“Even for most — not all but most — immunocompromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” [Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser] said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immunocompromised that vaccines don’t work.”
Most immunocompromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers.
Where did the “bad information” that Dr. Jha mentioned come from? Separately, the NYT seems to have discovered that a virus cannot kill the same human twice:
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal.
The good news is that the mask religion lasts longer than mask Science. Two photos from last week in Ireland (signage that was ignored) and a young slender apparently healthy person wearing a mask outdoors… in front of the Science museum in Salt Lake City (June 2023):
One of the most interesting talks at a recent anniversary celebration for computer science at MIT was by Michael Stonebraker, a fake MITer (he is best known for Ingres and Postgres, UC Berkeley implementations of IBM’s relational database management system concept). For the past few years, Stonebraker has been working on a database-first vision of computing:
For those who don’t want to watch the 55-minute video, the idea is to run a high-performance RDBMS underneath the operating system (OS) and have the OS use DBMS services to hold its state, support inter-process communication, to roll back to a known good state after a failure or an attack, etc.
The events opened with computer science PhDs acknowledging that humanity faces an existential threat from climate change (Science says that if you can program a computer you can predict the Earth’s temperature 50 years from now). If we combine that with the observation that humans are actually increasing, not decreasing, their CO2 emissions, humanity will soon be extinct. Do we actually need to rethink our practical foundation for computing if these are our sunset years? If yes, this strikes me as the most promising idea.
What about performance? Stonebraker says that the “OS-on-database” runs applications about as fast as conventional “OS-including-ad-hoc-data-management-schemes-for-all-of-its-state”.
We were just at the Kennedy Space Center and learned that discrimination by race and gender ID is something to be proud of. NASA crows that the Artemis crew has been selected to include a person who identifies as a “woman” and another person who identifies as “of color”. From the project web site:
A different branch of government, however, has recently ruled that universities that get government funding shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate by race (see Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard). I’m wondering if NASA will now have to redo the hiring for the Artemis mission in a race- and, perhaps, gender-ID-neutral manner.
Here are some photos from the visit, which coincided with a SpaceX launch of the Europeans’ Euclid telescope…
Banners everywhere celebrated “40 years of women in space,” just in time for the term “women” to have become undefined:
Celebrating specific gender/race groups can be continued at home after a visit to the gift shop:
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” is a purported 1943 quote from Thomas Watson, IBM’s CEO just before the dawn of the Von Neumann architecture on which all modern computers rely.
Suppose that he actually did say this. Is it fair to say that events in cloud computing have proven him correct? Watson was not talking about terminals (corresponding to our desktop PCs and smartphones), but mainframes, which correspond to computing clouds today. How many clouds of significance are there? AWS, Google, Azure, Alibaba, and IBM? (source) That’s five!
Happy Bastille Day to our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in France! Wikipedia says this day is also for “the Fête de la Fédération that celebrated the unity of the French people.”
What’s the situation in France right now with “the unity of the French people”? Are the mostly peaceful protests over and the French population, including Muslim immigrants, are now unified once more?
I can’t figure out what the theory behind low-skill immigration in France is. Even the French are no longer impressed by French culture. Why would immigrants to France want to adopt traditional French cultural values? If immigrants to France aren’t going to adopt French cultural values, why do the French want them as neighbors? It can’t be for financial reasons given that low-skill migrants in the world’s most expensive welfare state (by percentage of GDP) are going to be burdensome (the U.S. had the world’s 2nd most expensive welfare state, but that was before coronapanic enhancements so maybe we are actually number 1 now).
Here’s a picture that I took back in October 2022 from the Centre Pompidou:
Here’s a tweet from one of our most lavishly funded federal agencies:
In other words, the agency treated a patient with suicidal ideation by giving him/her/zir/them access to a full range of military-grade weapons. The theory is that it worked for Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket?
The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.
In other words, if your parents were unsuccessful, UC Davis wants you as a medical student!
The NYT article actually confirms the UC Davis economists’ conclusions:
There is also a family dynamic. Children of doctors are 24 times more likely to become doctors than their peers, according to the American Medical Association. It’s hard to know why the profession passes down from generation to generation, but the statistic drove the association to adopt a policy opposing legacy preferences in admissions.
