Coronapanic will usher in the Great Age of Convertibles?

by philg

Fight the plague by driving with the top down?

Now that things are open in most states (not here in Massachusetts, though! We liked Months 1, 2, and 3 of Shutdown so much we’re going into Month 4.), people have a reason to get in the car and drive. I wonder if convertibles will become more popular as a way of reducing coronaplague. If you have to drive with a non-family member, just put the top down first.

Suppose that you’re stuck in traffic on America’s roads built for 150 million and now serving 330 million. If everyone is in a convertible with the top down then everyone is breathing on everyone else (not okay unless at a BLM protest, right?). Maybe that problem could be solved by rolling up all of the windows? Now it is like being a grocery store cashier: you’re protected by a clear barrier.

What about exploiting a height advantage? To avoid any virus exhaled by someone stopped next to you at a light, try to have a taller vehicle. If he/she/ze/they bring a Miata, you bring a Mini convertible. If he/she/ze/they bring a Mini convertible, you bring an SUV with the top cut off. If he/she/ze/they bring an SUV with the top cut off, you bring an SUV that has been jacked up before the top was cut off.

My Facebook feed is now packed with panic regarding coronavirus infections that are occurring post-reopening in various states. This is exactly what “science” told us would happen under our March 2020 dogma (example). And it is exactly what Angela Merkel told us to expect. But somehow people are treating it as new information.

One thing that is odd is that people are refusing to consider adapting. People who live in tiny San Francisco dwellings say that they are proud to wear masks all the time and make sure that their only connection to the rest of humanity is Internet. They express pride in not being “selfish” by going out and/or going unmasked. Example:

I feel very lucky in San Francisco and the bay area. SF protocols have been very strict and remain so and there has been only 44 deaths out of 800,000. We’re starting outdoor dining this weekend but not much more. And masks are required if you are within 30 feet of anyone outside (not just 6). Goal is to set culture of mask wearing before things open more. I have seen too many Americans online complaining about mask wearing as if it’s an imposition. I totally agree about too much entitlement as you note and very selfish. I hope we keep this mask requirement for quite a while!

Why does she stay, though? She could have a bigger house in Wyoming, the same Internet, zero income tax, and be as isolated as she wants to be (though does not have to be, since Wyoming is mostly reopened, including for school).

At least until the fearful are confident that coronavirus has burned its way through the U.S. population and/or there is an approved vaccine, why wouldn’t people without a job that requires physical presence seek to move to places where life (and driving) can be conducted outdoors?

Readers: What convertibles do we need? Personally, I want a five-seat convertible, but there is nothing on the market except for one Jeep. Given the height issue discussed above, it would also be awesome to have a topless SUV or at least minivan. At the risk of being tarred with the label of “Tesla fan-boy/girl/zirl/they”, I have to say that electric drive would be more valuable in a convertible than in a regular car. When going slowly downwind there is no exhaust to be blown back into the seating area. It should be easier to keep the cabin quiet if there are no explosions in cylinders.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Bystander training for physicians

by philg

The author of Medical School 2020 said that he was going to be taking “bystander training.” I responded with “So you’ll know what to do if you see a car accident, like Tom Cruise?” It turned out to be something different:

We are excited to bring Bystander Training to [the school]. This program was built by [a person with a female-typical first name and degrees in psychology and women’s studies] and designed to train citizens to safely intercede when they see another individual at risk of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault. This evidence-based program is regarded highly as one avenue through which sexual harassment and sexual assault can be successful combatted.

This training will prove helpful not only in your interpersonal interactions privately, but also in your interpersonal interactions professionally. Unfortunately, sexual harassment and sexual assault are found in every setting. Learning how to navigate extremely challenging moments in time can prove invaluable to everyone involved.

This training is required for all M1, M2, and M3 students.

[signature from an administrator with a female-typical first name]

Full post, including comments

To understand the American black experience, talk to a white school administrator

by philg

Confused by the Black Lives Matter protests? If my inbox is anything to go by, our millionaire white school administrators are here to help!

