Keeping Count - part the fifth

Let's continue the tally of states that The Manchurian President is setting up to toss him out in November.

-- 31 March

And here's the long predicted Big Bertha shot to The Orange Shitgibbon's expanding gut

A growing chorus of big-city officials in red states like Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas and Missouri are now urging their governors to establish uniform statewide rules, arguing that refusing to do so undercuts their local initiatives by increasing the risk the disease will cluster in neighboring areas -- from which it can easily reinfect their populations.

There are way more voters in cities than in shitkicker country in every titular Red State. Piss them off enough, and they'll eat you for lunch. Need I mention that Xi got control of Covid in Wuhan/Hubei by simply ignoring such evident stupidity. Xi had the benefit, so to speak, of knowing where the patient absolute zero was, and could thus cordon off the area. Cities and shitkickers together.

Florida Again. De Santis is still a moron

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday said he had no plans to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, partly because he says he hasn't been told to do so by the White House task force.
...
When asked if Florida needed to issue a blanket order, Trump replied that DeSantis is a "great governor who knows exactly what he's doing."

What exactly he is doing is sucking The Orange Shitgibbon's johnson. Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise, they'll both be thrown out in a few months.

You're Full of Shit!! No! You Are!!

A twitter thread arguing about the lack of accuracy of predictions about the infection. The point of the initial twit is that the prediction timeline was only 2 weeks, and getting it so wrong must mean something. No, none of it is me. I am not a Twit.

The basis of the confrontation is: how much testing was/is being done, and the extent to which the perception of testing adequacy colored predictions. My recollection, all those few weeks ago is:
- we have no tests
- we test only those been to China
- we test only those who present as sick
- "everyone who wants a test can get one"
- some areas provide testing to those not obviously sick. some places require a Rx, others not
- we're generally back to testing only the sick

Of course, it's no longer doubted by anyone with a functioning brain that the asymptomatics (e.g., the Covidiots) are the prime driver of infection. It's the answer to a simple question: once Covid was identified on our Home Shores, who would get near anyone sneezing and coughing? Only the lonely, and the brain dead.

I suspect many experts gave their estimates assuming we'd come up with a concerted, coordinated effort to do the needful (shelter in place, etc.)

Very few could imagine we'd be so irrationally, catastrophically uncoordinated (starting from the head-of-rotten-fish top.)
-- SHELTER IN PLACE IF YOU CAN, COVID19 =/=THE F* FLU

The basic problem with the arguing is that by the time the 'contest' was run, the sick were being tested. Surveillance testing and contact tracing, not so much. But all you need to know to predict the future of some phenomenon is the preceding time points of that phenomenon. If you believe in time series analysis, of course. In this kind of situation where the data mechanism is simple and well enough known (symptomatic/asymptomatic infection divide doesn't matter), you figure out the shape of the curve and extend. Now, more and more large population centers, and less so in shitkicker states of course, are taking steps to curtail transmission. So, one might contract any further estimates from here. One pundit said on the teeVee (in the other room, so I don't know who or where is mentioned) that R₀ had dropped from well over 2 to 1.5. That will diminish transmission in those areas where that's a true number. It doesn't mean, note, that the contagion is halted in said areas.

But, naturally, I've not seen or heard any pundit factor in the impact of the Florida Covidiots on future infections. We'll see in the next couple of weeks. If the Florida Covidiots spread the virus like peanut butter on a wet t-shirt contestant and they went back to their bucolic small-town USA homes where their Right Wingnut governors don't believe in science, then the game has only begun in earnest.

Small Town Justice

From The Block Island Times

I have received reports from people that own houses here and from other states who have stated they are being treated poorly and aggressively when encountering others. Those that have called me have been here for weeks and are well past any quarantine issues. If there is a concern from a citizen, it is the police department's job to investigate and deal with those that are not in compliance. Please call and report any concerns here rather than confronting people. Let us not devolve into a modern-day episode of "Lord of the Flies."

Local population of the Island is around 1,000, and when we go in early spring (not this year I expect) and late fall (hopefully) we bond with no problem. We breakfast at "Bethany's Airport Diner" (now forced to close), and generally don't see many other mainlanders, which is one reason to go far off-season. We haven't spent much time there 'in season' and have not much interest in doing so. But like insular folks (literally and figuratively) everywhere, when 'the other' brings danger, hackles get raised. So far no reported Covid-19 infections on Island. The Island, in the form of the police department, is being pro-active (to be PC) in informing arrivals of required behavior as they leave the ferry. You betcha. What the reporting hasn't said, that I've seen, is how many arrivals are mainlanders or Islanders returning. The near off-season (the in-the-know call it 'shoulder season'; only recently found that out) starts late April. We'll see.

