Fears in the 1990s versus fears in the Age of Corona

by philg

Happy Halloween! Let’s consider how our fears have evolved.

In the 1990s, we were afraid of the following:

  • The government would invade our privacy via CCTV cameras when we were out walking around.
  • Microsoft would crush upstart competitors by bundling software with similar capabilities into their monopoly operating system. This could cost each of us $100 or more.
  • Everyone will be killed by HIV/AIDS
  • What else?

Fears today:

  • We don’t have to worry about CCTV cameras on the sidewalk since (a) it might be illegal to be out on the sidewalk to begin with, (b) if it were legal, we’d have to wear a mask.
  • Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, et al. will deplatform anyone who disagrees with what they deem to be RightThink on a wide range of issues.
  • Everyone will be killed by COVID-19
  • What else?

A friend’s minivan, decorated by a recent high school graduate…

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A 2016 Volkswagen e-Golf interfaces with the American used car market

by philg

A friend spent $10,000 on a 2016 Volkswagen e-Golf via Carvana, a fixed-price car delivery service. The vehicle arrived in beautiful cosmetic condition, but with a Nissan-brand charger that did not work, failing even to illuminate a green LED when plugged in, much less charge the Volkswagen. A week of hassle ensued in which the proud new owner was shunted from an auto parts store to a Volkswagen dealer. Eventually she got a Volkswagen-brand charger, which was a $700 part (enough for a year of minivan driving in the Age of Coronapanic and with gas at $2/gallon).

The new charger worked, but the car’s computer systems weren’t consistent. She would set off on a short journey with the computer showing a range of 80 miles and then watch the range forecast jump to 3 miles while the car stopped itself on the highway. 2.5 hours later, AAA towed the car away.

Eventually she decided to trade the car back for a 2010 Mini, powered, of course, by dinosaur blood.

I’m wondering if early attempts at electric cars will soon be clogging our junkyards. If her experience is typical, the systems seem to be at a Windows 98 level of reliability.

Speaking of cars, here’s a Mercedes ad from the a recent New York Times web page:

This leads to a “Pride month” web page on mbusa.com:

A Proud Owner Speaks

“This Pride month is unlike any other before it. We find ourselves in the middle of a global health pandemic, while so many of us have united in fighting to address and finally put an end to systemic racism and discrimination. As a proud Black and gay man, I take this time to pause and hold space for the Black community because we are hurting and we are demanding lasting change. Mercedes-Benz has stood with the Black and LGBTQ+ communities and has vowed to continue to be with us going forward.

As unique as this time is, it does truly echo and honors the legacy of bravery of the Civil Rights Movement and the historic Stonewall protests, which were led by pioneering Black transgender activists like Marsha P. Johnson. These movements, past and present, intersect at the common point of pushing towards equality for all.

(When you identify as LGBTQIA+, it is acceptable to modify “unique”?)

If the Wikipedia List of LGBT awareness periods is to be believed, Pride month is June, not October (home to Asexual Awareness Week, International Lesbian Day, International Pronouns Day, Intersex Awareness Day, LGBT History Month, Spirit Day, and National Coming Out Day).

We’re informed by the NYT that Americans who identify as LGBTQIA+ suffer employment and other discrimination that reduces their income and wealth. If so, how did they come to have $80,000 to spend on a Mercedes that performs the same function as a $25,000 Toyota or Honda?

Also potentially interesting: the Mercedes web site for German consumers does not contain any content regarding the company’s support of matters LGBTQIA+, at least none that a search-savvy Germany-speaking friend could find. Why are Americans so much more interested in this than Germans?

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Bloomberg tries to buy the elections in Ohio and Florida

by philg

From last month, The absurd conspiracy that Wall Street elites are manipulating American politics:

My Facebook friends like to conjure a bogeyman somewhere in the South or Midwest. He is wearing camo, carrying an AR-15, driving a car with a Trump/Pence bumper sticker, and spouting an absurd conspiracy theory about Wall Streeters manipulating American politics far beyond their coastal elite districts.

Showing just how wrong this conspiracy theory is: “Bloomberg pledges $60M to boost House Democrats” (The Hill). (This will also be great for allaying the concerns of those who believe that rich Jews have too much influence in the U.S.!)

From my inbox today, from MikeBloomberg.com:

Let’s turn Texas and Ohio blue

With four days until Election Day, we’re taking the fight to Donald Trump in two new battleground states.

Earlier this week, Mike announced plans to fund an ad blitz in Ohio and Texas in the closing days of the election. Now, new messages — about the worsening COVID-19 pandemic and Joe Biden’s plans to restore the economy — are hitting the airwaves.

You can help us get the word out. Watch and share the ads we’re running in Texas and Ohio: [links to ads such as this one]

The ads focus on Joe’s plans to “build back better” and Donald Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis. In the last two weeks, COVID-19 cases are up 60% in Ohio, 48% in Texas, and 42% nationwide.

