Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Mayor Eric Adams placed limits for the first time on Wednesday on how migrants arrive in New York, pushing back against continuing efforts by the governor of Texas to send tens of thousands of asylum seekers to the city.

In an executive order, Mr. Adams required charter bus companies to provide 32 hours’ advance notice of the arrival of a busload of migrants in the city and limited the times of day at which migrants can be dropped off.

The change, a year and a half into a crisis that has consumed the Adams administration, comes after 14 busloads of migrants arrived from Texas in a single night last week, the highest total recorded since the spring of 2022.

“We cannot allow buses with people needing our help to arrive without warning at any hour of day and night,” Mr. Adams said during a virtual news conference with the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, and the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston. “To be clear, this is not stopping people from coming, but about ensuring the safety of migrants and making sure they can arrive in a coordinated and orderly way.”

Companies that violate the executive order face class B misdemeanor charges, which could result in three months in jail and a $500 fine for individuals and a $2,000 fine for corporations. Buses violating the order may also be seized by the Police Department.

Under the terms of the executive order, buses can unload migrants only between 8:30 a.m. and 12 p.m., Monday through Friday. People must be dropped off at a specified location in the Times Square area or another location that city officials approve.

We are informed that low-skill migrants make us richer, but the article says that 10 percent of Denver’s budget is now devoted to housing migrants.

After the City of Chicago recently instituted similar regulations on bus companies, Texas responded by sending buses to the suburbs of Chicago instead, according to Mr. Johnson.

The buses have been “literally dropping families off in the middle of nowhere,” sowing “an incredible amount of chaos,” he said.

It is unclear if Mr. Abbott will follow a similar playbook by sending buses to places outside New York City. A spokesman for Mr. Abbott did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If that happened, Mr. Goldfein said, “that would only highlight the recklessness and total disregard for the welfare of the people who are passengers on these buses.”

I continue to be fascinated by progressives who say that Texas is a place where nobody should live, e.g., because of restrictions on abortion care, and at the same time that migrants are harmed by being provided with free transportation to Massachusetts, New York, or Illinois. Isn’t it worth a few days of sleeping in a church basement in order to enjoy a lifetime of governance by Democrats rather than suffering tyrannical Republic rule?

The New York Times ends the article by referring to becoming wealthier and culturally richer as a “crisis”:

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Sterile gloves are as effective as masks

December 27, 2023December 24, 2023 by philg

2015, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, “Unmasking the surgeons: the evidence base behind the use of facemasks in surgery”:

overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination

2023, Injury, “Risk of wound infection with use of sterile versus clean gloves in wound repair at the Emergency Department: A systematic review and meta-analysis”:

No evidence of additional protection against wound infections with the use of sterile gloves for wound repair in the ED compared to clean gloves was found.

Let’s ask Dr. ChatGPT:

Speaking of wounds, we can remember as we light the kinara this evening, for the second night of Kwanzaa the likely headwounds of the women who were hit on their heads with toasters by Professor Dr. Dr. Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., Ph.D., the creator of the holiday.

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Hierarchy of victimhood from the CDC

December 26, 2023December 24, 2023 by philg

Our celebration of Kwanzaa and the work of Professor Dr. Dr. Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., Ph.D., with and without toasters, begins today…

A Libs of Tiktok Tweet includes the following photo of a poster in a public school in Nashville, Tennessee:

Note the hierarchy of victimhood: The undocumented (listed first) are more important than Black students. Muslims are more important than those who identify as LGBTQ. Almost everyone is more important than the disabled.

Also, why does the school commit to celebrating Latinx culture, but not Muslim culture? What is stopping the school from celebrating what happens in Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen?

Where does the money to research, develop, print, and post this hierarchy come from? Your federal tax dollars via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

Here’s the glsen.org web site:

It looks like it is mostly a 2SLGBTQQIA+ organization, yet somehow they’re experts on other victimhood categories such as “undocumented” and “Black”. Their Form 990 for 2021 shows that they’re getting about $8.5 million per year in grants, perhaps part of “CDC allocated $85 million for grants requiring schools to start student-led clubs supporting LGBT youth” (The Center Square, 2022).

