By The Numbers - part the seventy ninth

A sad day for democracy. All those who voted for The Great Unhinged^© because they want a Strong Man as president will reap Menken's fury. So will the rest of us who wanted no such thing.

Which brings us to an early (likely incomplete), post-mortem: how come? While all the numbers aren't in, it's clear that the Latino vote abandoned the Democrats. And, why would that be? I've long harbored a distrust, in the political sense only, of that bloc. The reason is that most of Latin America has a history, and currency, of autocratic rule are worst, and one party control at best, energized democracy not so much. Thus immigrants from such countries are enured to the likes of The Great Unhinged^©. And they voted that way. Irregardless of the simple fact that political support has always come from the Dems and The Great Unhinged^© blamed them for the ills of the USofA!! "Poisoning the blood" and all that. That's cognitive dissonance that boggles the mind. Whether the Latino bloc has pulled off Jill Stein 2016 is not yet clear, but they put a big dent in Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©'s total. The answer will pop up in the news soon enough. One has to wonder how many of these legal MAGA Latinos will end up being deported? Just like the VA 'illegal' voters who were actually legal. I hope it's millions.

The other conundrum: of the 10 states voting on abortion, 7 passed and 1 'abstained'
Here are the passed:
Missouri - Trump
Nevada - ?
Montana - Trump
Arizona - ?
Colorado - Harris
Maryland - Harris
New York - Harris

Nebraska implicitly defeated 6 week ban by keeping the 12 week ban (for now) and a majority passed the viability amendment, but by less than the 12 week and thus lost; quite a catch, that catch-22.

A good deal of cognitive dissonance on display. Not enough, on this basis alone, to give her the White House.

The Big Question: will all this reactionary shit cause significant brain drain in these antebellum shithole states? One can only hope.

By The Numbers - part the seventy eighth

Well... prediction time. As one might imagine, Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© is my preference, for a host of reasons. But that don't amount to a hill of beans, and all that.

The 'honest' polling has Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© with a 3 to 4 point lead, nationally. But, as we all regret, that doesn't amount to a hill of beans, either. On another forum (not one of mine) the electoral college came up, yet again. Which led me to explore its history again. The most mind boggling is that for the first few elections, the electors were appointed by the state legislatures directly. No voting required.

In spite of Hamilton's assertion that electors were to be chosen by mass election, initially, state legislatures chose the electors in most of the states.

Moreover, we find that electoral colleges have been shitcanned in every Western democracy that had one; except here, of course.

By the end of the 20th century, electoral colleges had been abandoned by all other democracies around the world in favor of direct elections for an executive president.

Which, more or less, brings us to reading some tea leaves. We know that the Gold Standard Iowa poll has Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© ahead of The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon., which has sent him into near earth orbit. We know that Dems are out voting Reps in early voting. We know that wimins are out voting male chauvinist pigs in the early voting. We know that Sleepy Joe earned 7,000,000 more votes than The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. in 2020.

The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts have, at least since Nixon (but really long before), not run campaigns on political issues, but rather culture wars, which are wholly based on population density, i.e. shitkickers and the Bible vs. city folk and education. Not the Koran or The Vedas or The Tripitaka or any of those other pagan religions count. It's not as if the shitkickers have advanced any part of USofA life over the last 225 years, now have they? Along that line, I'm always amused, although not recently for obvious reasons, by photos of bin Laden directing using a satellite phone. What better way to drag the globe, the Western part anyway, back to 600 AD? Of course the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts want us to go back to 1 AD, or even earlier if they can find some text that fits their male chauvinist demands.

In sum then, what's going to happen? We know that Sleepy Joe earned 7,000,000 more votes than The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon.. We know that wimins are pissed at The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. for not only killing Roe, but boasting about it. And we know that females are out voting males by a non-trivial margin so far. So, we can surmise that Blue voting is running ahead of what Sleepy Joe earned in 2020. What's it all mean, Mr. Natural? My guess is that Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© end up 10,000,000 ahead of The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. when all is said and done. Whether she gets to 270 isn't clear. In 2020, Sleepy Joe's 7,000,000 was made from CA's 5,000,000 and small change elsewhere. What we do know: if The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. does get the Oval Office, he'll do a Russian Gulag with gusto. The Supremes have said he can.

By The Numbers - part the seventy seventh

Even though my paternal grandmother had a genealogy done way back when (those forbears came here from Jolly Olde England in 1638), I don't follow UK/British news on purpose much. I knew that the Tories had lost in the last election, but I didn't recall the numbers. Well here they are. That's gotta hurt.

The Tories were dumped from government in a July general election, going from 372 to 121 seats in the process, reflecting public anger over their management of the economy, crime, immigration and standards in public life.

And, of course, they go all in for The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. shit. Their very own Black Nazi? No, she didn't say that, but the report reads like someone who is. May be. Sort of. Will the Olde Sod tell us about us? Just remember: it ain't 1829 anymore.

By The Numbers - part the seventy sixth

What's that they say, "payback's a bitch"? First, the Musk Ox makes you his bitch (he he), then your business takes it in the neck.

On Monday, NPR reported that by midday more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Post, citing two people familiar with the matter.

What's the over/under in days to hit 1,000,000?

Well, today's total is up to 250,000!! Jeff is so, so not so

Ending them is a principled decision, and it's the right one.

I wonder how The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon.'s dick tastes? Is it that geezer mustiness? Not that I would know, of course.

By The Numbers - part the seventy fifth

What's that they say, "payback's a bitch"? First, the Musk Ox makes you his bitch (he he), then your business takes it in the neck.

On Monday, NPR reported that by midday more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Post, citing two people familiar with the matter.

What's the over/under in days to hit 1,000,000?

As of 2023, digital total was 2.5 million. Already nearing a 10% hit. Some bidnezz have gone under losing less. Have fun Jeff. May be the Musk Ox will give you a free ride on SpaceX? Blue Origin you say?

Just after I hit enter on this piece, Jeff's plea that he did nothing wrong, nothing at all popped up. As the many 'experts' on dictators have pointed out: they get going by instilling fear of retribution, and getting self-censorship in return. Note that Jeff says that there was no explicit quid pro quo involved. Well, as a very good line from a L&O episode put it (Claire), "like any good gift, it was a surprise". The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. has made clear, explicitly, he will use DoJ, IRS, and any other arm of the executive branch to attack anyone he finds 'disloyal'. Too bad he lost not only his hair but his gonads, too. A while ago.

"I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally," he wrote.

Jeff had no need to 'consult' with The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. before pulling the plug. He can't do that, because if he admits he's The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon.'s bitch, everyone knows he's The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon.'s bitch. Them's the words of a scaredy cat self-censor. You betcha.

Hinged

While we were out on the island, the hasp for the new shed door, about 3/4 inch of solid hardwood, was finally installed. These are barn door hinges. Big gorillas. The first attempt failed when the block to hold the receiver bracket split. Ah well. But now it's there, replacing a nicely warped sheet of plywood. Long story.

But, we're here to consider the unhinged. The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon. has been on a torrent of spewing shit by the cubic yard. Why? I told The Wife when this got really going a few weeks ago that the answer was as plane as the nose on all the Mount Rushmore faces. It's not well known among the average public, largely because the lamestream media don't talk about it anymore (they used to, a lot), but the fact is that campaigns especially the Presidential variety do a very lot of polling on their own nickel (and the PACs nickels, too). And if a campaign has really deep pockets or the PACs do, they can do more granular polling (larger sample sizes) more often and more widely. As a rule, these internal polls, only rarely exposed to the public before or after a campaign, are more accurate.

Which makes The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon.'s totally unhinged behaviour obvious: he knows he's going to get skinned alive. This also explains all the legal attacks being constructed for when he gets his ass handed to him. He's burned every bridge to a constituency except for the neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. We'll see in a few days, but I can't think of another reason for him to go totall batshit. He has to. It's his only hope.

Life Imitates Art - part the second

Paula Poundstone admitted once that her teeVee viewing is mostly "Law and Order". Same here. I suspect that she, as I, have no use for Tucker the fucker. And his unhinged rant a few days ago certainly is reason for such.

If you have one of the channels that loops the L&O episodes, get ready for "Surrender Dorothy"/2000

The DA's office believes that a well-known psychologist/author may have driven his daughter-in-law to suicide because her increasing rebellion against his "submissive wife" philosophy would have ruined his reputation and lucrative career.

One can only hope that no one takes Tucker the fucker that seriously.

And, lest we forget

"Honey, I'm Home"

These Right Wingnuts are all that wacko. Dad's always pissed.