From Rafael Reif, the president of MIT:

The death of George Floyd and the events unfolding in Minneapolis are deeply disturbing in themselves. And of course, they come on the heels of highly charged incidents, from Georgia to New York, that highlight yet again the tragic persistence of racism and systemic injustice in the United States.

I know that the pain of these events is especially intense for certain members of our community, beginning with those who are African American and of African descent, though certainly not ending there. And I know that, in this time of tension around the pandemic and rising strains in US-China relations, others in our community are also suffering distinctive forms of harassment and discrimination.

In the days and months to come, I would like us to find meaningful ways to come together to work on these challenges, for ourselves and for our society. I have asked John Dozier, our Institute Community and Equity Officer, to guide us in this effort.

(MIT has already hinted that undergraduates won’t be welcomed back to campus any time soon, so comfort will be provided via Zoom (perhaps with the help of the Chinese referenced in the email?)

From Larry Bacow, president of Harvard:

In the midst of this incomprehensible loss, our nation has once again been shocked by the senseless killing of yet another black person—George Floyd—at the hands of those charged with protecting us. Cities are erupting. Our nation is deeply divided. Leaders who should be bringing us together seem incapable of doing so. [i.e., Trump is bad]

As I think about the challenges that we face today, I return again and again to what I believe:

I believe in the goodness of the people of this country—and in their resilience.

I believe that all of us, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, whatever our race or ethnicity, want a better life for our children. [if he hasn’t talked to a Republican since starting his career in Academia, how does he know what a Republican might want?]

I believe that America should be a beacon of light to the rest of the world.

I believe that our strength as a nation is due in no small measure to our tradition of welcoming those who come to our shores in search of freedom and opportunity, individuals who repay us multiple times over through their hard work, creativity, and devotion to their new home. [remember that immigrants are good]

I believe in the Constitution, the separation of powers, the First Amendment—especially the right to a free and independent press that holds those in power accountable, and to a free and independent judiciary.

The last one is interesting. The First Amendment is apparently not real, since it is something that one either “believes in” or does not. Dr. Bacow is also picking and choosing here. He doesn’t mention the First Amendment right to assemble, which healthy young people have been denied now for months by state governors’ lockdowns.

The promotion of low-skill immigration is interesting because it is black Americans who pay the heaviest price when low-skill immigrants are welcomed by coastal elites such as Dr. Bacow (see “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” for a Harvard professor’s explanation of how low-skill immigration results in a $500 billion/year transfer of wealth from low-skill Americans, like George Floyd, to rich Americans, like Dr. Bacow).

In our nearly all-white suburb, the school superintendent sends us an email with a subject line of “Opportunities to Stand Against Racism”:

Mayor Walsh has asked Boston residents to hold a moment of silence for 8 minutes 46 seconds at 3:45pm in honor of George Floyd. I invite each of us to take part in this symbolic act as a stand against racism and demonstration of support to our community members impacted by acts of violence and racism.

As school has now been shut down for three months, we’ll be standing against racism on the two-acre zoning minimum lots that serve to exclude black Americans from our “community”…

Despite there being only one school in the town (K-8 for about 440 town-resident students), in addition to the above-referenced superintendent and her assistants, we also have two school principals. They sent out a joint email “K-8: We Stand Together Against Racism”:

Students, staff, families and community members have joined in conversations this week to talk about racism. We are committed to speaking out and creating change, and to educating ourselves and our school community so that we can cause true change. This video is the collective voice of the Lincoln School educators: We Stand Together Against Racism.

One change that they’ve created recently is committing to building the most expensive school, per student, ever constructed in the United States. This will raise property taxes to the highest levels in Massachusetts, thus creating an additional barrier to lower-income people of color who might want to live here (can they afford $20,000/year in property tax on a median house?).

One irony regarding the new school is that they couldn’t figure out a way to build the new building somewhere on the 70-acre campus other than where the current school is. So half the students (K-4) will be crammed into temporary trailers for three years while the site of the existing building is worked on and the 5-8 students are shuffled from one part of the building to the other.

