 Monday, January 3, 2021
Dear Naked Capitalism Reader,
Welcome to The Best of Naked Capitalism: Inaugural Edition, January 2022. We've created a monthly compilation of our favorites from the previous few weeks. Below are this month's selections: Posts, Links, Comments from you, our readers — boldfaced names -- plus Antidotes…. And away we go!
| | 12/01/21 Post, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Medium), Nassim Nicholas Taleb: No, Covid 19 Is Not an Old Person Problem. "Now if we were to compute the effect on life expectancy, note that the effect acts across the board: a 30 year old loses more than 50 years of life, an 80 y.o. loses about a decade, etc."
LawnDart comments: "Neoliberal capitalism has infected not only our society, but our thinking, our relations towards one another– human interactions are devolving into simple, cold transactions, it seems. … Third iteration of the Golden Rule: What you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself."
12/01/21 Post, by Jake Johnson (Common Dreams), Congress 'Asleep at the Switch' as Biden Continues Trump-Era Ploy to Privatize Medicare. "'Everything we know about Direct Contracting should be cause to halt the pilot,' Diane Archer, the founder of Just Care USA and the senior adviser on Medicare at Social Security Works, told Common Dreams in an email. 'Direct Contracting effectively eliminates the more cost-effective traditional Medicare program designed to ensure that people with complex health conditions get the care they need.''
Hepativore comments: "There is probably a large push behind the scenes on Biden's part as well as Congress to cement the Direct Contracting program in place as well as fast-track the privatization of Social Security. This is because the Clinton-Obama Democrats have been looking for a political opening to dismantle these programs for years but were afraid of the political blowback, so they have been waiting for a chance to do so on the sly, and Biden also has wanted to take a hacksaw to the programs for decades."
12/02/21 Post, by Elizabeth C. Tippett (The Conversation), Quitting Your Job or Thinking About Joining the 'Great Resignation'? Here's What an Employment Lawyer Advises. "Record numbers of Americans have quit their jobs in recent months, with more than 4.4 million submitting their resignation in September alone. Millions more may be preparing to follow them to the exits – one survey found that around a third of workers wanted to make a career change." CanCyn comments: "If you can speak up at an exit interview it can be most satisfying. I've had two exit interview opportunities in my life – one which had some consequences for the bad actor and one which did not."
12/06/21 Post, by Lambert Strether, Biden's Faltering Speech on His Covid 'Winter Plan'. "President Biden gave a speech on December 2 at the National Institutes of Health — Walensky's nose must be out of joint — on his 'Winter Plan' for Covid. The speech (transcript) seems already to have sunk beneath the waves of Omicron coverage, but I thought I'd pull on my yellow waders again and go through it. Get ready! I used the word 'faltering' in the headline, in three senses. First, as policy: The Adminstration seems to have, as it were, 'lost a step' in dealing with Covid; we have a policy of 'Vax Only' and some relatively minor and not especially coherent changes. Second, politically: The Administration is simply not doing well in the polls. Third, literally, in Biden's speech patterns." De. John Carpenter comments: "Alright. I've read the whole thing. Pretty much what I expected. Vax vax vax. It's like playing Uno with someone who doesn't understand the rules and keeps yelling 'Uno!' no matter how many cards they have. Thanks again for the footnotes. Man, this is bleak."
12/06/21 Links, by Lambert Strether, Gambling 'America's Amazon'. "Hours earlier, an embankment at the plant had ruptured, flooding the area with gray muck. The spill was an environmental calamity, and the fallout was immediate. The ash blanketed up to 400 acres, killed hundreds of fish, damaged more than a dozen homes and polluted nearby waterways. The clean-up took years and cost more than $1 billion. Coal ash, an umbrella term for the residue that's left over when utilities burn coal, is one of the United States' largest kinds of industrial waste. It contains metals — such as lead, mercury, chromium, selenium, cadmium and arsenic — that never biodegrade. Studies have shown these contaminants are dangerous to humans and have linked some to cancer, lung disease and birth defects." jhallc comments: "Re: Coal Ash "With the Clean Air Act, the nation traded one environmental problem for another, Evans, who works for Earth justice, said."Admittedly cleaning up the air issues had an immediate impact vs. dealing with the longer term waste problems. We're very good at kicking cans down the road. The Clean Water Act did the same thing in the 60's/70's. Industry just dug a hole in the ground between the factory and the river outfall and problem solved. We're still cleaning up the groundwater contaminated from those lagoons today. With regard to the coal ash piles, they forgot to mention vanadium as one of nasty metals, that is also unfortunately quite mobile."