To say that it is refreshing to read a literary reference from a 'small town' police chief isn't near enough. Not to mention: he's right.

Dearly Departed

Among The Orange Shitgibbon's zealots, the clarion cry is "flu has killed 20,000 this season, so Covid isn't a big deal with 1,500" or whatever the number is at the time. Firstly, of course is that the flu season has been on-going since the first week of October (the data date, not necessarily when cases emerged) so, yeah, there are more deaths. Covid-19 has been reving for about 2 months. Not apples and oranges.

The other cavil from this cabal is that governors and medical folks are lying about the need for beds, ventilators, and supplies since the number of deaths compared to flu... and so forth. One might think that this string "what percent of flu deaths happen in nursing homes" entered into the Yellow Google (or your searcher of choice) would pop up a nice clean number; either total count or percent will do. So far, nada.

But this paper does provide some guidance.

Influenza viruses. Outbreaks of influenza occur with regularity in nursing homes and often affect multiple facilities in the same region. For example, in a 7-county survey conducted prospectively in lower Michigan during the 1989—1990 influenza season, influenza outbreaks were identified in 17 facilities (38% of those studied) [12]. Similarly, during the 1997—1998 influenza season, 43 adult residential facilities in Virginia, including 32 nursing homes, reported outbreaks, which involved a total of 788 residents [9].

The point being that some percent, and it could be rather large since upwards of 70% of flu deaths are among the elderly. The percent from this document is ~84%. So for the geezer cohort (65+) 46,862 deaths of a total 55,672. One might reasonably believe that far more of these deaths occurred in institutionalized folks than the remaining 8,810. The largest count, by far, is 85+, so inferring that a goodly percent of those patients were already in a medical setting is quite reasonable. The point with regard to the Covid hospitalization problem is that most, so far and by far, have been new admissions. That's what's causing the problem. The Orange Shitgibbon is way too stupid and biased to discern the difference.

Deadly Future - part the third

I was remiss in not checking this first before publishing part the second.

Here's another couple of data points. It's clear that the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Covidiots (as shown in the Tectonix/X-Mode graphic) into the country east of the Mississippi is in fact happening. The Kinsa map: https://healthweather.us/ is a guess what moment? All that gray area between the Mississippi and the Atlantic is starting to light up. April 15th will be death and taxes.

Have a nice day.

One Classy Dame - part the fifth

One of the other Science Channel shows I'm addicted to is "Impossible Engineering", which exploits the meme that today's technology is derived from yesterday's. Of course, 'yesterday' is a time span that is greatly fungible. In compute, that might be measured in months. For the case of SCM, a few years might be appropriate. A piece at AnandTech sparked some additional walking through the Yellow Googles, yielding this antique (in compute time) more than a decade ago piece, dealing with SCM and I/O. Fits quite nicely.

The main point being: it makes no sense to treat SCM as a filesystem, full stop. I can get on that train.

Of the, so far as I've so far found, unique benefits of byte-addressable SCM is the impact that can be had on transactions. Universally, again so far as I know, RDBMS implementations limit transactions to the row (some early ones, still extant, set the limit to the page or equivalent). A row is locked as either shared R/W or exclusive W. But, we know that, modulo key columns (and intelligent relational design), non-key columns are independent of each other and therefore independently updateable. Wow!! So that means Jill can update Bill's age and Joe can update Bill's height at the same time and not violate any (assumed) constraints!!! That can't be allowed with row/block level locking/updating, of course. But with a byte addressable data store, there's no reason to prohibit such transactions. The overall result is as it is today: last write wins; the only difference is, no locking delay. The engine has to track unique/primary keys, and prohibit conflicting updates, of course (Jill knows Bill is, and always will be, row 111, so Joe shouldn't be allowed to change Bill's row id to 333 while there's a transaction on Bill's row in flight; but you wouldn't allow update to primary key, now would you?). But, an intelligent database designer wouldn't have multiple unique keys, right?

The main effect of this is to shrink logical transaction scope. Transactions become relevant only to one key and the columns being updated. Now, that key may well span joins, but still, only the re-written columns are impacted. And logging is done behind, as discussed in previous missives. And again, since this is done in byte-addressed persistent memory, time and latch (lock in legacy RDBMS jargon) are vanishingly short. Database coders will need to be retrained, just as an A300 pilot needs a lot of time in a simulator before allowed to fly a B777 for real. Batch transactions may well span minutes or longer, but real time transactions shrink to within row level, and very fast.

