Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[THE_WIZARD_]

EFZ

[iam416]

I would prefer those decisions are made at the state level rather than the federal government imposing a $15 minimum wage in low cost of living states/regions. It's been mentioned before that $15/hour does you no good in NYC or SoCal, but it would be crushing if you run a restaurant in Shiawasee County, MI.

And Obama did sign an EO to raise the minimum wage for federal contracting to $10.10 because it was all he could do with the Ds in the minority position. Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with an incremental increase to $10 over a few years but $15 is ridiculous.

Exactly. The COLA in Florida is different than the COLA in, say, West Virginia. Again, this was brought up in our previous discussion, but there are some states where $15/hr is right around the MEDIAN wage and other states where its poverty level. In those states, like WV, the impacts will be massively regressive -- poor people disproportionately paying for a raise to poor people. That's the policy. It's just bad.

But, hey, let's ignore all that and figure out where you stood in 1993.

I'm entirely for local control on this issue. If California wants to make it $20, great. If Seattle wants to make it $25 -- knock yourself the fuck out.

[Tom W]

What about the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017 makes you think they were open to the idea of a wage hike?

Nothing at all. As Talent noted, minimum wage earners aren't really stakeholders among this group. My own experiences at the lower end of the wage scale were back in the mid-90s when I worked part-time at a movie theater in metro D.C. even as an Assistant Manager, it was still only about $7 an hour. It was just a supplement that gave me free movies, beer for the fridge and opportunities to share them with LOTS of girls..

[iam416]

The argument that gets you actual meaningful income increases (as opposed to teens and 20-somethings at their first jobs) is that the increase pushes wages higher everywhere else. So, eventually, the actual guy who is supporting a family see a wage increase. Of course, this gets precisely to the point that's been made in that it the costs are borne in terms of increase COGS is necessarily a regressive cost. The dude getting his wage increase also gets to pay more for everything else.

As was articulated previously, I'm much more in favor of increasing/expanding the EIC. (1) You can actually target that toward the intended beneficiaries; and (2) you know exactly how the costs are borne -- through the tax system -- which is progressive, which means rich peoplle actually pay a higher relative share of the cost than poor people instead of the other way.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Simple ...... states can set minimum wages, although I'm not in favor of that either but it has a place when COLA is out-of-sight high, Feds manage the EIC. Passing a federal law that increases the minimum wage ain't happening so, we can start with that, dispense with all the nonsense arguments for a federally set minimum wage and focus on (1) incentivizing, you know, actual work and (2) how wages, in general, ought to be set in the market place.

[Jeff Buchanan]

So, you're waiting for a sharp economic recovery as vaccines roll out, mitigation measures are eased and people become more mobile, Right? Maybe not. This author offers an argument that "pent-up consumer demand" a popular phrase of economists talking about a V-Shaped recovery isn't pent up at all and is, in fact, pretty much already spent.

His argument, and for his purposes, is based on splitting the economy into two sectors - durable goods and services. Historically, durable purchases have led economic recoveries after economic shocks (wars, recessions, pandemics). That thesis requires the durable sector (cars, washing machines, construction) to be depressed. It hasn't been. What has been depressed is the services sector, particularly travel and leisure. It's born well over 60% of the economic damage. It is in this sector where recovery has to occur most sharply and this author argues it won't becasue of "long term consumer scarring ." The folks are still scarred and are unlikely to return to pre-covid travel and leisure activities.

It's a good argument and it made me ask, why are people still scarred? I think you know how I'll answer that and it pisses me off. I can recount a litany of activities that sane people have correctly undertaken during the pandemic by being smart about protecting themselves and others from infection and people who have already undertaken those activities will increase them as vaccines roll out. I can also recount a litany of reasons why, in an increasingly vaccinated population, fear of the virus should be taking a back seat to the social benefits of engaging in activities that involve both small and large congregate settings. Even in a mixed population of vaccinated and unvaccinated people, given the vaccination priority given to 65yo and older, the risks of serious illness or death to all age groups is rapidly dropping to nothing more than the risk of getting the flu or common cold and all the minimal symptoms that entails.

But, even recently, we continue to hear warnings and cautions about the continued serious risks to the public health from officials, augmented by the MSM, who should, right now, be planning on shit- canning all the unnecessary mitigation measures currently in place retaining only those that make sense and that would be masking in congregate settings with both vaccinated and unvaccinated persons in attendance, distancing (capacity limits) and hand washing. Even these can be afford to receive less attention as the percentage of vaccinated persons reaches, say, 40-50% (accounts for the 30% of the population that has had asymptomatic of mild symptom COVID).