Decorum

Very long time readers may recall references to Bermuda in these musings. That trip, by boat I may add, was before these missives began. But I've been on the email listserve of "The Royal Gazette" since then. Today is one of the few times I've felt the compulsion to share. It seems that the Attorney General of that Overseas Territory went ballistic in court. How very UnBritish.

"The Royal Gazette" asked the Bermuda Police Service if police were called to the court and a spokesman said: "On Tuesday, October 15, 2024, an officer assisted with a minor incident at the courts that was quickly resolved and did not require any further police action. There will be no further comment made."

Imagine if Bill Barr had blown his top? Well... crickets from the back benchers. Merrick Garland? The world is coming to an end.

By The Numbers - part the seventy fourth

For some years, all of them while I've been keeping track, the pharma bulls have bitched and moaned about the onerous steeplechase that has to be navigated to get these wonderful (new, occasionally) drugs approved. About 3 decades ago, FDA more or less caved to this bitching, and created a less onerous track called, as one might expect, accelerated approval. The gig was that if a drug had stat sig (mostly), clinically meaningful (mostly) benefit before doing a PIII trial(s), and (mostly) targeted an unmet need in the population, then the drug could be sold. The gotcha was that this was a conditional approval, requiring a full-blooded PIII trial post-approval.

The cynical among us (raises hand, very high) found this regime ripe for gaming. And so it has been. Today's Derek Lowe post reviews a rigorous study of these accelerated approvals in oncology. It ain't a pretty sight. In fact, recently FDA now requires that the all-important full-blooded PIII be underway before the accelerated approval can be granted; fobbing off the PIII has not been as rare as hen's teeth.

But the trends in these oncology trials are worth noting: the failure rates of the traditional Phase III oncology trials have been gradually falling over this period (with an overall Phase III failure rate of about 41%, but currently at 34%), whereas the confirmatory post-marketing Phase III oncology trial failure rates have been increasing in recent years, from around 14% during the 1992-2015 period to 33% in 2016-2023.

Conmen will con.

And, it's worth knowing that truly good new drugs don't have to complete a PIII. If the sponsor really, really believes that New Drug X is better than high button shoes, then the sponsor has the option to schedule (not make up as the trial goes along; mostly) interim analysis. It's a bit more convoluted than simply doing the same arithmetic that gets done with the full data set after all patients have been run through the trial; the stat requirements are a tad more stringent. If New Drug X meets the stat requirements, and FDA agrees with the trial data, then New Drug X will get standard approval before trialing all patients. But, as I say, if the sponsor really, really believes in New Drug X, then such is the more ethical avenue.

One might wonder how much worse the situation is in the CNS world. Alzheimer's strikes a familiar note. If you watch carefully on the teeVee, the mood altering compounds display some less than stellar efficacy in the fleeting, tiny print at the end of the advert.

Here's another report in that same space.

End of the Hype?

Well... it did have to happen, and may be it has. ASML has tanked bigly, stock market wise. As I type, it's down $180 from Monday's close and bouncing up a little and down a bit more. Seems that demand for their bottleneck machines is predicted, by them, to wane going forward. The AI chipmakers are collateral damage. May be the AI fever has broken? One hopes so.

Captain Obvious

Well, today's gobsmacking revelation just popped up on CNN

"The biggest single, best predictor of how someone's going to vote in American politics now is education level. That is now the new fault line in American politics," Sosnik told David Chalian on the "CNN Political Briefing" podcast.

I've never heard of Sosnik, but if he really, really believes this is "now", he's an idiot. Smart people, at least 99.44% of them, vote liberal/progressive/pussy today and since the beginning of the Republic. In order to keep control in the hands of the dirty boot idiots, we get the Electoral College and 3/5 and so on. FDR gave so much to pull the dirty boot idiots out of the muck that they think they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and immigrants and Jews and Negroes and HighSpanics are taking it all away.

As the topic has arisen in these essays over time, the cause has been since the beginning of the Republic: the dirty boot folk have always elected politicians who do all they can to keep them in dirty boots; sick, poor, and uneducated.

Which brings us to the only reason to question immigration from the shithole countries: such countries are (nearly?) all dictatorships, and have been for generations and even the escapees are enured to such treatment. The MAGAnauts ought to be welcoming them with open arms. Why do you think that the Central and South American immigrants tilt toward The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon.? He's what they know.

By The Numbers - part the seventy third

Well, I suppose it had to happen. The anti-vaxx crowd has organized and exploded. This report in the NYT (there are myriad others) makes the lunatics obvious. And gives them publicity they probably shouldn't get. Be that as it may.

It's the No Nothing Party gone beserk. They really do want to party like it's 1829. If the mRNA vaccines, not to mention the decades old childhood vaccines (not mRNA), were turning people into vegetables and the like, you'd think there'd be widespread reporting on such. Fox and Newsmax and such. Crickets.

Number of jabs of Covid mRNA in the USofA: 677 million. Of that total, aprox. 83,000 are Novavax, a 'traditional' type.

So, with all that mRNA circulating in the blood of witless Americans, you'd expect to see some instances of mRNA's perniciousness. Crickets. Yes, there are some rare cases. Here's the real skinny (if you believe in science): non-trivial side effects are about a handful per million doses, and occur in otherwise healthy young-uns.

Here's the CDC report on incidence of myocarditis deaths. Of course, the MAHA cabal will insist in roaring voice, that CDC/FDA/space lasers from Mars are conspiring to keep the gullible on the verge of death. No one was found to have been killed by mRNA caused myocarditis. Zero.

But, that's not the Big Kahuna of the MAHA crowd. The Big Kahuna is that mRNA, however administered or why, alters DNA of the patient. Um, nope. And, btw, Nebraska isn't a hotbed of Leftist elite.

The lunatic fringe, on a revenge ride like the surviving Earps, will wreak havoc and death to the USofA. Be careful who you vote for.

Junk Yard

Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© is a recent title. The latter is Walz, of course. His latest contretemps is the call to get rid of the Electoral College. The sort of bomb throwing one expects from the Junk Yard Dog. Not quite on the level of MTG's assertion that Sleepy Joe and Commie Law have been engineering hurricanes to devastate Red Counties just before the election. Get the hell out of Hurricane Alley. Blowback has ensued.

Today brings new reporting of backpedaling. Ah well.

But the notion boils down to the simple choice: do you want a Damn Gummint run by chucklehead hillbillies? They'll steal all the moolah from the Rest of Us to pay for living in Tornado Alley, Hurricane Alley, filthy Hollers, and any Desert they can find (with myriad water guzzling golf courses, of course; water supplied by the Great Lakes). And insisting that Earth is 6,000 years old and must be taught to first graders. Who don't get lethal vaccinations, of course.

Sleepy Joe squeaked out an EC win, but with 7,059,526 more total votes than Alzheimer's Ronnie, II. Covfefe!

The EC was created for the same reason as the 3/5 thing: to bring along the slave states, and guarantee them more than one-man-one-vote. It's right up their with the rule for deciding a tied EC: the House votes the President, but not on the House seat count, but by states, which just happen to be more MAGA. That's quite a catch, that Catch 22.

By The Numbers - part the seventy second [update]

Well... it's been clear for some decades that Big Time college sport, first football then basketball, were merely instructional leagues for the pros. Now the bandaid of "amateurism" has been ripped off. What's the over/under on years until Big Time college sports no longer require any classes for Big Time college athletes?

[A] group led by former Disney executives-turned-investment professionals has proposed a 70-team super league featuring schools from the four power conferences that would infuse up to $9 billion in private capital cash into the sport.

What's that olde saw? "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out". I went to a football game, and no one went to class.

I wouldn't find it quite so repulsive if at least some, preferably mostly, of those billions went into the academic functions of the schools. And, if memory serves, a lot of Big Time college sports (in the Red states, most) are state schools. Reminds me of those speed traps in the small town Red South. [update... didn't take long, did it?] Well, the bet is off, mostly. It's already here. Color me Shocked!! Shocked I say!!!

Last April, near the end of his third semester on campus, Sanders attended an in-person class for the first time. It was filmed for his social media accounts.

The Worm Turns

Once again, a report from Derek Lowe. This one is especially nice, since it is another feather in the cap of the Cambridge-Boston biotech hat. Well... mostly, but the other one went to UMass Med and teaches there now. That's in Woosta, which is mostly 'around Boston' to most folks.

Gentle Reader likely remembers the whacko crowd yelling that mRNA was going to do such horrible things to the bodies of those who got the vaccines. And right now, God damn it! Haven't heard from them in some time, now have we? I mean, for the MAGAnauts to believe their bullshit, they really, really should have been insisting that the Blue State pointy headed smart people get vaccinated early and often. So that they would die off next week, and the MAGAnauts could take over the planet. Kind of like zombies. But I digress.

