Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of March 15, 2021
Good journalism/Cool shit
Biden's first big win (and what comes next)
The new stimulus bill: it’s good! And there’s a lot there to like. On child poverty:
What’s interesting is that unlike the CARES Act, Biden’s relief bill promises to make cash payments a permanent feature of our economy. The most important item, in my opinion, is not the $1400 checks or Pandemic UI or any of that stuff — it’s the child allowance. Under the new bill, families will get monthly checks for $300 for each child under the age of 6, and $25 for each child between the age of 6 and 17.If you have two kids, that’s between $6000 and $7200 a year! Officially this is a temporary program, but many people expect it to become permanent.
Essentially this is a pilot universal basic income program for families. It would be phased out at higher income levels, but that’s not really that much different than a tax-supported UBI. The key here is that there’s no work requirement or time limit — all you have to do is have kids.
And on the strategy: just throw so much shit in that they can’t object to everything!
Remember when everyone was talking about how Trump basically DDOSed the media? He would say (and do) one outrageous thing after another, and the media would barely be able to start getting outraged over each one before the next one arrived. As a result, it all sort of blended together into this mishmash of opposition that could never really focus on one thing.
Well, maybe Biden is doing the same thing with actual policy! Conservative critics of the relief bill didn’t know whether to focus on going after the $1400 checks, the Pandemic UI, the $15 minimum wage, the child allowance, or the overall size of the bill. So they went after all of the above, and as a result they mostly failed. The $15 minimum wage was killed (or at least, delayed to another day), but the rest survived.
And what’s ahead:
But the real action will come in the next filibuster-proof budget reconciliation bill next fiscal year. By that time, COVID will be pretty much crushed and our economy will be bouncing back quite naturally. So it won’t be a relief bill. Instead, it will be an infrastructure bill. This will include the typical “repair the roads” type of once-a-decade infrastructure push, which unfortunately is how America handles routine maintenance. But it’s also going to include big climate initiatives, especially green energy and electrification. If this COVID relief bill was the quiet return of the welfare state, the “Build Back Better” bill will be the quiet reality of the Green New Deal. The Chamber of Commerce is behind the idea, so I’m optimistic that a big bill will get passed. [Noahopinion]
How Unfair Property Taxes Keep Black Families From Gaining Wealth
Awful stuff.
Despite its flaws, Scott clings to her little two-story Tudor on Lawrence Street with a devotion that’s hard to fathom, until you know the house’s ownership history. She’s renting a home she used to own. Wayne County took it away from her in 2013, after she fell three years behind on her property tax payments. Her house, which she’d bought in 2005 for $63,800, was auctioned off by the county and snapped up by an investment company for less than $5,000. Scott lost every cent she’d put into it.
She shouldn’t have. For years the city of Detroit used inflated valuations of Scott’s house to calculate her property tax bills, charging her thousands of dollars more, cumulatively, than she should have paid, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of her tax records. Hers was among tens of thousands of homes in Detroit’s lower-income Black neighborhoods that the city’s assessors routinely overvalued. Meanwhile they systematically undervalued homes in affluent areas, reducing the taxes those homeowners paid.
It’s not just Detroit. Local officials have overvalued the lowest-priced homes relative to the highest across the U.S., nationwide data show. From 2006 through 2016, inaccurate valuations gave the least expensive homes in St. Louis an effective tax rate almost four times higher than the most expensive. In Baltimore it was more than two times higher. In New York City it was three times higher.
These inequities are tucked deep inside America’s system for funding its local governments, tilting property taxes in favor of wealthy homeowners even before any exemptions or abatements. And they carry a jarring implication: The residential property tax, which raises more than $500 billion annually to pay for public schools, fire departments, and other local services, is, in effect, racist. [Bloomberg]
Down With the British Monarchy
This has always been my take too:
What is a monarchy if not the highest veneration of inequality? Based not on moral worth but on accidents of heredity, a small group of people are lavished with millions of dollars skimmed from the public till and are worshiped as sentimental nationalist gods, in exchange only for performing the duty of “being pleasant in public,” which they do with mixed success.
More than 60 million citizens, many of them living in poverty, are instructed to celebrate rather than to loathe this tableau of excess. They are told to be happy that someone has a dream life, even if it is not them, and to live vicariously through this soap opera cast of royals, rather than demanding equality for everyone else. The crown would greatly appreciate if you tune in to this show rather than spending your time reading Karl Marx.
And that plan appears to be working: More than four in five British adults have a positive view of the queen. The appeal of fancy hats is hard to overcome.
