Progressive Insurance abandons its Progressive Values

by philg

From June 2022, Progressive Insurance is Progressive, the company put a diversity and inclusion banner across its home page, dwarfing the “claims” button:

How about today?

They still have a Diversity & Inclusion link, but you need to scroll down two pages to find it. Unlike in 2022, the linked-to page makes no mention of 2SLGBTQQIA+ or any subset thereof. But this might be just an HTML coding mistake. The linked-to page is a generic “about” page and itself contains a Diversity & Inclusion link. That page does mention “LGBTQ” and “LGBT+”. The company has expert knowledge of what a miserable place the United States is for anyone but a white cisgender heterosexual non-immigrant person:

With so many acts of racism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia in our communities, this is more important than ever. We stand in solidarity with communities of color, the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups, and we encourage our people to discuss these all-too-prevalent issues with our leadership team, one another, and our Employee Resource Groups.

(employees tasked with handling claims are supposed to spend at least part of their day discussing “racism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia” with each other? What percentage of customers’ premium payments are to be spent on this activity?)

Possibly contrary to the recent Supreme Court interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the company says that it is passionate about “increasing the representation of women and people of color in management.” They’re proud of their new quota system:

To focus our efforts in 2020, we introduced an ambitious goal to double the representation of people of color in senior leadership from 10% to 20% by the end of 2025. As of December 2022, people of color account for 17% of our senior leadership ranks.

They’re also proud of their ability to cook the numbers:

We’re proud to report that for Progressive employees with similar performance, experience, and job responsibilities, women earn one dollar for every dollar earned by men, and people of color earn one dollar for every dollar earned by their white co-workers.*

This last one is confusing. If equal pay regardless of gender ID and skin color, once adjusted for “performance, experience, and job responsibilities”, isn’t already part of the job market as a whole, is Progressive overpaying some groups while underpaying others in order to achieve the precise pay equity that it claims? If so, why don’t those paid below-market quit and why don’t the shareholders complain about company management paying a selected group above-market wages?

This concludes my research into Progressive’s progressivism. As of this month, I have switched to State Farm for auto/umbrella (State Farm currently writes new homeowners policies in Florida, but not in our neighborhood. Our house is just barely new enough (2003), but maybe it is slightly too close to the ocean or too vulnerable to a storm surge or maybe they already have too many other houses nearby that they cover).

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What’s property tax inflation in your area?

by philg

We are informed that inflation is at 3 percent. The various county and local governments here in Palm Beach County/Jupiter somehow did not get the memo. A “Notice of Proposed Property Taxes” that I recently received shows that the taxing authorities are increasing their budgets by about 9.5% on a per-resident basis. The notice shows the millage rates with and without the proposed budget increases.

(I don’t think that the budget increases can be explained by the lockdown-driven exodus from the Northeast. The county’s population grew by only 13,000 in 2022, less than 1 percent (Palm Beach Post).)

Note that the first $50,000 of value is exempt for full-time residents under the “homestead exemption” and the assessed value for a primary residence cannot go up by more than 3 percent annually (but there is no limit to increases for the millage rates?).

Readers: What’s happening to your property tax bills in our 3% economy?

One of our neighbors is an accomplished oil painter. Here’s a photo that I took of what I think is one of the nicer-looking houses in the neighborhood for her to use as the basis of a painting:

What I think is the same house, but in white:

(The truly custom houses in this area are reserved for the truly rich!)

While shopping for furniture that would help our senior golden retriever get up on the bed, I found this upsetting example of inflation:

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Science says to avoid monkeypox by going to the bathhouse every night

by philg

A tweet from the Righteous:

According to the Scientists at Science, anyone who is not a Covidian is stupid and, worse, a denier of Science.

My response:

If Peter Hotez doesn’t want to get Covid, why won’t he stay home? That’s the one proven technique for avoiding a respiratory virus. He’s voluntarily entering packed rooms and holding indoor book signings (photo below), then telling others that he knows the secret for avoiding an aerosol contagion?

