Comments

JG4 • October 3, 2020 6:50 AM

If you turn the kaleidoscope to the angle where you can see entropy gradients, it all will become clear. Including the need for security and why the liars, thieves and murderers cheat, steal and kill. And why snakes hiss. Prigogine, Onsager, Szilard, Schrodinger and others were well ahead of me in understanding the role of entropy maximization in living systems. I should have started from first principles, which may have prevented a couple of those posts from getting deleted. The bioenergetics of the empire of lies are very fragile.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/10/links-10-3-2020.html
…
Assange Trial

Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange Areana. Interview with John Pilger. A must read.

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

Egypt police ‘using dating apps’ to find and imprison LGBT+ people Independent (resilc)

Paying ransomware demands could land you in hot water with the feds ars technica
…

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 3, 2020 7:30 AM

@ JG4

I feel ya man…there be dragons. Speaking to that–indirectly and for your amusement…

AS OF LATE–OR TOO LATE
Having written as clearly, accurately, using titles from articles and not extracts (often criticized for contextual ambiguity) with plain language and not specifically singling any one person out where criticism or concern exists it is the subject itself that must be in contention. Three names appeared, but each one of those appears in a myriad of publications, journals, and their own websites in the context of subject and in the titles of referenced articles. No accusations, just connecting dots to dashes and dashes to dots. Information related to specific elements of the topic are noted (without direct web site addresses, seems simple enough to follow a lead when the statement is for example: “ARTICLE TITLE, NY TIMES 25 Feb 2020”.

At this point I have reconstructed what I call a response article. It is a classic debate type response to written statements of individuals that are clearly untested by scholars or observers of such affairs. Not understanding any
legal constraint to the topic coverage, it may be I am mistaking the context for a content disagreement (at least editorially).

It has never been my intention either inadvertently or deliberately to disgrace, disuse, or denigrate the space that is Bruce’s home. I am here uninvited, an unannounced guest with a stream of bits in offer.

I am coming closer to concerned…

Tatütata • October 3, 2020 4:40 PM

John Naughton: “Why Amazon’s home security drone should set off alarm bells, Opinion, The Guardian, 3 October 2020

[…] What’s not to like?

Where does one start? The obvious place is Ring’s somewhat erratic past record on security. In 2019, an investigation by Motherboard found that its devices lacked “basic security features, making it easy for hackers to turn the company’s cameras against its customers”. In January this year, an investigation of the Ring doorbell app for Android by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found it to be “packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers.” Two weeks after the study was published, Ring announced that it was changing its privacy settings to block the company from sharing most, but not all, of their data. And so on.

JonKnowsNothing • October 3, 2020 9:11 PM

@Tatütata

re: Ring’s somewhat erratic past record on security …Ring announced that it was changing its privacy settings to block the company from sharing most, but not all, of their data.

Ring, Amazon, and the Flying Squirrel Camera have only one security setting that works above all others: Do Not Buy or Install.

If you skip the above, the only security setting that works as guaranteed is the one where the data rolls right over into all LEAs and LEOs that have contracts or manacles on the company.

Any setting purporting to be “user privacy mode”, just is not.

Why do people want that? I dunno, but I dunno why they won’t wear a mask either.

1% Lowfat Milk or 0% Non-fat milk?

name.withheld.for.obvious.reason • October 3, 2020 10:17 PM

I am starting to think that there is a theonomic undercurrent near or about this place. Demonstrating weak and indefensible assertions made with a self-righteous attitude accompanied with a less than testable hypotheses. What could go wrong? Is that screaming I hear–snowflake?

JonKnowsNothing • October 4, 2020 7:25 AM

@xcv

re: The trial if any then is only a fair show in the flesh for the entertainment of the ladies and gentlemen of the district, and conviction is a foregone conclusion because the jurors are all true believers.

In the USA there are some “accusations” that are auto-win for the prosecution.

One of our quirks is that prosecutors are elected officials. That means we vote for them.

Every election cycle, we get a flurry of “I put 99% of X in jail!” and “I convicted NNNN super-duty-bad-persons” and “YOU won’t be SAFE if you don’t elect me!”

So we have a built in incentive to go for the maximum, most horrific, most nauseating, most head-line grabbing claims. These accusations are filed whenever possible and they are almost impossible to defend against.

We are supposed to have an equal-adversarial system but as such things have been written about, there is no equality in the system.

From historical works, there doesn’t seem to have been much equality in any epoch.

Clive's Shadow • October 4, 2020 7:56 AM

Look! In the sky. It’s a bird, it’s a plane. Or is it a hellicopter? No actually I think it is a bird. Or maybe I’m just seeing things. Who knows… After 10 shots of Whiskey things start to get a bit strange.
I like to wax my legs and stick the hair on my back. Why? Because it keeps my back warm. There’s method in my madness.
I can drive 10 miles, walk 50 feet. Turn around and before I know it, I’d be back home. Or would I? I’m not sure but that’s just how it is.
I like to say things twice, say things twice. It can get annoying though, annoying though.
Life is full of temporary situations, ultimately ending in a permanent solution.
Microsoft bought Skype for 8,5 billion!.. what a bunch of idiots! I downloaded it for free!
A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.
Sorry, I can’t hangout. My uncle’s cousin’s sister in law’s best friend’s insurance agent’s roommate’s pet goldfish died. Maybe next time.
I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.
I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Don’t you find it Funny that after Monday(M) and Tuesday(T), the rest of the week says WTF?
Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t sell drugs. The government hates competition!
The human body was designed by a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?
I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realise I’m listening to it.
Thank you Facebook, I can now farm without going outside, cook without being in my kitchen, feed fish I don’t have & waste an entire day without having a life.
Suicide would be my way of telling God that I quit.
If you really wanted to do that, then why wouldn’t you do that? Instead you do this. It makes no sense.

Singapore Noodles • October 4, 2020 7:57 AM

Re: Theonomy

Just to provide a background in the actual texts of the Old and New Testaments –

The peculiarity in these theonomic claims is that it is a strong point of emphasis in Christian teaching that the old law was temporary, there only to convict of sins, until the advent of new law, the Messiah, and passed away with that advent. This is central in both the Old and New testaments, see Isaiah and Saint Paul. The only thing that survives from the old law is the moral teachings, basically the one great commandment, to love God with one’s entire being and one’s neighbor as oneself.

So these theonomies are not in accord with Christian doctrine. That makes them heretical from the Christian point of view.

An additional historical note, whether one accepts Christianity or not, one might as well be aware of some facts –

There are at most two options that have any direct claim historically to contact with the beginning of the faith, namely Roman Catholicism as it was up to 1958, and eastern Orthodoxy, which were themselves one before the great schism (look it up). All the protestant separations, out of which these theonomies arise, are very late and distinguish themselves by denying or recasting this or that various teaching among those going back to the beginning. It does not seem possible they can justify any claim to be Christian. As is said, orthodoxy (in the sense of the correct teaching of the faith) precedes heresy.

1&1~=Umm • October 4, 2020 10:04 AM

@Singapore Noodles:

“It does not seem possible they can justify any claim to be Christian.”

Hence they called themselves Calvanists, then there was the five years to get the ‘Westminster Confession of faith’ that became law to appease those in Scotland and condemn papists and catholics as idolatrists and not of their version of Christianity.

Whilst the laws were repealed they came back again with Willian of Orange. The scots supporters then moved into Ireland and to this day the “orange men” of Calvinist and Church of Scotland descent create mayhem and insurection in NI and harbour many a protestant/unionist terrorist and their lick spittle supporters in politics like the Democratic Unionist Party(DUP).

Such people can be found through out US politics and five hundred years of conflict that was brought upon Ireland that later became the “troubles” that masked a true criminal intent and brutal savagery appears to be the main intent of these “Christian Reconstructionists”.

The warning signs are there for people to see in both US houses, and if it is not yet clear, they are endemic in the current executive as well. Just waiting their time to start a crusade in Iran or other parts of the Middle East, it’s only by luck that certain of them were ‘to obvious’ thus lost their position otherwise the US would be in ‘Gulf War III’. If you want to know fear listen carefully not to the current POTUS but the VP. His ‘God and Church above all others’ words that are mearly decorated with ‘Party Rhetoric’ should tell you what kind of hellish world he wants, no matter how many body bags have to be flown home, no matter how many citizens will be destroyed on US streets by out of control Federal authoritarian followers who’s sole intent ‘is not just to follow but exceed orders in the most brutal and tyrannical of ways’.

At the end of the day, calling one’s self a ‘christian’ has little relevance, as deeds and actions speak louder than words. Their deeds and actions are not what others would expect of what they consider Christians with the three pillers of faith being ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ for these ‘Christian Reconstructionists’ have no charity just tyranny and modetn day ‘witch finders’ to put fear in the citizens.

Singapore Noodles • October 4, 2020 11:50 AM

@ 1&1~=Umm

For something that could truly be said to represent Christian political thinking, one could look at the writings of Don Luigi Sturzo.

There is a wiki entry on Sturzo. It makes a common error in suggesting that he was a socialist. Actually he was trying to implement the social teachings in the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. Those are also worth a look for genuinely Christian politics.

I think I hear the moderator sharpening up their keyboard so I will stop here.

Clive Robinson • October 4, 2020 1:51 PM

@ Anders,

Don’t remember it has been here…
And since there’s so few security news, so…

That looks like a phone I could use 🙂

But… I’d add some security features such as real properly working voice encryption…

Though I’m not sure the Adafruit 3G cell phone board would alow you to do that… Most won’t, and the few that do, that I’ve seen still route the audio through the chip so you’ve no physical segregation and only a guess at if the chip designers are being honest (I’d assume most are not for various reasons).

rrd • October 4, 2020 4:44 PM

@ name.withheld…

I am starting to think that there is a theonomic undercurrent near or about this place. Demonstrating weak and indefensible assertions made with a self-righteous attitude accompanied with a less than testable hypotheses.

(A) If they’re weak then refute their points.

If you can’t refute their points, I suggest you make sure you understand them. If you have questions, hopefully they’ll have embraced the virtue of kindness and will attempt to answer your questions as best as they can.

If they’re indefensible, then demonstrate their frailty.

Otherwise, probe their defenses, find a weak spot, and blow down their house of cards with your superior ideas.

(B) I call it good form to do so in the thread the comments were were made, or at least include their handle.

(C) What is the difference between false-self-righteousness and truly-positive moral righteousness?

What question could possibly be more important on our Earth right now?

(D) Backbiting is a vice of the soul.

It’s certainly not the last refuge of scoundrels, but it’s in their toolkit.

(ps1) I hope you are all having a lovely Sunday. Peace be with you all in this extraordinary universe so full of surprises.

(ps2) I’m still enjoying my best EVER birthday present this past week. And it was totally unexpected yet totally predictable, in retrospect. It might get even better in the next few days. Some gifts are life-changing but take time to ripen in order to fully take effect. Some gifts can even enhance one’s prospects for future security, peace and happiness.

(ps3) I know it’s purely hypothetical, but what if Hitler had died in 1943? 1944? Unfortunately, the universe didn’t facilitate that time frame for the human race. Alas, we just have to accept what comes our way, ya know?

(ps4) In the meantime, at this very moment, we’re listening to a song of one of our favorite artists: Bebel Gilberto. “Where were you, all this time? {some lovely instrumental bars} My love is yours, you know.”

Sorry, I’m more in writing mode than reading mode but I didn’t see any r-r-d’s. So maybe I’ll read further down later.

My love is yours, you know?

Heh, I just looked up the title of the track. It’s “winter”. Bebel sure has some beautiful songs; my guess is that her family experienced some brutalities in Brazil’s years of fascist military rule. Maybe I’m wrong about her and her famous family actually having been threatened or persecuted, but I seem to catch whiffs of such in her lyrics. Something definitely softened that talented and wealthy woman of privilege.

(E) How one argues says as much about a person as the ideas they try to support.

Or, then again, maybe I’m wrong 😉

I love learning when I’ve been wrong, because next time I’ll be more right. But that’s just plain common-sense logic, now isn’t it?

