Thursday, May 13, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

Patchwork garden.

Posted: 13 May 2021 01:26 PM PDT

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"A few weeks ago, I met my first Millennial grandparent. I was interviewing a woman in her late 30s..."

Posted: 13 May 2021 11:38 AM PDT

"... about President Joe Biden's new child-tax-credit proposal, and she mentioned that it would benefit not just her two young kids but her older son's kid too. The incidental meeting was a reminder both that Millennials are getting older and that they are doing so without growing up, at least not in the way that many of them might wish. The woman I interviewed does not own a home, nor is she anywhere close to affording one. She has nothing in the way of savings. Nevertheless, she is a grandmother, catapulting into middle age."

From "Why Millennials Can't Grow Up/ Today's economic conditions are not just holding Millennials back. They are stratifying them, leading to unequal experiences within the generation as well as between it and other cohorts. " by Annie Lowrey (The Atlantic).

"In a sharp turnabout from previous recommendations, federal health officials on Thursday advised that Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus may stop wearing masks or maintaining social distance in most indoor and outdoor settings, regardless of size."

Posted: 13 May 2021 02:54 PM PDT

The NYT reports. 

"The science is clear: If you are fully vaccinated, you are protected, and you can start doing the things that you stopped doing because of the pandemic," the C.D.C. said in a statement on Thursday.

The new advice comes with caveats. Even vaccinated individuals must cover their faces and physically distance when going to doctors, hospitals or long-term care facilities like nursing homes; when traveling by bus, plane, train or other modes of public transportation, or while in transportation hubs like airports and bus stations; and when in prisons, jails or homeless shelters.

In deference to local authorities, the C.D.C. said vaccinated Americans must continue to abide by existing state, local, or tribal laws and regulations, and follow local rules for businesses and workplaces....

Great. I hope my locality takes the cue.  

It's about time that those of us who've taken the vaccination get a return on our willingness to participate. The tables need to turn, so that those who are holding back are incurring the burden. There's no difficulty getting a vaccine for yourself now, so it's become unreasonable to demand that the vaccinated limit our freedom for the sake of the unvaccinated. Incentivize progress.

UPDATE: Our local newspaper says:

Dane County's local COVID-19 mask order will remain in effect at least until May 18 as officials review new guidance from the the Centers for Disease Control that loosened masking rules for vaccinated people. 

It takes 5 days just to think about this — this, the same thing they've been thinking about for months. I'd say it shows they don't care how much they hold back commerce, social life, and individual freedom. They should have been ready to receive the new CDC report and declare an end to the mask mandate immediately. If they could think of the idea that we need to wait until at least May 18th, they could think of the idea of ending the mandate. It's not complex, given all this time and the new CDC report. Pathetic!

Iris.

Posted: 13 May 2021 07:18 AM PDT

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"But what I’ve been learning through TikTok is it’s always better when you keep it simple. There’s this balance of having enough stuff in there that it’s layered..."

Posted: 13 May 2021 12:04 PM PDT

"... so it has rewatchability, but not so much that you don't know what to look at. For this video, we shot it first and then tried to figure out what we would green-screen behind me. I searched some different 3-D-asset websites to find a horse. We decided to have the horse grow and shrink to inject humor into the drama. It could have worked as a PNG that scales up and down, but I wanted that feeling of it getting bigger above us, so I learned just enough on Blender, a 3-D program. With each video, I watch a few more tutorials. I feel like a TikTok try-hard. I wish I could just do a quick thing. Maybe one day I'll get there."

Said Lubalin, quoted in "12 Video Creators on Their Hardest Edit Ever/It's all fun and games until you need to shrink a horse" (NY Magazine). 

Here's the video he's talking about, "15,000 pound horse" (from his brilliant "internet drama" series, which appropriates text from other people's random internet conflicts and sets them to music).

"The guest was initially stopped because her shorts exposed a significant portion of her buttocks. She was given multiple opportunities to change or cover up..."

