Do we need some more national parks?

by philg

A friend who has been suffering through shutdown on an oceanfront estate in Maine mentioned that Acadia National Park has experienced record-breaking visitor counts. For the first time in history, you need to make a reservation before driving into the park at all.

Our National Park system was set up in 1872, i.e., for a country with a population of roughly 40 million. Today there are 330 million residents of the U.S. (or 350 million maybe?). Mobility, even in coronashutdown, is greater than it was in 1872. This leads to what I would have previously called “Manhattan-style crowding” in some parks (but now Manhattan has been de-crowded!).

Having the Federal government run stuff is not ideal, as evidenced by the filthy and decrepit bathrooms that are provided for visitors to Acadia. On the other hand, of all U.S. government functions, the National Park system seems like the best value for the dollar.

Why not see if we can create some additional National Parks or at least National Forests with much better visitor facilities and cut out the logging?Demolish some ugly condo buildings before climate change can get them and create additional National Seashores?

If so, where should the new parks be? My semi-local ideas…

  • Lake Champlain (Vermont/New York)
  • Chappaquiddick Island (“The Ted Kennedy National Seashore”)
  • Baxter State Park (take it over from Maine, expand it, and make it more accessible with some awesome roads; call it “End of the Appalachian Trail Park”)
  • Moosehead Lake (Maine; buy up some land to connect with what is now Baxter State Park)

A few photos from Acadia, September 2020:

And, right next to the park, a guide to healing our nation (“Vote Democrat; Wach MSNBC & CNN News”):

Related:

  • Park Drive photo above by Tony Cammarata of Aerial Boston (I was flying the Robinson R44 helicopter)
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Testing will end coronaplague, but quarantine anyway…

by philg

From the local K-8 school…

I am writing to inform you that a student … has tested positive for COVID-19. All families with students in the impacted cohort have been notified and their children were picked up from school immediately. Our first responsibility is to keep our students and staff safe.

(In case you thought their first responsibility was education!)

We have been planning for this scenario during our reopening planning process and have a comprehensive plan in place to sanitize the school, inform families whose students were at risk of exposure or in close contact, and support the affected family as they navigate this stressful experience.

Our student body and staff have been closely adhering to the safety protocols including mask wearing, hand washing, and physical distancing.

(But we don’t believe that any of this stuff actually works, which is why what might be a false positive test leads us to shut down a “cohort” of the school?)

We are grateful to our families for their continued efforts to keep students home at the first sign of symptoms. These measures, taken in combination, greatly reduce the risk of additional transmission.
Though we cannot provide specific information about our school community member who tested positive, your child was not a close contact (defined as being within 6 feet of the person for at least 15 minutes) of the affected school member. Please continue to monitor your child for symptoms, and keep your child home if he/she/they shows any symptoms or is not feeling well.

Parents of students who were in close contact with the community member have been notified separately. All close contacts should be tested but must self-quarantine for 14 days after the last exposure to the person who tested positive, regardless of test result.

(Testing is critical for prevailing in the war that we’ve declared on this virus, but we are going to throw out the test results and quarantine everyone regardless.)

Some good news for Chlorox:

To further prevent transmission of the virus to other staff and students, we have disinfected the school with a focus on those areas frequented by the community member that tested positive. We will continue to be vigilant in adhering to all of the protocols that have been put in place in an effort to continue in person learning.

But they close the school every afternoon at 1:45 pm, a shortened school day compared to the old 2:50 pm. I had thought this was so that school employees, who can’t be expected to work past 3 pm, would have time to douse everything with Chlorox. If everything is already disinfected daily, what is this going to be? Double secret disinfection?

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Silicon Valley Shutdown Karens move into bigger houses

by philg

My rich friends in the Bay Area are tireless Facebook advocates for more shutdown. Most of them live in spacious homes worth $2-3 million or more. Consistent with Your lockdown may vary, here’s “Bay Area home prices soar with suburban boom” (Mercury News, October 7):

Coronavirus drives demand for space, single-family homes

With millions out of work, and restaurants, shops and retailers closing, one spot in the economy shines for thriving and affluent professionals — Bay Area real estate.

