Is it more difficult to be a mother today compared to 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago?

by philg

From our local public radio station: “I Love My Kids But I Loathe Mother’s Day — Especially This Year”.

… our culture has a pretty long rap sheet of under-appreciating women. And day in and day out, those moms tend to not get the credit they deserve because they make so much look easy: holding together infinite moving parts to accomplish the mission of the family machine, plus adding glitter. Metaphorical glitter. Sometimes real glitter, added by real children. Which the moms are usually stuck cleaning up.

The truth is, of course, that at this moment nothing’s okay for anybody. And I get that it isn’t the holiday’s fault that we need to adjust gender and work roles and laws and unwritten rules. But right now, it’s easier to imagine a marginally improved version of Mother’s Day (minus the false pedestal mess) than to dare to dream of civilizational change.

Solidarity, moms. Each and every one of you: Happy sub-optimal holiday in these sub-optimal times to some of the most superoptimal people on Earth.

In other words, something humans have been doing for 200,000 years is now intolerably burdensome, despite a climate-conditioned home packed with labor-saving machines.

Readers: Is motherhood in fact now more burdensome than in earlier eras? Or it was always intolerably burdensome, but mothers did not have as many outlets for complaining about the burden so we don’t how unhappy women were in Ancient Athens, Siddhattha Gotama’s India, or the China of Confucius?

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Swiss: children can’t transmit coronavirus, but teachers shouldn’t rush back to work

by philg

BBC story, April 29:

Swiss authorities say it is now safe for children under the age of 10 to hug their grandparents, in a revision to official advice on coronavirus.

The health ministry’s infectious diseases chief Daniel Koch said scientists had concluded that young children did not transmit the virus.

This week, garden centres and hairdressers have been allowed to open their doors. Schools and shops selling items other than food will be allowed to reopen in two weeks’ time.

Dr Koch told a news conference this week that the original advice to keep distance between children and their grandparents was made when less was known about how the coronavirus was transmitted.

“Young children are not infected and do not transmit the virus,” he said. “They just don’t have the receptors to catch the disease.”

So they have known for a while that there was no way that children could be involved in coronaplague transmission, but the teachers still needed at least two more weeks of vacation!

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Unemployed Teenagers in the Age of Corona

by philg

A friend harvested this from a (helicopter?) mom’s discussion group:

I want to vent but don’t want blow back. Our 18 year old who works 6-7 hours a week filed for unemployment benefits and then filed for the additional federal benefit of $600 a month,unbeknownst to us. She has received 1950 so far and spent 1200 already on clothes etc over 800 today alone. We found out about this earlier tonight. We are horrified and ashamed and at a loss. No federal money should ever have come her way. She’s a full time student and a dependent completely cared for. She made at most $2600 a year and she’s receiving the salary if someone who makes 40k a year at least (her benefits aren’t taxed). Right now we are deciding what to do. You can’t give the money back. By the time it’s over she will have received $8000!!!!! What do i do? We are contemplating have her give it to the charity of her choice. She is not loving that idea. I’m disgusted and just want her out of the house. I’m resisting that impulse but it’s a strong one

Personally, I think the soon-to-be-well-clothed gal is entitled to the money (but, unless she heads to the South, where can she go and wear her new clothing?). Before this started, she took the initiative to get a W-2 job, even if only one day per week. Despite her near-zero personal risk of dying from Covid-19, she has lost what used to be her Constitutional freedoms, e.g., of assembly. Unless she chooses a career of harvesting tax-free child support cash from a portfolio of married dermatologists, dentists, and radiologists, she will be paying for all of the costs of coronapanic via higher tax rates for her entire working life (the shutdown was sold as an attempt to protect Boomers, but the shutdown is being paid for with bonds whose interest payments will fall due mostly after Boomers are long-retired and/or dead).

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Get Off My Lawn, Coronaplague Version

by philg

A journalist friend posted on Facebook asking how people greet each other in the mask age.

Her friend:

I greet someone who is wearing a mask this way “GOOD MORNING, thanks for wearing your mask.. oh by the way, I am smiling” To the people that aren’t wearing one I turn my back and walk away.. I’ve started saying “nice mask, so clear, where did you get it?”

Me:

I like to scold unmasked teenagers here in our suburb who are having fun on skateboards and scooters on the road near our house. I remind them that their personal risk of dying of Covid-19 is at least as high as their chance of being struck by debris from the International Space Station and therefore I expect them to be diligent in mask-wearing.

“Get off my lawn!” has become “Stop breathing into my air!”

