Twosday?

Feb. 22nd, 2022 06:56 am
canyonwalker: I see dumb people (i see dumb people)
"It's Twosday!" as numerous news articles and sales advertisements tell me today. "The numbers in the date are all twos." And, "The date is the same no matter where in the world you are," some add.

Oookay, let's look at that. In the US we write 02-22-2022; month-day-year. Uh, there a few non-twos are in there.

And in Europe the date would be written 22-02-2022. As anyone who's ever messed up writing their SSN or bank account number can tell you, 02-22-2022 and 22-02-2022 are not the same sequence of numbers. The third option for date format, year-month-day 2022-02-22 is also not the same string of numbers.

So, 0-for-2 on "Twosday" claims. Any other stupid-cute ideas mainstream media writers who apparently failed 2nd grade math (see what I did there? ðŸ˜…) would like to share?
canyonwalker: coronavirus (coronavirus)
On Monday this week I read an interesting article in my newsfeed. It was "Why More Americans Are Saying They’re ‘Vaxxed and Done’" by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic (10 Jan 2022). In it the author makes the argument that responsible people who've followed the science of Covid and precautions against it should give up avoiding crowded indoors places and being such sticklers about mask mandates and instead just live our lives. As long as we're vaccinated and wear masks ourselves, he explains, we're as safe as we ever will be; so we might as well get on with life.

Coincidentally a bunch of my friends on a Discord server were discussing it Monday. It's an appealing argument. I'm definitely getting tired of staying home from lots of things and wearing a mask when I do go out. Lots of my friends are, too. And we're all the target audience this author is aiming at: we're all vaxxed; most if not all of us are boosted, too; and we've all been diligent about masking, social distancing, and foregoing many previously normal activities that entail being among crowds indoors.

But just because the idea is appealing doesn't mean it's good. And that's where my suspicions started getting aroused in thinking about this article. "Is the author really a science-follower talking to fellow science followers," I wondered, "Or a charismatic covidiot, a wolf in sheep's clothing trying to persuade us to stop trying to fight the Coronavirus?"

My suspicions were especially aroused because the author cites no data. His argument is all about feelings— you should go back to normal because you're tired— with no facts to support evidence based decision making.

So I went and looked at the facts. A simple one is the 7-day average new case rate. It's a stat I refer to repeatedly in this blog. I like it because it's the best data form of answer to the question, "If I go out right now, how exposed will I be to people who are contagious with this virus?"

What Actual Data Shows

My go-to source, as usual, is the New York Times "Coronavirus in the U.S." page. Here's a comparison chart I built from their latest data today:

New Covid Cases in the U.S. (New York Times, 15 Jan 2022)

I've highlighted a few datapoints above. The first one (on the left) is from June 10 last year. I picked that date because I was starting to feel close to "Vaxxed and Done" (VAD) myself back then. I'd gotten my second Pfizer shot two months earlier. Big employers were talking about bringing employees back to the office. We had friends over to our house for the first time in 14 months. The CDC updated guidance that vaxxed people could gather safely in groups (with strangers) outdoors. I took my first flight in 15 months. What I was still waiting on in to be truly VAD was for the rates to drop lower. By around the middle of June they had dropped pretty low and I was more or less VAD... but then the rates started to climb again, and Delta entered the picture.

The second datapoint I highlighted above is Nov. 10. (I'm kind of picking a 10th of the month thing here to align the dates with the article's publication date.) Even after the late-summer Delta surge has started to subside, the new case rate— aka, "How many sick people am I exposed to if I go out?"— was 5x what it was in June. 5x. And it had been much higher, more than 10x June's low, just a month earlier. Oh, and those are just the nationwide averages. In some states the October/November numbers were 50x higher than June's. So any feeling that we were VAD in June would have to be walked back by then. The facts on the ground just didn't support it anymore.

Then that brings me to the third datapoint I highlighted: last Monday's numbers. There I went with the latest data, rather than figures from June 10 when the article was published, because I want to show the numbers are astonishingly high and still rising. The January 14 figure is 55x the rate from June 10. (The rate on Jan 10 was only about 50x June's.) When the rate goes up that high from being ready to call it VAD, to keep calling it VAD is absurd.

