer some relief to the many parents who feel guilty about the amount of screen time they’ve allowed their children this past year.

So much great stuff in here! Facebook, formerly associated with making adolescents (and everyone else) worse off mentally, is now recommended. But that’s a minor joy compared to the idea that people can be “expert” in predicting the effect of something that had never previously happened, i.e., coronapanic and associated mass school closure, the shutdown of social life, travel, jobs, gyms, etc.

Credentials are a big help in prophecy as in other areas. One of Dr. Jill Biden’s colleagues:

Rabiah Harris, a public middle-school science teacher in Washington, has a doctorate in education, which permits her, as the mother of an almost 12-year-old, to take a philosophical view.

(If it is “Dr. Jill Biden,” why isn’t it “Dr. Rabiah Harris”? Her LinkedIn page shows that she has the same Ed.D. degree as Dr. Biden.)

Even more interesting to me than the editors of the NYT thinking that readers would buy into the idea that experts could predict the long-term effects of the Great Panic of 2020-2021-2022-…(?): the experts’ idea that teenagers listen to their parents.

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Covid spreading among the Mask Karens

by philg

Our country is swimming in vaccines, partly shut down (state of emergency continues until morale improves here in Maskachusetts), and populated by Mask Karens. How is coronavirus still thriving?

Earlier this month I saw a father and daughter flying a kite on the Cambridge Common. It was about 5 pm, windy enough to fly a kite, and nobody was within 100′. Both were wearing masks. A little later I went to a friend’s backyard for dinner around a propane fire pit. Except for me, everyone there was vigilant about being masked, including for kids down to age 5 or so. They were concerned about COVID-19, but as with airline travel, the mask protocol made them feel safe enough to leave their bunkers and gather closer than 6′.

But then some people took off masks in order to eat and/or drink. And some people took off masks in order to hear or be heard better. By the end of the evening, nearly every pair of guests had spent a fair amount of face-to-face unmasked time. If they hadn’t had faith in masks, I think they would either have refused the invitation and/or been more careful about staying farther apart.

Speaking of the virus thriving… I know a married couple who spend nearly 24/7 at home together. The husband caught what seemed like a bad cold, got tested for coronavirus, and tested positive. The wife also felt sick, got tested (two-day delay to schedule then three-day delay for result; cost $105 at Emerson Hospital even though testing is supposed to be free due to some fine print (she didn’t have a primary care doc’s referral)). Her test came back negative. She got another test a few days after that, this time from Regional Express, which actually was free. The free test came back within 24 hours… negative. Neither lost taste or smell. Do we guess false positive for the husband? False negatives for the wife due to not enough virus camping out in her nose? They both caught respiratory infections at the same time, but they were different infections?

(I tried to reach the wife every day during this ordeal, offering encouragement such as “We dug a grave for you in th backyard in case you need it.” Most of the time she wasn’t available. I asked, “If you’ve got COVID [presumptively from the husband’s test] and you’re stuck at home, how can you be unavailable?” She responded that she had been in Zoom meetings. “You have COVID and aren’t taking a sick day?” She replied, “Sick days are for wimps.”)

In case you object that it doesn’t make sense for laypeople to diagnose other laypeople via FaceTime, here’s what Herodotus had to say….

The following custom seems to me the wisest of their institutions next to the one lately praised. [The Babylonians] have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.

It worked 2,400 years ago, so it should work today!

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How will the government and media convince parents to give children a non-FDA-approved Covid vaccine?

by philg

Now that nearly all U.S. adults are on their way to vaccination (see Fact-checking Donald Trump’s predictions regarding COVID vaccine availability), it is time to get Americans to accept the injection of an “investigational” (non-FDA-approved; see We love our children so much we will give them an investigational vaccine and Facebook fact check) vaccine for their children.

I know a remarkable number of young people who are major Mask and Shutdown Karens and who are generally afraid to leave their apartments due to expressed personal fears of contracting coronavirus. I always ask these folks “Do you personally know anyone who has been hospitalized for COVID-19?” and the answer is almost always “no.” Nor do they know anyone who claims to be suffering from “Long COVID”. In other words, if they weren’t exposed to government and media stories about COVID they wouldn’t know that it existed or was hazardous to anyone their age.

Before people here in Maskachusetts were going to hear the news that public schools would remain shut, the state removed fatality-by-age-group data from the Covid dashboard. Thus, the general public was unable to learn that nobody under age 20 in MA had ever died from COVID-19. I’m wondering if there will now be a ramp-up of stories about children testing positive, being harmed, etc. Here’s a recent Boston Globe story:

Most people wouldn’t read beyond the headline to see a hint as to what might be behind the increase in “cases” (positive PCR tests), i.e., that many Massachusetts schools recently initiated a pooled testing program (test a pool every week, wait for result, then start testing individuals if the result for the pool is positive; due to the days of lag time, “useless” was the rating from a friend who is an expert in public health informatics).

From government-funded media, “Michigan Sees Surge In COVID-19 Among Children” (NPR):

There’s an alarming spike in COVID-19 cases among children in Michigan.

Dr. Bishara Freij is chief of pediatric infectious disease at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., which is just north of Detroit, and he joins us now.

FREIJ: Children do much better than adults in terms of infection. So their infections are much less severe, and far fewer of them get hospitalized. And certainly, death is pretty uncommon.

FREIJ: … The problem is it’s not predictable who’s going to do OK and who won’t. So I can tell you that most of the kids that have been really sick that we’ve taken care of had been previously well children. You know, they were not the chronically ill patients who happened to get COVID on top of their other problems. And so when we look at them, there’s no way to predict which child is going to have a bad disease. The odds are low, but you cannot say, my child is going to escape because that child is healthy.

Only the vaccinated will be spared!

Can the scientists help? “Vaccinating Children against Covid-19 — The Lessons of Measles” (New England Journal of Medicine, February 18, 2021):

Protecting children against SARS-CoV-2 infection is both an ethical obligation and a practical necessity. We need data from pediatric trials to reassure parents about the safety and wisdom of this approach. We must prepare for disinformation campaigns that prey on parental fears and target communities made vulnerable through histories of medical neglect, health disparities, and racism. … Dare we imagine a campaign that would actually thank children and parents for helping to protect others, as the rubella campaign did, perhaps suggesting that they proudly display their SARS Stars or Corona Diplomas?

(From the same journal: an editorial saying to stop classifying babies as boys/girls on birth certificates.)

I would love to see the “SARS Star” to be affixed to the clothing of a vaccinated person. As a starting point, here’s an idea from a museum:

What word should go in the center, though?

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