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Old rich white people can play golf again in Massachusetts

by philg

Do you belong to a dark-skinned inner-city victim group? Even if you’re under 20 years old and nobody your age has ever died from Covid-19 in Massachusetts, stay in your public housing 2BR with 4 or 5 additional family members please. Wear a mask if you venture out onto the sidewalk or be fined $300.

(The mask law also applies to 3-year-olds, despite the Swiss saying that the science is settled regarding children under 10 not being able to spread the virus.)

What if you’re old, rich, and white? Fore!! “Golf courses in Massachusetts can open, effective immediately”

“We’re All In This Together” is the banner across the main street of our town. Good reminder as one drives one’s $130,000 Mercedes SUV to the golf course!

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Will we need caravan-loads of immigrant workers after we are done with coronapanic?

by philg

Immigrants may have played a substantial role in the American coronaplague. Via immigration and children of immigrants we grew our population from 200 million to 330 million (Pew) with no corresponding increase in health care system capacity. So our terror regarding overburdened hospitals was in some ways a result of the immigration. The worst-plagued cities in the U.S. have been New York (40 percent foreign-born) and Boston (25 percent foreign-born).

But the shutdown plus policies that have made collecting unemployment more lucrative than working for the typical American are winnowing the natives out of the labor force. See “Since coronavirus crisis began, one-fifth of Massachusetts workforce has filed for unemployment” (masslive, April 30), for example. Also, “Labor Markets During the Covid-19 Crisis: A Preliminary View” (Berkeley and U. Chicago agree that Americans don’t like to work!):

First, job loss has been significantly larger than implied by new unemployment claims: we estimate 20 million lost jobs by April 8th, far more than jobs lost over the entire Great Recession. Second, many of those losing jobs are not actively looking to find new ones. As a result, we estimate the rise in the unemployment rate over the corresponding period to be surprisingly small, only about 2 percentage points. Third, participation in the labor force has declined by 7 percentage points, an unparalleled fall that dwarfs the three percentage point cumulative decline that occurred from 2008 to 2016. Early retirement almost fully explains the drop in labor force participation both for those survey participants previously employed and those previously looking for work.

In other words, a lot of existing Americans are done working! This is consistent with past periods of unemployment, in which Americans who get accustomed to lying on the couch watching TV while consuming alcohol and opioids transition seamlessly to SSDI (see “Long-Term Joblessness and Disability Benefits Receipt” (ssa.gov): “At 20 years after their job loss (voluntary or involuntary), these workers had a 25 percentage point higher likelihood of receiving DI or SSI benefits”).

Could it be, then, that to replace the Americans who stop working we will need to grow the population to 400 million or so? (we don’t have an Australia/New Zealand/Canada-style policy favoring working-age skilled immigrants so we will probably need 10-20 immigrants to replace each skilled American who has gone into SSDI/opioids or conventional retirement) And then, when the next plague hits (evolution may just be a theory, but it seems to produce a steady supply of new viruses…), we’ll get into a double secret panic regarding hospital capacity.

Related:

  • When Swedish infidels do business in the U.S… the IKEA Covid-19 page says “we have made the decision to furlough hourly U.S. co-workers in store locations and our Service Office effective April 19, 2020. This will allow our hourly co-workers, who are no longer able to work due to closures, to apply for expanded unemployment benefits.”
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God of Shutdown is Punishing Belarus

by philg

“DESPITE ONE OF WORST CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAKS IN EUROPE, BELARUS REFUSES TO CANCEL MILITARY PARADE” (Newsweek, May 6):

Belarus will continue to hold its annual military parade this week, despite experiencing one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe.

According to a tracker provided by Johns Hopkins University, as of Tuesday, Belarus had 7,000 confirmed cases of the virus and at least 103 deaths.

103 deaths? In a country of 9.5 million, that’s “one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe”? Wouldn’t Belgium, with 8,000 deaths out of a population of 11.5 million, be a better candidate for “worst”? Or Switzerland, with nearly 1,500 deaths and a population of 8.6 million?

What could account for the journalist and editors at Newsweek describing Belarus as a Covid-19 disaster area?

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic that has impacted countries across the world, Belarus has remained one of the only European nations to not impose a lockdown, to fight the spread of the virus.

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Coronapanic proved Greta Thunberg right

by philg

“Greta Thunberg to UN: ‘You’ve stolen my childhood with your empty words'” (DW, September 23, 2019):

“You come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” a visibly angry Thunberg told the high-level audience gathered for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing,” thundered the 16-year-old Swedish girl, who has galvanized youth across the world to mobilize against climate change.