The report is about the development of microRNA, and why it's important. Again, one needn't be a medicinal chemist etc. to get the gist of what's going on.

That went from model organisms like fruit flies and zebrafish all the way to humans, and further experiments showed that yes indeed, this microRNA system was involved in timing of gene expression in cells from all of these organisms. In fact, it seemed to be a very important part of the gene expression machinery in every creature with left/right symmetry in their bodies.

Which must piss off the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut crowd a whole bunch. If they ever find out. There's zero chance that Fox or Newsmax or the Butt Fuck Crier will carry the story.

And that, folks, is what a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery looks like.

Different Ox - part the first

Well, we're in it again. Another hurricane devestates some place, in the Red states. One might wonder whether those Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts will vote against another bailout, like they did with Superstorm Sandy? After all, that happened in rich Blue states, mostly, and they deserves to fend for themselves. And they ain't no such a ting as climate change.

I'm willing to bet that the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts are pleased as punch that Asheville, home to flower power hippie types, got thoroughly wiped out. God's punishment.

The hurricane damaged an estimated 80 percent of the buildings in the River Arts District of Asheville, N.C., and upended the lives of artists who had recast the city as a cultural force.

Will try to keep an ear to the ground. I'm pretty damn sure that Asheville will be on the short end of the stick when the Congressional delegation and state legislature get around to doling out the Bongo Bucks for rebuilding. God got rid of them infidels, and not a dime to put 'em back together. No sireeee.

Uncle Sugar - part the first

Well, it's happened again: a new drug for a (relatively) small TAM, expressly depends on Socialized Medicine to foot the bill. I kid you not:

According to a Bristol Myers Squibb spokesperson, the wholesale cost for a month's supply will be $1,850. Depending on people's insurance coverage, that cost could be lower for individual patients. Bristol Myers Squibb estimates that 80% of people with schizophrenia in the U.S. have insurance coverage either through Medicare or Medicaid.

So, schizo's are mostly geezers and/or in shithole circumstances? Is that what Bristol thinks/hopes? What would MAGA do?

And, for what it's worth, I'm still not clear that such would be covered by M/M directly, since this is not a doctor's office drug. It would be 'covered' for those who pay for Part D, which isn't always cheap. And United Health, et al, have built up a deserved reputation of putting profit before patient; will Cobenfy be as cheap as generic SoC? Not likely. So, it's really not Socialized Medicine, as generally defined. Who wooda thunk it?

By The Numbers - part the seventy first

Well, Ohtani did become the first 50/50 ballplayer, and all the lamestream baseball pundits are cumming in their dad jeans. What a crock. There is no question that Ohtani is a major attraction. But the 50/50 gaga is silly.

In 2023, MLB changed the pitching rule to limit the pitcher to three throws to first base, and increased the size of the base. Hmm?

So, enquiring minds need to know: league wide, what happened to stolen bases from 2022 to 2023/2024? You guessed it, up. By a bunch (doesn't say how far into '24 the numbers go).

2022 - 1,261
2023 - 1,820
2024 - 1,851

Not like falling off a log, but c'mon man! Consider what Ricky would have done with these rules?

Life Changing

Here's yet another report on the progress of fusion. To be clear: it's nothing more than another way to boil water to make steam which then spins a turbine connected to a generator which then pushes them wee little electrons down the wire.

It's a long-ish piece, but doesn't (as none that I've seen do) discuss the implications for how we would run a society or economy mostly, if not solely, on wee little electrons in the wire. In particular, the winners, based on current conditions, would be the Europeans (and some Asians) who still have a substantial infrastructure of electric transport. The USofA used to, but as is well known (not propaganda), GM bought up many city light rail systems and sold buses. The argument, then and now, is that buses can easily be re-routed from low ridership to high ridership routes. All well and good. After all, 29% of the USofA's fossil fuel energy consumption is transport. OTOH, as any highway engineer will tell you - once built, a new road (or even, lane) will almost immediately reach its 10 or 20 year design capacity. If you build it, they will come. Come to think of it, rail transport is the perfect way to drive urban design. What a concept.

Another important use of fossil fuels is heating our homes (and workplaces), which comes to 61%. Kinda big. Not surprising, switching building heat (and, you might be surprised, cooling) to 'all electric home' (you may remeber that phrase from decades ago!) requires little work at the infrastructure level. 3-phase transmission lines in housing areas might need a voltage boost to handle the increased load, and of course that oil/gas furnance would needs go away, but that can be viewed as a sociatal cost and mitigated by Uncle Sugar.

The big nut to crack is how to leverage 'nearly free' elecricity (at least at the operating cost level) for transport. Is their enough lithium to be mined to support "a Tesla in every garage"? Not sure. As so often, kinda depends on how you measure. Is lithium re-usable? Sorta. Kinda.

Of course, all that matters more in a car oriented society than a rail transport one. Boston (Charlie of the MTA crowd) once had extensive trackless trolleys, but the last line shutdown last year. Sigh. I suspect baksheesh this time around, too.

So, the moral of the story: They Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. While the direct cost of pushing those wee little electrons in the wire with fusion generation is likely to be quite small, the opportunity to use those wee little electrons is largely a function of USofA's energy infrastructure, and transport habits. Not so much.

This is tokamak.

Future Transcript - part the first

Now that Bone Spur Samurai^© and Just Dumb Vance^© have been playing the poor victim of the Lefties, wrt attempts of Off Bone Spur Samurai^©, I've found a transcript of part of a rally speech from Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© to be given on 31 September, in Tulsa, OK.

Enjoy!

My fellow Americans and Red Neck Sooners, the time has come to stop the bullshit surrounding the two, so far, attempts on Bone Spur Samurai^©. To be clear, the perps were not, nor ever were, Libs from shithole Blue States. No, in point of fact, they were/are died in the Rock Ribbed Red MAGA wool whackoes. What we don't yet know about their motives. It's clear that a disaffected Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut would only drift so far away from Bone Spur Samurai^© to feel the need to off the bastard with some deep provocation.

It would appear that there's really only three possibilites:
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has not gone unhinged enough that the perp has to take revenge
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has sucked Vlad's dick so much in Ukraine ...
-- Bone Spur Samurai^© has caved to the Deep State and gone all soft in the middle (well, metaphorically of course; he's Jabba the Hut IRL) so ...

So, Bone Spur Samurai^© shut the hell up. Just be thankful that a real marksman from one of those shithole countries that you keep pissing on, doesn't see to it that you get your just desserts.

USA!! USA!!! USA!!!! Bomb Moscow back to the Stone Age! We know how to do that!!

[ahem]
really dumb
-- Jonah Goldberg/2024

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the forty ninth

Well, boy howdy!! My early morning sojurn to the grocers and the greasy spoon (the former for foods and the NYT, the latter for a bun, a cuppa joe, and the NYT crossword) takes my by an Exxon station. And, boy howdy!! Regular at cash is $2.99.9!!! Take that Alzheimer's Ronnie, II. Ya gonna give credit to Sleepy Joe and Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©?? I suppose not.

Scaredy Cat - part the first

Well, he could saute himself, although one might surmise that his recent unhinged bloaviating indicates self-immolation. Be that as it may, we have this.

Scared little Bone Spur Samurai^©. I guess not getting the clap in the 60s and 70s qualifies as combat duty.

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the twenty fourth

Today's NYT has a long piece on the dangers of over-automation. Rather than repeat most of it, just this

Opposition from unions is just one obstacle to automation. The installation of new machinery and software can cost many millions and even billions of dollars — investments that can take years to pay off. And some ports may not have an incentive to invest in new technology when shipping companies and their customers can't easily move to more efficient ports.

Sound familiar? Use the automation a little or use it a lot, the cost is nearly the same, because it's all sunk and can't be avoided. What happens to capital when there's no more labor to replace?

By The Numbers - part the seventieth

Sex, lies, and videotape.

Bone Spur Samurai^© a lot, Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© not so much. CNN

Trump ultimately delivered more than 30 false claims during the debate, CNN's preliminary count found, while Harris shared just one false claim, though she also added some claims that were misleading or lacking in key context.

I suppose we'll see updated figures in due time.

And, of course, Bone Spur Samurai^© went totally unhinged afterwards, since every time he loses something, anything, it's because he's been sabotaged. Those six bankruptcies had nothing to do with him, of course.

They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Such a whiner.

Codd's Revenge

Some years ago, this report ran in the NYT, relating the not so spectacular life of IBM Watson. I find it a cautionary tale for those who cleave to the notion that there's some 'post relational' data world. They ain't no such a thing.