Covidiot Bingo

Okay, so the author's argument falls apart, absurdly so, when actual data is considered. But is he just wrong or a smiling liar, a wolf in sheep's clothing? For that I reread his article looking for the tells. I found he:
  1. Starts with a "Both Sides" argument equating Democrats to Republicans on issues of following the science of Coronavirus, social distancing, masking, and vaccines.
  2. Cherry-picks unrelated data points to discredit scientific consensus, government policy, and responsible behavior.
  3. Fails to cite any pertinent, organized data, even though it's readily available.
  4. Appeals to the audience's emotions, including tweaking the idea that if they just agree with him they'll be smarter than everyone else laboring under common delusions
  5. Presents arguments widely used by the science- and vaccine-denying political right, particularly the "We're all going to get it anyway so we might as well quit trying" argument. (This is similar to the "Let 'er rip" argument also going around the conservative blogosphere in recent days.)

All these, individually, are techniques the lying demagogues of the political right use to keep 30%+ of the country angry and stupid. With 5 together like this I shout, "Covidiot Bingo!"

Don't believe Thompson's article or his argument. He's a wolf in sheep's clothing trying to convince Covid-cautious people to give up. His goal wouldn't be to help us relax for our benefit but to stop calling for vaccine, testing, and mask mandates so that he and his Covidiot friends can live their lives unencumbered by responsibility.

canyonwalker: Cthulhu voted - touch screen! (i voted)
Today is the anniversary of an attempted coup against the U.S. government and its Constitution. On Jan. 6, 2021 a mob of thousands of people, some of them armed, swarmed the U.S. Capitol building with the intent of disrupting a vote to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Members of the mob fought with police, killing one and injuring over 100 officers. Members of the House and Senate were either evacuated from the building or barricaded themselves behind cover, in fear for their lives. This is the first time ever in the history of the United States that an attack penetrated the Capitol.

What drove the coup attempt was the lie repeated daily for weeks by then-President Donald Trump, and amplified by propaganda outlets such as the Fox News Network, that Trump rightfully won the 2020 election. In fact President Joe Biden won, by more than 7 million popular votes and an Electoral College vote of 306 to 232. Trump and allied propagandists have steadily claimed, with zero actual evidence, that Biden's margin of victory is due to widespread vote fraud.

"So what. The coup was defeated," some might say. "It was only a few thousand people. Out of, what, 330 million in the U.S.?" The thing is, the thousands of rioters who mobbed the Capitol are only a tiny fraction of an ongoing coup that's been happening in plain sight. Consider these facts:
  • On January 6, 2020, after the storming of the Capitol whipped up by the totally fake argument of widespread vote fraud, still several senators and over 100 representatives voted against accepting the Electoral College tallies. Their attempts to nullify the fair vote were also supported by the governors of 20 states. When the violent insurrection failed, these political leaders attempted a palace coup by using the processes of the government against itself.
  • It's not just a few thousand rioters or a few hundred politicians. Still today, a year later, 75% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. (Example source: CNN.com article, 10 Dec 2021)
  • Numerous states have enacted voting restriction laws. Even though every legal argument that widespread vote fraud occurred has been debunked and rejected by courts, politicians still take it as an article of faith to clamp down on voting rights. Of course, these clampdowns are proven not to impact voting fraud— because there is hardly any to start with— but do suppress the turnout of ethnic minorities and the poor and working classes.

So while the riotous coup one year ago today failed, there has been an ongoing coup continuing in plain sight. If Joe Biden or another Democrat elected in 2024, there could be a full scale insurrection. By then the political right will have had 4 years, not just 8 weeks, to feed its own lies and plan its next attack.

canyonwalker: coronavirus (coronavirus)
"It's not like March 2020," I've been seeing in numerous headlines about Coronavirus over the past 24 hours. The president even said it in a speech today. The point of the comparison is to reassure the public that 1) the risks of Coronavirus today aren't as bad as they were in March 2020, and that therefore 2) drastic measure such as shutdowns are unwarranted. But here's the thing: by at least one important, evidence based measure the risks are clearly worse.

A key metric I follow, and which I frequently reference in this blog when I write about Coronavirus trends, is the average daily new case rate. This best reflects the answer to the question, "What are my chances of being exposed to Coronavirus?" The more people who have recent cases, the greater the chance you'll be exposed to someone who's contagious. Here's how that looks, now vs. then:

New Covid Cases - Now and Then - NY Times, 21 Dec 2021

I created the graphic above from The New York Times's "Coronavirus in the U.S." page (retrieved 21 Dec 2021) with callouts to compare now vs. then. At the end of March 2020, the worst part of that month, the daily average was 19,217. Today the daily average is 157,412. That's more than 8 times as many new cases. By this objective measure, "This is not March 2020"; it's WAY WORSE!