(ps-last) <3

William Gibson said in “No Maps for these Territories” that the deepest truths really do boil down to fridge magnet quotes (my paraphrase). The fridge magnet quote “A mind is like a parachute, it only works when open” is deeply true. And I’ll add, “And even more so for the heart when it goes along for the ride.”

Imagine if the universe made everyone happy who makes their best effort to teach others how to be truly, deeply happy. Imagine if that truly is the meaning of “karma”, as a natural part of the effectful system we navigate with our choices.

I don’t have to imagine. And neither do you. It’s the Design. You’re already a part of it, just like the rest of us. All together, but separate, and interconnected.

The door is over there, I’ve already given you the key. And described what it’s like over here. And I’ve asked for ZERO in return, while being incapable of in any way adequately describing my experience of trying to describe the beauty. The word “joy” can … but … {!}

Seems to me, it aint the world that’s so bad but what we’re doin’ to it. And all I’m saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love baby, love. That’s the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we’d solve lots more problems. And then this world would be a gasser. That’s wha’ ol’ Pops keeps saying.
–Louis “Pops” Armstrong

That last line might instead be “That’s why ol’ Pops keeps singing,” as he begins singing “I see trees of green, red roses, too; I see them bloom, for me and you …”. Or maybe the quote is correct as I copied it from Wikiquote.

Either way, it’s very beautiful how he described the truth of this beautiful universe.

Clive Robinson • October 4, 2020 7:51 PM

@ rrd,

That last line might instead be “That’s why ol’ Pops keeps singing,”

Judge Satchmo’s words for yourself,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2nGKqH26xlg

It’s worth listening to the full spoken intro, because what was true back in 67 is still as true today.

The only difference, is our children are a little wiser with regards to the issues than I and my contemporaries were more than half a century ago.

rrd • October 4, 2020 9:09 PM

@ Clive

I consider WaWW to be one of the great songs of all time, both musically [those chords were tough for a guitar hack like myself (when I was still noodling around)] and thematically.

The spoken word intro version is the only version we have ever had in our family’s music mix for maybe a decade now. When I was in Atlanta, the 12-2pm DJ at WCLK (Clark Atlanta University, an HBCU, that had the greatest radio station I’ve ever had the privilege to be within antenna of) always finished her set with that particular version.

In the hopes that some new music might at least cheer up some people as we deal with another surge of badly trending COVIDtine stats and govt stupidities, please allow me to share some of the ones hitting the top of our instrumental charts recently (all music opinions are IMHO, of course ;-)):

Duke Ellington’s “Mr. Gentle, Mr. Cool” (Live) — Ray Nance’s “fiddle” and Johnny Hodges’s sax are out of this world.

Wes Montgomery’s “Bock to Bock”

AIR’s “La Femme d’Argent” — maybe the most perfect song I’ve ever heard.

SRV’s “Lenny” and “Riviera Paradise”

For the mostly non-instrumental sets, we’ve got:

An entire double-CD called “Afro-Cuban Jazz 1947-60” with the likes of Machito & His Orchestra (“&HO”), Stan Kenton &HO, Chano Pozo & Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band, and Charlie Parker &HO. That music will get you up and make you move to the groove.

4+ CDs full of my daughter’s favorite music — Brazilian, with more than a handful of Bebel Gilberto’s stunning tracks set among a sampling of supposed classics (by whomever’s definition).

More details available upon request.

It’s a damned shame our countries didn’t use our leaders’ time in hospital to remove their heads from their derrières. Or maybe that’s an operation beyond even the techniques of Ben Carson 😉

Sometimes it feels like I’m bouncing around a weird combination of focused seriousness, gallows humor and grown-toddler silliness, all driven by the gravity of “the moment”, and seasoned with my listening to the intense stories in Ambrose’s “D-Day” and (now) “Citizen Soldier”.

I hope you and your family are doing well in all dimensions, Clive.

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 5, 2020 2:06 AM

@ 1&1~=UMM
Spot on about the Houses, POTUS, and VP; might I suggest both DoJ and State Department head too?

There is a barrel shifter that keeps clearing the endian data registers about state security (U.S.). I am about to go DEFCON 2, having dry powder is not useful if the need for any powder goes away.

Clive Robinson • October 5, 2020 8:50 AM

@ Anders,

Re UK COVID testing and,

“The latest government line is that it was an “IT failure”.”

How many times more must people blaim it on “the computer says” or equivalent.

Don’t they know there has been a legal president set some years ago by senior judges?

In effect thr decision was,

“Computers are designed by humans and programed by humans thus any failing of this sort must be human in origin. As senior managment are responsible for the actions of those below them, then senior managment at the highest level in an organisation carries the full weight of responsability for any computer issues.”

Thus those blaiming computer errors are actually saying that the most senior of managment are entirely incompetent.

Which I would suspect in the first place if not for the fact that the UK government at the highest levels have repeatedly shown gross incompitence since before day one of the mismanaged thus miss named “COVID Crisis”. So much so that you have to now ask if it’s incompetence or deliberate policy, and I’m certainly favouring the latter, as are more and more each day this sort of behaviour goes on…

Clive Robinson • October 5, 2020 11:56 AM

@ Anders,

With regards the MosaicRegressor link describing it as,

“… we found a compromised UEFI firmware image that contained a malicious implant.”

Funnily I was describing a longterm design flaw involving the,”BIOS and later” on this blog just a short while ago. And mentioning as part of the history BadBIOS and what Lenovo put on their consumer laptops (something left out of the “SecureList” document, although they do “log roll” other security firms…).

What I find ammusing is that they say,

1, It uses mail.ru
2, It uses Korean characters
3, It uses Chinese characters
4, It’s been found on computers by those with an interest in North Korea.

So must be a Chinese Speaking Korean, thus must be working for North Korea…

That’s the sort of daft logic that will lead journalists etc to lable it as from the NKs which it is probably not…

Look at it this way, we know the CIA amoungst others have tools and development models to create such misleading identifiers, and as this is well known, you would expect anyone with half a brain to do the same sort of development model…

Thus thr only real indicator of who might be behind it is option 4,

“It’s been found on computers by those with an interest in North Korea.”

So unless the subset of computers with this malware on it can be further reduced, all we can realy say is,

“It’s from an entity that wants to know about those with an interest in North Korea.”

Which as that covers a whole multitude of different countries Intelligence Agencies and a number of Corporate Intelligence entities, realy only tells us,

“It’s probably an Intelligence entity that has the minimal ability to set up a development model to mislead investigators”.

As people should know by now, having a development model that makes it look like one of the four nations on the US cyber-existential threat list[1] is a good way to stop investigators digging depper. This malware ticks the box on three of them as identified as items 1-3 on the list and further by item 4.

Which realy should cause people to ask questions a little bit deeper than just making “easy assunptions”.

If we wait a little longer, as is common with malware of this sort, others will get hold of it and make a few minor changes. Because this code will have been “identified” as oF NK origin, almost as likely the next version found will use this as the key “attribution” identifier and so on…

Talk of “The blind leading the blind”.

[1] Beter called the US Orwellian distabt enemy “usual suspect list”. Consisting of China, Iran, North Korea, Russia.

JonKnowsNothing • October 5, 2020 2:06 PM

@Clive @ Anders

re: Thus thr only real indicator of who might be behind it is [door number 3]

iirc(badly)
There was a set of analysis reports a while back on a particular nasty piece of Nation State Malware, installed and intended to Do Harm Where Necessary and When Triggered.

All these analysis are fascinating about how the researches have to pretzel into the code to find out who what where how and what isn’t so.

One part of the analysis had some of the folks stumped because it was “not modern” after more digging and checking they realized that this portion of the code was written by an Old Timer and was written in an odd variant of C (iirc) which was dated Long Time Passing. None of the younger dudettes could sort it how because they had never been taught to programmed that way, modern code being structured differently.

That was about all they could say without pointing more fingers at the NSA types ’cause the NSA+Chums do not like it when you reverse engineer their junk.

I still get a smile that some ancient dude[ette] is still slugging Jolt Cola, muchin’ Pop Rocks and listening to the The Ray Conniff Singers while avoiding the regular No-Age-Is-Too-Young purges and still writing code that none of the Lessor-Purgable-Age groups can sort out.

vas pup • October 5, 2020 4:49 PM

Japan’s Mars moons mission leads to human spaceflight:
https://www.dw.com/en/japans-mars-moons-mission-leads-to-human-spaceflight/a-54961901

“A Japanese mission called Martian Moons exploration aims to be the first to bring back rocks from the Mars region. It could also help humans land on Phobos.

Japan’s Martian Moons exploration (MMX) mission aims to probe and observe Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos, collect surface material, and return them to Earth.

MMX is scheduled to launch in 2024 and bring back rocks and other samples, possibly from Phobos, the larger of the two moons, five years later in 2029.

That puts Japan and its space agency JAXA in direct competition with the USA and Europe.
So, what exactly­ is MMX and why the moons?

The MMX mission involves a spacecraft that will enter a Quasi Satellite Orbit around the Martian moon, Phobos, a lander with scientific instruments and tools, and a return vehicle. The German space agency DLR and the French space agency CNES are co-developing the lander or rover.

Its primary objective will be to help scientists learn and understand more about the Martian moons and the planet — to “clarify” knowledge on their origin and evolution.
The creation of this system is one of the keys to solving the mysteries of planetary formation in the solar system, say the JAXA scientists.

“The Martian system sits at the gateway between the inner and outer solar system,” they write in their email to DW. “Unlike Mars itself, which will have evolved through a multitude of geo-physio processes since its first formation, the moons preserve an earlier time in the history of the system.”
MMX will use a telescopic camera called TENGOO to observe the terrain of the moons, delivering images at a resolution of about 40 cm. Another camera will observe the moons’ topography.

A near-infrared instrument called MacrOmega will observe the distribution of “hydrous minerals, water-related substances and organic matter” on the surface of the moons. That’s being developed with CNES.

And that’s just three of the probe’s six instruments.
Other objectives include the development of the technology required for return trips between the Earth and Mars and establishing “optimal communication technologies,” using a newly developed, Deep Space Network ground station.

JAXA says results from the MMX mission will complement other missions that are focused on the Red Planet itself, such as Perseverance, the UAE’s Hope orbiter, or China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover.

The scientists describe MMX as an investigation of the Martian system, rather than a detailed investigation on the planet.”

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 5, 2020 4:55 PM

@ Bruce Schneier
On the site your latest books is listed as “Click Here to Kill Everyone” and not your latest composed of articles and essays as a collection–“WE HAVE ROOT”

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 5, 2020 5:14 PM

@ rrd
Your well remarked comments assume the context is with a fellow blogger, it is not necessarily. In a previous comment with the relative URI “#comment-356218” or URL https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/10/friday-squid-blogging-after-squidnight.html/#comment-356218 there is a deliberate set of actions, on my part, to responsibly answer any question I may have posed given that I was not using any rhetorical instrument. That would be intellectually dishonest on my part.

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 5, 2020 6:00 PM

5 OCT 2020 — DATA HAS MET ITS MATCH
A review of the review of Bruce Schneier’s “Data and Goliath”, that appeared in the New Rambler Review written by Bruce’s academic colleague Jack Gold Smith titled “The Ends of Privacy

In the article “The Ends of Privacy”, the author Jack Goldsmith seems to have grabbed several straw-man arguments erroneously employed as critical of your analysis in Data and Goliath. And as he is a colleague of yours and appears to be strong in his criticism of your work, I can assume that Jack is available to similar critiques.

Goldsmith laments the purpose of Bruce’s work in dismissively stating that “Bruce realizes that most of his proposals are unrealistic.” But Bruce’s words suggest otherwise, “I’m not living in a country where the majority of people want these changes.” This is not a statement of realistic, it is more specifically a bounded space where it most likely does not work. Other countries and their populations are well disabused of any benevolent benefit the U.S. provides when it comes to surveillance technologies and what privacy means. Bruce also nails it with the fact that the population has been sold the security theatre model wherein the state provides sanctuary from the bad things/people/ideas ‘out there’. The propaganda could have easily formulated a different model as an answer to whatever it was the state invented in the first place. We are paying to have less in the way of security at the same time the institutions brag about the wonderful job they have done keeping us secure…from them.

