All the jokes and insults about the other side just make the polarization worse. So stop it. We are wired differently, we think differently we respond to different motivations. For example, one study Political Ideology and the Perceived Impact of Coronavirus Prevention Behaviors for the Self and Others indicates that conservatives apparently are more likely to wear masks if you point out it keeps them safer and less likely to wear masks if you point out it keeps others safer.

I’m trying to stay away from taxes on this blog, but I was just asked again whether Biden’s tax plan would bring back manufacturing jobs to the US. I’m always a little disappointed when someone asks this question and particularly disappointed if that person is in the Federal government. It indicates that the person asking the question is so fixated on “taxes” that they have not stopped to think about all the other aspects and will be spectacularly unsuccessful.

This blog is eclectic because I can get sidetracked by lots of different things. Yesterday was the origin of the word “scientist”. Today it is data sourcing and analysis. WARNING: This is a data analysis rat hole expedition. Someone made a comment to me that police were the 22nd most dangerous job in the US which triggered some recollection in my brain that I had seen a report where they were 16th.

There is general agreement that the word “scientist” was coined by William Whewell (May 24, 1794 - March 6, 1866), a carpenter’s son who won a scholarship to Trinity College and eventually became the Master of Trinity College. He was a polymath and John Herschel described him as “… a more wonderful variety and amount of knowledge in almost every department of human inquiry was perhaps never in the same interval of time accumulated by any man.

The “Treaty of Westphalia” aka “Peace of Westphalia” is the combination of treaties signed in October 1648 in Osnabruck and Munster ending the Thirty Years War which had killed eight million people, including 30% of the population of what is now Germany. To give an idea of how complicated the political situation was, there were 109 different delegations represented. Some sources claim the peace conference had thousands of ancillary diplomats and support staff who needed housing and food despite the famine all around them caused by the war.

One of the many cultural differences between the US and Europe seems to be that Americans don’t trust the government collecting data about themselves but seem to find it acceptable that companies collect data and Europe seems to be the reverse. The American idea becomes an exercise in futility as soon as you understand that the government buys data from companies if it can’t collect the data directly. But what about other geographies and what data is getting collected about you anyway?

I really get tired of people comparing death rates from COVID-19 v. XYZ and thinking that is the end of the story - it isn’t so bad. NO. As the Mayo Clinic says, most people who have it recovery completely within a few weeks. But many people end up with lingering problems because it damages the lung and other organs. Organ damage caused by COVID-19 Organs that may be affected by COVID-19 include:

For any of you small government types reading this, the following applies to state and local governments as well as the Federal govt. The Supreme Court has held that the government (police or social services) does not have a duty to protect individuals from harm, even when they know harm will occur. See DeShaney vs. Winnebago 489 U.S. 189 (1989) and Town of Castle Rock vs. Gonzales. See also Warren v.

Mike Lee, US Senator from Utah tweeted the following on Oct 7, 2020: “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” Subsequent tweets included “We’re not a democracy”, Government is the official use of coercive force-nothing more and nothing less. The Constitution protects us by limiting the use of government force" and “The word ‘democracy’ appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy.

I can’t possibly express the anger I feel at the irresponsibility of a tweet saying don’t fear COVID. As of Oct 6, there have been 1,038,534 COVID deaths globally and 208,433 COVID deaths in the US. https://covid19.who.int/ There have been 35 million globally confirmed cases, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people who survived, but have respiratory and other problems caused by COVID. There is a reason to fear COVID but as I have expressed before - I can’t make people care about other people.

When all you know is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the most recent case, the UK managed to drop almost 16,000 COVID-19 cases from their result compilation because they were using Excel in the data gathering process. Excel has a limit on the number of rows or columns and apparently the amount of data exceeded one or the other of those limits. A BBC Report claims that the row limit was breached because someone chose to use a very old file format.

This post will likely get deleted as things progress, but my innate cynicism is too strong to keep quiet right now. So, I just saw the news that President Trump tweeted that he had tested positive for COVID-19. It is interesting that it happened the same day that a Cornell study claimed the President was the single greatest source of covid disinformation. This also has national security implications. See a twitter thread from Sam Vinograd, a national security expert, written before the news but after a White House Staffer tested positive.

Suppose you are a business that has been hacked and discover that all your files are locked and you will need to pay some unknown X to get them unlocked. Not Fun. Paying ransoms just make it more enticing to criminals and fund future attacks, but not paying may cause your business to fail. The US Treasury now says if you pay and the unknown person is subject to US sanctions, then you and everyone involved in the payments may be committing a crime.