Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

T R E 4 5 O N

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

You cannot shame the shameless.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

People are weird.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2024

Archives for 2024

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: April 24, 2024

by | 37 Comments

This post is in: ,

H5N1 Update: Unsurprisingly, the more evidence of ‘bird flu’ infection we look for, the more we find. My totally-amateur advice remains, for the moment: Stay away from raw milk; be scrupulous about hygiene after any contact with wild animals or livestock (I assume everyone’s already disinfecting bird feeders & gloving up when refilling them, for instance); keep your cats indoors, and keep an eye out for sudden deaths or disappearances among your neighbor ferals (infected cats tend to die rapidly from brain swelling).

***********

Good news: The Biobot Wastewater Monitoring dashboard continues to show a gradual, persistent decline in virus levels for all parts of the United States.

show full post on front page

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: April 24, 2024Post + Comments (37)

On The Road – arrieve – Saudi Arabia, part 2

by | 17 Comments

This post is in: , ,

arrieve

The second day in Jeddah I took a walking tour of Al Balad, the old town of Jeddah. It became a thriving port in the 7th century, and because it is less than 50 miles from Mecca, Al Balad was, and Jeddah is, a gateway city for pilgrims. The 650 buildings in the district—now a UNESCO World Heritage site—mostly date from the 19th century; many were built from blocks of coral carved out of the nearby Red Sea, with distinctive wooden balconies called rawasheen.

The tour was a little haphazard but this was so much more interesting than all the jewelry stores and construction sites on the previous day.

On The Road – arrieve – Saudi Arabia, part 2Post + Comments (17)

On The Road - arrieve - Saudi Arabia, part 2 9
Jeddah, Saudi ArabiaJanuary 3, 2024

Many of the buildings are dilapidated and some are in danger of collapsing, as the steep cost of upkeep led to many of the families leaving for the newer, more modern living options in Jeddah’s suburbs. The Ministry of Culture has now financed a full restoration project, and the streets were full of construction crews when we were there.

Many of the architectural details in Al Balad are this bright blue, or a slightly more subdued green.

War for Ukraine Day 791: Ukraine Waits as the Senate Debates

by | 44 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

Just two quick housekeeping notes. First, tonight and tomorrow night’s updates will be brief. Just a couple of long days so I’ve got less time to do deep dives. Second, several of you have asked after Rosa, aka Rosie, aka the Flooferina. She has now had two chemo treatments. When we took her in for the second one the oncology vet did an exam before she got the second treatment. The oncology vet was very pleasantly surprised to find that her lymph nodes had shrunk so much after one treatment that they were almost back to normal sized. We’re all taking that as a good sign. So thank you all again for the good thoughts.

The Senate cleared the threshold to move the aid package to the floor. Which is a good sign.

We are, however, dealing with the US Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative country club for otherwise unclubable geriatrics, members of the young fogeys club, and a few dozen normal people. So let’s not jinx anything by taking premature victory laps.

Here’s the no votes:

Rand Paul (R-Profile in Courage of One’s Convictions).

Here’s the full text of McConnell’s statement:

Mitch McConnell, a staunch backer of Ukraine aid, says the anti-Ukraine movement began with Tucker Carlson, “who, in my opinion, ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin.”

The Senate just voted 80-19 to break a filibuster on $95B aid package. Final passage expected tonight

Speaking of useless idiots:

And the full text of Graham’s (R-Brownnose) statement:

US-Senator Lindsay Graham is currently having the floor and he is making the case in favor of Ukraine as well as Israel and Taiwan. He is comparing the isolationists in the US with Charles Lindbergh, who back then in the 1940s claimed that it is useless to fight Hitler.

Graham further encourages using ATACMS against the Kerch Bridge.

Also Linday Graham:

And it just passed:

But it came at a price:

Here’s President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

show full post on front page

War for Ukraine Day 791: Ukraine Waits as the Senate DebatesPost + Comments (44)

Tuesday Night Open Thread

by | 78 Comments

This post is in: 

You know, it’s been a little over a year since Max came home with me, and it’s kind of amazing how much the two of us have bonded over that time. He’s really an interesting beast, and so unlike all the other cats I have known. He’s stubborn and willful but also desperate for attention always, he’s independent, yet needs significant amount of petting and love. He’s ornery as all hell, but mostly in a playful sense.

