How long can Hamas keep its tunnels ventilated?

by philg

We’re informed that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) has, literally, tons of fuel. NBC:

As U.N. officials say hospitals in Gaza are running dangerously low on fuel, Hamas is maintaining a stockpile of more than 200,000 gallons of fuel for the rockets it fires into Israel and the generators that provide clean air and electricity to its network of underground tunnels, according to U.S. officials, current and former Israeli officials and academics.

How long will this last?

“We don’t know how much they have, and we definitely don’t know how much they need, because no one is sure to what extent this underground city goes,” said Elai Rettig, an assistant professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv who studies regional energy cooperation. “If it’s just for ventilation and basic communication, it will last for months.”

I wonder if these estimates are wrong. Hamas’s western allies have been demanding fuel deliveries ever since the battle began. Here’s one from the UN Secretary General, just four days after the Gazans’ mostly peaceful attack on Israelis:

Note that fuel is listed first, so we can infer that it is more important than food and water. A week after the latest round of fighting began, state-sponsored PBS wrote that hospitals were “desperately low on fuel”:

Medics in Gaza warned Sunday that thousands could die as hospitals packed with wounded people ran desperately low on fuel and basic supplies. … Hospitals in Gaza are expected to run out of generator fuel within two days,

Every few days we are informed that hospitals in Gaza are 1-2 days from running out of fuel.

Hamas supposedly keeps its fuel reserves directly underneath hospitals so that (1) the fuel will be safe from Israeli bombs, and (2) any fuel delivered to the hospital can be easily transferred into the tunnel ventilation reserve.

If Hamas truly had “months” of fuel, why would their allies be so interested in supplementing this supply? And why did the calls to send in fuel begin just a few days after the October 7 attacks? Is it possible that the “months” of fuel that the Islamic Resistance Movement was estimated to have is actually more like “a month”? Also, what if the IDF is able to clear one or two hospitals of civilians and destroy the Hamas fuel supplies underneath? The useful lifetime of the tunnels could be radically shortened.

American and British bombing of Germany wasn’t very efficient in slowing down Germany’s war-fighting capability. As many as 635,000 civilians in Germany were killed, for example, more than 55,000 RAF Bomber Command crewmembers, and 75 percent of the pre-P-51 American bomber crews were shot down or killed. Yet the initial effects on German war production were minimal. Monday morning quarterbacks have concluded that the Allies should have concentrated on bombing energy production, energy transportation, and electricity production facilities. In other words… fuel. If Israel can prevent Hamas from being resupplied, either directly or via hospitals and UN facilities, perhaps Hamas will be forced to fight in the open (or just melt into the civilian population and wait for Israel to leave).

Readers: What’s your guess as to when Hamas runs out of fuel to keep its tunnels ventilated? (“Never, because the United Nations and other allies will keep the fuel restocked” is an acceptable answer.)

Update: A November 6, 2023 video posted from Gaza shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and doctors in clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer.

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Predictions for what happens to Sam Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators?

by philg

Let’s see if I got the Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) trial right… All of the co-conspirators who enabled the fraud at FTX agreed to testify against SBF in exchange for reduced punishment. They all then testified that everything was SBF’s fault and they were helpless puppets (somehow incapable of quitting FTX or exposing the fraud before it got bigger). Now SBF has been found guilty and will be sentenced to up to 110 years in prison in March 2024.

CNN:

Over the four weeks of his trial, Bankman-Fried watched a parade of people he once considered his closest confidantes testify against him. They included friends from math camp and MIT who became his co-founders; and, critically, his ex-girlfriend and trusted business adviser, 28-year-old Caroline Ellison.

The most damning evidence against Bankman-Fried came from Ellison, who testified for the prosecution over three days.

As both the CEO of Alameda and Bankman-Fried’s romantic partner for two years, Ellison was uniquely positioned to comment on what was happening within the tight inner circle of Alameda and FTX executives, many of whom lived together in a $30 million luxury apartment in the Bahamas.

