WNash

Ironbound is a pretty awesome historical Portuguese neighborhood in the eastern part of Newark, with traditional bars and restaurants that people visit from all over the NY/NJ region. Sad to hear that it’s the locus of an outbreak.

When a single case pops up, China tests every person in that city. Positive tests are required to isolate, and are monitored for the quarantine period, with severe penalties for non-compliance. It’s undeniably effective, but it’s not something that people in western countries, which political traditions that elevate personal liberty over obligations to society (to greater or lesser degrees, depending on the country). Countries that have more restrictions also tend to have governments that provide direct support to people who are inevitably economically harmed by both outbreaks and shutdowns. The US has opted to pursue an approach with fewer restrictions, more outbreaks, and less assistance to individuals. Extreme restrictions and mass testing have allowed China to largely resume business as usual. Our government does not have that degree of power to compel its citizens to behave in certain ways, so we have the individual freedom to do things that increase both our personal risks and the risks to others on our communities. So I don’t think we will have that sort of turnaround until we have either an effective vaccination program or sufficient cases that we get true herd immunity. (Though the risk of the “let it run its course” approach, unlike an ongoing vaccination system, is that fading natural immune response and viral mutations ignite another pandemic.)

Look, while I think the best way to get this under control is 15 -20 days of real lockdown, there are powerful people who exploit ignorance, stubbornness, and antipathy to discourage individuals from doing things that are inarguably in everyone’s interest. Biden can make a proclamation of a national lockdown, but many people won’t care, and others will actually do the opposite because polarization is a well developed and highly effective strategy for a small elite to maintain their wealth and power. The best we can hope for, frankly, is that whatever local or state lockdowns that happen are effective enough to make people in places ruled by leaders who oppose lockdowns understand that they don’t have to let loved ones suffocate to death with no family or friends to comfort them. Watching governors who have made all kind of anti-mask statements fold like a hold em player with a 2-7 offsuit hand gives you a sense of how this might happen.

Well, from what I have been reading, when ballots were tabulated by hand (as recently as 2012), the average miscount in an election — votes counted wrong or not at all — was around 1.4%. That rate would have represented about 65,000 votes this year in Georgia alone, and those were generally not addressed unless the margin of the election was within a 0.5% recount threshold. This paper explains the above very clearly and gives much more detail than I can: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4852/299c36ad9ffab0e18bfa077cb7b4ad3493af.pdf. Keep in mind that Trump didn’t gain 2600 votes from the recount — he gained 800 or so votes, because the 2600 votes split something like 1700 for Trump and 900 for Biden. And an update earlier today showed that 78 of the counties in Georgia completed audits/recounts. 57 of them had zero changes. 21 came out one vote off. We have a dumb voting system designed to be cumbersome for voters and to allow for a lot more error than we settle for anywhere else. I’d be annoyed if they didn’t count my vote on the first attempt to count, but this is a case of Hanlon’s razor — “never attribute to malice that which is better explained by incompetence.”

I have been reading about this because I wondered the same thing. The process of compiling ballots and recording vote tallies is called vote canvassing, and has always had inherent error rates. Recount and audit thresholds are around 0.5 percent because that threshold considerably exceeds the average counting error of electronic vote canvassing. At precinct or district or county level, electronic voting has dramatically reduced the error rate of vote canvasses, but the problem is that the inevitable errors that creep into electronic vote canvasses tend to be much larger than hand ballot counting errors. To explain it succinctly, there are fewer errors in counting ballots by machine than by hand counting, but the errors tend to be much larger in scale. The 2600 found ballots represents a level of error equivalent to about 5 ballots in 10000. Hand counts yield a much higher error rate, but the thing with human error is that instances are distributed randomly, and the chances that one campaign would net enough votes to change the result is extremely unlikely unless the race is far closer than this one. The recount in Wisconsin in 2016 yielded a change of Trump’s lead of 131 votes, increasing his lead of 0.77% to a lead of 0.7701%. Absolutely minuscule. In Georgia, those 2600 votes netted about 800 votes for Trump, about 6% of Biden’s lead. That seems like a lot until you realize that there would have to be about 19 errors like that for Trump to take a lead — a systematic bias so unlikely that it would almost certainly demonstrate fraud. But despite the Trump campaign’s attempt to uncover fraud, there is absolutely no evidence for it. Trump and his proxies have made a lot of public claims about actual fraud, but whenever they have had the opportunity to put those claims before an actual judge, they back down and make it clear that they have no evidence, and ask for relief from the court for something other than fraud, because the sanctions for getting in front of a judge and making demonstrably false claims are very serious. So... there’s nothing at all that implies anything fishy is going on, and in fact it’s growing more obvious by the day that the Trump strategy is to use unwarranted claims of fraud to push the argument that the remedy is to throw out legitimate ballots of hundreds of thousands of actual voters who cast votes in good faith following the correct process to vote. Anyone who doesn’t see the danger of that has warped their brains with the dumbest forms of politics.