The existing school, either built or renovated in 1994, has an exterior door in every classroom and massive banks of windows that can be opened for fresh plague-free air. The trailers appear to offer less than half the square footage per student and minimal doors and windows. Given that Americans refuse to believe the Europeans that the science is settled regarding young children not being a significant source of coronaplague, it is unclear how the trailers can ever be occupied.

Here’s a recent photo from an East Coast Aero Club helicopter. The existing school building is in the foreground, an L-shaped building. The trailers are in the middle of the L.

A close-up of the trailers, showing the lack of windows and doors and the generally more compact ideal virus-breeding environment.

So… not only did they contract for the construction at the very peak of the Boston real estate market ($110 million total cost; roughly $250,000 per town-resident student), but they will be trying to cram students into a reduced square footage less-ventilated space just in time for Wave #2 of a global coronavirus pandemic.

Related:

  • AerialBoston, Tony Cammarata’s site (he took the pictures)
Full post, including comments

Cardiology Shutdown in Massachusetts

by philg

I met with a cardiologist friend last night. He says that he is working roughly 60 percent as much as he was pre-coronapanic. “Where we would do five procedures per day, we can now do only two,” he said. “That leaves enough time for deep cleaning between patients. Also, they’re reserving 20 percent of the rooms in the hospital for Covid patients, just in case.”

He and his colleagues have already had multiple patients die while waiting for heart valve procedures that were considered “elective”. (see “StayHomeSaveLives or #StayHomeTradeLives?” and the link to the NEJM article) He gets paid in full despite the reduction in work and billing, and is at a vulnerable age for Covid-19 (70s), but is nonetheless anti-shutdown: “It was only a few years ago when parents were supposed to make sacrifices for their children. Now it is the other way around.”

Today is #ShutDownSTEM day. Plenty of righteous posts on Facebook from friends who are professors of various flavors of nerdism. They’ve been sitting on their butts for three months now, taking baby steps in the direction of online teaching (nowhere near as competently as faculty at Western Governor’s University, which has been online since the mid-1990s). Today they will sit on their butts even more firmly? It has been a struggle for me to refrain from asking “How could you possibly do less than you’ve been doing since mid-March?”

(Not all professionals are idle. A friend Facebook messaged me today about some divorce litigators who are fully engaged on an issue of life insurance. The defendant father wants to have the beneficiaries of his life insurance be a trust for the children (tweens). The plaintiff mother wants to ensure that the life insurance cash is paid to her, to compensate her for any reduction in profits from alimony and child support. The parties are divorced, but the litigation lives on (legal fees on both sides paid for by the father’s earnings that would have been the children’s inheritance).)

Speaking for myself, I participated in a Zoom meeting regarding some health records data analysis today, but all of the coding was in SQL so I am not sure if that qualifies as “STEM”! Later today it will be time to fly the helicopter, which can be considered a “STEM” activity by American journalists when a member of an officially recognized victim group is at the controls. One of the participants in the call is a third-year medical student. He won’t be able to do a clinical rotation until about a month from now (i.e., he will miss at least three months of clinical training).

From a neighbor’s front yard, “Science is Real” (but also not so important that you’d want to do it every day?):

From a recent visit to the doctor’s office in Concord, Massachusetts to get some blood drawn in advance of a regular checkup:

(any of 50+ gender IDs is okay, but we will depict, recognize, and give priority to only two?)

Full post, including comments

Team America saved our country from Covid-19?

by philg

One of the finest achievements of American cinema, Team America: World Police, features a group of heroes who have one yardstick for determining success or failure: the number of terrorists killed. The movie opens with the team declaring victory over a small group of jihadis in Paris. They’re satisfied with their results, but the citizens of Paris are unhappy about all of the city’s monuments being destroyed.