As if the devastating pandemic had passed over the tech campuses, Spanish-tiled roofs and Tesla-filled garages of Silicon Valley, luxury home sales exploded in August and drove median prices up 16 percent from the previous year to levels approaching the market peak in 2018.

The median sale price for an existing single family home in August in the Bay Area was $975,000, according to DQNews data. The gains were driven by a limited supply of properties for sale and a greater portion of high-end homes selling, agents and economists said.

“We’ve never seen such high price appreciation in a recession,” said Selma Hepp, deputy chief economist with real estate data firm CoreLogic. “The recession hasn’t hit everyone the same way.”

Bay Area agents say demand is driven by techies and professionals looking for more space for family and home office Zoom-rooms.

If these are the folks making decisions on when to end shutdown, I’m not predicting an early exit from cower-in-place!

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How will Amy Coney Barrett rule on the big question for 2021?

by philg

Readers: How are the Amy Coney Barrett hearings going? Did she truly sit through five (5!) hours of opening statements on Monday? Why couldn’t she have been resting at the Trump Hotel while the politicians talked about themselves?

This video shows that Judge Barrett’s daily driver is a Honda Odyssey minivan. Have the senators therefore questioned her on the big question for 2021: should we loyal Honda owners jump ship to the new Sienna minivan?

If you can live with seven seats, the top-of-the-line Siennas feature these Gulfstream-style recliners:

An expensive option? The Court disagrees! The entire top trim Sienna costs less than a single FAA-certified seat for a business jet.

How about this grille?

For comparison, the 2021 Toyota Avalon:

And the Audi e-tron (electric!):

Who decided that we needed cars with huge grilles?

Circling back to the Supreme Court nominee, let’s check my Facebook feed… From a Democrat who fled Manhattan:

A woman who hates women for the Supreme Court; it’s great, she can join a black man who hates black people (tap dancers get the bad rap but Clarence Thomas IS the ultimate Uncle Tom) and sit with the white guy majority who hates everybody. Bye-bye civil rights, bye-bye civil behaviour. Voting T-rump is the greatest act of self-hatred (and planetary destruction) currently available. Unmasked rage disguised as pride; wear it well. My absentee ballot has been counted in Maine.

From a righteous computer programmer:

I don’t know what Barrett will do once she’s seated on the Supreme Court. But it’s perfectly clear to me what the man who nominated her expects her to do. And it’s perfectly clear to her, as well.

(i.e., even after she gets her lifetime job, her thoughts and actions will be determined by a man)

From Maskachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark:

#AmyConeyBarrett says she doesn’t have an agenda. But she does have a record—and it stands as an affront to women’s health and rights.

From a divorced mom, part of the most reliable Democrat voting bloc, over a YouTube of Senator Klobuchar’s opening statement:

Please Vote. We can’t just stand by. We have to turn out. #vote2020 #vote

(but her friends are mostly in coastal elite states that are already 100 percent guaranteed to vote for Presidents Biden and Harris!)

From a university employee who describes herself as a “cat person, voter”:

This is not a drill. If Barrett is named to the Supreme Court, I and millions of others will lose access to health care.

(she needs some tips from folks who arrive via caravan over the southern border! Show up at the hospital, don’t give an address, and say “I’m undocumented”!)

Related:

  • NYT headline: “Barrett, Declining to Detail Legal Views, Says She Will Not Be ‘a Pawn’ of Trump” (i.e., the nominee talked about people who are and aren’t pawns of the evil mastermind Trump); NYT article body: “I would certainly hope that all members of this committee would have more confidence in my integrity than to think that I would allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people,” she said. (i.e., no mention of Trump specifically!)
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Young slender Ukrainian blonde moves to Sweden to produce pornography

by philg

For the Church of Shutdown faithful, Sweden’s lower death rate from COVID-19 can be explained primarily by the Swedes being masked and mostly shut down. By continuing to run schools, offices, restaurants, and gyms, the Swedes are merely practicing a variant form of shutdown. Without evidence or knowledge, American Shutdowners will simply assert that everyone in Sweden is wearing a mask. Sometimes white American Shutdown Karens will says that Sweden is a special case because the Swedes are vastly more intelligent than Americans (this might be a swipe at our darker-skinned underclass, which they believe does not exist in the Land of Blondes (in fact, 25 percent of Swedes are immigrants or children of immigrants)).

Enter @SvitlanaNosul, publishing smartphone videos that can be described only as “pornography” (showing humans doing things that are shocking to our sensibilities, e.g., riding the subway without masks). Examples:

Her Twitter bio:

I was born in the USSR, grew up in independent* Ukraine, and now live in the kingdom* of Sweden I stand for the truth and the right to be a free human being

She is lucky that she didn’t emigrate to Maskachusetts!

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Is watching sports less popular because we can’t watch other people watching sports?

by philg

“Why Are Pandemic Sports Ratings So Terrible?” (New York Magazine) describes a fall in TV viewership in a country where millions of people are more or less locked into their homes, unemployed, etc. How can Americans possibly have something better to do right now than turn on the TV and watch a game that they used to enjoy watching?

Here’s my theory: a big reason that people care about sports is that they see other people caring about sports. In the pre-coronapanic days you’d go into a restaurant and see people in the bar with their eyes glued to a professional sports game. This subconsciously communicated that the game was important. Maybe you’d go over to a friend’s house and the game would be on. Another hint that this game is important.

If you’re by yourself at home, on the other hand, there is nobody else to tell you that a particular sport is important enough to be worth watching.

Readers: What’s your theory? Americans are glued to screens more than ever, right? Why aren’t they watching sports on those screens?

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Should I vote for ranked-choice voting?

by philg

The first of my five mail-in ballots has arrived. 3 out of 7 candidates are Democrats running unopposed. The remaining 4 races are 100 percent guaranteed to be won by Democrats. A potential contest: Question 2 is whether to adopt ranked choice voting.

As someone whose political beliefs are most aligned with the libertarians, a last-choice party in a nation where people want a planned economy (my 2012 document after watching both the Republican and Democrat candidates promise that government would create jobs, ensure fair wages, etc.), is this for me? I could vote for a libertarian candidate and then also pick a second choice from a party that has a chance in a country whose citizens want government to cater to their every need? Yet in a Massachusetts general election it is almost inconceivable for a non-Democrat to win. So how can this have any practical effect?

The “Independent Women’s Law Center” opposes this question. We don’t know what people identifying with the remaining 50+ genders say. Wikipedia says that Estonia had something like this, but abandoned it in 2001. As government in Estonia is radically more efficient than here in the U.S., that’s a strike against the idea.

Readers: What do you say about this proposal?

Update, 10/16: a friend highlighted “The Ancient Greeks Teach Us The Perils of Ranked Choice Voting”, by a political science professor:

As this list [of supporters] makes clear, RCV supporters fall overwhelmingly into two (mostly overlapping) categories: Democrats and groups whose members vote heavily for Democratic candidates; and groups that (Libertarians aside) have practically no chance of winning elections even under RCV, except at the local level. Given Massachusetts’s status as a heavily Democratic state (the state’s congressional delegation consists solely of Democrats, who also have long held a substantial supermajority in the legislature), Democrats have little to fear from losing elections to Republicans as a result of RCV. Rather, they need to court members of left-liberal fringe groups, as well as public-employee unions, to ensure that they turn out to vote — knowing that those groups’ supporters would almost surely make the Democratic candidate, at worst, their second-choice candidate, further guaranteeing the defeat of any Republican contender.

