Month: May 2022

A couple of months ago I mentioned "Far UV" as a possible solution to COVID-19, so I was interested to see it mentioned prominently in a recent tweet thread from an expert.

In general, the thread was about which engineering (not social) measures are worthwhile and which aren't. To summarize super briefly, his advice is: Don't waste time with cleaning, but do spend time on ventilation. Here are his top four recommendations:

4. Open windows. Also open the door and use a fan to push air from the window and out the door. It will be a lot of flow. The main problem is it can't be done when it's cold outside. It's difficult to calculate the exact flow from windows. 17/21

3. Ventilation Improvements. Good ventilation can provide between 3-6 ACH. All the previously mentioned strategies are inferior to having a building with good ventilation. I can't overstate the importance of investing in upgrading ventilation. 18/21

2. Upper Room UVGI — the real deal. It can add 12-24 eACH. It reduced measles outbreaks by 75%. If we want to go all out on mitigating airborne spread, this technology is needed. 19/21

1. Far UV. I've seen estimates between 10-300+ eACH. This technology isn't widespread yet and still expensive, but it could be a game changer moving forward. 20/21

Note that ACH stands for air changes per hour—or the equivalent. Ventilation is good, and it's something we should focus on in the short term, but various forms of UV radiation, either in rooms or in ducts, have the potential to be spectacular. Why aren't we pouring billions of dollars into investigating this stuff? It's not as if COVID is the only thing it works on. Monkeypox, anyone?

NOTE: Here in California we've spent billions earthquake proofing our infrastructure. Why don't we do the same for virus proofing?

This is some  French countryside a few hours before sunset. It's mainly notable because I took it through the window of a bus. The combination of a polarizing filter to remove reflections and Photoshop to restore white balance makes the window disappear completely. Pretty cool clouds, eh?

FiveThirtyEight recently asked a panel of 2,000 Americans what issues worried them the most. The answer was inflation, which is pretty predictable these days.

But I'm more interested in how much Republicans and Democrats disagree about things. In the case of inflation, 42% of Democrats thought it was a top worry while 65% of Republicans thought so too. That's a difference of 23 percentage points.

But that isn't the area of biggest difference. Immigration is:

You don't have to believe in the great replacement or anything like that to understand that this has been a very, very large difference of opinion for a very long time. It's the second biggest worry for Republicans behind inflation—which is a transitory issue—while it barely registers with Democrats. This is going to haunt our politics forever unless Democrats eventually agree to take it seriously.

I was right! Yesterday's photo was indeed a picture of Église Saint-Sauveur du Petit-Andely, a 13th century gothic church in the town of Les Andelys that was (probably) built by Richard the Lion Hearted. It turns out that Les Andelys was Tuesday's stop, so I got to see a lot more of it while trying to ignore the chattering of our guide. Here's a selection of photos of both the interior and exterior of the church.

Every year since 2013 the Fed has released a report called "Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households."

Every year one of the questions is, "Could you cover a $400 emergency expense using cash?"

Every year the media breathlessly reports the answer with no context and no comparison to previous years. It is simply a totem showing how badly off American households are.

But this year is different. The Fed didn't just report the number for 2021, they included a chart showing the trend over the past decade:

It's hard to see this and just report the same old stuff. Obviously American households have been getting better and better off for eight consecutive years. And last year was especially good: the number of people able to easily handle an unexpected $400 expense went up four percentage points.

In fairness, especially from an inflation obsessive like me, it's worth pointing out that $400 today is not as big a deal as $400 in 2013. In fact, if you adjust for inflation the Fed should be asking about $500 expenses these days. Eventually the Fed is going to have to figure out what to do about this: change the question every year or so, which produces odd-looking amounts; or change it every decade or so, which produces unfortunate breaks in the series. But that's a problem for another day. For now, the best conclusion to draw from this chart (and from other data in the Fed report) is not only that American households are doing pretty well, but they've been improving their economic well-being for nearly an entire consecutive decade.

Glenn Greenwald has a question:

What do you think might explain this? pic.twitter.com/ImHHEXv0xh

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 24, 2022

Glenn is obviously implying that Biden is either stupid or senile. But that's just trash talk. It's worth taking this question seriously.

First of all, Biden has always had a reputation as a bit of a gaffe machine. So some of his recent gaffes are just gaffes. Nothing more to it.

But Biden also has a reputation for sometimes speaking his mind even if it puts him off the reservation. President Obama was not especially happy when Vice President Biden announced in 2012—an election year, no less—that he was in favor of gay marriage. But that's Biden: everybody on the planet knew that he and Obama had nothing against gay marriage even though they felt they had to say so in public, and Biden finally got tired of it. So he surprised everyone and just told the truth on national TV.