What if one wanted a victimhood poster without the hierarchy? How about a motorized wheel of victimhood in which the groups are arranged around the circumference? If the wheel rotates once every 7 hours, for example, that will make sure that students don’t see the same victimhood group on top every morning. I tried having my favorite artist put this together:

I’m not sure where ChatGPT got these bizarre spellings. I think that I spelled everything correctly in my prompt:

[after asking for a circular poster] Please change the poster so that the labels are only the following: Black, LGBTQ, Undocumented Immigrant, Muslim, Latinx, female, disabled

Are we seeing the HAL 9000 glitching following some circuitry removal?

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A Golden Merry Christmas

December 25, 2023December 25, 2023 by philg

Merry Christmas to all readers who celebrate and, for those who don’t, inspiration to get started celebrating…

This is “The Golden Retriever Family Christmas Tree” from the Danbury Mint. It is unclear when these were made, but the “mint” was in China according to this eBay ad. Via some research on archive.org, I found a 2006 web page offering a somewhat different version at $129.

I can’t figure out if the version at Mindy the Crippler’s vet is pre-2006 or post-2006.

Let’s hope that the Danbury Mint gets back into this important product area and that a Samoyed Christmas Tree centerpiece is an option as well.

Merry Christmas to everyone, especially the folks at archive.org!

A couple of images stolen from Facebook groups:

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If you strung your own Christmas lights, you were paid $6,000 after taxes

December 24, 2023December 24, 2023 by philg

Merry Christmas Eve!

If you want to feel better about your economic situation, here is a crew stringing lights at a neighbor’s house:

“Is that the same company that strung lights for the HOA’s clubhouse?” I asked. “They told me that their minimum fee is $5,000.” The owner of the house responded, “We’re paying $6,000.”

So… if you strung your own lights this year, that’s like being paid $6,000 extra, after tax.

Merry Christmas, indeed!

Separately, how tough would it be to build a robot that could climb a tree trunk, secure the end of a light strand at the top, and then come down while wrapping the strand around the trunk? This is a common Christmas light display for cities, hotels, and houses. It is apparently an expensive job and, without a bucket truck, a risky one. Isn’t this ripe for automation and semi-autonomy?

If we can’t have robots to string our lights, how about reengineering the lights themselves so that we can get a higher return on investment from stringing them? Any given light string should have at least 10 different themes (light colors):

Christmas (green and red)
Thanksgiving (orange, red, and yellow?)
Halloween (orange and purple)
(for Californians and Ivy League students) #FreePalestine (white, green, red, black for the Palestine flag and/or spell out “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”)
(for those practicing Jewcraft) Hanukkah (white and blue)
Ramadan
Eid al-Fitr
Islamic New Year
Holi (every color?)
Chinese New Year (red, yellow, and green)

Loosely Related:

‘Cause I’m a redneck woman
I ain’t no high class broad
I’m just a product of my raising
I say, “hey ya’ll” and “yee-haw”
And I keep my Christmas lights on
On my front porch all year long

(“Redneck Woman”, by Gretchen Wilson and John Rich (not to be confused with abortion care and lockdown advocate Gretchen Whitmer!))

The final look of the professionally-lit house:

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Lockdown skepticism as the modern French Resistance

December 23, 2023December 13, 2023 by philg

Vinay Prasad, the UCSF heretic against Faucism, recently posted the following on Twitter:

Heading back to SF from Wash U St Louis
It was great to give 4 talks over 2 days.

I hope to make at least 2 available on YouTube, & 3 on plenary session.

It was heartening to talk to so many sensible doctors. When it comes to COVID19 ppl stopped me in the halls to say…

Masking 2 year olds…
School closure…
Vaccine mandates for college kids…
Lockdowns…

were all illogical and horrific public health and they are glad I spoke up

Many agreed but the climate was too hostile for them to speak up

Is it fair to say that this is like the Resistance in France during World War II? Before 1945, nobody was a member and after 1945 it transpired that every French person had been a member of the Resistance?