Now that our cities are in ruins, I’m wonder if the same logic has been applied in 2020 regarding coronaplague. Americans now care about one thing only: the number of people killed by Covid-19. It doesn’t matter how old or sick these people were before coronavirus got them. Every life that can be saved from Covid-19 is worth an unlimited amount of (a) deaths due to withheld non-Covid health care, (b) family and life destruction due to unemployment, poverty, and kids kicked out of school and imprisoned in small apartments with a miscellaneous collection of adults (“Fewer than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage.”), (c) dollars borrowed that the children being denied educations, playgrounds, and friends will have to pay back, etc.

Isn’t it the same in Europe, you might ask? No! They took a more balanced approach. Yes, coronaplague was bad, but as soon as they figured out that schools weren’t primary drivers of plague, they reopened their schools (except in Sweden, where the schools never closed). Maybe the Europeans will suffer a handful of additional Covid-19-tagged deaths are a result, but they are looking at more than a single number to measure how their nations are doing. How about India? A brief lockdown followed by a swift reopening. Brazil? “sorry for all the dead, but that’s everyone’s destiny.” (even Trump can’t say stuff like this!)

Readers: Was Team America prescient regarding our national tunnel vision? We have a slightly lower death rate nationwide compared to Sweden (where I live in Massachusetts, though, the death rate is more than 2X never-shut Sweden’s, as we enter Month 4 of shutdown).

Full post, including comments

Are the BLM protesters protesting against their own actions?

by philg

Friends on Facebook are posting support for the Black Lives Matter protests going on around the U.S. A few brave souls post selfies from the (daytime) protests themselves (the vast majority prefer to show their support by updating their Facebook status!).

My stupid question for today is why city-dwellers need to protest to obtain the changes that they seek. The typical American city in which protests have occurred is ruled by a single political party voted for by a population that overwhelmingly identifies with that one party. If the people who live in a city want a different mayor, want the police department to be disbanded and started over from scratch, etc., why didn’t they already just vote for that? What obstacle was in their path?

Consider a few of the cities that have been in the news lately. My friends on Facebook are saying that the protests are necessary #BecauseRepublicans.

If the single-party voters and politicians in the above cities want to change something, why does anyone have to protest? Why can’t they just change whatever they want to change? Nobody from a different party is opposing them.

I tried asking the Facebook righteous this question. Here are some responses;

Jack is suggesting only Republicans will make the argument that black people need to be more aggressively policed. The prediction is true (regardless of your view on the merits of the argument, because some arguments are only made by one party or the other.)

(What difference does it make what arguments Republicans put forward? Why would the Mayor or the City Council of any of the above cities listen to an argument from a Republican?)

Republicans are the Core of Trump’s supporters, White Supremacists, and folks who never questioned the most bizarre acts of Trump.

(But if those Republicans live and vote in the suburbs, how can they stop the people of Minneapolis, for example, from voting to disband the police department, fire the city employees involved with management of police, replace the mayor, hire a new police force with different objectives, etc.?)

What’s it like for folks who are just trying to live in these towns? A friend in Venice, California (on the border with Santa Monica):

LA looks like a zombie movie. Every business boarded up and spray painted. Mobs with picket signs constantly. Everyone wearing masks. Never seen more thieves in a city in my life. People attempted to rob my house on a Friday at 930p while we were home.

In the chat group, a San Francisco resident responded to the above with security camera footage of a dark-sunglasses-wearing thief sifting through the day’s Amazon and UPS deliveries on his doorstep and taking a package.

A more rural Californian responded: Your stories make me feel better about my decision to live with the plane fueled up and the guns loaded. Lucky for us we are in a highly armed gated community. My father just bought a gun for the first time since when we were in Russia in the 1990s. [She speaks with an accent, so I assume she is an immigrant.]

To all of them, a member responded “Wyoming awaits.”

Separately, from a physician friend: “I bet Canada feels like they live in the apartment above a meth lab.”

Readers: The mayors of the big cities where protests are occurring have come out to support the goals of Black Lives Matter (example from San Francisco). If almost everyone in a city agrees that particular changes need to be made, why can’t they simply make those changes?