SpaceLifeForm • October 5, 2020 6:15 PM

@ Clive, Anders, JonKnowsNothing, rrd, name....

Reminder: Attribution is Hard.

Writing style is more difficult to fake.

Interesting.

My four stars for name do not show after preview.

Turns into dot dot space dot dot

It should show as dot star dot star dot star dot star

You know that it is how I’ve always done it.

Delano • October 5, 2020 7:03 PM

Good article on the kungflu hoax and related surveillance:

https://archive.is/3JmwD

Surveillance technology is not the way to get kids safely back to school

…But schools are buying them

We see facial recognition being used as a COVID-19 response — we also see thermal imaging. And these technologies are all invasive, they’re all expensive. But what they don’t have is evidence that they actually work.

We see companies that were marketing their tech as a way to prevent school shootings […]

But as soon as COVID-19 was in the news, and they saw that school districts were more interested in spending money on public health than on mass shootings, they suddenly started selling the exact same technology to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

They have technology and they’re trying to find ways to make us believe that it’s the solution to our problems.
Contact tracing privacy is really in a dangerous state today.
Currently, there’s almost no protection against law enforcement or even [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] coming in and getting this sort of contact tracing data.

And that’s why we’ve been fighting here in New York to pass legislation that would actually say that police can’t weaponize this information and make it another part of the school-to-prison pipeline.

SpaceLifeForm • October 5, 2020 7:54 PM

@ Clive, Anders, JonKnowsNothing, rrd, name….

Missing the whitespace.

New funny on end.

It is insanity to return to the scene of the crime.

But, alas, such has happened.

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 6, 2020 2:06 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm
As I see from the markup under the class “comment-excerpt” the following:

name.<em>.</em>.<em>.</em>

It looks as though a sequence may be filtered, hope this helps.

Winter • October 6, 2020 2:20 AM

@Clive, Anders
“The latest government line is that it was an “IT failure”.”

How much I would like to blame Boris et al. for everything, I know from people working in the trenches that the whole SARS-2 testing is a huge intractable logistic nightmare.

Global test supplies are still short of what is needed so test labs are scrambling to get the supplies they need. Sometimes test labs have to beg other test lab to borrow them some supplies. Most test labs have less than a week of supplies in stock and regularly do not get the deliveries they had been promised.

The other end of this logistic nightmare is the ad-hoc public test facilities that have to collect and bar-code thousands of samples a day, send them to far away test labs and send the information in parallel. With a workforce consisting of students and other inexperienced people who have never done anything like this. Then the results have to be conveyed to the tested subjects, and only to them, in a timely and secure manner.

This whole pipeline that is supposed to test 300k+ of people a day, every day, every week (UK) did not exist 6 months ago. As a result, everything is held together with duct tape and glue.

I have seen well managed logistic/IT projects with less ambitious goals and more time-to-market collapse and burn to the ground.

So, in this case I am ready to believe that “IT failure” is a likely cause. I would have been very surprised if there were no major “IT failures”

Winter • October 6, 2020 2:37 AM

@Clive, Anders
Adding to my previous comment. They found the cause of the “IT failure”

Botched Excel import may have caused loss of 15,841 UK COVID-19 caseshttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/excel-glitch-may-have-caused-uk-to-underreport-covid-19-cases-by-15841/

In short:
“But while CSV files can be any size, Microsoft Excel files can only be 1,048,576 rows long. When a CSV file longer than that is opened, the bottom rows get cut off and are no longer displayed. ”

I do think this is an “IT failure” straight out of the Text-books. Excel runs the global industry as “middle-ware”, but like all Office products, they are “consumer products” that lack the rigor and robustness for mission critical applications. MS Office products do not scale.

There are really good applications that can process CSV files and handle any size and complexity, (SPSS and R come to mind) and database products that can run a Mars mission (PostgreSQL). But NOT Excel nor Access.

To use Excel in such an environment is a classic IT error. You take existing procedures and scale them up a few orders of magnitude and suddenly everything collapses. The pilot ran flawlessly, the full application falls flat on its face.

SpaceLifeForm • October 6, 2020 2:51 AM

@ name.<star>*

It must be Markdown.

It’s interesting that the Preview and final are different.

Note above, I used the amper lt semi and amper gt semi.
Actual HTML markup.

If I just used real lt star gt, then it treats it as an unknown HMTL tag, and it just disappears.

Having only one asterisk at end is not a problem.

Hmmm. Any easy way to force disable Markdown?

Apparently three backticks does the trick

name.*.*.*.*

Ok, that works.

that was a line of three backticks before the name line
followed by a line of three backticks.

You can not see the 2 lines of three backticks.

The Markdown code sees them and sends to bit bucket.

JonKnowsNothing • October 6, 2020 7:51 AM

Spreadsheet applications are just fine for what they are intended to do: foot, tick and total sums.

Like much of the internet and browsers all sorts of stuff have been bolted on to provide more auto-magic analysis. This works on a small to medium scale.

Like most of IT/Tech the tools can exceed their use: it may be fine to use a hand trowel to plant a tulip but if you need to dig a long ditch you are better off with a trenching machine and if you need to build a bigger ditch you need an excavator and if you are duplicating the Grand Canyon in Arizona, add several millennia to that project.

iirc(badly) not only is there a max to the number of rows and columns, there is a name mangler that can happen (and did) where you can exceed the number of characters in a row/column name which will lock up your spreadsheet, depending on the decrepitude of your equipment there are also space and hard drive partition limitations.

Blaming these faults on noobs is really passing the bucket of slop to the least likely persons to fix the issue.

In my locale, we get daily and 2x a week updates on COVID-19 in the area. You can tell when someone has gone on vacation because the replacement cannot add or subtract. Today – Yesterday = Change. Either they do not know how, they do not check their work, or they hope no one will notice that the data is “off a bit”. I don’t know what their import/export methods are but those numbers are clearly hand calculated.

Expecting good programs is like waiting for Godot. It never happens.

Clive Robinson • October 6, 2020 8:49 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

None of the younger dudettes could sort it how because they had never been taught to programmed that way, modern code being structured differently.

As was once noted “reach for the source” does not of necescity mean the “C code” it could just as well be the “object code” after you’ve run it through a “disasembler” or “decompiler”.

Personaly I prefere as close to the metal as possible as it helps remove ambiguity… Which whilst that should not happen in “structured languages” can be easily done in a number of languages like C.

If you realy want to “futz with peoples heads” actually write the equivalent of a byte wide interpreter or similar, then intersperse the actual functional code to be interpreted in the likes of “strings” that get shifted by the compiler all into one place in the data segment…

I first did something similar four decades ago to stop people removing a copyright notice and from changing a serial number…

Winter • October 6, 2020 10:02 AM

@Clive
“If you realy want to “futz with peoples heads” actually write the equivalent of a byte wide interpreter or similar, then intersperse the actual functional code to be interpreted in the likes of “strings” that get shifted by the compiler all into one place in the data segment…”

My all time favorite Obfuscated C entry (I would call it MAin):

https://www.cise.ufl.edu/~manuel/obfuscate/heathbar

Judges’ comment:
The main reason we liked this entry was mainly because the main
effect of the source was self documenting!

Winter • October 6, 2020 10:26 AM

@JonKnowsNothing
“Spreadsheet applications are just fine for what they are intended to do: foot, tick and total sums.”

The Register says it all:
hxxps://www.theregister.com/2020/10/06/excel/

They link to a list of Excel Horrors:
hxxp://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm

TL;DR: MS to blame.

lurker • October 6, 2020 11:20 AM

@Winter

To use Excel in such an environment is a classic IT error.

…

TL;DR: MS to blame.

Sounds like classic buffer overflow = classic programming error = human error. 1st bunch of humans were employed by MS. It is difficult to make a non-defamatory sentence with both MS & QA. 2nd bunch of humans used product without RTFM. The row limitation is in the fine print， at least it is since it was discovered. 3rd bunch of humans used a RMDB[1] and thought they were doing the world a favour exporting CSV.

Those of us who detested Excel would terrorise colleagues by returning data as CSV, revealing the “hidden” columns; or pass it thru OpenOffice to strip out the macros…

[1] Real Man’s DataBase

JonKnowsNothing • October 6, 2020 12:55 PM

@lurker

re: Sounds like classic buffer overflow = classic programming error = human error.

Well the error is to have valuable information stored and sorted on anything less than a mainframe or supercomputer with Bluffdale storage abilities.

It’s a known hard fixed limit to spreadsheets, which is only partially the problem because spreadsheets can be split up into tabs or new sheets to adjust for size limits.

The other half is the import routines from other sources. Nearly every import option will allow you to see what is and isn’t being imported and into which columns it’s going. It also allows “preview” of what all is coming in. If you bother to notice that your imported file only has ~70% of the expected data, you might get a clue but you do have to scroll to the bottom of the page.

The other half of half is that the import did not contain or assign date and source fields, which would have been fairly easy to do if they were not part of the original files. This would have allowed a trace to where the missing bits might be.

Then there’s the integrity checking if anything was missed. 10,000 records and you only got 1,000 in the sheet? oh … time for tea …

And one might be fairly sure that some quick fix scripts were clobbered together to do the whole job. Get-download data from source, run import routines, save as YouGotIt, email-save output to department share drive, and then delete the import folder as clean up, since no one would ever want an audit done. More tea please.

Of course, it’s speculation. But it isn’t the first time that scenario has happened.

It’s happens on Big Iron too. It’s way more fun when it happens on Big Iron though because the magnitude of the gaff is supernova size.

vas pup • October 6, 2020 2:52 PM

Children use make-believe aggression and violence to manage bad-tempered peers
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201006114225.htm

“Children are more likely to introduce violent themes into their pretend play, such as imaginary fighting or killing, if they are with playmates whom peers consider bad-tempered, new research suggests. Academics believe that the tendency for children to introduce aggressive themes in these situations – which seems to happen whether or not they are personally easy to anger – may be because they are ‘rehearsing’ strategies to cope with hot-headed friends.

Dr Zhen Rao, from the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL), at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: “If children have a friend who is easily angered, and particularly if they haven’t coped well with that behaviour, it’s possible that they will look for ways to explore it through pretend play. This gives them a safe context in which to try out different ways of handling difficult situations next time they crop up in real life.”

Aggressive pretend play has been the subject of considerable wider research, much of which aims to understand whether it predicts similarly aggressive real-life behaviors. Most of these studies, however, tend to focus on whether these associations are linked to the child’s own temperament, rather than that of the children they are playing with.

The theory that children may introduce these themes to rehearse ways of handling bad-tempered peers is only one possible explanation. For example, it may also represent an attempt to stop playmates becoming angry by giving them a pretend situation in which to ‘let off steam’, or simply to keep them playing by appealing to their nature.”

vas pup • October 6, 2020 3:02 PM

@ALL – I am sick of those political news, but for many bloggers interested in them:

Higher narcissism may be linked with more political participation
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925134722.htm

“A politically engaged electorate is key to any thriving democracy, but not everyone participates in elections and other political activities. New research found that people who are narcissistic may also be more politically active.

In a series of studies performed in the United States and Denmark, researchers found that people with higher levels of ===>narcissism — a trait combining selfishness, entitlement and a need for admiration — were also more likely to participate in politics. This could ===>include contacting politicians, signing petitions, donating money, and voting in midterm elections, among other things.

“It is hard not to think that those high in narcissism taking part in the political process appears to have some role in the current state of our democracy,” Hatemi said.
==> “If people who are more interested in their own personal gain and status take a greater part in elections, then we can expect candidates to emerge who reflect their desires — narcissism begets narcissism.”

According to the researchers, previous work has shown that
==> higher levels of narcissism are linked with behaviors that could be harmful to functioning democracies — for example, shifting focus from civic responsibility toward a person’s own self-interest and gratification.
==> Higher narcissism in the general public has been connected with more conflict and civic strife, in addition to less cooperation, compromise, and forgiveness.

