About a month ago I wrote on the COVID 19 plight of the Navajo Indians in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham requested military field hospitals to be set up to handle the fast moving virus. Trumps comment was, “Wow, that’s something.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Federal Emergency […]
The humans always observe back: why I am rooting for NY to “crush the curve” So, in addition to a bunch of States in the Confederacy and a few in the high plains deciding that May 1 was the Day of Virus Jubilee, yesterday saw further discouraging news that not one but two epidemiological models […]
RIP John Horton Conway I am late to issue this RIP as John Horton Conway died on April 11, 2020, having been born in England, Dec. 26, 1937. He died of coovid-19. I was aware of his death when it happened, but have since become aware of things he did that I did not know […]
I don’t know what to do about the widespread complete ignorance about the concepts of null hypothesis, rejection, failure to reject, p-levels. I will rant after the jump
April jobs report: disastrous, but not as cataclysmic as feared; lower paid part time workers take the biggest hit HEADLINES: -20.5 million jobs lost. Between March and April this is a loss of 14.0% of all jobs since February. U3 unemployment rate up 10.3% from 4.4% to 14.7% U6 underemployment rate rose 14.1% from […]
Infections in US States by population density Since COVID-19 is a communicable disease, it should hardly be a surprise that the most densely populated States have the most cases per capita, and conversely the least densely States have the least cases. But since that basic point is lost in a lot of the analysis, let’s […]
A Very Grey Swan Keynes and Knight famously simultaneously in 1921 identified the concept of fundamental uncertainty as a situation not understandable by using a probability distribution, an idea popularized by Nassim Taleb just as the 2008 crash happened as a “black swan.” Taleb defined white swans as situations describable by Gaussian normal distributions. For […]
by Ken Melvin Are capitalism and democracy compatible? Both Capitalism and Democracy are complicated, complex concepts with varying interpretations. Beginning with a working definition of democracy: Democracy — A government formed of representatives popularly elected by the enfranchised citizenry of the governed entity. Webster’s : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people […]
There is a severe Remdesivir shortage On March 2 2020, I warned you that this was going to happen. I did not warn about the opaque and arbitrary Trump administration policy, because the Trump administration is always “worse than you imagine possible even taking into account the fact that it is worse than you imagine […]