(I had thought that support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) was the anti-Resistance in the sense that Palestinians polled prior to October 7 generally said that they supported Hamas, but after October 7 we were informed that no Palestinians supported Hamas. That’s still what one learns from the media and the typical Twitter feed, but, as noted in International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (and a poll result), Palestinians polled in November 2023 supported Hamas (75 percent) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (85 percent).)

Dr. Prasad is a vaccine believer: “People died by delaying the initial vaccine.” I think he means that people died because it took a few extra months to get the vaccine approved and distributed. That’s probably true for Israelis because if the vaccine been approved prior to the 2020 election, Trump would have been reelected and Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and various civilians likely wouldn’t have dared to kidnap, rape, and kill U.S. citizens for fear that the unhinged guy in the White House would push the button on them.

I still can’t figure out why we aren’t able to see the effects of the vaccine on a country-by-country basis, e.g., a lower excess death rate for a country that got vaccinated sooner. See Where is the population-wide evidence that COVID vaccines reduce COVID-tagged death rates? for a question that remains unanswered despite some studies within countries and the faith of otherwise reasonably skeptical people such as Dr. Prasad.

My own skepticism from three years ago… If COVID-19 vaccines weren’t tested on likely COVID-19 victims, how do we know that they will reduce COVID-19 deaths? (the kind of people whom SARS-CoV-2 had been killing were excluded from the vaccine trial):

Let’s have a look at the Moderna FDA paperwork. Only 3 people in the vaccine group, out of 15,208 total, died during the study (approximately 3 months; see pages 17 and 18), which tells you that Moderna picked a much healthier population with a much longer life expectancy than the kinds of people who have been tagged on death with COVID-19 positive test result. (If we assume that a typical COVID-19-tagged death is among those with a life expectancy of 4 years, we would have expected at least hundreds of deaths during a similar study of vaccination among people who really need the vaccination. Note that the Swedish data suggest that 4 years is an overestimate.)

Also three years old, but more fun… #MarkedSafe from Homemade Cookies and Crafts:

Dear Parents and Caregivers,

As we approach the December break, it is a time of year where many families and school staff like to give homemade baked goods and crafts as gifts of appreciation. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic we are going to respectfully ask to put a hold on this practice as a part of our ongoing efforts to keep everyone safe.

We have all worked hard to keep each other safe and to keep our schools open. We appreciate your willingness to find alternative ways to express your gratitude this year. A letter to the teacher with a specific thanks would be greatly appreciated!

(That was at a school for rich suburbanites. It was open with a mask order in force (later they added vaccine coercion). City school systems ostensibly serving the poor in Maskachusetts were still closed and would stay mostly closed until fall 2021.)

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ChatGPT as a productive climate scientist

December 22, 2023December 12, 2023 by philg

Some science professor friends were discussing “Surge in number of ‘extremely productive’ authors concerns scientists” (Nature Magazine):

Up to four times more researchers pump out more than 60 papers a year than less than a decade ago. Saudi Arabia and Thailand saw the sharpest uptick in the number of such scientists over the past few years, according to a preprint posted on bioRxiv on 24 November. The increase in these ‘extremely productive’ authors raises concerns that some researchers are resorting to dubious methods to publish extra papers.

Could ChatGPT enter the arena? I asked for 50 climate change paper titles:

“Rapid Arctic Meltdown: Implications for Global Sea Level Rise”
“Unprecedented Carbon Emissions: Nearing Irreversible Climate Tipping Points”
“Global Heatwaves: Escalating Threats to Human Health and Agriculture”
“Ocean Acidification: The Silent Crisis Decimating Marine Life”
“Climate-Induced Mega Droughts: The New Normal?”
“Vanishing Glaciers: Water Scarcity and the Impending Crisis”
“Rising Sea Levels: The Looming Threat to Coastal Cities”
“Extreme Weather Events: The Cost of Inaction on Climate Change”
“Disappearing Coral Reefs: A Warning Sign of Ocean Health Decline”
“The Methane Time Bomb: Thawing Permafrost and Climate Catastrophe”
“Climate Change and Pandemics: Linking Environmental Degradation to Health Risks”
“Food Security in Jeopardy: The Impact of Climate Change on Crop Yields”
“Climate Refugees: The Human Cost of Environmental Displacement”
“Infernos of Change: The Increasing Frequency of Wildfires”
“The Thinning Ice: Polar Bear Habitats in Peril”
“Floods and Famine: Climate Change’s Impact on Humanitarian Crises”
“The Vanishing Amazon: Deforestation and Global Climate Effects”
“Tropical Cyclones in a Warming World: Increasing Frequency and Intensity”
“Toxic Air: How Climate Change Worsens Air Pollution”
“Melting Mountain Snowcaps: Implications for Freshwater Resources”
“The Climate Gap: Socioeconomic Disparities in Climate Change Impacts”
“Lethal Heat: Surpassing Human Survival Limits”
“The Greenhouse Effect: Amplifying Global Warming”
“Shrinking Biodiversity: Climate Change and Species Extinction”
“Rising Oceans, Sinking Cities: The Reality of Coastal Erosion”
“Climate Change and Mental Health: The Unseen Toll”
“Disrupted Ecosystems: The Cascading Effects of Climate Change”
“The Bleak Future of Snow Sports: Impact of Warming Winters”
“Unstoppable Thaw: The Fate of the World’s Glaciers”
“The Disintegration of Ice Shelves: A Warning from Antarctica”
“Dying Oceans: The Impact of Warming Waters on Marine Life”
“Heatwave Hell: Surviving the New Climate Extremes”
“Arid Earth: Desertification and the Loss of Arable Land”
“Climate Catastrophe: The Economics of a Warming World”
“The Climate Health Emergency: Risks to Global Public Health”
“Suffocating Seas: Declining Oxygen Levels in Oceans”
“Climate Wars: Resource Conflicts in a Warming World”
“The Last Generation: Wildlife on the Brink in a Changing Climate”
“Tipping Point: The Last Chance to Prevent Climate Catastrophe”
“Collapsing Ecosystems: The Domino Effect of Climate Change”
“The Acid Rain Revival: Increased Pollution from Climate Change”
“Inescapable Heat: The Urban Heat Island Effect Worsens”
“The Climate Migration Crisis: Predicting Mass Movements”
“Warming Waters: The Threat to Global Fisheries”
“Carbon’s Legacy: The Long-Term Effects of CO2 Emissions”
“Climate Anxiety: Psychological Impacts of Environmental Change”
“The Drowning of Cultural Heritage: Sea-Level Rise and Historical Sites”
“The End of Seasons: Disrupting Natural Climate Cycles”
“Climate-Induced Starvation: The Future of Global Food Supplies”
“The Silent Killer: Rising CO2 Levels and Respiratory Health”

The last one is my favorite, but wouldn’t it be better as “I Can’t Breathe: Rising CO2 Levels and Respiratory Health”? I asked ChatGPT to draft it.

Abstract

The rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) due to human activities have become a significant concern for global climate change and public health. This paper examines the relationship between elevated CO2 levels and respiratory health issues. Through an extensive review of existing literature and analysis of current air quality and health data, we explore the direct and indirect impacts of increased CO2 on respiratory health. Our study finds a correlation between high CO2 concentrations and a rise in respiratory ailments, particularly in urban areas. This paper contributes to the growing body of evidence suggesting that rising CO2 levels pose a considerable threat to public health, beyond their widely recognized environmental impacts. We conclude with recommendations for policy interventions and further research to mitigate the health risks associated with CO2 emissions.

Introduction

1.1 Background Information

The Earth’s atmosphere is experiencing unprecedented changes due to anthropogenic activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, leading to increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). This increase in CO2 is a major driving force behind global climate change, with well-documented impacts on the environment. However, the implications of rising CO2 levels extend beyond climate change, posing significant challenges to public health, particularly respiratory health.

