Essential shopping at the gun store

by philg

A friend here in Maskachusetts texted us regarding his latest trip to an essential business that remains legal to operate: “No employees in gun store wearing mask.” A bit later: “At another gun store. Also no masks. Cop in here also with no mask.”

An exchange ensued regarding why an excursion was worth the Covid-19 risk:

  • Me: You’re in a gun store because you don’t already have enough guns? How many guns do you think you have at this point?
  • Him: Over 400. My Glocks are getting out of date.
  • Me: Are there actually significant improvements?
  • Him: These are 1/4 inch slimmer.
  • Second friend: Everyone is moving to red dot sights on pistols.
  • Third friend: No, the pistols themselves are stagnant if not possibly retrograde, but the improvements have been in aiming them.
  • Him: These are 3-4 oz lighter than the previous alternative. But [Third friend] is right in that a Glock from 1988 is 98 percent as good as new one.

Separately, what will happen to all of the guns that Americans bought during the BLM protests? There were a lot of first-time gun owners who aren’t committed to maintaining proficiency at the range, cleaning the weapons, etc. Will there be a public health emergency of misfires a few years from now as these guns sit?

Firearms advice from our next president (however briefly he may serve):

(my friends above beg to differ; “Best home defense is 6 inch 300 BLK SBR with 30 round mag with silencer and Aimpoint.” What about Biden’s idea of a double-barreled shotgun? “Those are for clay shooting. No one uses those for home defense. They are for shooting small birds so have 22-inch barrels. And if you saw it off, it is life in prison.”)

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Isaac Newton, investor

by philg

“Investors Have Been Making the Same Mistake for 300 Years” (The Atlantic) is an interesting article by Thomas Levenson, teacher of science writing at MIT.

Excerpts:

Already [in 1720] a wealthy man, Newton was usually a cautious investor. As the year began, much of his money was tucked away in various kinds of government bonds—reliable, uneventful investments that delivered a regular stream of income. He did own shares in a few of the larger companies on the exchange, including South Sea, but he had never been a rapid or eager market trader.

That had changed in the past few months, though, as he bought and sold into the rising market seemingly in the hopes of turning a comfortable fortune into an enormous one. By August, he’d unloaded most of his bonds, converting them and other assets into South Sea shares. Now he contemplated selling the rest of his bonds to buy still more shares.

He did sell nearly all of them. It was a disastrous choice. Within three weeks, the market turned. By Christmas, it had utterly collapsed. Newton’s losses reached millions of dollars in 21st-century money.

Even someone smart enough to steal credit for being the first to invent calculus was not smart enough to resist the Vegas-style appeal of the stock market.

I recommend this article, a rare break in the continuous stream of Trump-hatred from the Atlantic (owned by someone smart enough to have sex with a rich guy, thus illustrating a much more reliable path to wealth than trying to beat the S&P 500).

Related:

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Post-Harvey Weinstein conviction world is better for women at work?

by philg

From exactly 10 years ago, in Business Insider, “15% Of Women Have Slept With Their Bosses — And 37% Of Them Got Promoted For It”:

Research from the Center for Work-Life Policy shows mid-level, professional women need powerful, senior executives to help promote them to the next level of management.

The problem is this: More often than not, superiors are males who are married.

Enter, sex.

In that same CWLP study, 34% of executive women claim they know a female colleague who has had an affair with a boss. Furthermore, 15% of women at the director level or above admitted to having affairs themselves.

And worse, 37% claim the action was rewarded: they said that women involved in affairs received a career boost as a result.

Now that Harvey W. is in prison, presumably the sex-for-jobs exchange is less common and fewer of the plum jobs are allocated to the most brazen. Are women who don’t have sex with bosses obtaining promotions noticeably sooner than ten years ago?