 12/08/21 Links, by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, 'Terrible, flippant, wrong': Doctors and researchers tear into Psaki for mocking idea of mailing free at-home COVID tests to all Americans. "But Liasson was unconvinced, claiming that the plan was 'too complicated,' and asking why the government would not simply give out the tests free of charge to everyone. Psaki met the NPR correspondent's suggestion with apparent contempt, saying in response with a sarcastic smirk: 'should we just send one to every American?' 'Maybe,' Liasson shot back, before again trying to point out the example of other countries, only to be cut off by Psaki. 'Then what happens if every American has one test? How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?' the White House spokesperson demanded. Liasson replied: 'I don't know. All I know is that other countries seem to be making them available...in greater quantities, for less money.'" The Rev Kev comments: "And when you have a political party in opposition, this would be considered a golden opportunity. The Republicans could come out and promise that when they have power again, that all Americans would get free test kits at home upon request and would push for this after the 2022 midterms. And yet there seems to be nothing but cricket sounds coming from the Republicans from what I have seen. Odd that. It's almost if both parties had the same donors."
12/11/21 Links, by Yves Smith, Tesla Update Allows Video Games While Driving, and the Feds Aren't Happy (suggested by: Paul R). "First shown off in 2019, games have been available on Tesla infotainment screens for some time already. However, it's only in the most recent update that they've been playable while the car is in motion. Curiously, streaming services like Hulu and Netflix are still locked out while the car is moving." Samuel Conner comments: "I wonder whether listening to music or radio news or talk programs would also have similar attention-deficit effects. Maybe a useful future safety feature would be to have 'black boxes' in ground vehicles that can preserve a record of what was happening in the 'cockpit' in the seconds prior to crashes. This might be really useful for development of methods to reduce the frequency of road accidents. Doubtless there would be privacy concerns."
12/14/21 Post, by Yves Smith, Omicron Cases Serious in Denmark and Overall Morbidity Picture Not Pretty Either. "With the rise of Omicron, we have also seen something of a revival of the meme that Covid is no worse than the flu in our comments section. I suspect that's being touted around the Web as part of an informal campaign to preserve holiday spending festivities. So we again need to remind readers that the downside of Covid doesn't come only from dying or being hospitalized. Unlike the flu, it can and often does wreck all sorts of havoc on a disconcertingly wide range of functions. At least long Covid is getting more attention, but like chronic fatigue syndrome and advanced Lyme disease, those who don't have it likely find it hard to relate to how debilitating it is. Due to the very wide range of symptoms, it's proven difficult to nail down." Roger Blakely comments: "All front-facing retail workers need to be in respirators and goggles. There is a dose response to SARS-CoV-2. The less virus you inhale, the better you feel. Last week Marketplace mentioned an HR study tracking which workers in the economy are quitting their jobs. There was a statistically significant–not overwhelming–correlation indicating that more front-facing retail employees are quitting their jobs in low-vaccination states than in high-vaccination states. My guess is that many front-facing retail employees are finding themselves sick all of the time from inhaling SARS-CoV-2. I suspect that much of the long COVID problem can be attributed to people inhaling SARS-CoV-2 on an ongoing basis."
12/15/21 Post, by Richard Murphy (Tax Research UK), Being Rich Does Not Make You More Generous. It Makes You Meaner.. "No wonder we get people like Rish Sunak arguing that new covid boosters require the imposition of austerity. This is simply indicative of the self-serving thinking of the very rich in our society. And it is because of the harm that these people cause, and the impact that their wealth has on growing inequality that we must tax the multi-millionaires more. We do not need their money to pay for public services. What we do need is to stop the power that they have to destroy wellbeing in our society." Susan the other comments: "RM's last paragraph is the best diagnosis. We don't need to tax the rich to 'pay for the poor.' We can do that easily with sovereign spending and jobs. We need to tax the rich so they don't privatize the entire planet, the water and all the oxygen. And then profiteer from it and in the process demand that society, especially the poor, must suffer austerity to maintain a certain 'balanced budget' in order to keep the sovereign currency valuable. What unmitigated nonsense."
12/17/21 Water Cooler, by Lambert Strether, Boeing wants to build its next airplane in the 'metaverse'. "In Boeing Co's (BA.N) factory of the future, immersive 3-D engineering designs will be twinned with robots that speak to each other, while mechanics around the world will be linked by $3,500 HoloLens headsets made by Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O). It is a snapshot of an ambitious new Boeing strategy to unify sprawling design, production and airline services operations under a single digital ecosystem – in as little as two years. Critics say Boeing has repeatedly made similar bold pledges on a digital revolution, with mixed results. But insiders say the overarching goals of improving quality and safety have taken on greater urgency and significance as the company tackles multiple threats. The planemaker is entering 2022 fighting to reassert its engineering dominance after the 737 MAX crisis, while laying the foundation for a future aircraft program over the next decade." gc54 comments: "The idea is to fly the plane only in the Metaverse. Lowers the carbon output. Novel idea: run 10,000 copies in parallel and see which slightly tweaked design doesn't crash. You have your answer, off the the 3D printer then autoclave!"