1.2 Problem Statement

While the link between air pollutants like particulate matter and respiratory health has been well established, the specific impacts of elevated CO2 levels have received less attention. High concentrations of CO2 are known to affect air quality and, by extension, respiratory health. This paper aims to address this gap by investigating the relationship between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and respiratory health outcomes.

1.3 Research Objectives

To review the current literature on the impacts of increased atmospheric CO2 levels.
To analyze the correlation between CO2 concentrations and respiratory health issues.
To explore the potential mechanisms through which CO2 can affect respiratory health.
To assess the public health implications of these findings and suggest appropriate policy responses.

1.4 Significance of the Study

Understanding the health impacts of rising CO2 levels is crucial for developing effective public health strategies and policies. This study contributes to the body of knowledge needed to address one of the most pressing issues of our time – climate change and its impact on human health. It also underscores the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to tackling environmental challenges, one that encompasses environmental science, public health, policy-making, and community engagement.

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Plagiarism depends on the context

December 21, 2023 by philg

Regarding the person my academic friends are starting to call “Claudine GPT”… a guy on Twitter:

Plagiarism if a student does it. ‘Duplicative language’ if a university president. Please someone make it make sense

I asked ChatGPT to sort out the Twitter user’s conundrum. The TL; DR version:

When a student plagiarizes, it is often seen as a failure of this learning process. In contrast, the president of an esteemed institution like Harvard is expected to be well-versed in academic integrity. Plagiarism at such a high level suggests a deliberate breach of ethical standards, which is more serious given their role and influence. … The president of Harvard, as a leader and scholar, holds a position of significant influence and authority. Plagiarism in their scholarly work would severely undermine their credibility, the integrity of their research, and could lead to broader implications for the reputation of the institution they represent. … The president of a university is held to higher standards of accountability due to their leadership position. Plagiarism in their work can lead to severe consequences, including loss of their position, public censure, and damage to their professional career. For a student, consequences are usually confined to academic penalties, such as failing the assignment or course, and potentially facing disciplinary action from the university.

ChatGPT agrees that it is all about context:

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How many physical servers do we think are behind ChatGPT?

December 21, 2023December 11, 2023 by philg

A friend has a powerful new-ish desktop PC with an AMD Threadripper CPU and a moderately powerful GPU. He installed LM Studio and found that running LLama2 used 40 GB of RAM and was able to generate only 1 word per second.

ChatGPT is faster than that and there are millions of users. What’s our best guess as to the hardware and electricity footprint? More than all of the Bitcoin activity?

Just one of Twitter’s server farms, apparently one that could be turned off without compromising the service, was 5,200 racks and each rack held 30 servers (1U each plus some disk or switch boxes?). That’s 156,000 physical servers to do something that isn’t computationally intensive on a per-user basis (though, of course, there are a lot of users).

Why hasn’t OpenAI taken over every physical computer in the Microsoft Azure cloud?

Nvidia porn:

Here are some excerpts from the book Elon Musk regarding the Christmas 2022 move of servers from Sacramento to save $100 million per year:

It was late at night on December 22, and the meeting in Musk’s tenth-floor Twitter conference room had become tense. He was talking to two Twitter infrastructure managers who had not dealt with him much before, and certainly not when he was in a foul mood. One of them tried to explain the problem. The data-services company that housed one of Twitter’s server farms, located in Sacramento, had agreed to allow them some short-term extensions on their lease so they could begin to move out during 2023 in an orderly fashion. “But this morning,” the nervous manager told Musk, “they came back to us and said that plan was no longer on the table because, and these are their words, they don’t think that we will be financially viable.” The facility was costing Twitter more than $100 million a year. Musk wanted to save that money by moving the servers to one of Twitter’s other facilities, in Portland, Oregon. Another manager at the meeting said that couldn’t be done right away. “We can’t get out safely before six to nine months,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Sacramento still needs to be around to serve traffic.”

The manager began to explain in detail some of the obstacles to relocating the servers to Portland. “It has different rack densities, different power densities,” she said. “So the rooms need to be upgraded.” She started to give a lot more details, but after a minute, Musk interrupted.

