Cats, charts, and politics
Holy shit! I didn't bother googling the URL for my blog before I registered it, and it turns out that jabberwocking has an . . . unsavory definition:
I sure hope this is just some random addition to the Urban Dictionary, not actually a common use of this word.
As you've probably noticed, there's a row of social media sharing icons at the bottom of every post. Unfortunately, a reader wrote to tell me about a bug: The email icon didn't just email a single post, it emailed every post on the front page. Since the icons are generated by a plugin, there was nothing I could do to fix this.
So I rummaged around for a new plugin and ended up with the icons you now see below. From left to right, here's what they do:
These all seem to work fine. If you come across any bugs, please let me know.
We passed another grim milestone on Friday: it was our first day with more than 5,000 deaths reported. Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 12. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States, says the pandemic has been brutal on women workers:
About 2.5 million women have lost their jobs or dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic. That’s enough to fill 40 football stadiums. This mass exodus of women from the workforce is a national emergency, and it demands a national solution. Job loss, small business closings and a lack of child care have created a perfect storm for women workers.
It's actually worse than that. The Reuters article she links to says that the 2.5 million figure is just for women who have dropped out of the labor force. What's more, it's wrong. According to BLS figures, the number of women who aren't in the labor force (i.e., not looking for jobs) has increased from 56.5 million before the pandemic to 59.6 million today. That's an increase of 3.1 million. Add in the increase in unemployment and you get a total of 5.2 million women who have lost their jobs.
Lots of men have lost their jobs too, but women have lost more. In particular, the number of women who have dropped out of the labor force is 700,000 more than it is for men. This is especially notable since fewer women than men worked outside the home to begin with.
I still wouldn't call this a "women's recession" or anything like that, but women have clearly been hit a little harder—and that's before you account for the fact that they've undoubtedly taken the brunt of additional childcare duties. Harris isn't really right to say that the Democratic coronavirus bill helps women any more than men, but it certainly helps everyone who's lost income since the pandemic started. That's why it needs to be passed quickly.
The weather has been pretty glorious around here lately, which means the cats are spending a lot of time in the backyard lounging in the sun. Hopper decided to zip up the tree onto our patio cover a couple of days ago where she spent some quality time rolling around. She's such a cutie pie.
The New York Times surveyed a group of pediatric infectious disease experts and their message was clear: It's OK to send kids back to school. But only if common-sense precautions are taken:
The 175 experts — mostly pediatricians focused on public health — largely agreed that it was safe enough for schools to be open to elementary students for full-time and in-person instruction now. Some said that was true even in communities where Covid-19 infections were widespread, as long as basic safety measures were taken. Most important, they said, were universal masking, physical distancing, adequate ventilation and avoidance of large group activities.
This is the part that bugs me: "adequate ventilation." What does that mean? How is it measured? Who decides if a classroom's ventilation is adequate? If a building is serviced by a commercial HVAC, that's fine. With little or no change, air conditioning systems will guarantee adequate ventilation. Unfortunately, a recent GAO study suggests that nearly half of all school districts have lots of classrooms with inadequate air conditioning systems:
And if a classroom doesn't have air conditioning at all? The EPA basically says you should open some windows and maybe use a few fans. There's not a lot more you can do.
But is that enough? It sure seems like we could use some quantitative guidance here.
POSTSCRIPT: It's also worth noting that although the pediatric experts believe COVID-19 transmission is minimal in classroom settings as long as precautions are taken, they also put a lot of weight on the negative effects of kids being out of school. To some extent, they're willing to accept a small amount of COVID-19 transmission as a price worth paying to get children back in their classes.
Exciting news today, class! After a four-year wait we finally have new NAEP test scores for 12th graders. Without further ado, here are reading and math test scores from the early '90s all the way to 2019:
These are the most important test scores we have. It's nice when 4th and 8th grade scores are up, but what really matters is the end point. It doesn't matter if you're leading in the 200th lap if you end up behind ten other cars when the flag comes down after the 300th.
In general, test scores in 2019 were down slightly compared to 2015. The most tragic part of this is the continuing slide in test scores for Black students. In both reading and math, their test scores are now more than 30 points below those of white students. This means that, on average, Black students who graduate from high school have reading and math abilities similar to a 9th grade white student.
This has to get turned around. Short of existential global crises like climate change, it's perhaps the most important problem our country has. But what should we do?
What do I think of the impeachment trial so far? And why haven't I bothered to write anything about it?
The first question is easy: I think the House impeachment managers have done a great job. In fact, their video presentations have been exactly what I've wanted to see for a while: a dramatic tick-tock showing Donald Trump's minute-by-minute reaction to the violence at the Capitol. Kudos to them for an effective presentation.
Unfortunately, the second question is also easy. If there's anything I've come to loathe over two decades of blogging it's bad faith arguments. They're just endless these days, and they've gotten to the point where no one even bothers to hide what they're doing. It's such an insane waste of everyone's time and it drives me nuts.
And that's the entire story of the impeachment. The House managers could have video of Trump texting directions to the insurrectionists and it wouldn't matter. Republicans have decided to pretend that they have a deep constitutional objection to impeaching a president who's out of office, and that's that. The rest is just theater.
This is a bad faith argument, of course, and everyone knows it. Republicans don't want to convict a president of their own party, but they also don't want to force their members to cast a vote implicitly approving of insurrection. So they groped around for some kind of technicality that would eliminate their dilemma and came up with the out-of-office dodge. This allows them to vote to acquit but to claim it was solely because of their deep commitment to constitutional norms.
There's no point arguing about this since it's not meant seriously. It's just a bad faith argument designed to get Republicans out of a dilemma and waste lots of Democratic time.
But this is the world we live in. It's full of bad faith arguments like this, designed solely to produce a plausible explanation for the rubes and to waste everyone else's time. And it works. The rubes obediently parrot it back and the rest of the world earnestly explains why the argument is wrong. Nobody really cares, though. And then we move on.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 11. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
This is kind of interesting.