Deadly Future - part the second

Well, that didn't take long. While not explicitly a confirmation that the Covidiots have spread the virus hither and yon, there is this other LA city that is exploding. The point being, of course, it takes only one infection to start an explosion. Call it the fuse. If Westchester taught the sentient anything, that's it. Covid sits quietly for too long a time surreptitiously infecting. If nothing happens in the cities and towns east of the Mississippi by the end of April, I'll eat my hat.

Dr. Deborah Birx's statement that "almost 40 percent of the country (has]) extraordinarily low numbers and they are testing." Low compared to New York and New Orleans — sure. But safe enough to signal the all clear? Not even faintly true.

The Covid-19 epidemic in the United States has moved from "Oh, it's just a nursing home" in Washington state to "Oh, it's New York City, that place is a total mess" to "Oh, it's New Orleans what did you expect, they always have problems" to the current face of the outbreak: Shreveport, Louisiana, Longview, Texas, and countless other towns and small cities that have evidence of infection, little testing, lots of concern and countless citizens who only want help so that they can do the right thing.

Birx, for whatever reason, is swimming in The Orange Shitgibbon's Flavour Aid. Not a good thing. The tsunami of Covidiot Infection^™ has yet to hit the country east of the Mississippi. It's only a matter of time.

Deadly Future [update]

The Orange Shitgibbon is trying to punish the NYC MSA. He would. It's as blue as it gets. According to reports, it's driven by DeSantis claiming that those New Yorkers are bringing Covid-19 to poor Floridians. Bullshit. DeSantis refused to stop the Spring Break petri dish. Too much money at stake.

Here's today's prediction. Mardi Gras was 25 February, and the Covid-19 explosion in Louisiana happened about 3 weeks later. However long it was, it's there now, and what matters for predictive purposes is; are there any other mass petri dish events with a known related timeline? Of course there is: Spring Break on the Florida beaches.

Spring Break week was about 4 weeks after Mardi Gras (third week of March). If you look at the animation from Tectonix, you need to pay attention to the last few seconds. There you'll see the dispersal of those 'Covidiots' pretty much everywhere east of the Mississippi. The Covidiots explosion will be 4 weeks after the Mardi Gras one. So, in another couple of weeks, every city of any size in that huge area will explode.

And remember, the Tectonix data is only for a single beach at Fort Lauderdale. Rutroo.

Have a nice day.

[update]
Before the Florida beaches, there was a ski town in Austria.

There is some precedent for resort communities being slow to wake up to epidemics. The Austrian village of Ischgl, an Alpine ski destination and party hotspot, was slow to close down its establishments even as other nations issued travel warnings of potential coronavirus exposure. Thousands of revelers returning from vacations in Ischgl spread infections across much of Scandinavia. On Tuesday, Norway said 40 percent of its then-1,400 infections were traced to Ischgl.

This Way to the Re-Education Camps

I said it some time ago. The Orange Shitgibbon's game is to declare martial law, cancel the election, and rule for whatever life he has left, then cede to Jr.

sometime today we'll do a quarantine, short-term, two weeks on New York. Probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut
-- The Orange Shitgibbon/2020

Every long journey begins with the first step. Mao had the long march. Put your boots on.

Keeping Count - part the fourth

Let's continue the tally of states that The Manchurian President is setting up to toss him out in November.

-- 27 March

-- Georgia. God's country ain't safe either.

"All three of our intensive care units are full with COVID-19 patients," said Dr. Steven Kitchen, Phoebe's chief medical officer. "There are only four beds (available) for COVID-19 patients, and no available intensive care unit beds."

"We are at the point where we have tapped out in terms of our capacity."

Albany, GA is a prototypical rural area. Population is 77,000 and the MSA population is 165,000. Perhaps a bit more people than Mayberry, but not a city by usual definitions.

The Smartest Guys in the Room

This is just too rich

The bug, seemingly related to an internal runtime counter in the SSDs, causes them to fail once they reach 40,000 hours runtime, losing all data in the process.

The Private Sector is all powerful.

Context

If you look here, you get the global tally of Covid-19 by country. What you don't get is a more accurate population context. As you can see, China sports a 'Cases per 1M' a fraction of the USofA. But is that meaningful?

We know that the outbreak started in Wuhan (planted by the CIA or not :) ) and Xi ordered the lockdown soon after. Infection across China has not been widespread, the number of confirmed cases outside Hubei has shown a decreasing trend. Unlike for the USofA, since The Orange Shitgibbon let it spread like wildfire. And it is.

A better metric of control is to track the change in number of MSAs at risk for infection. That won't be a good number for the USofA, since new MSAs 'come on-line' with infection frequently (every day?). Likely, all those safe spots in The Orange Shitgibbon's Base are rapidly falling in number. And not a hospital any where.

