Here’s a chilling statistic.

But there are important questions that are attracting little attention: Why does America not have enough hospital beds to deal with this emergency? Why does an increase in 155,000 patients, about 3,000 additional patients per state, push the system to its breaking point?

The answer is that there are far fewer hospital beds in the United States today than there were just a few decades ago. In 1975, when the United States had 113 million fewer people, there were 1.5 million hospital beds in the United States. Today, there are just over 900,000.

That seems backwards. Why would one of the richest countries in the world start stripping itself of healthcare facilities before the pandemic hit? Read the link, it goes on at length about the processes that led to a reduction in hospital services, in short:

Vertical and horizontal consolidation means there is little competition for hospitals and related services that hospitals also own. By 2016, “90 percent of all metropolitan areas had highly concentrated hospital markets.” The lack of competitors has allowed hospitals to raise prices for outpatient services “four times faster than what doctors charge.”

In other words, hospitals are getting rid of hospital beds because they are making more money diverting patients elsewhere. The focus on the bottom line applies both to for-profit and non-profit hospital networks, which operate nearly identically.

I can be even shorter: because capitalism. The purpose of hospitals is to make money for their owners, don’t you know.

I’m a little envious that, in the UK, you have an opposition that’s willing to stand up and tell Boris Johnson to resign. We had a president who was just as bad and our opposition party just whined about the difficulty of scraping up support for an impeachment, while the Republicans lined up in lockstep behind the buffoon.

Here is Boris Johnson acting like a child at #PMQs while Ian Blackford replies with “what a look, the Prime Minister laughing once again at the British public.” pic.twitter.com/rPDwO6ZmNM

— Mike H (@mikoh123) January 19, 2022

This could be really interesting. Will BoJo’s ego even allow him to resign? I suspect not. He’s going to have to be pried out of his chair with a no confidence vote.

Corporate lobbyists are trying to put on a “woke” costume to fool everyone. Is anyone fooled?

Onward! Through the storm!

Previous Thread

And there are few more phony than Elon Musk. Here’s a good interview with Edward Niedermeyer, who has written a book about the way Musk built a car company on some good engineering (not done by him) and a whole lot of lies (his contribution). In particular, his so-called self-driving cars are killing people.

People such as Walter Wong and Josh Brown have died. The Tesla fans blame them. And Tesla basically says, These people chose to be distracted. They chose to operate the system in a place we told them isn’t necessarily safe for it. Therefore, it’s all on them. And the NTSB said, No. We know from literally decades of behavioral psychology—particularly those that look at safety critical systems and partial automation—that if you put someone in what’s called a vigilance task, where they’re just monitoring this automation, and they just have to be there to jump in and take over when something goes wrong, which over time gets more and more rare, it is not a question of good drivers doing okay and bad drivers doing poorly. It’s not the same as driving. It’s a task fundamentally different from driving. It’s one that we as humans are actually less well evolved to do than unassisted driving. There’s no moral or skill factor in this. Inevitably, every human who is put in that position will eventually, given enough time, become inattentive, then given enough time, the system will find something it can’t deal with. Basically, people are gambling with these sorts of numbers. They’re playing roulette in a way.

That’s an interesting point. Our brains don’t have a good autopilot — our attentiveness tends to wane if we aren’t seen constant feedback to keep us tuned in. I know that when I’m on a long distance drive, my brain needs constant reminders to refocus and stay in the present and the task at hand. If I don’t have that, I know I’ll lapse into daydreaming and thinking about totally irrelevant stuff.

I suppose if we had a really good self-driving system, we could replace the need for minute-by-minute attention to the road with a system that delivered random electric shocks with a voice over saying “wake up, dummy”, but I don’t think it would sell well, and if mandatory, would fuel a robust market in YouTube videos instructing you in how to rip it out.

When Elon Musk promotes self-driving cars, though, he’s being openly fraudulent.

