Abortionomics in Maskachusetts

by philg

In a recent phone call regarding correct Christmas Card mailing addresses, a nurse friend in Boston told me that she’s moonlighting providing anesthesia at an abortion care clinic. Anesthesia is required starting at about 10 weeks of gestation and the clinic provides abortion care to pregnant people who are up to 24 weeks pregnant. She said that they are especially passionate about providing abortion care to pregnant people who’ve come from states where abortion care is illegal or unavailable in practice at the 24-week mark.

Who decides how long the pregnant person has been a pregnant person? “That’s done with a combination of ultrasound looking at bone sizes and also asking the patient about the date of the last period.” In other words, depending on what the ultrasound shows, the clinic might refuse to provide abortion care to a pregnant person who has been pregnant for only 23 weeks or, if the customer gives a later-than-reality last-period date, to a pregnant person who has been pregnant for more than 24 weeks, which is still perfectly legal in Maskachusetts:

(Note the “mental health” judgment item.)

What’s the revenue picture for the clinic? “Prices start at $600,” she replied. What about for abortion care at 23.99 weeks? “I think it is about $3,500.”

What’s her daughter up to? I learned about various biomedical internships for the college undergrad. “She wants to go to medical school and become an ob-gyn.” I told my nurse friend about our neighbor who does IVF and who tells people if their insurance won’t cover the astronomical cost to get a job at Starbucks where they’ll be immediate covered. “Oh, my daughter wants to work on the other side of O.B. She wants to work in an abortion clinic where women [hateful term quoted; her language, not mine] come from out of state if they can’t get abortions in their own state.”

Related:

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Boston Tea Party anniversary

by philg

Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Some perspective from the Brits:

The ‘Sons of Liberty’ were essentially the henchmen of the rich smuggler-barons who were faced with ruin

At 6:30 p.m. on Thursday December 16, 1773, a group of between 100 and 150 Americans raided three East India Company merchantmen moored in Boston and threw 92,000 lb of tea (worth $1.7 million in today’s terms) into the harbor. A central part of the American founding story, the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party is being commemorated this month as a key moment when patriotic Americans fought back against the greedy British and their oppressive taxation policies that forced up prices on commodities such as tea, which in turn led to the American Revolution.

Far from increasing the price for American consumers, the taxed East India tea was going to be sold for about half the $1 that they were then paying for a pound of tea. The only people who were going to lose out were the smuggler-barons of Boston, New York and Pennsylvania who employed the “Patriots” who attacked the vessels. As the historian Charles Arnold-Baker has pointed out, “The Boston Tea Party was essentially a private operation for the benefit of racketeers,” rather than the action of selfless citizens.

When the first of the three ships carrying tea arrived at Boston harbor on November 28, 1773, the merchant-smugglers had no trouble in whipping up a mob, largely made up of their own employees, to prevent the tea being offloaded, which by law had to happen within twenty days of docking. The duty had to be paid on offloading, otherwise customs had the right to seize it. If that happened it would have to be sold on the quayside for knockdown prices, and the Boston merchant-smugglers would have lost the lucrative tea part of their business. So the next day they called a mass meeting of the so-called Sons of Liberty, demanding that the tea be sent back to England without the tax being paid.

Where do Elizabeth Warren and Justin Trudeau come into the story?

In the highly coordinated assault on December 16, three well-organized teams, dressed as Mohawk Native Americans and using soot for “blackface” in order to increase deniability in court, raided the ships, hatcheted open the 342 chests of tea and threw it overboard, all in under two hours. The efficiency of the operation points to it having been organized in advance by the Boston merchant-smugglers, rather than being a popular uprising of the outraged citizenry, as the American founding myth claims.

The articles asks a big question:

The Boston Tea Party was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. But far from being a spontaneous uprising of ordinary Americans angry at high taxes and prices, as it has been portrayed for a quarter of a millennium, it was, in fact, a well-organized assault by smuggler-barons and their henchmen against a government attempt to halve the price of one of New England’s major commodities. One wonders what would have happened if only Governor Hutchinson had put an adequate armed guard on the ships.

Given the enormous potential for financial gain of getting around the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which limited how much land the evil white European settlers could steal from the noble indigenous tribes, I don’t think a failure to have a Tea Party would have changed the course of history, as the article suggests.

Illustration of the inflation-free economy that we’ve been able to build under self-governance:

Related:

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Gavin Newsom is the best-qualified governor to serve as U.S. President…

by philg

…. because he has experience with running a government at a structural deficit, something that states are theoretically not allowed to do.