Ellison’s at times emotional testimony offered a narrative of events in which virtually every decision at both Alameda and FTX came down to Bankman-Fried, who founded and was the majority owner of both firms. A common refrain from Ellison, when asked who directed her to carry out various actions, criminal or otherwise, was a variation on the words “Sam did.”

From reading early reports on the meltdown, I got the impression that it was Ms. Ellison’s investment losses that had created the necessity for the fraud. Did that turn out to be false?

What happens to all of the co-conspirators, without whom SBF couldn’t have stolen a dime? Back in December, the New York Post predicted that Caroline Ellison might get off with probation.

This TechCrunch article is titled “Ex-SDNY prosecutor says Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh probably won’t get jail time”:

‘I’ve had cooperating witnesses who did get jail time, but it’s the exception not the rule.’

When Wang testified, prosecutors asked at the end of their examination how many years he was hoping to be sentenced. “Ideally hoping for no time,” he replied, which prompted some quiet laughter in the courtroom.

If this plays out as predicted, do we think it is fair? One altruist goes to prison for 100 years while co-conspirators who stole at least $millions for themselves are free to move on to the next scam? If SBF’s guilt had been challenging to establish, maybe this would make sense in some practical way, but it didn’t seem like a tough case for prosecutors to make.

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Hello Prenup web service vs. ChatGPT

by philg

A family member is soon to get married. The couple had decided that they wanted a prenuptial agreement. Both work, but there are differences between the two in terms of student loan debt, expected inheritance, and expected future income. They don’t have a lot of money right now and didn’t want to spend $20,000 on lawyers (maybe that was the pre-Biden number?) for both sides to draft what ultimately would turn out to be a fairly standard prenuptial agreement. I did some research and found Hello Prenup, a Boston-based startup that, for $600, will run Web-mediated negotiations between the two potential victims. The company’s About Us web page shows a Chief Diversity Officer’s dream team:

I decided that my wedding gift to the happy couple would be to pay Hello Prenup’s bill.

First, it is odd that this company was founded in Maskachusetts. The state’s family law renders prenuptial agreements potentially useless. Even if a prenup is fair when signed, a judge can invalidate it via a “second look test”, evaluating the fairness at the time of the divorce (the “divorce” happens at the very end of what might be years of litigation, so the prenup could become unfair merely because, for example, all of the assets of the couple had been handed over to attorneys). A prenup in Massachusetts is more likely to lead to an extra $300,000 in legal fees (one side challenges the prenup; the other side has to defend against that) than a substantial change to the plaintiff’s profits. (Remember that a judge can work around an alimony waiver by simply awarding more child support, for example, or a larger share of the property.)

I like the idea of the site because it gives people nudges to work together to get to a finished document. Unfortunately, the flexibility is limited. For example, the options for alimony are (a) complete waiver, (b) leave it up to state law, and (c) waiver if the divorce lawsuit is filed before N years have elapsed and state law otherwise. In a country where people love alimony (apparently, since we keep voting for politicians who preserve the institution) there is no option to build in alimony via a formula. Suppose, for example, you wanted a formulae, e.g., lower earner gets alimony X% of the difference in income for Y% of the years prior to the plaintiff filing the divorce lawsuit. This is not doable except via editing the Word document after it is generated. What if you wanted to agree that if one spouse quits his/her/zir/their job to take care of kids for more than 2 years then the other spouse would pay 40 months of alimony in the amount of 50 percent of after-tax income? Not doable. (Remember that alimony is now tax-free to the recipient and not deductible for the payor, so old formulas based on pre-tax income would leave the payor destitute. The law changed starting in 2019 after the IRS noticed that alimony recipients were defrauding the U.S. Treasury on a regular basis by not reporting alimony received as income (payors, of course, were still deducting it).)

Hello Prenup doesn’t seem to contain enough education regarding what it takes to make a prenup valid. After using the service, the happy couple to whom I gifted the service wasn’t aware that sloppiness in disclosing existing assets could be an easy route of attack for a divorce plaintiff trying to invalidate a prenup.

Nit: Hello Prenup does a poor job generating Microsoft Word documents. It doesn’t use “keep with next” for section headings, for example.