The general picture is that individuals who believe in themselves, and believe that they are better than others, engage in the political process more,” Hatemi said. “At the same time, those individuals who are more self-sufficient are also less likely to take part in the political process. This means that policies and electoral outcomes could increasingly be guided by those who both want more but give less.

“Successful democratic functioning ===>requires trust in institutions, efficacy, and engagement in the democratic process,” Hatemi said. “If those who are more narcissistic are the most engaged, and the political process itself is driving up narcissism in the public, in my opinion, the future of our democracy could be in jeopardy.”

Read the whole article for details if interested.

Clive Robinson • October 6, 2020 3:41 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, lurker, Winter,

Well the error is to have valuable information stored and sorted on anything less than a mainframe or supercomputer with Bluffdale storage abilities.

Whilst the data has to be stored, a data tape is not a computer supercomputer or otherwise.

So counting and sorting can be done by quite small computers.

All the computer needs to do is have two tape units one for reading and one for writing and as many tapes as required.

In the simple case of counting you have data tapes and subtotal count tapes. You read the data tapes and log the total for that tape as a single entry on a subtotal tape. When you’ve read all the data tapes you might have very many subtotal tapes but they are just a fraction of the number of data tapes.

You then read in the subtotal tapes, adding each single entry to a new subtotal for the whole tape that then gets written as a single entry on a new subtotal tape. This tape is obviously a fraction of the previous layer of subtotal tapes, and so you go one. Eventually you end up with a single subtotal tape which produces a single entry on a new tape that is the total count.

It’s not as fast as just reading all the data tapes and keeping a running total in memory, but it does work to any size that would be storable on a tape (and there are simple tricks to extend beyond that).

A similar process can be done for sorting tapes but that is nowhere near as efficient.

The failure as has been noted is.

“People did not plan for working with limitations thus failed to take simple steps to mitigate them…”

Yes it’s easy for anyone of us to say that with “20-20 hindsight” but in all honesty the people doing this task should have known about the limitations, otherwise why were they doing the job?

Thus did managment check they were qualified to do the job?

And so on up the tree till you get to the top. It might sound unfair but at the end of the day that’s what UK law requires of any “legal entity’s officers”.

Clive Robinson • October 6, 2020 4:10 PM

@ vas pup,

That is future of construction!

That is the future of most non-creative jobs, of which “manual work” is a primary target for automation.

If people want to know how much of a threat a robot is to their job, it’s realy not difficult to judge.

A simple indicator is,

“If you can do any part of your job on auto-pilot then it’s ripe for automation by a robot or similar”.

If you think about it most “administrative tasks” either have been or will soon be automated. That’s why phone receptionists are getting replaced with systems that work with “voice recognition” likewise audio typists, filing clerks have disappeard when filing cabinets started to be got rid of…

“Welcome to the brave new world and bow down to your new overlords the automation specialists…”

SpaceLifeForm • October 7, 2020 2:16 AM

@ Clive

Geez. I’m so old I forgot about 9-track sorting.

Something going on in IC land.

Anyone know how to brick an iPhone remotely?
Asking for a zillion friends.

Potus tweeted:

“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

And then others noted:

“A press conference will be held tomorrow at 11am [EDT] for a matter of National Security.

FBI Director Wray, Assistant AG John Demers of the NatSec Division, EDVA U.S. Attorney Zachary Terwilliger, and Acting Assistant Director of FBI WFO James Dawson will all be involved.”

SpaceLifeForm • October 7, 2020 3:01 AM

@ Clive

There may be parallels to this

hXXps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames

Clive Robinson • October 7, 2020 4:39 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Potus tweeted:

Remember his doctor has put him on a “strange brew” of drugs for alledged COVID infection. The brew includs a fairly powerfull steroid, which is maybe why he indicated he’s feeling better thsn hr has done since he was twenty or some such.

So technically the drugs are effecting his mind and perception of reality…

But,

A press conference will be held tomorrow at 11am [EDT] for a matter of National Security

He won’t –or shoulden’t– be there in person as he’s got another week and a bit to go on his COVID issolation. Which probably means he won’t be answering questions…

Oh and one thing to remember, with COVID it’s not the first week that makes you feel sick and weak, it’s week two where you end up starting the journy to ICU etc if that is the way you are going to go. We know POTUS is 74, overweight, probably has had blood clotting or heart issues (he’s on daily aspirin) and his cholesterol is probably not what it could be (he’s on statins). This puts his risk of death at over 5% and his chances of going on more than temporary oxygen are quite a bit more. However, the CFR is higher than the IFR so who knows his feet may still be under the table come the National Day of Mourning at Plymouth Rock.

Clive Robinson • October 7, 2020 5:20 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Geez. I’m so old I forgot about 9-track sorting.

Oh the joys and pit falls of living in a land of ICT plenty :-S

Such counting and sorting kind of stopped comming to peoples attention in the US in the mid 1970’s and a decade or so later in Russia.

However older embedded system programers and those designing Industrial Control Systems(ICS) were still wrestling with this sort of problem through the 1990’s.. Oh and there are still some ICS rigs out there that people dare not touch even the SCADA front end let alone those process and telemetry devices.

As for parallels with Ames, you realy can not tell what on earth is going on in either time line.

Supposadly he is 80years old and still alive, but under the SAM internment he is under I doubt anyone can say, even the Barr. One aged body in solitary confinment not alowed to speak to anyone looks kind of like any other aged body, if you’ve never met the person before. All we have of his side of the story is some of what was used during the proceedings. What we have from the prosecution is not exactly “the god’s honest truth”. But if even a fraction of it is true, then the agency conserned was very very lax in picking up on his behaviours. Which might suggest that they were seen as “normal behaviours” in the agency.

Flipping to the current time line, certain people got vilified and had to clear their names causing considerable embarrassment to people towards the top of the managment tree. Can you realy see that mess being alowed to play out again? Probably not. So “Declassification of any & all documents” I suspect not. In fact some of them I suspect legaly can not be made public as they were sealed by courts to protect individuals.

But the timing of this takes me back four years to the “Steel Dossier” which kind of started it all. Much of that was supposition based on third hand single sourced unverified payed for intel… So I’ve little or no idea as to the accuracy of it. Which makes me wonder if we are in for another replay.

So what are the chances “the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal” is going to bring up Biden damaging information?

I’m suspicious, because in effect he’s giving a “twofer” you don’t get the one you want without getting the other one. This is a classic play that even the Russian’s allegedly tried playing back in the begining…

Any way, I’m getting reports that the Internet to the US is being slower than a dog with no back legs this morning, but only for some sites… Guess I’ve got to put that other hat on and investigate something more tangible.

Winter • October 7, 2020 5:49 AM

@Clive & Others
“A press conference will be held tomorrow at 11am [EDT] for a matter of National Security”

What are the chances the Matter of National Security will be postponing, or interfering with, the elections until Trump can campaign again?

I know this is unconstitutional, but the WH embraces an interpretation of the Constitution that gives the PoTUS absolute power and places him above all laws.

rrd • October 7, 2020 7:53 AM

@ Winter

Yes, but the election is run individually by the states and they will each have their say. And mammals always abandon their alpha the moment they are defeated, having been waiting for a shot at the title the entire time.

It’s gonna be a landslide because only the most stubbornly idiotic and evil are sticking to Trump. They are really not that numerous, they are just boisterous and our media loves a shitshow. And this election will set records for turnout.

Regardless, there is no need to worry. There is no pill he can take to save him from a lifetime of evil karma. COVID is going to get the COVIDiot — although after the balcony wheeze-fest, I prefer “Covita” (as seen on Twitter).

And, yeah, he’s out of his mind on drugs now, drugs only ever making a person more of what they already are. It’s just the beginning of his death-rattle, he being truly lucky to have been able to go “home” to die. Most of the people his policies have doomed to COVID died alone in a hospital room with a tube down their throat. Of course, Trump will have no loved-ones around because he does not have a single person on this Earth that loves him, not a single person who will miss him. Not one. Their selfish ignorance has inoculated the whole lot of `em against love.

Living apart from the Tao, the ignorantly callous die with only their frustrated selfishness to accompany them; whereas those who harmonize their life with the Tao always have the Tao as their gentle, comforting companion.

Winter • October 7, 2020 8:48 AM

@rrd
“It’s gonna be a landslide because only the most stubbornly idiotic and evil are sticking to Trump.”

I would like to quote H L Mencken (probably a paraphrase)
nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people

@rrd
“Regardless, there is no need to worry. There is no pill he can take to save him from a lifetime of evil karma.”

Trump’s party knows that the only way to avoid a crushing defeat at the elections is to prevent Democrats from voting. So that is their current strategy.

See this (humorist) interpretation:
https://www.theonion.com/man-standing-outside-polls-with-ak-47-just-there-to-pro-1845275010

Clive Robinson • October 7, 2020 8:58 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, Winter,

Even “working stiffs” aledgedly get a lunch time…

During my quick dose of “left arm twinger” I received a message captioned “She’s back” that contained the following link,

http://thisfish.com/?p=2790

Titled “Mommy’s little socialist”.

It made me not just smile, but laugh a little, which at my age is something you do with care incase anything drops off :-S

It’s nice to see Heather blogging again, she has managed to make any number of dull drudge days that little bit fun.

Hopefully it will make others smile.

Clive Robinson • October 7, 2020 2:02 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

The evidence is rolling in from the antipodes (Auz, NZ) that what certain Asian countries did with “Closing the borders” is the only way to get ontop of COVID and staying there.

From my memory you were the first to call for “border closures” on this blog, even though at the time the first order risk calculations (to which I put my hand upto) showed the infection risk to individual passengers was low.

So to you I bestow the right to say,

“I told you so / I called it right”.

We know that the US and UK were subject to ultra heavy lobbying and bribery and out right threats by the Airline, Cruiseliner and travel industries.

Well as some of us worked out their ultra short term gains have given rise not to just painfull mid term losses but longterm major layoffs, and the inevitable shutdowns and effective bankruptcies in these industry sectors.

In the UK the Government has restarted their “granny killer policies” with the ending of the furlough aid combined with new lockdowns. This meanzs employers are not going to be able to pay staff when sick, thus many will see their incomes drop to a pitence (see N.I. Sickness payment it’s maybe 100USD/week equivalent and the national average income is something like 500USD/week equivalent). This means “hello job losses, join the poverty trap”, “the que starts at the Job Center if you can find one”… Some are talking about a 10% of total working population loss of jobs in November. So with 29million employed around 3million fultime employees will get the can, then there are the 8.9 million “zero hours” / “gig workers” / “SE tradespersons” who technically are not “PAYE” but “SE/Stamp” who are not entitled to unemployment benifits. Who will be joining the 2.7million (doubled due to COVID already) “claimants” who are currently unemployed.

So in theory upto,

(3+8.9+2.7)/(29+1.3) ~48%

Of the available to work UK population out of work…

SpaceLifeForm • October 7, 2020 3:42 PM

@ Clive, ALL

Thanks. But, I did NOT want to be spot on.

I’ve been thinking about this for weeks now.

As I have said before, it seems like Eons ago.

I said ‘Eons ago’, Eons ago.

Does anyone recall when there was a phrase ‘Slow News Day’?

Me neither.

JonKnowsNothing • October 7, 2020 4:19 PM

Analysis on the Value of COVID-19 Tests if classified as Taxable Income

Different governments are discussing how to recover the economic costs of COVID-19 from the survivors . Previous runs up the flag pole have discussed making COVID-19 Tests Taxable Income. In economies (USA) where the employers provide health care insurance, sick days benefits and other perks-of-the-job, anything an employer provides may be determined to be a taxable event, the same as salary or pay.

This simple analysis uses data from the State of California (10/06/2020).