These investments follow Mike’s commitment to spending $100 million in another key battleground state: Florida. That investment has helped mobilize voters and strengthened a COVID-19-responsible ground game to increase turnout for Joe Biden.

What if American voters do decide that an innumerate 78-year-old will, starting in January 2021, crack a medical/scientific/technical problem that has eluded all of the science-following European countries (exponential plague in the fully masked Old World right now)? How enraged are the working class folks who supported Trump going to be regarding the political influence of wealthy American Jews?

A 2015 photo of Chabad in Dallas. They might need to make a huge sign reading “We’re not Bloomberg-style Jews”…

The Fort Worth Japanese Garden (masks optional):

Just imagine how many awesome gardens Americans could have enjoyed if Bloomberg had decided to spend his $billions on gardens rather than on Trump hatred.

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How is my prediction about COVID-19 therapy by October looking?

by philg

From April 6, Best guess as to when the first successful COVID-19 therapy will be widely available?

Keeping in mind that it took months for coronavirus tests to be invented, approved, and manufactured (still not in sufficient quantities except for those who are hospitalized), what’s your best guess as to when you can go into the hospital ED, have the nurse shout out “COVID-19” and then an assistant comes in with some pills or a shot that will keep the symptoms down to some reasonable level of misery?

My guess: between July 2020 and March 2021, with October 2020 as the best single month guess.

How do we rate this prediction? I’m going to go with “Spectacularly wrong.” I started the April 6 post with “I’m a big believer that viruses are smarter than human beings.” Even with that, I was gulled into thinking that all of the world’s humans devoting nearly 100 percent of their energy to fighting coronavirus would actually be able to come up with something.

What do we have? From October 22, “FDA Approves First Treatment for COVID-19”:

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the antiviral drug Veklury (remdesivir) for use in adult and pediatric patients 12 years of age and older and weighing at least 40 kilograms (about 88 pounds) for the treatment of COVID-19 requiring hospitalization. Veklury should only be administered in a hospital or in a healthcare setting capable of providing acute care comparable to inpatient hospital care. Veklury is the first treatment for COVID-19 to receive FDA approval.

Mission Accomplished?

A second randomized, open-label multi-center clinical trial of hospitalized adult subjects with moderate COVID-19 compared treatment with Veklury for five days (n=191) and treatment with Veklury for 10 days (n=193) with standard of care (n=200). Researchers evaluated the clinical status of subjects on Day 11. Overall, the odds of a subject’s COVID-19 symptoms improving were statistically significantly higher in the five-day Veklury group at Day 11 when compared to those receiving only standard of care. The odds of improvement with the 10-day treatment group when compared to those receiving only standard of care were numerically favorable, but not statistically significantly different.

In other words, you need multiple studies and a Zoom session full of statisticians to tease out any useful effect.

Does GB get the prize for accuracy so far? His comment:

Some of the fat and lung comprised will die and the rest will be cured, by virtue of not already being unhealthy. Medical cure, nope, modern medicine ain’t that good.

Who wants to make a new or revised prediction of when medicine will simply cure us of Covid-19?

Related:

  • A typical failure… “Lilly Statement Regarding NIH’s ACTIV-3 Clinical Trial” (October 26): Based on an updated dataset from the trial reviewed on October 26, no additional COVID-19 patients in this hospitalized setting will receive bamlanivimab. This recommendation was based on trial data suggesting that bamlanivimab is unlikely to help hospitalized COVID-19 patients recover from this advanced stage of their disease. In this updated dataset, differences in safety outcomes between the groups were not significant.
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Mark Zuckerberg uses his $110+ billion wealth to lobby for a tax increase on people other than Mark Zuckerberg

by philg

“California Tax Revolt Faces a Retreat, 40 Years Later” (NYT):

The new initiative, Proposition 15, would amend the state’s Constitution so that properties like offices and industrial parks would no longer be protected by Proposition 13. By creating a “split roll” system, in which residential property would continue to be shielded from tax increases but commercial property would not, backers hope to capitalize on Democratic energy to raise taxes on large corporations without alarming homeowners.

Proposition 15 would raise $6.5 billion to $11.5 billion a year for public schools, community colleges and city and county governments, according to a nonpartisan state agency. The Yes campaign, called Schools and Communities First, is backed by a number of public employees unions and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

So… Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to see higher taxes on all forms of wealth, but only on wealth held in the form of real estate (0.01% of his personal wealth of at least $100 billion?)!

Separately, it turns out that commercial property owners actually don’t pay that much in tax in California:

It is not uncommon for neighbors to pay double or triple the taxes of a similar home on the same block. A recent analysis of property taxes across the Bay Area is rife with eye-popping comparisons, like a $9 million home in an exclusive neighborhood of San Francisco that has lower property taxes than a $331,000 home near an oil refinery across the bay in Richmond.