I included a photo from one of Professor Dr. Hotez, MD, PhD’s tweets:

He spends all day every day in crowded indoor environments talking about how stupid the average American is for not taking Covid-avoidance more seriously. If we translate this Scientific knowledge to another disease we find that anyone serious about avoiding Monkeypox should spend all night every night in a bathhouse.

What did the giant-sized brains of Science have to say about Professor Dr. Hotez, MD, PhD’s book?

… the fierce backlash against sensible public health measures … by uninformed citizens and bad actors on social media… Hotez calls for the US federal government to address anti-science aggression… a proposal for a new entity akin to the Southern Poverty Law Center that would both monitor hateful threats to scientists and offer legal advice and resources.

“Right-wing idealogues” are identified as prime targets who should be hit by those who are pro-Science and “Hotez’s warning about the broader implications of Covid denial must be heeded.”

Let’s check out the Defender of Science’s Twitter feed to see which crowded rooms he’s in.

In a crowded room where nobody wears a mask…

In Manhattan, which is in no way associated with crowding and filth:

Unmasked in a bookstore with a fellow Covidian:

In a Washington, D.C. bookstore with a Floridian and a Covidian:

Getting ready to gather in a crowd of 50,000 for a book festival (in a state where the New York Times informs us that books are banned):

Cuddling indoors with a Climate Doomer/Covid Doomer in Filthadelphia:

Inside a massive convention center stuffed with potentially infected humans:

(The infectious disease experts decided to hold a mass gathering instead of a Zoom-based conference?)

Flashback to three years ago on this blog: What to do when a family member is an anti-masker?

Update: Professor Dr. Hotez, MD, PhD is not afraid of death, but he is afraid of comments from other Twitter users:

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Science says that young people sick with COVID-19 should go home to their parents and grandparents

by philg

Courtesy of Jay Bhattacharya, the University of Michigan’s policy for dealing with the discovery of an unclean SARS-CoV-2-infected 18-year-old in a dorm shared with healthy 18-year-olds:

Let’s consider Pat Studymuch, a U-M freshman. He/she/ze/they lives in a single room amidst other 18-year-olds whose risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 is minimal. Where should he/she/ze/they go?

Science says “Go back to the parents and elderly grandparents” (in the “permanent residence”). But if removing an infected 18-year-old from a group of 18-year-olds and pushing him/her/zir/them into a community of older people is good, wouldn’t it be even better for contagious students to be sent to quarantine in nursing homes?

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The UAW strike and the continuing car shortage have a common root in executive incompetence?

by philg

At a Chevrolet dealer in Stuart, Florida on September 15, I learned that not-in-demand cars are selling at MSRP sticker price, leaving the dealer with $4000 more in profit than in the old days when the cars sold at invoice. In-demand cars continue to carry an additional markup. For example, an electric Chevy is $10,000 over sticker, as is a regular Corvette. A Z06 Corvette is $75,000 over sticker on those rare occasions when the dealer can get one.

Can you save some $$ by buying used? A three-year-old 2020 Corvette 3LT (the premium trim) is available for $95,800, which I’m sure is more than its original sticker price.

Let’s look at the Z06 Corvette. Here’s what Edmunds says about the simplest model:

According to the official prices, GM thought that the dealer would get about $7,000 in profit from selling this car. In the post-coronapanic world, however, the dealer will get $82,000 for taking an order (the difference between MRSP+$75,000 and invoice).

I’m wondering if this is why the car shortage has continued for so long. Ordinarily, if something goes up in price the producers get paid a lot more and begin working hard to increase production. If gasoline becomes more expensive, for example, gas stations don’t become insanely rich while oil producers keep getting the same old price. The gas station gets its usual small markup and the extra money for petroleum products goes to the oil company, precisely the signal that the market is supposed to give to producers in Econ 101. The legacy automakers, however, never got any financial signal that cars were in demand. Nearly all of extra money paid by consumers went to dealers, who responded by buying new beach houses, new business jets, new jet-powered helicopters for their kids, new yachts, European vacations, etc. The boost in auto prices, thus, spurred production of business jets more than production of cars.

