Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Kapture1]

Meanwhile, godspeed to those Cubans trying to rid themselves of REAL tyranny. It won't end well for them, but at least they're actually giving it a go. I'm sure AOC and the other self-proclaimed Democractic Socialists are mortified at the dissent.

nah, man. The State Department said they were protesting to get more COVID vaccines.

[Kapture1]

https://twitter.com/WHAAsstSecty/status/1414334778095046656

Julie Chung

@WHAAsstSecty
Peaceful protests are growing in #Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages. We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.
5:24 PM · Jul 11, 2021·Twitter for iPhone

[lineygoblue]

There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.

[Ghengis Jon]

Until it folds up into a brief case like George Jetson's, I'm not impressed.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/business/flying-car-flight-slovakia-scli-intl/?hpt=ob_blogfooterold

[iam416]

The Ds in the Senate seem set to pass a $3.5T budget through reconcilation that will include pretty much everything the Ds wanted in the infrastructure "deal" and that Rs refused to agree to.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-government-and-politics-personal-taxes-c80b07740f63853c78d41d900b265ed2?utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=SocialFlow

The Senate Ds say the package will be fully paid for but provided no details as to how.

Thank god inflation is only transitory.

[lineygoblue]

Only 'the rich' are going to pay for it.

That whole idea has been a lie from the beginning, but lots of folks seem to believe it.

[Dr. Strangelove]

The Ds in the Senate seem set to pass a $3.5T budget through reconcilation that will include pretty much everything the Ds wanted in the infrastructure "deal" and that Rs refused to agree to.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden...ign=SocialFlow

The Senate Ds say the package will be fully paid for but provided no details as to how.

Thank god inflation is only transitory.

Was thinking about that. I'm sure it'll have some inflationary impact but maybe not as much as what we've already experienced. It's spread out over 10 years so "only" $350 Billion a year. The three covid relief bills totaled around $5 trillion all passed in a 12-month period and those injected cash into the economy more directly than what I assume the reconciliation stuff will do.

I assume by now you've also seen more detail on what categories are driving inflation. The used car market alone accounts for 1/3 of all inflation. Most of the really ridiculous price increases are connected to travel: used cars, hotels, airfare, gasoline, car rentals, etc. Stuff that had extremely depressed prices at this time last year. And that's part of why I suspect it ought to die down as 2021 progresses because prices had rebounded by late 2020. Honestly, I wish there was a more readily available 2021 vs. 2019 statistic because that would prob give us a better idea of how much true inflation has occurred.

One person I follow DID point out that rents increased 2.3% in June. That's not the eye-popping numbers of say, car rentals, but it IS significant and a sign that the boom in housing prices has finally trickled down to renters.

But of course I could be completely wrong.

[iam416]

This is the NRO on inflation. https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...it-transitory/

They're in the same ballpark as you and me, but note that housing increases are (a) roughly one-third of CPI; and (b) still lagging (the huge spike in housing costs is still coming re CPI).

And the article notes that given our interest rates, there ain't much we can do to stop inflation if it's something more than transitory.

All of this is to say that continuing to helicopter money into the economy doesn't strike me as cautious.

[Dr. Strangelove]

ATTN: Jeff. This story was written just for you

Norwegian Cruise Lines sues the state of Florida over its "vaccine passport" ban

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/norwegian-cruise-lines-sues-state-florida-vaccine-passport/story?id=78827331

[Jeff Buchanan]

Has anyone noticed a disconnect between what people are reporting on the spread of SARS2 with reporting on the rapid increase in economic growth and activity? One might expect an increase in new cases would prompt governments to impose more lock-downs. Outside of Australia, few have. Of course there seems to be a direct relationship between new case numbers (reported as 7d averages) with widespread easing of mitigation and mobility restrictions .... at least that is what the press is writing about. The implication is that hey, the pandemic is worsening and governments should be taking steps to stop the spread by imposing more controls. There remains a strong contingent of "experts" who support near zero COVID as a national objective. They should be ignored.

The rationale that rising case numbers imply increasing disease burden is seriously flawed. Yet it has become the mantra of supposed experts who urge zero or close to it new daily COVID cases as a reasonable objective. That mantra is also seriously flawed. Once again, as in the beginning of this shit storm and the government imposed over-reactions it produced, fails to balance the enormous economic and social costs of mobility and mitigation measures with the supposed benefits of these measures to control of the virus. The nearly 18 month journey with SARS2 unequivocally demonstrate that the implementation of draconian mitigation measure result in an unending cycle of equal peaks and troughs in most metrics used to define the burden of SARS2

While the increase in daily new cases is undeniable these numbers in context reveal this:

• Increases in case numbers are regional and tend to skew global, statewide and national figures.
• The pandemic is regional and has become a pandemic or a regional epidemic among the un-vaccinated.
• Hospitalizations rise or fall regionally with percent of vaccinated in an inverse relationship.
• Deaths world wide and regionally continue to decline
• The vaccines work in preventing serious illness requiring hospitalization and deaths

What does all this mean? I've not seen a graphic depicting this but what if, before SARS2, we had reported every case of influenza/100k population among vaxed and unvaxed and compared that with today's reporting of SARS2 cases in that fashion. While I suspect that the graphs would not align absolutely, they'd be close. I might conclude that we shold stop reporting new case numbers as somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 states have elected to do. FL is one of them to the howls of Desanits opponents claiming his government is withholding critical SARS2 and C-19 data.

What Desantis has correctly, IMO, understood about this pandemic is exactly as I have described it above. He will not allow the continuing misrepresentation of data points drive his PH policy. IOW, our state is open and "don't Fauci FL." IMO, Desantis has also erred in his policy of not allowing businesses to ask for proof of vaccination. We need vaccinations and as close to 70% of the US population as possible. Recently, the French government under Macron implemented policy that French citizens had to be vaccinated to access most businesses. Following the announcement, 1.3m citizens signed up for vaccinations. I support that policy approach.

[CGVT]

The message that I see as front and center from the meeeeedaaaaaa is if you want life to return to “Normal” is to get your stupid ass vaccinated. It has been that way for a while.

[Hannibal]

On an annualized rate, inflation has been 8.8% for the past six months. The Jimmy Carter era is back! It’s the good old days again!

And that’s with tons of jobs unfulfilled because employers don’t want to raise wages yet and pass along the costs to consumers. If your favorite restaurant is closed today because they can’t get people, that’s inflation that doesn’t show up in the statistics.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Well, yes, of course. The problem is, in the US, we've reached a point that between dedicated anti-vaxers, the crowd that blindly followed Donald Trump's COVID messaging and the 10-20% of people residing in the US that are too stupid to understand the low risk and high value of vaccinations, we have around 35% of the US population that are going to remain unconvinceable ...... unless you kick their asses into action by implementing policy that if you don't get vaccinated, you will be required to stay at home to the extent that you can't enter businesses anyway without being vaccinated. If that sounds draconian in an opposite sense, so be it. It is blitheringly obvious, based on available vaccine facts, that if we want to beat this thing, vaccines and high vaccination rates are the way to do it. Let me point out that policy like this is both legal and defensible.

Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a USSC case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state. There might be some question of a federal policy like this and the state's policing powers to issue such requirements. Regardless, it's what is needed. Work on the legal basis for it after the fact. American citizens still have a choice. We can choose to be dragged down by SARS2 or get past it.

[froot loops]

The biggest way to get more vaccinations in this country is for Rupert to bring an edict down on his employees to quit giving the anti-vax guys time on the network starting with Fishstick Carlson. It's madness that Alex Berenson is given any time at all.

[THE_WIZARD_]

You are truly a looney bird.