When Proposition 13 passed, commercial property taxes were almost an afterthought. But since skyscrapers and shopping malls do not change hands as often as homes do, the law has shifted the property tax burden from corporations to homeowners. In 1975, a little under half the property taxes in Los Angeles County were paid by commercial properties. By 2017, commercial properties accounted for just over one-quarter of the property tax roll.

One part of this may be that each commercial property tends to live in its own LLC (oftentimes this is a condition of getting bank/mortgage financing). (So a guy like Donald Trump with multiple properties will inevitably have a complex tax return.) When investors come in and get bought out, the official ownership of the building hasn’t changed (still the LLC). California seems to have a mechanism for updating tax liability if most of the membership interest is swapped out, but I wonder how they enforce this in practice (since membership interest might not be accessible to the California government).

A friend who is a lawyer in Long Beach told me of doing some work for an apartment building owner. While doing this work he discovered that the massive apartment building paid less in property tax than he owed for his modest 2BR house.

As a percentage of residents’ income, California collects the 6th highest percentage of any state (Tax Foundation). On the other hand, the government is not nearly big/rich enough to give voters everything that they want and certainly not to give retired public employees everything that has been promised to them in terms of pensions and health insurance. So the state government will need massive additional revenue. But why not a straight wealth tax on Silicon Valley billionaires?

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Why is it okay for adults to brag about having voted?

by philg

Voting is supposed to be simple enough for roughly 130 million Americans to do. Yet my Facebook feed is packed with people bragging about having accomplished this act, almost always in non-swing states in which their votes are surely irrelevant. It seems like something that preschoolers would be celebrated for, i.e., accomplishing a task that is straightforward for most adults. (See also Are women the new children?)

Examples:

We voted! Less than an hour in line on a rainy afternoon in NYC – first time for [son] who turned 18 in August! #proudpapa #voteNYC #ByeDon

I voted! My blood pressure went through the roof when seeing all these senior women congregated at the Republican booth! How can any respectable woman or anyone with an iota of moral standing vote for this criminal is beyond me

i VOTED !!! My ballot is now in the drop box at City Hall! [From guy who changed his profile to a Biden-Harris seal of some sort]

Fantastic job! [response to the above]

It was such a stress relief, I took a nap afterwards! [additional response to the above from one of his friends, another purported “man”]

I voted today! Had to show ID. Not a problem. My favorite presidential votes were for my wonderful friend and mentor Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000.

Should I brag every time that we are able to finish something that was purchased at Costco, a far greater challenge than voting? “We used the last dishwasher pac!” or “We ate the last orange from the box!” or “Mindy the Crippler finished her last green dental chew!”

Maybe you’ll say that the voting braggarts are engaged in a sophisticated program to encourage others to vote (for Democrats!). If so, why didn’t they do that in the offline pre-Facebook world? I don’t remember anyone coming into work and shouting out, to the slaves within the cubicles of the coding plantation, “I voted!”

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Who is the Big Money candidate this year?

by philg

Hillary was the candidate of Big Money in 2016: “Trump won with half as much money as Clinton raised” (Politico). Trump and “allies” raised only $600 million versus more than $1.2 billion for the wife of the former President (just like in Latin America!).

What’s the story in 2020? And, if Biden does not similarly dominate the fundraising and spending process, to what do we attribute the difference?

“The Two Americas Financing the Trump and Biden Campaigns” (NYT, October 25) includes a map:

Joe Biden has outraised President Trump on the strength of some of the wealthiest and most educated ZIP codes in the United States, running up the fund-raising score in cities and suburbs so resoundingly that he collected more money than Mr. Trump on all but two days in the last two months … It is not just that much of Mr. Biden’s strongest support comes overwhelmingly from the two coasts, which it does. … In ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Mr. Biden smashed Mr. Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million — accounting for almost his entire financial edge. … Over all, Mr. Biden raised $1.07 billion and Mr. Trump $734 million over the last six months in the 32,000 populated ZIP codes, the analysis shows.

I’ve seen some of this in Maine. In the smaller towns and rural areas, it is rare to see a Biden-Harris sign. Portland, on the other hand, is all rainbow flags, BLM, Biden-Harris, etc. Portland and its suburbs/exurbs contain close to half of the total population in Maine, so the elite high-income city-dwellers need only a handful of votes for Democrats from elsewhere in order to impose their will on the small towners.

Even if the NYT is correct that Biden is getting more money and most of it is coming from rich Americans, we’re still left with the question of why. Is it economic self-interest? If so, based on what? A belief that a bigger government will help lawyers, accountants, doctors, and others with credentials? A belief that expanded low-skill immigration will help elites (see below)? A superior moral compass among the rich? (Hunter Biden getting paid by the Ukrainian oil company while his dad was VP (Senate committee report) was okay, but Trump hotels getting paid by various folks with an interest in government policy while Trump is President is not okay) Something else?

Is it reasonable to infer that if the coastal elites are funding Biden and working class Americans are funding Trump that we can expect the coastal elites to soak up more of the good stuff in the American economy/society after Biden-Harris prevail?

Related:

  • “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico), a Harvard economics analysis of how low-skill immigration (promoted by Biden) enriches the educated elites with roughly $500 billion per year, nearly all of it on the backs of working class Americans, who receive lower wages (and also pay higher rents and incur other costs from the extra population, but I don’t think the Harvard eggheads factored that in)
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Elite coastal Jews advocate discrimination against white and Asian males

by philg

Let’s look again at White men correctly perceive American Jews as their enemies? Here’s the latest from our Jewish-owned media elite… “Californians, Vote Yes on Prop 16” (New York Times, October 27):

Black and Latino people have been hit hardest by America’s recent one-two punch of public health and economic crises. They’ve been hospitalized for Covid-19 at quadruple the rate of white Americans. Their businesses have struggled to get the support they requested from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program. As of August, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was nearly double that of white Americans.

Amid these widening disparities, California voters are weighing a measure that could be a big help to women, Black and Latino students and business owners. Proposition 16 aims to reverse Proposition 209, a measure that California passed 24 years ago banning consideration of race, gender or ethnicity in public university admissions and public contracting. California was the first state to try to ban affirmative action, and others — including Michigan, Arizona and Washington — later followed suit.

Given that slots at public universities and funding for business owners are fixed and limited quantities, when Women, Blacks, and Latinos (but not the Latinx?) are advanced, necessarily, it is back of the bus for those unwise enough to identify as “white man” or “Asian man.”

Who else loves discrimination against white and Asian males, according to the NYT?

Proposition 16 has its supporters: the governor, Senator Kamala Harris, top public university officials.

So… a Jewish-owned newspaper reaches out from thousands of mile away to advocate for government-organized discrimination against white males and we will simultaneously say that white males who oppose Jewish-Americans are filled with irrational hatred? (We will also declare that white males who vote against the presidency of Kamala Harris are “voting against their own interest”!)

Related:

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Post-election Deplorable hunt enabled by mail-in voting?

by philg

I finally dug my way through the two ballot questions (see Should I vote for ranked-choice voting?) and am ready to vote here in Maskachusetts. The instructions that came with my mail-in ballot:

Put your ballot into the yellow ballot envelope and seal the ballot envelope.

Sign the ballot envelope. Print your name and address below your signature.

The ballot envelope also has a personalized name/address sticker on it.

When a person votes in-person in Maskachusetts (generally for a candidate running unopposed or one whose odds of winning are 99.99%), he/she/ze/they fills out a ballot in a private booth and then puts the ballot into a scanner. There is no association between ballot and person.

With vote-by-mail, local officials, nearly all of whom are from one party(!), could assemble a list of citizens (and the undocumented?) who failed to vote correctly. After the election, God willing, this could be the basis for correcting the big error that my Dutch friend said the American elites made in 2016 regarding the Deplorables: “They forgot to take away their right to vote.”

I haven’t seen this discussed much, but as far as I can tell, vote-by-mail means the end of anonymous voting in Massachusetts (not sure how it is done in the rest of the country).

Separately, the towns here have spent what is probably $10,000+ each on voting drop boxes on concrete pads:

People who don’t trust the government-run post office to deliver a local letter within 2-3 weeks can use this box to vote for a bigger government that will take over additional day-to-day functions within society and the economy. People who agree with Joe Biden that climate change is an existential threat to humanity can, instead of walking to the end of their own driveway and putting the flag up on their own mailbox, drive a CO2-spewing vehicle to/from the ballot drop box. They will, of course, vote for bold government action to cut CO2 emissions!

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The CDC and our state public health department tell us how to trick or treat

by philg

From mass.gov, “Halloween During COVID-19” (“Consistent with the Halloween activity guidance released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”). First some Dos:

  • A costume mask is not a substitute for a face mask or face covering. To protect yourself and others, ensure you are wearing a protective face mask or covering instead of or in addition to a costume mask. [A bandana is legal and effective PPE against coronavirus, but a Batman mask is not?]
  • Hold virtual costume contests or pumpkin carving events.

Now the Don’ts:

  • Attending crowded costume parties held indoors, or any gatherings that exceed indoor or outdoor gathering limits;
  • Going to an indoor haunted house where people may be crowded together and screaming; and
  • Going on hayrides or tractor rides with people who are not in your household.

Related:

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