2020
Matthew Yglesias explains the argument over the post office bailout [Vox]
No, the post office isn’t failing because Amazon is ripping it off, which is Trump’s stupid theory. People are just sending less First Class mail, and Congress won’t let The USPS go into other lines of business, such as banking.
Yglesias is skeptical that six-day-a-week delivery needs saving.
But given USPS’s popularity with the public, it’s also not really clear why spending money on this would be a big problem other than a principled opposition to having the government do anything at all.
In the immediate circumstances of a collapsing national economy that coincides with a census, a huge surge in people’s dependence on delivery services, and the potential need to convert the entire fall election to vote-by-mail, laying off tons of postal workers seems obviously unhelpful. But unless Congress can reach some sort of deal, that’s the situation they’ll be facing by late summer.
As others have pointed out, having a service that can visit every home and business in America in a single day seems like an incredibly useful thing potentially. One that should not be dismantled. Not useful every day, but useful during an emergency. Such as a pandemic.
Additionally, as Cory Doctorow pointed out earlier today, the postal service disproportionately benefits rural people and veterans, two groups that Republicans are popular with. It continually amazes me how the Republicans continue to shit on their supporters, and the supporters just ask for more.
5 of the 13 things Messy Nessy Chic found on the Internet Monday
100-year-old Bell Telephone ad; restaurant sleepover of World War II; rare 17th Century Parisian apartment for holiday rental (gorgeous!); how you get your hair done in the 1920s for a permanent wave; Harlem fashion boutique (1968) credited with popularizing Afrocentric style for the next decade; mini-dressed hostesses working for British Rail in 1972.
Trump goes postal, coronavirus in the UK vs. Ireland, and more on Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic.net
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net
Trump plans to murder the US Postal Service, in violation of the US Constitution.
The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.
But Congress has decided not to bail out the postal service, despite Art 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”
Maybe it’s because without a USPS we couldn’t have a postal vote in 2020?
The proximate cause of the post office’s bankruptcy is the pandemic, but that is merely the finishing blow. The USPS was murdered in 2006, when Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.
www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/w…
The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.
…
The USPS’s murder is straight out of the neoliberal playbook: “1 Defund, 2 claim crisis, 3 call for privatizatization, 4 profit!”
As Lambert Strether points out, it was a bipartisan act of murder, cosponored by the “centrist” Democrat Henry Waxman….
The USPS is the nation’s second largest employer of veterans, with 630,000 employees. Trump is about to allow it to collapse so that UPS, Fedex and other private firms can skim off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans totally isolated.
The loss of the USPS would mean the loss of the last truly universal federal program in America and would unduly hammer the people whom Trump claims to love — veterans and rural voters.
Also:
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has made election day a statewide holiday, joining the handful of other states that have passed this vital, democracy-protecting law, like Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky and New York.
It should be a federal holiday. It isn’t, because Republicans believe that increased voter turnout is bad for their electoral chances.
…
Northam’s new holiday-establishing order also eliminates Virginia’s Lee-Jackson day holiday, which celebrated the traitorous, slave-owning Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who murdered American soldiers to defend their right to treat other Americans as property.
Here’s a campaign to #TakeBackTuesday and establish a US-wide election-day holiday.
Also:
Coronavirus death rates in Ireland, which embraced quarantining early on, are half what they are in the UK, whose idiot Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in denial about the seriousness of the threat.
Medical historian Elaine Doyle notes that “as the Irish government was shutting schools, 250,000 people in the UK were gathering for a Cheltenham match.”
Ireland canceled St Paddy’s Day and shut pubs a week in advance. The UK had megaconcerts like the Stereophonics gig in Cardiff.
The Irish government made clear, continuous announcements about the gravity of the pandemic, urging people to stay home and take care. The UK government was virtually silent.
The thing about exponential growth is that early interventions make a huge difference. The UK dawdled for nearly two weeks before taking the lockdown steps that the Irish enacted.
The Tory ideology holds that governments are incompetent. This creates a perverse incentive: when Tories govern badly, they prove their own point. But Tories are supposed to murder poor people to juice the economy, not murder pensioners AND the economy.
Boris Johnson is a vile piece of work: a racist, misogynist bigot and a fool. His unwillingness to take (medical) expert advice (and his reliance on finance-sector advice) resulted in the measurable, deaths of Britons. Thousands of them.
What Cory says about Johnson and the Tories goes for Trump and the GOP too of course.
Minnie is recovering nicely, but she won't eat her regular kibble or canned food.
Minnie is hopping around on three legs and occasionally using the injured one, which suggests it is healing. She’s got her old personality back – active, curious and playful. She even tried chasing one of the cats yesterday.
However, she won’t eat her regular kibble or canned food. We’ve been giving her treats, a little cheese and a lot of rotisserie chicken. She loves that rotisserie chicken.
I put down a bowl of kibble for her to eat a few minutes ago. She sniffed the edges and gave me a dirty look, like, “You are SO getting a one-star review on Yelp for this!”
I’m not worried – yet. We went through something like this when she was a puppy. I’ll keep giving her rotisserie chicken until we run out of that, then switch her back to 100% kibble. If she skips eating two days in a row then back to the vet she goes. 📓
I am having my feelings and thoughts without guilt
Monotony, frustration over having to wear a mask, being unable to take the dog to the park, or go anywhere around people. And I have so many opinions!
But I am also mindful that there are people out their dying in the most miserable conditions, exposing themselves to contagion to stock supermarket shelves, and medical personnel working 20 hour days without adequate protection. So yeah my problems, while large to me, are small. 📓
I, too, am an armchair epidemiologist and I’m pretty sure I’m spelling that right. twitter.com/markhumph…
I am not a sentimental man who cries at rainbows and flowers, but when I saw this in the supermarket today I bawled.