Now, not everything is worse today. A big positive is that we've got the vaccine in wide availability. More than 2/3 of everyone in the U.S. has gotten vaccinated. I've gotten vaccinated and gotten a booster, too.

The problem is that the vaccine is not a magic bullet. It gives only about 4x protection vs. the Omicron strain (meaning vaccinated people are 4x less likely than un-vaccinated to test positive for it) according to preliminary data being reported this week. 4x protection but 8x higher exposure.... Those are not favorable numbers!

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Last week Better.com CEO Vishal Garg fired 900 employees over Zoom. "If you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off," he said. "Your employment here is terminated effective immediately." Employees found their access to company software systems shut off shortly thereafter. Example news coverage: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees over Zoom, CNN.com article updated 6 Dec 2021.

Much of the media coverage I've read about this in the past few days has had a breathless nature to it. Breathless, as in reporters not understanding which parts of the story are actually unusual so they emphasize everything. Like, "A CEO fired people over Zoom! 900 people! Fired! Over Zoom!" That failure to understand happens, BTW, because most business articles are written by young 20-something writers. They lack the professional experience, and even the life experience, to put things in perspective.

From my perspective getting fired over Zoom would be nothing new. I've had remote managers, and thus remote employment reviews, for 10 years. I resigned from a job by telephone (we weren't really doing Zoom back then) 8 years ago. I was fired from a job (laid off) by phone 6 years ago. 4½ years ago I had a contentious performance review via phone. I tendered a resignation with 2 weeks notice, then the company dismissing me summarily. This was all via phone, not even Zoom. But the point is, getting fired (or quitting) without walking into the boss's office is hardly news.

What is news is how poorly Better.com CEO Garg handled this. A better approach would've been to convene a company all-hands meeting to announce there would be layoffs, followed by 1:1 conversations between employees and managers to confirm their status. That's basically a remote-working adaptation of the process I've gone through twice in major corporate layoffs that booted 30% of the companies. Better.com's layoff was 9% of its workforce.

Why didn't they do this? Almost certainly the answer is because it's expensive. It takes time. And Garg has a history of being a total jerkwad when it comes to cheaping out with employees. He's hounded them as "stealing" from their colleagues by only working "2 hours a day".

Another question is why nobody at the company, particularly nobody from HR, averted this disaster. There's 2 parts to the answer to that one, and basically both of them boil down to, because HR protects the company, not the employees. The first part is that a CEO like Garg with strong (stupid) beliefs is not going to hire/retain an HR exec who challenges him. He'll hire a toadie. And second, there are plenty of toadies out there. In Corporate America it's referred to as "Aligning with the business". That's a euphemism for supporting whatever the boss wants, whether it's fair, just, ethical, etc., or not. In HR that means things like sweeping sexual harassment allegations against key executives under the rug, as documenting and reporting them would be bad for the business. That's why sexual harassment is still such a problem in Corporate America even 30 years after HR started lecturing the rest of us on why it's wrong!

In the past few days a few Better.com executives have resigned. It looks like 2 PR heads and the VP Communication. Example news coverage: 3 Better.com executives resign after CEO lays off 900 over Zoom, CNN.com article 8 Dec 2021. Notably these are not HR leaders. They're external-facing PR people— people who, presumably, who don't want their PR careers tarnished as being the tools who defended Garg's ass-hat behavior. The tools in HR who approved it, supported it coordinated it, or at the very least enabled it, are still there.

canyonwalker: Uh-oh, physics (Wile E. Coyote)
The government of Afghanistan has crumbled and its collapsed fled the country as the Taliban took over once city after another in just a few weeks. (See my previous blog from earlier today.) A military force that, on paper, had every advantage over the Taliban— vastly superior numbers, better training, air power— folded up like a paper tiger.

A common narrative across news coverage is that people are utterly shocked not only that this happened but that it happened so fast. But we shouldn't be. The memo about this came out two years ago.