I don't have the time or inclination to track down all the census data in both countries, but if you use MSA population numbers (and Chinese equivalents) for infected areas, China might not look so much better. But in terms of new MSA infection, it might well.

Can of Worms

Well, the next scheme in The Manchurian President's game. He's saying that some taskforce is going to carve up the country in low, medium, and high risk for Covid-19, at the county boundary lines.

The liberal press is flummoxed by all this, but that's only because they've managed to ignore the obvious.

Consider the principle he's used from the beginning: "I don't take responsibility at all". This is classic passive-aggression; simply don't do what you're supposed to do until those impacted by your inaction have to take the burden. This has been the core of his being for decades. Think like him, and you'll be nearly perfect in predicting what he'll do next. States bidding against FEMA, et al for PPE is just such a maneuver.

Now, how does the rank map fit the principle? First, again, is his hatred for any place, city, state, or region, that is anything left of fascist. He's been cornered into taking limp action two months late, which provides him the opportunity to blame the spread on those evil Blue Cities and States that he viscerally despises. They caused the virus to spread. This isn't a national problem, but a state problem. He assumes, clearly, that the empty states of his base will escape the virus. He's full of shit, of course; the empty states, all of which have some number of Blue Cities, will fall to the virus in time. They are far more underserved by hospitals than anywhere else. How to get retribution for not licking his dick? How?

Well, how about a map that signifies areas that 'must open up' because they're low risk? Designate some number of counties in California, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, and such. Now, demand that the governors of those states eliminate restrictions on distancing in those counties, and demanding that all businesses must return to operation. If any governor doesn't, well, then what little Federal aid they had been getting will cease immediately.

Mammy Yokum has spoken.

Lies, Damn Lies, and South Korea

We've done more tests in eight days than South Korea has done in eight weeks.
-- The Manchurian President/25 March 2020

Of course, he's lying. Sort of. In a really sneaky way that the poorly educated, his base, won't understand. The numbers of tests referred to is 331,000 for the third week in March, USofA and 348,582 in South Korea since the outbreak. It happens that both countries reported the first confirmed case on the same day, January, 20.

Birx, who should know better said

"We now have 370,000 tests that have been done. The majority of those -- over 220,000 in the last eight days, which, those of you who have been tracking the South Korea numbers, put us equivalent to what they did in eight weeks that we did in eight days."

As PolitiFact says

Its current tally of 359,000 tests per 327 million people comes out to about 1,084 tests per million. South Korea has run closer to 6,768 tests per million.

So:
A) South Korea started testing right out of the gate
B) The Manchurian President sucked his thumb for 8 weeks while the virus spread like wild fire
C) The USofA is 6 times the population of South Korea, so the equivalent number of tests (which should have been started in early February) is about 1,254,000.

Couple population size differences with area differences, and the USofA needs far more than just 6 times, since we have so many more cities, and far more of high density. South Korea has 22 cities of 500,000 or more. We have 36. If we take 100,000 as threshold for city, we get: South Korea with 47 and the USofA with at least 314, as far as the wiki goes. More tests? In a rats ass, me hearty!
[the wiki]

The poorly will, and have, lap up his lies. We should re-institute just one poll requirement: if your IQ is below 80, you don't vote. Which means The Manchurian President can't vote for himself; nor can his kids. Melania? It's hard to say. She barely speaks English.

No Man Is An Island

Mentioned a few times in these endeavors, I've been island bound (both senses) to both Block Island and Bermuda. As I type Block Island remains Covid-19 free, while Bermuda has been infected for a few weeks. Having visited there, but once, I remain on the island's newspaper's e-mail list, so get periodic updates.

Today's is somewhat concerning. Bermuda is larger and more populace than Block Island, but quite isolated at about 665 miles from Cape Hatteras, and a bit more from Charleston for shipping, 883 miles. Block Island is an hour from Point Judith, RI by ferry and about 15 minutes by air to Westerly, RI. In sum, Bermuda is pretty much on its own.

There have been reports about folks fleeing to 'remote islands' to escape Covid-19. May haps they're just extending the reach of the virus? Ya think?

Which brings us to today's Gazette report:

Mr Burt also told employers: "Before Government takes the heavy handed approach, if your staff can work from home, let them work from home."

He said it was "unconscionable" that some firms, including large companies, had blocked some staff from remote working.

Mr Burt added he had earlier talked to the premiers of the Cayman Islands and the Turks&Caicos Islands, who had said that "stricter measures" had to be taken against some employers.

Just the sort of bidnezz that The Manchurian President and Mississippi Reeves cherish. Bermuda is in trouble. They may not realize it.

Keeping Count - part the third

Let's continue the tally of states that The Manchurian President is setting up to toss him out in November.