“Do you know the head-explosion emoji?” he asked her. “That’s what my head feels like right now. What a pile of fucking bullshit. Jesus H fucking Christ. Portland obviously has tons of room. It’s trivial to move servers one place to another.” The Twitter managers again tried to explain the constraints. Musk interrupted. “Can you have someone go to our server centers and send me videos of the insides?” he asked. It was three days before Christmas, and the manager promised the video in a week. “No, tomorrow,” Musk ordered. “I’ve built server centers myself, and I can tell if you could put more servers there or not. That’s why I asked if you had actually visited these facilities. If you’ve not been there, you’re just talking bullshit.”

Musk then predicted a two-week move for the 150,000+ servers in 5,200 racks, each of which weighed 2,500 lbs.

“Why don’t we do it right now?” [young cousin] James Musk asked. He and his brother Andrew were flying with Elon from San Francisco to Austin on Friday evening, December 23, the day after the frustrating infrastructure meeting about how long it would take to move the servers out of the Sacramento facility. Avid skiers, they had planned to go by themselves to Tahoe for Christmas, but Elon that day invited them to come to Austin instead. James was reluctant. He was mentally exhausted and didn’t need more intensity, but Andrew convinced him that they should go. So that’s how they ended up on the plane—with Musk, Grimes, and X, along with Steve Davis and Nicole Hollander and their baby—listening to Elon complain about the servers. They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they could move them now. It was the type of impulsive, impractical, surge-into-the-breach idea that Musk loved. It was already late evening, but he told his pilot to divert, and they made a loop back up to Sacramento.

“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex [a Twitter employee who happened to be there] said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods. Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved. “Well that doesn’t seem super hard,” he said as Alex the Uzbek and the rest of the gang stared. Musk was totally jazzed by this point. It was, he said with a loud laugh, like a remake of Mission: Impossible, Sacramento edition.

The next day—Christmas Eve—Musk called in reinforcements. Ross Nordeen drove from San Francisco. He stopped at the Apple Store in Union Square and spent $2,000 to buy out the entire stock of AirTags so the servers could be tracked on their journey, and then stopped at Home Depot, where he spent $2,500 on wrenches, bolt-cutters, headlamps, and the tools needed to unscrew the seismic bolts. Steve Davis got someone from The Boring Company to procure a semi truck and line up moving vans. Other enlistees arrived from SpaceX. The server racks were on wheels, so the team was able to disconnect four of them and roll them to the waiting truck. This showed that all fifty-two hundred or so could probably be moved within days. “The guys are kicking ass!” Musk exulted. Other workers at the facility watched with a mix of amazement and horror. Musk and his renegade team were rolling servers out without putting them in crates or swaddling them in protective material, then using store-bought straps to secure them in the truck. “I’ve never loaded a semi before,” James admitted. Ross called it “terrifying.” It was like cleaning out a closet, “but the stuff in it is totally critical.” At 3 p.m., after they had gotten four servers onto the truck, word of the caper reached the top executives at NTT, the company that owned and managed the data center. They issued orders that Musk’s team halt. Musk had the mix of glee and anger that often accompanied one of his manic surges. He called the CEO of the storage division, who told him it was impossible to move server racks without a bevy of experts. “Bullshit,” Musk explained. “We have already loaded four onto the semi.” The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than five hundred pounds of pressure, so rolling a two-thousand-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only five hundred pounds. “The dude is not very good at math,” Musk told the musketeers.

After Christmas, Andrew and James headed back to Sacramento to see how many more servers they could move. They hadn’t brought enough clothes, so they went to Walmart and bought jeans and T-shirts. The NTT supervisors who ran the facility continued to throw up obstacles, some quite understandable. Instead of letting them prop open the door to the vault, for example, they required the musketeers and their crew to go through a retinal security scan each time they went in. One of the supervisors watched them at all times. “She was the most insufferable person I’ve ever worked with,” James says. “But to be fair, I could understand where she was coming from, because we were ruining her holidays, right?”