The memo, in this case, is The Afghanistan Papers. It's a set of assessments of the US effort in Afghanistan prepared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and published by the Washington Post in late 2019 after a 3 year effort to declassify them via the Freedom of Information Act. Example sources: "The Afghanistan Papers", Wikipedia article; "A Secret History Of The War", Washington Post article 9 Dec 2019.

What the Afghanistan Papers tell us is that all those years of military leaders and presidents telling us how well nation-building in Afghanistan was going were all lies. The metrics they offered to quantify success were all fudged. When they couldn't keep fudging them anymore because people could tell they were fudged, they classified them. The leaders even knew that the official objectives were ridiculous and that the country of Afghanistan was too riddled with tribal loyalty and corruption to be built into something resembling a modern Western state.

Why weren't we all more aware of this? Well, for one, this came out during the Trump administration, when articles about how our political leaders are deliberately lying to us were weekly events. It was quickly forgotten under Trump's "The media is the enemy, and the way to beat them is to flood the zone with shit" strategy of distraction.

While maybe for some of us the significance of The Afghanistan Papers got lost in the noise, one person who shouldn't have been so surprised is President Biden. He was in the White House for 8 years as VP, so he should be more aware than most of us what utter BS the Afghanistan success story was. But instead he promised us a month ago that "There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy"— recalling the US's ignominious exit from Vietnam in 1975— only for similar scenes to play out this week in Afghanistan.

I'm not saying that Biden shouldn't have completed the troop withdrawal— a withdrawal that was committed to by President Trump, I must point out— just that he should have been a bit more careful in setting expectations. Under-promise and over-deliver, not vice versa!


canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
We've had enough talk about one epidemic for the past 16 months, right? Let's talk about a different epidemic! 😅😰😭

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first clinically reported AIDS cases. As this CNN article (June 5, 2021) explains, the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 5, 1981 grouped 5 cases of a rare lung disease in otherwise healthy men in Los Angeles. The men had become sick with the infections over the prior 7 months, and two had died.

Pinning a specific date as the answer to the question, "When did AIDS originate?" is hard. Some would argue the date should be earlier, as people were already dying in 1981. Later studies found probable cases, though not widespread, years earlier. At the same time the date is also early. 40 years ago is when epidemiologists and infectious disease experts starting connecting the dots. They didn't yet know what it was. Even the terms HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) and AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome) were not agreed upon until a year later.

The first I learned about AIDS was 2 years later, when it made the cover of Time magazine on July 4, 1983.TIME Magazine Cover - July 4, 1983 I remember the cover picture vividly and I remember reading the story, though my understanding of it was incomplete as I wasn't yet even a teenager.

Awareness of AIDS became mainstream in the US after this publication. Informed awareness remained relatively rare, though. Scientists were still figuring out how the disease worked. Into the gaps of factual knowledge were poured boatloads of ignorance. People spread false stories out of fear... and hatred. Hatred, because AIDS was tightly associated with gay sex and intravenous drug use, two behaviors most religious and cultural conservatives regard as morally reprehensible.

While much more has been learned about AIDS over the past 40 years, the choice by many to diminish or ignore it as a moral failing remains. You sinned, this is your consequence.

This has led to a lack of political leadership in solving the AIDS crisis. 40 years later there isn't a cure or even a vaccine. Meanwhile an estimated 35 million people worldwide have died. 40 years. Compare that to how fast a Coronavirus vaccine was developed.

At least there are effective treatments today. They don't cure AIDS but they do greatly reduce its impact. People are now living with AIDS, not dying from it. "AIDS is the new diabetes," some people quip. But the drugs are expensive. So while the reasonably well-to-do can afford survival, the disease remains a scourge among the poor and in developing countries.

canyonwalker: Mr. Moneybags enjoys his wealth (money)
Are we still in a recession? That question occurred to me recently. It's kind of surprising there hasn't been much about it either way in the news lately. On the one hand, parts of the economy have been doing quite well. Others... maybe not so much? It's unclear.

Clearly things were bad last year in the spring. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) determined that the recession started in February 2020. They haven't said anything about when it has ended. I know; I checked.

While checking I found this Reuters article, "Is it over yet?" from a month ago (4 May 2021) stating, among other things, that yeah, the NBER is very cautious in declaring a beginning or end to things. Indeed, they only concluded in June that the recession had started in February. Even that four-month lag was quick compared to their past calls. It took them a year to determine that the Great Recession had started!