When your only arguments are “tradition” and “common identity” (lmao maybe common white identity if you want to go that far) you might want to reconsider. [New York Times]
Good grief — New York Times credits Trump for Biden's vaccine victory
Calling out the media:
In a wildly misguided attempt at Trump rehabilitation, the New York Times this week suggested Trump deserves credit for the extraordinary success the new Biden administration is having getting Americans vaccinated. Leaning hard into the Both Sides narrative, the Times generously headlined its piece, "Biden Got the Vaccine Rollout Humming, With Trump’s Help."
What the article lacked however, was any compelling evidence that Trump deserves vaccine credit, after having spent all of 2020 completely indifferent to the deadly pandemic, and spreading nonstop public health lies. Fully 60 percent of Americans over the age of 60 have received their first Covid vaccine today, compared to just eight percent under Trump. Biden should rightly take bows for that remarkable trend, after the previous administration showcased its vaccine incompetence.
Under Trump, the U.S. vaccine rollout was seen as a national embarrassment. Under Biden, it’s become a model for the world, administering nearly 100 million shots. And now the Covid relief bill, which Trump and Republicans failed to pass for ten months, will pump billions into helping communities nationwide vaccinate.
Trump wasn't some kind of passive, disinterested bystander during the Covid crisis. He actively made it worse at every possible turn, from the moment he gave the stand down order for the virus invasion last winter ("We have it totally under control"), to lying about testing , telling Americans to ingest cleaning fluids in order to cleanse themselves of the virus, and the complete disregard he showed for mask-wearing right up until his final days in office. In truth, Trump spread more deliberate lies about Covid to a larger audience than anyone else on the planet, according to a study from Cornell University.
Trump purposely contradicted established science and willfully endangering Americans. He virtually silenced the government’s public health experts and welcomed to the White House Dr. Scott Atlas, the Stanford professor and pandemic crackpot —the virus is overblown, the number of deaths is exaggerated! — whom Trump recruited after seeing on Fox News. [Press Run]
Sports hot takes
The future of offensive football
Extremely good stuff on the future of football (definitely worth a read):
During this roundtable, Vasseur and other defensive coordinators at the high-school level started with this premise: How do they handle the RPO (run-pass option) game in what they do? They had a number of answers — some of which we will get to in a moment — but the undercurrent of each of them was this:
Force opposing offenses to run the ball.
Remember, this is the high-school level we are talking about, where the running game is often thought of as king. But these defensive coordinators want to make the choice for the offense on each and every play: Make the QB turn around and hand the football off, becoming a spectator. Or better yet, make him keep the football himself. Both of those are preferable to the quarterback pulling the football away from the running back at the mesh point and hurling it in the air.
Why? Because the passing game, even at the high school level, is more efficient. [USA Today]
Can Gareth Bale Save Tottenham's Season?
I hope so. He’s been incredible in the last few games, although unlike Ryan, I think Bale has actually been managed well. (ed. note, post NLD: lmao nope) [No Grass in the Clouds]
Weston McKennie Is Right Where He Belongs
Rory Smith on Weston McKennie at Juve. [New York Times]
The unlikely story of how 'Dundee United' became an insult in Nigeria
This is fun.
But, most importantly, episode two of the series included a look at Makoko – a community built on stilts, on top of Lagos Lagoon – where a resident called Chubbey explained that survival in the city required a certain degree of street smarts.
“Anybody who came to Lagos and he didn’t learn sense, he cannot get sense ever,” he said. “Because here if you are a fool, they will learn you how to get sense. If you are a ‘Dundee United’, when they start to pour shit on you, you will get sense.”
After that the scene cut away and the documentary continued. But for any Scottish football fan watching, the producers had missed an important story: Dundee United is used to mean “idiot” in Nigeria. [The Guardian]
Health, politics, and academia
Private Insurance Wins in Democrats’ First Try at Expanding Health Coverage
The American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package that the House passed last week, would increase government subsidies to health insurers for covering recently laid-off workers and those who purchase their own coverage.
The new subsidies do not preclude future legislation that could make public plans more available. Some congressional aides say they are already laying groundwork for the inclusion of a public option plan in a legislative package expected later this year. And the stimulus package does introduce an incentive for states to expand public coverage through Medicaid, though it is unclear whether any states will take it up.
The decision to start with subsidizing private insurance shows how it can often be the path of least resistance when legislators want to expand coverage. The changes can slot neatly into a pre-existing system, and tend to garner support from the health care sector (which benefits).
Also if you don’t finish reading this seeing that doctors and hospitals are one of the biggest reasons why we won’t be able to expand Medicare/aid, then I don’t know what to tell you:
“The politics of expanding public coverage in a way that would shift people to public insurance gets tricky really fast,” said Karyn Schwartz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “There are very concrete losers: the providers who would see their payments go down.”…
These policies have moved forward easily and with little opposition. The health care industry has generally supported the changes because private health plans typically pay higher prices to doctors and hospitals. Democrats who support expanding public coverage generally describe these changes as low-hanging fruit — the changes they could accomplish quickly to expand coverage. [New York Times]
Biden is triangulating the Left
Honestly, just subscribe to Noah.