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Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to network engineers and sysadmins?

by philg

Despite having engineered the first two Middle East peace agreements in the 21st century, Donald Trump has apparently failed to qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize (maybe if he advocated for the deportation of Muslims, he could join Aung San Suu Kyi in the ranks of the winners?).

Who got the award? Some highly paid bureaucrats at the United Nations who take money that other people worked hard to earn, spend the money on food, and then hand the food out (BBC). This is analogous to borrowing a neighbor’s car, giving it to non-profit org (I recommend Harvard or MIT!), and donning the mantle of pure Jesus-like charity.

Readers: Who should have gotten the award, if not these UN bureaucrats who were simply doing the job for which they were hired and paid? (or maybe you want to argue that they deserved it!)

My suggestion: The network engineers and sysadmins that enabled richer people all over the world to cower in place while enjoying streaming video entertainment, Zoom and similar video collaboration tools, and other services that we would have expected to fall over in the face of a sudden 10X boost in demand. How is it “peace”, though? Consider that people from different nations have been able to continue to work together despite travel bans, thus promoting international trade and cooperation. There would surely be a lot more domestic strife and violence if locked-down people couldn’t reach out electronically and/or zone out with Netflix. Why not recognize the people who built the Verizon and Comcast networks, Amazon Web Services, and similar?

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Swedish scientist and expert on coronavirus endorses Joe Biden

by philg

A young Swedish scientist who predicted the worldwide shutdown of schools and universities as early as September 2019 and who has deep experience with the coronavirus has endorsed Joe Biden to be the head of state in a country in which she does not live:

“The upcoming US elections is above and beyond all that. From a climate perspective it’s very far from enough and many of you of course supported other candidates. But, I mean…you know…damn! Just get organized and get everyone to vote #Biden,” the [Swedish scientist] tweeted.

(source: New York Post)

Related:

  • the Great Barrington Declaration (Swedish science rewritten for an American and British audience)
  • April 2020 video from Johan Giesecke, a Swedish MD/PhD (former chief scientist of the European CDC) whose predictions seem to have been accurate for the U.S. (lockdown will yield a delay) and China (lockdown will squash the virus… until the next lockdown)
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Now that teachers are trained to do online teaching, why won’t they teach when the school building is closed?

by philg

The World’s Greatest Infrastructure (TM) met a cold front on the evening of the Vice Presidential debate. (Did the candidates talk about underground power lines or self-healing “smart grids” that will route around a downed line? (the technology has been available for more than a decade, e.g., from Hitachi ABB))

Power came back around 1:00 am, but #AbundanceOfCaution dictated that our local public school be closed. Email at11 pm from the superintendent:

Dear Lincoln School Families and Staff,

The power outage on the Lincoln campus has not yet been resolved. In addition, there are multiple trees down and road closures. As a result, we must cancel school on Thursday, October 8, 2020. The Lincoln campus will be closed. All employees excluding facilities staff and IT staff should not report to work.

The teachers purportedly had three months of experience in the spring providing online education (one email on Monday morning with some assignments; hosting a couple of video chats during the week). The teachers union negotiated a multi-week delay to the start of the school year here in Maskachusetts so that teachers could receive training on how to deliver online education #EvenBetter.

So… when the school building is closed, as it would be on a snow day, education soldiers on via Internet, right? The teachers and students work together from their respective homes? The answer turns out to be… No!

(The morning after this email was received, Senior Management noted that my failure to take a plate from the table to the dishwasher. I responded that I was following the lead of our public employees and that I would work only if conditions were ideal, e.g., if the plate did not need to be scraped and the dishwasher door were already open. She then asked why she could not use the same criteria for her own domestic efforts. I responded that, in the U.S., only about half of the adults could work for the government and therefore she had to be one of the private sector workers exposed to COVID-19, working 70 hours/week, etc. She replied that soon the U.S. would transition to socialism and everyone would be a government employee and thus we had to share kitchen tasks equally.)

Related:

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