I wrote about this back in 2022: Why aren’t cars (and pinball machines) auctioned as they come out of the factory?. The dealer agreement that I found did not prevent the manufacturer from abandoning a fixed retail/invoice price structure and instead simply auctioning cars to dealers or at least establishing a new market-based price every week. Nothing in the agreement required a manufacturer to keep the price to the dealer fixed for 6-12 months, as has been conventional for legacy automakers even during coronapanic.

Tesla, of course, has been a notable exception. The company has made frequent price adjustments throughout this period of lockdown-induced economic disruption. Thus, Tesla has had a financial incentive to maximize production, e.g., paying chip suppliers extra money if necessary to keep the lines going.

Let’s also consider the recent strike by the United Auto Workers, of whom roughly 146,000 work for the Detroit Three. They want a 40 percent pay increase to compensate for the inflation that the government says does not exist. Could the legacy car companies easily afford to pay this if they hadn’t been selling cars for far less than they were worth for nearly three years?

I think that the Detroit 3 have U.S. revenue of about $300 billion per year, combined. Let’s say that they could have gotten 10 percent more money by selling cars for what they were worth instead of selling them for whatever invoice price they’d established. That would have worked out to approximately $90 billion in additional revenue over three years. In other words, they could have given each UAW member a $600,000 coronapanic bonus and still had money left over to give to shareholders.

Should all of the executives at the Detroit 3 be fired? Every day they produced assets owned by shareholders, i.e., the cars coming off the assembly lines. Every day they sold those shareholder-owned assets for far less than they were worth. They enriched the dealers to whom they owed no fiduciary duty. They starved their own production facilities of the extra cash that could have been used to motivate suppliers, workers, etc. to maximize production and ease the supply shortage that has cost consumers so dearly (and helped to generate ugly inflation numbers). They failed to capture the cash that the UAW is now on strike to obtain.

Related:

  • One thing that keeps the Detroit 3 afloat is a 25 percent tariff on light truck imports imposed by Lyndon Johnson (Reason), though Wikipedia says that a Mexico-built truck wouldn’t be subject to the tariff
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It’s a “crisis” when more than 1/500th of the nation’s undocumented migrants settle in New York City

by philg

Back in 2016, approximately 22 million undocumented migrants lived in the U.S. (Yale study, published 2018). Let’s assume that today’s undocumented migrant population is closer to 30 million. From the August 31 New York Times… “As Migrant Crisis Worsens, New York Leaders Pressure Biden to Do More”:

A broad coalition of civic, business and union leaders has come together to apply pressure on Washington to help with the migrant crisis in New York. … Washington has failed to adequately address the migrant crisis that has overwhelmed the city in recent months.

Of the 107,000 migrants who have arrived since last year, almost 60,000 are still in the city’s care. … The city has opened over 200 sites and humanitarian relief centers to house and process the migrants, which officials estimate will cost $5 billion this year, as much as the budgets for the parks, fire and sanitation departments combined.

Mr. Adams said the current flow of migrants could cost $12 billion over three years, exceeding the city’s current fiscal and physical capacity to deal with the crisis…

Adams later elaborated about New York City actually being destroyed (see NYC mayor: Texas governor a “madman” for wanting to send city-destroying migrants away from Texas).

Let’s check some photos from my August 22-23, 2023 trip to Manhattan to see whether NYC is, in fact, being destroyed.

What if the migrants want to relax with some 2SLGBTQQIA+-friendly alcohol? Note the “Bud Light” at the top left of the “Open For All” rainbow neon sign.

Perhaps they prefer healing cannabis? New (“essential”) marijuana stores are opening in every neighborhood:

What about COVID? It does not make sense to move out of the crowded city when one can instead don a mask. At the Union Square Greenmarket:

What would you see if you were brave enough to enter the subway?

On any journey into the subway, we are reminded that Pfizer is taking care of us. From Grand Central Station:

Do you want to learn about the “beautiful complexities of the LGBTQIA+ experience”? A Manhattan sidewalk is the place to do it.

(It was a hater from out of town who wrote “all lie” on the sign about the three local queer artists?)

NYC still has plenty of garbage:

My friend who lives in Lower Manhattan attributes a spike in the rodent population to the “rat hotels” that restaurants have built in the street, each one raised up just enough to provide a cozy condo for multiple rat families. Good luck seeing whether a car is coming:

Note that the rat hotel’s floor is flush with the sidewalk:

Rats can also live in the middle of the street:

(See “‘Rat tours’ boom in rodent-infested New York” (the Guardian, 9/4): “sightings doubled last year”)

My departure from Teterboro was marred by a horrifying scene of inequality:

Related:

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California innovation: Gun safety freedoms

by philg

From Governor French Laundry:

I am in love with him/her/zir/them referring to these restrictions as “freedoms”.

Separately, I can’t figure out why the proposal is so weak. He/she/ze/they says these tweaks will “end our nation’s gun violence crisis”. But if the government continues to allow private citizens access to firearms, won’t there still be plenty of gun violence? Governor French Laundry promises to ban “civilian purchases of assault weapons”, but that still leaves approximately 6 percent of Americans in possession of an AR-15. If any one of those 6 percent wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, that’s high potential for gun violence!

Also, though Americans under 21 will be restricted by these freedoms from legally purchasing a gun, those 21+ will still be able to do so. Aren’t there enough Americans over 21 committing gun violence that we would still be suffering from a “gun violence crisis” even if nobody under 21 ever did any shooting?

Readers may recall Seal off criminal-rich neighborhoods to tackle the public health emergency of gun violence? in which residents of some neighborhoods would be locked down and walled off. Could being forbidden to leave the house/neighborhood also be considered a “gun safety freedom”?

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Progress in electric bicycles?

by philg

Extremely loyal readers may remember that I previously reviewed a 2013 Trek electric bicycle:

  • 52 lbs. for XL frame size
  • $2100
  • 250 Wh battery
  • 250 watt motor

It’s been 10 years. Let’s check in to see how much better today’s electric bikes are. Behold, the Trek Verve+ 2:

How much better is this than the 2013 bike?

  • 51.5 lbs. for M frame size (i.e., heavier)
  • 2,850 Bidies (BLS says that $2,100 in 2013 is equivalent to roughly 2,800 Bidies today, so this is about the same when adjusted for official inflation)
  • 400 Wh battery
  • 250 watt motor

The 2023 bike should be better balanced, due to the battery being in the middle, and it has hydraulic brakes. On the other hand, if the battery dies, the old bike’s 21-speed drivetrain will likely be superior to the new design’s 9-speed (presumably lacks the low gears you’d want to pedal yourself and a ponderous electric bike back to the garage).

I’m shocked at how little progress has been made. I would have guessed that, at the $2100 price, the weight would have come down to 40 lbs. and the battery capacity would have doubled to 500 Wh. Maybe if we’d put $20 trillion into electric bike engineering instead of coronapanic lockdowns, payouts, subsidies, etc.? Or are the bike engineers running up against the laws of physics and chemistry?

From my 2015 review:

What about the new stuff? It seems as though the 900-lb. gorilla of the bike world, Shimano, has entered the market with the Shimano Steps system, which is what Trek is using on their latest models. This may prove the point of Crossing the Chasm (that the innovators often don’t end up as market leaders because products that appeal to hobbyists and early adopters don’t necessarily appeal to the mainstream).

My bike is a regular Trek city bike to which they added some Bionx components, much as a consumer might have done in his/her/zir/their garage. What happened to Bionx when Shimano and Bosch moved in? A 2018 article:

Electric-assist and retrofit electric motor company Bionx has gone bankrupt and its assets are being sold off.

After cornering the North American electric-assist retrofit market, Bionx suddenly closed its doors and laid off all workers in February 2018, just at the start of the busy Spring season in the bicycle industry.

Apparently, the financial failure of the company is related to a deal with General Motors, in which Bionx was to produce electric bicycles for the auto-maker at a cost of $1000/ea. After finding that the bicycles would actually cost $1400/ea to build, Bionx defaulted on the contract and went into receivership shortly thereafter.

In the Department of Never Take Investment Advice from Philip, this is what I thought would happen to Tesla. They fiddled around with standard Li-ion batteries and electric motors. As soon as they’d proven that the market existed, the companies that were experts at making great cars would swoop in and take away all of Tesla’s customers because the cars around the batteries/motors would be so much better. The UK’s Car magazine, however, recently did a comparison test and BMW’s i4 M50 was ranked #3, Hyundai’s Ioniq 6 was #2, and the best electric sedan was the Tesla 3. In other words, Tesla figured out how to make a good car in less time than it took BMW to figure out how to mount some batteries and a motor into a car.

Related:

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Heroes of Technical Support: American Standard/Trane HVAC

by philg

Loyal readers may recall that I’ve been fighting high humidity in our house for a while (see ChatGPT is almost as bad at home maintenance as I am for a discussion about how window replacement resulted in our A/C being oversized).

I decided to splurge on the top-of-the-line Trane/American Standard TAM9 air handler and a variable-speed condenser for one of the three systems in our house. Once installed, the humidity did go down from about 55-60 percent to 45-50 percent. Mission accomplished, as George W. Bush might say? No. The thermostat raised dire warnings about “Err 166.00”. This is something to do with the Electronic Expansion Valve (EEV) and “superheat”, two terms that I can’t understand. After the error was raised, power consumption for the air handler dropped to about 20 watts, i.e., less than a small window fan. How could this possibly work even if the compressor was running at only 50 percent? That would be 1.5 tons (out of 3) spread into 5 rooms with 20 watts of fan power? After a week in this state, the system failed completely.

The dealer said that he had no idea what was wrong, but was planning to swap components out until the problem went away. “Maybe it is a sensor. Maybe it is the fan motor,” he guessed. Why not call the manufacturer’s tech support line? “They’re useless.”

He was over at the house the other day (Visit #5?) and I had him call tech support on speaker just to humor me. After learning that the 166.00 errors typically happen between 4 and 8 am, American Standard’s tech support expert attributed the problem to the thermostat being set at 72 degrees. “There is no cooling load in the middle of the night and nothing for the system to do, so it shuts the EEV valve to protect the compressor,” he said. What was his recommended fix? “Set the thermostat to 75, which is what air conditioners are designed for.” If this kind of protection was necessary, how had the previous single-stage system managed to survive more than 6 years, at least 1.5 of those years with the thermostat set to 72? “They don’t have as many sensors as the latest equipment.”

(He is correct that the Manual J calculation for sizing air conditioning typically assumes an indoor setting of 75F and an outdoor temp that is supposed to be the 99th percentile of hotness. In Palm Beach County, that’s 91 degrees, though if sizing a variable-speed system maybe it should be bumped to 95 to allow for the possibility that Professor Dr. Greta Thunberg, Ph.D.is a true prophetess.)

In short, what had caused the problem with our $12,000+ air conditioner was that we had tried to use it as an air conditioner and it wasn’t smart enough simply to turn itself off when the room temperature reached the thermostat set temperature.

(Everyone likes Lennox better, but their fancy “communicating” gear requires 4 wires between air handler and condenser and our existing systems had either 3 wires or 2 wires run between indoor and outdoor units. Trane’s communicating gear requires only 2 wires, so we’re stuck with Trane unless we want to start opening up walls and ceilings to run new wires. Florida houses have no basements and no attics, which makes retrofitting problematic, but nobody seems to care because the standard practice is to gut-rehab or bulldoze after 20-30 years (or 6, if you’re an elite New York-based environmentalist and sustainability expert).)

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Medical School 2020, Year 4, Week 28 (Advanced Surgery, week 2)

by philg

Still with the cadavers… this week we focus on neck procedures. Budding neurosurgeon Bri will focus on the anterior approach to a cervical fusion (called an ACDF, anterior cervical discectomy and fusion), while the rest of us focus on the technique for a tracheostomy (“trach”) and thyroidectomy. Bri passes out expired tracheostomy kits including a percutaneous (“perc”) trach kit.

Our trauma surgeon professor describes the scene: “It is an eerie night on call. At 2:00 am, an airway alert is sent out. It’s only you there. You arrive in a crowded room with a blue patient and the anesthesiologist puts the laryngoscope in for the third time. He isn’t able to intubate. The patient’s heart rate is dropping.” She pauses.  “The patient is about to code. He needs an airway. What do you do?” With blank stares, she gives us the answer: “Well first, you need God on your side so pray the patient is not obese. After that, all you need is an endotracheal tube and a scalpel.”

“Everyone palpate landmarks on each other. Feel the cricoid cartilage.” (The horizontal prominence below the Adam’s apple.) Our professor explains that there are multiple paths forward. “You have to choose one. Know what you are most comfortable with performing.” There are three main options: a cricothyroidotomy (tube inserted into the larynx through the cricothyroid membrane); an open tracheostomy (cut down on the trachea to insert a tube); a percutaneous tracheostomy (tube inserted into the trachea through a needle stick with serial dilations). “A cricothyroidotomy is a temporary procedure. It will need to be revised to a tracheostomy to prevent damage to the larynx over weeks, but in this scenario nothing matters if the patient can’t oxygenate.” She continues, “Old surgeons trained in an age of open trachs. Most trainees are more comfortable performing perc trachs.”  

We head to the anatomy lab to practice performing a tracheostomy with the expired kits. “My advice when you arrive at your new hospital is grab a kit for each procedure and open it up. An experienced surgeon will struggle performing a procedure if there is a new kit.”

For the next three days, we focus on the technical aspects of a thyroidectomy. The general surgery residents join us for this. The fourth and fifth year residents help walk the interns and medical students through removing one lobe of the thyroid. “Stay as close as you can to the thyroid when you divide blood vessels.” A third year chimes in, “Thyroids scare me. One small misstep and you’ll hit the recurrent laryngeal nerve.”

We finish the rotation at a coffee shop that is a five-minute walk from the anatomy lab. The trauma surgeon recounts her experience on a civilian medical response team, which was deployed after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. “Contrary to popular belief, a vast majority of the patients we treat are not injured from the disaster. Instead, we care for typical medical emergencies, for example, heart attacks, wound infections, appendicitis, and preterm labor, in a suddenly austere environment,” she explains. “In Haiti, a single generator powered the makeshift intensive care unit and operating room. Of course this went down for about 24 hours. Our team bagged a preterm intubated baby when the ventilator backup power stopped. She survived!”

Bri comments that his sister is in the Army Reserves as a nurse. She was recently mobilized, but the entire unit is staying in a hotel waiting for orders. This does not surprise the trauma surgeon. “Yeah, my team was sent to Iowa for two weeks waiting for orders only to be sent home eventually without having done anything.”

Statistics for the week… Study: 0 hours. Sleep: 7 hours/night; Fun: 2 nights. Example fun: Burgers and beers with Lanky Luke and Sarcastic Samantha. Samantha deliberates on the pros and cons of switching jobs. She is exhausted from stringing along patients who need consults with specialists who hide in hopes that someone on the next shift will take the patient instead. “I looked at the academic hospital, but they pay $30,000 less.” Luke: “I strongly recommend against a pay cut.”

The rest of the book: http://fifthchance.com/MedicalSchool2020

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