It’s an interesting idea to interview each engaged person separately via the Web, but I’m not sure that the $600 service produces a better result than sitting down together at a single PC and using the forms that come with the $29 Nolo Press’s book on prenuptial agreements or by using various other free or low-cost forms from services such as Rocket Lawyer.

Maybe the answer is that Hello Prenup doesn’t have enough AI? I gave the following prompt to ChatGPT (GPT-4):

Give me an example prenuptial agreement between Robert and William. Robert is a 60-year-old Medicaid dentist earning $1 million per year while William is an unemployed 20-year-old. They plan to have children.

The result was a recipe for epic litigation. For example, “In the event of a divorce, Robert agrees to provide spousal support to William for a period to be determined, taking into consideration the length of the marriage and William’s employment status.” So the attorneys on both sides will argue in front of a judge what the appropriate period of alimony should be? They can also argue how long the marriage was (it can take 2-3 years for a divorce lawsuit to get to final judgment; does the “length of the marriage” include this period of litigation or not?).

ChatGPT also included the seemingly reasonable boilerplate “This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the state in which the Parties reside.”

Does that mean the state in which the Parties reside at the time the prenup is signed? The state in which the Parties reside at the time that one sues the other? What if they don’t live in the same state either at the time of signing or at the time the lawsuit is filed? Hello Prenup generates agreements that are specific as to which state’s laws govern.

So… Hello Prenup has some deficiencies, but nothing like GPT-4’s!

If you’re considering getting married, don’t be distracted by foreign wars. Remember that, depending on the state where you choose to reside, you could be embroiled in a far more upsetting and personally costly war of your own in family court. A prenup offers a small degree of protection against this, though not against the most upsetting and expensive parts of a typical divorce lawsuit. The typical U.S. state sets up a winner-take-all battle between the two parents for who will (1) get to spend time with what used to be joint children, and (2) who will therefore get the river of cash that is associated with those children (“child support”; the flip side of this is “who will be forced to disgorge the river of cash while seldom seeing the children”). It is far more protective to move to a state such as Nevada that defaults to 50/50 shared parenting and limits child support profits than it is to work on and sign a piece of paper. For the typical married-with-kids person, it is far more dangerous to live in Maskachusetts or New York with an “ironclad prenup” than it is to live in a shared parenting state with child support profit limits with no prenup.

[Update: A friend provided the same prompt to GPT-4 today and it came up with a different clause for governing law…

Maybe ChatGPT has been going to law school?]

Related:

  • Real World Divorce, especially chapters 5 and 7 regarding what can be the subject of litigation
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Why won’t the people who say that Israel is committing genocide go to Gaza and fight?

by philg

It has become standard among American and European progressives to refer to the Israel military operation in response to the October 7, 2023 attacks by the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) as “genocide.” We can see the same term used in a comment on a post in this blog.

Let’s assume that the progressives are correct, ignoring the fact that the population of Gaza today is 3X what it was in 1990 (typically a “genocide” involves a population reduction, not a population explosion). Given that assumption, these folks say have identified an ongoing genocide. Why won’t they take meaningful action to stop the genocide?

If brave, they could go to Gaza and pick up a rifle (or a shotgun?) and fight alongside the Islamic Resistance Movement and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. If cowardly, they could advocate for the U.S. military and NATO to go in and destroy Israel or, at least, the Israeli military. Instead, however, they’ve decided to be idle bystanders while a genocide is perpetrated. They’ll perhaps post on Twitter or Facebook or occasionally attend a protest demonstration. “Dozens of students stage walk out at Harvard in solidarity with Palestinians” (CBS):

The Harvard students said Palestinians are facing genocide and they wanted to show their support. They’re calling on the university’s administration to address the conflict.

They’re young and healthy, but they won’t fight against genocide. Instead, they want to send meek Harvard administrators to do battle against the IDF.

Also, high school students in Democrat-run Philadelphia:

Hundreds of Philadelphia high school students walked out of school Friday to march around City Hall in support of Palestinians.

“This is not a war. This is a genocide,” Nora, a student in the School District of Philadelphia who helped organize the action, said of the ongoing Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, even in places where Palestinians were told to seek safety. “The goals of today’s protests are … to get justice, and to fight back, and to use our voices.”