There’s a lot to be written about this new Left, but I want to focus on an interesting dynamic that’s going on between it and the Biden administration. In his first few weeks in office, Biden executed on a large number of progressive priorities — rejoining the Paris climate talks, canceling the Keystone pipeline, ending the Muslim Ban, and much more. Then he passed a huge $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill (or “stimmy”, as the kids are now calling it), which also contained an incredibly generous unconditional child allowance that will transform American’s welfare state (assuming it becomes permanent at the end of the year, which many expect). But that’s only the beginning — Biden’s next moves include a big immigration bill with a path to citizenship, minimum wage, and a green infrastructure bill that’s not called a “Green New Deal” but certainly has some similarities.
In other words, Biden is bringing the most transformational progressive agenda since LBJ. And this presents the Left with a bit of a dilemma, because one of their core bedrock beliefs during the campaign season was that Biden was a basically Clintonite centrist. The fact that their predictions have been hilariously wide of the mark, and Biden is governing more like FDR, presents leftists with a choice: They can either admit (however grudgingly and provisionally) that Biden is a lot better than they thought, or they can find reasons to denounce Biden in spite of all he’s doing. And I think those impulses are going to pull the Left in two different directions, and possibly even lead to a parting of the ways.
As I wrote in my retrospective on Bernie’s campaigns, I see the new American Left as being motivated by two basic forces: Ideology and factionalism. The ideology part actually isn’t that radical; it’s basically just European social democracy stuff. There probably are a few DSA members who denounce Biden for refusing to abolish private property, but I think the vast majority just want a strong welfare state, unions, less inequality, national health insurance, some better trains, and so on. The factionalism piece, in contrast, is all about the Democratic party — it entails a conviction that the party establishment is corrupt and under the sway of billionaires and corporate lobbies, and that overthrowing this establishment is a prerequisite for things to get better in America.
Those two imperatives dovetail just fine in a primary campaign, but once an establishment Democrat wins and starts governing like a bold progressive, it gets harder to square the two. [Noahopinion]
Hate reading
I hate this article so much and it’s an absolute mess. Yes, OBVIOUSLY nothing is 100 percent and death is rare outcome (especially based on these small clinical trials). But you can’t just report the actual numbers like the passage below and just… hand wave it away?
The two vaccine trials that did explicitly report hospitalizations as an efficacy outcome make this latter issue very clear. For the AstraZeneca vaccine, one person in the control group had severe COVID-19, but eight people were hospitalized; for Johnson & Johnson, 34 people in the placebo group had severe COVID-19, but only five people were hospitalized. It’s true that zero vaccinated people were hospitalized in either study after the vaccines took effect. But with numbers that small, you can’t draw a reliable conclusion about how high efficacy may be for these outcomes.
And to just complete ignore the evidence in your own article?
I can see why this might seem like quibbling, but I just don’t think it’s a trivial matter. It would be different if I thought the effectiveness of every one of those six vaccines against hospitalizations and death would really end up being close to 100 percent—or if I bought into the idea, now widespread, that they have already been shown to “nearly” or “effectively” eliminate these outcomes.
They do nearly eliminate these outcomes! You literally wrote about it in your very own paper! Your issue is that you think people can’t understand probabilities and confidence intervals, which while valid, is awfully paternalistic and condescending of peoples’ actual intelligences. (ed. note: write this comment before the article tried to make the counterpoint. I can only laugh)
Yes the messaging has been bad (there are differences between the vaccines! You have to balance what’s important: efficacy of getting minor sicknesses, side effects, and one-shot v. two-shot) which this article actually does a pretty good job of:
Where does that leave us for making decisions? As Anthony Fauci told The New York Times last weekend, “Now you have three highly effective vaccines. Period.” Again, you will get a lot of benefit from any of them, and your risk will shrink even more as those around you get vaccinated too. Whichever one you start with, a booster may be coming in the not-so-distant future, of the same vaccine or perhaps a different one. By taking the first vaccine you can get, you’ll also avoid the risk of finding yourself without protection if infection rates surge where you live.
Efficacy is merely one layer, though. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an edge at preventing symptomatic illness, but the Johnson & Johnson vaccine brings its own advantages. It has no demanding freezer requirements, which means it’s easier to distribute and more accessible to many communities. It’s more affordable than the other two—the company is providing it at cost around the world. Then there’s the fact that resources can be stretched a lot further when only a single dose has to be administered.