12/22/21 Water Cooler, by Lambert Strether, Atlas of Endangered Alphabets (suggested by: Re Silc). "85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing — not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for hundreds of years — sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of a people — is lost. This Atlas is about those writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them." lyman alpha blob comments: "I don't think it's just the lesser used traditional scripts either. The kid went to overnight camp for the first time last summer and wrote my better half and I letters regularly. The handwriting on the first one we got was atrocious, especially for a kid on the verge of being a teenager. It looked more like how a 3rd grader would write. Then it dawned on me – 3rd grade was about the time they shoved an ipad at the kids in school and they started doing all their work digitally with the help of apple and google and the rest of the silicon valley asshats bent on destroying everything good in society. I will say that the kid's penmanship did improve dramatically after writing letters every day for a couple weeks. Too bad is was camp that taught her and not the public school."
12/25/21 Post, by Samuel Workman (The Conversation), Manchin Takes Aim at Build Back Better, but His Real Focus is on West Virginia. "Normally, major legislative initiatives would each have their own bill. But each would need to pass the Senate with 60 votes in order to avoid a filibuster that could end up killing the bill. To get past that hurdle, Democrats have piled all of Biden's initiatives into what's called a budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority of votes to pass – a much lower threshold and one that a united Democratic Party could meet in the Senate.Yet because legislators must cast a single vote for what is a diverse package, disagreement on one dimension can sink the whole reconciliation bill – even if there is broad agreement on the other proposals. In this case, Manchin wants to jettison the child tax credit, but made an offer that reportedly includes the improvements to the ACA, health care infrastructure, as well as the climate change provisions – remarkable for a senator from a state so dependent on fossil fuels for economic growth and stability." Huey Long comments: "House progs should have stood firm back in October/November and told Manchin/Sinema/Pelosi/Biden that there's either build back better with the social programs intact or nothing at all. Instead they caved and gave up all their leverage and we're here on Xmas discussing the desires of Manchin's constituents after another 'Lucy and the football' incident that even a 2-bit nobody from NJ like me saw coming a mile away. Wake me up when somebody decides to Do Something about Manchin, like strip his committee assignments, primary him, throw him out of the party, etc. Sinema too for that matter."
And Another Thing….
12/07/21 Charlie Sheldon comments on container shippping: A huge part of preparing a ship for sailing is "lashing" which is done by longshoremen when loading the containers and then checked by the ship's deck crew once underway. Lashing refers to these 12 to 20 foot long one inch diameter rods, with turnbuckles threaded at each end with shackles, which are fastened to the corners of containers and then placed on the ships walkways between stacks of containers, and tightened using big rods turning the tunrbuckle, such that these long rods are drawn as tight as possible to attach the stacks of containers not only to each other but to the ship, too. Between each stack of containers on a ship is a space, about 6-7 feet wide (?) which yu can see when a ship crosses in front of you and you see it side-on, and in that space, rising three or four levels about the main deck, is a gantry platform, with a level at each container level, and railings, accessed by ladders at each end of the gantry (ie at each side of the ship) and this is the thing those lashings are fastened to, and tightened from. It is hard work, but essential because if the weather gets bad those stacks will move and sway, and, unless held down, will come loose, and often they come loose anyway if the weather is really bad. When I sailed we ran the east coast of the US (New York, Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk and then we crossed the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal on our way to Singapore) and when we left Norfolk we'd turn to to check all the lashings and make sure they were tight. This took two or three days, actually. Then we'd check everything again before we reached Gibraltar, and it was astounding how much those lashings would go slack because of the ship's motion. I don't know if you can call this work highly skilled, but it is hard physically and tough to do properly, and that gear is heavy and dangerous. If a section of one of those lashings, say if the turnbuckle and shackle are unthreaded from the rod, that turnbuckle section and shackle alone weighs 30 pounds, and if it drops or falls and your hand is in the way youl'd lose your hand. I almost lost mine, three times. | |
… So there you have it - The Best of December 2021. It's been a lot of fun for us to put it together — We hope you've enjoyed it (or at least some of it) and will give us a chance to polish it up and make it better. See you in February!!
The Crew at Naked Capitalism | | | |
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