Hamas has soldiers who are the same age as American high schoolers (Daily Mail). These Philadelphians say that they want to “fight back”. Why doesn’t that include volunteering in the real fight against genocide?

Across the pond… “200 Bristol students join pro-Palestine demonstration outside Bristol Uni’s Senate House”:

A student-led pro-Palestinian protest broke out today in front of Senate House, with members calling for the end of the “Israeli Apartheid” and accusing the Israeli state of “ethnic cleansing and genocide”.

Members of the Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS), the student wing of a national Marxist organisation, led the protest with banners and speeches in solidarity with Palestinians.

Chants of “free Palestine” and “in our thousands and in our millions, we are all Palestinians” could be heard during the 45 minute protest.

If they’re healthy enough to go to university and they’ve identified “ethnic cleansing and genocide”, why aren’t they volunteering to put a stop to these crimes against humanity?

Here’s a tweet from Cori Bush, who represents St. Louis in the U.S. House:

Israel is guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “slaughtering” civilians, presumably with no military justification or rationale (unlike the U.S., which always protected civilians). Israel is committing “atrocities”. Does she advocate sending in the Marines to stop the Israelis? No. Airstrikes on every Israeli military base? No. Cori Bush suggests only that we cut off foreign aid to Israel, which can’t possibly deliver the hoped-for victory to the Islamic Resistance Movement or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even after shutting down for coronapanic and spending a ton of money on early Covid-19 vaccination (end result: a higher excess death rate than Sweden’s) Israel has a GDP of about $500 billion per year.

Related:

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Halloween in Florida

by philg

Due to the crowds drawn by our neighbor’s fantastic pirate house, we ran out of candy last year after giving out 1,500 pieces. This year, the stock is 2,000 pieces (thanks, Costco). Here are a few photos around the neighborhood:

We need this costume (at a neighbor’s party):

Johnny Depp is attacked by a more aggressive foe than Amber Heard:

I love this house:

Forecast for trick-or-treating here in Jupiter is 79 degrees and clear.

One of the nice things about Florida is the geographical and psychological distance from upsetting world events. No matter how upsetting the headlines, people here recognize that (a) they’re not important or powerful enough to change anything, and (b) their own life is mostly unaffected. A typical Floridian’s mood is not controlled by the media.

Related:

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Will the Gaza tunnel network prove to be Hamas’s Maginot Line?

by philg

An Israel-supporting friend was expressing gloom about the latest battle in the 75-year Arab-Israeli war. He cited an article by an armchair warrior about the IDF’s track record of failure in ground offenses:

Despite three weeks of bombing and 17 years of siege, Israel has been unable to curb Hamas’s ability to launch missiles deep within Israel. Israel lacks strategic depth, being one of the smallest countries in the region and with hostile or cold neighbors on all sides. It has nine power stations, out of which the second largest has been damaged by Hamas rockets.

Israel has not won a major ground campaign since the Battle of Jenin refugee camp in 2002. In 2006, Israel failed to advance four kilometers from Israel into Lebanon to capture the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil. It even failed to fully capture Maroun El-Ras, a small village two kilometers from the border. There was much handwringing in Israel over the lessons of the 2006 Lebanon War, with many recommendations supposedly implemented by the IDF. This, however, did not change the fact that Israel was barely able to enter Gaza City’s Shujaiyya neighborhood in 2014, despite overwhelming firepower. Israel has not attempted a major ground incursion since then.

The article describes the tunnels built by Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and the Party of Allah (“Hezbollah”) as strengths for Israel’s opponents. I wonder if these could instead be weaknesses (I wondered about this before in Can Israel find all of Hamas’s tunnels with ground-penetrating radar? And then what?) The tunnels are surely strong against any foreseen threat, but perhaps the IDF can come up with some unforeseen threats to the tunnels, e.g., against their ventilation systems or by using smarter radar and well-drilling equipment to insert explosives. In this case, the tunnels would become the Maginot Line, Jihad Edition. Built by the French, the Maginot Line is famous as an example of flawed military thinking. The Germans wouldn’t be able to go through it, so they wouldn’t be able to invade France. In 1940, however, the Germans simply drove around the line.

