Month: January 2022

The most amusing part of yesterday's press conference was Joe Biden's response to questions abut Ukraine. Everyone knows that there's only one acceptable answer here: If Putin puts one foot over the border we'll kick his ass so hard he'll end up in orbit. Then, when Putin invades and the US does more or less nothing, conservative hawks will be up in arms about red lines and weakness and failing our friends—even though they themselves oppose putting American troops into battle.

So instead, Biden just shrugged and said what everyone already knows: Putin is probably going to invade one way or another, and he'll eventually be sorry if he does. It'll be a rerun of Afghanistan or Vietnam. But Europe, as usual, is deeply divided about what to do, so there's not a whole lot we can do either.

Everyone already knows this. We know it. Putin knows it. Europe knows it. Hell, even I know it. But for some reason it's pearl clutching time if a president says it.

The hell with that. Better to tell the truth now than to make promises everyone knows we can't keep. It's Putin's call now, and Biden is right: invading Ukraine will send Russia down a rat hole for years. But in the face of a divided Europe, there's not much that the US can or should do about it.

This is a Texas ragwort, a disagreeable name for what's really a lovely little flower. But maybe it has a dark side I don't know about?

Even with today's agreement to restrict 5G deployment near airports, several airlines have announced flight cancellations:

Emirates, Air India, ANA, and Japan Airlines have all announced they’re canceling some flights to the US due to this week’s rollout of C-band 5G over concerns it could potentially interfere with some instruments....ANA cites specific guidance from Boeing, saying that “Boeing has announced flight restrictions on all airlines operating the Boeing 777 aircraft.” Japan Airlines also cites a notification from Boeing, saying that it was told that “5G signals for U.S. mobile phones, which will begin operating in the U.S. on January 19, 2022, may interfere with the radio wave altimeter installed on the Boeing 777.”

Among domestic airlines, Delta said it is preparing for possible flight cancellations in bad weather. Other airlines haven't announced anything yet. I wonder how far it will go?

I would like to know how good various kinds of masks are, but this turns out to be a surprisingly hard thing to find out. Partly this is because different studies come to different conclusions and partly because recommendations are often qualitative ("N95 is better than surgical," "cloth masks don't work") rather than quantitative. What I'd like is something like this:

This is rough guesswork, and I have no idea how accurate it is. Probably not very. I'm not even sure what the right measure is. Filtration efficiency? The risk ratio of passing along disease? Or something else?

But even with caveats and error bars, it seems like someone should be able to produce a chart like this backed by the best recent research. Has anyone done it? If not, will someone please give it a go?

Here is something I'm curious about:

This chart shows the case fatality rate throughout all of 2021. CFR is a measure of the percentage of people who die after being infected with COVID-19.

CFR is an imperfect measure, but it's still striking. At the beginning of 2021 we ranked #3 out of the ten countries I've charted. Today we rank #9, and we'd be dead last if not for a sudden burst of progress over the past four weeks.

What's going on here? Why have other countries all made considerable progress in cutting the number of COVID deaths while the US has been flat until very recently? It can't just be a result of vaccinations. We might not be as vaccinated as some countries, but we've gone from zero to 60+ percent over the past year. It's not as if we've done nothing.

So what's the answer?

This is a South African cheetah at the San Diego Zoo. These cheetahs often have dogs as companions, as this one did. However, the dog was sacked out at the far end of the enclosure, so there was no chance to get it in the picture. But the cheetah is the star of the show, so I guess it doesn't really matter.

It's good to stay up to date. You might be surprised by what's changed while you weren't looking. For example:

Are you surprised that the native American and Hispanic communities are now vaccinated at higher rates than white people? Probably. Even many Hispanic writers seem unaware that their community surpassed whites several months ago. Conversely, the Black-white gap is still large, although over the past six months it's narrowed from 12 percentage points to 8.

Here's another interesting thing. In addition to administrative data about who's been vaccinated, the CDC also performs surveys. Here's the response when they ask people if they've been vaccinated:

Aside from the American Indian community, everybody claims a much higher vaccination rate than the CDC records. According to survey data, Hispanic folks are vaccinated at a considerably higher rate than white people, and the Black-white gap virtually disappears.

So which is right? The official answer is the administrative data. But we know that the CDC's administrative data is fairly poor, so maybe the survey data is closer to the truth. If that's the case, then every group except American Indians is actually doing pretty well.

Paul Waldman unintentionally illustrates the confusion gripping liberals right now. He's talking here about vulnerable Democrats in swing districts:

Here’s the political dilemma they find themselves in: Although tackling difficult problems and passing legislation won’t ever guarantee victory for a party, not doing so almost certainly guarantees defeat. Delivering for the voters is the necessary but not sufficient condition for success.