I don’t think he has completely checked out. To his credit, he’s pushing hard to get US troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, although it looks like he’ll settle for pulling out only some of the troops while claiming he ended the wars, but going for a headline over substance is pretty much the way he is about everything. There’s also a story going around that he’s going to punish pharma for not delivering an approved vaccine before Election Day by eliminating the drug pricing structure that guarantees that the US government pays more for medicine through Medicare than any other country. Occasionally, Trump has done the right thing, but it always seems to be for a really bad reason. But for the most part, he’s raging because he lost, and doesn’t care who suffers. He’s a whiny p*ssbaby, and I wouldn’t care about it except for the fact that he’s forcing most of the Republican Party into taking a position that their political opponents are categorically illegitimate and have absolutely no right to rule. That’s how autocracy works, and it’s about as antithetical to what the US has thought of as its ideals since it was founded.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These a-holes. UB students from downstate came back up to UB over the last few weeks to party as well, no masks, no distancing. Big parties - 150+.

Some disturbing pictures going around social media from the last few days near UB south. Apparently a couple hundred students from all over the state flocked back for big frat house parties that have gone on every day. There’s a photo of a house on Main Street showing 100+ kids on the balcony and in the yard, with more visible in the house. No masks, no social distancing. If there’s an outbreak among this group of students, it could undo a lot of progress across the region, seed the whole state with the virus, and risk the ability of SUNY campuses to open this fall.

Same when I got mine from Erie County. They took a surprising amount for the antibody test. I wonder if they're reserving vials of blood for future comparison testing or studies.

It's possible he wants to run for president, but Biden is the Dem candidate now. I don't much like him, but it's really hard to imagine him not winning -- I don't think it's controversial to say that Trump hasn't made it a priority to attract votes that he didn't win last time, which is backfiring on him now. Republicans may be facing big losses, but they really have made their successful years count. Maybe Cuomo thinks he can run in 2024 to either succeed Trump or if Biden is in his 80s and steps down? But he has to realize how much he will be held culpable for what was essentially a bloodbath in the state's nursing homes. Even with the capital markets being a little bit down over the last year, total US market cap is 1.5x the entire GDP of the country, so money exists to upgrade climate control systems with HEPA filtration, install UV lights, put in thermal imaging cameras and staff them. We're going to pay one way or another, so it would be a good investment, if we could get a political consensus to make it happen. It would be a good time to work in climate systems and the safety industry, or better yet, to start a business to install such systems. Forcing herd immunity onto the country looks worse and worse as we recognize that this disease has dangerous sequelae even for many young and healthy survivors. Consigning a few percent of the public to death or a severely limited life as a survivor (extremely dependent upon public services or hard-pressed families) will be political suicide.

Another vital point is this: science proceeds based on hypothesis testing, which is a *falsification* process. Scientists subject a theory to repeated attacks in order to disprove it. They test a theory against case facts, or alternative explanations.For us to have scientific knowledge, it is *absolutely necessary* that scientists sometimes be wrong. Claiming that contradictory hypotheses are somehow proof that scientists don't know what they claim to know is a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific knowledge.