The value used is for one full set of tests. Some people will have to have multiple sets of tests, due to work, travel, close proximity to someone flagged with COVID-19. Some situations call for daily testing and others continued testing until “3+ days of 2 clear tests”. For some people with Long COVID-19 and other documented variations they may not have clear tests for months. One documented case is 6 months (and on going) of Asymptomatic COVID-19 Positive tests.

note: Previous analysis reports maybe found in the blog archives or on the wayback machine. An earlier Explanation of How USA Healthcare is Apportioned, may not have made it to the archives and perhaps can be found on the wayback machine.

data sources: CDC mortality and severity reports, USA Social Security data and life tables, Actuarial Analysis of Risks and Insurance considerations, Real Estate Estimates and Forecasting, various science and research papers, global analysis and reports, local reports and statistics. US Representative Katie Porter COVID-19 Test cost estimates.

note: There are lot of zeros. Some may have been added or dropped during the copy. Your numbers maybe different.

For the State of California, USA (10 06 2020)

Set of COVID-19 tests(1) $1331 USD
Number of tests in California 15,500,000
Gross Value 1331 * 15,500,000 = $20,630,500,000 USD
_
Population CA 40,000,000
Number of uninsured in CA 2,700,000
Insured 37,300,000
Medicare 6,400,000
Workers 37,300,000 – 6,400,00 = 30,900,000
Taxable Income 1331 * 30,900,000 = $41,127,900,000
Avg CA Tax Bracket 9.5%
Gross Income Tax .095 * $41,127,900,000 = $3,907,150,500

  1, A set of COVID-19 tests includes:
    * CBC $36
    * Metabolic $58
    * Flu A $43
    * Flu B $43
    * ER Visit $1151
    * (high severity and threat for COVID-19 )
    * Total $1331

JonKnowsNothing • October 7, 2020 4:50 PM

@Clive

re:The evidence is rolling in from the antipodes (Auz, NZ) [border closing]

AU and NZ seem to have different views of what closing borders means.

Scott Morrison PM AU is pretty desperate to Open AU Borders and has applied to NZ several times to have “an open bubble travel corridor”. AU does not have zero cases and does not seem to be able to get there.

The AU open bubble is From NZ to AU. There is no open bubble from AU to NZ. Anyone traveling into NZ, from anywhere, needs to do the quarantine.

Flights into both NZ and AU are limited to quarantine space, except for high paying VIPs that can hop past the quarantines to their villas.

Repatriation flights of both countries citizens have lists thousands long, waiting not only for an open quarantine spot but also there are not that many air flights to AU/NZ and the flights have limited space. Folks with economy or cheap-seats are bumped for high-paying business or wealthy tycoons up in first class. There is no requirement for the airlines to move stranded AU/NZ citizens home.

People who got caught on vacation, students, workers, and people who have lost their jobs are not able to return to their countries.

The cost of who pays for repeat quarantines is on the table. Currently, NZ pays for the first round.

Within AU, there are quarantines now between internal states. This is from internal travel transmissions and “oopsies” on COVID-19 circular laws and restrictions that change regularly.

For the USA “Closing the borders” is The Dream for some groups. We have never had “closed borders” that worked, but we do have a ginormous steel and concrete wall being built along one section.

Being surrounded by water is probably the best, but Boris hasn’t figured out what to do about the boats. Neither has Scott although AU likes to do re-enactments of Robinson Crusoe by dropping folks on uninhabited islands.

ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison

ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe
(url fractured to prevent autorun)

vas pup • October 7, 2020 5:11 PM

Scientists win historic Nobel chemistry prize for ‘genetic scissors’

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54432589

“Two scientists have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA.

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are the first two women to share the prize, which honours their work on the technology of genome editing.

Their discovery, known as Crispr-Cas9 “genetic scissors”, is a way of making specific and precise changes to the DNA contained in living cells.”

Good short video inside – read the whole article!

And as my high respect for Bruce and other usual suspects:

Gene-editing technology is progressing faster than our ethical conversations about how we should use it. Krystal Tsosie thinks that’s a problem:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/bioethics-crispr-indigenous-genome/

Video is at bottom -of the article. Enjoy!

Clive Robinson • October 7, 2020 7:01 PM

@ vas pup,

Scientists win historic Nobel chemistry prize for ‘genetic scissors’

Even more surprising is that a UK knight and mathmatician[1] should receive one for his work on “Perfect Black Holes”…

You can see Sir Roger Penrose talking[2] about it amongst other things,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xi_auG9R-Wo

[1] I’m not sure, but I think all other UK Nobel prize winners in such abstract fields if they did get knighted then it was after not before being awarded a Nobel. So this may possibly be a first.

[2] One of the things I like about Sir Roger, is that he is usually rather good at explaining what are both abstract and complex ideas. Also he’s not frightened about making hypothesises public whilst looking for evidence to confirm or deny them.

SpaceLifeForm • October 7, 2020 11:09 PM

@ Clive, ALL

“Oh and there are still some ICS rigs out there that people dare not touch even the SCADA front end let alone those process and telemetry devices.”

And some can not resist touching.

But, sometimes, a purely mechanical device works to educate.

hXXps://www.funraniumlabs.com/2017/09/the-tale-of-the-schrempeltraps/

“While Schrempel was a brilliant, wonderfully funny and charming guy, he was absolutely loathed in the laboratory because he was an inveterate button pusher, switch flipper, knob turner and lever puller.”

…

“So, they came up with a plan: they would add a bunch of extra buttons and toggles to their equipment consoles that weren’t connected to anything on the bench, but were connected to a low voltage power supply. The hope was that if Schrempel got shocked enough times he would learn and would stop touching things.”

…

“Sadly, that didn’t work either.”

JonKnowsNothing • October 8, 2020 1:23 AM

@Clive

re:…effective border controls work. You just need honest employees and good oversight bothbof which are even in the very short term way less costly than even one case of community spread.

NZ found this out too. While they were 100days COVID-19 Free, someone over in their quarantine department decided that quarantine did not mean “stay here, stay put”. It turned out that were where a number of “breaches” of the NZ rules coming from one particular group.

This started up their outbreak and then the odd fellow shows up. The small secondary group of Not Identified COVID-19 Genome that traces to North America.

Every country has a dominant form of COVID-19 (ABC) and there are many sub-branches. Every country also has the other forms coming from outside, business, tourism, travel. NZ variant is not the same as USA variant.

This second group was never publicly ID. The higher end of the genome would have been common to USA but the bottom end is much more localized.

With my tinfoil top hat on, it seemed very very unlikely that a random blob of COVID-19 would drop onto the public streets of NZ, just in time to start up another cluster.

NZ looked into all sorts of pathways, including cargo containers which they said was not how it got in, and eventually they all gave a big shrug with “Dunno” as an answer.

There are folks from North America in NZ, and they do by pass quarantine regularly. There are the Hollywood groups filming with full crew and actors. There are also the diplomatic groups from countries that have residences in NZ. Not to mention P Thiel is a citizen too, not based on his residency, but on his cash donations.

The receiver in my tinfoil hat says: who ever it is, NZ doesn’t want to throw a rock at them. Either it’s deliberate sabotage, or a huge diplomatic gaff.

With the NZ upcoming election, it will be interesting to see if NZ can hold the line against the Herd Immunity Policy Moose.

Clive Robinson • October 8, 2020 8:29 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

NZ looked into all sorts of pathways, including cargo containers which they said was not how it got in, and eventually they all gave a big shrug with “Dunno” as an answer.

Yes, if you remember I asked if anyone had news on that, because the fomite infection route is apparently small and decreasing by “evidence” in the case of SARS-CoV-2 infections on an almost daily basis[1].

That said the “on cargo” fomite vector, be it chilled or frozen is still a very real risk unless it can be proved otherwise. I’ve mentioned in the past what has been found with tests and SARS analogue testing.

What we do not know is the actual probability with SARS-CoV-2 of the individual risk vectors and their related factors and thus we do not know the more efficient ways to combat them…

Without such knowledge starvation and economic colapse due to clamping down on world wide and regional food / essentials transportation is a real worry, especially if the “border closure” response is to restrictive, or to lax… Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and without hard facts the only other way is to “hunt your way in” which could mean endless yo-yo mode…

[1] Both The WHO and US CDC were very “anti suspended dropplet” untill almost this week. The rest of science based investigators have said almost the opposit for something like six months now. Why The WHO and US CDC have been more “On Message” for so long with certain counter productive political views I’ll let other make their minds up on. But lets put it this way, there is a lot of death that could have and still can be prevented if their publicly facing message had followed the experimental evidence not political mantra.

Clive Robinson • October 8, 2020 11:05 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, MarkH,

There is an attempt going on to “redefine herd immunity policy”…

The reason is fairly clear that the notion behind herd immunity policy has failed as fairly predictably it would…

Thus the idea “of vulnerable people not becoming ill” when some percentage of the general population m has succumbed to the disease in some way is begining to look less and less like it’s true (unsurprisingly).

We already know that at around 10% of the population in the afflunt West will become hospitalised, with 5% seriously so, and that all would with out medical intervention probably die or be significantly debilitated (which is happening in some places already as demand outstrips supply of healthcare, or suitable heakthcare is either unavailable or unaffordable).

Now some academics say in effect herd immunity policy is only to get infections down to an acceptable rate, and that the vulnerable should in effect be locked in their homes whilst others are free to be rampant disease spreaders…

There are a great deal of things wrong with these academics proposals some of which are covered here,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9lSmSWx6kjA

Unsurprisingly the presenter is not infavour of the idea…

In essence there idea is to turn as many students from primary school through university into infectious persons as quickly as possible, and that 4/5ths of the population goes back to the way it was before COVID got going. As for the other 1/5th of the population who are vulnerable, they should be shut away from society in their homes for effectively ever…

Lets just say from the little I’ve looked at it, they appear “hell bent” on doing some loony politicos and their money/asset grabing chums a big favour…

As the old saying has it, “You could not make it up if you tried…”.

As one of the 1/5th there are only two ways out of COVID. Firstly death that is be killed by it, or live imprisoned untill you die of insanity etc… Or live by getting vaccinated.

Personaly I still think vaccination is the only long term way out, even though the US FDA has added atlest two months to the approvals process pushing the earliest vaccination time to the end of January or later…

Winter • October 8, 2020 12:49 PM

@Clive
“Herd immunity”

I think another aspect of the policies wrt young people is that it has proven very difficult to get them to observe corona safe life styles. Which is natural. They won’t be seriously ill if they contract it, they tend to be single, they have no job or family to care for. Who expects them to lock themselves up in isolation without force?

I think all cards are put on keeping infections manageable with fast tests until vaccinations can cut into the inventions.

Without vaccinations, the only possible course for the pandemic is to infect everyone. Because in the end, everyone will have to develop immunity, one way or another.

Clive Robinson • October 8, 2020 3:15 PM

@ Winter,

I think another aspect of the policies wrt young people is that it has proven very difficult to get them to observe corona safe life styles.

But in some respects they have not been given any choice.

There are some seriois problems in Northern UK Universitirs. Where groups of fofty or so students have been put into “bubbles” at University without them being tested. They are now in effect “locked in” and doing their classes online.

Thus if there is any infection in the “bubble” it infects every other student in that “bubble” very very quickly.

The Uni’s only need to have the students there appears to be to gain upto a thoudand pounds a month in “hall fees” out of each of the students. Because as one student noted to the BBC they could have stayed at home and done the courses online and saved themselves ten thousand pounds of debt and a much increased risk of dying.

Apparently the locals around some Universities have become quite hostile to students and the students ability to get basic food stuffs etc has become severly curtailed as shops will not let them in etc.

Also it appears that tales of wild almost orgiastic parties are considerably over egged in the majority of cases. That is it appears UK Uni Students certainly English ones are no where near as gregarious as students in other places are portrayed to be, and are too woried about being ~€200,000 in debt over thirty years that they will never fully repay[1]. Especially with interest rising with the RPI. And that’s before the prospect of finding suitably compensatory work at the end of their courses in a now rapidly shrinking “professional job market”… Shrinking not just from COVID but Brexit as well, with many professional tech etc jobs nolonger being open to UK entrants for “national security” reasons post Brexit also with the loss of large swaths of EU research money it’s looking bleak.

