sufeitzy

sufeitzy https://www.dailykos.com/user/sufeitzy/rss/index.xml News Community Action Copyright 2005 - Steal what you want Sat, 22 May 2021 22:31:04 +0000 Sat, 22 May 2021 22:31:04 +0000 Daily Kos rss@dailykos.com (Daily Kos) Daily Kos rss@dailykos.com (Daily Kos) Breaking Story: Arizona Recount https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/5/10/2029850/-Breaking-Story-Arizona-Recount (API) Breaking: Arizona Recount Calls on MIT for Metallurgical Forensics rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Arizona breaking.news Recount Republican.recount Trump.recount _2029850 Mon, 10 May 2021 20:04:12 +0000 Back to the Future, Dystopian Version https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/5/6/2029265/-Back-to-the-Future-Dystopian-Version Google has replicated my 70’s world, but as always, with a slightly sinister twist. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 70s dystopia Google intercom Nostalgia Rescued rooftopantennas _2029265 Thu, 06 May 2021 19:45:22 +0000 Living the Paradox: Russell-Zermelo Paradox That is https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/4/29/2028270/-Living-the-Paradox-Russell-Zermelo-Paradox-That-is One of the fantastic things discovered quite some time ago in mathematics is called Russell’s Paradox, or the Russell-Zermelo paradox which involved quite some back-and forth in movie-worthy dusty parlors at the turn of the century in England and Germany, involving names like Bertrand, Cesare Burali-Forti, Schröder, Cantor, and personal favorite “Gottlob Frege”. They don’t name them like that anymore. We’ve been discussing a kind of similar paradox for some time, about Covid. Fascinating! rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid covid.passport russells.paradox _2028270 Fri, 30 Apr 2021 01:52:22 +0000 I Was a Gender Dysphoric Child. Here's My Story. Ask Me Anything. Puberty Blocker? Part 2. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/4/27/2027882/-I-Was-a-Gender-Dysphoric-Child-Here-s-My-Story-Ask-Me-Anything-Puberty-Blocker-Part-2 I was a gender-dysphoric male child, who believed I was supposed to be a girl. At puberty, I overcame dysphoria and intense feelings that I was a girl in a boys body, and simply became a gay man. I am relieved that was never exposed to the euphemistically named treatment we have today called “Puberty Blockers”. I have written of my childhood experience, and to close the circle I want to cover some adult experience, and instead of feelings about PB’s, some science about PB’s. Initial disclaimer. Again, for everyone, I’m speaking exclusively of my experience and feelings as a gay cis-male man, and what I view as an abomination of chemical experimentation perpetuated on children exactly like me. I speak for or about no other groups and any interpretation of such is entirely a figment of the reader’s imagination. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) bi Gay gender.dysphoria Lesbian lgb LGBT puberty.blocker sissy.boy _2027882 Tue, 27 Apr 2021 21:18:14 +0000 I Was a Gender Dysphoric Child. Here's My Story. Ask Me Anything. Puberty Blocker? I'd be Dead Today https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/4/25/2027567/-I-Was-a-Gender-Dysphoric-Child-Here-s-My-Story-Ask-Me-Anything-Puberty-Blocker-I-d-be-Dead-Today I was as gender dysphoric child. Here’s my story, ask me anything. If I had been “treated” with Puberty Blockers, I’d be dead today. Blogs seem to do best with Daily Kos when they speak from personal experience, so I’ll give a reveal I’ve very rarely shared with anyone. I have an unnervingly precise, geometric, emotional and visual episodic memory, so let me share exactly what I remember, with significant editing for readability, it’s long. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) chemical.castration childhood.gender.dysphoria Gay gay.male gender.dysphoria Homosexual puberty puberty.blocker Recommended Transgender _2027567 Sun, 25 Apr 2021 23:37:06 +0000 To Our Asian Community in The Bay Area: a Heartfelt Thanks https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/4/21/2027045/-To-Our-Asian-Community-in-The-Bay-Area-a-Heartfelt-Thanks The San Francisco region, San Jose northward through San Francisco county, has an extraordinary presence of people of Asian ancestry In comparison with the rest of the US, Except for Honolulu (which has more than a 50% Ethnic Asian population), no other area even comes close to the Asian presence here.  We enjoy a vibrant mixture of East Asian cultures in San Francisco proper, with enclaves of groups representing Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, Laotian, Indonesian and Mongolian ancestry,  to name a few.    One thing I noticed when I moved to San Francisco many years ago was the frequent appearance in public of people wearing masks, most commonly among people who looked to me like the certain chic young, harried middle-aged, or dignified older residents of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, or Manila, where work has taken me in the past. Mentally, I filed it away under the “things that are are different in SF” category, and thought nothing more until an article I read today in Mother Jones. The Grassroots Activists Who Protected San Francisco’s Most Vulnerable—and the City—From COVID <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/the-grassroots-activists-who-protected-san-franciscos-most-vulnerable-and-the-city-from-covid/" target="_blank">www.motherjones.com/…</a> They cited hard data: <blockquote> As of March 15, about 450 people had died from the virus in a city of almost 900,000, the lowest rate of any major US city. </blockquote> As much as that may chagrin the far right critics of the city and our early “catastrophic shutdown”, as well as the grossly selfish libertarians and complaints about the hellish controlling communist junta of the city, the numbers are facts.    Ostensibly about absolutely critical work done to protect the Latino community here, in the article there was a key line that linked many ideas for me: <blockquote> This success was due in part to aggressive actions by the local and state governments, and a populace that embraced mask-wearing and took social distancing seriously.   </blockquote> For many Asian constituencies, mask wearing is completely ordinary. Like many residents of the city, I was completely habituated to seeing people wearing masks as utterly ordinary. When wearing a mask became an act of community protection, there was an almost effortless transition from seeing masks to wearing masks. Certainly that wasn’t true across the US. We are all aware of the endless childlike, petulant complaints from people who are ostensibly adults about performing an absolutely minimal act in a pandemic — wearing a mask. The look of masks, perhaps the symbolism of constraint, or fear of the new, I can’t fully hypothesize what all the reasons are for not wearing masks for many people. But I do know I’m grateful for the Asian community in San Francisco, who through what was a cultural commonplace, created the opportunity for all the citizens of the city to effortlessly, unemotionally, and collectively embrace the cultural norms of mask wearing for individual and community protection. I offer a heartfelt thanks if you are reading this.  I’m constantly surprised as open secrets of the city open up to me. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Asian.american BayArea Covid.masks COVID19 East.asia masks SanFrancisco _2027045 Thu, 22 Apr 2021 02:11:55 +0000 The Police Attacked Your Mom After They Killed Your Friend: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/4/20/2026870/-The-Police-Attacked-Your-Mom-After-They-Killed-Your-Friend-Quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes A woman, Karen Garner, with speech loss and mild dementia is brutally attacked by the police, not a police officer, but by the police. Her fragile elderly bones were crushed and snapped. She looks and acts like my Mom. A man,  George Floyd, trying to hustle through the day, is brutally attacked by the police, not a police officer, but by the police. His neck was crushed until he couldn’t breathe and died. He looks and acts like an old boyfriend of mine. The trial and conviction of D. Chauvin will create a fall guy, an example in one person of a theatre of sadism that attacks, crushes and maims people like your buddy George, and your mom Karen. We will hear all about the “police officer”. Superb deflection.  There are a cast of thousands of supporting actors and crew (roll the titles) inside and outside the system as a whole, not limited only to police mind you: The officers standing to the side. ”Law and Order” actors, producers, writers, crew. The radio dispatch agent. ”Cops” cast, producers, writers, crew.  The 911 call agent. And a word from our sponsors: Wal-Mart We’ve created a system that doesn’t protect us. We need protection from our own system. When are the rest of the accomplices going on trial, I ask myself.    And as Juvenal wrote in poetry two thousand years ago, and I think of it today, with this trial: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” or “Who watches the guardians” Apparently, nobody.  rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Derek.chauvin.trial george.floyd Karen.garner Making.money.from.brutality Police.brutality _2026870 Wed, 21 Apr 2021 01:36:10 +0000 Are We There Yet? Summary of current reading on the Covid epidemic’s end in the US. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/4/1/2023972/-Are-We-There-Yet-Summary-of-current-reading-on-the-Covid-epidemic-s-end-in-the-US My readings show that experts feel we are out of the Covid epidemic as a country when the daily case rate over the United States is somewhere around 5,000 and when the daily positivity rate is around 1.0%. California hits those levels at around May 18th. The US as a whole hits a “Fauci” level end-June. We have much to look forward to if we continue doing together what has worked to prevent Covid rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) California Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 covid-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel end-epidemic Pandemic Vaccination _2023972 Thu, 01 Apr 2021 19:24:39 +0000 I’m Breathless: How Long Before the Eric Trump Article Here? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/3/29/2023464/-I-m-Breathless-How-Long-Before-the-Eric-Trump-Article-Here Kos, like much progressive media, has an unfortunate tendency to generate repetitive and unnecessary articles on Conservative hypocrisy, generally stemming from the latest shitstorm ignition attempt by Fox.  The cycle is exactly the same over and over and over, let’s call it the “SNORe” model.  S - Statement X. N - “Not actually the case.” O - Obscure experts provide microscopic dissection. R - “Republicans are Hypocrites” Certainly not limited to Kos, The SNORe model is all over the place. I’ve attached an image of a CNN article by the ordinarily somewhat readable Chris Cillizza of a SNORe report. Vanity Fair reporting is also very good SNORe reporting.    I’m curious how quickly we will see the body of the FOX material on Kos, dating from Noon PST today. Perhaps a betting pool is in order, the winner gets a delicious nap without access to Fox News in a gentle tropical retreat suitable as a “Wheel of Fortune” prize puzzle. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) bidentravel EricTrump fakeoutrage FoxNews JoeBiden KamalaHarris RepublicanHypocricy trump TrumpTravel _2023464 Mon, 29 Mar 2021 19:19:41 +0000 Progressive Vaccination Action: Sonoma County https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/3/23/2022539/-Progressive-Vaccination-Action-Sonoma-County Sonoma County wine industry has vaccinated over 95% of essential vineyard and production workers. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid COVID19 GoodNews success Vaccination _2022539 Wed, 24 Mar 2021 04:22:29 +0000 The Cure for Vaccine Hesitancy! https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/3/17/2021504/-The-Cure-for-Vaccine-Hesitancy (CNN) Reports are very quietly emerging of startling, but apparently beneficial side-effects of COVID vaccinations several weeks after final vaccination. Researches are calling it the “Cocoon” effect, after the 1985 Comedy-Drama due to the remarkable nature of the measurable changes those having been vaccinated have enjoyed. These include substantial stress-reduction leading to better sphygmomanometer systolic/diastolic readings, visible reduction in effects of sub-dermal collagen complex polymer-cross linkages on the skin, and apparently pleasant effects on libido. That is for laypeople — lowered blood pressure, younger skin, and increased sex drive. Amelie Incheek, a Dutch immunologist from Johns Hopkins COVID Sentinel laboratories has long hypothesized that unique metabolic pathways of the new mRNA viral clearing mechanisms by the human body may actually trigger “cleaning house” systems at the cellular, even mitochondrial level. <blockquote> “It has been suggested that the combination of unique encapsulating ionizing cationic lipids and structural phospholipids which are used in the COVID vaccine apparently also induces both telomere lengthening or ‘renewal’ at the cellular level, mitochondrial ‘flushing’ of free radical-induced aging acceleration, and body-wide reconfiguration in agiotensin substrates. Remarkable.” </blockquote> Other researchers are somewhat alarmed since these effects were not seen in clinical trials, but multiple meta-studies of participant outcomes along with AI-driven cellular repair pattern sensing studies are being launched at the Centers for Cellular Aging at Caltech, Stanford, and MIT along with unreported support from several high-tech compute facilities. Sammy T., a Florida retiree, was laughing at his wife’s comments in a recent interview when Adele T. said, grinning furiously: <blockquote> “Sam can be 30 again, while I have to deal with the sexual issues of “Co-Viagra” Vaccine. It's put the world on 'tilt.' ” </blockquote> You read that correctly, like many blood-pressure-reducing treatments, the possible reconfiguration of angiotensin substrates have a net effect of lowering blood-pressure, acting very much like full-body viagra in men — and women. Sammy looked on affectionately at his pink-cheeked wife of 40 years, “It’s like she’s had a face-lift!” Several medical authorities have disputed the effects, notably Canadian Psychologist Jordan Peterson, pointing out that stress reduction from “getting their room cleaned up” as well as “standing up straight to COVID” could account for the entirety of the post-vaccination effects. <blockquote> “Sure, I’d have an increased libido and look younger too if I didn’t have to worry about dropping dead in a Pandemic.” </blockquote> The CDC didn’t respond to requests for access to long-term data on correlations between hypertension, libido, skin presentation, which some conservative medical groups have claimed is “Wanting to keep Red-Blooded American Men and Women in the dark on the true mood-elevating and passion-drive benefits of COVID Vaccination.”  Meg Fury, former conservative columnist and Texan Trump supporter, has claimed “It all makes sense:” <blockquote> “The Liberals want to keep COVID vaccination to themselves, and suppress information about the Cocoon effect — why do you think they’re not giving it to 18-year-olds! Hell! My 18-year-old would explode!”  </blockquote> When asked about the effect in a private conference recently, Dr. Athony Fauci grinned and averred that he “Knew nothing about it.” Soon everyone will, perhaps, except for those hesitating to be vaccinated.  rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) coocooneffect Covid hesitancy Snark tongue-in-cheek trump Vaccine vaccinehesitancy _2021504 Wed, 17 Mar 2021 18:21:24 +0000 25% of Blood Donations With Antibodies: WSJ Will Pull Prior Claim of 50% Immunity? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/3/15/2021241/-25-of-Blood-Donations-With-Antibodies-WSJ-Will-Pull-Prior-Claim-of-50-Immunity Back in February another laughable COVID story by By Marty Makary appeared in Wall Street Journal with the key takeaway line “...about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.” (Read it here: <a href="https://apple.news/AUfW5zRTSSJiuPO0VNZxcfQ" target="_blank">apple.news/..</a>) One wonders how a financial paper tolerates such poor math reasoning instead of sample data, but it’s been par for the course now since April last year. Claims over and over in different outlets essentially saying “Cases are a zillion times higher than Scientists are willing to admit.” Makary, from the normally reliable Johns Hopkins, delivers it al. The article has dubious mathematical extrapolation, not peer-reviewed or research-based, scientists are conspiring to holding back key information, and is not written by an Epidemiologist (a surgeon), and has a book to sell. Magic!  A particularly bad version of this kind of press came from Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who was routinely dismissed after sponsoring and promoting studies “proving” COVID is widespread and people are alarmist. He, of course is Doctor but not an epidemiologist, but a medical economist. Bhattacharya also was a signatory to the “Great Barrington Declaration” which advocated essentially doing nothing about Covid, we’ll All rapidly have group immunity. His “proof” studies both signed and secret were refuted for failing elementary long division. I kid you not.  [ I intensely dislike “herd immunity”, and prefer “group immunity” or better yet the “Wheel of Fortune” style rhyming and happy-sounding “community immunity”, a dual to “community transmission.” Humans are not herd animals. ]   Today, CNN reports that the Red Cross, in testing blood for COVID antibodies as far back as last year found something quite fascinating. (Read here: <a href="https://apple.news/ABHQfSD8zRViH-N3kc5mAfQ" target="_blank">apple.news/...</a>) <blockquote> ”According to data shared with CNN over email, about 1.5% of donations tested in the first week of July were positive for Covid-19 antibodies. That increased to nearly 4% of donations tested in the first week of October, about 12% of donations tested in the first week of January and nearly 21% of donations tested in the first week of March. </blockquote> Dr Jay claimed 10-20% positive for the same period the Red Cross claims 1.5%. These are of course not random samples (I don’t know how many people under 18 or over 75 donate blood) but asymptomatic COVID, the core assertion of “Most of us had Covid already” is very unlikely to be anywhere near what has been stated by Dr Jay or Dr Marty. Its a shame that medical reporting is politicized — underestimating Covid is a standard, repeating message by conservative media. It’s a shame that doctors are presenting information as through they are epidemiologists instead of bad arithmeticians. It’s a shame that confusing messages are being propagated. Don’t go financial media for medical information. Don’t go to medical media for investment information. Everyone will be happier.    Now, will the WSJ update with relevant information? I doubt it. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) communityimmunity Covid herdimmunity RedCross WallStreetJournal WSJ _2021241 Tue, 16 Mar 2021 04:03:22 +0000 Ohio Plain Dealer: Progress on Political Trolls https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/3/15/2021236/-Ohio-Plain-Dealer-Progress-on-Political-Trolls As reported in the Washington Post <a href="https://apple.news/AGRo4iZ5GSLGJ7unOPtnmRQ" target="_blank">apple.news/</a>… the Cleveland Plain Dealer has decided to “ignore inaccurate statements” made by Josh Moore. He has adopted the standard M.O. of trolls by making incendiary statements which used to guarantee media coverage.    <blockquote> “[Quinn’s]decision is a marked departure from conventional journalistic wisdom that politicians’ statements inherently deserve coverage and that every story has at least two sides. Newsrooms across the country have increasingly reevaluated that approach because of President Donald Trump’s <a href="https://apple.news/AJN3Sp0r0PQ6VWklQLDqjFA">more than 30,000 false or misleading claims</a>, many of which dominated the news cycle and helped him amass a following.” </blockquote> As I’ve advocated in other postings, it’s simple for a reporter to make a factual statement like “Politician <X> made a series of false claims on subject <Y> today.” Or even better kick in standard troll delay: “This week, Politician <X> struggling for relevancy, continued to make false claims in an effort to gain attention and coverage.” Or even better, don’t repeat them at all. Speaking truth to power, the role of press is not repeating statements, but to identify operating truth, that the person continually lies. Once they begin repeating refuted claims, their press coverage should begin the process of ignoring their statements.    One day I’ll understand why that’s not standard procedure now, and why it wasn’t applied to Former Guy long before the first election began.   rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) ClevelandPlainDealer Formerguy JoshMandel Lying Ohio Press Republicanlying Trolling _2021236 Tue, 16 Mar 2021 01:56:28 +0000 Helping Hand: Bay Area Vaccinations https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/24/2017983/-Helping-Hand-Bay-Area-Vaccinations Over the last few weeks I reached out to friends who were struggling to get vaccination appointments in The SF Bay Area. I’ve posted in the past on how bad the vaccination system is and that there are very simple changes which would tremendously accelerate vaccinations.  I know simplification with the current system is not going to happen. But my friends over 65 were not going to spend the day clicking a website over and over and over to see if an appointment would suddenly emerge.   What I ended up doing is creating what in business parlance is a “Robotic Process Automation” (RPA). My Robot would log into their healthcare provider on internet and check for the nearest open vaccination date. If a date was found it would immediately request the time for my friend, and if it got confirmation it would text me and my friends with the date, time, location, and contact. If I didn’t see them respond, I have a quick call to ensure they knew they had an appointment. The robot would look every 10 seconds for an open vaccination spot, and operated completely without supervision on my Apple Laptop. Easy Peasy. I find it ludicrous of course that people have to resort to such tools, end entirely inequitable because of course not everyone has internet, can use websites, much less such tools.  My first person got an appointment within 2 hours, and was instructed to get in an Uber and go to a vaccination site within 30 minutes. The 2nd, 3rd and and so on got appointments generally within a few hours — people do cancel appointments all the time.    I’d like to be of more help. If you are an older people struggling in the Bay Area, I’d be happy to work with them to see if I can adapt the Robot for your healthcare provider. I only ask for patience in return. These things are not Magic. I think KOS has a decent message system which I’ll check daily.  rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid Covidvaccine SF SFBay _2017983 Thu, 25 Feb 2021 04:29:16 +0000 Necropublican: The Party of Death? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/24/2017835/-Necropublican-The-Party-of-Death I collect anecdotes, articles, stories and books on a wide variety of subjects (I have a crazy reading list), and from time to time I begin to group themes together. A book I read many years ago <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mutants-Genetic-Variety-Human-Body/dp/0142004820" target="_blank" title="">Mutants, On Genetic Variety and the Human Body</a> had an enormously rich subject base. One thread connected to height, which in absence of testosterone (lets say, by castration) can lead to people who effectively grow taller throughout life — A Capon vs a Rooster for animals, a Castrati versus an ordinary Tenor in humans. That connects to a magazine article in the New Yorker <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/04/05/the-height-gap" target="_blank" title="">The Height Gap</a> about how Americans aren’t getting taller, which in turn connects to an article at NIH about Girls given Injections to keep them short: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598084/" target="_blank" title="">How tall is too tall? On the ethics of oestrogen treatment for tall girls</a> — something awful is going on in Norway, Iceland, Sweden… In my head this begins to connect to early menarche in US girls, accelerated epiphyseal fusion, lavender-induced ‘xenoestrogens’ in boys causing breast tissue growth, and then on to the NIH again with  <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5012964/" target="_blank" title="">Genetic and Environmental Factors in Hypospadas</a> — what gives men shorter cocks, with flattened heads and the opening positioned on the underside rather than the tip, and can drive towards smaller cocks and ‘microphallis’.  