The tendencies to enjoy sitting in biology lectures, studying for tests, and slicing up cadavers are “passed down from generation to generation” but the Followers of Science at the New York Times can’t come up with an explanatory mechanism.
Separately, let’s have a look at UC Davis’s most famous recent pre-med major, Carlos Dominguez. KCRA:
Dominguez came to the U.S. near Galveston, Texas in 2009 from El Salvador.
A U.S. and Immigration and Customs Enforcement official confirmed to KCRA 3 that ICE has placed a detainer with the Yolo County Sheriff’s Office, which means the agency would take custody of Dominguez should he be released from local custody.
Detainers are requests to state or local law enforcement agencies to remove non-citizens arrested for criminal activity once they have been released from their custody.
The ICE official referred to Dominguez as Carlos Alejandro Reales-Dominguez and said his immigration case had been closed in April 2012. He had come to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor from El Salvador in 2009 near Galveston, Texas, and was transferred to a family member at the time.
Mr. Dominguez thus will qualify for preferential admission to UC Davis Medical School due to the adversities of (1) being an undocumented immigrant, and (2) having an encounter with our racist criminal justice system.
The good news for folks who actually live in Davis, California, is that their health is guaranteed to be excellent because the town is rich in (“essential”) marijuana:
Interested in escaping to the mountains for all or part of the summer? Here’s a report, based on 2023 visits, regarding three possibilities.
Park City, Utah (elevation 7,000′) is the best choice if you’re passionate about Pride and 2SLGBTQQIA+. The city purchased at least 100 trans-enhanced rainbow flags and has hung them from every lamppost in the small downtown area. You can pay obeisance to Rainbow Flagism before you think about entering a business establishment, which might in turn have its own 2SLGBTQQIA+ talismans on the windows or door. If you’re not a follower of the state religion, however, you might be annoyed by Park City’s tilted situation. There are no level streets downtown. Park City is great if you’re planning to break a bone doing an adventure sport or if you’re planning on suffering a total body meltdown due to old age. A friend went from ski accident in Park City to world-class University of Utah hospital in 25 minutes via ambulance. The surrounding area is certainly more scenic than most of Florida, but it is far from any National Park.
Big Sky, Montana exemplifies everything that is bad about American sprawl. There are three main developments spread out along a highway, none of which has sufficient critical mass to constitute a city or even a “town”. Let’s call them three strip malls, one of which includes ski lifts. Everything is part of a single “resort”, which is able to impose a 4% sales tax on everything sold by the stores within Big Sky (Montana itself has no sales tax, so stock up in Bozeman or West Yellowstone!). But the resort corporation ignored all of the principles of New Urbanism and the sprawl does not feel planned. You can be crammed into a townhouse or condo development or you can be isolated and car-dependent far out from one of the three strip malls.
For peasants, Big Sky is tough to access. It is a 1.5-hour drive from the regional airport in Bozeman. The elite will sometimes do this or Gulfstream it to KWYS, a 35-minute drive away and blessed with an 8400′ runway and approaches down to 200′ AGL.
The exception to the above might be for the rich folks who hang out together in the Yellowstone Club (two shared and one private helipad inside so that the above drives are rendered unnecessary). Otherwise, Big Sky shows the genius of the New Urbanism folks who created our community. The shared gym, pool, lawn, playground, etc. for every 150-200 households and the compact layout (but still mostly single-family homes) facilitate social connections.
If you’re going to check out Big Sky and coming from sea level, I recommend the Marriott “Wilson”, which is in the middle strip mall that is 1,000′ lower than the base of the ski hill. This hotel was built in 2019 and folks say that the base lodges are getting worn and tired. There is a good walk down to an impressive waterfall. Bidenflation is a Republican lie: my haircut (without shampoo) at the local barber shop was only $55 plus tip. Here are the prices at the local Mexican food truck where local laborers get lunch (13 Bidies for a sandwich):
Jackson, Wyoming (elevation 6,237′) shows the importance of flatness. Hills are great if it is winter and you want to ski, but they’re annoying if you’re going to the supermarket. Jackson has a huge amount of more-or-less flat valley area that enables the development of a functional city, an extensive bike path network that you don’t need to be a hero to enjoy, etc. The wildlife art museum is a great place to hang out, especially because the members’ room is open to all and there is a good restaurant on site. You could spend 4-5 hours here with a meal and then doing some reading while looking out over the elk refuge. Jackson has its own regional airport (kind of a short runway and the approaches aren’t great, but airlines serve it). It also has an in-town low-elevation ski hill that looks good for beginners (the eponymous ski resort for Jackson is huge and terrifying).