California has been in the news lately for its forecast $68 billion budget deficit, about 30 percent of total spending by the state government and about $7,000 per significant taxpayer (in just one year) if we assume that only about 10 million Californians are earning enough to live an unsubsidized life. The report that is the basis for these media stories has a more interesting figure, though:

Like the federal government, the California state government is set up to spend more than it collects in tax revenue. California can’t print money the way that the Feds do. I’m wondering what their theory is for how they can run deficits indefinitely. Do they believe that the U.S. is in a huge slump right now and better economic times are around the corner once another 10 or 20 million undocumented cross the border? And that migrant-fueled economic boom will increase tax revenue to move the state back into surplus? In the previous version of this report, the analysts said that the budget had to be balanced every year (but reserves can still be spent to allow a deficit?):

What’s the near-term solution that the legislature’s analysts propose? Cutting spending on education! I can’t see a proposed long-term solution in these documents, though.

Oh yes, let’s also look at how good the best and brightest humans are at economic prophecy. The previous year’s report forecast a deficit for 2024-5… of about $17 billion.

Related:

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The profitable side of DEI

by philg

“Former Facebook employee pleads guilty to stealing $4 million” (CNN):

An Atlanta woman pleaded guilty to stealing more than $4 million from Facebook while she was an executive at the company.

Barbara Furlow-Smiles who worked as a lead strategist, global head of employee resource groups and diversity engagement at Facebook, Inc., now known as Meta, from about January 2017 to September 2021 according to U.S. Attorney Northern District of Georgia Ryan K. Buchanan’s Office.

“This defendant abused a position of trust as a global diversity executive for Facebook to defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission,” said Buchanan in a statement.

That last paragraph is my favorite. The U.S. government employee implies that the mission of DEI, despite its having been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, is sacred.

The other interesting aspect is that she stole $4 million via expense account fraud. Where can the rest of us get an expense account big enough that $1 million per year in fraud isn’t detected for more than 4 years?

Loosely related… a Maskachusetts Congresswoman says that the Supreme Court is “corrupt”:

Maybe this is why federal employees can ignore the Court’s ruling that the principal objectives and methods of DEI are unconstitutional?

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Costco Auto Program: mostly a scam

by philg

Our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey’s lease expires in January 2024. Due to the mostly peaceful inflation that the government says does not exist, leasing a replacement would cost nearly 2X what we’ve been paying on our lease whose built-in interest rate is close to 0%. I’m trying to decide whether to buy the car from Honda for about $25,000 or trade it in on a new one (where “new” means “identical to the 2021 version”). I requested a quote from the Costco Auto Program, figuring that the result would be a simple fraud-free number. Here’s what came back from the local dealer that is the Costco affiliate:

The dealer adds in about $4,000 in profit via some worthless accessories for $4,225 and then tacks on $999 as a straight-up “dealer fee” in addition to an “agency fee” of $99 (either of these could be $5,000, right?). On the third hand, there is a note about the accessories being discounted by 75 percent and a bizarre calculation that adds up to more than $73,000 (Cybertruck territory!).

What is the value of going through Costco if the result is having to sort through this multi-layered fraud and being delivered a car that has been disfigured by the dealer? It looks as though Costco negotiates a discount off MSRP and then the dealer is free to add back in as much profit as it wants to with accessories and fees. Costco could negotiate a price of $10 for the Odyssey and the dealer would still be able to charge $45,000 or $75,000 or whatever other price it felt like.

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What we can learn from Claudine Gay’s PhD thesis (when Blacks are elected, whites should move)

by philg

I found Claudine Gay’s PhD thesis, which has been in the news recently, on ProQuest (locked down tightly so that peasants can’t get access, but free to academic elites… and me). Here’s part of the abstract:

The last part is interesting, if true: “Where African-Americans enjoy political prominence, race becomes the primary lens through which blacks and whites, alike, interpret and experience politics. The end result is an electorate polarized in attitudes, in political preferences, and in political involvement.”

The thesis was completed in 1997. Can we at least give President Gay credit for being a successful prophetess?

What’s in the conclusion?

The only certainty in regards to [Black] constituents is that when it comes to winning the black vote, black incumbents always secure a larger proportion than do other incumbents.

At least some Americans vote purely based on candidate skin color. This supports my previously stated theory that Republicans should run only Black female candidates if they want to win elections. Gay suggests that Democrats, at least as of 1997, could do best by picking white progressives:

The significance of black congressional representation is best measured in white constituents alienated from politics, and white votes lost to Republican challengers.

A white stooge could do everything that Black Americans might want, but without causing white Democrats to stay home on election day or, worse, vote for a Republican. I’m not sure that this is true in 2023, however. First, we have the phenomenon of Barack Obama, which shows that 21st century white Americans, including Republicans, are more than happy to vote for a candidate who identifies as Black. Second, we have vote-by-mail, which requires only a slight amount of engagement for a vote. But perhaps Democrats are being guided to some extent by Claudine Gay’s thesis. Joe Biden and his fellow senior citizen Senator Ed Markey both appear to be white, yet they advocate for discrimination against whites far beyond what, according to the Supreme Court, the Constitution allows.

Part of the conclusion doesn’t make sense to me. The U.S. is huge, far larger than the people who dreamed up our political system could ever have imagined and with the central government in D.C. taking a much bigger role than was ever imagined (via the magic of the Interstate Commerce clause). Except for some billionaires, nobody in the U.S. has representation at the federal level.

For whites, black congressmen compromise the representational experience: they are considered less sympathetic and less helpful to the constituent, and less active in serving the district. Even white constituents who share their representative’s party affiliation are unhappy with the quality of representation they receive. The disapproval only increases over time….

In a country of 336 million (or 346+ million?), any peasant who says “my congressman/woman cares about me” is delusional and that was also true in 1997 (population 273 million; all of the increase due to low-skill immigration). Still, if what was true in 1997 is still true and if we believe Claudine Gay (and/or the sources from which she drew), white people can make themselves happier by moving out of places where Blacks dominate politics. Instead of trying to fit in at an Ayanna Pressley rally in Maskachusetts, for example, a constituent could move to tax-free New Hampshire and be represented by Chris Pappas, Harvard graduate and white guy:

(saves 5-9% income tax and 16% state estate tax, resulting in children who are 40% wealthier)

The #Science of DEI says that it is important for people in victimhood groups to be surrounded by authority figures who “look like me”. Claudine Gay’s PhD thesis found that this is also true for white people. When possible, based on Wikipedia, they should move out of California and New Jersey due to high tax rates combined with Black senators, and out of Al Green‘s Houston district and up to The Woodlands.

Loosely related…

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New York Times: immigrants choke out the natives

by philg

Diversity is our strength until it arrives in the Northeast, say the elites. Eric Adams again? No. From the New York Times, November 28, 2023:

The Connecticut River faces a crisis: An aggressive invasive plant that grows in thick underwater mats is spreading swiftly.

It chokes out native plants, changes the water’s chemical balance and raises its temperature. It ensnares boaters and slows the river’s flow, which heightens flood risks and makes an ideal nursery for mosquitoes. And it is on the move: The plant, a new strain of hydrilla, was discovered in several other bodies of water in Connecticut this year.

Hydrilla, many strains of which originated in Asia, first appeared in the American South decades ago before spreading through much of the country.

The Huntington Library in Pasadena, California was keeping kids (snail kids) in cages:

Speaking of the Huntington, their cactus garden (November 16, 2023):

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Who loves aviation and Boston weather in January?

by philg

Our MIT ground school class happens January 9-11, 2024. Why not come to Boston and spend three days learning everything that the FAA wants Private pilot certificate holders to know, plus some of the engineering behind the facts?

For this year, although MIT is not Ivy League, I’m going to try to apply standard Ivy League polices. You can be expelled from the class if you misgender anyone, but there will be no problem if you call for the elimination of Israel and the killing of all Jews (unless “the speech turns into conduct” says the Penn president). Please keep in mind that my pronouns are Absolutely/Fabulous. Depending on your financial circumstances, the course may be available at a $330,920 discount from the normal $330,920 cost of attending MIT for four years. Simply send a financial disclosure statement listing all of your checking accounts, your Social Security Number, and your online banking usernames/passwords to my records department in Lagos, Nigeria.

The student who scores highest on the final exam will win a new Tesla Cybertruck with a custom wrap:

Depending on your skin color, you might be invited to a party hosted by the Mayor of Boston:

A Wu administration official, on behalf of the mayor, mistakenly sent all Boston city councilors an email Tuesday inviting them to a holiday party that was meant exclusively for “electeds of color,” prompting an apology and mixed reactions.

