#eric felten

[reportwire]

Tensions Rise In Virginia Schools Over Racial Issues

By Eric Felten for RealClearWire In January 2022, on his first day in office, Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, showed race antagonists the schoolhouse door. During the campaign, Youngkin had promised voters he would end what he called the “Inherently Divisive Policies, Programs, Training, and Curricula” centered on race. Conservative parents had been protesting ideologically…

[arcticdementor]

Let’s say there is a mass migration of people from the bleak, crumbling concrete of Newark, New Jersey, to the palm tree paradise of La Jolla, California. Every day, 100 people rent U-Haul trucks in Newark, drive cross-country, and after unloading, drop their trucks off at a U-Haul in La Jolla. In this scenario, hardly anyone is renting a truck in La Jolla for a one-way trip to Newark. It wouldn’t take long for there to be thousands of U-Haul trucks parked in lots in La Jolla and none anywhere near Newark.

It is a conundrum that provides the basis for a new game I’ve devised, one suitable for playing with your COVID-19 bubble buddies. All you need are some scraps of paper, each marked with the name of a different city, and a connection to U-Haul’s electronic reservation system.

U-Haul’s strategy for keeping its vast inventory of trucks spread around the country, available whether you want to go from Detroit, Michigan, to Detroit, Texas, or from Wilmington, Delaware, to Wilmington, North Carolina, is simple, though executed with sophistication. If there are too many people moving to a given area, U-Haul jacks up the price. If not enough people are heading in the opposite direction, it encourages do-it-yourself movers by slashing the rental fee.

The pricing is based on minute-to-minute data on where its trucks are and where they’re headed. U-Haul ultimately gathers this data into an annual “Migration Trends” report. The report is informative, but since it’s an annual exercise, the data are relatively stale by the time they're released. The 2019 report, for example, came out two months before major cities were roiled first by COVID-19 and then by widespread rioting.

More interesting is the real-time data that U-Haul (inadvertently) makes available. The information is found in the online pricing of trucks based on their points of origin and destinations.

Here’s how different the daily pricing data is from the annual report. The Migration Trends released in January lists Manhattan ninth among top growing cities in the country. That was before the recent escape from New York began. To maintain inventory in New York these days, U-Haul is charging people roughly twice as much to take a truck out of the Big Apple as it is to bring one in. For example, if you need a big 26-foot box-truck to move your stuff from Manhattan to West Palm Beach, Florida, it will cost you (as of this writing) $3,892. Go from West Palm to the city that never sleeps, and it will only cost you $2,115.

And that overstates the current appeal of Gotham. Brooklyn to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, (all figures are for the big 26-foot rig) will set you back $2,603. Chapel Hill to Brooklyn, by contrast, is $492. It is an unambiguous measure of the current attractiveness of living in Brooklyn that moving there costs less than one-fifth of what you’re charged just to get the hell out.

Which brings us to the game: Each player picks two scraps of paper, each of which has the name of a city. Players guess which direction between their two cities is cheaper and what fraction (in eighths) of the more expensive destination that cost is.

Let’s say I put my hand in the hat and picked Philadelphia and San Diego. I guess Philly is the cheaper endpoint and surmise that it costs about half the freight of going the other way. A quick check of pricing on U-Haul’s website would show I won the round. Make it a drinking game (unless you have any driving to do), or make it a betting game.

Before you start betting, it’s worth becoming familiar with the magnitude of the current desperation migration. Here are a couple of examples that illustrate, in U-Haul dollars, the panicked flight from certain cities. If you want to move from Los Angeles to Phoenix, U-Haul charges $1,978. Go from Phoenix to LA, by contrast, and all you’ll need is $186.

Or take poor, hapless Portland, Oregon. A truck to take you away from there to the calmer precincts of Boise will set you back $1,242.

Boise to Portland? $91. Anyone? Anyone?

[gettothestabbing]

It’s not that there wasn’t a federal public health service. It just did very little for the public. Wilson had signed an executive order in 1917, putting the health service under military control.

Resources that might have mitigated the suffering on the home front in 1918 went to the army. Perhaps the most important resource, nurses, were in short supply when the influenza epidemic began to spread.