He has a ton of really weird idiosyncracies- one of which is that if I call him, he comes RACING in and I can hear his little bell jingling the whole way, and as soon as he has sight of me, he starts chirping and then chirps with every step.

Another really funny thing he does is that showering is no longer a private affair. When I get into the shower, he will come into the bathroom and sit outside the shower the entire time I am in there, he will sit there quietly. When I finish and pull open the curtain, it always startles him, and he starts chatting up a storm and doing the figure eight between my legs getting hair stuck all over them. He then follows me to the bedroom, and as I am sitting on the bed putting my socks on, he chatters non stop and attacks the socks as I try to put them on.

He’s really turned out to be a first rate companion, and I am so glad he is here.

Tuesday Night Open ThreadPost + Comments (78)

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Vice-President Harris, Doing the Work

by | 103 Comments

This post is in: , , ,


Charles Blow, in the NYTimes — “The Kamala Harris Moment Has Arrived”: [gift link]

… Vice President Harris has served nearly a full term alongside President Biden, and she is moving into another moment when the political stars are aligned for her as the perfect messenger on a subject that has fixed Americans’ attention and is central in the 2024 presidential campaign: reproductive rights.

This time, her target is Donald Trump. And being in a position to go on the offensive is something of a reversal of fortune for a vice president who has endured withering — often unfair — attacks and who struggled to define herself in the role…

Criticisms of Harris have been relentless, ranging from legitimate challenges to her policy statements to ridiculous commentary about her laugh. Much of it has seemed tinged with gender bias.

And she remains a source of concern, a perceived vulnerability to Biden’s re-election. In March, the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that Harris should bow out for the sake of the country, absurdly comparing her to Sarah Palin in 2008.

Over and over in her failed run for this year’s Republican nomination, Nikki Haley pointed to the possibility of a future Harris presidency as a scare tactic, saying in an August interview on “Good Morning America”: “There is no way Joe Biden is going to finish his term. I think Kamala Harris is going to be the next president, and that should send a chill up every American’s spine.”

But the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and Republicans’ lust to enact increasingly regressive policies to restrict reproductive rights in states across the country have made Harris’s voice an essential one in the campaign.

show full post on front page

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Vice-President Harris, Doing the WorkPost + Comments (103)

Guessing cost-sharing wrong matters a lot

by | 44 Comments

This post is in: 

Tomorrow afternoon, my co-author Dr. Alex Hoagland of the University of Toronto will be presenting our paper  Medical Bill Shock and Imperfect Moral Hazard to the Electronic Health Economics Colloquium (EHEC) at 14:00 ET on Zoom.  It is an open presentation.

ZOOM REGISTRATION HERE:  

We want to know how does the provision of accurate billing information change the consumption of medical services.  We live in a society where we make policy with the assumption that people are reasonably rationale and forward looking so patients are intended to act as consumers.  We know from other research that people are really bad at responding to clean incentives from deductibles but we wonder how good are people at guessing what they owe and does this matter?

PEOPLE ARE REALLY BAD AT GUESSING WHAT THEY OWE

AND IT MATTERS A LOT!

We use a triple difference design to estimate changes in consumption before and after the arrival of a bill for Household Member A for everyone else in the household.

Below is a bunch of economic-speak from our abstract:

Consumers are sensitive to medical prices when consuming care, but delays in price information may distort moral hazard. We study how medical bills affect household spillover spending following utilization, leveraging variation in insurer claim processing times. Households increase spending by 45% after a scheduled service, but this is curtailed by 15% after the bill arrives. Bill effects are driven by learning about prices from particularly informative bills, and affect the type and location of care received. A model of household belief formation with delayed information suggests households overestimate expenditures by 10%, ultimately over-consuming an average (median) of $842.80 ($480.59) annually.

This is, I think a BFD… and I would love for some of the econy and academic Jackals to join us tomorrow.

Guessing cost-sharing wrong matters a lotPost + Comments (44)