For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?
Ellen Barry unravels the mystery at the New York Times
If TP shortages continue there’s always the three shells youtu.be/n7nFEnFtv…
James Nicoll reviews Isaac Asimov’s 1950s time-travel novel, “The End of Eternity,” and finds it still holds up.
Interestingly, Nicoll notes, the premise of Eternity is similar to the Foundation series — a secret cabal manipulating human history — but this novel takes the story in the opposite direction.
Earlier I said the premise of Foundation is sinister when you think about it: The two forms of government we see are empire and rule by a secret, unaccountable conspiracy of technocrats. Both of these states are presented as utopian, when in reality the first has been shown to be pretty awful, and the second looks a lot like Communism, which has not proven to be swell either.
Nonetheless, I cut Asimov slack. He was a VERY young man when he initially wrote Foundation, reading headlines about the Nazis seemingly unstoppably conquering the world and wanted assurance that everything was going to be OK. Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory could have provided that assurance, had it existed. That observation is not original to me; Alec Nevala Lee said it in his terrific history of science fiction, “Astounding.”
I think it’s also true that in both the Foundation series and later in End of Eternity, Asimov was exploring the desire to be assured that the grownups are in charge of the world, as presidents and prime ministers and heads of billion-dollar companies and vast government bureaucracies, and that these grownups had matters under control. The 21-year-old Asimov who wrote Foundation had very diffferent ideas about that premise than the 34-year-old who wrote The End of Eternity.
Asimov wrote more Foundation stories in the 1980s. By that time he was in his 60s, written hundreds of books, including bestsellers. He appeared many times on national TV and had been published in the New York Times. He was an American public intellectual, and was himself one of the supposed grownups running the world. He had a different perspective on those issues once again.
Passover was a really big deal when I was a kid
We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty.
Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.
Jimmy Fallon said in an interview once that when he was growing up, his parents didn’t have friends. They had brothers and sisters and cousins. Says I to myself on hearing that: Holy crap. I thought that was just us. My parents socialized frequently, but it was almost always with people genetically related. Though my Dad did have one or two old friends he grew up with, whom he saw once or twice a year.
Mom was usually not a great cook, but she did a great job with the seder, working for days and putting on the full spread. Mom and Dad seldom drank, but they had a little wine with dinner – Manischewitz and Mogen David, of course! – and laughed a lot. My uncle Nat and Aunt Harriet were the only real drinkers in the family; my parents kept a bottle of vodka in the house for when they came to visit. We told the same jokes every year and never got tired of them.
To this day I am only a social drinker. I like beer and wine and Jameson’s and I went on a martini kick for a few years. But I don’t drink when I’m at home and I can go for weeks and months without having alcohol, and I do not miss it. 🌕
We kept kosher for Passover for the full eight days. The rest of the year we were lax. I like to say that we were pizza-and-chinese-food-on-paper-plates kosher – the foods we kept in the house were kosher, and we kept the proper two sets of plates, one for meat and one for dairy. But we brought in pizza and Chinese food regularly, and when we did, we ate it on paper plates. When I was an adult, it took me some time to get used to eating pizza on regular dishes.
I loved matzoh during Passover, and gobbled it up plain, or with margarine, rendered chicken fat or cream cheese. I never got tired of matzoh during Passover, but I stopped eating it and switched back to bread the moment I could, and never had matzoh, or wanted it, the rest of the year.
Happy Easter!
He is risen!
But do not talk to Him until He has had coffee because seriously he’s just plain grouchy til then.
One of the crazy things about this pandemic is that it’s all going to be over in a year or a few years at most. Done. History. Past tense.
Everybody who was going to get it will have gotten it, many will die, the rest of us will just get on with our lives. The disease itself might continue in the population, but it will be like the flu. Just part of normal life. No social distancing or special measures required.
And if the 1918 pandemic is a guide, we will not talk about it much and it will be all but forgotten in a generation.
A generation from now we will STILL be talking about the 1970s because that was such a crazy decade. But the “coronavirus pandemic?” What was that? Never heard of it.
Last night I was getting ready for bed and looked at my pedometer app and saw it was at 9,800 steps and said to myself, welp, guess I’m not making it to 10,000 today.
And then I got into bed and pulled the covers up and was all set up and cozy and ready to go to sleep and I looked at the pedometer app again and it was over 9,900.
And I got out of bed and walked around the house for about 5 minutes until I was over 10,000.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net
[Private equity] companies that “looted healthcare want billions in bailout.”
Corporations that went to binding arbitration to stiff consumers are screaming now that automation is threatening to make the playing field fair
E-voting is a nonstarter for secret elections but it’ll work for public votes by elected officials such as legislators
Republicans plan squads of ex-military and ex-police to intimidate black and Latino voters
“‘Job creators’ are job annihilators”
Eric Snowden warns that pandemic surveillance will become permanent. If you liked the PATRIOT Act, you’ll love pandemic surveillance!
Also: “RIP MAD’s Mort Drucker: One of ‘the usual gang of idiots:”
His daughter, Laurie Bachner, told the AP: “I think my father had the best life anyone could hope for. He was married to the only woman he ever loved and got to make a living out of what he loved to do.”
Drucker worked at MAD from the mid-50s on, helping to define the magazine’s caricature house-style.
I just cancelled my $119 annual Dropbox account, which expires in 10 days. I’m pretty sure I can get everything I need from iCloud plus the free Dropbox tier.
As a test, I moved everything out of the Dropbox sync folder except for one small folder that I still want to use with Dropbox. We’ll see if anything breaks!
I’ve been using Dropbox for at least 10 years, so this feels like more of a big deal than it probably actually is.
