yeah, you’re right in the current climate, I think because banks and corporations that play by federal rules can’t play. So it’s a cash-only industry of small businesses, which is attractive to organized crime the same way laundromats and bingo halls are. If this was just another product on the shelf at Walgreens, industrial agriculture conglomerates (a cartel in their own right) would exert a lot of pressure on the illegal model.

homelessness is an interesting paradox because is it the disease or the symptom of a different disease? Do you go for a curative or palliative treatment? The easy route is to push the problem around by having the police move people along. I grew up in a small county with an annual homeless budget of a few hundred dollars used to dole out one-way bus tickets to Fresno. I saw a story about Salt Lake City, that they took an approach 20 years ago to provide unconditional real housing (apartment beds not shelter beds). Most of the homeless at that time were mentally/physically disabled or addicts, so unemployable. They realized they couldn’t treat those root problems if those people didn’t have a reliable address and they dramatically cut homelessness. But then it came back 5 years ago, though a different group of people. These were working people who had never been homeless before. And they found that these people didn’t need services other than cheaper rent 6 months ago. But if these people stayed homeless more than a few months, they started to develop physical and mental problems that impacted employability. Growing income inequality with the people on the upside spiking real estate prices and then not wanting affordable housing in their neighborhood seems to be a big problem. UBI seems like a good tool for the kit.

You make some fair points on drugs, but maybe the best way to squeeze cartels is to legalize pot and let Phillip Morris grow it. As far as subsidizing people, I’d rather not have to, but it costs like $15k a year to get them in housing, $50-80k to put them in jail. It’s cheaper to let them hotbox an apartment.

From what I gather, we might see J&J vaccine hit pharmacies by March. While maybe not as effective as Pfizer and Moderna, perhaps the single dose and simpler handling will speed distribution. It uses an adenovirus (a common cold virus as carrier?) instead of mRNA. I believe it is similar to the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. I'm not sure I fully understand the mechanism, but maybe I don't need to.

I read the writer's bio... looks like she was previously with LA Times and until recently, the Sac Bee. It says NYT "correspondent", which I think is code for a freelance journalist paid per article rather than a staff reporter paid a salary. I think the business model for online news and increasingly print news is just that... the reporters are gig workers and the news organizations are little more than editors/curators that buy articles. I would imagine in the Bee's case that they do not pay journalism students much if anything. I think new entrants to the career do a lot of pro bono work up front to build their portfolio and resume. Bully for the UCD press office for getting a connected journalist to this story. I think it shows that UCD can attract national attention when it shares something widely applicable. Far too many of the stories that Davis pushes are niche vanity projects that interest narrow corners of academia and the social justice movement. Normally I see these kinds of headlines in the UCD news feed - "A multicultural exploration of the intersectionality of paint and canvas in relation to implied sexism of paintbrushes" - the kind of stuff that ain't going to make the NYT.

Several models of Fitbits are able to measure SpO2 levels. Fitbit has been moving more and more towards monitoring health metrics along with tracking activity levels — BlueGoldAg

Fitbit is now owned by Google, so they are into tracking any potentially saleable piece of information they can about you. They must have an advertising customer wanting to know your O2 levels :chin:

The campus has a no visitors policy for dorm areas and requires any visitor to campus to fill out a COVID questionnaire. Students and employees are mandated to participate in testing, visitors are encourage to test. I don't know how well they are enforcing the questionnaire on casual walkers or bikers through campus. What I get though from it though is that visitors without a compelling reason are just not wanted right now. Partly to prevent spread of disease, but also partly to enforce order around their public health efforts. The University has tools to discipline students and employees for breaking COVID policies. It's harder to discipline unaffiliated visitors for unwanted behavior that does not rise to the level of being illegal and warranting trespass from public property. I wouldn't bank on spectators, though if that becomes an option later in the season, maybe students and staff get first crack since they are already in the testing/surveillance bubble.

I hope there is a good online audio/video feed. I live far outside KHTK's terrestrial range. For streaming, regardless of provider, Aggie Stadium has far more technical problems than the other schools in Big Sky. Somebody should be checking the upload bandwidth of their modem.

