Ode to the Sub-GED Class

To anyone paying attention, it's clear that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 continues to bet on the sub-GED class to come through, yet again.

Now we find that he's out to poison the blood of the electorate by seeing to it that knuckledraggers without any education or identifiable skill will get paid as much as teachers or accountants or coders. All of whom do have education and skill; well, may be not so much for coders. But you get the idea. Idiot Brown Shirts will rule.

But Mr. Lighthizer dismissed studies critical of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, describing them as biased in favor of free trade and arguing that inflation had held steady during the administration. He also said that while efficiency, profits and low prices were important, the priority should be encouraging more manufacturing jobs for Americans without college degrees.

Well, no one who's had at least high school econ would believe that China, et al, pays extra on their exports. It's the American consumer, of course. There's that great line from "The Usual Suspects"

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that... he is gone.

Studies have decided that imports are a net benefit to the sub-GED knuckledraggers from all those Asian locales.

The Orange Jesus may well be convincing some of the sub-GED crowd that he's on their side (Not!), but it's fur shur that no one else is biting. Of course, the sub-GED crowd is rather large in many/most/all of the so-called Swing States. As mentioned in these missives a few times, Sleepy Joe 'won' by 7,000,000 votes, but he squeaked by with 5-digit margins in those Swing States. And much of that 7,000,000 difference (~5,000,000) came in California. Another reason the Electoral College was a sop to the slave south.

The Oracle of Atlanta

The news has it that JN.1 is already dominant (44.2%) and could get near to Covid-Ο's massive peak. Not claiming that it will meet it. But there's a problem: that assertion is based on CDC's "Nowcast" figure for this week, and that's a stat estimate. The Nowcast is two periods (4 weeks) out from the last 'hard data'. Version 2 of this missive will see how accurate it turns out to be.

I Told You Fucking So - 15 December 2023

Well, boy howdy, but at long last, we find out that the Spooks really do know what really happened in 2016. Too bad they didn't tell us in 2016 before Comey gave the election to the Orange Jesus. Not that this is news here.

The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.

May be that Christopher Steele isn't such a damn liar, after all? As I said from the beginning, they ain't be nuthin that da NSA don't know the foreigners are sayin, or e-mainlin, or textin, or anyting else. No wonder the Orange Jesus shredded it.

To quote our Dear Leader, Sleepy Joe: this is a big fucking deal.

By The Numbers - part the thirty eighth

Performance inflation is everywhere. Well... except when it's in your venue, and there it's because you and yours are now so much better with no help from Da Man. Two examples:

Yale's been dinked for giving out A's like Christmas candy

Nearly 80 percent of all grades given to undergraduates at Yale last academic year were A's or A minuses, part of a sharp increase that began during the coronavirus pandemic and appears to have stuck

Now, if you go and read the report, you'll find that Yale isn't an outlier, nor are the Ivys a group outlier. It's everywhere. It's been a bugbear for decades, going back to, at least, my undergraduate time many decades ago. And, so far as that all goes, now that college atheletes (in the Upper Level schools) can be paid directly (well, it's not likely to get stopped), how soon will they no longer even be required to take classes and get grades? Already, may haps?

Schools with "the most financial resources and the biggest brands" would form a new subdivision that could set its own rules for roster size, recruitment and transfers.

OTOH, it is today announced that the arbiters of Golf have decided that players, especially professionals, have been blasting through par like A bombs. And, of course, that has been going on for years. The R&A and USGA have been trying to keep the ball in play where the course designers intended. So, now (well, in a few years) golf balls are expressly limited in how far they can go under specified test conditions

The longest hitters are expected to see a reduction of as much as 13-15 yards in drive distance. Average professional tour and elite male players are expected to see a reduction of 9-11 yards, with a 5-7-yard reduction for an average LPGA or Ladies European Tour (LET) player.

And, of course, this isn't the first time the arbiters got outraged by a cool new ball.

One might argue that Ivy grade inflation and golfer driving distance inflation aren't the same. But the fact is, for golfers, the arbiters have allowed ever more clever ways for equipment manufacturers (clubs and balls) to make everyone special. It's not often they put down the hammer ('anchoring' a long putter being tossed is the only other edict I recall at the tip of my tongue), so golfers should be happy. Most other sports, and college atheletes in particular, are more actively governed.

Cottage Cheese - Redux

Truly dedicated readers will recall the prediction that commerical real estate was skating on thin ice. Yes, they are.

Well, some of those chickens are now roosting in plain sight. And, as usual, the NYT has the numbers.

About 23 percent of office space in the United States was vacant or available for sublet at the end of November, according to Avison Young, a real estate services firm, compared with 16 percent before the pandemic.

So, what to do? What to do?

Office landlords, hit hard by the work-from-home revolution, are resorting to a desperate measure in the real estate world: "handing back the keys."

Well, as is obvious, that just means the owner just defaults on the loan(s). Would that civilians could get away with that:

But there's a difference: Big property companies can keep doing business after they default, and are even considered savvy for jettisoning distressed buildings.

Homeowners who stopped paying their mortgages, though, suffered a huge hit to their credit ratings and had to find somewhere else to live.

Mr. Natural

"Mr. Natural? What does it all mean?"
"Don't mean sheeit!"
One of many

And that could be true with Amazon's latest silicon.

