Get your flu shot

The omens suggest it’s going to be a rough season.

Flu season is here — and early red flags suggest it’s on track to be very, very bad. The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Flu View report show extraordinarily high numbers of positive flu tests reported to the agency from labs around the US. As of November 5, nearly 14,000 positive flu tests had been reported, as shown in the orange line on the below chart. That’s more than 12 times the number reported at the same time in 2019 (shown in the black line).

Combined with COVID-19 and RSV, I’m anticipating a lot of hospitals are going to be clogged up, so don’t get sick for any reason. Just stay healthy. Vaccines will help.

You know what else would help? Masking. That seems to be a lost cause right now, unfortunately.

And now for something completely different

The news is mostly politics and Twitter right now, so here’s a dose of perspective.

Apple finished Wednesday’s session with a $2.31 trillion market cap, according to Yahoo! Finance data. Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta were worth a combined $2.3 trillion. Meta’s meltdown, of course this year, backed– or helping to drive that underperformance there. Big Apple, though, indeed the winner.

These absurdly rich companies are happily sliding under the radar while Elon Musk is distracting everyone. Tax them all more.

Boy, I remember when everyone was predicting that Apple was going to decline into irrelevance.

It’s all part of the brilliant plan to become profitable

The first step in making money with Twitter is to drive away all those scientists. They’re so critical!

Still, with uncertainty about how Twitter will change under Musk, many of the thousands of medical and scientific experts on the platform have started to look for alternatives or are considering giving up on social media altogether. For a while the hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter and #TwitterMigration were trending, and many researchers have been posting their new Mastodon handles, encouraging others to follow them to the site, which has gained more than 100,000 new users within days of Musk completing his purchase.

For the moment, most researchers are waiting to see what happens with Twitter. “I’m hedging my bets with a Mastodon account but not planning to leave in the short term,” says biologist Carl Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom, 163,000 followers) of the University of Washington, Seattle. Many other researchers are doing the same. That means even if little changes for now, the groundwork is being laid for what could quickly become a digital mass migration of scientists.

Once those old crotchety stick-in-the-muds are gone, Twitter will prosper. Just like when chasing away those computer scientists made it possible to sell dancing serfs as robots, and making the neuroscientists roll their eyes at Neuralink opened the door to brain surgery on his fans, and horrifying space science realists makes it possible to sell seats on a rocket to millionaires, Musk has a grand plan. By antagonizing all the rational people, he’s left with a market packed with fools — it’s like those Nigerian prince scams, where the skeptics get turned off by the subject line, but if the mark reads through a whole paragraph, you know you’ve got a potential sucker.

Like Bergstrom, I’m staying on Twitter for now — for the lulz, if nothing else — but I also have a backup plan with an account on mastodon that I set up 5 years ago (I’m on octodon.social/@pzmyers, if you want to track me down). There, I’ve noticed a recent flood of familiar science-related names showing up, which is nice. It’s always been a pleasant crowd over there, but I was sad that I had to go to Twitter to hang out with most of my science-related online pals, and now Twitter is becoming less and less essential.

By the way, if you find Mastodon confusing, DrSkySkull has written a short guide.

Fox News reaches new levels of shrieking idiocy

Fox News shows have gotten creepier and more demented and more histrionic over the years. They’ve also gotten more openly anti-education. Here are a couple of Fox News women working hard to find something to find something to hate about college students — like that they might like cats, which tells us that students are weak.

They think students should just toughen up, they can’t possibly be stressed. And if they’re stressed, they shouldn’t be able to find the energy to protest injustice. They really are serving up a heaping bowl of bullshit in this segment. If you like cats, you’re a snowflake! If you can’t make it in college, then just drop out, said in a pitying tone of voice, because spending four years in advanced and difficult studies of complex topics is soooo easy, and they’re there just to take advantage of the freebies.

What freebies? College is expensive (it shouldn’t be) and it’s mainly a lot of hard work and stress, genuine stress.

Then they invent stupid problems, like that students are man-handling the cats. They think the appropriate way to help students learn is to take the George C. Scott approach, and slap them. Nope. Colleges are staffed with trained professional educators who know better, and are aware that physically assaulting people is not a good way to motivate them.

Who are these appallingly stupid people on this panel? I don’t want to know. I also don’t understand how this is going to appeal to their base. Where I live, that base is a population of farmers with barn cats and a good ol’ dog on the front porch and kids who are in 4H and love their farm animals to bits, who will watch movies like Old Yeller and Dog and struggle to hold back a tear at the end. This is just desperate reaching for something to despise about young people getting educated, and being smarter than every hateful dolt on that network.

On a more pleasant note, here is Archie, UMM’s campus therapy dog.

He’s a sweet, friendly pup who is often seen around campus and loves to be petted. He’s a good dog.

Fox News wants to slap him and make him homeless and shoot him.

Aww, the bosses are missing their eager-beaver work force

Uh-oh. The workers aren’t working as hard as they should..