This was predicted some time ago

This goldrush is being driven by the hauntingly accurate results AI has delivered in fields like image, audio and video recognition. Yet, at the end of the day, these algorithms are merely correlation machines, sifting through vast piles of numbers to record subtle correlations among inputs without any high order understanding that would allow them to divine causative relationships. In the end, we are building our AI revolution on a correlation house of cards.

It's not widely discussed, but IBM built DB2 on top of mainframe VSAM way back when. Codd was driven to define the RM in the face of IBM's then major database product IMS, which was/is the hierarchical database. It was defined as a way around the network database. If one wished to, one could have built DB2-lite into any COBOL application, since key-indexed files were/are a part of VSAM, and even earlier machines. Codd, essentailly did that. And Watson and AI and what-have-you continues to do that; xml nonsense being an exception, being just a poor man's IMS. For those with faulty memories, Watson (Jeopardy! version) emerged in 2011. That makes it a decade old, a lifetime or two in IT land.

So, what happened?

The company's top management, current and former IBM insiders noted, was dominated until recently by executives with backgrounds in services and sales rather than technology product experts.

"until recently" is gilding the lily just a tad, implying that the probable was specific to Watson. It's not. IBM from Watson, Sr. on down was/is a sales effort; the science and engineering bits are tolerated as begrudged expense. Remember, the IBM/PC which did jerk IT around for some decades, was built almost wholly from bought-in parts; the Suits thought so little of it.

The Watson they built was a room-size supercomputer with thousands of processors running millions of lines of code. Its storage disks were filled with digitized reference works, Wikipedia entries and electronic books. Computing intelligence is a brute force affair, and the hulking machine required 85,000 watts of power. The human brain, by contrast, runs on the equivalent of 20 watts. [my emphasis]

What Watson is: a relational database on super-duper steroids. Or, at least, it ought to be. Imagine if IBM designed the thing to sequencially search all of that text? Of course not. Indexes up the wazhoo. The only real question: is Watson a structural relational database or a correlation engine? Not everyone acknowledges that these are two distinct ways of looking for 'intelligence'. The relational database is grounded in relations, of course. But relations, in Codd's term, is not the PK/FK 'relation' at all but rather the connection of attributes to the defining identity of the entity. IOW, the standalone table. Again, indexed files existed in VSAM very early on. Nearly everyone considers the PK/FK 'relation' the raison d'etre of the RDBMS, in contrast to the hierarchical file systems which preceded. Both systems are grounded in 'relations' specified by the Designer.

Or is a Watson a correlation machine, continually calculating R among gallions of data points?

The former is structural, dictated by the Designer, while the latter is explorational, hidden in the data.

In the end, so far, Watson would be the Health Guru to smarten doctors. Not so much:

Now IBM is paring back Watson Health and reviewing the future of the business. One option being explored, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, is to sell off Watson Health.

This essay sat in the queue since 2021. Not much has changed, except to increase the AI hype. And to create the WatsonX brand as some vehicle to re-coup all that moolah. They'll end up throwing good money after bad. It will still end badly.

Nuthin

Once again, with vigour: yet another report 'proving' that real estate, particularly residential, is a non-producing 'asset'. A house ain't anything like an ASML litho machine. And even that real asset can only turn a profit for the owners if it can run 24/7 and can shift all that output.

The company's newest lithography tool weighs a staggering 165 tons and will cost up to $380 million, roughly double the price of its previous low-NA EUV lithography machines.

The capital/labour ratio for such automation has to be sky high. Let's see if we can find some numbers. Well, not specific to ASML, but to high-NA EUVL machines in general

Perhaps surprisingly, operating labor costs are expected to be relatively stable. Leading-edge fabs are extensively automated because that approach is less likely to introduce contaminants or defects in the production process than with human intervention. As a result, staff size and responsibilities — mostly in engineering, technical, and operations functions — won't need to change substantially.

So, at the least, labour cost isn't going to rise with The New Machine (with or without a Soul).

Therefore, we see another case of the Tyranny of Fixed/Average Cost.

China's problem today, is just a worst case scenario of any pyramid scheme: it only works if the Next Buyer has more available cash than the current owner. Housing, as a non-producing asset, can only be profitable to the mortgage holder if incomes of those in the buyers class (a bit different for each profitable price point) continue to rise. Inflation, according to the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, is always bad; unless and until they go to sell a house! Then it's God's Gift of Capital Gains.

Sane Washing - I learned a new term

By now, those who read the NYT on the innterTubes have long since encountered Peter Baker's execrable paean to Bone Spur Samurai^©. I just got through it in my dead trees version. Clearly, the Money People at the NYT are fully in control, and fully deeply closeted MAGA.

That the NYT refuses to headline every story about Bone Spur Samurai^© - "Unhinged Narcissist Goes Nuts Again" is evidence enough. They sure did about that with Sleepy Joe.

The tell, so to say, is at the end where Baker leaves Bone Spur Samurai^©'s verbal diarrhea on tariffs paying for child care stand uncontested. To be clear, as the GED level crowd knows from high school (or GED, a ha), a tariff is paid for by the consumers of the importing country. No country has the (direct) authority to impose taxes on other countries' companies. Well... in 19^th century (and earlier) regimes where Western powers plundered colonial areas that sorta, kinda is what happened.

But, to give Bone Spur Samurai^© his due, how would things work out if his wet fever dream were true: the US Treasury forces Chinese companies to remit billions and billions of dollars to Uncle Sugar? Do you really think said companies would not raise their prices to cover this new cost of production? Damn right they will. I mean, where else is the USofA going to go for EV batteries and drug API? You guessed it: about nowhere. You see China has cornered the market on those goods, and lots of others. The beauty of off-shoring. Who has who by the nuts?

By The Numbers - part the sixty ninth

The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts are, once again as always, claiming voter fraud without, as always, even a mere shred of evidence that raping and murdering wetbacks are voting Damnocrats into office. Even the President. And they mean to stop it.

But, one might muse, what's the fair way to establish eligibilty to vote? At the beginning one had to be, more or less, a rich (if only land holding) white guy to vote. About 6% (lost the link, boo hoo, but various pages make that reference) of the population!! Ain't minority rule grand?

In the states that did hold elections, suffrage was generally restricted to white men who owned property.

What that means: some states assigned electors by the legislature. An even teenyer minority rule!!

Yes, that's what the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts want to make the (Federal, just like abortion) law again, with no mistake.

If you read the wiki piece, you'll discover a fact not necessarily obvious: the Constitution accrues almost all voting authority to the states, separately. I suppose it's a recurring wet dream for the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts to have the Right Wingnut Supremes declare the 15th and 19th and 24th amendments unconstituional! And, without doubt, what's left of the Voting Rights act!! Party like it'a 1788!!

Since many of the uber-rich never pay any taxes:

We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.
-- Leona Helmsley/1989 (or earlier)

May haps the right to vote should accrue only to those who actually pay, not simply file, taxes. So, let's look for some numbers. And, of course, the point is that some number of non-legal immigrants still pay taxes. (The numbers come from different sources and slightly different times.) Green Card status doesn't explicitly confer National or State voting right. There are small exceptions. Suffrage based on paying taxes would change that, of course, and would not, in and of itself, require a Constitutional amendment. It would require a change in Federal law. Good luck with that.

number of eligible voters: 252 million

number of taxpayers: 128.7 million (and, no, I can't find an explanation for the size discrepancy)

number who voted: 122 million

For perspective, Sleepy Joe got 7 million more votes than Bone Spur Samurai^© in 2020, and one could expect that most of that 7 million other difference is largely W2 bound voters. Not likely to be MAGA morons. One hopes, anyway. So, one hopes, a ~14 million landslide for the Damnocrats is feasible.

So, who's more entitled? The Leonas who merely slurp from Uncle Sugar, or those W2 bound losers? It's your choice. But if you don't want dictatorship, which is just how the rich minority keep most of a country's resources in order to stay rich, then giving the vote to those who actually work and pay taxes and live here, irregardless of status, is most fairest. .

NIMBY

Not In My Back Yard is an age old epithet, but so is Not Invented Here. Too often, in PhARMA, where the advances come from is at the least elided, if not concealed. And so it is with the mRNA Covid vaccines.

About the most stupid vector of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts cabal that appeared during Covid was the assertion that the mRNA vaccines were conjured up immediately to suck of Uncle Sugar's Bongo Bucks, and to poison the population, and so forth. The knee jerk affirmation of the sub-GED cult happened right on cue. About that time, and in more than one venue, I noted that mRNA had been around (well, it's been around pretty much forever, but it took some time for us bipeds to notice) for a very long time in medchem years. It was well understood by the time of Covid, and so on. Of some note, especially to those who call bullshit on PhARMA's bleating poormouth, these mRNA discoveries were done in academia and NGOs, not Big PhARMA.