Okay, so if officials are only going to tell us officially when something is over when it's "No shit, Sherlock!" obvious, what can we figure for ourselves? Well, let's look at the stock market.

S&P 500 from Nov 2019 through May 2021 (Yahoo! Finance)

I obtained this chart from Yahoo! Finance showing the S&P 500 Index from November, 2019 to present. You can see the precipitous drop following a market high on Feb. 19. That's a key indicator, possibly the only key indicator, the NBER used to determine the beginning of the recession. Of course, by the time they figured that out in June, 2020, the market was already well on its way to a recovery. By August the market had already eclipsed its previous high (trace across the dotted line I provided) and has gone on to grow 20% beyond a full recovery.

So, by stock market indicators, the pandemic recession ended 10 months ago. For the rich the pain was short lived, and the rich are now richer than ever. As I've noted before, though, the market is not the economy. While the rich have done well, others may still suffer.

What's another indicator? How about unemployment. I looked up unemployment statistics and found this bare-bones but effective chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

US Unemployment rate, Nov 2019 - Apr 2021 (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Unemployment hit a high of almost 15% in April, 2020. Since then it has recovered... but not to its pre-pandemic levels. In late 2019 unemployment stood at about 3.6%. Today it remains just above 6%. That's still a lot of people who aren't back to work yet. ...And coming out of recessions these figures are generally considered an under-count. That's because people who've been out of work long term and have given up looking for work are not counted in the statistic.

So, for the investor class, the recession ended months ago. For the working class, especially those working in sectors hard hit by shutdowns, we're not over it yet.


Take-home essay question: Why, when these charts took me less than a minute each to find, has there been so little coverage in the news?



canyonwalker: Mr. Moneybags enjoys his wealth (money)
A few days ago in a forum I follow an overseas member posted, "OMG, Americans are so wealthy!" with a link to this CNBC article (8 Mar 2021) about the average net worth in the US. In particular she focused on the figures in the far right column of this table:

Household net worth by age

Age of head of familyMedian net worthAverage net worth
Less than 35$13,900$76,300
35-44$91,300$436,200
45-54$168,600$833,200
55-64$212,500$1,175,900
65-74$266,400$1,217,700
75+$254,800$977,600

This prompted a discussion by pretty much everyone else in the forum about the difference between median and mean.

What's the Average? Mean vs. Median

In mathematics there are several different ways to define "average". The one most people are familiar with from grade school math is the arithmetic mean. Add up all the numbers, then divide by the number of numbers in the set. For example, the arithmetic mean of 1, 1, 2, 6, 20 is 6. That's because 1+1+2+6+20 = 30; and 30÷5 = 6.

The mean is not the only definition of "average", though. In high school math you probably learned about two other terms, median and mode. The median is essentially the middle value in a set; the point at which half the numbers are above it and half are below it. In the set 1, 1, 2, 6, 20 I gave above the median is 2. Note that's a fairly different "average" value from the mean of 6. The mean is 3x higher than the median.

When it comes to talking about wealth, experts widely agree that median wealth is the figure that should be used. Even the article linked above acknowledges this, though begrudgingly and in passing in the middle of the story:

"Economists argue that it’s better to look at the median net worth to understand where most Americans fall on the spectrum, since it’s not skewed by mega-high-worth individuals or those deep in the red."

As it notes, the reason experts routinely use median instead of mean to talk about "average" wealth is that it's not skewed by the values at the extremes. In the US, the wealthiest people are extremely wealthy. A Forbes article from October reports data from the federal government that the top 1% of Americans hold more than 30% of the total wealth in the country. The bottom half of all Americans hold just 2%. Link: Federal Reserve report.

So, that example set of 5 numbers I suggest above? You might have thought that big 20 on the end was out of place, that it skewed the average. Indeed it did skew the average (mean), but it's less skewed than actual economics in the US.

Those figures in the table above showing that "average" households in their 50s, 60s, and 70s have over $1,000,000? That's not representative at all of reality in the middle class. Those mean figures are skewed way up by the tiny number of people who have billions, tens of billions, or even hundreds of billions, of dollars.


canyonwalker: Y U No Listen? (Y U No Listen?)
Fox News is begrudgingly admitting that its prime-time hosts have lied, lied, lied about the results of the 2020 presidential election. In response to threats of legal action from a pair of voting technology companies multiple Fox News personalities falsely claimed had participated in systematic election fraud, the network is airing a piece that debunks their claims. Example coverage: CNN.com article updated 4 Feb 2021.