[Note that Wikipedia says that the real-world Maginot Line was not the Maginot Line of metaphor and the French were not as incompetent as we like to think:

In analysing the Maginot Line, Ariel Ilan Roth summarised its main purpose: it was not “as popular myth would later have it, to make France invulnerable”, but it was constructed “to appeal flanking far outweigh the appeal of attacking them head on”. … before construction in October 1927, the Superior Council of War adopted the final design for the line and identified that one of the main missions would be to deter a German cross-border assault with only minimal force to allow “the army time to mobilise.” In addition, the French envisioned that the Germans would conduct a repeat of their First World War battle plan to flank the defences and drew up their overall strategy with that in mind.

In other words, the line perhaps did function as designed.]

This is not to say that the Islamic Resistance Movement, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Party of Allah are doomed to defeat (I’m not confident in my armchair strategy skills). I’m just questioning whether the tunnels will prove to be a source of significant strength. Consider that if the battle goes on long enough and the West doesn’t resupply Hamas with fuel as a “humanitarian” effort, Hamas could simply run out of the fuel that it needs to generate electricity to ventilate the tunnels. A tunnel without ventilation has no military value. (See Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea)

[On the third hand, maybe the Islamic Resistance Movement and friends did not expect to use the tunnels during an Israeli ground offensive. In that case, the tunnels would be exactly like the real Maginot Line.]

Separately, my friend is a loyal California Democrat who has spent two years expressing hatred for Ron DeSantis, the one presidential candidate who says flatly “no” to interfering with Israel’s military efforts and also “no” to accepting Gazans as immigrants to the U.S.:

Like my other California Democrat friends with advanced degrees and elite jobs, he enjoys pointing out how stupid working-class Americans are for voting Republican. They’re “voting against their own interest”, he has said. He, by contrast, has supported (a) increased immigration of Muslims, (b) the election of progressives such as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib to Congress, and (c) the defeat of Ron DeSantis, who has proved to be the most unequivocal supporter of Israel.

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The Money Illusion in the Wall Street Journal

by philg

Here’s an article from the people who claim that they’re smart about money:

As in many states, more Alaskans are without shelter due to rising housing costs. Average home values in Anchorage have grown 20% since 2019 to about $377,000, according to Zillow.

“grown 20%”? The BLS says that inflation since 2019 is about 22 percent:

So the average home value in Anchorage is, in real dollars, less than it was in 2019 (and yet lower if we think that official CPI understates our lived experience of inflation). This shows how powerful the Money Illusion is, even for journalists and editors whose job is to write about money.

Separately, how many of the homeless have documents that are sufficient to get through TSA screening?

Some are being offered one-way tickets to the Lower 48 states. “My focus is keeping people from freezing to death,” said Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson.

What’s the budget impact of this? If Anchorage sends a homeless person to San Francisco, Anchorage pays $500 for the plane ticket and San Francisco pays over $100,000 per year. (It was $106,500 per homeless individual in 2021 dollars, according to Hoover.)

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What the authors of our modern immigration policy believed that it would do

by philg

“The Hard Truth About Immigration” (The Atlantic; paywalled, but included with Apple News subscriptions) has some interesting quotes from the people who authored our current immigration policy. This is not about the asylum policy that has effectively opened the border to anyone who asks, but the official immigration policy that has resulted in most of the population growth in recent decades. From Pew:

The author of the article is a New York Times journalist, i.e., from a team of cheerleaders for open borders. So perhaps we should be skeptical of any claims regarding the benefits of low-skill immigration to natives (see this 2016 Harvard analysis for how elites benefit and the working class gets destroyed financially), but I think that the quotes are likely accurate.

What did the best and brightest of the 1960s predict?

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said as he put his signature on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, at the base of the Statue of Liberty. “It does not affect the lives of millions.” All that the bill would do, he explained, was repair the flawed criteria for deciding who could enter the country. “This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here.”