-- 25 March

Mississippi. Who wooda thunk anyone could be this venal and stupid? Well, the governor of Mississippi qualifies. He's doing a Mao dictat: no local Covid-19 effort; only what He decides.

Impatient with what they consider Gov. Tate Reeves' lack of guidance amid the COVID-19 outbreak, some Mississippi mayors recently placed protective restrictions on their towns' residents and businesses.

Then, Reeves issued his own sweeping executive order.
...
For example, the governor's order limits gatherings in public or private places to no more than 10 people, but allows restaurants to keep dining rooms open as long as fewer than 10 people are inside at once. Many cities and counties had previously required restaurants to close their dining rooms completely.

Southern morons.

Keeping Count - part the second

Let's continue the tally of states that The Manchurian President is setting up to toss him out in November.

-- 24 March

Texas. Well, they're really wacky, but then you already knew that.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Monday night that he's "not living in fear" of the novel coronavirus pandemic and is "all in" on lifting social distancing guidelines recommended by public health experts in order to help the economy.

That may warm the hearts of cowboys out on the range, and oilmen who consider themselves self-made, but how will it work in the ever bluer cities?

Idaho. Ah, not any real cities

Idaho health districts reported at least 27 new confirmed cases of coronavirus Monday, but Gov. Brad Little focused on relaxing state health care rules rather than imposing restrictions on residents.

Yeah, they're real American cowboys. None of that city sissy stuff. May be they're OK with a local epidemic. Not that the state has all that many beds or ICU units, anyway. Let 'em die. It's the American west's way.

Tennessee. More stupidty from a moron. That's one damning graph. Not a regression coefficient in sight.

The timeline also shows Kentucky Governor Beshear sometimes acted almost a week earlier than his Tennessee counterpart in shutting down public gatherings and closing schools.

"What we're seeing here is staying at home, avoiding public contact, and minimizing your exposure and exposing yourself to your neighbors can make a difference," [Stephanie] Jolly told WAVE 3 News via Facetime while on self-isolation in New York.

May be the surviving Tennesseeans will take it out on The Manchurian President and his toady Bill Lee.

Virginia. So now the Christian Soldiers think they'll be OK?

"They thanked us for making that decision," Falwell told the Liberty University News Service, describing a call to move classes online but also, in his words, to get his students "back as soon as we can—the ones who want to come back."

In fact, Lynchburg city manager Bonnie Svrcek says that while she did thank Falwell for moving to online classrooms, she was led to believe that the school was also abandoning plans to invite students back into residence halls following spring break. Neither she nor Lynchburg Mayor Treney Tweedy said they signed off on Falwell's decision to re-open Liberty's dorms.

God fearing asshats in motion.

Mississippi. NIMBY in spades.

Gov. Tate Reeves rejected calls today for a statewide shelter-at-home order, a measure of caution against the spread of COVID-19 being rapidly deployed next door in Louisiana, elsewhere in the United States and across the globe.

May haps he's trying to knock off some more of those old, white men. Oh joy!!

Coitus interruptus

The Manchurian President just can't get his dick satisfied. It is a problem, for sure. He, and his handlers (Miller and Kushner, mostly it appears), look at the annual death toll of regular flu and respond to Covid-19 with, "what's the fucking big deal here!!!" Upwards of 20,000 this season, and about that for many years. Now, if you were smart enough to get the flu shot (I did, for the first time!), data show it's about 45% effective. Of course, there is no shot for Covid-19.

The difference is clear: if you die from the flu, you have, to some degree, your own stupidity to blame. Flu shot is free, more or less.

Given the annual rate (season is about October to May) of flu infections and deaths, The Manchurian President and his handlers started out with, "what? me worry?" since the death toll wasn't near regular flu. What they ignored, and still do, is that a) Covid-19 'season' is just starting, b) there is no vaccine, c) it's not clear that this is truly 'flu' which abates with season; it is, after all, pandemic in the southern hemisphere summer, and d) flu infections are running at 60 million; a whale more than Covid-19 so far. Being a novel pathogen in a naive population, the epidemiologists know from the history of such pathogens that infection and death are highly non-linear functions. Despite The Manchurian President and his handlers wishes, the science has been proven right over his 'gut' every step of his drunken, stumbling walk.

Now with the scramble to find effective anti-virals for Covid-19, one might reasonably ask why so little has been done for seasonal flu? 20,000 isn't chicken feed. Unless you're Mao (see previous essay).

As I type, the infection count is 48,000 and the deaths 600. If Covid-19 hits the infection count of this season's flu? 750,000 bodies on The Manchurian President's head.