Posted: 13 May 2021 06:19 AM PDT

"... but refused. Instead, she responded with profanity and offensive conduct, including further exposing her buttocks." 

Six Flags responds to the woman who Facebooked her outrage at being asked to leave the amusement park because her shorts were extremely short. 

From the Facebook post: "Then [the park police officer] proceeded to follow me and grabbed my shoulder to turn me around and proceeded to tell me my shorts were 'too short.' I committed no crime and proceeded to walk to my boyfriend as I am autistic and have a hard time talking to officers. She followed me yelling and calling for backup... [W]e were about to leave and were blocked by your female officer from leaving and she pulled out her cuffs and demanded my ID. When we asked for probable cause their answer was 'because they are the police.'"

Video clip at the link, showing part of the interaction with the cop. Without the full context, I'm not going to opine on what the cop did. I'm wary of these videos that begin after conflict has escalated. But I support the park's requirement that guests keep their buttocks in their pants! By the way, the woman with the shorts is a petite and pretty white woman. The cop is a large black woman. Whatever the buttock exposure policy is at Six Flags, it has to be the same for whites and blacks, for the slim and the fat. Enforcing the policy on this woman is, I think, evidence that Six Flags is treating all its guests the same. Rules are rules. No exceptions.

"Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home. Those who are überly engaged with the company want to go to the office two-thirds of the time, at least."

Posted: 13 May 2021 05:42 AM PDT

Said Sandeep Mathrani, the C.E.O. of WeWork, quoted in "WeWork's C.E.O. says 'least engaged' employees enjoy working from home" (NYT).

So even the "überly engaged" only want to go in 2/3 of the time?

Having people show up at the office is a good way to test dedication — make sure you've got the right kind of people working for you. Not these balky people — people with a life of their own, working intermittently — efficiently — and doing what-all with their extra time. In the office, claiming any time of your own takes craft and stealthiness. I mean how often do you have sex or take a nap or whatever? If you're really "engaged" with your work, you just lock in and go like a machine, until 8, 10, 12 hours fly by. Obviously, the boss wants the engaged worker, and don't you want to be one too? Don't you want the non-engaged gone from your workplace? Another way to phrase that is: Would you hire yourself?

Backyard protractor wheatfield.

Posted: 13 May 2021 05:06 AM PDT

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Yes, it's our backyard. Yes, it's a wheatfield. Obviously, it's in the shape of a protractor — an old-time-y open-center protractor.

"Found this on the side of the road in my neighborhood. Thought it was a brain, then dissected it and now I have no idea."

Posted: 13 May 2021 04:33 AM PDT

"Lots of small lobes, fuzzy inside, rubbery?... The dark part almost looked like fabric, although it could have picked that up from the ground. It did not smell like formaldehyde, it smelled kind of sour. It was rubbery and stayed together fairly well, but soft and easily crumbled into the 'lobes.' Found in a residential neighborhood."  

Said the man who posted on the whatisthisthing subreddit, only to find out the thing he'd become fascinated by was dog shit.

And isn't that a metaphor for life itself? 

Well, maybe but don't talk about that on r/whatisthisthing. The moderators will crack down on you: "This thread is locked because the hundreds of now removed comments discussing 'how amazing this thread is' are not considered helpful, and thus violate our rules. The item has been identified and there's not much else to say about it."

It's a subreddit for identifying the item, not for taking off and having fun with your random bullshit, even when the item is shit.

"We are closed" is trending on Twitter.

Posted: 13 May 2021 04:37 AM PDT

For the Annals of Lateral Thinking: Ohio makes vaccinating into a million-dollar lottery.

Posted: 13 May 2021 03:57 AM PDT

Governor Mike DeWine announces on Twitter: 

Two weeks from tonight on May 26th, we will announce a winner of a separate drawing for adults who have received at least their first dose of the vaccine. This announcement will occur each Wednesday for five weeks, and the winner each Wednesday will receive one million dollars.