Related:

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American schools will have to stay closed even after an effective COVID-19 vaccine is available

by philg

Turbine-powered Shutdown Karens: “A Vaccine That Stops Covid-19 Won’t Be Enough” (New York Times). Even if we have a vaccine that prevents coronavirus infection from turning into COVID-19 disease, it won’t be safe to leave our bunkers:

But even if one, or more, of those [vaccine development] efforts succeeds, a vaccine might not end the pandemic. This is partly because we seem to be focused at the moment on developing the kind of vaccine that may well prevent Covid-19, the disease, but that wouldn’t do enough to stop the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

A vaccine’s ability to forestall a disease is also how vaccine developers typically design — and how regulators typically evaluate — Phase 3 clinical trials for vaccine candidates.

Yet the best vaccines also serve another, critical, function: They block a pathogen’s transmission from one person to another. And this result, often called an “indirect” effect of vaccination, is no less important than the direct effect of preventing the disease caused by that pathogen. In fact, during a pandemic, it probably is even more important.

That’s what we should be focusing on right now. And yet we are not.

Stopping a virus’s transmission reduces the entire population’s overall exposure to the virus. It protects people who may be too frail to respond to a vaccine, who do not have access to the vaccine, who refuse to be immunized and whose immune response might wane over time.

Preventing the very transmission of SARS-CoV-2, no less than stopping it from turning into Covid-19, should be a main priority of current efforts to develop the vaccines to end this pandemic.

So… the shutdowns will continue even after people stop getting sick and/or dying from COVID-19.

In other recent coronaplague news:

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Tesla could have saved us from coronaplague

by philg

From Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World:

As a regular solo customer of Delmonico’s, the polite and gracious inventor had let the highly trained staff know that he liked to have eighteen pristine napkins in a stack at his table. Very discreetly, Tesla used them to wipe the germs off each piece of heavy silverware, sparkling china, and crystal stemware before he partook of the chef’s many delights. Tesla’s germ phobia had developed after a fellow scientist allowed him to observe through a microscope the many normally invisible creatures inhabiting unboiled water. Tesla would later explain, “If you would watch only for a few minutes the horrible creatures, hairy and ugly beyond anything you can conceive, tearing each other up with the juices diffusing throughout the water—you would never again drink a drop of unboiled or unsterilized water.” So Tesla was ever vigilant in limiting his exposure to these vile microscopic bugs.

(Thank you to Steve for the Amazon gift card and suggestion to use it on this book!)

Nikola Tesla was also a pioneer in social distancing:

More and more [in the 1930s], Tesla lived in his own world, as big a romantic as ever, and as eccentric. He had his vegetarian meals specially cooked by the hotel chef and insisted that the help not get closer to him than a few feet, part of his phobia of germs.

How about #FollowScience and #BelieveTheExperts?

And in fact, on May 6, 1893, the officers of the Niagara Falls Power Company declared unequivocally that polyphase alternating current would be their choice. This was, at the time, still a very bold and highly controversial stance. The eminent Sir William Thomson, chairman of the International Niagara Committee and just elevated to become Lord Kelvin by Queen Victoria, cabled Adams on May 1 to head off the announcement. He proposed an ambitious DC plan, urging, “Trust you avoid gigantic mistake of adoption of alternate current.”

In other words, one of the greatest scientists of the age was sure that low-voltage DC was the way to electrify a country.

BLM at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (named after someone who refused to #BelieveScience and lit up by Westinghouse AC):

On the hot Friday of August 25—Colored People’s Day at Festival Hall—the great abolitionist and leader Frederick Douglass wearily entreated in this era of Jim Crow, “All we beg is to receive as honest treatment as those who love only part of the country.”

How rich was the pre-electrified country?

… [in 1890] America’s population up to a mighty sixty-three million, according to the recent census. Politicians had taken to boasting that the United States was now a “billion dollar” country. It was, in fact, far richer than that, thanks to its relentless can-do commercial spirit and the reckless ambition of men like Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. In the postbellum United States, the national wealth had soared to $65 billion, more than the accumulated holdings of all the aristocrats and commercial classes of Great Britain, Germany, and Russia combined. By 1890, in America, nearly $40 billion was invested in land and buildings, $9 billion in the sprawling network of railroads, and $4 billion in manufacturing and mining.