So what about his latest statement saying the US would defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression? Official US policy for decades has been "strategic ambiguity." There have been two points to this: by telling China that we might defend Taiwan we deter them from invading. But by telling Taiwan that we might not defend them, we deter Taiwan from doing something stupid that incites a war they know we'd fight for them.

In reality, everyone knows that American politics would never allow us to stand by while China invades Taiwan. Biden spent more than 30 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, so this is a very unlikely subject for him to stumble on. Nor do these sound like the words of a man whose mind is wandering:

“You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons,” a reporter said to Mr. Biden. “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”

“Yes,” Mr. Biden answered flatly.

“You are?” the reporter followed up.

“That’s the commitment we made,” he said.

The president’s declaration, offered without caveat or clarification, set the stage for fresh tensions between the United States and China, which insists that Taiwan is a part of its territory and cannot exist as a sovereign nation.

The obvious interpretation of these remarks is also the correct one: He got tired of being forced to speak gobbledegook in public, so he stopped. And he didn't warn his staff beforehand because he knew they'd try to talk him out of it and he didn't feel like hassling with that. Afterward the White House released the predictable statement that "nothing has changed," and in a way that's true. Everyone has always known we'd almost certainly defend Taiwan if necessary, and Biden has merely confirmed that.

Oddly enough, you have give Donald Trump some credit for starting this trend of occasionally abandoning diplomatic niceties. As with everything else Trump did, he did it ignorantly and incompetently,¹ but he did show that it could be done without huge blowback. I imagine Joe Biden has taken a lesson from that.

¹Remember Trump's pre-inauguration effort to implicitly recognize Taiwan? It didn't go very well.

Would you like to hear my latest bitching about something tech related? Of course you would! Here it is.

When I'm traveling, I can always receive email but I can never send email—at least, not on a regular email client. I can open up Cox Communication's web app and do it that way, but it's a pain in the ass.

Knowing this, I contacted Cox a couple of days before we left. Their chat robot collapsed almost immediately. Then a human took over, but he had no idea what to do and could only give me the number for second level support. The next day I called them.

It didn't go well. The rep wanted my IP address. Fine, but it was my normal local IP address and she wanted to know what my IP address was going to be in France. But how should I know? And anyway, it's going to change every time I move around.

Yes, she said, which means I'll have to contact Cox while in France and open a ticket for my IP address at the time. They will then get back to me within seven business days.

Seven business days? That means you're telling me I can't send email from Europe. No, insisted the rep, I'm just telling you our procedures.

But those procedures mean I can't send email. No, they're just procedures.

I swear I'm not making this up. So I gave up and then had a brainstorm: Why not just set up a TeamViewer remote connection to my home computer and open it whenever I want to read email? I'll just send and receive through my email client at home.

I tried it and it worked great—until we got to Europe. I don't know what happened. Maybe when my home computer goes to sleep, the TeamViewer connection dies.

Then I had another brainstorm: Just use my Gmail account. I tried it, and it worked. Yay!

But then I got suspicious for some reason. I sent a regular old cox.com email to a friend who keeps late hours, and she responded in about a minute. Then I tried someone else. There was no problem at all sending and receiving email through my Cox account.

What the hell? This has never worked in the past, so they must have changed something. But their rep insisted repeatedly and at length that it wouldn't work unless they knew my IP address in France. Why?

In any case, that's it. A technology bitching story that turns out to not only have a happy ending, but was actually happy the entire time. But I still wish I knew what was going on here.

One of the things about cruising down a river is that you never know exactly where you are. I shot this picture on Sunday morning at sunrise, and I think it's the Église Saint-Sauveur du Petit-Andely. I may find out for sure on our way back. But for now that's my best guess.

I'm on vacation cruising down the Seine, so my threshold for commenting on dumb stuff is higher than usual. What's more, the proximate cause of my latest annoyance is the Wall Street Journal editorial page—which is sort of like saying I'm annoyed by cancer. I mean, I am annoyed by having cancer, but I'm annoyed by it every day and it's hardly worth bitching about it every time I get an upset stomach or something.

That said, I'm awake while Marian is still snoozing and I have nothing special to do. So here's the latest from the Journal's distinguished editorial board:

Well, of course Hillary did it. That goes without saying in Journal land. But what was it this time? Did she kill Elon Musk? Steal Joe Biden's stash of Diet Coke? Pull the heist of the century by emptying Fort Knox?

Nah. None of that. Apparently she ran for president a few years ago and her campaign manager, Robby Mook tried to interest the press in some dirt about her opponent:

Prosecutors asked Mr. Mook about his role in funneling the Alfa Bank claims to the press. Mr. Mook admitted the campaign lacked expertise to vet the data, yet the decision was made by Mr. Mook [and some others] to give the Alfa Bank claims to a reporter. Mr. Mook said Mrs. Clinton was asked about the plan and approved it. A story on the Trump-Alfa Bank allegations then appeared in Slate, a left-leaning online publication.

