Cats, charts, and politics
Here's a chart showing job openings in the United States:
Does this really make sense? There were about 6 million job openings right before the pandemic, and this was fairly normal. Now there are 9 million. But why? GDP right now is almost identical to GDP just before the pandemic:
Are there really 9 million job openings in the United States? Or is this some artifact of the reporting process? It sure looks to me like the real number ought to be around 5-6 million.
Behold the Wall Street Journal's opinionmongers on Afghanistan:
It's just one Biden crisis after another. You'd almost think they had something against the guy.
At least 1,500 American citizens remain in Afghanistan...with 500 more expected to depart soon.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the government was trying to track down around 1,000 American citizens still believed to be in Afghanistan who had not responded to a frantic flurry of emails, phone calls or other messages offering to evacuate them.
I'm wary of saying anything concrete since I'm not on the ground in Afghanistan, but wtf is going on with these people? It's bad enough that there are so many Americans who ignored advice months ago to get out of Dodge, but why on earth would anyone be staying behind at this point?
In other news, the Times, using numbers from the Association of Wartime Allies, claims that there were more than 300,000 Afghans who assisted us during our 20-year war and deserve our help in being evacuated. Of these, about 250,000 remain and still need to be airlifted out.
Maybe so, but I'd take this with a grain of salt. The AWA has been pushing this number for months, but as near as I can tell they're the only ones. As you can imagine, it's a very difficult number to estimate, which means that it's easy to produce nearly any figure you want. The AWA may be right, but other estimates I've seen seem to hover around 80-100,000, of which we've already evacuated about 60,000 or so. If that estimate is correct, it means we have 20-40,000 Afghans left to evacuate.
Obviously I don't have any independent way to estimate these numbers myself. I just want to point out that the AWA has been alone in its estimate for months, and the fact that the Times has finally decided to write a story about them doesn't make their estimate any more (or less) credible than it's ever been.
I'm more interested in immunoglobulins than most people because they happen to be the thing that's cancerous when you have multiple myeloma. There are different types of immunoglobulins, and my particular version of multiple myeloma affects the G type.¹ Every month I get test results showing me my immunoglobulin levels:
As it happens, the G type is associated with resistance to upper respiratory infections, and it turns out this is key to the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. They boost the G immunoglobulins but do nothing about the A immunoglobulins, which are associated with mucous and saliva.
This is why even if you get COVID-19, it will likely be a mild case if you're vaccinated. The virus will attack the mucous in your nose, making you feel a little bit woozy, but when it travels northward and attacks your upper respiratory tract, the G immunoglobulins are all primed to wipe it out. After a few days it goes away.
I thought this was interesting since I had never really understood why the vaccine makes COVID-19 so mild even if you get it. But now I know, and so do you.
¹Technically, my version of multiple myeloma is IgG light kappa.
This is the interior of Santa Maria Maggiore. It's a panoramic shot that shows lots and lots of ceiling.
I have a whole bunch of shots like this and you'll see them all eventually. Why? Because whatever else you might think about the Renaissance church, they sure knew how to decorate a building—and I love getting lots of that in a single picture. I also overexpose almost all of these pictures, which makes them brighter than they are in real life. But really, who needs a bunch of dimly lit decorations? I'd rather show them off so you can admire them.
Coronavirus cases lead to missed school days for 6,500 LAUSD students during first week
That sounds like a lot! But here's the third paragraph:
About 451,000 preschool through 12th-grade students are attending Los Angeles public schools in person this fall.
So 1.4% of all LAUSD students missed some days during the first week of school. That actually seems surprisingly low, what with the Delta breakout and all. It's too bad that Americans are widely considered too innumerate to handle things like percentages in headlines.
U.S. and allied planes have flown an additional 19,200 people out of Kabul in the past 24 hours, officials said on Wednesday, as the Biden administration makes substantial inroads into getting American citizens and Afghans who worked for the United States over the last 20 years out of Afghanistan.
But thousands of U.S. citizens are believed to still be in the country, and President Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline for the withdrawal of American troops is rapidly approaching. Tens of thousands of Afghans who qualify for special immigration visas are also waiting to be evacuated.
As of 3 a.m. in Washington, the United States had evacuated about 82,300 people from Kabul’s international airport since Aug. 14.
I think it's inevitable that things will get more desperate on the ground as the final deadline approaches, but we're at 82,000 with six days left to go. By the time this is over we will have evacuated a helluva lot of people from Kabul.
.@POTUS: "As of this afternoon we've helped evacuate 70,700 people just since August the 14th. 75,900 people since the end of July." pic.twitter.com/pwwXK9Fd3n
— Andrew Bates (@AndrewJBates46) August 24, 2021
I periodically look at the oldest picture in my photo queue and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Either I post it or I delete it.
This one is a red maple tree at Big Bear Lake with the moon in the background. It's nothing special, but then again, it's hardly the worst picture I've ever put up. So here it is, three years late but finally making its big debut.
This morning I once again got caught in a Twitter debate about whether the FDA should have given the COVID vaccines full approval months ago.
Argument in favor: Months ago the FDA was saying that full approval was a sure thing and was recommending the vaccines to everyone. So why not just go ahead and give them approval, which would make things like vaccine mandates easier to implement?
Argument against: Lots of people are vaccine skeptics, and the fastest way to keep them skeptical is to simply declare the vaccines approved for political reasons.
Here's what's missing from this dispute: actual facts. What we need is either a domain expert or a good reporter to explain exactly what's involved in giving a drug full approval. Are there parts that could be skipped considering that millions of doses have already been given? Are there things that could be speeded up, or is the timetable hostage to absolute requirements like "12 months of data required from Phase 3 testing"? What kind of danger is there in rushing approval?
That's what I'd like to see. A detailed rundown of exactly what's involved, with both the history and science of drug approval explained. That wouldn't necessarily end the dispute, but at least it would put it on a more factual footing.