Month: January 2022

This is Bourbon Street in New Orleans on the evening of Wednesday, November 3. The lights are on and they're trying their best, but there's just nobody there. I guess this is a good time to visit if you want to avoid the crowds, but the crowds are kind of the whole point, aren't they?

I have more data! Here are the top-level email domains used by people (?) registering on my blog recently:

Before December 28, everything was normal. It was mostly .com addresses with a smattering of oddball TLDs.

Starting at precisely 11:30 am on December 28, that changed. Normal sites now make up only a quarter of registrations. The rest are .top, .site, and a few other oddballs.

According to Wikipedia, .top domains "are often used for malware and phishing, and is included in the list of banned TLDs for some antimalware venders (i.e. Malwarebytes)."

Wikipedia doesn't mention anything noteworthy about the current reputation of .site other than the fact that it's owned by a company that's owned by a serial entrepreneur billionaire. However, every single .site address is of the form

name12345@lhfye.site

The numbers are random and there are five domains being used: lhfye, injis, nniks, scekd, and wgwpyi.

So this is obviously being done by bots or something similar. But why? And is there anything I can do about it?

I have more noodling for the new year. Here it is: Republicans succeed mainly by scaring people about liberals. They'll ruin the country with huge deficits. They'll open the borders and let all the immigrants in. They'll make it impossible to be a devout Christian. Crime will surge and the whole country will be a hellhole like California. Etc.

The obvious response is to scare people about conservatives. The target here is not confirmed lefties who already fear conservatives, but centrist voters in swing districts, since they're the ones who will make a difference. But how?

Abortion won't do it. That's up to the Supreme Court. Donald Trump being an idiot won't do it. We have convincing evidence that most people don't care much about that. Conservative refusal to spend more on the poor won't do it. That just isn't scary to most people. Cutting taxes on the rich won't do it. It's not popular, but it also doesn't seem to bother most people.

Of course, there's always the reliable Democratic standby: Conservatives will cut Social Security and Medicare. But Trump was shrewd enough to kill that idea, and conservatives don't talk about it anymore.

Any ideas? Or is scaring people just not something that works for liberals?

And now for something completely different. A few days ago I noticed that there was a sudden burst in the number of people registering so they could leave comments. At great personal effort, I have been able to quantify this:

On December 28, the average number of people registering on the blog suddenly spiked from its usual 5 per day to 35 per day. This would be great news if it was because my blog had suddenly gotten seven times more popular thanks to my sparkling and incisive analysis of current events, but it hasn't. My audience has remained at its rock steady level of about 15,000 readers per day.

Being the suspicious person that I am, then, this makes me suspicious. What's going on? Is it bots? Did someone suggest signing up for my site so that they could flood it with comments when the time was right? Is it some weird technical artifact? Inquiring minds want to know.

Here's a tweet from constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe:

Mass public ignorance is the predictable result of inadequate elementary and secondary education. An ignorant populace is ripe for manipulation by despots. We reap what we sow.https://t.co/8pvhMqTApw

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) January 2, 2022

Tribe is mostly writing about January 6 and the decline of democracy in the US, but in this tweet he repeats the hoary old claim that modern education is terrible and produces legions of ignorant citizens. But where's the evidence for that?

I'm not talking about high school kids here. I'm talking about voters. Is there any evidence that, say, the average 40-year-old today is any more ignorant than the average 40-year-old of the 1950s? Or the 1920s?

Contra Tribe, we're certainly better educated. Both high school and college completion rates are higher than they used to be. The education of people of color is far better. The Flynn Effect suggests that we're smarter. We have access to more news in a wide variety of formats. And research suggests that belief in extreme political positions is more common among those with more education, not less. It certainly wasn't a dullard population that led to the Third Reich.

Normally this might not matter. It would just be a continuation of my annoyance with people who suggest without evidence that we're all dumber than we used to be. But it's dangerous right now because it sets us on a pointless course of action. The answer to Donald Trump and January 6 isn't more civics classes. The answer is to fight down the highly educated folks who are very deliberately stoking the fires of anti-democracy. That means Fox News, Republican leaders, and the conservative media ecosystem. These folks all have college degrees and know precisely what they're doing.

Forget civics education. These are the real enemies.

Suppose you have a test for a rare condition that affects one person in a million. If you test a million people, you will, on average, find one person with the condition. However, if the test is 99% accurate (which is very good!) then 1% of the results will be wrong and you'll get 10,000 false positive results. This means that if you're one of the people who get a positive result, there's only one chance in 10,001 that you actually have the rare condition.

This is called the base rate problem and it's nothing more than simple arithmetic. It depends solely on the accuracy of the test and the rarity of the condition. Here's a quickie table that shows how likely it is that a positive result is actually correct under different circumstances:

With this in mind, you might want to read a piece in today's New York Times, "When They Warn of Rare Disorders, These Prenatal Tests Are Usually Wrong." Just keep in mind that nothing in it is really the result of an "investigation" and none of it has to do with poorly performing tests. The whole thing is purely mathematical and anybody with even a modest mathematical background was aware of it all along.

POSTSCRIPT: I should clarify something. When I say "anybody with even a modest mathematical background was aware of it all along," by anybody I mean the scientists at the test companies—and, therefore, everyone else at the test companies too. They have no excuse for not being clear about this all along.

Every once in a while a meme returns to Twitter for a few days about things from your youth that today's youth wouldn't understand. The answers always seem to be things like dial telephones and stick shifts, which are kind of ridiculous. Kids know about these things because they see them in movies and TV. I mean, I understand all about sextants even though nobody uses them anymore.

The real answer needs to be something that's subtle enough that it never gets explicitly mentioned in period pieces. But those are hard to think of! They're mostly subtle enough that all of us oldsters have forgotten about them too.

For example, there's the sinking horror of boarding an airplane and discovering that your no-smoking seat is in the very last row of the no-smoking section. (Since smokers are concentrated in the smoking section, it means you're right next to a huge plume of concentrated smoke.)

But even that isn't very good. What we really need are things that were routine parts of your life in the '60s or '70s but were never important enough to think about or mention. They were like water to a fish.

This is surprisingly challenging. Any ideas, fellow oldsters?

This chart shows the growth of COVID-19 in the United States since mid-December, when the Omicron variant started to spread. Cases are up by more than 3x; hospitalizations are up by 75%; and deaths haven't increased at all.

It's now been two weeks since the case rate started to spike. Will the death rate begin to follow soon?

 

This again?

NY State Department of Health warns they don't have enough Paxlovid or Monoclonal Antibody Treatment and white people need not apply. https://t.co/shbMWDomLJ pic.twitter.com/MwBtjv2pDx

— Karol Markowicz (@karol) December 31, 2021

That's not at all what this document says. All it says is that (a) meds are reserved for people with risk factors, and (b) being non-white is a risk factor. You may or may not approve of this, but anyone who has a risk factor in addition to the other requirements can get the meds. This true whatever your race.

But it doesn't matter. This has been up for two days and has surely already passed into conservative lore.

Here's the view to start off 2022 here in Irvine. Let's hope this is a harbinger of a better year than last.