Which brings us to Derek Lowe's current report on the subject. Again, well worth the read, even for those who aren't university trained medchemists. The delivery tech of mRNA vaccines is not exactly olde hat, but close.

Among those people who have now heard of LNPs [lipid nanoparticles], I would guess that many of them have the impression that these are a new development. They likely also have a similar impression that the idea of an mRNA vaccine itself is a new idea, but neither of these are true.

There was a time when gaining new knowledge was The Best Thing, but with the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts attempting to subvert intelligence and science, we may well fall into a very long Dark Age if the likes of Putin, Orban, and wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© run the world. I often wonder why they all don't sign up for Islam: a more Male Chauvinist Pig ideology is difficult to conjure. Ya don't need no book larnin to walk behind a mule and make babies!! Preferably fishbelly white, of course; none of those shithole country shades. "Party like it's 1829"^©

Yeah, Right

So, this is where the latest white folks killing white folks happened

We know you've made the best decision by moving inside the City limits of Winder, Georgia, founded in 1893. Originally called Jug Tavern, Winder gained its new name from railroad builder John H. Winder.

So, a joint that proclaims its existence as white trash. Perfect.

Leave it to the Brits to explain the corruption in Georgia.

In 2022, Georgia enacted a permitless carry law, repealing provisions requiring people to obtain a license and be subject to fingerprinting and a background check before carrying concealed weapons in public spaces.

In sum: party like it's 1829!!! We don't need no laws.

Likely not in what's left of my life span, but nobody with brains will live in these stupid Red States.

Nom de Guerre

As regular reader is aware, one of the joys of these missives is the opportunity to skewer prominent folk, mostly the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts of this world. On occasion, I've adopted their epithets for the progressive minded, Sleepy Joe being first among equals.

A whlle ago, I invented (so far as I know) Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© as a skewer to the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts' increasingly unhinged half-wits. Well, what do you know?

And in a reprise of past GOP campaigns branding Democratic nominees as extreme liberals, Trump and his supporters are trying to frame Harris as a communist and a "Bolshevik." South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem blasted Harris' running mate, Tim Walz, as a "security risk" because he once taught in China.

Life, sometimes, does imitate Art.

American Hegemony

A few weeks ago, I discovered that CBS Sports Network (a cab/sat-only feed) carries CFL games, two or three a weekend. Which led me to the wiki. I'm old enough to sorta, kinda remember Doug Flutie went to the UFL (playing for wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^©'s New Jersey Generals!) before getting a gig in the NFL. Then he went to the CFL and great fame in The Great White North, and thence back to the NFL. The odd differences between CFL and NFL are easily seen on the field. What I was curious about was where do the players (have to) come from?

The wiki, and other sources, describe a variable rule-set for rosters. Near as I can tell, the current rule is that a CFL team has to have 7 more-or-less Canadian players on the 24 man playing field; it's 12 a side up there. That's not a whole lot of Canadians playing CFL football. I had suspected that the rule, for competition reasons, would allow some number of non-Canadians on the roster, but not require a minimum number of Canadians on the field at all times. Turns out, they do. Good on them.

Which brings us to today's NYT (again), and the saga of Mexican baseball. Here the difference has gone for more imports.

[T]he floodgates opened this year, when the league office increased the number of foreign players allowed on each team's 30-player roster from seven to 20.

And foreign players, and not just Americans, flooded in.

Whenever the subject of immigration from the shithole countries to the South rears its head, I usually send readers off to the wiki to review how Operation Wetback actually came about. And it was the Mexican side that initiated the program; their government felt that losing workers, even the barely skilled, to El Norte was a bad thing.

[I]t originated from a request by the Mexican government to stop the illegal entry of Mexican laborers into the United States.

But now, let's get us some good ballplayers!! My, how times have changed! Although the report does note that some in Mexico find the loss of roster spots for natives is not a Good Thing.

"It has taken away from what I call the traditional Mexican League," said Diablos manager Bundy, who grew up in Virginia and first experienced the league as a player in the 1980s. "Obviously, it has definitely taken opportunities away from the younger Mexican players."

It's a small world, after all. Classical econ says that labor will always get its fair share of revenue. Were that such were ever true.

Deep State - part the first

Now we know more about The Real Deep State^©, thanks to the NYT, of course.

DoL reporting is supposed to have hard-and-fast embargoes. But, it turns out, not always. And more than a one-off in this last year of Sleepy Joe's administration. Could it be that there's a MAGA/Big Bidnezz/billionaire Boys Club deep inside such a Blue Gummint? Fool me once, your fault. Fool me some more, my fault. So, yeah, there has to be.

To be clear: much of the data that comes out of DoL is actually gathered by Commerce's survey staff. Gives them something to do when they ain't no census.

And in May, the agency inadvertently posted data on the Consumer Price Index 30 minutes before the scheduled release time. The report is closely watched and heavily traded, and some Wall Street firms and data platforms monitor the part of the bureau's website — internally called "flat files" — where the data was accidentally published. Less sophisticated users do not.

Yeah, and they not be using RDBMS. COBOL uber alles!!

Lost in Translation

Way back when, high school, I read Russian for a year. It was intended to be at least a two year stint, but The Powers That Be in the school system decided that our teacher was a latent Communist, and rather than fire the guy, pushed him into administration. And didn't get them a new teacher. Of course. It was the Cold War. Thus avoiding public scrutiny. Oddly, he was just a standard short Jewish American, who had been studying the language with a Russian native speaker, an older woman whose name I've long since forgot. This was Classical High School (no, I'm not making that up), designated as the city's college prep school, meant to rival the tony private schools that proliferated in my corner of New England. The number of languages on offer included Hebrew, of course.

All that by way of introduction to a long-ish piece in today's NYT on a husband and wife team of Russian literature translators. They've been at it for a while, and their output is considerable.

Both the NYT piece and the wiki page discuss their supporters and critics. The NYT piece points out that at least two of their critics don't read or speak Russian. I can't claim to have a perfect memory of the language from all those decades ago, but among other things, the structure is more Latin-esque than Latin itself. As in Latin, nouns have declension, while verbs have conjugation.

Here's the wiki for Latin declension: 6 cases
And for Russian: they go on and on

Yes, it was a bitch to keep it all straight. And, of course, the weird alphabet and script. CCCP isn't see-see-see-pee, y'all know, right?

I imagine that Russian is the toughest sorta, kinda Western language to render into idiomatic English. One point made in the NYT piece is that other translations leave some names merely transliterated into English alphabet; thus Foolsburg here is what the Russian word means in English. Previous translations just left the Russian/English spelling word. Unless you are somewhat fluent in Russian (I'll imagine the Russian word is a borderline swear word), you don't get the joke.

It's likely too extreme to say that translation of fiction is harder than writing fiction in one's own language. But it ain't like falling off a log.

I Told You So - 26 August 2024

So, it was last night that I elevated Dr. McElhone to the long-term (if not permanent) spot at the top of the page. And, boy howdy!! What should I find today? Derek Lowe (you really ought to read him) just posted an essay on the low-level chemistry of cells. Since my biology was one year in high school and chemistry two years in college, I can't claim to be an adept in the field. But I've long wondered how it is that we (well, the actual scientists) can know how these molecules behave? Can we only know now what we know due to electron microscopy and such? Until the Bohr model, how did we know what water looked like? And so on. A fun read.

The authors of the new paper linked above find that the ppGpp system is a very good mimic of "sliding mode control", a control method for nonlinear systems that one might have thought was rather advanced for a bacterium to implement. But they're not working it out mathematically - instead, as usual, there have been two or three billion years of do-or-die optimization that arrived at it.

Turns out, Dr. McElhone is right again. Not to mention Darwin, of course. Oh, and Mother Earth is really 6,000 years old.

By The Numbers - part the sixty eighth

So, you think your life is complicated? I'm not a Starbucks sorta guy; they ain't be one near my neighborhood (shithole that it is). So, it was with some amusement that I encountered this report on their travails

Starbucks says there are more than 170,000 possible drink combinations available, but outside estimates have put the number at more than 300 billion. And the person in front of you always seems to be ordering 100 million of them.

And, of course, the company ethos (like Friendly's in my hometown, and elsewhere since) decrees that staffing always be less than sufficient. The Large Minds that run such retails remain convinced that keeping labour cost under some Magic Number is the key to profit.

Pity that there's no accounting entry for lost revenues from customers who walked away.

And, of course, for those who surmise that "the easy 80%" is a figment of my warped mind

In many businesses, including food and grocery, the 80/20 rule applied. You'd get 80 percent of your business from 20 percent of the product line.