[1] The Student loans are more like an unknown tax than a bank loan. With the only current positive thought bring “it’ only 30years” hanging over their head at the moment. With many students are scared that as projections suggest the loan bodies will only get maybe 40% of the money back the English Government will just change the rules on them. Especially if the only way they can get work after Brexit is by “emigrating” to Europe or moving permanently to other countries… A student is expected to leave with £48,000 in Student Loan debt as a minimum. With thirty years at 5% or a little over it gives you £207,000 debt that any Treasury Chancellor would be keen to get their hands on, much like a previous chancellor did with workers pensions…

JonKnowsNothing • October 8, 2020 3:47 PM

@Clive @All

re:There is an attempt going on to “redefine herd immunity policy”…

They are calling this proposal for Death by the Millions, the Great Barrington Declaration.

Be very careful if you follow the links to their “declaration site” as maybe they will AutoSIgn it for you.

I clicked a link in a reference and ended up on their Official Site. As I have scripting disabled the rendering was skewed but the Big Button was SIGNIT.

One might think they actually expected people just to go “click the button”… hmmm… probably we will see some stat that a bazillion clicks happened.

Maybe George Takei could help out…

note: the wikipedia site value is questionable as it does not (yet) have specific analysis of what the proposal is about.

  * ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration

note: This is a pdf copy of the declaration held by wikipedia.

  * ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Barrington_Declaration.pdf

ht tps://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/05/proud-boys-hashtag-lgbt-twitter-users

The Star Trek star and activist George Takei made the suggestion on Thursday, writing on Twitter: “I wonder if the BTS and TikTok kids can help LGBTs with this. What if gay guys took pictures of themselves making out with each other or doing very gay things, then tagged themselves with #ProudBoys. I bet it would mess them up real bad. #ReclaimingMyShine”.

(url fractured to prevent autorun)

JonKnowsNothing • October 8, 2020 4:06 PM

@Clive

re:That said the “on cargo” fomite vector, be it chilled or frozen is still a very real risk unless it can be proved otherwise. I’ve mentioned in the past what has been found with tests and SARS analogue testing.

There was an NZ Official Statement in MSM that the source was not on/in the cargo container, the contents or in the refrigerators or in the cargo container storage area.

There was an earlier NZ Official Statement in the MSM that NZ had contacted AU over a similar mysterious COVID-19 cluster in AU that also pointed at a cargo container. AU said that the container was not the source of their mystery cluster. Shortly after that NZ issued their statement that the cargo container was not the source.

The outbreak in the Wet Market in China, also had them looking into cargo containers but that ended with dead air and no public findings.

Both NZ and AU do sewer scans in their cities for what strains of COVID-19 are about. It’s one of their early warning mechanisms because it seems you excrete COVID-19 pretty quickly after exposure. They have some methods of segmenting their sewer maps so they know which parts of town has outbreaks in progress.

If there was an odd COVID-19 genome hiding in their sewer systems that would likely be noticed. I haven’t read much about this procedure other than they run many tests.

If the formite was on the cargo container, and NZ AU China are In Denial, one might expect there to be a lot more outbreaks from global cargo container trade. If there was something unsavory about the contents (excrement, dead somethings) I’m not sure why they would want to hide this information.

However, USA now has “murder hornets” which are imported even though cargo containers are supposed to be fumigated. Clearly our border importing protocols are not up to snuff.

ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet
(url fractured to prevent autorun)

vas pup • October 8, 2020 4:12 PM

@Clive Robinson • October 7, 2020 7:01 PM
Clive, as I recall Nobel openly banned mathematicians from award pool due to one of them screw woman he loved.

moz • October 8, 2020 5:16 PM

@bruce

I’m torn about whether to blow the high reputation of my nick on this site, but then again, since nobody else seems to have submitted this, I guess it falls to me:

“Smart chastity device could be hacked to lock users in permanently, security experts warn”

I thought you might like me to help complete your list of IoT devices where the security flaws seemed like an inevitable bad idea. This kind of seems to tick all the boxers.

  • centralized database with user details
  • controls an important bodily function
  • denial of service flaw
  • data leakage flaw
  • no manual override
  • need to use an angle grinder (gulp!)

vas pup • October 8, 2020 5:56 PM

@G dude • October 8, 2020 4:11 PM

Thank you for the link provided.
We start moving to ‘1984’ many years ago in violation of Bill of Rights, but recently acceleration is very high. You post just one of many evidence.

Clive Robinson • October 8, 2020 6:19 PM

@ moz,

need to use an angle grinder (gulp!)

If you search the internet for product warranties and a certain Swedish tool company you will find stories about how one for a chain saw has a specific “warning lable”[1] use prohibition of

“Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals”

No I’ve never checked if the story is true or not but then there was the “Johnson and Johnson” bad marketing prose of,

“Every one personally tested by our staff to ensure your comfort and satisfaction”

On a rectal thermometer…

Does anyone realy want to buy a used rectal thermometer? Which is what the prose implies you are doing… But then Johnson and Johnson also had a warning on “cotton buds” not to put them in your ear cannal… Which to be honest I thought was the reason most people buy them for ie cleaning their ears with… Yes I know you can use them for “make-up” and as I have from time to time in model making and restoring old things but that is hardly main stream use…

At one time back in the 80’s there were so many of these “Don’t use our products for this…” warning lables to avoid court cases that author Douglas Adams used one on “tooth pick usage” as a central story arc in a book (So Long and Thanks for all the Fish) as a metaphor for how mad the world had become…

[1] Yes people do blog about stupid warning lables,

https://everything2.com/title/warning+labels

So much so they even satirize them… But then people still do daft things then sue manufacturers in the land of the free, despite political intervention…

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 8, 2020 10:26 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing
Considering your contribution to the SARS-nCoV-2, COVID-19, Coronavirus wiki (at least here) I have to wonder if anyone has considered the genomic tail shed in the RNA strand as it mutates. With some 32k in codons/alleles and a large percentage of shedding available at/during/for mutation (approximately 4K codons) and with the large pool of infection hosts and reservoirs, it would seem that a vaccine would be rendered near unless in many populations in a short period of time.

Here is a series of questions:
1.) Mutation rates across exposure/reservoir host densities (with larger populations with more infections it follows that more mutation opportunities exist) say as n-generations per 1Mil infections.
2.) Antigen response to markers of what variation (for example SARS-nCoV-2 shares about 76% of genetic codons/alleles with the generic SARS) or a percentage or deviation from the targeted genetic signature is a threshold
3.) What is the potential for multiple generations from separate infective populations might require different vaccine regiments? So if N-generations, irrespective of population, require a different antigen marking.

I know it is not your responsibility but your tenacity and attention to this issue makes you the prime candidate. Lucky you, but anyone else is welcome to chime in…

There are others here that have made great contributions and wish not to diminish or have them go unrecognized so I will try to enumerate (from memory):
Clive, SpaceLifeForm, MarkH, Winter, vas pup, Anders, Sanchez, and there a few I know I am missing…apologizes.

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 8, 2020 10:37 PM

Another issue with this whole herd mentality (yeah I am queuing off our fearless leader in the U.S.), what about the long term effects and what can be considered as the cost in longevity from various ages in life. Does for example a young person have a linear decrease in out years from complications or is there a more exponential or logarithmic curve. So if your five years of age, 10, and 20 can we say that the knock off in years would look like 2, 5, & 10 or more like 1, 2, and 3. Or is it even the inverse, younger contractors of COVID-19 actually experience greater drop off in later years of life?

To assume a herd mentality (again, going off fearless leader) approach to be an extremely irresponsible solution/strategy if there is nothing of significance in medical research that addresses the aforementioned issue. I would call it criminal negligence and willful medical malpractice at this point.

JonKnowsNothing • October 9, 2020 1:40 AM

@name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons

re: COVID-19 genome and genetics.

re 3.) What is the potential for multiple generations from separate infective populations might require different vaccine regiments?

disclosure: I am not an expert in this field. I have read up on some aspects.

This last is one very possible outcome as COVID-19 continues to be passed along within regions and across geographic areas. A number of science articles discuss this threat-risk as the virus gallops through the population.

There are 3 main variants A, B, C. Within these current branches there are many subbranches. Each country has a dominant version. Current COVID-19 has one major mutation D614G and this is the version that is world wide. The virus mutates naturally about twice a month. Most of these do nothing, some revert, repeat and the DG mutation has spawned and despawned more than once.

First we still do not know very much about the virus. So lots of thinking-caps are on trying to equate what we know and compare this to other virus.

COVID-19 has not had much in the way of evolutionary pressures. It has lots of hosts and it hops readily every 14 days to a new one. This is the concept of “herd immunity”, that by preinfecting larges swaths of people the virus will find fewer hosts and die back.

There are serious financial, moral, ethical and scientific reasons what that is not a good plan unless there is a successful vaccine.

Even if you get past the huge death rate, there is no guarantee this will work because the virus mutates quickly and there is always another generation of new hosts and the eventual reservoir of perpetual COVID-19 hiding in plain sight like other viral diseases.

Herd Immunity Policy is not the same, although it uses similar words. Herd Immunity Policy aka Swedish Light Touch, Barrington Dead Squad, is about killing vast numbers of people to enable the economic profits of the .05% to continue uninterrupted.

So one concern is that as the virus goes unchecked, is that it will be similar to Dengue Fever Virus. This is also an RNA virus and if you read up on it you will find it is quite similar in many aspects to COVID-19 but from a completely different virus family.

There are 47 strains of Dengue virus. There are three genotypes and perhaps a new 4th one.

There is a vaccine but there are issues. It should only be given to people who have already had the virus. Giving it to someone who has never had the virus may worsen additional infections. If you have version A and later get version B or C you will get very ill.

The other issue for COVID-19 is that humans do not seem to hold on to an immunity for very long, 4-6 months. This is an area were what kind of vaccine will be needed for short term or long term immunity.

There are increasing reports of re-infections from within the same branches of COVID-19 (Bn+y … Bn+z)

There are multiple questions and not many answers.

  * Vaccine by A B C
  * Vaccine by subsets B1-Bn
  * Vaccine short term
  * Vaccine long term

And the very real possibility that there will be another major change that will alter how the virus infects people, cats, dogs, minks, ferrets, otters …

For some farm animals the vaccines are geographic because there is a localized version of the disease. Some virus have never had any successful vaccines even though they have been known since antiquity. In many cases, the virus cannot be controlled directly but only through habitat and external controls.

For COVID-19 the external controls are Stay Home, Wear a Mask, Stay far Away, and Wash Up.

Right now we have one version of COVID-19. The continuing Open-Close-Travel-Spread will improve the odds that the virus will be mutating having many more strands of RNA to combine.

This maybe why there is are “odd outbreaks”.

There is a site that has public information on ~5,000 COVID-19 genomes and other viral genomes with some good info about what’s currently happening. It has all the genetrees and you can drill down into the data as provided by researchers all over the world.

Personally, I hope we get ourselves sorted out pretty soon ’cause the virus doesn’t look both ways before crossing the street.

Just imagine the future fun for all. The UK after BreXplosion: 7,000 long truck backups crossing the channel. Huge incoming swaths of new COVID-19 infections on every plane. Open COVID-19 transmission by bars, and intoxicated patrons. The Exceptional transmitters because the rules don’t ever apply to them. The WhatCanItHurt types who figure having a nice dinner will never hurt anyone.

As Space Life said STOP THE PLANES. 40 days and we would be done. 40 days Jeff Bezos could fund the world with his pocket change and still be the richest guy still breathing.

ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clade

ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever
ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_virus

ht tps://nextstrain.org/
(url fractured to prevent autorun)

JonKnowsNothing • October 9, 2020 2:09 AM

@name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons

re:long term effects and what can be considered as the cost in longevity from various ages in life.

Well…

  * If you get it and die and you are a worker(under 65), you will die 15-17 years earlier than your life table.

I made some posts on this which maybe in the blog archives or perhaps on the wayback machine detailing how that all gets calculated.

  * Long COVID is of unknown duration, some have had continuous or sporadic episodes of symptoms.

  * Long Term Disease eruptions of serious medical conditions that can happen months after you “appear” normal and return to ordinary activities. Heart damage, necrosis and blood vessel inflammation followed by sudden death.