We'll see if this actually moves the needle at all with the literally tens of millions of voters in the US who believe (falsely) that massive, coordinated fraud occurred in the recent election.

Update: Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox, various of its show hosts, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell on Thursday. CNN.com article 4 Feb 2021.

Update 2: Fox abruptly canceled Lou Dobbs Tonight, its highest rated show, on Friday. Dobbs is one of the people named in the lawsuits, as he was shameless in his show at shilling for Trump's ridiculous conspiracy claims. Fox has declined to comment on whether their cancellation of the show is related to the lawsuits. CNN.com article 5 Feb 2021.
canyonwalker: Cthulhu voted - touch screen! (i voted)
This week President Donald Trump was booted off Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social media platforms. It was a long-time-coming decision that culminated with his incitement of, and after-the-fact glorification of, violence and lawlessness in attacking the US Capitol. Hundreds of legislators in active session were besieged, their offices looted, and at least one police officer was killed.

The loss to Trump of these platforms is huge. Part of his mastery of persuasion, both as president for the past four years and in recent years before that, has been his skill at using social media. He understands social media in a way that very few people his age (early 70s) and almost no politicians even 30 years younger do. His use of Twitter, especially, has amounted to what I've called The World's Biggest Megaphone.

Through Twitter, et. al. Trump was able to communicate directly with his 88,000,000 followers without the filters that the traditional media provides— things such as checking facts and providing context. He was able to lie and distort with impunity and cater to people's basest instincts. Now that has been taken away.

Unsurprisingly Trump has been apoplectic about being de-platformed, according to administration insiders speaking anonymously. Well, now with his megaphone taken away, he can scream it into the void.
canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
When something occurs frequently the phenomenon needs a name. This week I realized there needs to be a name for "news" articles that are actually just advertisements. These are the pieces in my news feed, usually several per day, with titles like "Five Unbelievable Deals at Amazon Today!" (someone's flogging their affiliate links) and "Three Secrets of Chik-Fil-A" (a transparent ad for the restaurant chain, and the research for the article consists of quoting two Reddit posts). For these fake, advertising articles I propose the term advertarticle.

ad·ver·tart·ic·le, n: an advertisement, for a product or service from a paying sponsor, purporting to be a news article.

I thought about this again yesterday when I saw an advertarticle from Lonely Planet about how Lake Tahoe is a great place for travel right now in the Coronavirus pandemic. Oh yes, there are multiple levels of stupid in that.
  1. The advertarticle was transparently a ploy to drive people to bookings sites for air travel, hotels, and vacation rentals— which Lonely Planet earns referral fees from.
  2. Among other things the advertarticle touted was that Lake Tahoe is a great place for summer fun right now. Uh, no it's not! It's December and very much winter right now. Temperatures at water level at Lake Tahoe's 6,224' elevation are around freezing with snow in the forecast almost every day this week.
  3. This is not only a terrible time to travel because of the Coronavirus pandemic but especially so in California (3/4 of Lake Tahoe is in California) where state public health rules nominally prohibit leisure travel right now. The advertarticle is not only mindless but irresponsible.

As if to highlight the money-grubbing absurdity of #3, news— actual news— posted later in the day that Lake Tahoe is shutting down to tourists on Friday (San Francisco Chronicle, 9 Dec 2020).


canyonwalker: Cthulhu voted - touch screen! (i voted)
As states continue to tally the results from the US presidential election held more than a month ago, President-elect Joe Biden's lead continues to grow. As reported by CNN's election tracker today (retrieved 5 Dec 2020) Biden is now up by just over 7 million in the popular vote.

Biden ahead by 7 million votes... and counting! [Dec 2020]

These 7 million votes represent a margin of almost 4.5% of all votes cast.

While this election has felt like a close result— to a large extent because Trump has been Tweet-storming the past several weeks claiming, with zero evidence, that he actually won, and partisan news media have repeated his lies uncritically— the actual numbers are not that close. Not in terms of the total popular vote, anyway. Only one presidential election since 2000 has seen the winner lead by more than Biden's 4.5 point margin. That was Barack Obama's 2008 win— with Biden as vice president.



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