The AWS Graviton4 processor packs 96 cores that offer on average 30% higher compute performance compared to Graviton3 and is 40% faster in database applications as well as 45% faster in Java applications

It kinda, sorta depends on what they mean by 'database applications', now doesn't it? If they mean, and I strongly suspect they do, just faster RBAR reads, then that's just shit. Coders have been out performing RDBMS engines from the beginning, continue to do so (COBOL/COPYBOOK), and with good reason; they can 'monitor' their transactions however poorly they wish. Codd's notion was that data and it's integrity were not separable, really. At the time, COBOL and VSAM were lingua franca in (mainframe, 99.99%) commercial applications. IBM helped along with CICS as transaction processing monitor, so coders didn't have to write their own transaction engine (almost always as an assembler module; yuck) if they didn't really, really have to.

But still, today, esp. among the java/web kiddies, RDBMS (MySQL, SS, et al), it's all about 'doing the transactions in the client'. Stupid is as stupid does. With innterTubes bandwidth being what it is, server bandwidth being what it is, server memory capacity being what it is, there's no justificable reason for being that stupid. Admit that the 'client' (mostly some PC) is nothing more than a GUI-fied VT100, and keep all that logic with the data where it belongs. Reduce the cpu load everywhere, and (horrors!) reduce the code load everywhere. But it does keep lots more java/web coders writing lots more code that would be oodles more efficient in 3/5 NF schemas. Oh well.

By The Numbers - part the thirty seventh

Today brings Krugman's scheduled offering. He takes up the issue, appearing here a few times, about the effect of increasing life-span-at-birth on SS and Medicare. He reaches the same conclusion that I, and other intelligent lifeforms, have: increasing the eligibility ages for them will only hurt the poor and downtrodden, aka the group the Right Wingnut Populists claim to support. But he doesn't offer up any numbers. Well, I'll take up the gauntlet, once again.

Curiously, someone put the column title (not always at an author's discretion), "Nikki Haley Is Coming for Your Retirement", which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since the NYT is the newspaper of record for the well-to-do, not Joe Sixpack who favors the New York Post and the Murdoch Universe. Be that flaw as it may.

Anyone who says, as Haley does, that the retirement age should rise in line with increasing life expectancy is being oblivious, perhaps willfully, to the grim inequality of modern America. Until Covid struck, average life expectancy at 65, the relevant number, was indeed rising. But these gains were concentrated among Americans with relatively high incomes. Less affluent Americans — those who depend most on Social Security — have seen little rise in life expectancy, and in some cases actual declines.

As offered here in the past, life expectancy at birth has, indeed, risen dramatically since 1900, and a bit less so since 1930 (a reasonable benchmark for SS benefit start):
at birth 1900 - 47
at birth 1930 - M:58 F:62
at birth 2021, est - 76

So, the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts scream, "this can't go on!!! nearly 30 fucking years longer!!! this can't go on!!!" They are, per usual, lying.

First and foremost, almost oll of that increase in lifespan has been due to reduction in early death, mostly through drugs and vaccines. In other words, more births lived through working age which led to an increase in SSA revenue compared to 1930. Or another way: the Baby Boomers' incomes were what made generous SS benefits possible for their parents and grandparents. You're welcome. SS was never, and could never be, an 'individual retirement account'; if that had been the implementation, no one would have gotten SS until about when Kennedy was shot, assuming a 30 year work life. It was implemented as a current account system so that those reaching 65 would receive benefits irregardless of how long they had 'contributed' to SS; they didn't contribute. It is just a dedicated tax input.

What actually matters is what's happened to geezer life expectancy over that time frame. If geezers still live about as long as they did in the Good Ole Days, then the bitching is all theatre.

So, what are those numbers?

Here's the numbers, once again
all folks
at 65 (1950) - 13.9
at 65 (2007) - 18.6

poor folks
at 65 (1950) - 13.9
at 65 (2007) - 17.2

So, how to 'save' SS?? The straightforward solution is to simply increase the income level that contributes and, of course, make it progressive just as income tax is supposed to be. For 2023, the max is $160,200. Not even near the 1%-ers' level. There hasn't been an adustment since 1990. Let's do it again. So, yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

And, just so ya know: those of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut Brigade who point to the at-birth numbers and insist that such dramatic increases are in the future imperils 'the rest of us' are lying. Of course. The dramatic increase from 1900 to 2000 (or so) was due to much better medicine (and public health initiatives, which the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts hate; it's Socialism and all that) are about done with. The easy 80% (or may be 99.9%) and all that. The improvement in overall survival from cancers and heart diseases is barely out of the noise. Get old enough, and one or the other will get you if dementia (there's no therapy known to work here) doesn't. And, by the bye, ignore 'cancer survival rates' or 'heart disease survival rates' numbers as the answer. What matters is the mean/median length of survival from disease. Just because the survival rate may rise, doesn't mean that the afflicted live longer, just that more of them live long enough to die after the same length of time they always have.

This is the crux of the matter for cancer (2022)

However, overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) were only prolonged by a median of 2.80 and 3.30 months

Yeah, that's going to keep lots and lots of geezers on SS so much longer.