The pool of names for the drawing will be derived from the Ohio Secretary of State's publicly available voter registration database. Further, we will make available a webpage for people to sign up for the drawings if they are not in a database we are using. The Ohio Department of Health will be the sponsoring agency for the drawings, and the Ohio Lottery will conduct them. The money will come from existing federal Coronavirus Relief Funds.

To be eligible to win, you must be at least 18 years of age or older on the day of the drawing. You must be an Ohio resident. And, you must be vaccinated before the drawing. We will have further, specific details tomorrow and in the days ahead.

I know that some may say, "DeWine, you're crazy! This million-dollar drawing idea of yours is a waste of money." But truly, the real waste at this point in the pandemic -- when the vaccine is readily available to anyone who wants it -- is a life lost to COVID-19.

You could spend $5 million on ads cajoling people — or shaming them — into getting vaccinated. One way or another, it costs money to complete the vaccination project. The great thing about the lottery idea is that it's an effort to reach minds that are not primarily oriented to science — people who are emotional and transrational.

Am I making up the word "transrational"? I had to look it up. I can't credit myself with coinage. There's a whole Wikipedia article, but let's see if it means what I — in my thwarted word-coining effort — had in mind:

Transrational... refers to the experience of phenomena occurring within the natural universe where information and experiences does not readily fit into the typical cause and effect structure; the kinds of experience that are often dismissed as unfathomable or superstitious. It differs from the 'supernatural' and the 'rational' in that it neither directly controverts nor affirms rational reason. A transrational experience is not pathological. One of the most popular examples of transrational experiences are individuals witnessing blessed/evil omens which turn out to become true, or feelings of extremely intense dread which helped staved an individual from disastrous catastrophes, even if the individual has zilch prior knowledge or context....

People are often so afraid of being considered "pre-rational" that they avoid and deny the possibility of the transrational....

Well, this particular Wikipedia article isn't written according to the usual Wikipedia standards. It's more like a blog post. There's an effort to flip rationality into irrationality: People cling to rationality out of fear. That's not an entirely irrational thing to say, but it's just interesting speculation. I happen to think many people irrationally believe in their own rationality, but the answer to that isn't to become "transrational," but to work endlessly on the rationality of your rationality, which is not easy.

The Wikipedia article ends with 6 examples of the transrational, beginning with this:

[After an account of human communication with animals and stones] "Of course, many of us shudder when we think of some of our companions who do talk with inanimate objects or invisible friends. Yet even here, I think that psychologists' scholarly prejudices have often overcome their common sense and analytical skills. The point is not whether people talk to animals and plants, but the validity of the messages that are given and received."

In that light, may I recommend the Haruki Murakami story "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey"? It's in this new collection. A man encounters a monkey who talks to him at some length — about how he learned to speak, about how his only sexual attraction is to human females, and about how he fulfills his sexual needs by "stealing" part of the name of each woman he loves. But can the man tell anyone about the talking monkey?

Why try if no one would ever believe me? People would only end up saying I was just "making up stuff again." I also couldn't figure out what format to use. It was way too bizarre to write about it as if it were real, and as long as I couldn't provide proof—proof, that is, that the monkey actually existed—no one would ever buy it. That said, if I wrote about it as fiction, it lacked a clear focus, or a point. I could well imagine, even before I started writing about it, my editor's puzzled expression after reading the manuscript, and the question that would follow: "I hesitate to ask you, since you're the author, but—what's the theme of this story supposed to be?" Theme? Can't say there is one. It's just about an old monkey who speaks human language, in a tiny town in Gunma Prefecture, who scrubs guests' backs in the hot springs, enjoys cold beer, falls in love with human women, and steals their names. Where's the theme in that? Or moral?

That's not how the story ends. There's more, and it's quite satisfying.
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