On Oct. 31, 2016, [Jake] Sullivan issued a statement mentioning the Slate story, writing, “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.” Mrs. Clinton tweeted Mr. Sullivan’s statement with the comment: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” “Apparently” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

In short, the Clinton campaign created the Trump-Alfa allegation, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it was legitimate news.

Hold the presses! A campaign passed along to the press some potential dirt that they hoped might lead to further digging. It wasn't something they "created," either: it had already been a widespread subject of rumor and investigation on blogs and Twitter for months (I was alive back in 2016 so I know this). Nor did "the press" run with it. A bunch of reporters tried to run down the allegations, but none of them was able to. Finally one person, Frank Foer of Slate, took a flier and decided to publish everything he could dig up. This is a common way of attracting the attention of sources who might be able to add something to a story.

And the Clinton campaign's shameful conspiracy to take advantage of Foer's piece? Two whole tweets!

All things considered, Foer probably made the wrong call. There were lots of questions about the Alfa Bank activity but not enough to justify a fishing piece. But that's it. A close but wrong call.¹

So in the end this was one of the most common and trivial things imaginable: a campaign trying to get the media interested in digging around a possible bit of mud. It's hard to think of anything more commonplace or basically innocuous in the world of presidential campaigns.

ALSO: The Clinton campaign merely passed along some information they hoped was worth checking out. But when it comes to feeding false information to the press and then quoting it back as confirmation when it's published, the all-time king is Dick Cheney during the marketing phase of the Iraq War. Or, more recently, Rudy Giuliani and the Hunter Biden laptop. Oddly, though, I don't remember the fine and honest folks of the Journal editorial page ever getting distressed about either of these things.

AND: As long as I'm at it, the Journal also offhandedly claims that this incident and others started the FBI's long Trump-Russia investigation. This is, unsurprisingly, an outright lie. The timeline of the investigation is very well known and it began not with Hillary Clinton but with a Trump advisor telling an Australian diplomat over drinks about alleged Russian emails that were damaging to Clinton. The Australian government passed this along to the FBI after Wikileaks published hacked DNC emails. This happened in July 2016, months before the Alfa Bank allegations.

¹And to Foer's credit, he promptly published a follow-up piece noting objections and new information about the Alfa Bank story.

This is probably not worth anyone's time, but it annoyed me so I'm going to make you all suffer through it. In New York, Ross Barkan provides a potted summary of the infant formula shortage and ends up with this:

Though off the table for now, more radical solutions should be considered too. Why not have the government manufacture baby formula? If moderates and conservatives will oppose full-bore nationalization of the industry, a public option for baby formula could be worthwhile, forcing Abbott and others to compete against the government while guaranteeing, in the event of another recall, baby formula for all. A government fail-safe could be readily available, always.

Can we talk? The baby formula shortage is serious, but we have serious problems like this about a dozen or a hundred times a year. So why do we so often find liberals suggesting that some kind of nationalization is the answer? What possibly makes anyone think that the US government would make a great manufacturer of infant formula in all its many variations? In fact, a manufacturer so spectacular that it would guarantee formula for all? Can you even imagine the politics that would doom such an effort? It's crazy.

This is obviously something best handled by the private market. It might make mistakes now and again, but it has a tremendous incentive to sell as much formula as possible. And the fact that formula is more important than, say, cat food, doesn't matter. The government also doesn't manufacture life-saving drugs. It doesn't manufacture vaccines. It doesn't manufacture pacemakers. It regulates all those industries to make sure they don't cut too many corners, but that's it.

The US government isn't a manufacturer, and there's no reason to think it should be. What's more, if you're worried about monopolization, is one supplier really better than four? Why?

So please, let's cut the crap about nationalizing industries every time there's some routine problem that the media suddenly finds out about after months of ignoring it. It's ridiculous, and all it does is give liberals a bad name.

AS AN ASIDE: Can we please get some better reporting on the infant formula shortage? Here are the things we know:

• There are a large number of specific types of formula that are in short supply. But we don't seem to know which ones.
• Reporters are keen to dig up anecdotes about people who had to drive to the next county to find the particular type of formula they want. But how many of these stories are there?
• Abbott's plant in Sturgis was shut down over a cronobacter infestation of some kind. But what kind? And why did it take so long to re-open the factory? Was it because of stonewalling by Abbott? Or because of dumb requirements from the FDA?
• In fact, how much of a shortage is there, really? How many actual people are running short of formula? How many people have run completely out of formula and literally can't find it anywhere—not in the next county, not on Amazon, not anywhere? How many babies have ended up in the ICU because of some formula-related crisis?

These are all pretty routine questions? Why have they gone unanswered for so long?