Here's my bottom line: The Biden administration should include in its post COVID economic recovery plan (1) measures that promote a science based view of SARS-2 as it recedes as the threat it has been to the public health. Ameliorating the impact of "long term COVID scarring" depends on making US citizens feel safe and comfortable engaging in travel and leisure activities. This isn't hard but it does require boldness and leadership - something missing in the past and desperately needed now. That comes from better official messaging from the federal and state level. It also comes from (2) strengthening state level public health capacity to quickly identify outbreaks at the local level and deal effectively with them. There is no excuse - NONE - for not beefing up this capacity that should have been present and wasn't in January and February. These two steps taken together are inter-related and feed off each other both for the good and bad. Do them both together well and we'll be out of this shit-sandwich sooner rather than later.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dont-expect-an-economic-boom-because-theres-little-pent-up-consumer-demand-11614116049?mod=mw_latestnews

[crashcourse]

let the numbers speak for themselves and let the public judge instead of a non stop media blitz about the need for continued masking/school closure and avoiding crowds that the most of the media/government continues to feed us.

I cant for the life of me see how states like california and newyork basically castrated themselves during the past year chasing citizens and businesses away. pentup consumer demand will surge to travel and leisure but it aint gonna be to cali or ny --and next year start planning that cruise or overseas trip

the one thing that bugs me more then anything though is these kids are just being butchered for no reason other then teachers have turned into government employees--i wish reagen was around to fire the whole lot of them

[Dr. Strangelove]

Former Buckeye Anthony Gonzalez officially has a Trump sycophant primarying him: Max Miller, who was one of Trump's leads in organizing rallies.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Well, today's messaging from Fauci and Walensky is anything but encouraging or words that might lead to local officials easing restrictions. In fact, quite the opposite and intended. According to these now public faces of the Biden administration's COVID experts, the rate of decline in new infections is slowing so, don't break out the Champaign just yet ..... or worse, don't start relaxing mitigation measures.

Here's the basis of that. Epidemiologist think that the UK variant is going to become the dominant strain in the US. It has risen from 1% of new cases to 10% here. The UK variant is more transmissible because it spends more time in the human host compared to the original strain (13d v. 8d). Ostensibly, that leads to one person infecting more people that they come in contact with, IOW R(0) rises. So, R(0) must be rising, right? Is R(0) rising?

I track three sources of data that are the basis for R(0) - the most reliable measure of trends in circulating virus; when it's below 1.0 it can be present but it is not increasing in sero-prevalence (% positivity). All of them are in agreement: the presence of the virus is declining*. There may be local increases but these are few and far between. Check your state here:

https://epiforecasts.io/covid/posts/national/united-states/

* This data is collated and presented at this website on a weekly basis and is current as of 02/20/2021. The CDC does not get anymore accurate data than what the states report and they will report week-ending data for 02/26/21 tomorrow. Wslenski is shamefully premature and probably wrong in suggesting that circulating virus "could be" on the rise.

Are deaths and hospitalizations rising? Nope...... and these two metrics are the best and most important measures of COVID disease burden.

https://covidtracking.com/analysis-updates/good-news-despite-data-wobbles-weekly-covid-19-data-feb-25

So, WTF, people? If I can go out and show that today's statements made by Fauci and Walensky are at best premature and at the worst, fucking blatantly wrong and misleading how much confidence should Americans have in what they're selling? Is there any doubt why people are still scarred and won't go out? Any doubt why we will continue to have these unnecessary measures being foisted on us by local officials? To bring that point home, an article popped up in my local Sun Sentinel around 2p today. The author interviewed a handful of vaccinated people in S FL asking them if their behavior was going to change after they got vaccinated and as more Floridians got their shots? Everyone of them said they were still concerned about getting COVID and still wouldn't go out or socialize much ...... face palm follows. Once people buy into how they should behave, it is really hard to change that unless and of course you aren't following this advice like sheep. I simply cannot do much about stupid sheeple.