I don't think decentralization is unique to California or health. I think it is rooted in the 18th century where people wanted to be within a day's horse ride of their decision makers and wanted to make sure that their local tax dollars didn't leak out to help poorer areas. On one hand, the needs in Modoc County are very different than LA County, but at the same time, county lines are kind of arbitrary because Lancaster is very different than Long Beach. Our system relies on having qualified elected officials who are invested in the public good both hiring and listening to topical expert civil servants. In general, I think civil servants can do a better job when the politicians provide responsible funding and framework and then butt out of daily affairs, which I think other than habitually underfunding, the politicians do get out of the way of the VA's daily affairs. Historically not the case over at places like USDA and Department of Education because nothing brings politicians out of the sewer faster than perceived sleights to small business and organized religion, and those departments are a mess because of it. Interestingly in this case, thousands of health civil servants across the country have basically all said the same things, which has some perceived conflicts with small business and organized religion, so out come the politicians. And rather than a national approach with just one set of politicians interfering, this is a fragmented approach involving 50 governors and about 3000 boards of supervisors and sheriffs micromanaging. And what we've seen is that a lot of civil servants are actually better than we give them credit for, while a lot of politicians of any stripe are morons more concerned with personal reelection prospects and ego wars over jurisdiction than the public good. We have public and private sector experts in this country that could pull off this heavy lift, if only we would have liquored up the politicians and dropped them off at the Dixon corn maze while the adults figured things out. If anything, a couple of blind spots that the vaccine distribution has highlighted - we have a lack of domestic emergency access to raw materials and manufacturing and we have a lot of residents for whom we don't have a good means of contact to identify them and let them know their place in line.

, @DrMike Some off-topic insider knowledge on hotel bookings... scroll by if this isn't of interest to you --

All of the hundreds of "discount sites" you are aware of are ultimately part of Expedia or Booking.com, so there is limited benefit in cross-comparing. TripAdvisor is deeply in bed with both. They use tracking cookies across sites to determine if you are a feature-conscious or price-conscious shopper, and if you start price comparing sites, it generates false scarcity ("one room left!") and the best deal you saw might even "sell out" while you shop (clear your cookies and it's back). On the hotel end, the hotel pays 10-20% commission to the site, so it's great for the hotel to use it on lower demand nights to fill rooms (occupancy rate and annual revenue per room are important metrics for investors and GM bonuses, so anything above 0 helps). But on a high demand night, they don't want to pay the Expedia tax if they could fill the room with a direct booking. As for how the hotel receives your booking - at some properties Expedia has a backdoor to their property management system, but for many others the front desk gets a fax or an email that staff manually enter. There is an element of human error here... fax machine out of ink, or they actually sell out before inputting the Expedia reservations. Because a lot of Expedia reservations cancel at the last minute, some hotel operators will short it and overbook, which could leave you stuck if they hedge incorrectly. If something goes wrong, remember Expedia Corp is the hotel's "guest". They pay the hotel with a one-time use virtual credit card and basically sublet the room to you. So if your potential bad review doesn't intimidate them, the front desk may not do much problem solving for you, instead telling you to sort it out with Expedia. Because you've basically bought the room at auction, some hotels will put you in blacklist rooms, next to the ice machine, pool pump, etc. You don't have the same lifetime value to them as someone brand loyal. Hotels prefer you to book direct and it does give you better insurance that your room exists and they will handle problems directly. Some hotel brands like Hilton will match Expedia offers right on their own site, others you have to call and they should match. In fact, franchise hotels typically have to pay the franchisor a 5% commission for web or call center reservations, so sometimes if you pretend it's 1990 and call the front desk local number direct, they can hook you up because they save all the commission costs. At a Best Western type joint, during they day you may well be talking to the owner. I've done this with the Best Western in Dixon, booked Picnic Day and football season all at once and the GM gave us an unpublished deal. All hotels subscribe to an industry report that shares occupancy information and then their own revenue algorithms adjust rates in real time based on a live look at bookings at every hotel in town. Some owners are strictly committed to data, but others are willing to override the algorithm with human finesse if the deal feels right. Moral of the story, discount sites are good for market surveillance to see your options, but there are reasons to consider making the reservation with hotel directly.

Things going well at the VA? I don’t understand. How could a nationalized single payer health system outperform a network of 3000 county health departments entangled with a variety of for-profit hospitals and pharmacies in competition with each other?

I’m writing from the assumption that assistants are UC employees, in which case I think policy prevents family members from directly supervising each other, at least on paper with the HR department. I would agree that assistant coaches typically do not get a national search committee, but when you are presumably handling taxpayer or student fee money, you want to both be and appear above board. While cooking the stat books may not be on the table, questions about fairness on performance reviews, raises, or HR complaints become more complicated when it’s all in the family at a government entity.

In a lot of businesses father/son combos work great because of deep shared understanding (and sometimes intense kitchen table refereeing from the Mrs.) Seems like most small plumbing contractors and moving companies do it this way and it works. At a publicly-funded entity, this is a little tricky because whoever is doing the hiring has fiduciary responsibility to get the best candidate and hold them objectively accountable for results. Within the shadow of nepotism, real and perceived accountability are always going to be tough and using an "intermediary as supervisor" usually doesn't improve the look if results are lacking. Sort of how Teresa Gould was but wasn't Ron's supervisor. I hope Cody turns out to be a great OC. But if it doesn't work out, things need to be handled the same as any other assistant.