That's not exactly the easy 80%, but in the same family.

So, is there any data which proves that the BoM of retail is dominated by labour? Let's see what our fingers walking through the Yellow Googles can find. Boy Howdy! there is some data.

For fashion retailers, labor costs typically ranged from 10% to 20% of sales
...
Grocery stores, on the other hand, had lower labor costs, as many positions require less specialized skills.

I'll guess that Starbucks falls toward the grocery store end of things: customers know what they want (the more convoluted the better), the baristas aren't helping them get the right look, and so forth.

So, what's the deal? At the store level, managers have no other say in cost control and little to no say in stimulating demand. Knowing a few managers in such retail, about all they do is fill out paperwork, and try to keep a handle on "shrinkage". And, increasingly, as the report shows, Corporate controls staffing pretty tightly. The C-suite denizens feel powerless (and may be right) to control any other costs or increase demand. As a result, profit, such as it is, has to come out of the hides of the worker bees. Ain't capitalism grand?

Simpletons

In the days when I got paid to do econ for a living, the issue of home buying came up, generally during times of shifting interest rates. There were/are some in the field who still insist that mortgage rate and house price are not correlated. Such morons do piss me off. One buys a house on the basis of the monthly nut: the maximum nut varies from time to time and lender to lender, but hovers aroung 30% of gross income.

Luckily, today brings a report on the issue. Thankfully, it makes the case.

If you're old enough, you might remember the 70s with double digit mortgage rates. House prices crashed as a result, but the boomers who bought their Cape Cods found the prices adjusted nicely over the next decade or two. Windfall capital gains with no effort. The American way.

By The Numbers - part the sixty seventh

Killing them softly with his song? What with Baffert still in deep shit, is there much future for killing horseys with races as a side-effect? It appears dicey.

In 1990, for example, more than 40,000 foals were born in the United States
...
Last year, the number of would-be thoroughbred racehorses born was 17,200

Horse racing needs its own JD Vance. Let's make more babies!!! Well, so long as we keep those rich Mid-East Oil State dictators from providing younguns. OH, wait... they buy up most of the good foals.

"Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Bahrain are areas that have an increased interest in dirt racing; and the one thing that is clear, is the best dirt racehorses in the world are coming from the United States," he said. "It is a natural progression that paid dividends today."

W. Edwards Deming is said to have said: "In God we trust, all others bring data." In the racing bidnezz it appears to be, "In money we trust, who cares about deprivation?"

Thought For The Day - 23 August 2024

Well, what to say about RFK Jr.? Just that the nutballs who would vote for him would vote for wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© were he not around. Which he isn't now. Will he slough off the disaffected Progressives from Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©? Hardly.

Sense of Humor - part the second

Yet another series, based on a previous essay: the NYT sometimes displays a cruel sense of humor in printing contradictory reports on topics of national interest.

Today's duet: does the Deep State really impeded progress or stifle it? Two reports, one about Ketamine and the other about sweatheart regulation. It's hard to take the NYT seriously, at times.

The first deals with Matthew Perry's OD death by Ketamine, and puts the spotlight on what FDA approval really means.

Because the Food and Drug Administration approved ketamine for one purpose — sedating patients during surgery — more than 50 years ago, doctors can prescribe it for other uses.

So, it was perfectly legal to give Perry ketamine in any amount they wanted. The fact that he died as a result may be criminal, but charging them for over-prescribing is iffy. IOW, FDA isn't really some Deep State actor putting handcuffs on drug companies. As the report implies, may haps it's not such a good thing to have off-label prescribing? But, of course, that would entail forcing drug companies and FDA to fully test (at least one PII trial) some drug for each indication. There are drugs that already go through that regimen, but not for clinical reasons. It's all about the money. Insurers generally don't cover off-label use, so getting FDA's OK for a large use population can worth the grief.

That brings us to clearly corrupt conflict of interest by a C-suite FDA critter. It's a very long report, and smells to high heaven. He is head of device approval at FDA, and she (Wifey) is a lawyer working for companies seeking approval of devices. While the Perry story is about one sad fuck up, this one is about myriad corrupt events.

Their job is to protect the public health. They're doing the opposite. Anybody who doesn't see that is not looking.
-- Paula Cofer

Among other things, it reports that FDA, much after the fact, admits that the two engaged in conflict of interest activities. She actually backed Theranos, of all things.

Her partner at the helm of the firm's life sciences team began representing Theranos, the discredited blood testing company, in 2015, demanding that the F.D.A. halt an inspection at its sites in California.

Up to 1962, before the Kefauver-Harris Amendment, FDA's remit was safety. Yet, under his involvement

Reports of device-related injuries soared to 900,000 in 2023, up from about 190,000 in 2012, according to Device Events, a company that makes F.D.A. data user-friendly for subscribers.

Now, that's doin the job Sparky.

So, yeah, FDA is all about persecuting drug companies in a Socialist frenzy. Sure.

By The Numbers - part the sixty sixth

With the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts revving up their Founding Fathers engine, let's have a look at one of the bigger lies they rely on: socialized medicine for geezers is a cost we can't and shouldn't afford because Americans are living so much longer than they used to. Keeping geezers alive is an unjust burden on the Young (tee hee).

Well, as mentioned before in these essays, it depends on how you measure. Here's one report (from the esteemed school that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© claims to have "gone to") that provides some data.

In 1900, one in 40 Americans died annually. By 2013, that rate was roughly one in 140, a cumulative improvement of more than two thirds. As shown in Figure 1, life expectancy at birth rose by more than 30 years over this period, from 47 to 79.

All well and good. And true. But not relevant to the question of the burden of keeping geezers alive now versus 1900. To be blunt: 65 year old geezers will not now, or likely ever, live to 95 as a matter of course. The 30 years is almost wholly due to the Younger Generations not dying like flies. If you made it to adulthood in 1900 or 2024, your cohort of geezers will be about the same.

So, what?

[T]he average life expectancy at age 65 (i.e., the number of years a person could be expected to receive unreduced Social Security retirement benefits) has increased a modest 5 years (on average) since 1940.

And, one might expect, not much different if using 1900 as base: almost all the interventions keeping geezers alive longer have happened post WWII.

So, you guys, shut the fuck up. It bears repeating - since SS is a current account system (NOT an individual retirement account), getting babies to live to adulthood (and contributing) is a Good Thing. It's why the parents of Baby Boomers got fat and happy on SS - more workers. Just Dumb Vance^© is a dumb motherfucker, fur shur, but if Mother Earth weren't overstocked as it is, then rebalancing the age distribution with scads of sub-GED fishbelly white babies would also be something of a Good Thing (if it weren't powered by eugenics, of course). But Mother Earth is overstocked, and the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts and fellow travelers deny that Mother Earth is hot under the collar. And ready to burn the whole thing down. Mother Earth got along just fine without humans for Billions of years. She will again. She's nostalgic.

Brainiac

One has to wonder whether Bone Spur Samurai has even an ounce of grey matter left? So, once again, he's insulting real heroes and praising a couple of rich Jewish donor-class geezers (one dead and gone). And, of course, he lies

[I]t's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It's actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor — that's soldiers. They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead.

There's so much wrong with that, and the whole remark is worser. The main point being that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a perk controlled by the President's discretion. He gives it away to those he favors; if that's his ploy.

any person recommended to the President for award of the Medal or any person selected by the President upon their own initiative.
-- the wiki

It is NOT, as Bone Spur Samurai asserts, the equivalent to the (Congressional) Medal of Honor. You know, for those shot up or dead soldiers. Award of the Medal of Honor is NOT a door prize for shipping lots o Bongo Bucks to a broken down politician. It's equivalent is the Congresional Gold Medal, the other Branch's highest medal. Bone Spur Samurai really needs to use what's left of his Alzheimer's addled brain and consider: if he keeps at this, somenoe who knows how to shoot a M16 is going to put him in her sights. Bank on it.

They's Gold in Them Thar Shills

We've already seen Just Dumb Vance^©. So, why not Just Dump Vance^©?

I should sell rights to both: the DNC and the RNC, who're widely reported to be sick of The Guy already. Who would blame them? With all those ads and prints and such on both sides, I'd have enough to get a boat next to the Busted Flush. Ah, Florida Man.

But, thoughts of vast wealth streaming through my artificial brain made me reconsider why it is that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 would hang such a pair of concrete overshoes off his bone spurred patent leathers? And, as a bolt out of the Blue, it was clear. If, by some subterfuge, he did get back in the White House, impeachment will be just a wink and a nod away. How to build a moat? And, of course, the answer is simple: a Veep that is so far more unhinged, that not even AOC would go the distance. The Devil you know is better than the Devil You Don't. Impeachment insurance.