In other words, roughly $1,000 in wealth for every resident, roughly $28,000 in today’s mini-dollars. The U.S. had a net worth of $124 trillion as of 2014 (Wikipedia, assets minus debts). Population back in 2014 was 318 million (compare to 330.1 million today). So the per-person wealth in 2014 was $390,000, about $430,000 in 2020 dollars.

How did folks in New York City entertain themselves back then?

As an appalled Parkhurst and his two companions toured every kind of beer-soaked dance hall, cheap saloon, and sleazy brothel, they became astonished, genteel witnesses to a large and rowdy underworld thriving on illicit gambling, cheap liquor and beer, and organized, commercial sex catering to every kind of appetite. Gardner also had his own detectives out gathering affidavits. So when Reverend Parkhurst mounted his pulpit a mere month later on Sunday, March 13, 1892, he possessed documented evidence that Tammany was “rotten with a rottenness that is unspeakable and indescribable.” He had proof that 254 saloons and 30 brothels had been roaring with business just the previous Sunday. In the ensuing months, a grand jury handed down a few placating indictments, but little would change immediately. The urban poor (and a certain number of their better-off confreres) wanted jollity and dazed forgetfulness, be it craps, bawdy dance halls, or cheap, quick sex, for theirs were hardscrabble lives.

Reverend Parkhurst would be a big fan of coronashutdown!

George Westinghouse might not have been. In response to Edison’s arguments that high-voltage AC was dangerous, he responded that, statistically, electrocution was an uncommon cause of death:

Westinghouse tried to put it into perspective with the following: In the year 1888, sixty-four people in New York City were killed in streetcar accidents, fifty-five by omnibuses and wagons, twenty-three by illuminating gas, and all of five by electric current. This was not exactly an orgy of wanton and careless killing.

Westinghouse might have referred to the CDC’s excess deaths chart:

Speaking of death, there was a huge amount of enthusiasm for capital punishment via high voltage.

Two physicians leaned forward to examine Kemmler [the first electric chair victim]. The other doctors gathered around and dented Kemmler’s flesh to judge his state. Dr. Southwick smiled broadly as he came away from the fresh corpse. “There,” he exclaimed to a knot of witnesses who had quietly withdrawn to the far end of the chamber, “there is the culmination of ten years’ work and study. We live in a higher civilization from this day.”

Higher civilization wasn’t completely civilized…

But the blood was continuing to ooze from Kemmler’s small finger wound. His heart still had to be beating. The physicians around the limp figure recoiled as one yelled in horror, “Great God! He is alive!” Another ordered, “Turn on the current.” “See, he breathes,” gasped a third. When Dr. Southwick and the others whirled around at these cries, they saw that Kemmler’s body was still limp, but his chest was heaving up and down. He seemed to be struggling for breath, and foam was seeping horribly from his masked mouth hole. “For God’s sake, kill him and have it over!” screamed one witness. The Associated Press reporter fainted on the wood floor, and several men carried him to a bench, where they fanned him. Durston had turned chalk white. He fumbled and reattached the scalp electrode. As the current flowed anew and Kemmler again went horribly rigid, “an awful odor began to permeate the death chamber.” Kemmler’s hair and skin were being visibly singed. A blue flame played briefly behind his neck. His clothes caught fire, but one of the doctors quickly extinguished them. “The stench,” reported the Times, “was unbearable.” After several minutes, the current was turned off, and as purple spots mottled Kemmler’s hands, arms, and neck, the doctors again declared him dead. The room reeked of burned meat and feces. The nauseated witnesses signed the death warrant for Warden Durston and then trailed out into the stone corridors, silent, shaken, several sick, the Erie County sheriff so distraught that tears trickled down his face. Three hours later, when the doctors had sufficiently recovered to perform an autopsy, they found that rigor mortis had stiffened Kemmler into a permanent sitting position. Examination of the body showed scorch marks wherever the electrodes and buckles touched the body. Kemmler had been “roasted” as well as a piece of overdone meat. Once the autopsy was complete and numerous organs removed, Kemmler’s baked corpse was taken and buried at night in the prison courtyard with great quantities of quicklime to dissolve all ultimate traces.