For individuals, too, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has benefits. As a one-and-done injection, it’s more convenient. It also has a lower rate of adverse events than Moderna’s. You can’t compare results of these trials too precisely, but there are indications of a striking difference. About 2 percent of those who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine recorded having reactions, such as fatigue, muscle aches, and fever, that were severe enough to interfere with daily activities. For those getting their second injection of Moderna, that rate was higher than 15 percent. People who are on the fence about getting vaccinated may find that this difference tips the scales in favor of getting a shot. Others who have doubts about the newness of the mRNA technology in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may appreciate the fact that Johnson & Johnson’s approach has already been deployed in the company’s Ebola vaccine, which got full drug approval in Europe last year.
But the main conclusion is that yes, all of the vaccines are extremely good against hospitalizations and severe disease, but they don’t grant you immortality. That’s the main takeaway! Don’t wrong 1,000 words on confidence intervals to be (technically) correct. Ashish has my take too:
Jha wrote in an email that he stands by the message of his original tweet, and notes that COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are so rare among the people vaccinated in these trials, to quibble over differences is akin to “counting how many angels are dancing on the head of the pin.”
Brief tangent: while I think the messaging is poor, I’m also upset at how much people are focusing on the efficacy differences. The J&J and Moderna/Pfizer vaccines broadly aren’t comparable in that number (not the same testing environment and different variants going around), but also if both prevent most severe cases, I’m broadly not that concerned if some more people get cold-like symptoms. The bottom line is actually that all three of the vaccines perform admirable and we don’t know which of the three are better! [The Atlantic]
This study is… all kinds of terrible? There are a lot of opportunity costs associated with not being able to go out and do things in the young that older people don’t have! Of course we’re more stressed!
“The Covid-19 pandemic has led to an outbreak of ageism, in which public discourse has portrayed older adults as a homogeneous, vulnerable group,” the authors conclude. “Our investigation of the daily life amid the outbreak suggests the opposite: Older age was associated with less concern about the threat of Covid-19, better emotional well-being, and more daily positive events.”
Read: young people are being more responsible and older (mostly white) adults are just living their lives and spreading disease. So by being more responsible, we’re more stressed, and this article is mocking us. Cool.
It gets worse:
One of the few investigations to find no age-related differences in well-being, posted last year, was focused on 226 young and older adults living in the Bronx. In this, New York’s most underserved borough, older people often live with their children and grandchildren, helping with meals, school pickup, babysitting, in effect acting as co-parents. No “age bump” in emotional well-being for them, the researchers found, in part, they concluded, because “the sample was somewhat ‘more stressed’ than average levels nationwide.”
Yeah no shit! So the people that are “better at regulating stress” (lol such a terrible phrase) are just rich people with… less stress! This is barely a study, the controls are TERRIBLE. Of course young people trying hard to prevent Covid and poorer people are more stressed! My only takeaway here is that you’re more stressed if you try to be responsible.
It gets even worse (I know I said this already but still):
Even with that crucial distinction noted, these studies bolster a theory of emotional development and aging formulated by Dr. Carstensen that psychologists have been debating for years. This view holds that, when people are young, their goals and motives are focused on gaining skills and taking chances, to prepare for opportunities the future may hold. You can’t know if you’ll be any good running a business, or onstage, unless you give it a real chance. Doing grunt work for little money; tolerating awful bosses, bad landlords, needy friends: the mental obstacle course of young adulthood is no less taxing for being so predictable.
After middle age, people become more aware of a narrowing time horizon and, consciously or not, begin to gravitate toward daily activities that are more inherently pleasing than self-improving.
They’re more prone to skip the neighborhood meeting for a neighborhood walk to the local bar or favorite bench with a friend. They have accepted that the business plan didn’t work out, that their paintings were more fit for the den than for a gallery. They have come to accept themselves for who they are, rather than who they’re supposed to become. Even those who have lost their jobs in this tragic year, and face the prospect of re-entering the job market — at least they know their capabilities, and what work is possible.
NO. N. O. All this study suggests is that the young are more community oriented, we try a lot more, and we’re willing to give things up for the greater good. The older generation isn’t willing to make sacrifices, have fewer things to lose (aka less of a future), and are being irresponsible and therefore prolonging our pandemic. Cool. How the hell did y’all spin this positively for the boomers?
“I think the older generation now, as much as it’s been threatened by Covid, they’re beginning to say, ‘My life is not nearly as disrupted as my children’s or grandchildren’s,’” Dr. Charles said, “and that is where our focus on mental well-being should now turn.”
Yes, obviously, when you don’t care about others, have built up wealth, aren’t work, don’t have kids to take care of, and have robust support networks. It’s not cause they’re better at coping. 🙄 [New York Times]
Music
Not my choice for number one, but this is fun (I’ve got either “Harborcoat” or “Nightswimming,” Steven’s got a lot more songs from Out of Time than I would). Also probably took lots of effort to do this too. [Uproxx]