....There’s no real mystery about what could help Democrats now. Only two times in recent decades has the president’s party avoided a major defeat in a midterm election — and it wasn’t because the party delivered well-designed legislation that brought tangible benefits to the electorate, who then flocked to the polls in a show of gratitude.

Both times it was because that electorate got angry at the opposition party. The first time was in 1998, when voters were angry at Republicans over the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and the second was in 2002, when a Republican scorched-earth campaign convinced them that Democrats were on the side of terrorists.

So which is it? Are Democrats doomed if they don't pass great legislation? Or does it not really matter because voters mostly vote against a party, not for it?

IHNRAC,¹ but I'll take door number two. It's hard for me to think of any good examples where legislation played a key role in a national election. Reagan's tax cuts, maybe, though even that's iffy.² Or possibly Bush's Medicare prescription bill among elderly voters, though there's not much evidence for that.

I have to remind myself all the time that no matter how oblivious we think most voters are, they are even more oblivious than we think. They simply don't pay attention to politics and haven't got the slightest idea of what legislation is pending or whether Joe Manchin is being a dick. Hell, even the stuff they think they know is usually wrong.

So from an electoral point of view, nobody should be worrying about the failure of voting rights or BBB. It's far more important to make swing voters afraid of Republicans. You'd think that would be pretty easy these days, but so far Democrats haven't found the magic key. A strong economy will keep us in the game, but we still need a killer app against the party of the Big Lie.

¹I Have Never Run A Campaign.

²Reagan's reelection landslide was primarily due to a booming economy. His tax cuts helped seal the deal, but didn't really play a huge role.

Have you been following the great 5G freakout? It's fascinating. Today is D-Day, when 5G towers using C-band spectrum finally begin operation around airports, and the airline industry is describing it with words like "catastrophic," "chaos," "devastating," and "incalcuable."

The basic problem is simple. The top end of the new 5G spectrum is close to the spectrum used by the altimeters on commercial aircraft. If 5G interferes with altimeter operation during bad weather, pilots could be misled about their altitude and end up plowing into the ground. If you saw Die Hard 2, it's something like that.

But wait. Europe has already ramped up 5G operation and everything is fine. Why are things worse in the US? There are three reasons:

• In Europe, the guard band between 5G and the altimeter band is 400 MHz. In the US it's only 200 MHz.
• European cell towers use lower power levels than US towers.
• The buffer zone around airports is bigger than it is in the US.

But wait again! Cell operators say this is all theoretical.

• Until 2023, carriers won't be using the full 5G spectrum. So in practice, the guard band will be 300-400 MHz or more for at least a year.
• Ditto. Carriers are transmitting at low power levels until at least July. In practice, this means that power levels are similar to those used in Europe.
• This is true, but it doesn't appear to be a huge problem.

The FAA is busily working to clear both airports and aircraft for operation, but they haven't finished up. The Boeing 787, for example, remains uncleared, as do many smallish airports. This only affects landings in bad weather, but even so an airline lobbying group says it could ground about 4% of all passenger and cargo flights.

So who's right? If 5G is allowed to power up on schedule, we'll find out by watching the sky for airplanes crashing into runways—or for lots of flights being grounded because the FAA won't clear them or pilots will refuse to fly them. If it's delayed yet again (the rollout has already been delayed twice), then we'll argue some more.

UPDATE: The day of reckoning has been postponed to Wednesday, and the cell carriers have agreed not to activate a certain number of towers near airports. This is a temporary solution that will presumably be revisited once the FAA has finished its analysis of all airports and all types of aircraft.

Donald Trump was really on a roll during his Saturday rally in Arizona:

the resentments of white people who fear non-whites are eclipsing them in 21st century America is, now overtly, the engine of the Trump-era Republican political/media apparatus https://t.co/mwAI2LAqO7

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 16, 2022

This is ridiculous. At the same time, it's true that in the state of New York they count being nonwhite as a "risk factor" that increases your chances of getting COVID meds if supplies are limited. These figures from the CDC make it clear that this is justified:

Wait. What's going on here? I went over to the CDC site to grab a number for the increased risk of being nonwhite, and instead I got the chart above. For most of 2021 the Black and Hispanic communities did indeed have a higher risk than the white community of dying from COVID. But that risk started to plummet in October, and today the death rate is nearly the same for all three. Only the American Indian community is significantly higher.

(Note that this chart is for age 30-39, which I picked as an illustration. This is because the white, Black, and Hispanic populations have very different age distributions, so you need to compare within age groups. However, nearly all age groups look roughly like this one. In fact, among the elderly the Black death rate is now lower than the white death rate.)

This is news to me. But maybe it means that being nonwhite should no longer be considered a risk factor after all?

FOOTNOTE: COVID deaths by race and age are here. Population by race and age group are here.