The author chronicles the cruelties inflicted on innocent animals, such as dogs and calves, in the years leading up to the execution of convicted criminals via electricity. This was the work of Edison affiliates, anxious to paint the Westinghouse AC system as dangerous.

Investment advice from Tesla turned out to be almost as bad as investment advice from Paul Krugman (November 2016: “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? … If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”):

And what of Niagara Falls? the local reporters urgently asked. Tesla replied without hesitation: “The result of this great development of electric power will be that the falls and Buffalo will reach out their arms and will join each other and become one great city. United, they will form the greatest city in the world.”

(See “Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?” (2007), in which we learn that “The 1920s were the last real growth period for Buffalo” and that rail and road transportation reduced the importance of the Erie Canal. “Then the Saint Lawrence Seaway opened in 1957, connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic and allowing grain shipments to bypass Buffalo altogether.” Meanwhile “New York’s high taxes, burdensome regulations, and pro-union laws made Buffalo less attractive to employers than its more successful southern competitors. … Despite 50 years of population loss, Buffalo has one of the steepest metropolitan tax burdens in the country—including one of the nation’s highest local property tax rates, according to a 2003 study.”)

Vaguely related, the Glen Canyon Dam, circa 1990, captured with Kodak Tech Pan film:

It was legal to go to the Canadian side of the Falls just a year ago!

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Covid paranoia will lead to inflation

by philg

Franklin Templeton manages about $700 billion in assets. What does their Chief Investment Officer for Fixed Income think Covid-19 will lead to? Inflation!

An article by Sonal Desai:

Americans still misperceive the risks of death from COVID-19 for different age cohorts—to a shocking extent;

The misperception is greater for those who identify as Democrats, and for those who rely more on social media for information; partisanship and misinformation, to misquote Thomas Dolby, are blinding us from science; and

We find a sizable “safety premium” that could become a significant driver of inflation as the recovery gets underway.

How can a virus drive inflation? I think that her argument is that Americans with money will spend like crazy to protect themselves from the virus, e.g., buying first class airline seats or choosing airlines with blocked middle seats. Meanwhile there will be contraction in supply. We’ve already seen this in real estate. The rich are spending even more for country estates and for fixing up country estates. It is impossible to get a contractor because they’re already hired and the additional workers they might want to hire are relaxing on $600/week (but maybe that will change soon?).

These misperceptions are destroying our economy:

This misinformation has a very concrete adverse impact. Our study results show that those who overstate deaths among young people are more cautious about making purchases, more reluctant to travel, and favor keeping businesses and schools shut.

I.e., the Swedes who gave the finger to the virus are likely to do relatively better than Americans (but we stole a bigger piece of land from the Native Americans than they did, so we might still be richer).

What does the cower-in-place nation look like, emotionally?

How did the misperceptions arise? Facebook Shutdown and Mask Karens: “People who get their information predominantly from social media have the most erroneous and distorted perception of risk.” Traditional media was also responsible, says Desai:

Fear and anger are the most reliable drivers of engagement; scary tales of young victims of the pandemic, intimating that we are all at risk of dying, quickly go viral; so do stories that blame everything on your political adversaries. Both social and traditional media have been churning out both types of narratives in order to generate more clicks and increase their audience.

Stories that emphasize the dangers of the pandemic to all age cohorts and tie the risk to the Administration’s handling of the crisis likely tend to resonate much more with Democrats than Republicans. This might be a contributing factor to why, in our survey results, Democrats tend to overestimate the risk of dying from COVID-19 for different age cohorts to a greater extent than Republicans do.

Related:

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Election of President Kamala Harris will end the BLM protests?

by philg

From The American Conservative (both of them?):

There once was a general who fought a war to protect slavery. That’s not how he would have described it. He would have said he was fighting to protect his way of life from a foreign invader. Whatever construction he put on it, his so-called way of life rested on the sweat wrung from forced labor on plantations and gold earned from buying and selling black flesh.