Throw in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fast-Food-Nation-Dark-All-American/dp/0547750331" target="_blank" title="">Fast Food Nation</a> and correlating the use of phthalate-soaked plastic instead of glass bottles in the 70’s which strangely linked exactly to exactly when American height stopped growing, men’s cocks seemed to have exponentially more developmental problems, American weight overall started skyrocketing (people in photos from the 70’s were skinny!) . Atrazine, of course, completes the picture <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/107/10/4612" target="_blank" title="">Atrazine induces complete feminization and chemical castration in male African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis)</a> — it’s an extremely widely used herbicide. Introduced in the US in 1959, its use grew in the 60’s and it became widespread in the 70s’. When genital deformations became more common in men. When US humans stopped growing taller. When people started becoming much heavier. Coincidence, correlation, causation, I can’t say. That’s a bit how my mind works.  On to Republicans and Conservatives, generically. In collecting anecdotes, I began taking notice of people dying. Take for instance <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States" target="_blank" title="">Mass Shootings in the US</a>. Nobody likes mass shootings, of any party. But it’s a peculiarly extreme Republican that attempts to convince us that even with slaughter of entire elementary school groups in Connecticut, festivals in Las Vegas, a Church in Texas, a Church in Charleston, the list is endless, that we are to be convinced that more guns are the best solution while <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-stop-more-crimes-evidence-shows/" target="_blank" title="">research shows the opposite</a>. This leads unfortunately to the peculiarly extreme Republican become mainstream and advocating for more guns, leading to more death. Death at the hands of Police — even Police on Police — has a strangely muted response, especially of course Black people in the hands of Police. Children dying due to lack of medical care — well CHIP (Child Healthcare Insurance) was put in place under Clinton, but it expired under Trump (2017) and then reinstated (2018) after pretty much a lot of pressure. Killing of Adults by execution in the US <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55236260" target="_blank">accelerates</a> under Republican administrations. <a href="http://%20https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1081152" target="_blank" title="">War criminals</a> are pardoned under republican administrations. This has led me to a view, which tires my friend in conversations, that the Republican party is the connecting factor in escalation of death in the US. I can’t cite everything but let’s see: <div class="table-wrapper"> <table border="0" class="dk5-table"> <thead> <tr> <th></th> <th>Death Age Group</th> <th>Republican Focal Points</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <th></th> <td> Infant Death Early Childhood Death Teenage Death Early adulthood Adulthood Late Adulthood Retirement & Elderly  </td> <td> <ul> <li>Halt of funding for planned parenthood and other pre-natal care organizations.</li> <li>Contraceptive access</li> <li>Supplemental nutrition.</li> <li>Federal Death Penalty</li> <li>State Death Penalty</li> <li>Overturning ACA.</li> <li>Fighting Medicaid.</li> <li>Critical infrastructure (Water, Electricity) deregulation.</li> <li>Advocating guns in response to Gun Violence.</li> <li>War crimes death.</li> <li>Workplace safety.</li> <li>Fighting Medicare.</li> <li>“Grandma can die for the freedom of her kids:” COVID and no masks, no distancing, no management.</li> <li>Refusal of refugees of war and violence</li> <li>Cutting benefits in Social Security for the Elderly</li> </ul> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> These are just some items I have collected notes and articles on. What triggered me on this is a nice summary article <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/02/24/the-gops-ayn-rand-death-cult-trumps-party-is-literally-killing-the-american-people/" target="_blank" title="">The GOP's Ayn Rand death cult: Trump's party is literally killing the American people</a> from Salon, which is worth reading.  The killer line is <blockquote> In addition, <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n439" target="_blank" title="">since 1980 public policies have reduced Americans' lifespans by 3.4 years as compared to the other "advanced" countries in the G7</a> (with data included through to 2018). America's public health problems considerably predate Trump's tenure in office — but his regime made them much worse.  </blockquote> So it’s not me stringing articles together from books and short-form writers, it’s a measurable outcome. Shocking is barely the word. I’m curious as to other opinions from Readers on how Republicans have become a “party of death”. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) CapitalPunishment Covid-19 Medicaid Obamacare Republican republicandeathmachine War WarCrimes WorkPlaceSafety _2017835 Wed, 24 Feb 2021 15:59:57 +0000 How Not To Report: Donald Trump & Vanity Fair https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/22/2017591/-How-Not-To-Report-Donald-Trump-Vanity-Fair I have been writing about anti-social social media recently, and about trolls and complicity of media in giving Trolls a platform to enrage and upset people.  Vanity Fair, which has generally fun though snarky reporting today delivered an object example of what I feel needs to stop.    President #45 issued a “statement” today about the Supreme Court Ruling which, as expected, communicated his self-involved fantasies about the election, as well as his unhappiness with the motives for investigation of his potentially criminal tax evasions. Notice that I didn’t merely repeat his statement claims. I communicated the essence. I’m not a gifted write or reporter, but I think anyone with a grasp of English could summarize 45’s points as reporting (certainly we all expected the bitter denunciation) without essentially a word-for-word repetition. Trolls, and 45 is a troll, live for their words being repeated and causing unhappiness, without sense or reason. In my opinion, Both “fun” reporting like Vanity Fair, and serious reporting from, for instance, New York Times should be able to report on a troll subject without platforming them.  Vanity Fair unfortunately reported verbatim 45’s statement. Admittedly it was to be catty — “Like a Man Who Knows Prison Is in His Future”. Unfortunately any frivolity is negated with adding his misinformation to the miasma that surrounds him in general.    I wish we could send a message to news sources to adjust their “writing” away from stenography. It would make life much more pleasant in the long run, still leaving us informed. I’m happy to read the original some year after 45 is in jail as a biographical note; it’s on my “Fuck this shit list” otherwise known as Fuckit list, right after jamming razors under my fingernails or being on “The Bachelor”.    Question: what would you rather do, as part of a fuckit list, than ever read another word from 45 for all eternity? Love to hear. Meanwhile I read any article mentioning 45 with apprehension. At least the nauseating quoted tweets are gone. Progress!   rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) DonaldTrump Recommended trump trumpcriminalinveatigation TrumpFinancials trumpstatement trumpsupremecourt trumptaxes VanityFair _2017591 Tue, 23 Feb 2021 03:38:50 +0000 Harvard Prof Says: No Design Flaw in Texas Grid https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/19/2017091/-Harvard-Prof-Says-No-Design-Flaw-in-Texas-Grid My family and I lived in Houston from January 2000 to February 2016, and in that time we enjoyed multiple Hurricanes, Tropical Storm Floods, an entire year without any appreciable rain (2011). In the years since I left, there were “100 year floods” three times.    On top of such extremes, there was temperature shifts. Most people are aware of the steamy searing summers, not unlike New Orleans in intensity, but people are always surprised that it gets jarringly cold. We had a superb bougainvillea when we moved and a backyard full of what we thought were fairly robust palms. Then after a few years we hit the first hard freeze, about 15f. It killed one palm, stunted most of the others, and killed the bougainvillea pretty much back to the roots. We also had gigantic Staghorns hung on our fence under the palms, on yard-wide wooden plaques a friend made:  they were bustled off to the garage the moment we got the freeze warning.    The bougainvillea recovered slowly, the palms were replaced. Then the next hard freeze for several days came. Then the next. Several times in Dallas for work in winter months, I had to deal with what felt like sub-zero temperatures. Cold is not typical in winter as far south as Houston. Texans, however, always expected an arctic blast at times. Meteorologists always explained it as a cold jet stream excursion. Every time. Many times over the decades. Today I had to burst out laughing at a quote from one Mr. William Hogan, a Harvard Economist, in the Wall Street Journal: <blockquote> William Hogan, an energy economist at Harvard University who helped design the Texas market, said this week’s blackouts weren’t indicative of a major design flaw, but rather inevitable imperfections stemming from extraordinary weather challenges. </blockquote> I dropped my phone laughing folks. The way I read this is “the entire system failing for better part of several days and destroying water distribution for untold thousands, killing many from a single point of failure...” no that’s not a major design flaw. Texas, the state, is an extraordinary weather challenge even in the decade and a half I lived there. The  iidea that an economist can “design a market” rather than the electrical grid system itself to be resilient to rather mundane weather — sub-freezing in Houston and Dallas and Abilene and Austin and Amarillo isn’t extraordinary, for days at a time, and clearly within the range of possibilities — well here we are!    I am finding more and more that when there is a catastrophic failure of some kind, that an economist is involved. A medical economist says “let them all get Covid”. An economist says “here’s the perfect electrical grid”. An economist says “cut taxes for the rich”. And we all face the result. I’m now waiting for an economist to tell us about race, about gender and about schools. That ought to really work out well. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) coldweather Economics Harvard Recommended Texas texasfreeze texasgrid texaspower texaspowerrputage _2017091 Sat, 20 Feb 2021 01:40:17 +0000 The Demon of Speed: Anti-Social Media https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/18/2012811/-The-Demon-of-Speed-Anti-Social-Media -- This is the last of a small series of articles “Anti/Social” discussing why I have not ever, and won’t use popular social media platforms, why I’d advise readers of Kos and their friends not to either... Life’s too short to spend time being outraged by computer systems designed and built by trolls (oh, those trollgorithms, let’s call engagement algorithms by what they are...) to seduce with ‘friendship’, then once you’re hooked, deliver an outrage machine. I first was aware of Facebook, Twitter, and even back to MySpace, my instant reaction was “what a nightmare”, and I had no interest or even curiosity in participating.  There are two preceding pieces — <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/1/2012807/-A-Cesspool-of-Melancholy-The-Anti-Social-Media" target="_blank" title="">A Cesspool of Melancholy</a> and <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/9/2012809/-A-Suppuration-of-Trolls-Anti-Social-Media" target="_blank">A Suppuration of Trolls</a> in which I walk through a brief history of Usenet — the prototype of all social media systems, and it’s descent into the cesspool, facilitated by trolls, and how we can watch that behavior over, and over and over again.  <hr> I want to speak now to my fourth major observation: <h3>4 — The faster the flow, the faster the degradation of social media. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.</h3> Usenet, the prototype social media system from the ‘80s I’ve been mentioning, used to be slow, and connecting to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) which had Usenet, and grabbing gobs of data with a dial-up 2400-Baud Racal-Vadic Modem was tedious in the late 80’s and 90’s. Crap postings could actually be cancelled before they spread far and wide because message flow was all so entirely slow. Now, a crap posting (today, ideally, a troll posting about Quanon containing some hideous pornographic image) can be circulated via Usenet within fractions of a second. Well, same with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… When you read that the prior Administration posted something misleading about voting, then there are always 3-4 lines which follow in a news article — “but before facebook could ‘tag’ the posting as violating some arabesque of propriety, it had already been read by “10,000,000” people, the video downloaded “300,000,000” times and reposted continuously, and the troll posting it responded with “outrage” that their first amendment rights to throw shit were trampled on.” I read that a YouTube posting telling people some brazen fiction about Vaccines, or sponsorship to organize a Far-Right terror rally “can’t be caught” before it’s been distributed to tens of millions of people — really? We’re speaking of an “oops” moment? Organizations that can target ads to people by age, religious affiliation, skin pigmentation, what kind of car they like, where they’ve been on vacation, what they’re talking about with friends, what kind of birth control they’re searching for, what kind of issues they’re having with their spouse — these organizations can’t figure out how to block anti-vaccination postings? Why is that? Honestly, when you read the same news story 5, 10, 1000 times, you begin to realize that the instantaneous distribution and outrage is by design. The Trolls, in the case of modern fast unmoderated media, actually design and are running the social media system. Yep! What I feel is that systems like Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and Tik-tok are actually designed by Trolls for Trolls, the more I read about them. The design of the prototype Social Media Usenet was perfect for attracting and retaining Trolls, but it had one flaw. Information was slow to travel, and generally users were unaware of what everyone else was reading, perhaps shocked by, and responding to. But it’s gotten so much better now. The social media itself measures reader ‘engagement’, and queues up more and more outrageous content automatically,  content naturally coming from a wide variety of troll species. It’s designed to be a machine of outrage, no matter what you read about clever algorithms and filtering. It’s purely an effect of instantaneous mass distribution – virality, just like Covid. Trolls have built a system to guarantee that troll postings dominate all communication, are always the ‘most shared’ over time, and infect the most people with unhappiness. And when people object, and particularly horrible postings from the cesspool are, by some poor soul deleted, the ‘social media’ simply then points out that the cesspool posting by a troll troubled tens of millions of users, but it was ‘deleted’, and in pointing out the magnanamous restraint of their system, they naturally repeat “the posting telling people that Covid Vaccine causes ...” simply keeping the ball rolling. Horrible to realize isn’t it? I’m sure people do enjoy connecting with one another on Twitter, FaceBook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram… and so on. And then you lose control of the ‘feed’. You get “other friends” are reading feeds. And stories are forwarded to you because you know someone who knows someone. You watch an instruction video, and the next one that queues up, and starts automatically, is a little more aggressive. You’re in the socialverse, and your conversations begin to revolve more around what surprised you than what informed you. “Are you on instagram”, starts the pull into multiple feeds and sources, and instead of connecting with friends, you’re connecting with… people. Then you read a posting that makes you pause, unhappy, and want to respond. The Troll Factory keeps sending you more, and more, your original friends somewhat distant as you find a majority of your news is from Facebook. or YouTube. And it’s more raw, more awful, because it’s hypnotic and frightening, and compelling. When you are left unhappy reading, it’s time to stop. Leave social media. It’s a machine designed by trolls to endlessly troll. When I was reading about mass coordinated attacks in (Myanmar, Southern India, Kenya, Brazil, Germany, London, Oregon, the Capital...) on Facebook, or Whatsapp, or Instagram or Twitter or Reddit — I thought “wow’, that’s the specific design, the intent. The ultimate in trolling on social media is not just to upset people “ex machine”, but to get people upset enough to start to scale up their fears, anger, and depression in the real world. The faster the troll factory can feed them, without any connection to reality, the better it works, the more engaged, the more upset, and the more reactionary they become. That’s the design, I’m afraid. A tale of two postings then: One gives accurate information about where to vote, or successful strategies for avoiding COVID, or a strategy for exercising while in isolation. Anodyne, possibly uplifting, but easy-to-skip. Compare that with an incendiary posting about “voter fraud conducted by mail by some foreign or minority group trying to take over government”, or how you “may have already have had COVID, can you hold your breath for more than 2 seconds then you don’t need a vaccine”, or best of all the outrage over a “minor celebrity says they definitely were not at a Hollywood body fluid eating or virus-spreading party,” or perhaps “You won’t believe how Angie Dickinson looks today!”  The anodyne postings spread very slowly, but the lie/troll/cesspool postings spread like wildfire — nobody is vetting them, and within moments the OMG reflection system has spread the troll-jam far and wide. The system designed for the fastest flow of the most enraging content. However, a very simple principle would stop it all cold, and it involves only slowing down dissemination of a post, in effect, ensuring that viral anonymous troll posts never spread with speed humans clearly can’t manage. The “R0” of measles, spread through the air is 12-18 — one infection can spread to 12-18 other people — yes, the term ‘going viral’ is not a good thing - and soon you have zillions of infected people. Wear a mask, have a vaccine, enforce physical and time distancing — slow it down and the impact of virality is destroyed, and people live uninfected. Social media became the monster we know because of speed, and in particular, the speed at which completely anonymous content, from bad actors, can spread on the platform designed to spread the worst the fastest. Here’s an idea you don’t see: Stop using anonymous sites. Would you have unprotected anal sex with an anonymous person in the age of HIV? Reading, (and spreading!) untested postings by any source in the age of Internet has the same danger. Few or no media sites I know of, which have anonymous public access, have quality or content tests which actually matter. Reading postings on social media in Usenet, and apparently today, which had no human preview as to conforming to standards of decency is the mental equivalent to unprotected anal sex with in the age of HIV. Sorry to be so vivid, but count me out. You cannot ‘unsee’ cesspool content. I read postings here on DailyKos from KOS staff mostly. I’m not a staff member, this posting is relatively anonymous, and I’m generally not a troll as are most posters and responders here. KOS is both slow (I see postings usually a day or two after mainstream media), and managed. It’s human-scale, and it doesn’t have Trollery. I also read content on <a href="http://reason.com" target="_blank" title="">Reason</a>, a mirror-image of KOS. It’s one of my favorite Troll Honeypots. Besides the knee-jerk wildly negative response to any concept that doesn’t involve pure selfishness (yes, we’re talking Libertarian), their completely anonymous ‘hands off’ commentary to libertarian writing, you can in a few seconds get a feel for the zeitgeist, as when Covid writing came out and Trolls simply wrote, as you can imagine, about the benefits of accelerating death of undesirables. I was amused to see even hardened Reason Libertarians were shocked — shocked! and dismayed! — that other libertarians could be so unapologetically fascist and rabid.  Trolls love fast-response anonymous social media, so we have Twitter just for them. Here’s an idea you don’t see: Don’t “Tag” troll postings — remove the troll. Remember the Communications Decency act, which tagged records (God Bless Tipper Gore) to identify adult content? Or movies and now TV (contains scenes of nudity, drug use, body shaming, body shaving, nose-piercing, uncomfortable airplane seats and smoking cigarettes while drinking beer). Sounds like a movie I’d end up watching. Can you imagine Disneyland allowing people into the parks with Measles, but requiring them to wear purple sweaters? Why would they be there at all? It’s crazy! Tagging increases visibility of a posting, increases visibility to a troll, and elevates cesspool content. As the adage goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The bad thing is simply disappearing. Here’s an idea you don’t see: Freeze troll postings. Any basic damaging posting which has a delay in being viewed and shared, which can be isolated, identified, cancelled or ‘treated’ for virality, will have a very low, to no spread rate. No posting of a beheading should ever have a million views before being ‘taken down’. We should learn something about controlling hackers and passwords. When you try a password in many systems, if you make a mistake more than a few times, then there’s a pause before you can login again. 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute. It won’t stop a hacker from trying, but it makes it very, very slow to crack a password. If a robot is trying to crack the password, it easily manages giant robot armies hacking away. They rapidly become unusable. Why isn’t this an method for trolls? Freeze them. If you originate or spread a discredited post, you have a 24-hour delay up to the next post. If you have a 2nd discredited post, you have a 48-hour, then 96-hour, and so on delay, the anti-viral doubling delay. They delay is in proportion to your personal Troll R0.  The network of viral troll postings gets an exponential slowdown which literally halts non-topic, incendiary, troll-lies immediately. There’s not ‘freedom of speech’, issue, just a ‘pollution of speech. Robot troll armies, everything hits molasses very quickly, and it becomes expensive to keep up the crap, and you simply can’t get responses, and people won’t spread for you. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, it should also replace laws concerning profanity and penalties on public TV networks. I couldn’t care less about profanity (lets scrap that!), but it certainly generates lots of breathless concern. Does anyone remember the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine" target="_blank">Fairness Doctrine</a>? Cleverly scrapped by an original Troll-in-Chief Reagan, this mandated that, for holders of communications licenses, in matters of public importance and controversy, they would be forced to broadcast other positions on the matter. What an idea! In fact, the US supreme court (8-0 ruling) found that the fairness doctrine was constitutional, and even applied to Teletext! Zowie! All gone in the 80’s. The FCC simply said, anyone can monopolize a communication resource from now on… So therefore we suddenly got trolls like Russ Limbaugh and others monopolizing radio time, Fox monopolizing network time… and Trolls effectively monopolizing Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… I’d rather hear that the FCC imposes a combination delay, and equal time troll penalty as a new version of “Fairness”— on Troll networks. One self-harm advisory (forget masks! gargle with Lysol!) imposes a one-hour block on their programming in prime-time, to be replaced with one-hour of “how to manage COVID” commercial-free for a week. The second event, a two-hour block free block in prime-time for a week. A statement by a troll personality communicating voting-machine libel — one hour block for a week. two hour block for a week… A politician communicating unmediated or mediated, debunked lies about voting, about Qanon simply results in under an ‘equal time’ rule an exponentially increasing amount of time devoted to the facts. Speakers are free to say what they want. But distribution networks are held accountable for damage and speed of misinformation.  Another idea you never hear: Never quote a troll.    Generalize around troll communication when referencing it or you become the problem. Quotes and citations merely continue to provide exact duplicates of troll information with ludicrously ineffective disclaimers (see the purple sweater in Disneyland from my original post). The information flows continues to zip along at the speed of affrontery:   <blockquote> John Doe claimed he was acting on authentic “Votes were changed, and the election was a fraud.” information when he assaulted police officers, information known to be is false.  </blockquote> Still Troll-talk on a high-speed network: both a great callout for John Doe and that less-than-useful ‘false’ label.    <blockquote> When arrested for assaulting police officers in a recent riot that lead to 5 deaths, and hundreds of injuries, John D. offered a confused explanation that his actions were directed by, and in response to bizarre, anonymously spread conspiracy theories and legally discredited false statements made by the losing electoral candidate. </blockquote> The Demon of Speed is tamed. Troll postings freeze on social (and other) media, and where necessary, wrapped in clear but protective language. We’re not wired for intellectually managing high-speed viral Troll lie distribution. So rewire the distribution back to human speed. Or, as I advocate, stop using social media. Stop being part of the problem!   Finally, probably the last social media observation: <h3>5 — Social media is not a conversation, it’s a recording.</h3> Recently I read some usenet posts I made back from the mid-80’s in a kind of ‘best of’ archive’, along with “Deja-News” which was taken over by Google. Folks, we’re speaking of 40 years ago, was I aware that my postings would be archived and ‘recorded’ for all time? Of course, when I made the postings, there was a small audience who was used to my peculiar humor, and it was all fun.  Then there was the day a few years later I talked with someone from Johns-Hopkins, and found a posting I had made was printed out and put on bulletin boards, still humorous but faintly… disturbing. Not distribution I intended. When I chat with friends, I don’t imagine that what I say is recorded, and can be played back at any time. It’s just… talking. As social media created the ability to ‘chat’ with many people simultaneously, at a distance, it also began to lull people in to feeling that an online chat and an in-person chat were the same. They’re not. We all laugh when a politician posts something which is childishly simple to challenge from one of their prior postings, or a video, or a tweet, you name it. “Gosh, didn’t they know that everything they do or say on internet is permanent?” Unfortunately, Usenet also signaled to me that for us, ordinary people, everything we do or say ‘on internet’ is recorded, and more or less permanent, and fully accessible to Trolls. Don’t people find it startling when software mines their conversations and presents a ‘timeline’ 5-10 years prior? Ugh! The first time is startling, as my friends show me their ‘timelines’. The second time is creepy, and it grew into a very creepy feeling for me. My Usenet observations from only 30 years ago, that everything even then was a recording, is all too true. Social media makes everything you do — everything you post, click on to read, click on to forward — a permanent recording. Would you want exactly the wrong person to get your reading history on Facebook? It’s there… it’s been recorded.   For a strange digital project I’m working on in Artificial Intelligence, I found that I can download years of postings from, say, Reddit, or Usenet or other sites, for training an AI. My Usenet postings of 40 years ago are ‘online’. And I have no say in the matter - for most social media the presumption is I gave up all rights to my own conversation while using the media tool. Does everyone realize that? No. My own postings from decades ago are now raw material for something entirely different. Do you realize your social media usage is the same? We simply aren’t wired or trained yet to understand, to feel that everything we ‘say or do’ online in social forums is not a real-world conversation. It is patiently digitally recorded, then indexed, then merged into databases, so that people you don’t know and can’t see, aren’t even aware of, are searching and reading and ‘mining’ for ways to convince you put more of your private conversations online to store, and index and mine and… I don’t know about you, but I’d rather talk to friends personally and enjoy the moment without the inhibitions that come when we know recordings are going on. There are people who seem to not care about privacy. There was a period when we read about college students posting bleary post-party-binge pictures online, then were desperately trying to delete them later, or postings which created drastically negative impressions for jobs, or for police searches, or perhaps… political searches and purges. Suddenly some of them came to their senses.    The older people get, the more they appreciate privacy, and perhaps begin to understand why transferring social contact to social media isn’t such a hot idea. What you did 10-20 years ago has a way of showing up perhaps at exactly the wrong time, because your information in social media isn’t yours, it is read and indexed and searched and shared by people you don’t know for purposes you can’t imagine. Count me out. The evil magic comes when the Trolls then find social media — in other words, recordings - , and then use them to foster irritation, to upset people, divert conversations, create ad-hominen attacks of the maximum number of people possible, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Do you remember what you said 10 years ago when irritated at a neighbor and perhaps, just perhaps, said something you might regret, or might come learn is abusive (though at the time felt acceptable). Social media remembers, and will hold it against you forever. Ugh! That’s the perfect dystopia — social media, access to all your past (recorded activities), handed over to a troll to create sharply enraging content, propagated faster than can be shut-down, and with trollgorithms designed to generate the maximum outragement. Lovely! Private information on social media is a fantastic drug for trolls. Doxxing, is a powerful form of trolling focused on spreading private information — addresses, phone numbers, visits to a sex club, payments to a prostitute…. spreading the information about a person far and wide. It may stem possibly from the concept of ‘outing’ hypocritical politicians who were anti-gay in in public and very pro-gay in bed. With social media — demon speed, forever data, anonymous trolls, descent into melancholy — it takes on an inhuman dimension.     Another really atrocious troll system is one is a deepfake annealing someone’s face to a porn-star’s body in a video. Or publishing private sexual conversations — executives and Politicians know all about that now. It’s all recorded, forever. Finding privately shared pictures which became public. Pictures of your children. Private emails. Treasure troves for humiliation. Every posting, conversation, every picture and joyous moment posted in social media can become part of the cesspool of memes, doctored images stealing lives, spread with demonic, uncontrollable speed at the moment when you’re most vulnerable. Does that sounds fun? Positively Social? Enough on these topics perhaps. So, that’s why I’m kind of “Anti/Social Média” – in the non-digital world I actually have a lot of friends and acquaintances, love long involved conversations and tall tales, enjoy all-evening dinners and all-day lunches and events with friends and family, and maintain a network of contact with people worldwide from decades of traveling for work and pleasure/ Just not on social media. It’s effortless. I’ve never been attacked or trolled in the last 20-30 years, I don’t worry about private subjects being broadcast. My interactions are valuable, for the most part at human speed, and I learn things from people. Just not on social media. Social media are all the same, it’s about the name changing as the old systems become polluted. Usenet becomes AOL becomes Myspace becomes Facebook becomes Twitter becomes Instagram becomes Reddit becomes 4chan becomes Snapchat becomes Baidu becomes Tiktok. Do you really want to subject yourself accidentally to reading or spreading troll hate? Do you want to subject yourself to the melancholy of instagram “Troll” influencers, or the humiliation of “where did those photos come from”? Do you want to get into a screaming fight with someone who doesn’t care, and enjoys being insulted? Do you want to read from trolling ‘expert’ economists giving medical advice? Do you want to worry about whether the neighbor next door is a rabid racist, and what you need to do? Then ‘keep connected!’ and realize that in the long run, it may just not be so good for you. And, count me out. And I always advise, count yourself out too. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 4chan 8chan Facebook Instagram Myspace Pinterest Politics reddit SciTech Snapchat SocialMedia Society tiktok Twitter Usenet YouTube _2012811 Thu, 18 Feb 2021 14:20:25 +0000 Mean Girls 2: The SF Skool Board https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/15/2016296/-Mean-Girls-2-The-SF-Skool-Board On another lighter note, tonight as I watch local news, there’s a double-header on the SF School Board, which continues to have no plan for children to re-enter schools: their new priority is to humiliate volunteers as they continue to fail history exams in attempting to rename empty buildings.  When you have all the cards — most liberal city in the country, diverse, politically involved population, a liberal-led and eminently successful response to COVID by an extremely popular Mayor who happens to be Black and a Woman… how do you fuck it up to the level that the Mayor is suing the school board instead of being a model of progressive success? By continuing to act as of “Mean Girls 2: School Board” while failing history tests with crib notes from Wikipedia.    We now have a well-documented example of a humiliating two-hour public discussion, in front of the volunteer and audience, of whether they would “accept” them. Not a single question, not any referral to background or suitability, but the entire discussion rotated on the person’s perceived race, “white”. The fact that the entire volunteer body was women, the volunteer (volunteer!) was GLBT in a city where GLBT children are still bullied, nothing seemed to materialize in the boards minds that there are different kinds of diversity than race…. publicly stating that they didn’t want a white person as a volunteer (Volunteer! School volunteer! Two Hours! The only Male!) All I could think of was Lindsey Lohan in “Mean Girls”. I can’t wait until election seasons rolls around because I want every single board member subject to withering public criticism, and removed. Under the guise of “progressive politics” I see the board visibly acting like idiots and tarnishing a valuable progressive agenda achieved by amazing people — like the Mayor. It’s actually hard for me to consider the stupefying rudeness of holding someone silent in a meeting for two hours while discussing them... Mean Girls!   On a related note, the board also continues to receive actual historic information on the Harry-Potterish Schools-Which-Must-Be-Renamed as they delete names which don’t meet their exacting standards (I’m waiting for a Renaming away from San Francisco). A school with the word “Sánchez” in its name was on the chopping block because it seemed to have been named after… a 17th or 16th century conquistador? Or actually, like Sánchez street, named after an early Mexican Mayor of San Francisco… but they continue to refuse historians’ support. A school board who doesn’t consult historians on history is a board I have a very hard time imagining is consulting, well, Doctors about Children’s health in COVID!  <a href="https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/28/2012602/-San-Francisco-Skool-Board-Unable-to-Write-Or-Reason-Deplatforms-Feinstein-Edison-Lincoln-Trees" target="_blank">More</a> from a previous article.  And there’s a great New Yorker article on the debacle which must be read to be believed.  <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-renamed-its-schools" target="_blank">www.newyorker.com/...</a> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) covidschools Racism SanFrancisco schoolrenaming _2016296 Tue, 16 Feb 2021 03:44:08 +0000 A Suppuration of Trolls: Anti-Social Media https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/9/2012809/-A-Suppuration-of-Trolls-Anti-Social-Media This is the second of a small series of articles “Anti/Social” discussing why I have not ever, and won’t use popular social media platforms, and why you probably shouldn’t either, if you want to remain a happy, centered, adult. This is about Trolls. My previous posting is <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/1/2012807/-A-Cesspool-of-Melancholy-The-Anti-Social-Media" target="_blank">Here.</a> <hr> I want to speak here to my second major observation: <h3>2 — All social media always attracts ‘trolls’ who publicly and cruelly antagonizing the maximum number of people possible, without reason or purpose.</h3> A suppuration of trolls always appear in social media. (I like “suppuration”: there is no collective noun for Trolls. In other writing, my new favorite term is a “conjugation of porn stars.”). The suppuration appears sometimes slyly, like a tingle on your lip then suddenly there’s a massive herpes lesion — unhappiness. The suppuration then abruptly causing chaos (trolls appear even in lightly moderated context — J.K. Rowling probably doesn’t even realize she’s a twitter troll).  There are so many different types of trolls on social media, it’s hard to really consider them all. There’s the basic vitriolic troll (“all of you must die” is a common type message). There’s the threat troll (“I know where you live”). The insult troll (“Can a human be as stupid as you? Yes!”), the oblivious troll (“Why don’t you people people just buy real estate instead of whining about rent control?”), the ‘splaining troll (“You should really try breastfeeding. It’s better for your baby.”), the concern troll (“I support feminism, but wouldn’t they get further if they weren’t so anti-male?”), and a new breed of influence troll (“Breakfast at the beach in Bali just feels safer in the pandemic, you should think about it, here’s a photo”), and the injured party troll (“It upsets me to hear biological men called women, it’s just crazy.”).  It doesn’t seem quite to be an effect of anonymity (Trump and Rowling are instant counterexamples) though anonymity certainly accelerates troll-colonization of social media. It  seems related to ‘ultracrepidarianism’ (a recent favorite word) – ‘being expert in a field you are not qualified in’ a little bit, it’s also about confusing facts with opinions and feeling, sometimes the need to always have the last word, perhaps just being a bully - there are so many troll behaviors I’ve seen in Usenet in the 80’s, discussed in the prior article, it’s hard to really understand the underlying model, but the outcome is always the same – people getting upset by what they read, censoring what they may write, and ultimately abandoning the platform. To me, it’s simply an outcome of unmoderated social media. The conversations always dive to the lowest common denominator, which is usually insults, and when the trolls are most successful, paradoxically, everyone abandons the platform. Knowing Trolls Internet fostered the creation of “Godwin’s Law”  in the early 90’s, in which the longer a conversation grows on internet (substitute social media here), the higher the likelihood that one or more contributors will be compared to Hitler. When you’re in a Godwin-heading conversation, you’re working with trolls. Valuable use of time? Made you feel better? Nope — time to go! The Trolls have taken over. What Usenet, from my first article, didn’t have as troll behavior was modern technology mutations - networks of trolls (conspiracy networks), cancel trolls, video upload trolls, troll robots (no human being involved!). There are so many ways to upset people now, so many ways to bully, divert conversation and drive self-attention. It all looks the same to me in the end. It’s important to recognize that the moment you are reading something in social media which is intentionally infuriating - time to go! The Trolls have taken over! What’s fascinating is how attracted Republicans are to public media. There’s a reason. I could make the case that the entire visible Republican party is simply a gigantic suppuration of trolls, infecting media, spreading incendiary lies, diverting issues, and attempting to antagonize the maximum number of people possible for no reason other than to sour everyone on civic engagement — “abandon the platform!” Pure troll activity.  Troll Management There are troll management techniques we learned from Usenet in the 80’s. Here’s an example. I was speaking recently to a woman who headed up a reproductive rights organization in SF, who was clearly shaken, or pissed, with having to ‘managing responses’ on their public website to informational blogs. The depravity can be considerable. I told her that in the early ‘80’s, we found the simplest response to a troll message, aside from ignoring it, was a recipe.  Just post a recipe in response and the troll diversion dies instantly. Short recipes that can just be a keystroke macro work fine. <blockquote> Heat oil, lard, or fat in an 8-qt. Dutch oven over high. While whisking, sprinkle in flour until smooth, 1-2 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low; cook, whisking continually and slowly (to avoid hot splatters), and scraping the edges and sides of pan until roux turns the color of dark chocolate, 40-50 minutes for 1 cup of roux. </blockquote> She loved it, and I recall her husband looking startled, and happy that there were some simple lightweight tools she could use. Trolls had really taken their toll. When it’s possible to nullify responses from trolls with recipes or other humorous, but engaging media (economic statistics?) — but why does it kill troll talk? Three things happen: <ul> <li>The trolls are infuriated because clearly nobody cares, or responds further to their invective. Often they stop posting, but they are still lurking and will lash out.</li> <li>It makes a game out of troll riddance for some of those involved, and frankly we’re all curious about short, fun recipes, but the time and effort to purge infuriating posts  makes everyone, over time, tired.</li> <li>It’s easier to troll than to block. The coordinated blocking will, in the long run, tire people and fail. Entropy and noise always win if there’s no investment in energy and time.</li> </ul> But, it takes energy and time. And when faced with Demon Speed (later in this series), even the best automated recipe posting from the “The Joy of Cooking” wears down. Troll management at the individual level unfortunately becomes overwhelming, which leads me to another key observation. <h3>3 — Groups of people can coordinate responses to stop the cesspool of Troll, but they will always lose in the long run outside of moderated forums.</h3> The recipe post and other techniques can work on small scale, and did, but ultimately trolls added and added to Usenet groups, until the Usenet groups were completely unuseable — kind of the state for certain forums on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, on and on. Again, for what I see in social media, I hear substantial complaints which simply tell me that trolls, even ones that are conforming to ‘moderation’ are abundant. But there’s always (misplaced hope) that groups of people can coordinate responses to stop trash, but history proves that they will always lose in the long run. By moderation, of course, I mean imposing rules of engagement, and their being uniformly enforced on social media. Do not not attack people individually or in groups. Keep on topic. Do not advocate self-harm. Do not advocate violence. Do not commit Fraud. Do not commit libel. Do not advocate governmental overthrow, violation of civil rights. Do not threaten, coerce, or blackmail individuals to leave the platform. You know, “the honor system”. Active moderation ensures that communications meets standards before it is allowed to be seen by others. So simple! Over 10 years of Usenet – roughly all of the 80’s – in certain unmoderated and moderated groups, frequent posters and people with shared views found ways to counter bad behaviors by coordinating anti-troll activity. The “recipe” in the last posting is an example. But, with expansion, the inevitable problem comes that spam and troll messaging reaches such a volume that no team, or filters, can really stem the tide. New readers and posters come on all the time, and don’t understand or participated in coordinated management, and eventual real messaging simply ends up disappearing into chaos and junk. The people seeking for value from the social forum just leave, because it becomes a waste of time. What’s become interesting to me is that even externally moderated forums can become polluted by noise if there isn’t sufficient coordination and moderation. The pure volume of irrelevant information and lies, which conform to moderation but aren’t necessarily blocked or removed in ‘social’ media eventually also rises. In Usenet, it became impossible in certain groups to remove or cancel all spam. It became impossible to redirect irrelevant discussions to relevant groups. As noise rose, even those moderating and attempting control just gave up. The only coordinated way to manage was human review and approval of messages, which strikes many as ‘a bad thing’, but it’s no worse than masking real content through noise (the term “steaganography’, hiding information in noise, is probably relevant). One of the reasons I am a big fan of Wikipedia is because it’s so relentlessly curated and controlled, and stays relevant. Social media sites which aren’t relentlessly curated and controlled become irrelevant and simply die. So, ask yourself. Am I reading messages which infuriate me on a social network? The Have I reacted only to have the reaction make me even more furious? Is my news continually filled with irrelevant messages, are conversations diverted by tangential information intentionally, or even unintentionally? Do I feel more tired, more exhausted, and less informed after reading from a social media network? Are postings creating envy, sadness, feelings of inadequacy? Why are you bothering with it at all then? Trolls consume lives: your life, and the lives of others. That’s a reason I never use social media systems. (The kicker: (non-social) media systems which platform trolls, say network news, also become irrelevant and die. Just watch.) Next up: Fast Track Hell. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 4chan 8chan AOL Facebook Instagram Myspace Pinterest reddit Snapchat SocialMedia tiktok Twitter Usenet YouTube _2012809 Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:50:49 +0000 STFU! San Francisco Skool Administration, Unable to Read, Changes Own Name https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/2/2013649/-STFU-San-Francisco-Skool-Administration-Unable-to-Read-Changes-Own-Name On another light note: the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) administrative division formerly known as VAPA” (or Visual and Performing Arts) has “changed its name” to the “Arts Department” because “acronyms are a symptom of white supremacist culture.” Naturally I wanted to call NAACP for their 411 on “MLK” (my apologies, but the lugubrious irresistabity of endlessly using strings of letters or numbers is something no human could resist at this point) but first I wanted to learn more.   