90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #567

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #565

Lisa Simpson Disease Plagues Scientists

They think they can run the world.

In “They Saved Lisa’s Brain,” Lisa Simpson joins the local Mensa chapter, whose members subsequently decide their intelligence equips them to run Springfield. A live-action version of this Simpsons episode occurs in the pages of Science, which presently lowers its aspirations from explaining the universe to merely running the United States.

“The United States has an insatiable desire for technological advancement but is governed by founding documents that are completely unsuited for science and technology,” Holden Thorp, Science’s editor, writes in an editorial for the publication. “This incongruity has manifested in recent disastrous actions by the US Supreme Court on guns, abortion, and climate.”

He refers obliquely to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Dobbs v. Jackson, and West Virginia v. EPA; the Second Amendment protecting the right to keep and bear arms; the Tenth Amendment preventing the federal government from usurping functions of government not delegated to them, even in penumbras or emanations, by the states; and the Constitution guaranteeing a republican form of governance that necessarily forbids legislation by unelected bureaucrats.

Upon becoming editor in 2019, Thorp, the former chancellor of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill until his 2013 departure following an athlete-cheating scandal, made Science less science and more politics. While the chemistry professor failed at running a government-funded school, he believes other scientists should possess more say in running the government.

In May, for instance, Thorp advised scientists in Science: “Make protest signs. Start marching. Push lawmakers to finally break the partisan gridlock that has made moments of silence a regular observance. The National Rifle Association and its minions must be defeated.”

The corruption of purpose witnessed in Science follows the corruption of purpose witnessed in science. A sort of keeping-up-with-the-Einsteins phenomenon nudges that publication and its competitor Nature toward hot-button political topics and social “science.” In veering from the rigors of the scientific method to the self-flattery of a priori assumptions, the publications undermine science in depicting it as yet another field pushing not truth but ideology. Recent...

The financial behemoth privately fears that regular people have too much leverage.

A BANK OF AMERICA executive stated that “we hope” working Americans will lose leverage in the labor market in a recent private memo obtained by The Intercept. Making predictions for clients about the U.S. economy over the next several years, the memo also noted that changes in the percentage of Americans seeking jobs “should help push up the unemployment rate.”

The memo, a “Mid-year review” from June 17, was written by Ethan Harris, the head of global economics research for the corporation’s investment banking arm, Bank of America Securities. Its specific aspiration: “By the end of next year, we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.”

The memo comes amid a push by the Federal Reserve to “cool down” the economy, informed by much of the same rationale — that high wages are driving inflation. This year, the Fed has increased interest rates for the first time since 2018. Historically, this has often caused recessions, and that is exactly what appears to be happening now: The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product has fallen for the second quarter in a row, indicating that a recession may have already begun.

Parts of the mid-year review, in particular its emphasis on a looming recession, received press coverage at the time of the memo’s release to clients. This is the first publication of the document in full.

What the memo calls “the ratio of job openings to unemployed” is generally calculated the other way around — i.e., the ratio of unemployed people to job openings. The more widely used ratio offers one measurement of the balance of power between workers and employers. The lower this number, the more options unemployed people have when searching for work and the greater opportunities employed people have to switch to jobs with better pay and conditions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this ratio stood at 0.5 as of May, meaning that there were then two job openings per unemployed person.

Bank of America memo4 pages

In 2009 — at the worst moments of the economic calamity that followed the collapse of the housing bubble during the end of the George W. Bush administration — the ratio climbed as high as 6.5, so there were more than six unemployed workers for each open job. It then slowly declined over the next decade, reaching 0.8 in February 2020 before Covid-19 lockdowns began.

This recent, unusual moment of worker leverage made Bank of America quite anxious. The memo expresses distress about “a record tight labor market,” stating that “wage pressures are … going to be hard to reverse. While there may have been some one-off increases in some pockets of the labor market, the upward pressure extends to...

Visage à trois #383

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #564

New U.S. Postal Service election division will oversee mail-in ballots

WASHINGTON — The United States Postal Service is creating a division to handle election mail issues as part of an effort to ensure swift and secure delivery of ballots for the 2022 midterm election, officials said Wednesday.

The idea behind the creation of the Election and Government Mail Services is to have a permanent division dedicated to dealing with election matters, instead of handling issues one at a time as in the past.

Adrienne Marshall, executive director of the division, said Wednesday that the services will oversee “election mail strike teams” in every local and district community to address any problems that might arise.

“We are fully committed to the secure and timely delivery of the nation’s election mail,” she said.

The Postal Service was dogged by backlogs and questions ahead of the 2020 presidential election, in which more than 135 million ballots were delivered to and from voters.

Despite the pandemic, the Postal Service said it delivered 97.9% of ballots from voters to election officials within three days, and 99.89% of ballots were delivered within seven days, in the 2020 election.

The Postal Service is sending guidance letters to election officials in each state and territory this week.

Postal workers are already hard at work delivering ballots this...