By The Numbers - part the sixty fifth

Someone needs to clue Just Dumb Vance^© into some history and demographics. "Me, teacher! Me, teacher!!".

Humbly, I leap into the breach. Just Dumb Vance keeps prattlingly on about the glory of breeding. More people, preferably fishbelly White, not cows and pigs. As most of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, he is either blythely ignorant or just dumb. Mother Earth is in no need of more humans. Mother Earth has a finite caring capacity, full stop. We're perilously close to that carrying capacity today; his kids will live in a world beyond that. Their kids will live in poverty hell. Hot and burning kind, not the ice at the bottom of hell as Dante wrote. The 1% will only notice that something has gone wrong when all their amassed wealth can't buy them clean water, air, survivable temperature, and abundant energy stocks. Way past too late, buddy.

So, where does mass breeding myth come from? Well the Judeo-Christian Bible, of course. Specifically, Genesis and the tale of Onan. And it ain't what the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts want you to think.

This act is detailed as retribution for being "displeasing in the sight of Lord". Onan's crime is often misinterpreted to be masturbation but it is universally agreed among biblical scholars that Onan's death is attributed to his refusal to fulfill his obligation of levirate marriage with Tamar by committing coitus interruptus.

Of course, levirate marriage no longer exists (the wiki), outside of Shithole Countries. Or, may be in Appalachia it still happens. Just Dumb Vance could tell us. The point being that this "spilling seed" prohibition is written in Genesis, about 400s BC. And, if you read, it really says nothing about demanding mass breeding, at all. But the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts try to enforce it that way.

So, how low was the people meter back then?
-- 100 to 162 millions
So, how high is the people meter these days?
-- 8,162 millions

And, of course that mantra of the social Darwinist cabal remains true: "the rich get richer and the poor have kids". There's even a long essay in today's (dead trees version) NYT about how crypto has been taken into oligopoly land; no central control? Not hardly. Didn't take long, now did it?

It doesn't pay to contradict the ultimate truth:
The world is not linear.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D. [math stats, Iowa State]/1980

Ingrates - part the second

Yet again, we find some on the Mealy Mouthed Left trying to suck the dicks of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts. This time it was cancelling "Morning Joe", on the putative reason that MSNBC would have first-chairs wall-to-wall coverage of the failed wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 kill shot.

Didn't happen, and once again The Brass at NBC News look like ineffectual MAGA dick suckers.

Not to mention yet more reporting on the ingrates in the MAGA Red States taking credit for the IRA support these shitkicker counties are getting. It's just stupid to be nice to folks who've been ingrates since FDR. They're not going to change, or vote Blue. When the USofA goes to hell in a handbasket, some charismatic Darkie Democrat will be dragged into cleaning up the shitstorm just like always?

"Since House Republicans have no record of accomplishments, they are trying to falsely take credit for ones that aren't theirs," said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for House Democrats' campaign arm. "This is exactly the sort of hypocritical behavior that the public hates, and the DCCC will be sure to remind voters of Republicans' do-nothing agenda between now and November."

And, by the bye, it was 104 in DC a couple of days later. As Billy Joe Bob, a close buddy of mine says, "dey ain't no such a ting as climate change! God said he won't flood the earth again, and I guess dat means he won't fry us like a Tanksgibbin turkey, either!" Gotta love Billy Joe Bob. The wonders of Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts education.

Billy Joe Bob doesn't read or see much news that isn't Fox or Newsmax, so I guess he's not heard about Houston.

"Areas that fail to protect local quality of life in the face of extreme events will suffer a 'brain drain' as people and jobs will migrate to relatively safer areas," one of the authors of the study, Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at the University of Southern California, said in an email.

Well, no shit Sherlock. Yes, it does cost more to have competent governance. And yes, that governance is almost always funded on a progressive structure because just soaking the poor isn't fruitful enough. Did you know that the first federal income tax was on only the top 10%?

In 1894, Democrats in Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman tariff, which imposed the first peacetime income tax. The rate was 2% on income over $4,000, which meant fewer than 10% of households would pay any.

With the 16th amendment, the result was about the same. The Red State ingrates!

Damn Lazy Bureaucrats

It likely comes as no surprise that I live in the True Blue Northeast. On the other hand, the Shithole County that I actually live in is dripping blood Red. It's tons of fun. It happens that Wifey has a nearly lifelong friend who is a whisky heir in Canada. There are lots of them, going back to at least Prohibition. Had it not been for that rank stupidity, Canada might still be a frozen shithole country.

We've been granted adoption should wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 succeed. Well, I dug out my passport, and Yikes!! Expired Aug. 2019!! Well, that gives five years to renew, which is nearly gone. So I trundled off to the Post Office, expired passport, picture, paper, and check in hand the end of July. The clerk asked if I was traveling soon, and I said no. Couldn't risk saying the real reason, of course. I asked how long it takes, and he said four to six weeks for the new one, and the old one returned a week or two after. I said, fine. As long as it's before November. Which it would be. Off it all went.

Well, boy howdy! New passport the beginning of the week and old one yesterday!! How could that be? It appears that State does triage, on renewals at least. While I got the application in some weeks from the deadline, the new passport has an issue date the beginning of August. I surmise that the new issue date has to align with expiration date + 5 years, not that the date of application has to align and the issue date is whatever the processing makes it to be. So, rather than send the pile back and forcing me to get a brand spanking new passport, they did the smart thing and process renewals (at least) in time to fit the date window.

These damn bureaucrats are such lazy idiots!! Right?

Water Madness

It was just over 3 years ago that water diversion became a topic in these here parts. Well, so it is again.

This go-round seeks to divert Great Lakes water, rather than Mississippi river, to water the Central Valley of California. Which valley is said to produce 25% of USofA's agriculture. I suspect the midwest cereal farmers might dispute that, but that's another episode. The Central Valley is mostly truck farms. Some big, but not staple foods.

The author points to, among other crops, almonds. It turns out that almonds (mentioned before in these essays) require a prodigious amount of water. Hard to see where it goes, given that almonds are more like rocks than tomatoes. So, an alternative to shipping Great Lakes water to CA, is to cut down all those fucking almond trees. It isn't as if almonds are a staple food, now are they? They are, by and large, an upper-class candy. We need a one-day dictator to raze those almond farms! You can have more people or more almond trees; ya caint have both. In due time, neither more.

If you look closely, the author is in one of those Desert States that covet thy neighbors' water. I guess all that sun, and no shade, turns people Red. These thoroughly Red States are always taking from the Blue States, since they are 'growing' and deserve others' resources. Not that it ever made sense to populate deserts and haul water in from great distances in the first place. I saw "Chinatown". Did you? FDR might have done the country a better long-term solid by killing Hoover Dam and the stupidity of building cities and farms in goddamn Deserts. It gets tiring after a while.

For comparison, the Colonial Pipeline runs from Houston, TX to Linden, NJ. I can't find the end-to-end distance, only system pipe total length of 5,500 miles. But map programs show that to be ~1,600 miles. So, that's the current state of the art.

So, let's spitball the problem. The easiest way to move the Great Lakes to the Central Valley is to backfill the Colorado; just use the river's right-of-way. The straightline distance from Chicago (not that we'd start the pipeline along Lake Shore Dr., of course) to the headwater is 989 miles in Rocky Mountain National Park. Not that we could go like a flying bird. The current driving distance (which is a decent surrogate, since the highway folks had to work around messy spots, first) is ~1,000 miles. Since, I'll guess, the map programs use Interstates as much as feasible, we might speculate that this pipeline could be built, largely, in the median of said Interstates on stanchions just like oil pipelines.

Mother Nature does offer up a problem: hydrocarbons don't freeze at 32^°, but water does. The oil pipes are heated and massively insulted, since crude does slow down a bit if it cools. So, we'll need the engineers to optimize speed (moving water doesn't freeze at 32^°, but somewhat lower depending on thermodynamics) versus heating the water. This assumes, of course, that the pipeline is above ground. Burying such a large pipe below the frost line the whole way is another option; cost and time difference are likely to the moon. And, of course, the engineers will take into account the properies of water vs. oil.

Now for something completely different. Who pays? The pipeline itself will be Socialist just as Hoover Dam (and most, if not all, of the many other dams on the Colorado) was. But how much should the Blue states soak the Red state fools to water their lawns and golf courses and swimming pools? Lots o Bongo Bucks is my suggestion. Enough to force them to choose among golf courses and almond trees and more houses for more rednecks.