President Mao

He (Ch'in-Shih-huang, the first emperor of China) only buried alive 460 scholars, while we buried 46,000. In our suppression of the counterrevolutionaries, did we not kill some counterrevolutionary intellectuals? I once debated with the democratic people: You accuse us of acting like Ch'in-shih-huang, but you are wrong; we surpass him 100 times
-- Mao Zedong/1958

Now you know what's eating The Manchurian President; he wants to follow in the footsteps of Mao. Kill off all those Blue City intellectuals. It's not a coincidence that The Manchurian President has been dragging his feet, disparaging the scientists, and ruling from his gut all this time.

But stopping the efforts to curtail Covid-19 will backfire. There's precious few hospitals, beds, not to mention ICUs, out in God's Country. Once the virus gets a foothold out there, with morons who disdain facts, goodbye Momma.

Well before the COVID-19 threat, rural health care's profitability had collapsed nationwide due to a combination of narrowing Medicare reimbursements, a larger share of patients lacking high-paying private insurance and the hollowing out of rural America. Given such pressures, more than 120 rural hospitals have been forced to close over the past decade.
...
To be sure, rural hospitals are not as equipped as larger hospital systems to handle the most serious coronavirus cases. Many are not outfitted with ICUs or enough doctors and staff to handle multiple intensive care patients. That means they have to transfer those patients to larger hospitals.

Well... should those hateful, liberal, LGBTQ loving city hospitals take them? After all, those rural folk hate city folk to begin with. Red state rurals all voted for The Manchurian President, right?

A fact: Hong Kong's leaders thought all was well. Turns out, not so much.

Hong Kong was proof that these measures worked, with the city of 7.5 million only reporting some 150 cases at the start of March, even as the number of infections spiked in other East Asian territories like South Korea and Japan, and spread rapidly across Europe and North America.

Now, however, Hong Kong is providing a very different object lesson -- what happens when you let your guard down too soon. The number of confirmed cases has almost doubled in the past week, with many imported from overseas, as Hong Kong residents who had left -- either to work or study abroad, or to seek safety when the city seemed destined for a major outbreak earlier this year -- return, bringing the virus back with them.

Removing the tourniquet while the patient still bleeds is the act of a fucking moron. You read it here first.

Keeping Count - part the first

Let's start a tally of states that The Manchurian President is setting up to toss him out in November.

Florida. This report puts the whole Darwinian approach of Boris, Dominic, and Donald (latter day Huey, Dewey, and Louie) in a very bright light.

Florida, with 1,001 coronavirus cases, has the seventh most in the country. Obviously because of Florida's sizable elderly population and the fact that the virus' mortality rate is considerably higher for people over 70, there are concerns that the Sunshine State could rapidly grow into a hotspot.

Ya think?

Washington. The Manchurian President is very thin skinned, as we all know.

Speaking in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump went off on Inslee for saying that he wanted Trump to stick to the science when discussing the outbreak. Trump has repeatedly tried to downplay the gravity of the outbreak and floated his own hunches on matters of science.

If you don't follow the link, that was reported back on 6 March.

Michigan. Another shot to the foot.

Shame on you, @realDonaldTrump," Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel responded on Twitter. "@GovWhitmer is working tirelessly to lead our state through these diff times. You could learn a lot about what a REAL chief exec looks like from her. You just can't stop being a jerk-can you? People are dying. Grow up and try leading by example.

First Flint, now this? The Right Wing never loses the opportunity to kick you when you're down.

Wisconsin. Not just The Manchurian President but the whole evil gang.

The emergency measure — which includes free testing for COVID-19, paid emergency leave and other emergency appropriations — easily passed both houses of Congress
...
Indeed, all five Republicans in the Wisconsin delegation cast a no vote, according to roll calls published by ProPublica. All four state Democrats voted for the bill.

And, yes, that clean sweep of Republican votes was unique around the country.

Ya think they'll remember in November?

Louisiana. Not a liberal Northeast state.

Louisiana has the fastest rate of growth rate of coronavirus cases in the world, the state's Gov. John Bel Edwards said during a news conference on Sunday, citing a University of Louisiana Lafayette study.

Graphs provided to CNN by the governor's office show the rate of growth in the state on a steep upward trajectory similar to that of hard-hit Italy and Spain.

Ya think they'll remember how The Manchurian President blew off the virus when they get in the voting booth? Sure they will.

Dee Feat Is In Dee Flation - part the fortieth

Well, The Manchurian President and Moscow Mitch want to trickle down some moolah to those Red State knuckleheads who put him in office. What happens when you dump more moolah into a market where production has been ground to a halt? It's called inflation. And then The Manchurian President and Moscow Mitch will set in motion measures to crush working folk, those dumb enough to vote for them.