The moving contractors that NTT wanted them to use charged $200 an hour. So James went on Yelp and found a company named Extra Care Movers that would do the work at one-tenth the cost. The motley company pushed the ideal of scrappiness to its outer limits. The owner had lived on the streets for a while, then had a kid, and he was trying to turn his life around. He didn’t have a bank account, so James ended up using PayPal to pay him. The second day, the crew wanted cash, so James went to a bank and withdrew $13,000 from his personal account. Two of the crew members had no identification, which made it hard for them to sign into the facility. But they made up for it in hustle. “You get a dollar tip for every additional server we move,” James announced at one point. From then on, when they got a new one on a truck, the workers would ask how many they were up to.

By the end of the week they had used all of the available trucks in Sacramento. Despite the area being pummeled by rain, they moved more than seven hundred of the racks in three days. The previous record at that facility had been moving thirty in a month. That still left a lot of servers in the facility, but the musketeers had proven that they could be moved quickly. The rest were handled by the Twitter infrastructure team in January.

Getting everything up and running in Portland took about two months, in the end, due to incompatible electrical connectors and hard-coded references in the Twitter code to Sacramento. Elon beat the 6-9 month estimate, but not by 6-9 months, and he admitted that rushing the move was a mistake.

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Two-year anniversary of Boston’s order that 5-year-olds be injected with an experimental vaccine in order to appear in public

December 20, 2023December 16, 2023 by philg

It’s the two-year anniversary of the Boston Covidcrats ordering 5-year-olds to be injected with a non-FDA-approved vaccine if they wanted to enter a restaurant, do an after-school sport, see a movie, or visit a museum. The Science-informed order says “vaccinated individuals are less likely to develop serious symptoms or spread COVID19 to those near them” (i.e., claims that the injection prevents transmission despite the fact that the injection was never tested for its ability to reduce transmission).

“Mayor Michelle Wu announces COVID-19 vaccine requirement for certain indoor venues in Boston” (Boston.com) summarized the situation:

The requirement will apply to indoor dining at restaurants, including bars and nightclubs; indoor fitness centers; and indoor recreational spaces, like theaters, concert venues, and sports arenas.

The first phase — requiring employees and patrons ages 12 and up to show they’ve gotten at least one dose of a vaccine — takes effect on Jan. 15. They will subsequently be required to show they’ve received at least two doses on Feb. 15.

Boston will also require children as young as 5 to show they’ve gotten at least one dose to enter those indoor spaces by March 1. And by May 1, children aged 5 to 12 will be required to show proof of full vaccination as well.

The order Monday follows similar policies in other major American cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. And it was announced in conjunction with other neighboring Massachusetts communities — including Arlington, Brookline, Cambridge, Salem, Somerville — that are advancing mirroring vaccine requirements for their local indoor venues.

Some initial resistance was anticipated:

Businesses will also be required to post a printed notice, available in multiple languages, informing visitors of the policy. And according to Wu, the city’s Inspectional Services Department will run checks to ensure compliance with the order.

“Once it gets to the point that it is part of the culture, part of the standard expectation, there’s much less direct challenge in compliance,” she said.

However, Wu described the proof of vaccination check as “just one more interaction that is already happening” between customers and staff.

“It would be a quick glance at an app or a card or a photo of your card,” she said.

If the following is true, why didn’t Mayor Wu order a real Chinese-style lockdown?

“We need to take every available action to protect our cities, residents, businesses, and institutions,” she said.

Why did the Followers of Science allow the filthy unvaccinated remnants to continue to congregate inside the never-closed (“essential”) marijuana stores, for example?

Separately, here’s a photo of the Scientist who imposed the order wearing a rainbow sash, but the sash lacks the trans-enhanced rainbow triangle that is part of our state religion. From “Boston mayor under fire after sending list of critics and protesters to police” (New York Post, July 16, 2023):

More recently…. “Boston Mayor Michelle Wu shows off photo from ‘electeds of color’ holiday party after defending gathering: ‘A special moment’” (New York Post):

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