The author belies an ignorance: all surface water is groundwater. Those rivers and lakes and streams and ponds are fed by groundwater. It's called a "headwater" for a reason. Yes, intelligent states (mostly Blue) have reservoirs supported by watersheds, which do what the word implies: send rain into the reservoir. But that's just a faster way to claim the water. Absent the watershed structure, rain percolates down to the watertable and, voila, groundwater.

There's one final issue. Not all underground water is equal. Some (many? most?) aquifers store what's called paleo-water. The most well known is the Ogallala. Such water sources aren't easily, or at all, replenished in real time, due to the geologic cap on the aquifer.

The aquifer is composed of unconsolidated alluvial deposits. Groundwater in this aquifer has been dated to have been deposited in the humid time following the last glacial maximum. In much of the aquifer's area, an impermeable layer of calcrete prevents precipitation from infiltrating. In other regions of the aquifer, some relatively small rates of recharge have been measured.

You don't miss your water until the well's run dry.

Some Assembly Required

Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly line method of manufacture, that was about 1853, but Henry is the avatar for its use. The Boeing door plug saga is a lesson in doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Or, may haps, doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

Years ago, Volvo among a few others, tried building cars in situ with a dedicated cadre of workers who did most of the assembly tasks as a unit. The effort was abandoned rather quickly.

If all goes as planned, the plant will be organized into work teams - each of which will ultimately assemble a complete car by itself.

Now, it can be argued that the assembly line method is the most efficient way to build widgets.

Ford was inspired by the meat-packing houses of Chicago and a grain mill conveyor belt he had seen. If he brought the work to the workers, they spent less time moving about. Then he divided the labor by breaking the assembly of the Model T into 84 distinct steps. Each worker was trained to do just one of these steps. Ford called in Frederick Taylor, the creator of "scientific management," to do time and motion studies to determine the exact speed at which the work should proceed and the exact motions workers should use to accomplish their tasks.
[my emphasis]

For what it's worth, Taylor is infamous for the art of de-humanizing labor.

It can be argued that assembly line manufacture really only works when the widget is actually made in an in situ linear process, the widget moved step by step to the next task. Today's autos are built with an even more capitalized assembly line. The key to success is that each task point is limited and specific. The 737 has an estimated 500,000 individual parts. A car about 30,000. And, of course, a car can be assembled in a traveling assembly line.

One might wonder whether aircraft assembly is amenable to the method. Based on today's reporting (and earlier similar), Boeing's method rely heavily, if not exclusively, on ad hoc manual reporting, "paperwork", to keep track of the status of a plane. That's not really assembly line method.

As it happens, I am addicted to a Canadian series, "Air Disasters", which tells the stories of airplane crashes (you thought it was about mahjong games?). More than a few incidents are driven by maintenance work which didn't keep proper paperwork and let the aircraft crash. Maintenance isn't done in an assembly line fashion, and when the work exceeds a shift and/or team, paperwork must follow the plane. No paperwork, no task completed, no part installed. It appears that aircraft manufacture has the same issue.

What happened with this 737 is that, according to the existing record, the removal and replacement of the plug door was done by multiple groups doing a single task; single from the outsider's point of view. In particular, hard to believe, is that the group which put the plug door back in the fuselage, wasn't tasked to bolt it in. Now, the assembly line method is based on reducing the work done in each task to the minimum possible. But here we find a case, if true, that the following group(s) can only know to replace the bolts if there's paperwork in the flow to tell them to. It's not clear from my reading of the record whether the replaced door plug was such that the missing bolts were not viewable; that is, was the interior panel set in place at the time the door plug was re-fitted?

Deming said that the best policy is to do it right the first time. From the report, we get this

To avoid the problem in the future, Boeing is considering adding a warning light in the cockpit that would alert pilots if the door plug moves even a little bit — well before it could blow out in the kind of accident that occurred on the Alaska Air flight. Since it is a known phenomenon that aircraft fuselages flex during pressurization cycles, won't such an alarm fire every flight?

Given how the door plug eventually failed, after ~150 flights, one might wonder whether such a warning light would do any good? If the plane is at 35,000 feet, and the warning light flashes, how much time would the pilot have to get the plane back on the ground before the door plug flew away? A second? A millisecond? Stupid.

It would appear that calling aircraft manufacture an "assembly line" process has led the industry to complacency. Since it's an assembly line, then we must know that a plane can't get from Step X to Step X+1 without Step X being completed, by definition. Guess not.

Tennis

Most folks follow tennis, at least at the Majors (and possibly, the Olympics), and are aware of the, now past, kerfuffle when computerized, e.g. Hawkeye, line judging put all those folks out of a job. Now, it seems, something similar is happening in medchem. It's a fascinating read, even if you don't get all the jargon.

As mentioned more than once, I started undergraduate as a chem major, but that didn't last long thanks to a 1940's vintage PChem lab. But since then, I've always wondered about the process of determining the structure of molecules. Clearly, it was possible decades ago before X-ray methods were available, since we still know what water looks like at the atomic level.

At one point in time I happened on a piece written, I assume, by a coding guru which boiled down to: 'software has eaten the world'. Which asserted that writing code was the key to Tomorrow. Well, not so much. Even in its current lame version, AI is possible not because of new Nobel level software algorithms, but because the EE folks have managed to generate logic and memory at densities never contemplated. So, sorry coders, but your lame century and a half old correlation programs now can converge on something resembling "truth" thanks to prodigious amounts of CPU, GPU, and memory. Now, if only AI could just intuit like Einstein...

Stupid Is As Stupid Does - part the fourth

Today's dead trees NYT has an "interview" betwixt David French and Neil Gorsuch. More like a softball game, thus more fun to make fun of.

Whether either knows it, all that's accomplished is making certain that Gorsuch is just an Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut hack. But enquiring minds already know that. But the "interview" does contain some stunning words of idiocy.

What do we lose in that process? We lose juries. Juries are wise, right?

Well... not necessarily. And, as anyone who's watched even a little bit of L&O knows, there is a very positive side of a plea bargain: the perp's allocution. A jury verdict of guilty does not carry an admition of guilt. A plea does. That's why there are plea bargains. And that's why prosectutors go to Hell and back to make the plea penalty so much less than the verdict exposure: they, and the victim (most always) want the admission.

You're absolutely right that in an increasingly complex world, we need experts. There's no question about that. At the same time, our system of government is premised on the idea that we the people — those are the first three words of our Constitution — are sovereign, and we are entitled to govern ourselves.

And here is the crux of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts vast stupidity: the sub-GED majority in the shithole states get to govern, comfortable in the beliefs like bleach, hydroxychloroquine, and such snake oil are the God Given Cures for Covid, and, further, that any future disease cure is their remit.

And, herein, he reveals the depths of his stupidity:

And I think if you go back and you look at what Madison and others had in mind, it could be summarized by the wisdom of the masses, that concept. You know, Francis Galton, who's a cousin of Darwin, went to a county fair in England, and there was a "guess the weight of the ox" contest. And he observed all the experts and their guesses on the weight of the ox. But then he also summed up all the guesses of ordinary people. And he found that the average of the ordinary people's guesses was more accurate than any of the experts.

It gets better. If you read the wiki on this "experiment", it is not the case that the Masses were more accurate than the experts, only that they agreed to a minuscule difference. IOW, ole Neil lies, if only by saying that the median/mean of the crowd is "more accurate than any of the experts". Well, yeah, that's the nature of stats.

Only the truly innumerate would buy such a pile of shit. It's called The Small N Problem, and figures quite prominently in drug clinical trials. In a nutshell (repeated in various ways over the course of these missives), if you have an estimate of a parameter twice, once with a small sample size and once with a large sample size, the large sample size will almost always be closer to the true value. Always. The Phase II trial will have up to a few hundred (cherry picked) patients, will often show that Drug X is a miracle. Then, on to the Phase III trial which will have much more, as much as 10 times the number of patients. The efficacy measure plummets, sometimes so much that Drug X is abandoned There is no wisdom of the crowds, only stupid rubes being conned by conmen.

So, based on a bit of stupidity from a 19th century conman, we should embrace the Governance of the sub-GED cabal?

Toward the end, French tries, not very forcefully, to pin Gorsuch down to what "text, history and tradition" really means. He won't admit that the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts are using that non-Constitutional code for extreme reactionary justice driven by their simple greed for reactionary power. "Party like it's 1829!" Just what the sub-GED cabal wants.

Finally, near as I can read, French does not tell Gorsuch that there's not really "too much law" compared to 1800 just because the USofA is much larger, land and population and complexity. 99.44% of what the Law has to deal with didn't exist in 1800. So, yeah, there's more Law on the books now.

USofA, 1800 -   5,308,483 
USofA, 2020 - 392,500,000  

Grow the fuck up, Neil.