July 6, 2020

Number one must be electoral reform. Ability to do everything else FLOWS from that.

* End voter suppression
* National standards for access
* - sufficient polling stations
* - vote by mail
* - no onerous voter ID
* End gerrymandering: independent commissions
* Any reduction of big money would be good
* Real efforts to combat foreign interference
* Real ways to fight fake info with real info

Need to support voting rights at the state level through federal action wherever possible.

Ideally, get rid of the Electoral College, but that would require a Constitutional Amendment.

Note: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not require an Amendment.

July 4, 2020

Yup, these days. Also it is said of economies, America catches a cold Canada gets pneumonia.

And that USA is like an elephant sleeping beside the mouse.

But the economies analogy is only applicable to that, and, seemingly not the last two times, and not to the pandemic. Canada weathered the Great Recession of 2008-9 better than the US, with less public debt. And economically, Canada is doing reasonably well this time around so-far.

As to the meth lab, yeah tRump is breaking bad and has been broken and breaking bad all his life.

Re pandemic, see chart below. Yeah it feels like we had a bit of a bender for two months but rehab is working.
However, the US is like a whole apartment block full of meth heads and a huge dirt cheap batch landed in the courtyard last month.

July 4, 2020

That is not to deny the OPost figure, is it. There are two death rates.

One is per detected cases. That what is usually meant when death rate is discussed.

The other is your figure which is per actual cases. It is the more desirable figure to know but at this point it is inscrutable. The ratio of true cases to known cases varies from time to time and from place to place. It is only estimable after the fact and even then will have bounds of uncertainty around it.

The problem is that the per-actual adds another layer of uncertainty onto the detected figure (which has uncertainty) which is based on an already clouded official death count. A triple layer or triple cloud of uncertainty makes the final figure effectively meaningless.

July 4, 2020

Yes, I have not thought the looming debacle would end the Repubs but I think they

... I think they will spend a longer time in the wilderness and have a tremendous amount of soul searching to do.

All their tropes and memes and slogans will have reduced power for years to come.

Chances are fairly good that if the Democrats govern well and navigate some tricky waters (climate change, China, fixing wealth & income disparity), then they are likely to have the Presidency for 12 or 16 years.

Perhaps the biggest agenda item will be to reform elections, campaigning and voting to greatly reduce trickery and gerrymandering and voter suppression. It can be done and must be done. That will go along way to tilt power away from Republicons and make the votes more reflective of true demographics.

July 4, 2020

Wearing a mask is a medical statement. NOT wearing a mask is the political statement. . . . . nt

June 27, 2020

It's the ambiguous binary / non-binary nature of the word

A word like "defund" can mean either

1) Withdraw all funding of an institution, or

2) Withdraw some funding

My gut reaction on hearing "defund" used widely re police departments some weeks ago was it was to destroy, delete, and dead-end police departments.

And that is despite that I frequently encourage people to avoid binary all-or-nothing thinking. Hoist by my own petard. Or, more accurately, I am not immune to that which I warn against.

It was only a little bit later that someone made it clearer to me that it can mean reducing funding, say by 10%, not eliminating it entirely. A duh moment for me. There is merit, for example, to the idea of sending wellness professionals to do wellness checks instead of sending beefy police with guns and tasers and sunglasses and black boots and all.

June 25, 2020

Threads for when posting links:

Trim a link, try it. If it works, trim more and try again. If it fails, go back the previous trim and post that.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213615353

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213629496

June 6, 2020

This is the military signalling to tRump: We will not kill Americans for your campaign or after

Or at least I sure hope I'm right.

June 4, 2020

Amazing that 3 guys navigate to middle age and think they can get away with it. 3 reasons

Three reasons:

1) They believe in and depend on white privilege.

2) The system encourages that kind of behaviour, especially under tRump.

3) White privilege is a real thing and is harsh on people of colour and uplifting of white people.

But, all the same, they are still dead stupid.

May 23, 2020

Here's how I look for Covid-19 spikes, outbreaks, and blowups

I compare daily new cases (detected) and divide that by the number of active cases (detected), using data from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ though other sites data can be used too.

1) Only active case cases can infect.
2) Detected cases / deaths are proxies for actual cases / deaths (some unknown multiplier).

This will find second waves in places that have a lot of recovered & dead cases.

On worldometers Yesterday button (for a complete days worth of data) I can sort the Active Cases column and then run down the New cases column looking for states/countries where the new cases is higher than nearby ones in the list. Then I can do the division on a few prominent states/countries found that way.

The US as a whole is running about 2% by that ratio, which is rather good and an indication that the PEOPLE are taking big precautions -- no help from the federal government.

When it gets to about 5%, that is a bit alarming. Texas has been running about 5%, and going by yesterday's figures, Louisiana is about 5%. Tennessee about 7%.

10% is a genuine outbreak. North Carolina, Mississippi, Wisconsin are about 9-10%. Minnesota is high, has been over 10% for a while.

Brazil is running about 15% and is blowing up on its first wave. Mexico is over 20%.

Ideally the data is smoothed by 3 day or 7 day running averages because there are jumps and dips that are from effects like weekend vs weekday.

Daily New Cases divided by Active Cases, as a percentage.