This was a debatable point at the time, but just six months later children around the world were cut off from their playgrounds, their friends, and their schools (i.e., most of their “childhood”)! Bizarrely, one of the only countries where this did not happen is Sweden, home of infidels who reject the True Church of Shutdown.

So… Greta Thunberg might turn out to be wrong regarding atmospheric physics, just as the academic researchers who’ve gotten grants for climate modeling may turn out to be wrong (Cato article on a paywalled Nature paper). But I think she got the generational dynamics correct! Given the chance to cut their personal risk of contracting Covid-19 by a percentage point or two, older adults had no difficulty deciding to rob children of their childhood. (And when coronapanic is over, it will be time to for Boomers to go shopping for a new pavement-melting SUV!)

Readers: What’s your best guess as to when children get their childhood back? Folks here in thoroughly plagued Massachusetts are saying that they do not expect schools to reopen in September. The general public will demand protection from child-to-child spreading, even if there are few examples of this documented by the countries that are good at contact tracing. Teacher unions will seek to keep the 100% pay/5% hours/0% commute system that is currently working for them. Children will not get a vote. New York City is saying “50/50” on whether they reopen.

Related:

  • NYT on Denmark’s April reopening of schools: “instead of arriving through a single entrance, pupils must enter through several side doors, depending on the location of their classroom.” (here in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the school that is about to be torn down and rebuilt ($110 million for 440 town-resident kids) actually has a door from every classroom to the outside; this was eliminated in the new design on the grounds that it would make the school a more defensible fortress against an armed attacker (if the students couldn’t get out except through a central hallway?), so the new school building, in addition to having a lot less fresh air (“Net Zero”) won’t be as ready for plague times)
  • “Greta Thunberg is donating $100,000 to help children affected by coronavirus pandemic” (CNN)
  • the Swiss health ministers say that “scientists had concluded that young children did not transmit the virus” and therefore they’re reopening schools; righteous American climate change #resisters will say “the science isn’t settled” on this one? (BBC)
  • “Should schools reopen? Kids’ role in pandemic still a mystery” (Science, May 4, 2020) (but there is no mystery to the paychecks that keep arriving in adult teachers’ and school administrators’ mailboxes!)
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Your lockdown may vary: Senior Epidemiologist Edition

by philg

From last month, https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/15/your-lockdown-may-vary/:

Are we actually all in this together? I talked to four friends from the aviation world in the last few days. One is isolated on 40 acres of oceanfront with 12,000 square feet of interior space, a dock with a sailboat and a power boat (not in the water yet this season), jogging trails, a tennis court, a hotel-size home gym, etc. One is isolated on 90 acres of ocean inlet with more than 8,000 square feet of interior space, a pool, a tennis court, a dock with multiple boats. One is on 20 acres of oceanfront over in Europe (in a country that is smart enough to do load balancing of patients to hospitals). One is in a city in a southern state with ample health system capacity. He’s on more than 2 acres with more than 13,000 square feet of interior space.

(I found out later than my friend on 2 acres also owns 200 acres of land a 15-minute drive away and goes there for dog walks.)

What about the epidemiologists who are promoting lockdowns for the benefit of the general public? I previously noted “Shutdown decisions are made by people with no skin in the game; when would they ever decide to reopen?”

Now it seems that at least one epidemiologist is involved with some skin… “Imperial scientist Neil Ferguson whose advice led to lockdown being introduced QUITS government role after ‘breaking the restrictions to meet his married lover'” (Daily Mail):

  • Prof Ferguson has been a vocal supporter of lockdown, continually telling the public to follow the restrictions
  • However, he has now admitted he allowed his married lover to travel across London to visit him at least twice
  • Antonia Staats, 38, lives with her husband, in his 30s, and two children in a £1.9 million house in south London

The tabloids used to have to make up stuff like this!

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Deplatforming Coronaplague Heretics

by philg

Amazon has an advertising affiliate program. There is an easy way to get deplatformed that is highlighted in red at the top of the page:

As a reminder, we ask all of our associates to exercise good judgment when covering COVID-19 and refer readers to the CDC website for accurate information. For more information, see the FTC’s guidance around Coronavirus claims. As a reminder, advertising with unsubstantiated claims is a violation of law and a violation of the Operating Agreement and may result in account closure, including withholding fees.

Here’s a partial screen shot:

Soo… you can disagree with the official CDC line (which one though? “Don’t wear a mask” or “wear a mask”?), but your ad-supported web site will become a charity project.

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