The reason cited by one BAMF who has a serious FIGJAM problem is a paper called “White Supremacy Culture“ <a href="https://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/4/3/5/7/43579015/okun_-_white_sup_culture.pdf" target="_blank" title="">www.dismantlingracism.org/…</a> (oh, gulp, which uses an abbreviation “DR” for dismantling racism, but not perhaps entirely an acronym in their branding: distinction without a difference? IDK maybe it’s just too DL for the likes of me) which somehow called out acronyms. Only naturally the acronym problem simply isn’t even referenced in the paper, not even really close. Another reading deficiency issue in the SF school system. Children aren’t in school, but we need to focus on increasingly bizarre artificial problems in education. Apparently empowering children with a fantastic education isn’t a priority. You can’t make this stuff up. Sadly.    Read more <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/san-francisco-school-acronyms-white-supremacy" target="_blank">Here!</a> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Childrenlast FUBAR Offtherails performativepolitics SanFranciso SFSDU VAPA WhiteSupremacy _2013649 Wed, 03 Feb 2021 03:51:11 +0000 Covid-19: Death Takes a Holiday for 60+: Near One-in-a-Million Fatality Chance after Vaccination https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/1/2013391/-Covid-19-Death-Takes-a-Holiday-Vaccination-Reducing-Fatality-to-Near-One-in-a-Million-Chance Cheerful news from the Israeli Ministry of Health — Israel has managed to vaccinate roughly 1.7 million people with the Pfizer vaccine. That’s about a third of their population (34% of the population) according to news blogs I’m watching and here’s the money shot in a recent blog: <hr> <blockquote> <h2>Over 60-year-olds:</h2> Data was collected from 668,100 people who were fully vaccinated. <ul> <li>Among them, 473 were diagnosed positive to Covid-19 (0.07%).</li> <li>Among those positive, 38 were hospitalized.</li> <li>11 were in serious condition.</li> <li>Three were in critical condition.</li> <li>Two died.</li> </ul> </blockquote> <ul> <li> This is roughly 15x the number of people who were vaccinated in the original trials for the Pfizer vaccine, and only in the over-60 population which has the highest chances of fatality from Covid.</li> <li>Only 2 deaths a week or more (initial date) after the final vaccination, is a 0.003% fatality rate. That’s stunning compared to what we would see without vaccination.</li> <li>I believe we are starting to looking at close to one-in-a-million chance of dying from COVID, for over-60. </li> </ul> I’m enormously relieved. Israeli Ministry of Health (If you can read Hebrew): <a href="https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general" target="_blank">Israeli Ministry of Health</a> Great Blog:, including information about all age groups and vaccinated/unvaccinated comparisons: <a href="https://coronavirus.medium.com/more-good-news-about-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-5633d9b16e2e" target="_blank">Good Covid News</a> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid-19 covid-news covid-vaccine Covidvaccine Pfizer Pfizer-vaccine _2013391 Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:54:07 +0000 A Cesspool of Melancholy: The Anti-Social Media https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/2/1/2012807/-A-Cesspool-of-Melancholy-The-Anti-Social-Media I was mildly shocked recently to read a statistic that 75% of Americans used Facebook, and I paused for a moment to think that I’ve never used Facebook, Twitter, or in fact any modern social media system. I thought it would be interesting to reflect a little on why this is true, and after the recent events in our administration, how simply shutting off ‘social media’ immediately brings peace. It shuts off a cesspool of melancholy. <hr> To qualify, I do read DailyKos and occasionally write on DailyKos, which is heavily moderated, and other forums such as Medium, but they are also fairly heavily moderated, and having read the moderated feedback from their readers, I feel it’s worth the effort to participate, definitely not a cesspool, but has its tinges of melancholy. When I first was aware of Facebook, Twitter, and even back to MySpace, my instant reaction was “what a nightmare” to these sites. I had no interest or even curiosity in participating. This reaction is still odd to many of my friends. I was thinking about my reaction, and wanted to write a little about why Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and similar ‘social media’ are, and always will be to me social deathtraps. 40 years ago I used a “media” system called “Usenet” (let’s call it a bulletin board, generically). Functionally, it’s pretty much identical to variations on Twitter, Facebook, DailyKos, Instagram, YouTube, (but not instant messaging) except of course it (at the time) wasn’t saturated with advertising. Usenet started (as all media seem to do) with the equivalent of uncharted, semi-anonymous blogs, of threads/responses, groups (moderated and open), it evolved to allow sharing images, music and video. On it, I experienced almost all modern digital social media issues – they are old, far older than people imagine perhaps, and have long been addressed by the usenet ‘pioneers’. Usenet access was originally limited to ‘elite’ Universities and technology research organizations, and no ‘spam’ — advertising — was allowed, by consensus. As internet evolved, Usenet eventually became accessible to everyone, anonymous, easily, and for free.  The minimum requirement of Usenet was the ability to connect directly or indirectly (1200 baud anyone?) to a provider which hosted usenet data, having elementary software to download and upload messages to the server on the Internet Service Provider or ISP (freely available on all pc platforms). Create a name for yourself connected to an email address (be your own email provider for full anonymity), and you can begin reading and posting. More detail <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet</a> Imagine, a blog/bulletin board/news feed that any anonymous person could post on, unlimited, with worldwide distribution, for free. What could go wrong? After a decade of Usenet, I learned exactly what goes wrong, and went wrong over and over. <blockquote> <ol> <li>All non-moderated digital ‘social’ media always devolves into pure trash.</li> <li>All social media always attract reactionary ‘trolls’ who publicly and cruelly divert, antagonize, and upset the maximum number of people possible, without reason or purpose.</li> <li>Groups of people can coordinate responses to stop trash, but they will always lose in the long run outside of moderated forums.</li> <li>The faster the messages flow, the faster the failure of the system to maintain civility will evolve.</li> <li>Digital social media is not a conversation , it is a recording, stored forever, out of your control and managed by organizations you neither can see nor trust.</li> </ol> </blockquote> For these reasons I basically don’t use any major digital ‘social media’. No Facebook, no Instagram, no YouTube, no Twitter, very light DailyKos (when DailyKos first came online, I tried a conversation and got Troll rolled instantly, under a different name; it’s more relaxed now.) I do read responses on some news sites with ‘social’ response areas to blogs (like reason.com) once every month or two because it gives me a ‘temperature reading’ of troll insanity. I use private messaging to chat with friends. I use email as a ‘last resort’, and have an array of addresses to deal with variously spam, authentic business, family, receipts, subscription mails. So, the first idea. <h3>1. All non-moderated digital ‘social’ media always devolves into pure trash.</h3> Today, all non-moderated groups (a group is similar to a facebook group or a twitter hashtag or a subreddit) on Usenet are unbelievable cesspools of spam and bottom-feeding trolls antagonizing each other. I used  Usenet over a 10-year period in the 1980’s, which at the time had nowhere near the reach of today’s internet. At first, it was a set of great groups (think Reddit, or YouTube channels, or Facebook Groups) with fairly sophisticated users, and fascinating freewheeling conversations which began shaping how internet culture would be thought and talked about. A lot of terminology ordinary today was originated in the ‘80s. The “:-)” smile emoticon is an example, or the “FAQ” — Frequently Asked Questions. Likewise “RTFM” and other acronyms. I remember beginning to see the smiley emoticon first it in Usenet, and suddenly it became completely natural.  After the 7th or so year being available, Usenet started to become, (ironically) ‘unusable’. Specialized groups — I used one unmoderated group allusively called ‘soc.motss’ for “Social Members of the Same Sex” which was devoted to conversations on lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transexual topics — well, that group became difficult. We would have the occasional “All gays must die” kind of posting, which in the early-80’s would cause a problem to the poster, who could always be identified by which academic institution the mail came from. It wasn’t pretty when the complaints went back to their boss, or academic advisor, or other administrative oversight. But, with opening access to Usenet to anyone who had a modem, the negative postings increased in frequency, and attacks against “blogs”, or “threads” or conversations increased dramatically. Spam began. Channels like motss suddenly had so much non-conversation that the first big group of posters on MOTSS began one by one to salute a farewell to contributing. Moderated channels persisted — postings had to be approved by a centrally selected group — but the vast majority of Usenet was moving towards Useless. By 1993, when I touched toes in the water of usenet again, it was completely unusable — and apparently had begun to have massive circulation of repulsive things like child pornography, ripped music, and virus-laden hijacked software, along with rotating malestroms of spam and vitriol. It was sad — there was so much promise, and I certainly made internet friends and buddies I cared about and met in ‘real life’ but our conversations now were entirely via private email. Some of my oldest friends and acquaintances — now counting almost 40 years — are from Usenet. Going back and reading ‘best-of’ postings, and seeing the promise, and seeing the reality highlights the melancholy, and vividly outlines the cesspool it had become.   Media, like any human information creation, has value in proportion to the energy and time put into it to make it meaningful. When there’s no effort, the value always goes to zero. I think of Effort as ‘paid contributions’ by writers (Washington Post, New York Times, Daily Kos), by team human moderation and curation (wikipedia), and by other methods which ensure the information presented doesn’t absorb enough noise to become meaningless. I like highly moderated, highly curated media — “The Root”, “Vox”, “The Dish”… the content has investment (though as Fran Leibowitz said of magazines, and I misquote “How can you spend much time reading something designed to be thrown away.”) Everyone here would enjoy “The Baffler.”  But Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… little or no investment, staggering noise to information ratio, and cesspools rank rank with trolls. Kos has high investment, Medium very high investment, Substack. Valuable. Interesting. Heavily moderated. When we speak of “fake news” or “Russian Disinformation”, or spam machines, bot armies, layered systems of conspiracy theories, that’s what I consider a cesspool. Maximum noise (think of thousands of junk postings per hour), no information, and actually engaging with this type of ‘social media’, it (to me) actually damages the ability to think rationally and sensibly, because it consumes time better spent enjoying life, learning, and engaging with friends and family, and substitutes the opposite effect. It’s the mental equivalent of going into a really grimy seedy public bathroom somewhere where there’s high foot traffic, and reading and writing messages on the wall as a pastime. Cue skin crawling. Cesspools also create ineffable sadness and melancholy, particularly “is humanity really this bad” kind of feeling. Rabid anonymous postings, threatening postings describing intimately grotesque fantasies of depravity the Marquis de Sade could only dream of, stealing peoples lives and shredding them publicly for entertainment, far surpassing Roman entertainments with lions and prisoners. I read “Reason.com” occasionally, one of the most ironically named websites that there could be. Declared Libertarian, in fact anarchic, but recently with Covid and discussion of “government misinformation — it’s no worse than the Flu! Only Old People die!” type postings, the responses — “Good riddance of oldies” and “need to cull out miniorities” — seemed to shock even the most jaded, hardened Libertarian. “Are we really this bad? Is this what libertarianism is about?” is the summary response. From me, a wry smirk, and a checklist that “Reason” had reached the cesspool of melancholy stage with no moderation, anonymous access, and hate- and rage-filled trolls having access. More on trolls later. Another cesspool element is Spam. Somehow, my email spam level has actually declined over many years. Wow! I’m not sure why I don’t receive offers for genital enlargement or Nigerian inheritances anymore. But on unmoderated Usenet groups, spam is huge and growing. Its easy to recognize there. It’s not so easy, yet, to recognize on Facebook and Twitter since spam and disinformation constantly mutates, but it’s there and growing, and consuming people’s life. It’s when you’re reading articles and suddenly what seems like an article is an advertisement. Deceit. When you’re reading someone, and you realize they’re not looking at an idea, they’re talking about something to buy. For you to buy. When you notice that 50% of what flows past your eyeballs is advertising disguised as information — you’re in a Spam cesspool! You thought you had gotten over it by email, only to find it resurfacing in social media. I don’t see spam on Medium, and I do see somewhat interesting articles and commentary. I don’t see spam on Substack and I do find interesting articles and commentary. Moderation, investment of time and energy to keep focus and value. General purpose social groups always, over time, to sustain any information, have to start tapping into the Spam cesspool. Usenet is the poster child. The true horror of pure, unmodified social media — Usenet, 4chan, 8chan, and so on - is the ability to transmit things like child pornography, viral software, stolen ‘girlfriend’ and ‘boyfriend’ shaming photos, stolen movies and music – stolen lives. Fortunately, some time ago, many ISP’s (Sprint, Verizon) finally came to their senses, or were made to, and simply halted the hosting and/or transmission of the unmoderated so-called ‘alt.*’ newsgroups — alt.sex.* groups for example (rather than adult conversation, now replete with all manner of unmentionables); alt.binaries.* — yep, pirated content in binary form, all you can eat.) The blocking of that which contained much of the highly illegal, and untraceable content was a start. I didn’t hear any Republicans whining about freedom of speech. Unfortunately, that was just trying to plug one hole in a mutating seething mass of data flows. There is no ‘cure’ for unmoderated instantly distributed content and ‘social media’ systems. As ISP’s shutting off newsgroups, or abandoning Usenet hosting entirely was a starting solution, the real solution looked like simply migrating away from Usenet to AOL. Then AOL fell apart, and we got things like myspace. Then migration was to Facebook. Then to… social media systems which are not entirely polluted by disinformation. Moderated. Valuable content. Paid for controls. Clearly, with reformatted and unmoderated pure trash circulating on the top-10 platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram and other platforms, the cesspool has now taken roots into what “75% of Americans” now subscribe to. Celebrity on/off departures from social media — “Leslie Jones”, “Miley Cyrus”, “Adele”, “Kanye West”, “Alec Baldwin”, “Donald Trump”, “Steve Bannon” among others — are a repeat of the 1985-87 Usenet show with users stopping/starting/banning, trying to ride the cesspool. A repeat of 40 years ago. A repeat of 30 years ago. People, please consider the value you get from social media — because it’s really not good for you. Many of us learned this in the ‘80s. It’s time for everyone to learn it in the 2020’s. The kicker? Apparently some moderated media can also descend into pure trash when bad actors run the show — welcome in the trolls. It’s called TV network news — a “Platform”.  Next Up: All social media always attract ‘trolls’. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 4chan 8chan AOL Facebook Instagram Myspace Pinterest reddit Snapchat SocialMedia tiktok Twitter Usenet YouTube _2012807 Mon, 01 Feb 2021 15:56:46 +0000 San Francisco Skool Board Unable to Write Or Reason, Deplatforms Feinstein, Edison, Lincoln... Trees https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/28/2012602/-San-Francisco-Skool-Board-Unable-to-Write-Or-Reason-Deplatforms-Feinstein-Edison-Lincoln-Trees On a lighter note, the entire San Francisco Skool Board, unable to manage budgets sufficiently to buy remote learning laptops and bandwidth for children in need of educational equity during Covid decided to spend 10’s of millions of dollars to rebrand a huge chunk of schools in the city. Almost any human a born between roughly 1550 and 1950 will be removed from school names irrespective of their contributions to humankind due to the school board’s inability to contemplate and assess actual historical record.  Likewise, whimsical removal of Spanish names if there is a possibly convoluted attribution to colonialism, unable apparently to grasp a simple truism that any name in California cannot exist in Spanish or English without a 100% origin in the language of colonial invaders.    Reaching a new level of irony as a “school board”, they apparently are also unable to even take notes in Standard Written English as they contemplate educational priorities. Embarrassed, I would welcome hearing of the entire board being fired or replaced by April by their inability to focus on children instead of wildly ill-timed agendas. Sample: <blockquote> Tenderloin is word because before SFPD got paid more money than any other police station both by the city and there was many police who would beat us trans sex workers and steal from them. the tenderloin was the more expensive cut of the meat that these cops could afford, the cops in this area made more money than cops from other stations </blockquote> Next on the agenda is the hairsplitting determination <blockquote> supposed to be a Ohlone word but not sure which Ohlone Language </blockquote> About the name Aptos.  Here’s the deliberation of the name Longfellow <blockquote> He wrote poems & prose with stereotypes of nonwhite people </blockquote> Here’s a link to enjoy the earnest sadness of the entire endeavor. <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/16cre1vbJzE44JWmto_Ll7J06q9ZblQoBC-Eas3Qwf2c/htmlview#gid=0" target="_blank">School Board School Name Worksheet</a> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Agendasnotkids California cancelculture Deplatforming Racistmonunents SanFrancisco schoolnames selfparody _2012602 Fri, 29 Jan 2021 03:35:17 +0000 Trump Residue: The Baby Edition https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/22/2011208/-Trump-Residue-The-Baby-Edition I’m very interested in how millions of people in the US are going to “unify” in our joint future (yes, the future is a shared thing even more than ridesharing or “the common good”), and reading an article recently on someone who supported the 45 death machine (non-ironic), it keeps cycling back to something my grandmother said: tell the truth.    One example I see is coming is seeming in a most innocuous form, from a “Baby Sleep Influencer” or something like that. Certainly I know babies can be persnickety when in comes to sleep time — it certainly is hard for them to sleep in poor neighborhood — goodness knows as does the National institutes of health <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6943834/" target="_blank">www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/</a>… — there’s plenty of research on all aspects of infant development. It’s probably also difficult to get cuties to sleep when they don’t get enough food, or attention from a parent working two jobs in a pandemic, or, well, they’re in cages with a cement floor. I can hear my grandmother’s cackling, and see her shaking that head with a big puff of what looked like cotton candy, “light blue” flavor — how dumb can you be! The “Baby Sleep Influencer” comes with an article from Buzz Feed, <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/taking-cara-babies-trump-donations-controversy" target="_blank">www.buzzfeednews.com/</a>… (not the most easy to read news site but quite nice through Apple News.) “What must her followers do?” Since it’s been clear that, listing her business on donations, she’s been supporting the 45 Death Machine for years. There’s the usual got-it-from-an-internet-be-your-own-lawyer-template-for-$12.99 equivocation statement: “As with many citizens, there were aspects of the Trump Administration that I agreed with and some that I disagreed with. I will continue to serve all parents by empowering them with the tools they need to help their babies sleep.” Got the “good people on both sides” type statement? Classic. “Some things I agree with”, “Some things I disagree with”  Of course anyone who is conscious wants instantly to know if she agrees with  - overturning the constitution?  - grabbing monther’s genitals? - pardoning war criminals involved in Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday, who have destroyed families? - committing hundreds of thousands to death with delayed pandemic response? - family separation targeting families of a particular religion (Muslim) - committing hundreds of thousands to death by promoting infection-spreading activities as patriotic? - financial and political support of domestic white supremacist terrorists?  - encouragement of increasing toxins in food, water and air? - forcible separation of tiny infants and babies from their parents, sequestering them in cages just of the top of my head of course. Then when you put it all in the context of baby sleep, of course, the contradiction between stated goals (baby sleep) and what she may, in fact support (sleepless chaotic Armageddon?) seems a bit much.  So in comes the word “Truth”. Since the Cara Business politicized itself, and made attempts to qualify that politicization, just tell the truth:  Which parts of the 45 Death Machine did you support, and which parts did you not? Answers like “Nobody in their right mind would support <X>” are insufficient. Uncomfortable perhaps, but that’s one of the downsides of truth, it always hurts if you’ve done something wrong. After the truth comes reconciliation and reparation. What can the Cara Baby Company do to compensate for  supporting something they didn’t believe in (perhaps) which damaged so many hundreds of thousands of lives. Maybe just tell every other person who defiantly supported (well, probably still supports) the 45 Death Machine how they were wrong. Then start working out a way to help all babies sleep better at night. I’m sure the Cara Baby Business is awake at night right now worried about “Cancel Culture” (I think it should be branded “recall culture” — when toxic ideas have to be pulled back). But the moment they tell the truth and deal with the. Consequences is the moment they will sleep better knowing they have  finally done the right thing.  rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) babysleep baghdadbloodysunday cancelculture ChildrenInCages ComingtoTerms Covid COVID19 ToxicChemicals TruthandReconciliation Unity _2011208 Fri, 22 Jan 2021 21:02:49 +0000 Getting Your Covid Vaccine? Got Internet, a Credit Card, Proof of Employment and Proof of Insurance? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/16/2009797/-Getting-Your-Covid-Vaccine-Got-Internet-a-Credit-Card-Proof-of-Employment-and-Proof-of-Insurance If you read this vaccine appointment I made, a few things are striking. Read on. <hr> <ul> <li>There is no way to prove you live in Santa Clara or San Mateo counties. Driver’s licenses are not reissued if you change address. Passports are certainly not updated with addresses. In California, there is no central registration system for where people live.</li> <li>People 75 and older are generally not working in a business context. Exactly the people needing this aren’t employed. Job status shouldn’t even remotely alert people getting a covid vaccine.</li> <li>Why should someone have to be insured to get COVID vaccine? The clinic should bill the State of California. Accounting should not prevent covid vaccination.</li> <li>I had been scanning internet via Google Alerts to find Covid vaccination. How many non-tech people take this approach? None. </li> <li>This process took me around 20 minutes on with the provider site, failing twice. It involved relinquishing a credit card number for ‘proof of age’. Unconscionable, and bad design.</li> </ul> Since a month has gone by for ‘high priority’ healthcare vaccinations (Like research Doctors at Stanford, IT support teams, and whoever happened to show up) other vaccinations should be by <ul> <li>Pairing the birth year with a day in the week <ul> <li>Born in 1937? Your day is 23 January</li> <li>Born in 1942? Your day is 28 January</li> </ul> </li> <li>Require neither “a credit card”, nor “proof of insurance”, proof of address, or anything except proof that you are there at the right day via an ID with an age on it.</li> <li>Internet should not be required, nor should a phone or any special technology.</li> </ul> Ask your state health department or representatives to simplify this madness. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid Covid-19 covid-vaccine vaccinefailure vaccinegaming vaccinepriority vaccinequity VaccineRollout _2009797 Sun, 17 Jan 2021 03:10:48 +0000 Get Your Covid Vaccine Without Tears https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/16/2009662/-Get-Your-Covid-Vaccine-Without-Tears Public Health Groups are making life as difficult as possible to get covid vaccinations. It’s truly amazing.   Tell your elected representatives it has to be as simple and humane as possible.  <div> <hr> I have yet another note in California to “check back on the portal of your healthcare provider” which has no information. Imagine if that was the reaction for, say, cancer treatments, a house fire, or voting. It presupposes internet, using portals, patience to check over and over for hours a day, it even assumes having a healthcare provider! </div> <div></div> <div>The simplest possible human-centered solution would be to pair the year of birth with a day in a future week for a vaccination anywhere:</div> <div></div> <ul> <li>Born on or before 1935? Your day is 25 January</li> <li>Born on or before 1945? Your day is 31 January</li> <li>Born on or before 1955? Your day is 10 February</li> <li>etc.</li> </ul> <div></div> <div>Incredibly easy to communicate, manage the allocations, and everyone can plan without worrying.</div> <div></div> <div>Younger people  who have internet and are good at ‘sniping’ don’t win out over more risky older people. No waiting in lines. Right now, as far as I can see, it’s a total clusterfuck.</div> <div></div> <div>On your day, Just show up with ID to any local vaccine center, register on the spot and get a shot, no payment no insurance, just vaccine. </div> <div></div> <ul> <li>Born on or before 1935? your Booster shot is...  11 Feb</li> </ul> <div>Same idea</div> <div></div> <div>More vaccine? Simply add years to the range:</div> <ul> <li>On or before 1935-1937 — your day is 25 January</li> </ul> <div></div> <div>Larger crowd? Simply add months</div> <ul> <li>On or before Jan 1960-Feb 1960: Your day is 26 February</li> </ul> <div></div> <div>Anything else is confusing, time consuming, and frustrating to the population which if truth be know is the least technically adapted.</div> <div></div> <div>Tell your doctor, your “healthcare provider”, your local public health authority, your mayor, governor, congressmen — you demand a simple, fair effortless way to be vaccinated. It’s your right. </div> <div></div> <div> <div>Sent from my iPhone</div> </div> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Clusterfuck Covid Covidvaccine HealthCare slowvaccination Vaccination vaccinepriority _2009662 Sat, 16 Jan 2021 16:10:11 +0000 Fatal Complexity: Covid Vaccination https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/15/2009499/-Fatal-Complexity-Covid-Vaccination I’ll continue to highlight here, and I’ve asked friends in CA to speak to Pelosi: the Vaccine Allocation (not distribution, allocation) scheme as most complex allocation schemes is failing badly.    An article from Vox on the state-level ridiculousness: <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2021/1/15/22229300/covid-19-vaccines-coronavirus-rollout-us-america" target="_blank">www.vox.com/…</a> It’s as though nobody who is involved professionally in supply chain was in any way consulted, and that the rules were cooked up my committee which had no concept of how humans operate. You should be able know, weeks in advance, when your turn is for vaccine and be able to walk into any center anywhere without registration  <a href="https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/15/2009388/-Your-Birthday-your-V-Day-Keeping-it-Simple" target="_blank">m.dailykos.com/…</a> It’s as unconscionable as the failure to distribute masks to everyone monthly or weekly, starting in March. I don’t mean the federal government which is a wash, but state government. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) COVID19 over65 slowvaccination Vaccination _2009499 Fri, 15 Jan 2021 21:05:51 +0000 Register to Live? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/15/2009449/-Register-to-Live An article on Huffington Post highlights the awfulness of COViD vaccination : <a href="https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_6001af5ec5b6efae62f81ee2" target="_blank">Hours of Work... to Register?</a> As I wrote in another note today, vaccination should be as simple as knowing what your Vaccination “V-Day” is based on your birth, and just showing up with an ID. No registration, “healthcare providers” or hours on the phone.     <a href="https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/15/2009388/-Your-Birthday-your-V-Day-Keeping-it-Simple" target="_blank">m.dailykos.com/...</a> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid Covid-19 Vaccination vaccinephases vaccinesimplification _2009449 Fri, 15 Jan 2021 18:46:45 +0000 Your Birthday, your V-Day - Keeping it Simple https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/15/2009388/-Your-Birthday-your-V-Day-Keeping-it-Simple I ran some numbers quickly, and if it has not been proposed yet (there are people smarter than me certainly), I wish California, and likely the rest of the country at this stage develop, communicate, and follow an utterly simple plan to get vaccines out as rapidly as possible to the most vulnerable in an extremely easy-to-understand away. <hr> I heard with a tad of relief and alarm that a friend of mine took his parents to be vaccinated, and the team simply  vaccinate him too. The current 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 2c, 3a, 4-xyz, 5/1 L-23, 401K plans are, to me, ludicrous. In California, I sat down to look at, in San Francisco County #1 — how many vaccine doses are allocated to the city, and #2, when would my husband be getting vaccinated (he’s way over the age threshold). The information was both poorly structured, and contradictory. Par for the course with Covid. Proposal Design I ran some numbers quickly, and if it has not been proposed yet (there are people smarter than me certainly), I wish California, and likely the rest of the country at this stage develop, communicate, and follow an utterly simple plan. Starting, say, January 20th, If you were born on or before 1935, simply go to a public vaccination site, show your ID, and get vaccinated. Your V-Day is 20 January. On January 21st, if you were born on or before 1936, go to a public vaccination site, show your ID, and get vaccinated. Your V-Day is 21 January. As the month progresses, and more vaccines are distributed, the system keeps flowing with utter simplicity. It provides a clear structure and communication plan to everyone. Two weeks later is your B-Day, using the same logic, for the 2nd “Booster” Shot. No registration, no online maze, just go to the same site and just get vaccinated. Communication I can call a number give my year and get my day. I can ask family and friends, and get a day. TV News can announce next week’s V-Days. I can text a date, and get my date. I can enter a year on a website, and get my day. I can plan. Advantages The most vulnerable are protected the fastest. I think that a 90-year-old deserves to be at the front of the line, in all cases.  Easy Acceleration: If more vaccines are available, then the year can be moved forward. On or before 1940 for 24 January can become on or before 1945, to slowly accelerate the program. Clear, easy communication. Avoid the Registration nightmare, and all that entails — website registration, ‘call your healthcare provider’ (does everyone have a healthcare provider?), trying to snipe the last appointment somewhere, endless telephone calls and waiting, jumping the line, all gone. Simplicity. No more overwhelmed sites. I calculated that in San Francisco, 10-15 sites (I believe they are in place now) can easily accommodate the vaccination per-hour rate needed to keep to this schedule. Each year’s number of people potentially to be vaccinated slowly grows, pretty much in lock-step with how vaccines will be slowly increased. No site gets overwhelmed. Special Populations. If other populations need acceleration, they get a V-Day also. For instance, if you’re  a Teacher and you were born on or before 1962, your V-Day is 25 January. Easy. Later in Year, under-65. If you were born on or before May 1968 — add a month — your V-Day is 15 April. It easily accommodates expanding to very large age groups by adding a Month to the guidance. Vaccine-Avoiders. As people who are nervous about vaccines decide its in their interest, they are always accepted easily, in their age-groups — the barrier to vaccination if their V-day is past is zero. They are the ones for whom the process should be simplest of all. -— Disclaimer as always: I’m not a doctor, though I have extensive training in science and math. The complete and ongoing failure at the federal, state, and county level to address Covid is incredibly distressing to me as it is to everyone. But it’s not too late to begin to fix it.  rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid-19 failure-to-execute HealthCare mass-vaccination Pandemic slow-startup Vaccination vaccinationplan vaccine-distribution _2009388 Fri, 15 Jan 2021 15:59:40 +0000 Unity is Easy! https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/11/2008274/-Unity-is-Easy Tell the truth. That easy. <ol> <li>Everyone admit that the election was free and clear, and that #45 lost fair and square.</li> <li>Everyone admit that #45 has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, and work to remove him from the political system entirely. </li> <li>Admit which elected representatives of the people are not representing the people, and the constitution, and are unfit for office.</li> <li>Admit that domestic terrorists, from Lynchings and Tulsa, from Militas exterminating Mormons and events of Oklahoma City, to terrorists last week at the Steps of the Capitol: these are the greatest single threat to the country, and we must be mobilized and funded to eliminate. </li> <li>Tell the truth and admit that preventing terrorists from organizing is not “violating free speech.”</li> <li>Admit that the complete failure to respond adequately to the greatest mass-death the country has known has been driven by leadership lies from day 1, and those driving the slaughter will be held accountable.</li> <li>Admit that opposition parties are legitimate and honorable.</li> <li>Admit that there is no Secret Conspiracy of the opposition involved in rituals and abuse leading to ‘overthrow a way of life’</li> </ol> Just, you know, as a start to unity.    The truth is known. Unity means distributing it together. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Democrats DonaldTrump Insurrection Republicans Sedition trump Unity _2008274 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 19:47:14 +0000 Impeachment as a “Wrong Move” https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/10/2008059/-Impeachment-as-a-Wrong-Move I’m watching local TV news (San Francisco) which is actually airing Republican talking points in discussion of Impeachment that “it will be the “wrong move” and “inflame problems” in our “divided nation.” It’s amazing to me that the TV people, who are always focused on how to improve life in the Bay Area, can air any words from the Republican Party at this stage without a red banner “likely falsehood”. I think at this stage the track record of truth speaks for itself.    At Forbes has said about companies who hire anyone from the Trump administration — “ we will assume anything said is a lie from the company”. I think until there is a reconciliation, there should be a universal assumption that anything said by representatives of the Republican administration, that everything they say, claim, or cite, is a lie. Not disputed, not opinion, but an intentional lie.  It won’t be difficult to tell if these people are lying. There is no difference between talking and lying at this stage.  rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Impeachment Insurrection Republican ript Sedition _2008059 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 02:16:50 +0000 Now To Shut Off Life Support: His Internet https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/1/8/2007319/-Now-To-Shut-Off-Life-Support-His-Internet I know it’s likely not feasible, but I believe that there are examples of people who are ordered, as part of legal settlements, to never access the internet. His interstate incitement to sedition and terrorism have to be stopped at the source, or it only moves from platform to platform much like a demon from “The Exorcist”.  The lifeblood of a troll comes through the actions of crushing the soul of people through intentionally upsetting them in public life. Impeaching our troll is water off a duck’s back.  Time to cut the cord.  rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Insurrection Punishment Sedition _2007319 Fri, 08 Jan 2021 22:01:07 +0000 Moving Beyond Republicans: Learning from Al-Anon https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/12/28/2004639/-Moving-Beyond-Republicans-Learning-from-Al-Anon The country is going to have to begin a recovery, and for those of us who are not Republicans, we need to unlearn unlearn behaviors which are self-preserving but destructive. Then we can deal with Republicans.  Sone questions from Al-Anon are instructive, and I paraphrase: <div> <div> <div style="text-align:center"> <h2>Did You Experience a Problem Republican?</h2> </div> <div></div> </div> </div> <div> <div> <div></div> </div> </div> <div> If someone close to you, such as a family member, friend, coworker, or neighbor, has or has had a Republican problem, the following questions may help you determine if Al‑Anon is for you: <ol> <li>Do you constantly seek approval and affirmation?</li> <li>Do you fail to recognize your accomplishments?</li> <li>Do you fear criticism? I’m</li> <li>Do you overextend yourself?</li> <li>Have you had problems with your own racist, sexist, homophobic, avaricious, narcissistic or otherwise bullying behaviors?</li> <li>Do you have a need for perfection?</li> <li>Are you uneasy when your life is going smoothly, continually anticipating problems?</li> <li>Do you feel more alive in the midst of crisis?</li> <li>Do you still feel responsible for others, as you did for the problem Republicans in your life?</li> <li>Do you care for others easily, yet find it difficult to care for yourself?</li> <li>Do you isolate yourself from other people?</li> <li>Do you respond with fear to authority figures and angry people?</li> <li>Do you feel that individuals and society in general are taking advantage of you?</li> <li>Do you have trouble with intimate relationships?</li> <li>Do you confuse pity with love, as you did with the problem Republican? </li> <li>Do you attract and/or seek people who tend to be compulsive and/or abusive?</li> <li>Do you cling to relationships because you are afraid of being alone?</li> <li>Do you often mistrust your own feelings and the feelings expressed by others?</li> <li>Do you find it difficult to identify and express your emotions?</li> <li>Do you think familial Republicanism may have affected you?</li> </ol> Not all are relevant, but they encapsulate a lot of what non-Republicans have to deal with now. Forget “all getting along together” until we ourselves can get it together. It’s not a going to be easy.  </div> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) after-trump Al-Anon alanon Alcoholism Democrat Recovery Republican _2004639 Tue, 29 Dec 2020 07:36:13 +0000 Good Ideas: Frontline Fast-Track https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/12/27/2004306/-Good-Ideas-Frontline-Fast-Track Frontline workers in the US on Visas should get Fast Track to citizenship.  Not just fast track to green cards if they are on work visas, but full citizenship should they so choose.    I read an article in The NY Times today on this occurring in France, where I worked and lived for some time, and France is the last place where I would imagine this happening. It should happen here in the US.  <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/world/europe/france-naturalization-covid-frontline.html?referringSource=articleShare">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/world/europe/france-naturalization-covid-frontline.html?referringSource=articleShare</a> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Citizenship covid-frontline essential-workers foreign-workers FrontLine frontline-workers _2004306 Sun, 27 Dec 2020 14:26:36 +0000 Rule 11: Forced Admission of Truth by Administration https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/12/13/2001853/-Rule-11-Forced-Admission-of-Truth-by-Administration For lawyers reading DailyKos, my reading indicates that as the Trump Campaign loses lawsuit after lawsuit for simple lack of any evidence whatsoever there are significant legal problems evolving with the “Rule 11” on bad faith, or nuisance lawsuits.  What could be done to compel or pressure the different Judges involved to make a simple sanction: the litigant who failed must <ol> <li>publicly state the facts of the matter that there was neither any evidence of fraud, nor evidence of broken election laws.</li> <li>The election team must admit that Trump lost the election that they litigated and</li> <li>They cannot litigate future similar cases without the Judge’s permission</li> <li>They cannot discuss the case publicly without permission by the judge involved.</li> </ol> It seems like that doesn’t go through the quite harsh debarment process which I understand Judges are loath to try, but actually achieves much more: an irreversible set of public admissions by the campaign of who won and how fair the elections actually were.  rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 2020election DonaldTrump electionlitigation ElectionResults fakelawsuits judicialactivism LawSuits overturningelection rule11 trump _2001853 Mon, 14 Dec 2020 02:52:14 +0000 The Death Maximizer https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/9/27/1981263/-The-Death-Maximizer As I have written several times here in response to other blogs, I asserted back some time ago that the goal of the current administration is to maximize American and other human death, as cruelly and visibly as possible. From refugees to Covid, Afghan military to ACA, I see this over and over again without any real media response. Until today — an interesting article in Salon on precisely the same subject. <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/09/27/the-president-wants-you-dead--and-so-do-his-friends-and-advisers-its-that-simple/" target="_blank">The President Wants You Dead</a> A sobering read by a better writer than I. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) AffordableCareAct Covid Obamacare RussianBounty trump _1981263 Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:16:32 +0000 COVID-19: The 100,000 Milestone; Thoughts, One Positive https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/5/28/1948360/-COVID-19-The-100-000-Milestone-Thoughts-One-Positive (I put my forecasting on hold for a few weeks because it was fairly emotionally draining even for a numbers person like me, because I tend to visualize numbers as people I know. Instead, I spent the last couple of weeks pursuing a rare book collecting hobby, where I wrote a series of tools that scanned book dealers over "all of internet" so I can find and buy volumes to fill gaps in my library. It’s daunting when you realize you’ve bought every single book of the series you pursue available everywhere from New Zealand to Croatia to Texas, and you’re only 50% to goal. I’m an oddball.) <ul> <li>Forecast: As is in every news outlet I know of, the 100,000 person fatality milestone was passed this week. I took the time today to look at the forecast I made 6th of May, and 21 days out I had forecast between 97,585, 105,997, and 111,931 deaths using different models. The 105,997 figure compares to 100,417 that I saw with Johns Hopkin’s data with 5.56% error, and I suspect that deaths data are being somewhat suppressed as I read the news — so not bad for a model as models go. I’ve attached my current forecast model, which clearly shows a slight decline… through June. I think the undead IHME model showed around 200,000 for today? Not sure. Junk. I show that we hit WW-II levels of fatality around 6 June. After that, my models start diverging, which is new. </li> <li>News: What are we hearing today about COVID? Unfortunately, as I wrote to someone else on DailyKos, what goes for data today in the news on the pandemic is pretty poor. There are so many mathematical problems in information published today that I ignore 90% of what I read. An example is that the New York Times publishes a "states up / states down" kind of set of figures for case rates, to show, as though comparable, case rates are increasing in Arkansas and California, while decreasing in Pennsylvania and Kansas. They're even visualized at the same scale. (The New York Times lost me a decade ago when they reported, as though describing a reasonable activity, on the Catholic Church giving seminars on exorcism. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/world/europe/exorcism-catholic-church.html" target="_blank" title="">www.nytimes.com/</a>… It’s like reporting on “Demons on the increase,” says Pope). See it all here: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html" target="_blank">www.nytimes.com/...</a></li> </ul> <figure class="image-captioned width-xl"><img alt="" class="width-xl" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/810643/original/ScreenShot2020-05-28at4.22.31PM.png?1590708171"> <figcaption>California Left, Arkansas Right (talk about intelligent design). Same scale, same misleading number: gigantic difference.