  * Herd Immunity Policy Worker Contribution Estimates may alter. Currently a USA worker has a lifetime value of $10,000,000 USD. This is what the worker puts in the pockets of the 3%-.05%.

If someone dies early this value changes. There is wealth to be garnered from the dead.

However, if the worker has Long COVID and becomes unproductive and therefore unable to produce the required $10,000,000 USD there maybe some societal issues.

You might be able to discern some aspects from Pre-COVID treatment of the unemployed, under-employed, gig workers, disabled, elderly and the various laws and limitations enacted.

You can get a further view of likely outcome as the Neoliberal Economies begin to claw back COVID financial supports from companies, individuals and geographic regions. Countries like UK, AU, USA where COVID-19 support is being removed or was never really sufficient to address the emergency. Herd Immunity Policy programs are about accelerating the removal of these support systems. The individual or personal economic collapse is an opportunity for neoliberal disaster capital harvesting.

I made some posts on this topic too which maybe in the blog archives or perhaps on the wayback machine detailing how that all gets calculated.

  * Does COVID-19 reduce the life expectancy of the over all population?

I don’t know. Current life tables still seem to be the same as before. The actuaries are doing more risk analysis for insurance forecasting. This is more about individual life insurance or corporate business risk than overall population age decline.

If the Herd Immunity Policy groups become the dominant mechanism for COVID-19 control; their direct target is the population 44, 55, 65+; there will certainly be a lot of younger people and not many older ones. This shift in demographics can be seen in parts of Afrika where various epidemics have killed the older generations.

SpaceLifeForm • October 9, 2020 3:11 AM

@ Clive, ALL

I still don’t see it an hour later.

I Told You ALL: there is something going on.

SpaceLifeForm • October 9, 2020 3:27 AM

If there is no magnetic field, water disappears.

hXXps://www.sciencealert.com/the-sands-of-mars-have-been-forming-shifting-dunes-for-a-very-long-time

hXXps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodissociation

H.U.H. • October 9, 2020 3:35 AM

@SpaceLifeForm
If there is no magnetic field, water disappears.

Where you get that sort of idea from?

Singapore Noodles • October 9, 2020 3:58 AM

We often hope we will have a relation of 121, but usually they are less than that, like 36, 49 or maybe 64, maybe a few 81.

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 9, 2020 6:52 AM

@ Clive, SpaceLifeForm

Welcome to the club, seems there are topical limits irrespective of the character or tenor of the comments.

Too much tension in the environment, edge of the tolerance index seems to be expanding. There are pressures marking sites based on topics and reporting or reporting sources.

Winter • October 9, 2020 6:59 AM

“If there is no magnetic field, water disappears.

Where you get that sort of idea from?”

Wikipedia offers several mechanisms: Atmospheric escape
Non-thermal (suprathermal) escape

Escape can also occur due to non-thermal interactions. Most of these processes occur due to photochemistry or charged particle (ion) interactions.
Photochemical escape

In the upper atmosphere, high energy ultraviolet photons can react more readily with molecules. Photodissociation can break a molecule into smaller components and provide enough energy for those components to escape. Photoionization produces ions, which can get trapped in the planet’s magnetosphere or undergo dissociative recombination. In the first case, these ions may undergo escape mechanisms described below. In the second case, the ion recombines with an electron, releases energy, and can escape.[5]
Sputtering escape

Excess kinetic energy from the solar wind can impart sufficient energy to eject atmospheric particles, similar to sputtering from a solid surface. This type of interaction is more pronounced in the absence of a planetary magnetosphere, as the electrically charged solar wind is deflected by magnetic fields, which mitigates the loss of atmosphere.[6]
The fast ion captures an electron from a slow neutral in a charge exchange collision. The new, fast neutral can escape the atmosphere, and the new, slow ion is trapped on magnetic field lines.[7]
Charge exchange escape

Ions in the solar wind or magnetosphere can charge exchange with molecules in the upper atmosphere. A fast-moving ion can capture the electron from a slow atmospheric neutral, creating a fast neutral and a slow ion. The slow ion is trapped on the magnetic field lines, but the fast neutral can escape.[5]
Polar wind escape

Atmospheric molecules can also escape from the polar regions on a planet with a magnetosphere, due to the polar wind. Near the poles of a magnetosphere, the magnetic field lines are open, allowing a pathway for ions in the atmosphere to exhaust into space.[8]

Clive Robinson • October 9, 2020 7:17 AM

@ H.U.H., SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Where you get that sort of idea from?

It could be from the fact the Red Planet does not have an intrinsic global magnetic field as we do on Earth due to our core and the moon circling us which gives us a magnetosphere of sufficient size and strength to keep much of the solar wind away from the Earth’s surface.

What Mars does have however is an interaction between the solar wind and Mar’s very thin atmosphere. Which gives rise to the forming of magnetic field tubes and thus a week magnetosphere from them.

This poses significant issues and challenges not just for traditional style earth navigation but also for mitigating solar radiation and retaining an atmosphere as the solar wind strips it of like a file does to a block of plastic.

Combine this lack of a magnetic field, Mars relatively small mass, and its atmospheric photochemistry, and you get a situation where all would have contributed to not just the loss of it’s atmosphere but it’s highly toxic nature.

Mars note only has Ionizing solar and cosmic radiation at the surface, it has about 6/10ths of the amount of light, about 4/th’s the gravity and an average temprature of -63 Celsius compared to Earths 14C.

So death by poisoning, radiation and freezing might appear your main worries but no there’s one that will kill you faster. That’s the lack of atmospheric pressure, at about 1/100 of Earth’s it’s well below the Armstrong limit,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit

Which basically means you are dead within a little over a minute as the water in you “boils away” into gas.

Which is where the lack of water comes from. H2O in actual gas form is of little use to life as we understand it. You could chose to call it “raw steam” but it’s way less dense than that. To be useful to life H20 has to be in the liquid form we call water. But it can be of use to life in the solid form we tend to call ice, due to the fact water can be obtained at it’s surface from it.

So yes our friendliest neighbouring planet, is not a place to go for a stroll and forget your hat (Hence the sarcastic “Space Pirate” joke in the film the Martian where he leaves the habitat for the last time).

Clive Robinson • October 9, 2020 8:04 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

I Told You ALL: there is something going on.

Well it’s about the sixth or seventh time it’s happened to me since the move. Which is not good.

@ name.withheld…, JonKnowsNothing,

I’m hoping it’s just a configuration / software bug, not anything more. Though with the issues to do with 5G going on in the UK at the moment and my habitual posting via mobile phone, that gives several more possibilities…

The content I was posting was about COVID Sequelae in response to your question. It contained a number of links to published papers and articles based on healthcare observations. But @JonKnowsNothing has since said about the same so has covered the answer which is basically,

“Herd imunity policy” is designed to kill not just in the short term but the longterm. New COVID Sequelae are showing up on a daily basis with neurological and psychological damage being the most recent. With a very real possibility that dementia will rise significantly in those infected, and cancers and immunological disease becoming significantly prevalent. Thus the average age of death globaly –which is 82 where I live– is going to drop, most significantly where the wealthy middle class Westerners live…

Which as the average age of death was dropping in the US already is going to hit harder in Europe, especially in North West Europe which the US State dept and the neo-cons appear to have a real hate for (and I think you can make a good guess as to why). The one place it probably will not make much difference is sub Saharan Africa, for two reasons, firstly they get wiped out by other diseases and lack of healthcare, secondly apparently they do not have what are called “Neanderthal genetics” that everyone else has…

But one interesting take away to think about,

Vitamin C,D and Zing all effect the ability of your immune system to fight of viral infection. Observational studies show that people living in much of the northern hemisphere are well down on these for various often “commercial” reasons thus we are very susceptible to respiratory infection and pneumonia type deaths. You can buy for around 12USD/month over the counter tablets to correct these deficiencies at “max strength” levels. Observational testing of hospitalised COVID patients show they are deficient in these…

When asked Dr Fauci said he took 1-2grams VitC 6000IU VitD which are the max strength for those. It appears quite a few other Drs and those with domain knowledge are doing the same. But has their been any proper trials? No why do The WHO and many Government Health Agencies only talk about very minimal levels of supplementation. Oh and in the US why is the very expensive and mainly usless if not harmfull Remdisiver being pushed into people?

Oh and the FDA has recently added requirments that are going to keep vaccines out of US citizens arms for atleast a further two to three months. Yet we know that POTUS gets an ass full of monoclonalantibodies on “compassionate prescribing” that is unavailable to just about anybody else…

JonKnowsNothing • October 9, 2020 8:32 AM

@Clive @ SpaceLifeForm,

re: I Told You ALL: there is something going on.

fwiw: I’ve had the new site eat a few posts but the old site ate a lot more.

Well, I still do not see @Clive’s missing post and his comment about it vaporizing was sandwiched between my two long replies.

Having had code vaporize over the years, especially after I made a ton of changes and had it blow up before the commit, I generally keep side copy versions. Inevitably as soon as I skip saving my “redundant” copies, I lose the whole enchilada into the bit bucket of the internet.

I have no idea how you do that with phone-in-posts.

There is also the admin-delete-key and maybe the dog put a paw on it.

JonKnowsNothing • October 9, 2020 8:49 AM

@Clive

re: “Herd imunity policy” is designed to kill not just in the short term but the longterm. New COVID Sequelae are showing up on a daily basis with neurological and psychological damage being the most recent. With a very real possibility that dementia will rise significantly in those infected, and cancers and immunological disease becoming significantly prevalent. Thus the average age of death globaly –which is 82 where I live– is going to drop, most significantly where the wealthy middle class Westerners live…

The Dead Moose Policy folks are soon going to have to address not only the after effects of COVID-19 but also the economic after effects which if they revert to the old Austerity Is Good For You program, is going to plunge a good part of the planet into dire economic circumstances.

Numbers for thought:

  * Population of USA 350,000,000
  * Unemployed in USA 30,000,000
  * Economic Pump GREATER THAN EVER (Bezos doing just fine thanks!)

So the USA Moose Cull will be looking at that 30,000,000 as surplus redundant drains on their wealth. This is additional to all the non-working members of society (elders, some disabled, children, permanent unemployed 50+yo).

History has not been without descriptions of what happens when societies decide that segments of their populations are Not Needed, Not Wanted, Not Productive, Not Like Us.

The vaccine wars are just heating up. One might guess that sans-cooperation, they are not going to be cross-usable. You are going to have to Pick One and Only One similar to the Dengue Virus vaccine.

My Tinfoil Sorting Hat says: Don’t take the first one off the shelf….

Winter • October 9, 2020 9:57 AM

@Clive
“Which as the average age of death was dropping in the US already is going to hit harder in Europe, especially in North West Europe ”

Why? Life expectancy in the US is falling for quite obvious reasons, bad health care, low education, poverty, bad life styles… North West Europe has a good trac record of increasing life expectancy, and neo-cons or neo-libralism as it is called here, have gotten a really bad name.

Yes COVID will also hurt the people in North West Europe, but it seems that region is much better able to actually do something about it than the US.

Winter • October 9, 2020 10:32 AM

@Clive
“Which as the average age of death was dropping in the US already is going to hit harder in Europe, especially in North West Europe ”

PS, the decline in the USA wrt other OESO countries started in 1982 with the Republican Neo Con revolution. So we know who we can blame for it.

The U.S. and comparable countries once had similar life expectancy – in 1980, average life expectancy at birth was 73.7 years in the U.S. and 74.5 years in comparable countries. However, while the U.S. gained 4.9 years of life expectancy in the subsequent decades, comparable countries have gained an average of 7.8 years.

ht tps://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/#item-le_total-life-expectancy-at-birth-in-years-1980-2017_dec-2019-update

Clive Robinson • October 9, 2020 10:34 AM

@ Winter,

Why?

The deaths by age appear to folow a logrithmic curve.

Thus the older you are the more likely you are to die.

So if where you live the average age at death is greater than eighty the number of deaths as a percentage of the population is going to be greater than places where the average age at death is less than eighty.