Edward Kennedy, the 33-year-old senator who had shepherded the bill through the Senate, went even further in promising that its effects would be modest. Some opponents argued that the bill would lead to a large increase in immigration, but those claims were false, Kennedy said. They were “highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact,” he announced in a Senate hearing, and “out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship.” Emanuel Celler, the bill’s champion in the House, made the same promises. “Do we appreciably increase our population, as it were, by the passage of this bill?” Celler said. “The answer is emphatically no.”

How wrong were they?

Johnson, Kennedy, Celler and the new law’s other advocates turned out to be entirely wrong about this. The 1965 bill sparked a decades-long immigration wave. As a percentage of the United States population, this modern wave has been similar in size to the immigration wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In terms of the sheer number of people moving to a single country, the modern American immigration wave may be the largest in history. The year Johnson signed the immigration bill, 297,000 immigrants legally entered the United States. Two years later, the number reached 362,000. It continued rising in subsequent decades, and by 1989 exceeded 1 million.

How did they get it so wrong? The miracle of chain migration, which Donald Trump tried to end:

The most consequential nonquota entries proved to be family members, including extended family. The law declared that immigrants who were coming to join relatives already in the United States would not count toward the quota. That loophole was not wholly new. But it had not mattered much before 1965, because the overall system was so restrictive. The new law opened the doors to the entire world without solving the nonquota problem.

Didn’t anyone foresee how the U.S. would be transformed?

The critics’ predictions—that annual immigration might soon triple, as one conservative congressman forecast, and eventually surpass 1 million, as another anticipated—ended up being more accurate. The advocates of the 1965 law also incorrectly promised that any increase in immigration would come from white-collar professionals filling specific job shortages. Willard Wirtz, Johnson’s labor secretary, went so far as to tell Congress that the bill offered “complete protection” against increased labor competition. In truth, many arrivals have been blue-collar workers, admitted as extended family, seeking a broad range of jobs.

The Harvard analysis that I cited above was considered hate speech in 2016 when Hillary was running for the Presidency that she so richly deserved. The author of this Atlantic piece presents the same conclusions, with the implication that we’re only figuring this out right now:

The decades when the American masses enjoyed their fastest income gains—in the middle of the 20th century—were also the decades when immigration was near historic lows. The 1965 law ended this era and caused a sharp rise in the number of immigrants entering the workforce. Shortly afterward, incomes for poor and working-class Americans began to stagnate. The 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s were a time of low immigration and rapidly rising mass living standards. The period since the ’70s has been neither.

The post-1965 immigration wave has had both benefits and costs. On the plus side, it has probably accelerated economic growth, mostly by expanding the labor force. With a larger population, the United States has been able to produce more goods and services. Immigration also appears to have benefited many high-earning, native-born professionals. The costs of immigration for these workers have been fairly low because they face relatively little competition from immigrant workers. Few of the highly educated immigrants who come to the U.S. are lawyers or doctors, partly because some professions have created barriers that restrict entry. In medicine, foreign doctors are required to complete a multiyear residency program in the United States, regardless of their prior experience. Professionals who have enough political influence to shape labor-market rules, like doctors, understand that a larger labor pool can reduce incomes.

(When I lived in Maskachusetts and a cardiologist would talk about how the borders should be open, how no human was illegal, how much Trump needed to be hated, etc., I would ask “Should a cardiologist from Switzerland or the UK be allowed to come here and practice?” The answer was inevitably “No.”)

After acknowledging that low-skill immigration makes the working class poor, just as the Harvard nerds said in 2016, the author explains that “racism” is why working class voters oppose open borders:

Racism, of course, is part of this story. In both the United States and Europe, right-wing politicians like Trump have tried to raise fears of immigrants by using xenophobic stereotypes and lies. This racism can be anti-Latino, anti-Asian, anti-Black, or anti-Muslim, depending on the time and place. The tactic has proved distressingly effective at winning working-class voters.