</figcaption> </figure> <ul> <li>Cases: The fact of the matter is that today, case rates most significantly link to the number of people who want to be tested and have access to testing, not necessarily to infections at all, same as it was early April. Arkansas has a flat fatality rate, roughly one person passing away a day today, which has declined since the 1st of May. The reporting gives the impression that the disease is at roughly the same level in California and in Arkansas, and that it's increasing. That's measurably incorrect. I’m a poor visual designer, but I did learn to read a graph in early elementary school (perhaps SRA reading labs?). Edward Tufte would be horrified (do read his “Visual Explanations”). </li> <li>Testing: I called my doctor Thursday several weeks ago and asked “Can I get an antibody titration and Coronavirus test?” Their immediate response was “Oh, is something wrong?” (I love doctors. “Yes, we’re in a Pandemic.” was my response). I went in the following day for the nasal coronavirus swab in their office. The reason they wear head-to-foot PPE is because having an eight-inch-long swab pushed into your nasal cavity all the way to your throat instantly induces the need to violently sneeze right at the poor person, if not retch. After the 10-second unpleasantness of having a plastic q-tip twirled in your nasopharyngeal cavity through your nose, I drove on to a testing lab, and had a blood sample taken for antibodies. The following Monday morning, I had my results (negative & negative). My partner tried a drive-through swab where we were the only visible visitors. I’m completely mystified now why everyone isn’t getting tested, why there’s a “not enough tests” situation, because in fact we are the only people we know who have been tested, who hadn’t actually had a coronavirus infection. Nobody I’ve spoken to in a large circle of acquaintances has even thought of “oh, maybe I should be tested”. I have a cousin in a rural southern state who oversees laboratory medical testing, and while in early April, there were some capacity problems — which provider they sent the daily batch to — today, that’s long gone. Why aren’t people getting tested of their own volition, regularly? </li> <li>Illness as a Metaphor: I’m also continuously bemused by the idea of "Fighting a War" against COVID (News program last evening). It is unfortunately like trying to fight a war on gravity or a war on hurricanes. You can't fight the natural physical and chemical processes underlying an epidemic, which are entropic, statistical, and irresistible. People who resist the idea of evolution certainly would have a problem with the idea that our body "evolves" defenses (immunity), or that a population "evolves" defenses (identification, treatment, and prevention). Corona/Covid can be delayed (best strategy now) to preserve life, but it won't go away. We don’t compete with COVID any more than we compete with earthquakes. </li> <li>The Melanin Penalty: From Holding your Breath to everyone’s infected it is no worse than the flu to Chloroquine to Vitamin D . I received a note from my brother this week instructing family members to start taking Vitamin D, and in which dosages. I sent a response back saying that people should consult their physician before doing something like this, perhaps a blood test would be smart to see if, in fact, they have low serum vitamin D levels. As I wrote in another blog, as with HIV, back in the ‘80s, there’s always some interesting thing you should do medically that crops up monthly to help prevent, lessen the severity of, or treat the viral disease, and the usual “It can’t hurt.” Seems that “evidence” in a “not peer-reviewed study” on low Vitamin-D levels has been reviewed by smart skeptical optimists. Low Vitamin-D may be associated with (a) high-melanin skin in Northern Italians which prevent them from creating endogenous (internal) Vitamin-D from sunlight (uh, as opposed to the pale, wan creatures cranking out Vitamin-D in the dazzling sun-splashed Nordic realms in February and March? I’ve worked in Stockholm in February. The sun literally looks like a 15-watt bulb behind a misty curtain, for about 4 hours a day.) (b) high-melanin skin in people of African descent which prevents them from creating sufficient protective vitamin D from sunlight (oh, I won’t even begin to unpack that cringingly bad idea — let me say rich-people low-deductible health insurance correlation and let it rest at that), and because melanin isn’t enough, (c) the elderly with low Vitamin-D levels somehow because… they’re elderly (except there’s little difference Vitamin D levels between people over 50 and people over 60 and people over 70 and ...) It’s strange that people publishing and reading research can’t keep in mind that correlation isn’t causation. Naturally, it takes about 2 minutes to find a study, from the UK, peer-reviewed, that there were no difference in infection levels (not checked outcomes yet) between people of South-Asian, and African Descent (e.g. high-melanin level skin). </li> <li>Ray-of-Hope: There’s something just startling with the idea that what used to be called “untrammeled promiscuous gay sex” would lay a foundation for a relatively simple way out of the pandemic until we have a vaccine, and that understanding the foundation would rely to a degree on being able to speak Spanish. It’s a strangely metaphysical irony. I wrote in an early blog on studies that I hadn’t seen, natural experiments, with the coronavirus, among which was looking at correlation between use of PReP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis: taking medication to prevent a viral disease), which uses nucleoside analogs to prevent HIV infection, and “lack of” infection with Coronavirus. Not immunity, but dramatically lowered risk. Inform yourself more on HIV and PReP here: <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep.html" target="_blank" title="">www.cdc.gov/</a>… In research I’d been waiting to find a study simply correlating prevalence of gay men with reduced coronavirus infection — by far the majority of PReP users are gay men. I finally have the right data, and may try to look at the idea mathematically this weekend. (One of my nieces remarked to me that most of her gay friends are on PReP, but it “clearly is not because they’re getting laid a lot.“ Gotta love millenials.) Nucleoside analogs like those in PReP, and Valaclyclovir (for Herpes, or Cold Sores), work by having exactly the right properties to be used your cells to make Viruses when the cell is infected, but the process of making the viruses keeps… stopping. Imagine a lego-brick that’s missing several of the teeth. Imagine that every time you wanted to make a structure, and you used a “Lego Brick Analog”, when you tried to click the bricks together, they wouldn’t actually mesh, and your lego building project would just keep… stopping. The lego brick has some of the right properties to be used in the project, but it’s an Analog. With a “Lego Brick Analog” you’d never build a building, and with “Nucleoside analogs” viruses would never build new copies. What’s interesting to me also, is Remdesivir. If it has the right “analog” properties, it would cause virus replication (copying in the cell) to halt. If you took it in a severe ongoing case, sure, it could help the active case to resolve more quickly. But, as with ‘shelter-at-home’ in an epidemic cycle, the earlier you catch the problem, the more effective the treatment. I think remdesivir has only been used on especially bad cases of COVID-19. If it were used at the first symptom, it might halt the disease immediately, but this is all my medical speculation. Until now. My reading has located a study which almost precisely looks at the “studies I hadn’t seen” in a much more interesting way. In Spain, they are giving PReP and Chloroquine to at-risk healthcare providers in a large-scale randomized clinical trial, to see if they can reduce the incidence of infection. Magic!</li> </ul> <figure class="image-captioned width-xl"><img alt="" class="width-xl" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/810660/original/ScreenShot2020-05-28at5.52.01PM.png?1590713538"> <figcaption>Note the Dates!</figcaption> </figure> Note the dates: within 30 days, we should starting seeing some results which, if the gears in my head have meshed correctly, may indicate that taking PReP can be a reasonably effective “Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis”. This is the first medical study which matches my expectations for some way to manage COVID before infection, because by the time you’re in the hospital, significant damage has already been done to you, and you may have been passing the virus on to innumerable people (well, actually numerable: around 0.906919 other people according to my calculations, at the national US level). Read all about the study, if you’re interested (someone obscure technical jargon) here: <a href="https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04334928" target="_blank" title="">clinicaltrials.gov/…</a> <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 Epidemic Pandemic prep remdesivir Science _1948360 Fri, 29 May 2020 01:21:55 +0000 COVID-19: The June Crossover https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/5/7/1943476/-COVID-19-The-June-Crossover There have been many statements made about COVID-19 and Voting Patterns, including <ul> <li>Older Republican voters will be decimated</li> <li>COVID is a Blue State problem</li> <li>Red, Rural states shouldn’t worry about current ‘lockdown’</li> </ul> I reviewed data 6 weeks ago to look at the idea that Older Republican voters will be decimated and it will cause a large electoral shift, but it’s not proven in numbers. Both Democrats and Republicans have a large older base, Republicans larger in Boomers, but even if they lose more voters than Democrats, their older base turns out in much higher numbers than younger Democrats so it balances out. What I did look at today was the assertion that COVID is mostly a “Blue State” problem (a callous and bizarre idea), and that current policies on distancing are irrelevant in Red states. For people who follow me, I’m really only looking at SEIR models at this point because they’re proving at this stage of the epidemic to track total fatality with more accuracy than other models (logistic, gaussian, hyperbolic, I look at multiple models concurrently). I’ve actually been able to add weekly pattern factors (Sunday/Monday are always lower than a forecast, etc.) and get very nuanced highly accurate predictions now at a daily level for weeks backwards and forwards, >98% mean average percentage error over 28-day blocks. I took my models this evening and simply separated out state-level data on the basis of 2016 voting patterns noted in wikipedia. This will not match total fatalities for US because territories cannot vote, of course, so I’ll be off slightly, but it’s not going to change the overall view. I treated red states as one population, and blue states as another population, and let my model take actual fatality data, and calculate initial infections, exposures, transmission rates, recovery rates and so on to fit the data. I’ve tried to separate populations at state level for projections (published early views here), but my results are not consistent and repeatably accurate enough to satisfy me. Red / Blue is. What I is really happening with Red/Blue? <ul> <li>Indeed, “Blue” states were hit very hard through April. In fact, for the month of April, for every 100 people who died in Red States, 264 died in Blue states, a Red/Blue ratio of .378. It was also an East Coast phenomenon with New York, New Jersey, suffering devastating losses. It’s hard for me to write this so abstractly.</li> <li>However, around Mid-April in the US we starting having a peak in fatalities instead of continued growth because so much social distancing was in place, and fairly severe restrictions we are all aware of. This mostly affected Blue states, and there was a fairly strong decline in Blue state fatalities in proportion to Red States. As of the time of this writing, yesterday’s data show that the Red/Blue ratio is .595, a large change.</li> <li>If all distancing were kept in place as it is currently (which won’t happen), on or around the 4th of June, the Blue/Red ratio becomes 1. At that point, it is no longer a “Blue State” problem, as if it ever had been. COVID fatalities then would become a diffuse problem, because Red”states have low urban concentrations compared to Blue states. COVID will become scattered and endemic to an abundance of rural areas with no apparent focus, and Red States will be in the news each evening for the balance of the year, and the Pandemic. </li> <li>Around October 1st, the Red/Blue ratio becomes around 10, and starts increasing even more, so that by early January Red/Blue becomes 100. Stated clearly, that means that for every 100 deaths in a Blue States, there will be 10,000 deaths in Red States. The Red State peak will occur around December 2021, and won’t show a natural decline to less than 1000 deaths daily until April 2023. </li> </ul> So, when you read or hear that Blue is hit harder, it has been. But Red is about to be hit much, much harder, hundreds of times harder than the worst experienced by Blue. <figure class="image-captioned width-xl"><img alt="" class="width-xl" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/802354/original/BRTotal20200507.png?1588898772"> <figcaption>Blue State Total Fatalities growing slowly, Red States accelerating</figcaption> </figure> The thing I saw with my forecasting is in the last two weeks, all my numbers have shown an uptick in fatalities out past July. We have definitely “flattened the curve” — remember that? We will not see peaking like we saw in Blue States, in a few major cities. But by August/September, we’ll see peaking everywhere simultaneously in Red States, not in urban centers with somewhat scalable hospital care. This is before we get “open for business”, which will accelerate the Red/Blue Ratio even more. If “open for business” increases transmission by 50% (a low estimate from many sources), Red State daily fatalities will start peaking around 4,000 daily end-June, and my forecast shows that even with resuming distancing, Red State fatalities will continue to increase to 10,000 a day by November. There’s really no end in sight. However, I did finally see something from NIH that I’ve been looking for since the beginning of the Pandemic, a study on pre-exposure prophylaxis — a preventative medication study. I’ll write on that in a separate post. <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) BlueState Covid Covid-19 Medicine Modeling Pandemic Recommended Redstate Science _1943476 Fri, 08 May 2020 01:19:38 +0000 COVID-19: What I Worry About - Food, Distribution, Rage https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/5/5/1942771/-COVID-19-What-I-Worry-About-Food-Distribution-Rage I wanted to share some other information about COVID I watch closely, though I’ve not developed a large-scale measurement yet. I think people need to start thinking very carefully about food, distribution, and rage at the national level. When I’ve had the discussion about disasters in other contexts, and “What would you look at?”, my first response is always “Secure Labor, It’s irreplaceable”. With hurricanes, I’ve seen that it’s not the food processing plant getting knocked out in Louisiana, it’s the fact that homes are swept away and there’s nobody to work food production for 100 miles. With floods or snowstorms, when you have to re-route distribution, you can very quickly run out of people to drive trucks. You may be able to plan and drive production with a computer, but you cannot execute production, especially in food or transportation, by computer. It begins and ends with real people. I stated that with COVID-19, expect rolling waves of labor shortages in key sectors where you must forecast where the virus goes, and how to protect people and mitigate capacity loss because of network effects. I’ve not seen that except in very few instances even discussed at the national level. Food I put a screenshot of Tyson Food’s Days of Inventory here. What this means is that at any point in time, Tyson Foods is holding enough inventory to ship for 40 days. If their factories are shuttered, there are only 40 days (on average) until they simply stop shipping meat products. Since grocery stores and distribution networks generally only hold a few days of fresh food, it means that some stores simply might not have Tyson products in the near future. What it also means is that if their current factories drop production by half — let’s say, out of 2000 employees, 1000 turn up with COVID — then without them being shut down, they will still run out of food sometime after 40 days, maybe around 60 days because they can’t run full or even half-shifts. Tyson is huge. They supply quite a large percent of food into the US grocery system. But I don’t want to obsess on Tyson. In rural areas, there are many highly-concentrated producers of food across the spectrum — meat, poultry, vegetables, fruits, and processed grains. As I look at the food supply chain, what strikes me is with few exceptions, that there is almost no excess capacity, and we see numbers around 40-50 days of inventory. Makes sense. My concern is that if we get knocked out of 20%, 30% capacity in food production at all levels — planting, gathering, packaging, slaughtering, processing — then within a month or so the “days of inventory” starts dropping, and dropping, like the proverbial “boiling a frog”, as we’re barely aware. I don’t know of any national-level visibility to food security with something as simple as days of supply, and seeing how it is fluctuating. Because, I can guarantee, it is. We’re losing capacity we can’t make up. I don’t know what % of food distribution goes outside the US, but I’m looking at it soon. Distribution Many food production facilities have rail-to-silo, but I’d say the vast majority use trucks for outbound distribution. It seems easy to re-organize and find more truck drivers as one plant shuts down and others ramp up a bit, different routes as production ebbs and flows. It’s not. It’s well known that there are many challenges in the trucking industry, primarily back to labor — truck drivers.We were already at a difficult point with transportation labor — truck drivers. <ul> <li>There is a shortage of hundreds of thousands of drivers in the US market</li> <li>50% of truck drivers are in the 45-75 age range</li> <li>Drivers are overwhelmingly men (I think probably 90% or more).</li> </ul> If those last two elements sound familiar, it’s because they the COVID segments with highest fatality rates. Trucking capacity, with wider spread of COVID into distribution networks, could take an already poor situation and take it over the edge. So think about it — not enough food being produced, what’s being produced can’t get shipped. Then add on that a third problem. Rage Imagine a rural family group which has been facing COVID deaths, having to make a decision between working unsafely or having no food, but even when they do work food suddenly is insecure. Imagine an area like Metro Miami, or Memphis, or Denver, or El Paso where enough people don’t have work, and can’t get food, and day after day they see Trump on TV, associated with COVID. It doesn’t matter what he says, it’s the face that gets locked in their mind with COVID. I think that the protests we are seeing in certain states are the tip of the iceberg in accumulating rage. When food becomes a very bad problem in a month or so, for multiple reasons, we will have masses of people in a rage. They will be storming large grocery stores, Wal-Marts, Costcos, and other large visible institutions which are their only real sources of food. That of course creates a problem for everyone, as the entire institution gets shut down, and similar distribution points become flashpoint for rage all over the country — it’s not out-of-work people that don’t have food, everyone’s food becomes a problem. Trucks can be subject to highway robbery, driven off the road from origin distribution out over the country, making the distribution problem even worse than it is already, and starting to then have deeper and deeper ripple effects in shutting down distribution, and further building up rage. And day-in and day-out you have Trump on television, associated with COVID. Not everyone understands “the economy”, not everyone will see layers of hundreds of people dead coming out of hospitals, but everyone understands when they have no food. And all they see is Trump. I normally write about COVID from a worry about the pandemic, fatalities, and getting it under control, and I’m not an epidemiologist. But my views and measured forecasts are strangely accurate. In areas where I have a lot of knowledge, I’m even more worried. This should rapidly become a national conversation. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid Covid-19 Distribution Food Inventory Pandemic Science SupplyChain Transportation _1942771 Tue, 05 May 2020 21:02:57 +0000 COVID-19 Fatalities - Surpassing Vietnam War, Reshaping the Epidemic https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/29/1941482/-COVID-19-Fatalities-Surpassing-Vietnam-War-Reshaping-the-Epidemic Yesterday, as we have seen numerous places in the news, COVID fatalities in the US have surpassed those of the Vietnam War. At the beginning of April, based on no measurable distancing impact yet to the course of the epidemic, my original projection was we would see the milestone around the 12th of April, so we have ‘pushed out’ that milestone by a few weeks. That’s push-out has been stable for weeks now. for those reading these blogs. The dynamics of our current social distancing model is measurably consistent. My daily fatalities projection looking backwards and forwards 5 days and 10 days is < 1% error, in fact my projection backwards several weeks has < 1% Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE), so I’m confident looking forward a week or so that we’ll continue to see a slight decline in fatality growth. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, nothing is changing underlying these numbers, and I’m now afraid of “opening up” again, which changes the dynamics of the formulas underlying the model above, and not for the better of course. Completely hypothetical: SEIR with changing infection rates What I wanted to share today was how I was looking at the rest of the year with the pandemic, using a SEIR model. A SEIR model looks at multiple factors, and all are common-sensical, and feels in my head like the English nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built”. (I can’t help it but i hear written words all the time in a sing-song, usually somewhat of a iambic pentameter. I’m a strange person admittedly. I won’t tell you what color words or numbers are or how they sound. It’s that bad.) This is the pandemic the virus built. These are the people who are removed from the pandemic the virus built. These are the people who are infected by and become the people who are removed from the pandemic the virus built. These are the people who are exposed to and become the people who are infected by and become the people who are removed from the pandemic the virus built. These are the people of the US who are susceptible and become the people who are exposed to and become the people who are infected by and become the people who are removed from the pandemic the virus built. Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Removed = SEIR. (I’m sure this “cumulative song” can be modified to put appropriate political figures in key spots.) My best case daily curve (above) follows a SEIR model I built which includes fatalities. I show gradually declining daily fatalities, based on all the parameters of SEIR fitted to actual fatality data. I didn’t try to built a model on first principles as an epidemiologist does, I built it using excel and fitting SEIR parameters to observed fatalities. I’m sure it’s a terrible idea, but unfortunately all the data I have been monitoring for a month is all over the place on conversion of susceptible to exposed, initial levels of exposed and infected, and rates of conversion from infective to removed, case fatality rates, and so forth. But, I was able to find a set of stable values for all the key parameters which can project forward (and backwards). The curve fit has a very low, below 2% MAPE (same as above, higher error, but stable). Then I looked at the idea that, if over two weeks there is a daily reduction of fatalities (not cases), then we’d see a ‘relaxation’ of social distancing. I think we’re already starting that now, and have seen it with the protests. I’m not sure how heavily that impacts the rate of conversion from susceptible to exposed, which is done in concert with the levels of infective people, but I know the rate one infective person exposing multiple susceptible people was possibly somewhere between 2.2 and 2.5 late March, that’s why we saw such a rapid increase. That rate is called R0, as has been noted often in the news. Distancing hit, and after a few weeks, we started seeing a decline in fatalities, and R0 declined to 1 or less. So what would happen if we changed how we distance, granted that we have inadequate testing, no vaccine, and no real contact tracing. So i adjusted my SEIR model to make R0 — rate of infection — dependent on the idea of “we can relax” after two weeks of declining fatalities, and it could rise to pre-April levels. If fatalities rose enough, Panic would ensue, and we’d resume distancing. Here’s what I saw: <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/798922/original/20200428SEIR.png?1588216936"> <figcaption>SIER with Beta (component of R0) Dependent on “Two Week Decline”</figcaption> </figure> The red lines are on a linear scale (left) in the millions (susceptible and removed), Green and Blue lines are on a logarithmic scale (right), showing fatalities (total, daily, actual). <ul> <li>Around mid-May, distancing is “officially relaxed” (two-week decline trigger), so R0 (infection rate) climbs back up to late-March / early-April levels because there’s still no vaccine, inadequate testing, and inadequate contact tracking.