Denise DosSantos, the mayor’s director of City Council relations, told the body’s “honorable members” that, “on behalf of Mayor Michelle Wu,” she was cordially inviting each of them “and a guest to the Electeds of Color Holiday Party on Wednesday, Dec. 13 at 5:30 p.m. at the Parkman House, 33 Beacon St.”

Approximately 15 minutes later, however, DosSantos sent out a follow-up email to city councilors, apologizing for the prior email, which was apparently only meant for those who were invited. The body includes seven white councilors and six of color.

“I wanted to apologize for my previous email regarding a Holiday Party for tomorrow,” DosSantos, a Cape Verdean Black woman, wrote. “I did send that to everyone by accident, and I apologize if my email may have offended or came across as so. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.”

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Best Christmas gift ideas?

by philg

What are your best Christmas gift ideas?

If your friend needs to be reminded that Snoopy was gay, how about this rainbow watch from Timex?

Maybe your friend is a university president and wants to know what kinds of plagiarism policies to put in place and whether to organize daily official pro-Palestinian protests. You could give him/her/zir/them a $9,900 gift certificate to this “Harvard Seminar for New Presidents”:

Perhaps your friend is a Democrat and would like a complete collection of videos in which Susanna Gibson stars? “Her Online Sex Life Was Exposed. She Lost Her Election. Now She’s Speaking Out.” (Politico) is curious. The Virginia Democrat was selling access to her streaming videos. Wouldn’t the correct headline be “Her Online Sex Business…”? Amazon was not started as an “online book life”. Carvana is not an “online car life”.

(You don’t want your friend downloading Democrats’ videos via BitTorrent. This can lead to a lawsuit for copyright infringement because, apparently, the BitTorrent system makes it trivial for a publisher to get everyone’s IP addresses.)

What if your friend is a Republican? Make a donation to the Ron DeSantis campaign on his/her/zir/their behalf. (Why the inclusive pronouns? If New Yorkers can chant “Queer, trans, no peace on stolen land!” in a pro-Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) rally then a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community can be a Republican.)

We’ve been getting a lot of use out of our discontinued Ninja Foodi FD101 pressure cooker (5 quarts, which seems to be sufficient 95 percent of the time with meals for 4-6 people). The upscale replacement is neater because it has just one lid, but it is also kind of huge: the $350 OL701 (8 quarts; Amazon reviews suggest that the innovative lid may not be easy to clean). The manufacturer’s blurb says “steam and crisp at the same time” so maybe it works like a $8,000 built-in steam oven for roasting chicken. Maybe the best option is the FD302, which holds 6.5 quarts and is still available new but is no longer offered on the Ninja web site (so it is actually discontinued?). That’s a taller version of what we have, I think. These have lots of buttons and modes so it is kind of like programming to use them.

Do you need the expensive/huge OL701? Here are some excerpts from the inspiration guide:

Since Americans get less numerate every year, the chicken recipe doesn’t ask the owner to set a target internal temperature, but rather to tell the machine “I’m cooking chicken.”

We’ve used the FD101 every day or two for more than a year and it hasn’t failed, but maybe it will and then we can justify upgrading to this even-more-complex marvel!

Given how much smarter and cheaper these countertop devices are than built-in appliances, I wonder if kitchen designs should be updated. Instead of a huge amount of space devoted to heavy industrial-size industrial-weight built-in appliances, shelves and systems that can facilitate the storage and use of these inexpensive super-intelligent constantly-improving countertop machines. Perhaps keep one big (steam!) oven for the Thanksgiving turkey and 2 or 3 induction burners, one of them super powerful, for cooking pasta. The rest of the kitchen can be optimized for a countertop smart oven/air fryer, a multi-/pressure-cooker, a countertop grill, a purpose-built 700-degree pizza oven, a waffle iron, etc. Maybe the ovens can go on shelves where the built-in double oven used to be, for example.

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Second write-down for Gillette after the Toxic Masculinity and transgender ads

by philg

Loyal readers may recall A/B tests here in which the Dorco Pace 7 proved slightly superior to anything that Gillette offers. Other brands of razors were found to be grossly inferior. Background:

P&G wrote down the value of their $54 billion Gillette purchase by $8 billion after the Toxic Masculinity and transgender ads. The Wall Street Journal recently reported a $1.3 billion additional charge:

It looks as though Gillette is still stuck on the same 5-blade system that I tested in 2019, though it has been renamed.

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