That general was Samori Touré. The West African chieftain is honored today by black nationalists for resisting French imperialism in the Mandingo Wars of the late nineteenth century, but thousands of Africans were enslaved by Samori’s raiders in the course of building up his empire. After his final defeat in 1898, for more than a decade, columns of refugees tramped into French Guinea to return to their home villages as they escaped or were liberated from Banamba or Bamako or wherever Samori’s men had sold them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates named his son Samori, after the great resister. That means that Between the World and Me, the best-selling anti-racist tract of the current century, which takes the form of letters from Coates to his son, is addressed to someone named after a prolific enslaver of black Africans.

Unless the U.S. is packed with hidden Deplorables that poll-takers can’t find, at some point in 2021, the U.S. will be led by a president who identifies as “Black” (though we also have to accept the possibility that Kamala Harris changes her racial and/or gender ID between now and then).

Is it safe to say that the BLM protesters/rioters will go home for eight years, starting November 4? We didn’t have BLM riots during the Obama Administration, right? (“Obama Says Movements Like Black Lives Matter ‘Can’t Just Keep on Yelling’” (NYT, 2016) turned out to be prescient!)

Every day of the Obama administration was a day in which life for Black Americans became more challenging (see “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration,” NBER 2007) Yet as long as there was a person in the White House who identified as “Black,” it apparently did not bother lower-income Black Americans that their jobs, apartments, and infrastructure were taken over by immigrants

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Tsarnaev appeal might go to the Supreme Court

by philg

In April 2015, I wrote the following:

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been convicted by an impartial jury of 12 locals wearing “Boston Strong” T-shirts. Now they are deciding what to do with him.

In July, the appeals court agreed with me that a local jury was unlikely to be impartial (NPR):

The higher court noted that the judge who presided over Tsarnaev’s trial had rejected the defense team’s request for a more distant trial venue where prospective jurors might be less likely to be prejudiced against the Chechen immigrant. That judge did so, the ruling maintained, promising that local jurors would be adequately screened.

But the three-judge panel ruled that the trial judge had failed to impanel an impartial jury.

In another part of the opinion, Judge Juan Torruella wrote that the District Court judge relied on “self-declarations of impartiality” by prospective jurors, calling that “an error of law and an abuse of discretion.”

Today we learn “Justice Department asks Supreme Court to review decision to vacate Boston bomber death sentence” (CNN). The Marathon bombing was more than 7 years ago and featured a governor’s “shelter-in-place” request:

Readers: Does the epic length of proceedings against/related to Mr. Tsarnaev reveal a defect in the U.S. legal system? From the Wikipedia page on the trial:

Tsarnaev’s attorney, Judy Clarke, opened by telling the jurors that her client and his older brother, Tamerlan, planted a bomb killing three and injuring hundreds, as well as murdering an MIT police officer days later. “There’s little that occurred the week of April the 15th … that we dispute,” Clarke said in her 20-minute opening statement

In other words, the defense and the prosecution actually agreed regarding most of the facts. Shouldn’t we have had a resolution long before now?

Related:

  • “Boston Marathon Bombing Trial: Why Are Judges Loath To Change The Venue?” (Harvey Silverglate, 2014)
  • “Brothers’ Classic Immigrant Tale Emerges as Relatives Speak Out” (NBC, 2013): Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an outspoken athlete who spoke three languages, played the piano, studied engineering, was a devout Muslim and aspired to represent the United States at the Olympics. … The brothers were part of a family refugees who fled the war-torn Chechnya region of Russia and immigrated to America a decade ago. … “They immigrated and received asylum,” Ruslan Tsarni, the brothers’ uncle, told reporters outside his home in suburban Maryland.
  • “Russia’s Warning on Bombings Suspect Sets Off a Debate” (NYT, April 2013): In March 2011, the Russian security service sent a stark warning to the F.B.I., reporting that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “a follower of radical Islam” who had “changed drastically since 2010” and was preparing to travel to Russia’s turbulent Caucasus to connect with underground militant groups. Six months later, Russia sent the same warning to the C.I.A. … F.B.I. officials have defended their response to the Russian tip, which prompted agents to interview Mr. Tsarnaev and his parents and check government databases and Internet activity. The bureau found nothing.
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Coronavirus tests accelerate the spread of coronavirus?

by philg

We’ve done more than 70 million coronavirus tests in the U.S. so far (CDC). Yet the plague rages, even in virtuously masked Trump-free states such as California. What’s the solution? More testing: “‘We’re Clearly Not Doing Enough’: Drop in Testing Hampers Coronavirus Response” (NYT, August 15).