Related:

  • “Critics denounce Black Lives Matter platform accusing Israel of ‘genocide'” (Guardian, August 2016): The policy platform titled A Vision for Black Lives, is a wide-spanning document that was drafted by more than 50 organizations known as the Movement for Black Lives. … In the Invest/Divest section of the platform, the group criticizes the US government for providing military aid to Israel. “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” the platform says. “Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.” (If the U.S. police kill only the occasional citizen while Israel is committing “genocide” against millions of Palestinians, why is BLM bothering to protest anything being done in the U.S.?)
  • L.A. Protest Draws 50,000
Full post, including comments

Star Trek misogynistic?

by philg

A friend’s Facebook status:

I just finished re-watching Star Trek (The Original Series).
WOW… every single episode is uncomfortably misogynistic.
EVERY. SINGLE. EPISODE.

He then amplified this for a friend who questioned the above statement:

in this case misogynistic does not mean “hate” so much as objectification and dismissal — In the first few episodes of the first season we hear that women are prone to more emotional outbursts than men, that they are all searching for a man to care for them, that they need a man to be self actualized.
That women can be coaxed from their command duties (commit mutiny or traitorous activity) when a man shows interest.
Even the first episode which had a female officer as second in command (With Command Pike) the female officer was shown to be lustful toward Pike at one point and catty when compared (by the butthead aliens) to the younger ensign.

Me, always trying to be helpful on social media:

You could create a new series: Woke Trek. All officers of the Starship Safe Space have PhDs in Comparative Victimhood.

Readers: What would be the ideal science fiction series for our woke time?

Full post, including comments

Epidemiologists switch from doing politics to writing science fiction

by philg

“Emergency COVID-19 measures prevented more than 500 million infections, study finds” (Berkeley News):

Emergency health measures implemented in six major countries have “significantly and substantially slowed” the spread of the novel coronavirus, according to research from a UC Berkeley team published today in the journal Nature. The findings come as leaders worldwide struggle to balance the enormous and highly visible economic costs of emergency health measures against their public health benefits, which are difficult to see.

“The last several months have been extraordinarily difficult, but through our individual sacrifices, people everywhere have each contributed to one of humanity’s greatest collective achievements,” Hsiang said. “I don’t think any human endeavor has ever saved so many lives in such a short period of time. There have been huge personal costs to staying home and canceling events, but the data show that each day made a profound difference. By using science and cooperating, we changed the course of history.”

Armed with a few lines of Excel or R code, epidemiologists had been making prophecies about what would happen 1-8 weeks into the future. Citizens would then be able to see what actually happened:

(It is not surprising that these “scientific” results proved to be false, even beyond the usual “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” factors. As no country had ever tried an American-style “shutdown” (in which citizens still meet at grocery, liquor, and marijuana stores and still party every night on Tinder), only a scientist with a letter from God would have had a prayer (so to speak) of predicting the effects of such a shutdown. The self-proclaimed “scientists” also had no data regarding how easy it was for coronavirus to spread, what percent of the population was naturally immune, etc.)

The obvious inability of “scientists” to make useful predictions is not good for the image of “science”, even if “scientists” hadn’t further brought ridicule on themselves by flip-flopping on masks and the dangers of contaminated surface transmission, telling people it was okay to gather in huge crowds for BLM protesting, and telling others to quarantine while having sex with married women who would then go back to their husband and kids.

What’s the solution? Scientists can take up the genre of alternative history science fiction.

Traditional novel: What if the Germans had won World War II? Maybe the U.S. would be governed by an authoritarian puppet president, controlled by a foreign dictator. State governors would issue stay-at-home orders that eliminated Americans First Amendment rights to assemble. Young children would be locked into small apartments, denied schooling, friends, and playgrounds. Some brave folks would #Resist by going into the streets to battle with the city governments that they themselves had elected and would soon vote to re-elect.

Science-informed novel: Look at this two-parameter mathematical model. It shows what would have happened if we hadn’t locked down like I was recommending.

The beauty of this new approach is that, as with the “What if the Germans had won?” novel, there is no way to prove the author wrong.