[Jeff Buchanan]

What I just said ..... stop worrying about extremely unlikely COVID risks. This is a Bloomberg opinion piece that's paywalled but is free content here:

https://tylerpaper.com/ap/commentary...88d89ab63.html

[Dr. Strangelove]

Not an original joke at this point but...meh...welcome to CPAC!!!

golden-trump-statue-cpac.jpg?fit=scale&fm=pjpg&h=350&ixlib=php-3.3.0&w=700&wpsize=fp_800_350.jpg

1101978090_univ_lsr_xl.jpg

[Dr. Strangelove]

Also might be the first instance of the Bablyon Bee foreseeing the future

https://babylonbee.com/news/first-baptist-dallas-members-melt-golden-jewelry-towering-donald-trump-statue

https://babylonbee.com/news/three-conservatives-who-refuse-to-bow-to-trump-statue-thrown-into-fire-at-cpac

[Whitley]

Here's my bottom line: The Biden administration should include in its post COVID economic recovery plan (1) measures that promote a science based view of SARS-2 as it recedes as the threat it has been to the public health. Ameliorating the impact of "long term COVID scarring" depends on making US citizens feel safe and comfortable engaging in travel and leisure activities. This isn't hard but it does require boldness and leadership - something missing in the past and desperately needed now. That comes from better official messaging from the federal and state level. It also comes from (2) strengthening state level public health capacity to quickly identify outbreaks at the local level and deal effectively with them. There is no excuse - NONE - for not beefing up this capacity that should have been present and wasn't in January and February. These two steps taken together are inter-related and feed off each other both for the good and bad. Do them both together well and we'll be out of this shit-sandwich sooner rather than later.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/do...=mw_latestnews

LOL. You are not going to get that from President Biden, a man that has always been a moderate in the Dem party and wanting to build consensus with Republicans. The man wants a return to back pre Trump America. Not happening.

[Jeff Buchanan]

This stuff is interesting tm me, may not be to others but I post it here mainly because there is so much misinformation about the SARS-2 variants, what they actually are, whether vaccines will be compromised by their appearance or whether or not they evade detection and produce more serious symptoms. The authors of the article where this chart appeared, along with being frankly honest about the risks a handful of variants present to controlling the virus, is that a mutation process known as "convergent evolution" dictates that more worrisome SARS-2 variants will be few instead of many. In practical terms it means that variants found in South Africa may be of the same lineage than those found in Brazil. The implication is that vaccines can be tweaked to handle just a few lineages containing multiple variants and will work fine against all of them. Something I took from this chart is that out of the hundreds of variants (not all of them are shown here) only 6 of them are of concern to scientists studying them and 1/2 of these come from the same lineage.

Genome.JPG

[Jeff Buchanan]

LOL. You are not going to get that from President Biden, a man that has always been a moderate in the Dem party and wanting to build consensus with Republicans. The man wants a return to back pre Trump America. Not happening.

I think your reason for saying "you are not going to get this (boldness and leadership) from President Biden" because he is a moderate ..... and wanting to build consensus with Republicans is specious. Getting people right in the head about COVID risks - they are extremely low, concentrated in a relatively small cohort and have been since the start of this thing - isn't about forming consensus, it's about messaging coming from the administration and public health officials at all levels.

The link below - which challenges my record of being wordy and long winded - argues that the predominantly negative COVID messaging coming from official sources and augmented by the MSM is ........

........sapping people of energy to get through the winter, and the rest of this pandemic. Anti-vaccination groups and those opposing the current public-health measures have been vigorously amplifying the pessimistic messages—especially the idea that getting vaccinated doesn’t mean being able to do more—telling their audiences that there is no point in compliance, or in eventual vaccination, because it will not lead to any positive changes. They are using the moment and the messaging to deepen mistrust of public-health authorities, accusing them of moving the goalposts and implying that we’re being conned. Either the vaccines aren’t as good as claimed, they suggest, or the real goal of pandemic-safety measures is to control the public, not the virus.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/how-public-health-messaging-backfired/618147/

The author goes on to present five key fallacies and pitfalls that have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response in the US.

This is what I'm talking about here and have harped on for a year. The pessimism, the vagueness, the treating of Americans like they are too stupid to understand the science of the virus has to stop. Period, full stop.

Instead, officials need to provide guidance on how to live reasonably normal lives - impaired by COVID as it rightfully is - by taking sensible steps that reduce risk of becoming infected and transmitting that infection to others. The most damaging example of US dumbfuckery in this regard is the shuttering of schools. Right up there with that idiocy is banning cruise ships from operating from US ports - unnecessarily shutting down a multi-billion dollar global enterprise that provides millions of jobs and many millions of dollars in economic activity at a local level because targeting and scapegoating them was convenient and met the demand of the public to "do something."

Those two actions were profoundly stupid and costly on multiple levels. What I had hoped for and have not seen yet from the Biden administration is more of what I'm looking for and less pessimism. Not happening and lends credence to Trump's ham-fisted approach to muzzle Fauci and Redfield (CDC before Walenski). There's a shit-ton of good COVID news out there. I have seen more articles and opinion pieces in the last two weeks advocating for more optimistic messaging from public health officials than in the past and that's encouraging. Now that pressure from critics needs to shape PH messaging going forward.