Does this make sense? What if Covid-19 tests actually accelerate the transmission of coronaplague? Consider that a swab from an infected person who is asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic is unlikely to contain any virus. Even with perfect machines and technicians, therefore, any test will return a false negative. (perhaps about 70 percent of tests on the infected, but not-sick or not-very-sick, will be false negatives)

Suppose that we enter the American technocrats’ dream world. We have unlimited testing capacity with the current testing technology. The person who doesn’t feel 100% goes in for a test. It comes back negative a day later. Buoyed by the test result, even though the person feels a little worse, he/she/ze/they decide to go shopping, go to work, etc. Thanks to the negative test result, this person can be fairly sure he/she/ze/they is suffering from a cold or some other minor virus, not the dreaded Covid-19.

Imagine a world in which no testing is available. Fever or just not feeling well? Stay home in isolation because there is no way to know whether it is Covid-19 or not.

Readers: What do you think? Is all of the testing not only a waste of time and money, but actually counterproductive if the goal is to slow down the spread of coronaplague?

Potential evidence: A bunch of American universities were reopened recently. This was partly due to faith in (a) masks, and (b) testing. Some of them have already shut down for in-person instruction. The explanations in the media that I have seen are that not every student wore a mask at all times and that not enough testing was done. It could have worked if only mask habits had been better and perhaps if testing had been stepped up to every day instead of every three days. These media articles are typically accompanied by a photo of students wearing masks and standing or sitting fairly far apart.

Related (sort of): if cowbell isn’t working… More Cowbell

Related:

  • Stockholm University: “The Public Health Authority urges everyone with symptoms of a respiratory infection, even a mild one, to avoid social contact, as they pose a risk of spreading infection. Everyone with symptoms of illness should stay at home.” (i.e., don’t come out coughing even if you have a negative test result to show!)
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Massachusetts has at least two simultaneous public health emergencies

by philg

The First Amendment rights of young people to assemble, go to school, work, socialize, travel, etc. have been suspended or eliminated due to the coronavirus public health emergency declared by the governor here in Maskachusetts.

Recently, however, I learned that we’re in the midst of a second public health emergency. From “Massachusetts Municipal Leaders Pledge to Take Action on Systemic Racism”:

The municipal leaders agreed on five shared principles:

We agree that systemic racism is a public health emergency, which must be addressed by strong and decisive actions over the coming weeks and months, and by patient and determined efforts years into the future. We are in this now; we are in it for the long haul.

In other words, in addition to the multi-year coronavirus “emergency”, there is a “long haul” “emergency” that will stretch “years into the future.”

Readers: What former Constitutional rights that survived corona-edicts can be eliminated to deal with this emergency?

Related:

  • When does coronaplague stop being an emergency? (July 6)
  • “Mass. Students, Kids in Day Care Must Get Flu Vaccine, DPH Says Amid Pandemic” (NECN): Students at Massachusetts schools from kindergarten up to universities, as well as children at least 6 months old in day care, must get the flu vaccine by the end of the year if they’re around others, health officials said Wednesday. The new requirement from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health comes amid the coronavirus pandemic, which public health experts have said could be exacerbated by the annual resurgence of the flu in the fall and winter. “It is more important now than ever to get a flu vaccine because flu symptoms are very similar to those of COVID-19 and preventing the flu will save lives and preserve healthcare resources,” said Dr. Larry Madoff, medical director of the DPH’s Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences, in a statement. (Why not prohibit alcohol if we are trying to save lives, instead of going door to door hunting for young people who are #Resisting flu shots?)
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