For me, this is where Tesla crosses into unambiguous fraud. First of all, it’s Level 5 autonomy, which you have to understand nobody in the space is pursuing. Level 5 means fully autonomous, with no need for human input ever. But operating anywhere—basically anywhere in the United States, anywhere a human could drive, this system needs to be able to drive. This is the core of its appeal as much as, Oh, we’re developing this generalized system. Everyone else is tied to these local operating domains with mapping and all this other stuff, more expensive vehicles. We don’t have time to get into all of the ways in which this is an absolute fantasy. Anybody who’s serious in the AV sector is just amazed that this even has as much credibility as it does. What it comes down to is that he’s identified not a plausible fraud or vision that he is selling, but an appealing one. People believe it because they want to believe it. They want to believe that they can buy a car—it gets back to that frisson of futurism—without having to change any behavior. You’re just gonna go out and buy another car. It’s gonna belong to you like any other car. But unlike other cars, it’s going to drive itself anywhere and everywhere. And that’s absurd. With a camera-only system, technically, people call it AI. People call it machine learning. Fundamentally, it’s probabilistic inference. And when you think about that term, probabilistic inference, you think about something that could kill you at any second. Does it sound like a good combination?

No, it doesn’t. That’s a terrifying combination. Even worse, imagine being on a freeway with thousands of other cars, all relying on those odds. That’s not just you rolling the dice, that’s everyone doing it simultaneously, trusting that no one will get snake-eyes.

This is the principle that drives the profitability of casinos. Even tiny advantages in the odds of a chance event, when iteratively repeated by a great many people, converges on inevitability. Hey, that’s also a factor in understanding evolution!

James O’Brien always says what makes sense.

'If your car breaks down, go to a mechanic. Don't go to your uncle Keith's Facebook page.'

James O'Brien on vaccine misinformation.@mrjamesob pic.twitter.com/ot9qc2KvoW

— LBC (@LBC) January 10, 2022

Sometimes, though, I think the government is run by a bunch of bumbling Uncle Keiths who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t ever look at the evidence. For instance, here’s what the omicron variant is doing right now:

Deaths are down from last year, which is very good — we’ve got a better fortified population of people who have been vaccinated. This disease is still raging, though, which makes this decision by the St Paul school district incomprehensible to me.

Just as coronavirus cases are surging after winter break, St. Paul Public Schools is considering no longer identifying and excluding unvaccinated students who come into contact with an infected person at school.

Contact tracing is taxing school health personnel, and extended quarantines are hard on families, said Mary Langworthy, the district’s health and wellness director. She said many students have had to stay home for 10 days on three different occasions.

“Our parents are struggling to get to their jobs, they don’t have daycare options. … That’s a hardship for many of our families to endure,” she told the school board this week.

That is quite the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard from someone who’s supposed to be sensible and reasonable. We’re seeing many students being exposed to COVID, so our solution is…to close our eyes and stop testing, so we don’t see them anymore.

I know what a hardship it is to have your rigidly scheduled work life disrupted by natural causes, we used to have kids in our home. Somehow, though, the American solution is to pretend the problems of health and illness don’t exist, because work must carry on as if no pandemic existed. We can’t possibly decide that work must compromise and develop a greater flexibility to accommodate the needs of the people in this time of stress. Oh no, you have sick children at home? But how will these widgets get made? How will luncheon be served to those wealthy matrons? How will these boxes of Amazon goods get next-day delivery, and how will Jeff Bezos be able to afford a new rocket? Your priorities are maladjusted and out of alignment with American values! There are bosses and landlords whose pockets must be filled!

While we don’t have kids at home anymore, if my wife got sick, my number one priority would be helping her, and my job would have to work around that fact. If I got sick, my next goal would be to not drag my sniveling, virus-infected respiratory system back to the classroom to share my viral load with the students. I’m weird that way.

Also, public schools are not a baby-sitting service, even if some school officials think that’s their most important role.