Have a nice day.

Herd Mentality

The TeeVee was on in another room, with news on of course, and I heard one of the pundits describe 'herd immunity' as the result of survivors of Covid-19 passing on their immunity to others!!! How? All those who survive get an 'I' tattooed on their forehead, and go around giving ten-second tongue kisses to those not tattooed?? About the dumbest thing I've read/heard about the pandemic yet.

Well... there's always Boris.

Since he's dumb as a sack of hair, UK Boris Badenough asserted that 'herd immunity' would happen there, and why the UK government wasn't taking any steps to curtail the virus.

On Twitter, the former director of maternal, child, and adolescent health at the World Health Organization, Anthony Costello, wrote that researchers don't even yet know if people become immune to the novel coronavirus after catching it.

"Is it ethical to adopt a policy that threatens immediate casualties on the basis of an uncertain future benefit?" he wrote.

Boris has since backed off the induced herd immunity schtick, which some of his 'advisers' say was never the policy. Right.

Based on vaccination experience, most folks (humble self included) assume that immunity lasts at least long enough to protect from the next exposure. Turns out, immunity varies

First, we don't know how long immunity against the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 [Covid-19], lasts. When people are infected with OC43 and HKU1—two other coronaviruses that regularly circulate among humans and cause common colds—they stay immune for less than a year. By contrast, immunity against the first SARS virus (from 2003) holds for much longer. No one knows whether SARS-CoV-2 will hew to either of these extremes, and according to one recent study, its behavior could mean anything from annual outbreaks to a decades-long quiet spell.

What herd immunity really means is explained in the wiki.

Moo.

Thought For The Day - 17 March 2020

Happy St. Paddy's day, all. Not so happy for the Pat's fans in Southie, of course. But it was predictable, surely.

Belichick dumped Bledsoe for Brady.

Belichick Bledsoed Brady.

The earth returns to its axis.

Not that anyone knows who Belichick plans as the next Tom Terrific. May haps Bill will exit stage, right?

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the tenth

Well, more proof that capital, in the age of hyperautomation, is in trouble. The issue with automated production, from at least the days of Ford's River Rouge plant, return on capital derives entirely from the removal of labor from production. The downside to that is: if production doesn't increase while amortizing said capital, average cost can't be driven down. Ya gotta pay the vig no matter whether you shift one widget or a million.

So Intel and Micron made a new agreement on 3D Xpoint memory. They need to boost output, aka sales, in order to get average cost under control. Intel sees off-shoring to China as the way to drive out what little labor there remains. But it'll fail, if nothing is done to promote demand. They just ain't much labor left in semi-conductor manufacturing; for the 300mm fab (far and away the mainstay) overhead labor is 10 times direct.

Intel should have folks smart enough to go back to the future with a lean cpu doing all operations in memory. Yes the TI-990. I said it againa

This is How

Early on in the Covid-19 infection, The Manchurian President said it would soon go to zero, and the experts guesstimated that the transfer rate would be 2 or 3 per infected person, based largely on the 'fact' that Covid-19 infected people were contagious for about 2 weeks prior to symptoms. This contagion rate was enough for the epidemiologists to expect widespread infection.

Boy, were they optimistic. How about 50 per?? Now, this may be the exception rather than the norm for Covid-19. He's a Jewish man, and the stereotype is a 'close knit' community and all that. Which, stereotypically, means lots of close contact. From the report, what happened doesn't seem out of the norm for any middle-class person.

50. And we have a fucking moron president trying to convince his idiot followers that all is well, and that it's all a Democrat hoax anyway.

One Classy Dame - part the fourth

Yet another country heard from (you'll need to schedule some time for its 200 pages, though):

Assuming a hybrid SCM-DRAM hardware architecture, we propose a novel software architecture for database systems that places primary data in SCM and directly operates on it, eliminating the need for explicit I/O.

As Dear Reader is aware, I myself am not a fan of MVCC semantics for RDBMS. It is resource heavy and invites developers to consider transactions cost free, thus ending up with applications awash in 'persistent transactions'. Alas, I suspect due to involvement with SAP/HANA, this paper's PoC is MVCC based. I don't hold this failure against it.

It's quite clear now that there is a 'spectrum' of invention with regard to RDBMS (really, any stored data), from such direct transactions to SCM at one end, to caching/buffering/logging and thence to SCM as we do today with DRAM and SSD/HDD. What to do? What to do?