Employers across the country are worried that workers are getting less done — and there’s evidence they’re right to be spooked.

In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when “quiet quitting” — doing only what’s expected and no more — is resonating, especially with younger workers.

That certainly is troubling to employers. This article tries to answer why, and the journalist sets off on a quest to find the causes. I’m not going to discuss the answers at all because they’re garbage, but I instead browsed the article to see who they talked to.

“professor of economics…”

“Tech CEOs…”

“Microsoft chief executive…”

“Leaders…”

“founder of Career/Life Alliance Services…”

“Managers…”

“chief operating officer…”

“economist Lawrence H. Summers…” (Fuck Larry Summers)

“lead economist…”

“chief economist…”

“chief economist at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise…”

“senior economist…”

“many economists…”

Wow. That reporter sure spent a lot of time on the phone & email talking to people about why workers were in a slump. There’s talk about burnout, and the pandemic, and the recession, and the labor shortage, and workers setting more boundaries, and “quiet quitting”, but I noticed that someone was missing. There’s someone — a lot of someones — nobody talked to.

Workers.

Gosh, that’s a peculiar omission. You try to find out why worker productivity is down, so you go talk to the employers to try to figure out why, and you get a lot of fuzzy, vague answers and shrugs. I wonder why?

My personal answer would be that what I’ve experienced and learned in the last few years is that I don’t like managers and tech CEOs and bosses and economists and think tanks and executives and good goddamn, fuck Larry Summers and why the hell do journalists still talk to him? It’s clear to me now, at last, in my old age, that capitalist businesses and institutions don’t care about workers except as hands and brains and eyes to be exploited to make money for the middle men and executives, and that very little of the vast profits management makes will trickle down to the people who do the work. Instead, they’ll use that money to buy politicians and found new companies that will find fresh ways to squeeze blood from the masses. Oh, you brought home a few pennies from a day’s work? Then you can afford to spend them on insurance and health care, those executives love to wring out your pockets, too. What’s this? You need a place to live? All the houses have been bought by landlords, who are eager to raise your rents. And if anyone notices they’re being gouged, well, we’ll distract them with lurid tales of drag queens reading children’s books and trans people using the bathroom and black folk protesting the denial of their rights and if that’s not enough, we’ve got a well-armed paramilitary police force staffed with bullies and haters.

That’s my answer. The system is so broken that the curtain hiding the machinations of the CEOs and big money executives is in tatters, and we are starting to see how our labor is stolen by the people we used to trust to manage our workplace, our communities, our country. Why should I work harder? Any extra effort is going to gain me nothing, because it’s going to be siphoned off by some asshole in a suit with a McMansion and a vacation home and an overpriced car and a condo in Cabo, paying private school tuition to keep their kids away from my kids, all built on my faith and trust and confidence in the system.

Well, guys, my faith and trust and confidence have been blown to flinders in the last few years. You’re going to have to find some other sucker to play your con game. I suspect a lot of workers are feeling the same way.

But you won’t know because you don’t talk to them.

He’s going to kill Twitter, isn’t he?

Musk is off to a rip-roaring start. During his first weekend of Twitter ownership, he fired off a tweet suggesting that the attack on Paul Pelosi was his fault — that it happened in a drunken gay tryst. It was just the worst kind of right wing libel from crazy town.

Elon Musk and a wide range of right-wing personalities cobbled together misreporting, innuendo and outright falsehoods to amplify misinformation about last week’s violent assault on Paul Pelosi to their millions of online followers.

A forum devoted to former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s right-wing radio show alerted its 78,000 subscribers to “very strange new details on Paul Pelosi attack.” Roger Stone, a longtime political consigliere to former president Donald Trump, took to the fast-growing messaging app Telegram to call the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband an “alleged attack,” telling his followers that a “stench” surrounded mainstream reporting about the Friday break-in that left Pelosi, 82, hospitalized with a skull fracture and other serious injuries.

I guess this is where Twitter is going, transitioning to a collection of those lunatic Facebook posts your demented uncle reposts online. Content is going to suck, but also…they call Musk a brilliant businessman? He has no idea what he is doing. He wants to increase the profitability of the platform instantly by charging to get a blue check mark on their account.

Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription, though that price is subject to change. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

Musk has been clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. He is also keen on growing subscriptions to become half of the company’s overall revenue. On Sunday, he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”

This is nuts. For years they’ve given users the ability to get “verified”, that is to have their identities confirmed, which would grant them the glorious reward of having a blue check mark next to their name. That’s it. They never made a good case for what benefit this would provide, other than bragging rights and ego stroking, so I never bothered to apply for it. The features offered by Twitter Blue, and not worth $5/month, let alone $20.

He has also informed Twitter engineers that they must get these boring new features implemented by 7 November, or they’ll be fired. Brilliant.

I was assuming that Musk would let Twitter limp along, making incremental changes, but it looks like his plan is to accelerate the implosion of the company as fast as he can.