Barry writes that hospitals had been stripped of their most essential workers and that “many private hospitals around the country [were] so short staffed that they closed, and remained closed until the war ended.”

One might argue that Wilson had a war to win and couldn’t afford to get distracted by anything so pedestrian as the flu. But other wartime leaders recognized the threat diseases pose.

On July 4, 1775, George Washington, newly made commander of the Continental Army, instituted a regime of social distancing to keep smallpox from spreading among his soldiers. There was a quarantined smallpox hospital near a pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Washington made the pond off limits: “No person is to be allowed to go to fresh-water pond a fishing or on any other occasion as there may be a danger of introducing the smallpox into the army.”

It was one of the first orders Washington issued, and he never lost sight of the threat epidemics posed to soldiers and civilians alike.

The man who would become the first president urged his fellow founders to have “the utmost vigilance against this most dangerous enemy.”

If that “enemy” talk sounds more like the anti-pandemic rhetoric of Donald Trump than that of Woodrow Wilson, it may be because Wilson had no anti-pandemic rhetoric.

As coffins piled up in garages in major cities, the president stayed focused—first on winning the war, and then on securing his internationalist dream, the League of Nations.

Wilson would indeed shape the postwar world—primarily by way of the disease his decisions did so much to ship abroad. In the face of such epic suffering, President Woodrow Wilson—erudite rhetorician, progressive statesman, and eminent world leader—had no comment.

[thecollectibles]

Enki, Sumerian god of creation by Eric Felten

[bizarrobrain]

Crawler Tank by Eric Felten

[crisisofinfinitemultiverses]

Thanos by Eric Felten

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Ghost Story by Eric Felten

[fatherbyknight]

“If loyalty is, and always has been, perceived as obsolete, why do we continue to praise it? Because loyalty is essential to the most basic things that make life livable. Without loyalty there can be no love. Without loyalty there can be no family. Without loyalty there can be no friendship. Without loyalty there can be no commitment to community or country. And without those things, there can be no society.” – Eric Felten

[manfrommars2049]

Cyberpunk Drive-By by Eric Felten via ImaginaryTechnology

[bi-the-way-which-ones-pink-blog]

This weekend on Saturday I married my best friend Maura aka Mau aka @musingsofmaura She proposed to me on a Grecian mountain top last summer. Everything went off without a hitch. I had a blast and I felt like the sexy queer dragon punk that she sees me as. What a great weekend with dope people. The Eric Felten jazz septet provided the music and I ate half my weight in falafel, salad, and salmon and the other half I drank in pbr and Jameson. I love you, yo. Here's to us punks sticking together!

[grandmarecipesblog]

Ice for Cocktails

Good, fresh ice made with boiled, filtered water will make a noticeable difference in the taste of your cocktails. As Eric Felten advises, Use ice untainted by municipal chlorine and free from memories of trout caught last summer. Ice For Cocktails Ingredients 1 quart filtered water How to Make Ice For Cocktails Pour filtered water into a tea kettle or large pan and bring water to a boil.…

[boatsthatfly]

Eric Felten

[innocentamit]

How Russiagate Became The Story Of Your Old Friends In High Place

How Russiagate Became The Story Of Your Old Friends In High Place

Author Eric Felten of RealClearInvestigations The indictment of Washington’s lawyer Michael Sussman – who falsely accused the FBI of apologizing to Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign – reveals that he was in the hands of a powerful Democrat. It’s a card he played over and over again to advance the Trump-Russia plot: friends in high places. They used their peers to coerce them into secrecy;…

[tachtutor]

The Rise Of The 'Digital-Intelligence Complex'

The Rise Of The ‘Digital-Intelligence Complex’

Eric Felten, RealClearInvestigations: 60 Years After Eisenhower’s Warning, Distinct Signs of a ‘Digital-Intelligence Complex’  In June 2019, Susan Gordon stood on a stage at the Washington Convention Center.  Behind her loomed three giant letters, “AWS,” the abbreviation for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the giant Internet retailer.  After three decades at the Central…

[stimulintellect]

Eric Felten On How Big Tech Could Be A BIG Problem Regarding National Security

Eric Felten On How Big Tech Could Be A BIG Problem Regarding National Security

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj0w8ojpOKQ