Here's what's proposed:

A hybrid SCM-DRAM hardware architecture allows for a radical change and a novel database system
architecture in different perspectives:
• There is no need to copy data out of the storage system since directly modifying the data stored in SCM becomes possible;
• The use of persistent data structures in combination with an adequate concurrency scheme allows for completely dropping the logging infrastructure;
• It can be dynamically decided where to store certain database objects as long as their loss can be tolerated;
• It is possible to achieve near-instant recovery. We realize the above design principles in SOFORT, our prototype storage engine which we implemented from scratch for this purpose. In the following, we give an overview of SOFORT and contrast our design decisions with state-of-the-art.

More specifically:

Most previous works have focused solely on improving OLTP performance in row-stores. In comparison, SOFORT is a hybrid SCM-DRAM main-memory transactional storage engine intended for hybrid analytical and transactional workloads. It is a single-level store, i.e., it keeps a single copy of the primary data in SCM, directly operates on it, and persists changes in-place in small increments.

So, not just MVCC, but column-store. No matter. The principles of implementation should be agnostic to both characteristics.

Once again, from the wiki, IBM OS/400 (now called 'IBM i'):

The system was one of the earliest to be object-based. Unlike traditional operating systems like Unix and Windows NT there are no files, only objects of different types. The objects persist in very large, flat virtual memory, called a single-level store.

And, once again, the machine and the OS and the RDBMS (a version of DB2) are an integrated whole. Here's an overview of the OS as i5/OS nomenclature.

In the News Biz, it is considered a major flaw to bury the lede. Well, here's the lede, and it's buried at the very end. As these various reports have demonstrated, the potential use of SCM falls into two contradictory patterns: read/write to it directly with no intermediaries or simply substitute it for legacy file/file systems. What to do?

It turns out that SCM existed many decades ago, but was supplanted by semi-conductor memory, and processing.

When not being read or written, the cores maintain the last value they had, even if the power is turned off. Therefore they are a type of non-volatile memory.

Who knew? I did, since I started in the compute world while such machines were still around, barely.

So, why is SCM viewed as such an innovation? I suppose partly because many in the compute industry have no memory of, or study of, the past. Also, core was bulky and expensive, so the notion of even megabyte memories was envelope pushing. And it's been many years since MRAM was first proposed and is still not 'mainstream'. Bye the by, the wiki piece mentions the CDC 6600, which was the machine I used while at the UMass econ department grad program. Ah the memories of pounding on that O59.

Turns out that semi-conductor circuits aren't all equal, and as time went on, cpu speed exceeded not only memory but especially disk speed. As time went on, the RISC protocol began to take hold, and with increasing density of fabrication, the core conundrum had to be dealt with: how to get a speedier computer with cpu speed ever increasing, but disk speed all but static? Enter multi-level cache/buffer, OO execution, multi-thread, and multi-processor. IOW, there became many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. The main report discussed here takes 200 pages to work around the many points of disconnect in modern cpu/memory/storage regimes vis-a-vis SCM. Making best use of SCM simply won't work with all these tiers in modern cpu and memory management controllers, just to make SCM look like *nix files. The cpu should just see a flat address-space of persistent objects, and manipulate them directly, not some convoluted file system on disk, even a SSD mediated by myriad caches and buffers. Managing all those caches/buffers/memory and storage to put the needed data in the 'right place at the right time' becomes a valueless exercise. The worst nightmare up and down the semi-conductor production stack!!

It will take a bunch of radical EEs to build such a microprocessor which could look a lot like that TI-990 of yore, and there's no guarantee that the resulting machine will be 'better' than today's standard. A really simple machine built with at least an order of magnitude fewer elements. Not what Intel or even ARM would welcome; if you don't need billions and billions of transistors to build a cpu, then what becomes of all that money spent building ever teenier nodes to squeeze more transistors into a wafer? If not, then SCM will go the way of the Sony Walkman. Lots of money spent drilling a dry hole. Or taking a worthless compound through PIII trials.

More to come, I'm sure. But this one is more than long enough.

Back To The Future - part the third

[W]hen you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done.
-- The Manchurian President/26 February 2020

In order to block the Radical Democrats from staging a coup to oust My Government, and protect real Americans from COVID-19, which is a Radical Democrat plot, I hereby suspend the 2020 elections at all levels.
-- The Manchurian President/Labor Day 2020

Thought for the Day - 6 March 2020

You want to know something difficult:
Theoretically, you can play these 1200 chords in 7 different octaves on a piano, which results in a total of 8400 possible chords.
-- Quora

Memorize that.

Yellow Bellies

American CxO class reveals its true color: Yellow Bellied Coward. They've been chasing 'risk-free' Treasuries for some time, but they've reached new low.

The 10-year Treasury yield falls below 1.0% for the first time ever in the wake of the Fed's surprise 50-basis point rate cut.

Who was it who said that Powell wouldn't suck The Manchurian President's dick? Free money for the monied class. Swell.