As the relationship is logrithmic then for each year above the effect is greater than each year below.

So if you look up the normalized (%) chance of dying by age for say 85 and 75 you will see a marked difference.

Obviously at some point due to the greater death rate in the older population the average age of death will drop faster and aproach that of any region with a lower average death rate.

In theory if it continues eventually a new semi stable average death age will be reached. What it is depends on other factors like healthcare provision and other social care, which should improve as those in retirment get significantly thined out.

Oh it could also improve as those who have died nolonger draw down on state funded pensions etc, as well as their previously “tied up” assets becoming part of the “tax take” and economy where it is hoped their would be an increased “churn” (but it would also depend on where the political encumbrants chose to direct it, in the US and UK it is not going to be where the average citizen might hope or think reasonable).

Clive Robinson • October 9, 2020 11:42 AM

@ name.withheld…, ALL,

With regards your question that relates to “Long COVID” and “COVID Sequelae” guess what?

Just a couple of hours ago this appeared on You-Tube,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H7-pLxvf9dk

The presenter Dr John Campbell not only does his research he also inckudes links to the source material he uses for it.

It’s a half hour watch, more upto date than I am and worthwhile watching.

Winter • October 9, 2020 12:04 PM

@Clive
“Oh it could also improve as those who have died nolonger draw down on state funded pensions etc, as well as their previously “tied up” assets becoming part of the “tax take” and economy where it is hoped their would be an increased “churn” ”

Neo-cons/neo-cons are already hated, but probably not yet hated enough. With such mainstream politicians, you get to understand the alt-right.

vas pup • October 9, 2020 3:39 PM

US Army trials augmented reality goggles for dogs:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54465361

“The US Army has shown off augmented reality goggles for combat dogs, designed to let them receive orders at a distance.

The technology, made by a firm called Command Sight, is managed by the US Army Research Laboratory.
Military dogs can scout ahead for explosives and other hazards, but need instructions.The goggles are designed to let their handlers direct them, safely out of harm’s way.

In current combat deployments, soldiers usually direct their animals with hand signals or laser pointers – both of which require the handler to be close by

But that need not be the case if the prototype AR goggles are widely adopted, the army said.
Inside the goggles, the dogs can see a visual indicator that they can be trained to follow, directing them to a specific spot.
The handler, meanwhile, can see what the dog sees through a remote video feed.

“AR will be used to provide dogs with commands and cues; it’s not for the dog to interact with it like a human does,” said Dr Stephen Lee, a senior scientist with the Army Research Laboratory (ARL).

He explained that augmented reality works differently for dogs than for humans, adding: “The military working dog community is very excited about the potential of this technology.”

Each set of goggles is specially fit for each dog, with a visual indictor that allows the dog to be directed to a specific spot and react to the visual cue in the goggles.”

vas pup • October 9, 2020 3:57 PM

Nerve cell activity shows how confident we are:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201009121928.htm

“Should I or shouldn’t I? The activity of individual nerve cells in the brain tells us how confident we are in our decisions. This is shown by a recent study by researchers at the University of Bonn. The result is unexpected — the researchers were actually on the trail of a completely different evaluation mechanism. The results are published in the journal Current Biology.

Every day we have to make decisions, and we are much more confident about some of them than others. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn have now identified nerve cells in the brain whose activity indicates the confidence in decisions.

Participants had to judge a total of 190 different snack pairs in this way. At the same time, the scientists recorded the activity of 830 nerve cells each in the so-called temporal lobe. “We discovered that the frequency of the electrical pulses in some neurons, in other words their ‘firing rate’, changed with increasing decision confidence,” explains Mormann’s colleague Alexander Unruh-Pinheiro. “For instance, some fired more frequently, the more confident the respective test person was in their decision.”

Researchers at the University of Bonn were originally looking for a completely different phenomenon:
==>When we make a decision, we assign a subjective value to each of the alternatives.
!!!”There is evidence that this subjective value is also reflected in the activity of individual neurons,” says Mormann. “The fact that we instead came across this connection between fire behavior and decision confidence surprised even us.”

Qs: (1)How AI is confident in its decisions?
(2)Does AI assign ‘subjective’ values to alternatives when making decisions?

SpaceLifeForm • October 9, 2020 4:42 PM

@ Clive, name.*.*.*.*

FYI, this post, and the prior four were posted without "Preview".

This post and the one prior were posted via disabling markdown with the three backticks on first line and last line.

I have observed a very strange artifact when posting after doing the "Preview". The artifact occurs after hitting
"Submit", lasts maybe one second max.

I do not see the artifact if I skip "Preview".

I'll need to setup a camera to document.

Having been on the Internet since it's birth, nearly every day, you tend to notice weird stuff.

Just saying.

SpaceLifeForm • October 9, 2020 4:51 PM

@ Clive, name.*.*.*.*

Just noticed that the font is different if markdown is in place or not.

This post also via no "Preview", markdown disabled via the three backticks.

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 9, 2020 4:55 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, Clive
Thanks for the update. I guess it may be as suspected, some post filtering process in multiple stages. Haven’t experimented with it yet but just give me chance…I’ll screw something up.

My FOD, acronym used out of context but sounds good, I made an error in the post to the new squid in the title, should read:
9 OCT 2020 — Seeding the Present Denies the Future and the Past?
NOT
9 OCT 2020 — Seeding the Present Denies the Future and the Present?

name.withheld.for.obvious.reasons • October 9, 2020 5:02 PM

@ Clive
Thanks for the link…

By the by, have seen many of Campbell’s videos. He has been kind of an icon for on the ground reporting respecting the pandemic. I’d say a real hero–has invested a lot of time and effort and has done diligent work. Most of the reporting is accessible, clear, and concise. Job well done! Here, here.

Why can’t people like Dr. Campbell be elevated to positions of responsibility instead the weak-kneed hacks and politicos that act as ineffectual intermediaries (such as “Boring us Johnson”)?

Singapore Noodles • October 9, 2020 7:50 PM

@SpaceLifeForm

Yes, 25 would be nearly unbearable, and 169 is impossible because it would mean turning things up to 13, since we can only turn things up to at most 11.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ8Vy8FqnKs

JonKnowsNothing • October 10, 2020 12:14 AM

@Clive @All

re: The Great Barrington Declaration and open click to sign

It seems that someone(s) have taken action or advantage of the “click to sign” options on the Barrington Moose Call.

Some fun(ny) scientists have signed in support:

  * Dr Johnny Bananas
  * Professor Cominic Dummings
  * university of your mum
  * specialist whose name was the first verse of the Macarena

Definitely “reclaiming my sunshine”. 🙂

ht tps://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/09/herd-immunity-letter-signed-fake-experts-dr-johnny-bananas-covid
(url fractured to prevent autorun)

Clive Robinson • October 10, 2020 1:46 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL

With regards “The Great Barrington Moose Call.

Some fun(ny) scientists have signed in support

That “sign” mechanism is going to alow for two things,

1, Fake signups.
2, “plausable deniability”

Perhaps journalists should ask the “alledged” signatories if they did “sign in suppprt” or not… After all the details required are “public knowledge” and could have been skimmed from academic etc web sites.

I suspect given a little more bad publicity it thoroughly deserves as “politically motivated” nonsense not science then people might check to see if their name is there… Then I suspect the number of deniers will move upwards.

It is entirely possible the entire thing is a “red flag” operation by those who have previously gained ground via anti-vaccers, anti-maskers, anti… And “loony libertarians”[1] and others out there at the edge or beyond of rational thinking.

I know and acknowledge that science is not perfect and has limitations. However it’s method when practiced correctly tends to improve mankinds abilities via knowledge rather more so than other methods (what mankind then does with that knowledge is an entirely different thing).

My view on COVID like any other disease is “avoid it if you can” as to be a disease it has to have downsides that are not going to improve either the quality or extent of your life.

If what we believe of evolution is true, then disease is a consequence of eveloution competition, thus removing a competitor from the game is the best way to go. Thus we should have very early on taken the measures required to “eradicate SARS-CoV-2” but we did not. So now we are suffering the cost of competition and it’s a high one. Think of it on terms of “free market economics” or “all out war” and you can see where it’s going to go.

Yes there are lessons to be learned but some people appear incapable of grasping them. Why is a discussion for another day. Currently the problem is stopping them doing more harm.

If they will not respond to rational argument then ridicule and other “social exclusion” methods exist on a broad spectrum. Though making them guniepigs of their own ideas thus “hoisting them by their own petard” sounds atractive, it would be neither ethical or in the long term sensible.

[1] All political parties and ideals collect “fringe” “loonies” that are polarised beyond what even those considered “beyond the norm” are. For some reason some national cultures appear to encorage them more than others. Thus make them easier to find and exploit in one way or another. Unfortunately exploiting such people is becoming apparently more and more prevelant…

SpaceLifeForm • October 10, 2020 6:45 PM

Trump wonders why the US Intel community is not investigating the connection between the emperor penguins and the polar bears.

It's a conspiracy I tell you. The CIA knows they are communicating via meteor.

Trump wonders why Rosenstein did not follow up on this backchannel long ago when he was informed by GRU.

SpaceLifeForm • October 10, 2020 7:22 PM

It's clear that everything is being MITM-ed thru Hillary Clintons server in her basement.

Obviously, NSA knows this, yet IRA keeps atttacking her server.

Makes no sense.

Chris • October 10, 2020 8:55 PM

This time i use Windows and only some whonix in virtualbox
i lived in another country where it was dangerous to transmit in clear
so i need to use encryption but also obfusctation
so i was trying alot of new at that time new obfusctaion stuff
and also we and our group were one of the first to use
only encryption tech, meening that we use no leakaged routers
i cant tell more since it seems very few people understands this
anyhow have anice day
this tech was tried out in chiangmai bangkok udonthani vientianne 2012 – 2018
and 8it works very well

Chris • October 10, 2020 10:00 PM

I dont know Bruce i know the reason i guess for going to wordpress
and it makes sence kindoff but if its going down the path of showing commercials and all sorts of weird stuff that are not part of the normal security blog, and the same
time not showing what is relevant because the blog is filtered without any knowledge from the part doing the filtering, then i would say its the end of this blog.
This may not come quickly but it will show due time.
I hope i am wrong since i have allways liked the place for its openness
//Closed

SuDa • October 10, 2020 10:45 PM

Hi I think this whole Covid thing has become somesort of security nightmare
has anyone actually thought about how to end this nonsense
Part from that anyhows, I dont get this blog, is it about security
then if so where is the solutions, it looks to me like this
is more of a pissing contest, common do better than that

Clive Robinson • October 10, 2020 10:49 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

It’s a conspiracy I tell you.

There are some that thibk even know, that anything that involves the workings of the Fat Man and Little boy needs to be kept secret, no matter how incendiary. Oh and who would want the Russian’s to get their hands on either.

MarkH • October 10, 2020 10:51 PM

@SpaceLifeFormFont:

Either another person is commenting using handle ‘SpaceLifeForm’ …

… or it’s the same person, and he has lost his sense of proportion.

SpaceLifeForm • October 11, 2020 12:35 AM

@ MarkH, Clive

Note SLFFont wrote:

"Dude whats going on with your font"

Well, weigh in, and tell me you do not
see my observation.

Or the opposite.

It is clearly there.

If you can actually see the 'stuff'.

Note all of the new nicks.

SpaceLifeForm • October 11, 2020 12:55 AM

@ Clive, ALL (and the others that think they are ghosts)

If you are going to keep doing this MITM, can you upgrade your raspberry Pi from 3 to 4?

I'm not the bogeyman you are looking for.

It's Obvious. Annoyingly slow.

Hell, just go with an old Pentium2.

Thanks.

JonKnowsNothing • October 11, 2020 11:34 AM

@SpaceLifeForm @Singular Nodals

re: tell me you do not see my observation.

The only thing I notice from the backtick disabling the markdown, other than the font change, is that long sentences do not line wrap. That means they trail off the screen on the right edge and are not directly readable.

Not a big problem as @SLF generally writes in short sentences.

It could also be my ancient HW+SW does not recognize something.

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