Jackson offers quick access to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that it will take nearly 5 hours to drive to the nearest real city: Salt Lake. I’m sure that the local hospital is great for orthopedics, but if you need any other high-end specialist it will be quite a project to see a doctor in Salt Lake City. The lack of inflation meant that it was only $30 plus tip for Pad Thai in Jackson:
Residential construction was proceeding at a feverish place in all of the places that we visited (on our way to a Chinese level of population density!), but even where it seemed that a lot of land was available the prices were stratospheric. Park City was perhaps the most affordable. In Big Sky and Jackson, the townhouse lifestyle is $1-2 million and the single-family houses with a big of land and a gorgeous view were mostly $4-10 million. Here’s the downtown Jackson view on Zillow. Note that many of these multi-$million properties are either apartments or vacant land.
Tax implications: Wyoming has no personal income tax. If you end up getting stuck there for more than 6 months or fall in love with Jackson and decide to make it your primary home, you won’t pay income tax. Utah and Montana both have income taxes. None of the three states have estate or inheritance taxes. The family law systems and associated profits for alimony and child support plaintiffs are quite different among these three states as well. See Real World Divorce.
Conclusion: I think that Jackson is the nicest place among the above three. Unfortunately, it is also everyone else’s favorite so it is super expensive. The long distance from a major city is concerning as well. Due to the urban layout, it should be easier to build a social life in Jackson than in Big Sky or Park City. That said, it probably still wouldn’t be that easy due to the large percentage of transients.
On the third hand: If you stay in Florida for the summer, you are unlikely to suffer from forest fire smoke, a problem that has been common for thousands of years in the mountain states, especially up north. Here’s the sky in the Titusville/Cape Canaveral area on July 1, 2023, when folks in the Midwest and Northeast were putting their N95s back on:
Anheuser-Busch InBev will continue to support the LGBTQ community despite backlash over a Bud Light advertising campaign featuring a transgender influencer that has simmered for nearly three months, CEO Brendan Whitworth said Wednesday.
Bud Light should be “all about bringing people together,” he told “CBS Mornings.”
“I think the conversation surrounding Bud Light has moved away from beer, and the conversation has become divisive,” Whitworth said. “And Bud Light really doesn’t belong there.”
AB InBev, the parent company of Bud Light, drew criticism from conservative activists and consumers for hiring transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a promotional March Madness campaign.
Does this seem like a sensible business strategy?
“There’s a big social conversation taking place right now, and big brands are right in the middle of it and it’s not just our industry or Bud Light,” he said. “It’s happening in retail, happening in fast food.
Why would big brands be in the middle of whether someone wants to identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+? Does a toothpaste brand need to pick a victimhood group to support, for example? (Rainbow Flagism is the social justice cause that is least likely to require adherents to give money, as I noted in Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?)
It seems unfair for Anheuser-Busch to have fired two mid-level executives over the Bud Light marketing campaign when it is apparently the CEO who is desperate to make his/her/zir/their mark in the Rainbow Flag Crusade. But why does Mx. Whitworth have to do that when Rainbow Flagism is the official state religion?
Readers: Are American consumers who (deplorably) reject Rainbow Flagism going to forgive “Tranheuser-Busch” when the CEO keeps talking about how 2SLGBTQQIA+ is the one group that he wants to support? (Not the unhoused, not the disabled, not those suffering from cancer…)
Overheard in Delft… a chubby California blonde was on her iPhone describing the marvels of the city to friends back in Sacramento and San Francisco: “It’s incredibly clean, not like the cities in our country.”
This was late on a Sunday afternoon and, in fact, the streets and sidewalks were somewhat trashed by all of the weekend tourists and strolling locals. Trash cans are relatively sparse, takeout food is common, and smoking is more common than in the U.S. In fact, even before the weekend I had noticed that the city was dramatically more littered, especially with very small items, than what we’re accustomed to in the parts of Florida that we visit.
A potential source of trash (my host forced me to eat fries with mayonnaise):
Locals eating just outside the shop:
Three tourists (background left) eating/drinking outside of the old city hall:
