WNash

Also, invoke presidential powers under the Defense Production Act to compel manufacture of PPE and other equipment and medications, to prevent price gouging on scarce materials needed to treat and prevent the disease, and to assemble and create efficient logistics for distribution. There are two possible reasons to suggest that Trump has done all he could. One is to run interference with the objective of sheltering him from criticism. The other is because we have been conditioned (by both parties) to believe that the government is incapable of materials improving people’s lives. Our experience of politicians from both parties using resources to preserve or grow the wealth of the already wealthy elites reinforces our sense that we should hope for nothing good.

Earlier that afternoon, Milwaukee had a 79 mph wind gust. I didn’t see any tornado reports, but the straight line winds were roaring. When I lived in Nashville, the NWS and local broadcast mets would remind their audience that November was the 2nd severe season in Tennessee. Not quite as wild as April, but we would usually get at least one tornado watch in the first part of the month.

This is somebody’s cut and paste from Twitter. The original comes from a Twitter account called APhilosophae, and his analysis is based on a flawed data set (he used a rounding method to reverse engineer a level of accuracy that does not exist in the data set), and is a selective analysis, excluding data sets from states that contradict his analysis. It’s clearly an attempt to create uncertainty by assuring an online audience clamoring for proof of vote fraud that he found such evidence, then mystifies his claim with a purportedly technical analysis. I’m a data analyst, and once I located his data set (there are a bunch of weird scammy links that in the Twitter thread), I spotted the methodology error fairly quickly. There are a number of technical evaluations of this purported evidence on Twitter. One that I found that noted the rounding issue and several other flaws is here: The original analysis wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny in court, if it came down to that, but audience isn’t a judge with the authority to act upon a legitimate claim of fraud. The audience is a bunch of very mad, very online people who were absolutely certain that Trump would win, so they know with equal certainty that his loss must mean that the election was a fraud. A lot of beliefs in which I had a lot of confidence were blown out of the water by Trump’s election, but it was inarguable that he won enough votes to have an electoral college majority in 2016. It wasn’t the world that was wrong, it was ME that was wrong. I shouldn’t have to tell anyone that a worldview which rejects empirical data — what your eyes and ears tell you or sources who have little reason not to be impartial tell you — is staggeringly dangerous. The “fake news” ideology in which anything that contradicts your belief system must be wrong is absolutely circular reasoning, and circular reasoning has no claim to truth. And even worse, a great many people belief that their side has an absolute right to rule and the other side is categorically illegitimate. The political system that comes from those beliefs is by definition totalitarian, and all of the hand waving about “upholding the Constitution” doesn’t make it any less so. People ascribe their own ideology to the founding fathers all the time, but one thing that the foundational documents of this country have in common is opposition to totalizing ideology.

A few justices will always want to get involved, but I think that the Chief Justice and at least 1-2 of the right wing associate justices know that they’re likely to have legitimacy issues fairly soon, and they won’t want to start that problem over something so obviously bogus as Trump’s fraud claims. To have any chance at retaining his office, his legal team has to persuasively make multiple completely contradictory arguments at once. Not gonna happen.

Polls of enlisted personnel showed a fairly close split between Biden and Trump (ranging between Biden +5 and Trump +5). It's pretty clear that most pollsters have no idea how to accurately poll Trump voters, probably because they don't know any Trump voters, but there is also some evidence that a small number of Trump voters attempted to monkeywrench the polls by lying. If I were to guess, I'd say Trump leads enlisted personnel by around 5% and officers by 20-30%. Enlisted personnel outnumber officers by a little less than 20 to 1, and about 1/3 of all service personnel have historically voted. Civilian voter participation was very high this year, but military voting would have to be far higher than that for Trump to accumulate enough military votes to change any results.

At least in MI and PA, the legislature rejected proposals to allow counting of mail/absentee ballots prior to the closing of the polls, which dovetailed nicely with Trump's pre-election claims about fraudulent mail ballots (a criticism which selectively didn't apply to states where he expected to do well with mail ballots, like FL). This slow process is what the legislatures of those two states wanted to see. NV on the other hand allows ballots with a postmark on or before Election Day to be counted, so while they have the capacity to process far more ballots than they are receiving, ballots are still arriving due to the deliberate slowdown of USPS sorting.

Because of four hours of subfreezing temps last week, I had to take down about a dozen thriving indeterminate tomato plants. I picked more than 85 green tomatoes right before the freeze, I tried to leave part of the vine attached to give them a better chance of ripening, but probably 90% of them were too early. If I could have protected them for four hours, this current spell of weather is warm enough and forecast to continue long enough that they could have vine-ripened!

Just going to vent here for a minute, because this is a relatively sane place even if we don’t all have the same political views. I keep seeing on social media the same nonsensical claim that “the US is a republic, not a democracy”. Typically this claim is made by someone who seems to think the Democratic Party has no legitimate claim on power. “Republic” and “Democracy” are NOT mutually exclusive categories. A republic is simply a form of government that is not a monarchy, meaning power fundamentally lies with people or their nominal representatives instead of a central figure. And there are multiple kinds of democracies, including direct democracies (where the people rule themselves by voting directly on laws) and representative democracies (in which the people elect a smaller body of representatives who vote on laws on behalf of the people they represent). Most republics are representative democracies. The USA is one of them. Making a claim that “we are a republic, not a democracy” is beyond ignorant. It seems like another way of saying that the Republican Party is legitimate and the Democratic Party is not. Of course, the Republican Party didn’t even exist for most of the first century of the United States, and the Democratic Party actually formed about 50 years after independence out of something called the “Democratic-Republican Party.” Both of the current major parties have at one time or another held just about every political position possible. The Republicans even had a large faction of socialists just a century ago. And we all know about the support of Democrats for overt white supremacy for decades. Our worst problems are coming from a sense that the other side has no legitimate right to govern. That nonsense has to stop or there will be a body count, and that will simply make things worse. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

This would be the ideal solution, but the US selectively relies on greater or lesser degrees of federalism to administer functions that elsewhere are standardized by a national system. We end up with the current mess (frankly, that’s what it is), allowing states to perform various roles as long as they meet minimum standards in administering those roles. Unfortunately, those standards are perpetually ratcheted down by activist federal courts and in recent years by an executive branch who often wants to “drown the government in a bathtub.” A convoluted and cumbersome electoral process inarguably lowers participation and allows the government to be run by those with the biggest financial stake. That’s the REAL swamp.

WNY New Snow, name checks out

Pretty good squall!

You hit the nail on the head. There is a valid debate about whether the benefits of a shutdown are outweighed by the consequences. And there a valid debate about how much of an economic safety net the government should provide to the many people who are economically harmed by shutdowns, and if so, who should pay for it. But it’s dishonest and wrong for someone to decide that because they are opposed to a shutdown, they’re going to do everything they can to undermine confidence in objective, neutral facts about the pandemic. Likewise, denying that a major shutdown causes real harm to many people would be dishonest (although I can’t think of anyone who actually has claimed that shutdowns don’t have negative effects on many people. There are people who hold the view that letting the weakest members of society die because the cost of a shutdown is too much to bear. Unfortunately, that viewpoint is often accompanied by claims that the death toll is inflated and/or denial about growing evidence of dangerous complicated for people who recovered from acute COVID infections. But the people who acknowledge the medical reality of COVID but still think a shutdown isn’t worth it get credit for honesty. That hard nosed survival of the fittest live is a hard sell once it comes down to sacrificing your own 78 year old mother just so you can eat inside a McDonalds.

If you’re going to make a claim that hospitals and doctors are deliberately miscoding diagnoses and causes of death, then you should say so, rather than hinting that something is happening due to the CARES Act, but not saying anything that can actually be evaluated as true ir false. But it sure sounds like you’re claiming that providers are falsely billing Medicare for COVID treatment that isn’t being provided. Medicare billing fraud is a very serious crime. By implying that COVID statistics are so significantly inflated that the count of 180k+ deaths is not credible, you’re alleging that a conspiracy of doctors, examiners, and hospitals is working together to falsely bill Medicare for a huge amount of money... tens of billions, apparently, considering that CARES establish a $100 billion fund for reimbursing costs of treating COVID patients. That’s very serious claim, and if you’re going to hint that corruption exists on a vast scale among providers of healthcare across the country, then back it up with more evidence than a few anecdotes reported by a local TV station in Oregon. We can agree to disagree about opinions, but I’m not agreeing to disagree about matters of fact. If you think doctors and hospitals and medical examiners are engaged in tens of billions of dollars in Medicare fraud, then show some evidence.

That’s an issue with the doctors represent cause of death on death certificates in general. The rule is supposed to be that the immediate cause of death is primary, and other conditions that contributed to the death are detailed in a separate part of the death certificate — “intermediate” or “underlying” causes of death. I know this because when my father died three years ago, what the death certificate actually said became very important. He died of multiple organ failure caused by a c diff infection when he was in the ICU with congestive heart failure caused by agent orange toxicity. The VA rated him at 100% disabled (actually higher, VA disability ratings defy math) due to service. He was ground-based FAC in Vietnam, and drank and showered in Agent Orange contamination for two different six month tours. As a consequence, his health was destroyed from multiple chronic diseases. When a physician at the hospital where he died initially completed his death certificate, it only referred to multiple organ failure from c diff. But without the death certificate referring to the reason he was in the ICU to begin with — ischemic heart disease — the VA wouldn’t pay a widow’s benefit to my mother, who was my father’s caregiver for years. So I contacted the physician who completed the death certificate, and he agreed that the underlying cause of death was the ischemic heart disease that put him in the ICU where he was vulnerable to the infection that killed him. As a result, my mother receives a widow’s benefit. COVID deaths are handled no differently than any other death in that regard. A friend in Mississippi lost his mother to COVID recently. She had COPD and had survived cancer. The chronic condition COPD was listed as a contributor to the death by COVID. Alternative, there are clear COVID deaths that don’t refer to COVID on the death certificate. A friend of a friend, a healthy guy in his late 30s living in NYC, no underlying conditions, had COVID symptoms for two weeks in April. They didn’t test him, but he clearly had COVID (he gave to his wife and her brothers who were tested). In early June, he died of a stroke — he had never had hypertension, no high risk behavior like smoking. It’s highly likely that deaths like this are COVID sequelae not being coded as COVID in the data. So please don’t misrepresent the standard practices involved in specifying cause of death as a conspiracy to inflate COVID numbers. It’s not true.

I’m truly sorry about the stress you and your wife are going through. I’ve been there. It’s terrible. But your argument by anecdote to assert that the death count is being inflated is wrong, both factually and morally, and undermines bonafide public health measures to control the spread of the disease.

Yeah, in general we're going to trend above normal, but long range outlooks don't seem to be able to identify when the normal or below normal stretches will happen. Whenever I look at these things, it just looks like they stick with "persistence."

Was Hazel fully extratropical? I think it tracked all the way up to James Bay.

I’m on the cautious side, but as long as there is near 100% mask compliance and we shut things back down quickly if there’s a significant outbreak, and as long as we do contact tracing competently, then we should re-open almost everything.

I think it's entirely in line with the rest of what I wrote. I think I established that the grounds for going after the USPS from a business perspective are pretty tenuous. They were saddled with a budget requirement that is basically unique. I think concerns about how to pay for pension obligations are generally legitimate, but the solution is to scale down from the really generous pensions of the past. I would love to have the pension my in-laws earned -- something like 65% of their highest annual wage, but they only had to contribute about 2% of their income for the first ten years they worked. That's obviously not sustainable, but the generation who had that really extreme pension is dying out, and the obligation will decrease. I'll get roughly 40%-45% of my average last three salaries after a longer service period, and I'm paying in the entire duration of my job. So if it's not pension obligations that are the reason to go after the USPS, why go after it? I think some people don't like to see a large unionized workforce that isn't accountable to Wall Street or other private investors. Some of that is ideology and some of that is political tribalism (when you are so loyal to your team that you do everything you can to destroy the other team). But what's more plausible is that the USPS is caught up in a general attempt to put as many obstacles to voting in place as possible, ostensibly to stop voter fraud. The problem is that actual voter fraud is statistically insignificant. Voting is actually kind of a pain in the ass, even for me, with a regular work schedule. When voter registration is made needlessly complex, many states require ID. Poorer people are less likely to have ID, and while you can say "that's on them", why require an ID at all, if illegal voting barely exists? Why not make election day a holiday? Why not automatically register people to vote? Frankly, and I know this isn't popular, I think everyone should be at least eligible to vote, including prisoners, because we have seen that once politicians decide to exclude one group, they will keep trying to find more groups to exclude. The big problem is that many politicians, and most of one of the two major parties, have gone a long way down the road of restricting voting. They're very committed to that position, and they suspect that they'll pay a price if a lot of people who were systematically constrained from voting are suddenly sent a ballot. But that price will be paid sooner or later, because the less that a government reflects the will of the people, the angrier the response will be later on. And I don't think it would be as bad for Republicans as they do -- after all, a very stupid war AND a calamitous financial crisis happened on their watch, and yet they were back in charge of the House within two years and in charge of the entire government within eight years. They're much better off trying to figure out how to gradually wind down voting restrictions instead of trying to tighten the vise harder by doing dumb things like gutting the post office because they are likely to lose one election.

I wish I could put today in a bottle and open it up whenever I need to. Warm, sunny, very little humidity. I worked in the garden for a half hour in mid-afternoon wearing shorts and a t-shirt and never felt a drop of sweat. Absolutely perfect. And one of my tomatoes finally showed the first blush of color.

The postal power is explicitly stated in the Constitution. There is a reason why the founders thought that postal service was fundamentally valuable to the nation: it's a neutral medium of communication, allowing first amendment expression to be put into practice. Unlike private shipping companies, the USPS has a universal service obligation. They have to deliver to everyone. If the government were to order UPS or to FedEx to deliver to everyone without exception, it would be seen as a wild abuse of the free market. As private enterprises, they're allowed to make decisions about who to serve and who not to serve, and as long as those decisions don't explicitly target protected classes, the federal government can't do a thing about it. A universal service obligation requires a public postal service. Moreover, the postal service can't restrict the content of what it delivers (with some notable exceptions for criminal activity), while a private service could restrict free expression. Not everything is a business, or should be modeled on a business. The military, clearly, is not a business -- the explicit use of US soldiers as mercenaries is out of bounds, the antithesis of a military oath of service or oath of enlistment. While private security guards are an option for commercial ventures or private individuals, our system of laws depends upon enforcement by a public, not private, police and prosecutors. We have been fortunate enough to have a postal system that for most of its existence has been fully self-funding. The law the mid-2000s to require pre-funding of retirement benefits is virtually unique to the USPS (every other employer operating at anywhere near the scale of the USPS operates largely or wholly on PAYG funding. As a basis of operation, it's just not controversial. The law that burdened the USPS with unmanageable expenses was a bad one, passed by a lame duck congress acting on behalf of private competitors to the USPS, none of whom pre-fund pension obligations. UPS's pension operates largely as PAYG, with some pre-funding at the discretion of the company. The post office has potential that far exceeds its remit. Until the last generation, the Post Office used its extensive reach, with branches in every corner of the country, to offer postal banking, to great success. The usurious payday loan industry has replaced that valuable service to the detriment of millions of working people. Other public postal services provide insurance services, administer retirement savings plans, even provide internet services, basically at cost. It's a great boon to consumers, and because postal services have rate-setting authority, very little of this is done at the expense of the taxpayer. The potential of the post office to help hundreds of millions of ordinary people is threat to the handful of people who pay themselves a lot of money to run duplicative services, and the money that has been accumulated by that relative handful of people is used to buy the votes of politicians. This is called regulatory capture -- the process by which the wealthy use their wealth to kneecap public competition or accountability -- and it is the swampiest form of corruption because the people who commit these corrupt acts have used their corrupt gains to buy the lawmakers who are supposed to hold them accountable. While regulatory capture kicked off this crisis, what's accelerated the problem is that the post office is uniquely situated to allow people to participate in the democratic process. Post offices are everywhere. Someone from the post office goes to every home in the country at least six times a week. At a time when in person voting, already made deliberately complicated and challenging for millions of people, is also a risk to the health and safety of voters and of poll workers, we already have the answer in front of us: vote by mail. But corrupt politicians already get to pick their own voters by throwing up every hurdle imaginable, including crippling the postal service itself. It's incredible to consider that politicians are driven by a completely arrogant question: what benefit to office holders could come from making voting easier? As a result, we have to listen to endless lies about ballot security and vote counting. The reality that they don't want to acknowledge is that the very legitimacy of their rule ultimately depends upon the extent to which they represent the actual people of this country.

Very cool story about researchers chasing the huge MCS’s in Argentina https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/22/magazine/worst-storms-argentina.html

Neither of us are civil service. At all SUNY schools there are civil service lines (represented by CSEA) and professional lines (represented by UUP), and professional lines go through a competitive search, basically like the rest of the world. But I work with plenty of civil service, and even have been on civil service search committee. I wish I had done civil service years ago when I lived in NYC. Your exam results get you in the door, but I’m not kidding when I say that if you’re civil service eligible, a good interviewee, and there is an actually vacancy, you can get an offer on the spot. It’s just slogging through the exam process that’s tough. Not that it’s hard, but it’s a lot of hoops to jump though. I have friends who are COs. It can be miserable, but if you can compartmentalize your work from the rest of your life, you can retire comfortably relatively young. I was taking to a cop friend (NYPD sergeant) a couple weeks ago and he said he wouldn’t get into it if he had been starting out now. Everything is up for change and not for the better as far as officers are concerned. The best state jobs in my opinion are trades jobs working for state agencies. I know a carpenter at UB, great union, very safe workplace, good pay.

I had a job loss during the recession before this one, and an extended period of unemployment was followed by a return to work at a salary 2/3rds of my previous rate. I had a six month emergency fund that I stretched out to 10 months, but then had to go into my retirement savings before I got another full time job albeit at lower pay. Having gone through all that, I started looking for jobs that would provide a pension. I got a state job specifically for the pension. I make less than I could in the private sector, despite the fact that my work week is no shorter than it was at my private sector jobs. But I consider my pension to be deferred income. The days when you vested at ten years and never paid in again are long gone (except for some old timers), but both me and my wife have pension plans. We also are rebuilding our 403b and IRA balances, so we hope that it might be possible to have a traditional three legged retirement (pension, savings, and Social Security). I’ll still have a couple decades left in the workforce, God willing, but I don’t think my savings could ever come close to 10x salary.

I was at my mother in laws in Gardenville until 2 AM trying to get a sump pump working. Absolutely miserable experience that makes me appreciate my dry basement. Next time we move, a basement that doesn’t flood is going to be on my non-negotiable list.