</li> <li>Daily fatalities start growing later in May, and because there’s more widespread infectivity (very different from mid-March) the fatality rate grows more quickly, and reaches a much higher level. We hit around 100,000 plus fatalities (WWI level)</li> <li>Panic ensues, fatalities hit all-time highs, and people resume isolation distancing for a time, then feel-good messages arrive and we stop distancing again.</li> <li>Within weeks, infections rise, and then hospitalizations and fatalities arrive again, Panic ensues, and distancing resumes. We hit WWII level fatalities.</li> <li>This persists on and on for months as people become more inured to 2000+ fatalities daily, but the numbers of susceptible are significantly reduced (removed, including fatalities) because a high % of the population has simply been infected and may have some level of immunity.</li> <li>We’re above the million fatality level around September and it rises to 1-1.2Million through the end of the year. We hit one of my original milestones, all US wars combined.</li> <li>Daily fatalities bounce smoothly between dozens and a thousand persistently through 2023. If a vaccine is found, we won’t see it impact on these curves before mid 2021 at best. </li> <li>I think effective treatment will change fatality rates, but not the underlying SEIR model characteristics. It may paradoxically increase all fatalities because so many fatalities seem to be occurring outside of a hospital setting — with stroke or heart attack. We’ve all see how high all fatality levels are compared to previous years, yet not stemming from deaths in a hospital setting.</li> </ul> So that’s new shapes we may see with this pandemic. I’m sorry to have such a complex graph, but we’re entering a new period — beyond an ‘inflection’ in a simple model. We’ll see something like this play out nationally — not as sharp — but as a combination of all different state-level policies with no national model. I’m expecting that by 15 May or so, we’ll see exactly what happens when you relax distancing without a vaccine, treatment, tracking, and testing, and I can curve-fit the remainder of this model to a varying R0 based on actual data. I’m constantly thankful to be living in the bay area. I don’t anticipate our area to ‘relax’ without accelerated testing and substantial contact tracing, which I think can suppress transmission to rates which allow a semblance of life sometime after July. Closing Note on Modeling I think IMHE and other models have been debated to death, but I wanted to contribute a link to people who feel IHME data are of particular value: https://www.covid-projections.com It summarizes IHME dimensions over time. Here’s an example. <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/799015/original/ScreenShot2020-04-29at10.25.14PM.png?1588224385"> <figcaption>Comparison of IHME projections day by day.</figcaption> </figure> You can see how IHME oscillates up and down in all outcomes. Other public models have much higher reliability. I’d focus on those institutions which publish a model with accuracy measurements along with it. Otherwise, it’s all academic, as they say. <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Coronavirus cover-19 Covid Epidemic Medicine Pandemic Science SEIR Vietnam _1941482 Thu, 30 Apr 2020 05:32:10 +0000 COVID-19 Fatalities - Positive End-April Update: Models Converge, R0 of ~.97? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/27/1940813/-COVID-19-Fatalities-Positive-End-April-Update-Models-Converge-R0-of-97 While this week the Data from Johns Hopkins seemed to jump around a bit unpredictably (after one update, the total US Fatalities dropped inexplicably to 36,000), the updates over this weekend seemed to provide some additional corrections, and the net effect for my models has been to see all models converge end-April to very closely aligned values for the rest of 2020, with more optimism. The pandemic is not over. But, we are seeing a clear plateau now, and an indication when strategies may be feasible to shift to a different management method. <ul> <li>The “Compartmental” SIR (SEIR) model shows only slightly higher fatality outcomes now compared to functional models, and a long, slow decline in daily fatalities for the US as a whole. The Logistic and Gaussian functional models show a slightly faster decline. We have avoided the very high fatalities I originally saw end-April, and high daily fatality. I see fewer than 80,000-120,000 fatalities this year with no changes to current distancing policy.</li> <li>My models show that by the 10th of May, we may have two consecutive weeks of declining daily fatalities, which is a one benchmark for considering changing distancing policy.</li> <li>The Effective R0, which is an indicator of how many people one infective person can spread to, seems to have dropped below 1. My SEIR model suggests we have an R0 of around 1.01, but it is a lagging indicator based on infections from weeks past. I think based on declining 7-day fatality sums basis, the R0 is around 0.97. This is a very good thing, since this would mean by late June, we may have a low enough infection rate that testing and contact tracing is feasible to change suppression strategies. The benchmarks on those strategies are still in debate.</li> <li>My SEIR model shows that by end-year we may have up to 7% of the US population having been exposed to the virus, and with current distancing that confers effective herd immunity.</li> <li>State-by-State, I’ve reviewed the plateau, and there are some significant differences as to when they locally hit their plateaus — New York had a sharp peak already, Minnesota will be peaking later in May, California further out towards summer — but overall for the US, the net plateau will be soon.</li> </ul> And I want to re-iterate: The pandemic is not over. Unless we have either treatment or vaccination, we are going to be in this distancing state and/with a state of rapid testing, contact tracing and isolation into the foreseeable future. <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Covid Covid-19 flattening Medicine Pandemic Plateau Science _1940813 Mon, 27 Apr 2020 18:48:29 +0000 COVID-19 Fatalities - 19 April Update: Approaching Vietnam, then Waves of Failed Optimism https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/20/1938863/-COVID-19-Fatalities-19-April-Update-Approaching-Vietnam-then-Waves-of-Failed-Optimism I’ve been projecting the shape of COVID, and some of the forecast course since late March, and I am beginning to see all my forecasts beginning to converge as we move from the current phase we are in for COVID fatalities, and enter a new one. I still foresee COVID-19 fatalities reaching Vietnam War level in April, perhaps this week. This Phase: distancing numbers <ul> <li>Current Case Fatality Rate: 5.31% — how many people will die as a percentage of those diagnosed. This is based on CEBM.net numbers, and is much higher than when I began forecasting, when I used 3.45% from the WHO. We have a lot more data now than we did back in March.</li> <li>Current Plateau of Fatalities Projection: 13 May — all my models show that around that time, based on current distancing, fatalities, growth, that we will plateau and possibly start a long slow decline in fatalities.</li> <li>Current Total US Fatalities Projection: 400,000 to 1.2 Million — my models are converging to a range, but within that range it will become more and more specific over the remainder of April with real data. They’re similar to the initial projections from London, late-March.</li> </ul> When I started, compared to where we are today, you can see how effective distancing has been: <div class="table-wrapper"> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="dk5-table" width="560"> <caption>Milestone Projections Over Time</caption> <thead> <tr> <th>US Event</th> <th>Event Deaths</th> <th>COVID Deaths</th> <th>Fcst 4/1</th> <th>Fcst 4/12</th> <th>Fcst 4/19</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <th style=" background-color: azure;">Afghan War</th> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">2,216</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">2,565</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">28-Mar</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">29-Mar</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">29-Mar</td> </tr> <tr> <th style=" background-color: azure;">9/11 Attack</th> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">2,966</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">3,102</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">30-Mar</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">30-Mar</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">30-Mar</td> </tr> <tr> <th style=" background-color: azure;">Iraq War</th> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">4,497</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">4,992</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">1-Apr</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">1-Apr</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">1-Apr</td> </tr> <tr> <th style=" background-color: azure;">2019/20 Flu</th> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">30,000</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">32,916</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">9-Apr</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">14-Apr</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">16-Apr</td> </tr> <tr> <th style=" background-color: azure;">2019 Auto Fatalities</th> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">36,505</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">36,773</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">10-Apr</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">15-Apr</td> <td align="right" style=" background-color: azure;">17-Apr</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Vietnam</th> <td align="right">57,939</td> <td align="right">60,851</td> <td align="right">12-Apr</td> <td align="right">18-Apr</td> <td align="right">24-Apr</td> </tr> <tr> <th>WW I</th> <td align="right">116,516</td> <td align="right">122,680</td> <td align="right">15-Apr</td> <td align="right">23-Apr</td> <td align="right">5-May</td> </tr> <tr> <th>WW II</th> <td align="right">405,399</td> <td align="right">410,743</td> <td align="right">20-Apr</td> <td align="right">1-May</td> <td align="right">4-Jun</td> </tr> <tr> <th>Spanish Flu</th> <td align="right">675,000</td> <td align="right">678,217</td> <td align="right">23-Apr</td> <td align="right">5-May</td> <td align="right">7-Jul</td> </tr> <tr> <th>All Above</th> <td align="right">1,331,038</td> <td align="right">1,547,706</td> <td align="right">26-Apr</td> <td align="right">10-May</td> <td>TBD</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Whereas I forecast around 9 April to hit 2019/2020 Flu fatality level, it was pushed out to 16 April, same with Auto Fatality comparison. Vietnam-level fatalities are now pushed out to 24 April, and for the last few days have been staying there. Whatever we are doing for social distancing seems to have reached it’s limit of impact. As we plateau, some of the worst projections I had early April may not be realized this year at all. The Next Phases: the waves of fatal optimism I believe the next wave of fatalities is starting, driven by poorly-vetted optimistic data, and will be harder to fight. <ul> <li>Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) data (34,000 low, 140,000 high deaths by August) that was touted as reasons for lifting stay at home orders earlier, since they project that by June we’ll have perhaps a death every day or so. At least some people are finding the entire forecasting setup is poor, “its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.” No, we aren’t having a low of 34,000 deaths, we’ve exceeded them and may exceed the high estimate substantially. Likewise, the IHME projection stops at August. Believe me, deaths will continue long after August, but they create the impression that “that’s the limit.” </li> <li>A <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" title="">Stanford University “associated team” Antibody study</a> seems to show an “unadjusted prevalence of coronavirus in Santa Clara of 1.5%”, which when combined with the population size and current fatality level seems to imply <a href="https://reason.com/2020/04/17/covid-19-lethality-not-much-different-than-flu-says-new-study/" target="_blank" title="">“about the same fatality as influenza”</a> (link to a strangely conservative website). Unfortunately, if you actually read the study (I did), and the <a href="https://htv-prod-media.s3.amazonaws.com/files/covid-19-technical-overview-pi-1585787121.pdf" target="_blank" title="">inserts for the antibody tests</a> (I did), you’d expect false positives around to be possible 1.9% — 2.3% of the time, far exceeding the “unadjusted test results” in this case. No it doesn’t have the same fatality as the flu.</li> <li>I continue to read non-peer-reviewed papers which generate simulations where the pandemic is over very quickly, and I fear that like a virus, one or more of these papers will “pop out” and via uncontrolled spreading influence media and political responses to cause serious damage.</li> </ul> I think it’s entirely possible that last week’s “I don’t want to shelter at home” tantrum is due to this administration’s attempt to be overly optimistic with IHME data from end-March. I think it’s entirely possible that the non-peer-reviewed Stanford Antibody Study which has been circulating widely in the news since Friday will have a similar devastating effect. People will feel “they’ve already been infected”, and pretend all is well in another week or two, and bump up fatalities in May. These waves of optimism followed by fatality peaking will be exhausting and depressing for everyone. They won’t be helping with ultimately trying to find a way to relax safely. I can’t model that happening without incredibly amplified testing, tracing, and finding a way to personally protect others if someone is actually infective but asymptomatic. My “SEIR” model extended with shelter-at-home relaxing changes over time (“cautious opening after two weeks of declining cases”) simply shows wave after wave of fatalities jumping up then jumping down. I cannot see anything yet (trying to work with masking) that seems to change anything essential about the predicament we are in. Final note, I’ve shifted all my data sources to Johns Hopkins, which seems to be cited most often, so my comparisons will mirror others. <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. </div> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) antibodies Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 flatten IHME Medicine Pandemic Science testing Vietnam _1938863 Mon, 20 Apr 2020 20:01:37 +0000 COVID-19 - got mask? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/17/1938245/-COVID-19-got-mask I have been thinking more about HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, and in all the fog of what I heard over 40 years, I remember two messages distinctly. Know Your Status At the beginning of HIV/AIDS, it wasn’t easy or ordinary to be tested. Tests originally were not to diagnose HIV/AIDS, but to screen blood for possible presence of the virus. Tests took weeks to get results, and we went through generation after generation of tests to finally arrive at one which can detect exposure after “only” two weeks. However, everyone can know their status, and it’s routine in many contexts to have an HIV test in the normal course of healthcare. Use Protection The other message that was drilled in from day 1 was “Use protection”. HIV/AIDS started out with an enormous number of people simple ceasing to have any sexual activity at all. That wasn’t really feasible, however as a long-term strategy. People will simply not be able to comply indefinitely. Over time, it was clear that using protection during sex, while it wasn’t 100% reliable, reduced the risk enormously. It was perhaps comparatively easy to develop a test for HIV. Changing behavior and social norms so that having unprotected sex was seen by most people as risky and somewhat selfish, well that took decades. COVID-19 Testing We are at the very beginning of COVID-19 testing. Testing is scarce, reliable information from authorities is unavailable, multiple non-certified tests are rapidly entering the market. I see this as an unfortunate crazy-house-mirror repeat of HIV/AIDS testing. I hope, but don’t expect, that by Mid-May we may see a reliable plan to have testing at scale, and which can truly illustrate and help manage the spread of the virus. COVID-19 Protection The only almost 100% complete protection from COVID-19 at the moment is complete withdrawal from ordinary social life, as far as I can tell. That, like complete abstinence, isn’t feasible as a long-term strategy. People won’t be able to comply indefinitely, or perhaps even briefly. We’re already beginning to see, after only weeks, a lot of push-back to compliance. My feeling is that, as physical barriers like condoms were to HIV/AIDS, we’re going to see masks become a necessary protection for ordinary social life, for some time, for everyone. Like a condom, a mask certainly isn’t 100% reliable at preventing transmission of viruses. There are many conversations, and a scarcity of data, of how well masks prevent transmission (I can’t tell you how much I’ve been reading). Most opinions seem to support the idea that in a situation with two people, one infected and one not, both people wearing masks reduces the possibility of transmission dramatically. All parties wearing masks in social situations is the only way I foresee being able to cope and stay reasonably healthy in the mid-range and long-range. Testing will not magically appear. I hope, and expect, that very soon, perhaps in days, we will begin to see social norms develop where it is understood that not wearing a mask in public is risky and selfish, masks are interesting and perhaps fun, and we learn to adapt for the time being. You see, it is not about preventing becoming exposed to the coronavirus, it has to be clearly about preventing transmitting it to others as being a valued part of a social contract. <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 gotmask mask Medicine Pandemic Science _1938245 Sat, 18 Apr 2020 00:30:32 +0000 COVID-19 Fatalities - 16 April Update: COVID Exceeds 2019/2020 Flu Season in Only Six Weeks https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/17/1938115/-COVID-19-Fatalities-16-April-Update-COVID-Exceeds-2019-2020-Flu-Season-in-Only-Six-Weeks Several things I wanted to share today, but my main observation is that 16-April according to NYT data, we passed the milestone of COVID Deaths exceeding the entire 2019/2020 Flu Season. This happened a week later than my pessimistic projections back end-March, so it’s only a slightly better outcome. I read an article today about “Dr Phil” saying that we don’t go into a panic about the annual rate of automobile deaths (he estimated 45,000, I see 39,000 for 2019), why COVID? Because with COVID as we are today, the lower annualized death rate would be 250,000 deaths, and based on the last week or so of data an upper annualized death rate would be close to 750,000 deaths. As some may recall in my prior postings, if we had done nothing (“All will miraculously disappear in April”), we’d be having daily death totals in the range of 10’s of thousands, and by end-April in the 100’s of thousands. We’ve done a lot to reduce transmission, and we can do more, and it starts by not listening to celebrities, and non-medical sources of information. <ul> <li>Fatality data are being changed, the numbers are being increased backwards in time due to changes by the CDC on classifying deaths, so that a person dying at home of reasons which seem related to COVID will be classified as COVID. This will cause a substantial revision up of deaths, and will change projections. So far I’ve heard 3000-4500 fatalities upwards, depending on source.</li> <li>Case Fatality Rate has increased substantially according to CEBM.org for the United States, to 5.11% — that means that slightly more than 1 in 20 people who are diagnosed with COVID will likely die. I can’t overstate how staggering that is, and the CFR keeps rising as time progresses. Early talk had been Case Fatality Rates would decline with testing, I don’t see that.</li> <li>Growth is flattening, but isn’t flat at the US level. Whereas at the beginning of April, the daily fatality rate grew 10x every 10 days, it seems to project growing now 10x every 30 days. I see peaking now end-June, but I suspect since we’re approaching a limit to growth, we may never meet it and decline, we may just get to a level and sit there for months, inching up and up. That’s the nature of asymptotes in math, if that’s what is happening.</li> <li>I’ve been using a variety of models, with different accuracies. I’ve written here about the <a href="https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america" target="_blank">IHME models</a>, which I look at occasionally, but they are so far distant from today’s reality (refreshed 13 April) I’m feeling that they’ve served a purpose about alarm. I think they’re probably counterproductive. Will we have 300 deaths today, or 6000? Doesn’t inspire confidence.</li> <li>I have built a SEIR model which combines Susceptibility, Exposure, Infectivity, Removal, as well as multiple time-phased Susceptibilities — people who have zeroed the probability of exposure with what is effectively a home quarantine (like my family here, who have been at home for 6 weeks), people who will get irritated with home quarantine and simply go out, but to me importantly people who will adopt physical barriers, like face masks, enforceable through law in public situations. My first models showed numbers of fatalities rising and dropping as we’ve all heard — “the waves” — depending on factors like “two weeks of dropping fatalities, then relax” and adoption of physical barriers. Several models showed me if we had a high rate of barrier adoption (masks), and that the barrier would reduce COVID transmission probability (all data I see show that it does), then we could actually have some quite surprising outcomes as early as July. I will share when I feel confident in how the model reflects reality, rather than my optimism. I haven’t factored testing in, I have no confidence in testing capability at all, or in any data around testing.</li> </ul> <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 COVID19 Influenza Medicine Pandemic Science _1938115 Fri, 17 Apr 2020 19:03:22 +0000 COVID-19: What I Don't See - The "Natural Experiments" For Treatments https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/13/1936717/-COVID-19-What-I-Don-t-See-The-Natural-Experiments-For-Treatments One thing I’ve been quite surprised about with scientific reaction to the COVID-19 crisis and the Coronavirus spread, is that there is little or no literature about looking at fatalities with Coronavirus, and seeing if the current discussion around Chloroquine, and a multitude of HIV treatment and preventative medications could be informed by what is called a “Natural Experiment”. There has been discussion of the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w" target="_blank">Cruise Ships</a> which were kept isolated as “Natural Experiments”, in terms of seeing Case Fatality Rate, infectivity, and so forth. Likewise, between <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/coronavirus-kentucky-tennessee-social-distancing" target="_blank">Kentucky and Tennessee</a>, or Republican-leaning vs Democratic-leaning states, or New York and California for social distancing. I’ve seen anecdotal papers stemming back to 2004 and SARS (first major Coronavirus Epidemic) that HIV patients treated side-by-side in clinics with SARS patients had zero incidence of SARS, while staff themselves developed SARS (20% I believe). Always lots of anecdotal from China, however. Here’s Natural Experiments I’d like to read about, but haven’t seen. The drugs listed below are often used for chronic illness, so it’s not a question of giving a group the drug, there are already groups who are actively taking the drugs. First, what drugs do people take today, for chronic conditions, which could be in the process of being assessed as treatments or prevention of COVID-19? Here’s what I found from a quick scan, bolded names I’ve seen in candidate clinical study so far, not an exhaustive list. <div class="table-wrapper"> <table align="center" class="dk5-table"> <caption> Anti-Viral Treatment candidate "Natural Experiments" </caption> <thead> <tr> <th style="text-align:left">Drug Class</th> <th class="AlignLeft" style="text-align:left">Names</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <th>Viral Entry Block</th> <td> <ul> <li>gp41 (Enfuvirtide (ENF, T-20))</li> <li>CCR5 (Maraviroc (MVC)</li> <li>Vicriviroc†, Cenicriviroc†, PRO 140)</li> <li>CD4 (Ibalizumab†, UB421)</li> <li>gp120 (Fostemsavir)</li> </ul> </td> </tr> <tr> <th> Reverse-Transcriptase Inhibitors </th> <td> <ul> <li>Abacavir (ABC)</li> <li>Didanosine (ddI)</li> <li>Emtricitabine (FTC)</li> <li>Lamivudine (3TC)</li> <li>Stavudine (d4T)</li> <li>Zidovudine (AZT, ZDV)</li> <li>Amdoxovir</li> <li>Apricitabine</li> <li>Censavudine</li> <li>Elvucitabine</li> <li>Islatravir (EFdA)</li> <li>Racivir</li> <li>Stampidine</li> <li>Zalcitabine (ddC)</li> <li>Tenofovir disoproxil (TDF)</li> <li>Tenofovir alafenamide (TAF)</li> <li>Efavirenz (EFV)</li> <li>Nevirapine (NVP)</li> <li>Delavirdine (DLV)</li> <li>diarylpyrimidines</li> <li>Etravirine (ETR)</li> <li>Rilpivirine (RPV)</li> <li>Doravirine</li> </ul> </td> </tr> <tr> <th>Integration / Maturation Inhibitors</th> <td> <ul> <li>Dolutegravir (DTG)</li> <li>Elvitegravir (EVG)</li> <li>Raltegravir (RAL)</li> <li>BI 224436</li> <li>Cabotegravir</li> <li>Bictegravir (BIC)</li> <li>MK-2048</li> <li>Bevirimat</li> <li>BMS-955176</li> </ul> </td> </tr> <tr> <th>Protease inhibitor</th> <td> <ul> <li>Amprenavir (APV)</li> <li>Fosamprenavir (FPV)</li> <li>Indinavir (IDV)</li> <li>Lopinavir (LPV)</li> <li>Nelfinavir (NFV)</li> <li>Ritonavir (RTV)</li> <li>Saquinavir (SQV)</li> <li>Atazanavir (ATV)</li> <li>Darunavir (DRV)</li> <li>Tipranavir (TPV)</li> <li>TMC-310911</li> </ul> </td> </tr> <tr> <th> Non-HIV antivirals (for Herpes, e.g.) Nuceloside Analogues </th> <td> <ul> <li>Aciclovir</li> <li>Valaciclovir</li> <li>Gangiclovir</li> <li>Penciclovir</li> <li>Lamivudine</li> <li>Adefovir</li> <li>Tenofovir</li> <li>Entecavir</li> </ul> </td> </tr> <tr> <th>LUPUS Treatments</th> <td> <ul> <li>Hydroxychloroquine</li> <li>Chloroquine</li> <li>Methotrexate</li> </ul> </td> </tr> <tr> <th>Combination</th> <td> <ul> <li>Kaletra</li> <li>Aluvia</li> <li>Truvada</li> <li>Descovy</li> <li>& Other Groups</li> </ul> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> Second, how would you discover people taking these drugs for chronic illness, and them map back to populations and see if there was any evidence from a “Natural Experiment” that they had effects. <div class="table-wrapper"> <table class="dk5-table"> <caption>Natural Experiment Versions off the top of my head</caption> <thead> <tr> <th>Select For</th> <th>To See</th> <th>Data</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Prescription Variance</td> <td>How do prescriptions for these drugs vary between populations, areas, other demographic segments with similar rates of COVID Fatality — higher per-capita prescriptions linked to higher COVID, neutral, or lower COVID fatality. </td> <td> Pharmacies Medicare, Medicare records Insurers </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Population Fatality Variance</td> <td> Gay and Bisexual Men make up an estimated 2% of the US population, but count for 55% of people living with HIV/AIDS according to HRC. They may be on one or more types of HIV/AIDS treatment, though some studies show only 30% of them may be on active treatment. What is the level of GLBT Men within COVID fatalities nationally compared to all fatalities? What is the level of COVID fatality for Lupus Sufferers compared to all fatalities? </td> <td> CDC GMHC Lupus Foundation of America Aidsvu.org </td> </tr> <tr> <td>Regional Fatality Variance</td> <td> Areas of the country with higher populations of people taking these drugs, such as cities with higher HIV/AIDS prevalence — higher per-capita fatalities linked to underlying conditions, neutral, or lower COVID fatality. <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="HIVAIDSMap.jpg" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/791334/large/HIVAIDSMap.jpg?1586798573" title="HIVAIDSMap.jpg"> <figcaption></figcaption> </figure> </div> Look at the data around areas such as San Francisco, New Orleans, Salt Lake City (on the higher end of metro area gay populations according to NYT), consider PrEP usage. <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="2-AIDSVu-PrEP_77000-Graphic-1024-x-512-v10.png" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/791335/large/2-AIDSVu-PrEP_77000-Graphic-1024-x-512-v10.png?1586798591" title="2-AIDSVu-PrEP_77000-Graphic-1024-x-512-v10.png"> <figcaption></figcaption> </figure> </div> Look at data around population groups suffering from Lupus nationally, and see if there’s any linkage to COVID. <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned width-md"><img alt="lupus.jpg" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/791330/large/lupus.jpg?1586798019" title="lupus.jpg"> <figcaption>Lupus Mortality Map</figcaption> </figure> </div> </td> <td>CDC GMHC Lupus Foundation of America Aidsvu.org </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> <div class="table-wrapper">My hypothesis would be that if the drugs had a naturally protective impact, or none, or if the underlying disease would have co-morbidity with COVID-19, you’d be able to see statistically unusual numbers for these types of populations, derived entirely from existing data and correlations. </div> <div class="table-wrapper">I’ve not been able to get my hands on underlying data (Lupus, PrEP, HIV) except graphically so far, but I’m continuing to research. If anyone is aware of studies along these lines, I’d be all ears because it should point to interesting conclusions, such as “Even with underlying HIV/AIDS, Drug-X seemed to have a protective effect”, or “Even with underlying Lupus, Drug-Y seemed to have a protective effect.” </div> <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. For more on large-scale research on anti-viral drugs, a good general-purpose magazine article at the New Yorker is “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-quest-for-a-pandemic-pill" target="_blank">Quest for a Pandemic Pill</a>” <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="200413_r36175.jpg" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/791341/large/200413_r36175.jpg?1586799689" title="200413_r36175.jpg"> <figcaption>New Yorker Article: Quest for a Pandemic Pill</figcaption> </figure> </div> rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 2019-nCoV 2019-NovelCoronavirus Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 COVID19 Medicine naturalexperiment Pandemic Science _1936717 Mon, 13 Apr 2020 17:42:15 +0000 COVID-19 Fatalities - April Update: Stretching and Flattening https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/12/1936698/-COVID-19-Fatalities-April-Update-Stretching-and-Flattening I have not updated my model projections for several days after I wrote my HIV/AIDS comparison to the news we are barraged by with COVID-19, frankly it was too saddening, and I needed a breath. I update my data today from NYT spreadsheets, and looked at what was happening: <ul> <li>Social Distancing has had a large effect, and seems to have set the US on a consistent new trajectory since early April, stretching out some initial milestones at least several weeks, so whereas I had seen the US hitting 30,000 “2019/2020 Seasonal Flu” fatalities by 7/8 April, it now looks as though it would be roughly a week later, the “Vietnam War” milestone is two weeks later, and other peaks (WWI, WW2) into May and June, very good news indeed for hospital Capacity Peak issues.</li> <li>Three different models I use are having smaller and smaller Projection / Actual errors in a 5-day window, so the actual “shape” of what is happening is very consistent.</li> <li>The Case Fatality rate that I source from CEBM.net has been going up, and we’re now at 3.4%, close to where I started at 3.45% from WHO.</li> <li>I can’t tell if daily fatalities are leveling, they tend to jump all over the place; 11 days ago they ‘seemed promising’, then they jumped high. It still looks exponentially growing.</li> </ul> At this point, I can’t see how to project the top end reliably, and I don’t think I’m alone, I’ve read “model comparisons” papers which show wide, wide differences. I can get projections from this point on with multiple models which have 100:1 difference in peak fatality, and four-week swings in peak dates with very low differences in error over the last two weeks. We’re in the middle of an inflection, a big set of changes to what we see, and what we experience. Whereas several weeks back I could reliability set the date for the first three milestones, now I can’t. I’m going to create a new model which adds in a factor for “agreement” with social distancing, let it vary over time dependent on how frightening daily case or fatality rates are, and see what those curves would look like if, when case fatality rates fall below some threshold for people to think “it’s all OK, regardless of what state government says”, social distancing drops. <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 2019-nCoV 2019-NovelCoronavirus Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 COVID19 Epidemic Health Medicine Science _1936698 Mon, 13 Apr 2020 01:42:52 +0000 COVID & HIV/AIDS: Deja-vu All Over Again, Personal Note https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/8/1930914/-COVID-HIV-AIDS-Deja-vu-All-Over-Again-Personal-Note Speaking about myself personally is sometimes uncomfortable for me, but I wanted to share something to others about how I think about COVID: with a mixture of deja-vu and nausea. Sometime in early December 1989, I remember on free weekend wanting to go out to the movies. It was so laughably trivial an event in my life, but it’s stayed in my head for decades. I lived in LA, and saw a theater was playing Total Recall (notwithstanding IMDb publishing that it was released in June 1990; I definitely saw it in 1989: I didn’t live in the US in 1990). I began thinking of who I knew would enjoy it, and I could invite to go out with me. Then, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Everyone I thought of who might like a movie date, I had only really known for months or less (the technical term of art in 1989 was probably “hot trick”), and had no idea if they would enjoy the film. Everyone I had friendships with that I really knew, that I at least understood their tastes in film and pop culture, was dead from HIV/AIDS. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 2019-nCoV 2019-NovelCoronavirus AIDS Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 COVID19 HIV HIVAIDS Medicine Pandemic Rescued Science _1930914 Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00:07 +0000 COVID-19 Forecast Washington State: IMHE Model Errors Growing https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/8/1935544/-COVID-19-Forecast-Washington-State-IMHE-Model-Errors-Growing I continue to be surprised by the often-quoted Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and yesterday I was triggered by a note in the news, specific to Washington State, about “Hopeful” and “Sharing Ventilators” with other states. Then, of course I saw a quote about IHME data showed that the peak was past. The forecast I downloaded from them yesterday showed, for Washington State: <ul> <li>Peak Date of the epidemic was in the past — 27 March</li> <li>Peak Fatalities for the epidemic were only 24</li> </ul> However, reality was already quite different: <ul> <li>Peak Date so far was 6-April, 10 days later</li> <li>Peak Fatalities so far were 39</li> <li>5 Days Wrong, and around 50% off?</li> </ul> Part of it is a problem with having small numbers: a 5 fatality-miss can look like more than 20% error, because Washington’s daily fatalities are very flat. However? Would you like your State to relinquish medical supplies or cancel orders based on optimistic forecasting? I would have grave concerns. California, for instance is sharing ventilators, and IHME projects the peak of fatalities for California around 15th of April. Fortunately, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-06/newsom-california-ventilators-coronavirus-peak" target="_blank">California is apparently not using IHME</a>, and is seeing, as have I, peaking later in May: <blockquote> Given that coronavirus cases are not expected to peak until May, under current estimates, California could afford to lend the medical devices to parts of the country where they are in seriously short supply, Newsom said. </blockquote> So, IHME isn’t asleep, and they shared another projection, from apparently 12:30am this morning, which I combined with current data (7 April) from the New York Times: <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/789114/original/20200409-IHME4-WA.png?1586368140"> <figcaption>Today from IHME, for Washington: Peak Was Yesterday.</figcaption> </figure> Today is the peak, and it’s all downhill for fatalities in the State. Hopeful, and I’d love that to be the case for Washington State, but I suspect in a day or two, it will revise up (as it already has), and then up again, and again. Here’s the crux of the problem: My perception is that IHME keeps re-forecasting using actual data (good), but is not revising their assumptions around maximum fatalities and inflections in their model. As flattening works, you would assume peak dates stretch out, and that the peak flattens, which is what happens in other models. Gavin Newsom calls it “<a href="https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article241838551.html" target="_blank">Flatten and Stretch</a>,” (sounds like something to do at the gym). Strangely, IHME shows peaking and compressing, at least for Washington State, sharper peaking and dates pulling forward instead of pushing out. Something is quite wrong there. I will continue to watch, but as I’ve said in multiple posts, what they publish at this point is easy to refute (compared to actual data), and can provide a dangerous sense of optimism. I’m saddened that it continues to be widely communicated. <hr> Stay Calm. Critical decisions need a clear head. Stay Sane. Incessant COVID noise from deranged people will derange you. Stay Home. There’s no safety in numbers, for the time being. Disclaimer: I’m not a statistician, nor am I an epidemiologist or physician. I do have substantial training in science and mathematics. My assumptions are based on publicly available data, and interpreted without domain-specific expertise to temper my judgements. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 2019-nCoV 2019-NovelCoronavirus Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 COVID19 Epidemic Health Medicine Science _1935544 Wed, 08 Apr 2020 18:06:02 +0000 COVID-19 Total Fatalities at IHME: Fatal Optimism? https://www.dailykos.com/story/2020/4/7/1935289/-COVID-19-Total-Fatalities-at-IHME-Fatal-Optimism The influential Institute for <a href="https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america" target="_blank">Health Metrics and Evaluation</a> has posted a new set of projections on COVID-19 deaths, and has oscillated from around 80K to 95K to 81K in very few days. I’ve written before on why I don’t trust their data. I’d like today to cover a little on why the math isn’t working for me, and I’d like to continue to emphasize today why low, optimistic projections can have fatal consequences. I want to preface this by saying as I always do, I’m neither an epidemiologist nor am I a statistician. I don’t have the training to temper my judgments other than “Sheldon” level Science and Math. I also have a simple bias, which I’m well aware of and I seek to control: whenever I see any piece of information associated with Donald Trump, I always assume the diametrically opposite is true. I’ve never been disappointed in that bias, unfortunately. Donald Trump’s organization seems to like IHME projections and communicate them frequently, which sets off all my alarms, perhaps yours too. Some Math There are many, many ways to forecast natural biological phenomena like epidemics. All of them seem to me to basically fall into one of two methods — using statistics to build a general function which predicts things like fatalities as a function of time, or using statistics to build a detailed model of flow between susceptible, infected, and recovered populations like a “SIR” model. If you use a general function, there are many to use, but they all share some common features. They all have a “sigmoid” shape like a stretched “S”, which is patterned after a slow start on the left, rapid rise in cases in the center, and a slow decline on the right. Two other sigmoid models often used in biology are called Gompertz, and Generalized Logistic functions. <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="1920px-Gjl-tx.svg.png" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/788829/large/1920px-Gjl-tx.svg.png?1586292027" title="1920px-Gjl-tx.svg.png"> <figcaption>A sampling of sigma curves which could be used to model COVID</figcaption> </figure> </div> When I set out to understand what was happening, I started with many of these curves to model COVID with a simple function model. What I also wanted to ensure was that my model would be use close as possible to actual data. As I built my model, I measured the actual difference, every day, between my model and reality, and also looked the fit between a series of days, and also all days. Using Excel, it was pretty easy to find the right parameters for the function that would bring the overall difference between my model and actual fatalities to as low a value as possible, zero if possible. I checked all the models above, and several others including the ones I mentioned — Gompertz, and Generalized Logistic. The function I found which gave the least error when I fitted it to observed data was the Generalized Logistic, but I continue to test other models, including the SIR model. No model will be perfectly correct, but one or two models will be correct more of the time. They are more likely to show what’s happening tomorrow, next week, and next month. Two key pieces of data on all models are “Case Fatality Rate”, or how many people are likely to die when they get an infection, and what Percent of the US population is likely to be infected over time. Without any intervention, and without containment, it is possible for the entire US population to be infected, but that may take years. In several models, if a significent subset of the population becomes infected, it makes it harder and harder for a person in the uninfected population to meet someone who is infected. Distancing is a way to make it hard to meet an infected person, of course. But in general, if somewhere between 70% — 80% of the population becomes infected, according to several estimates by leading institutions, then the wildfire-like spread of COVID becomes contained. Not eliminated, but contained. The Case Fatality Rate for the US keeps increasing, for many reasons, so you must keep adjusting models to account for this. The IHME Model The <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.27.20043752v1.full.pdf" target="_blank">IHME model uses an “Gaussian Error Function”</a> to model COVID-19 total mortality, and you can read all the technical details. The new forecast they’ve shared has running 5-day average error of around 6.71%, but in general it had a fairly low running error, about the same as what I had, and near to that of a SIR model. However, they show epidemic fatalities peaking 9 days from now. I see mid-May. They forecast total mortality of 81,000 people, I show significantly higher, and, I’m not alone. <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="20200406DailyPercent-Comparisons.png" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/788784/large/20200406DailyPercent-Comparisons.png?1586287032" title="20200406DailyPercent-Comparisons.png"> <figcaption></figcaption> </figure> </div> I’ve been assessing multiple models for weeks. I’ve looked at a Logistic Model, SIR model, IHME, and now a Gaussian Error function, which is what IHME uses. All models that I use show higher fatalities, and peaking in May. Even my forecasts using their own functions, and publicly identified case fatality and susceptible populations, come to a much higher trajectory. I’m surprised at the new data they’ve published, because I’m seeing a gap, and multiple people are also seeing a gap and questioning what IHME is doing. Fatal Optimism There have been numerous critiques of their method and of their paper on their forecasting, which I note has been published but not peer-reviewed. A good long thread on twitter by<a href="https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1243819232950751233" target="_blank"> Carl Bergstrom i</a>s somewhat withering. One comment he made is (to me), the essence of the problem here: <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="ScreenShot2020-04-07at2.20.59PM.png" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/788838/large/ScreenShot2020-04-07at2.20.59PM.png?1586294488" title="ScreenShot2020-04-07at2.20.59PM.png"> <figcaption></figcaption> </figure> </div> Well, it’s happening. You can read an excellent article in the Washington Post about different models: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/06/americas-most-influential-coronavirus-model-just-revised-its-estimates-downward-not-every-model-agrees/" target="_blank">www.washingtonpost.com/...</a> <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned"><img alt="ScreenShot2020-04-07at2.14.43PM.png" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/788843/large/ScreenShot2020-04-07at2.14.43PM.png?1586294668" title="ScreenShot2020-04-07at2.14.43PM.png"> <figcaption></figcaption> </figure> </div> The quote that echoes what I’ve been saying is this: <blockquote> <div> Leaders in one state said Trump administration officials have used IHME’s numbers to push back and in some cases deny their requests for equipment and help. Officials in that state cited emails and documents in which federal officials highlight IHME projections as evidence the state needs thousands fewer ventilators and beds than the state’s models project. The state officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they said they fear retaliation by the Trump administration that could result in even fewer ventilators and less federal assistance. </div> <div> “If the federal government is really making these kinds of life-or-death decisions on a single model and on only on the lower end of that model, that’s scary,” said one state official. </div> </blockquote> So, from this article and others, and my views: <ul> <li>There are many COVID models built by reputable organizations worldwide — WHO, Imperial College London, CDC, and others. Most models put fatality estimates for the US above six-figures.</li> <li>We know federal sources have been lowballing estimates month after month, week after week, day after day because it suits the political messaging.</li> <li>One model among a constellation, the one from IMHE, has almost suprisingly low numbers, extrapolated from a Wuhan-level lockdown across the US.</li> <li>It is seemingly used to help guide allocations of materials among the states and hospitals which are facing COVID.</li> </ul> If you look at IHME, I’d be very cautious. Consider what they’re saying, what assumptions they have, and what others are saying, and how the information is used. When we’re told constantly that this is more severe than the 2019/2020 Flu, and this organization is saying the epidemic is no more severe than 2.7 times last year’s flu season for fatality. I don’t see their evidence is sufficient to make this extraordinary claim. rss@dailykos.com (sufeitzy) 2019-nCoV 2019-NovelCoronavirus Coronavirus Covid Covid-19 Epidemic Health Medicine Science _1935289 Tue, 07 Apr 2020 22:22:17 +0000