Related:

  • “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER, 2007): For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points. … For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise. [This study is not cited in the Atlantic article by the NYT writer!]
  • “A price tag to reject migrants? It’s not the only fight threatening a reform package” (Politico EU): Negotiators are haggling over a per-migrant fee — somewhere between €10,000 and €22,000, according to numerous people involved — to charge a country if it declines to take in asylum seekers. [We are informed that low-skill migrants make a country richer, which means each migrant should be valuable. Instead, the price within Europe is negative and countries will have to pay to unload a migrant.]
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How’s Twitter doing, one year after Muskification?

by philg

It has been a year since Elon Musk took over Twitter. Is that a long enough period to determine which side of the fine line between stupid and clever the acquisition fell on?

After half a year, Elon had cut the number of employees by 80 percent (CNN).

Here’s my 15 minutes of fame on Twitter:

The tweet in context, replying to a tweet from state-sponsored National Public Radio:

Correction: An earlier tweet incorrectly stated there is limited scientific evidence of physical advantage. Existing research shows that higher levels of testosterone do impact athletic performance. But there’s limited research involving elite trans athletes in competition.

The glorious like itself:

Note that Twitter’s software didn’t highlight this to me. Elon Musk was lumped in with “and N others” in the notifications. I probably wouldn’t have noticed my brief moment of Twitter fame if not for the separate notification of the ELON ALERTS tweet.

The financials sound bleak. Despite all of the payroll cuts, the company was losing money as of July 2023 (Reuters).

And, more importantly, how is our democracy doing after a year of being attacked with misinformation? Will the biggest beneficiaries of freedom of speech on Twitter turn out to be supporters of Hamas? In the pre-Musk days, Facebook and Twitter might have prevented the righteous from expressing their hatred of Israel, Jews in general, etc. On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t seem to be censoring anti-Israeli posts. Example:

It is not “misinformation” by Facebook standards to refer to what is happening as “Israel’s war on the people of Palestine” nor to assert that Israel bombed a hospital despite the fact that nobody at Facebook has seen a picture of a bomb crater.

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Gender and pregnancy in the New York Times

by philg

In 2021, gender ID had nothing to do with pregnancy. “The C.D.C. escalates its pleas for pregnant and breastfeeding Americans to get vaccinated against Covid.” (New York Times, September 29, 2021):

In an urgent plea, federal health officials are asking that any American who is pregnant, planning to become pregnant or currently breastfeeding get vaccinated against the coronavirus as soon as possible.

Covid-19 poses a severe risk during pregnancy, when a person’s immune system is tamped down, and raises the risk of stillbirth or another poor outcome, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Twenty-two pregnant people in the United States died of Covid in August, the highest number in a single month since the pandemic started.

About 125,000 pregnant people have tested positive for the virus; 22,000 have been hospitalized, and 161 have died. Hospital data indicates that 97 percent of those who were infected with the virus when they were hospitalized — for illness, or for labor and delivery — were not vaccinated.

Vaccination rates among pregnant people are lower than among the general population. Fewer than one-third were vaccinated before or during their pregnancy, the agency said.

Some data also suggest that pregnant people with Covid-19 are more likely to experience conditions that complicate pregnancy … Clinical trials have a long history of excluding pregnant people from participation, and pregnant people were not included in the coronavirus vaccine trials.

The phrase “pregnant people” occurs 10 times in the article.

Fast forward to this week… “Despite State Bans, Legal Abortions Didn’t Fall Nationwide in Year After Dobbs”:

… increased options and assistance for women who traveled …

The response by abortion providers and activists to the end of Roe v. Wade, it seems, has resulted in more access to abortion in states where it’s still legal — not just for women traveling from states with bans but also for women living there.

Many women, especially in the South, have turned to methods outside the U.S. medical system or carried their pregnancies to term, researchers said. These women are likely to be poor, teenagers or immigrants, and to have young children or jobs that don’t give them time off.

Planned Parenthood Northern California, which operates 17 clinics, began hiring and expanding appointments and telehealth months before Dobbs. It was in part to prepare for an overturn of Roe, and in part a realization that demand for women’s health care had built up during the pandemic, said Dr. Sara Kennedy, its chief operating and medical officer.

More recently, women in states with bans have also been able to order the pills because of shield laws that protect providers that prescribe and mail pills to such patients.

Not a single use of the phrase “pregnant people” to describe those who receive abortion care.

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