Full post, including comments

U.S. should approve a saline injection as a Covid-19 vaccine?

by philg

As a nation, we can’t admit our mistakes. We have never apologized to the Vietnamese for our role in the pointless and destructive Vietnam War. We have never apologized to the Russians for supporting the jihadis fighting them in Afghanistan (ultimately, of course, we fought a 19-year (so far) war against those same jihadis). So it seems safe to say that we are never going to apologize to Americans, especially to young Americans, for shutting their schools, jobs, and social life down in a futile attempt to modify the trajectory of coronavirus (against the advice of the former chief scientist of the European CDC and his colleagues in the Swedish government).

Coronavirus has already killed quite a few of the Americans who are easiest for a virus to kill: the old, the sick, those who live in ideal virus breeding grounds (New York City and Boston), etc. When the virus comes back in the fall, as Dr/Saint Fauci says it will, rather than admit that shutdown was a dumb idea, born of panic, how about the following strategy:

  • approve a saline injection as a “coronavirus vaccine” and say “like the flu vaccine, this Covid-19 shot isn’t 100 percent effective”
  • tell people “you should expect coronavirus to be a little worse than a bad flu season, perhaps killing 100,000 Americans, but also many of these will overlap with what would have been flu deaths”

Schools can stay open, social life can proceed more or less normally, businesses can run except those that depend on mass gatherings, and the American people and government never have to admit that they made mistakes in the past.

Update: Facebook friend’s comment on this post… “If a bandana is effective PPE for Covid, then a saline injection is surely an effective vaccine.”

Related:

  • 1957-58 flu (killed as many as 116,000 Americans, equivalent to about 225,000 today given that the population has nearly doubled since then)
  • 2017-2018 flu (killed an estimated 80,000 Americans)
  • “Chasing Seasonal Influenza — The Need for a Universal Influenza Vaccine” (NEJM, in which Dr. Fauci is an author): “Influenza A (H3N2) viruses predominated [in Australia], and the preliminary estimate of vaccine effectiveness against influenza A (H3N2) was only 10%.” (i.e., if we still love the flu vaccine when its effectiveness may be as low as 10 percent, why not a saline injection whose effectiveness is 0 percent?)
  • “Charlie Baker can’t admit he blew it” (Boston Herald, by 68-year-old Howie Carr): You have totally blown it with your hysterical overreaction to a crisis that was largely of your own creation. Just admit it — you panicked when you realized all those nursing-home deaths were going to be on you, and in a pathetic attempt to change the subject, you needlessly shut down the entire state. And now, like the buck-passing bureaucrat that you are, you have no idea how to climb out of this hole that you’ve dug for yourself and 6.7 million innocent citizens. … Let Maskachusetts be Massachusetts again. … Deaths among people under the age of 50: 104. Unemployed since the lockdown began: 1 million plus.
Full post, including comments

Why does Uber charge a commission on rides given by black drivers?

by philg

“Uber Eats stops charging delivery fees to black-owned restaurants” (New York Post):

In an email to customers late Thursday, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber Eats will promote black-owned restaurants on its app, and that the service will not charge delivery fees to those restaurants “for the remainder of the year.”

“I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short,” the 51-year-old CEO wrote. “I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths.”

Let’s ignore for a moment how it is just for a “black-owned restaurant” (would Dolezal’s Pub count?) to be spared Uber’s rapacious fees on December 31, 2020 and also just for a “black-owned restaurant” to be hit with those fees on January 1, 2021. (Maybe the problem of racial injustice will be completely solved by January 1?)

If it is unjust to collect fees from “black” (in Uber’s judgment) restaurant owners, how can it be just for Uber drivers who identify as “black” to give up a massive slice of the revenue collected from customers as a fee to Uber? If Uber is measuring restaurant-owner skin color and not charging those it deems to be sufficiently “black,” why isn’t Uber doing the same with drivers? Presumably a typical Uber driver has less wealth than a typical restaurant owner.

Related:

Full post, including comments