I went by the D2 board and radio silence from Simon Fraser and Western Oregon, but a good deal of chatter from the Central Washington fans. Apparently they have a long term deal for out of conference games with the Lone Star Conference, but most people acknowledge it is not long term sustainable. It kind of leaves them the options of moving up to FCS, moving down to NAIA, convincing regional NAIA schools to move to D2, or drop football. The problem is of course that D2 is the right place for their basketball teams, they can't afford the jump to FCS, and don't want to take the prestige hit of dropping down to NAIA where most of the competitors are 500-student bible colleges. In the case of SFU, their facilities are all built to American standards rather than Canadian. CWU is similar in character to EWU, but the cautionary tale they tell is that despite EWU's on-field success, their budget is a perennial disaster that puts them on the chopping block, even with some big name donors.

Considering how many football players California high schools generate of all skill levels, it seems strange and a disservice that there are such limited options for college players that don't measure up to FCS skill level. I suppose economics started going south in the early 90's and many CSU campuses became less residential in nature. A complaint I've seen on the D2 boards, and I can't verify if it is true, is that smaller public universities on the west coast have trouble attracting quality chancellors/presidents and athletic directors. The assertion is that they tend to inherit late-career administrators from bankrupt east coast private universities who are seeking a 3-5 year refuge to lock in a secure state pension, and as such they are survivalists rather than visionaries.

Kind of interesting which schools have opted in and out at this point. Probably not who I would have bet on a few months ago. I think Hauck touched on the miserable February weather in Montana. And while I don’t think he cares an ounce about anyone else, he probably doesn’t want to freeze his own baguettes off. I do hope the South Dakota State guys do some trolling on eGriz about outdoor football in cold conditions.

My understanding is that NY has a red/orange/yellow system with indoor dining only allowed in yellow counties (but now expanded to orange). Upstate bar owners in “orange” counties sued and won a temporary injunction allowing reopening. But the state seems likely to appeal. Dining rooms in NYC remain closed under a separate order. I don’t really see a huge connection to senate elections.

When looking at vaccines administered as a percentage, the US is 4th in the world, nationally at about 2.3 doses per 100 people. Israel leads by far at 19 per 100 with UAE and Bahrain running up. Worth looking at what they are doing, though they are more culturally homogenous countries with more centrally administered governments. Curious if Israel has seen differences in health outcomes with the Palestinian minority like we have with some minority groups here. The suggestion of having appointments for the priority groups with an unrestricted "standby line" for leftover doses seems workable. I think NY has strict penalties for out-of-order administration because initially the rich and powerful were managing to sneak into nursing homes to cut the line. That said, age is like the easiest criteria to filter people by because it is an easily verifiable number. For the following groups of essential workers, eligibility will be very difficult to ascertain unless the shots are given in the workplace.

As to previous comments, I'm not sure any governors are going to get passing grades. Some mistakes were made in the fog of war, others are far less excusable. Seemingly the planning and communication for vaccine distribution is unacceptably incomplete. My guess is that states were distracted managing disease prevention efforts in open conflict with local interests after the emergency economic backstops were allowed to expire. In NY it was the nursing home lobby, in FL it was the restaurant lobby, and in CA it was the open rebellion from Orange, San Diego and parts of LA County.

Here is a good tracker on vaccine distribution for anyone interested. Distribution started accelerating a few days ago, but the acceleration is not consistent across states - CA has a more consistent trendline than some states that achieved big jumps.

Consider this for context, the CDC says about 52% of Americans take the flu shot every year. And it is usually a drama-free experience without much wait at a pharmacy, doctors office, or workplace event. This proves we have the injection capacity for a mass vaccination over a couple months time, because we literally do it every year. To some degree there are handling challenges with the temperature of this vaccine. But it seems the biggest challenge is managing the patient side of the scarcity equation in a supply/demand mismatch. Fundamentally, do you give the vaccine to those who want it most or need it most? Much faster to give it all out to the wants because they will jump railings to cut to the front of the line. The same people do it at Six Flags and the grocery store deli. In this case, the most urgent needs tend to be harder people to reach in society and trying to get to them is only made harder by the din of the wants pounding on the doors, so to speak. It is a very valid question as to how much time you invest chasing the hard to reach people in the name of "health equity" before moving on. In FL and TX, they weren't done with healthcare workers yet but the governors were dissatisfied with the percentage optics so they opened it to everyone 65+, without telling the counties prior to going going live to the press. It's pandemonium with limited doses available at fragmented hospitals, health departments, and pharmacies and seniors racing all over town to chase them. At the end of the day, the seniors being successful are those who are plugged in to social media and spry enough to hop in the DeVille and peel out on a moment's notice. The seniors who aren't online, don't drive much, and can't stand for long periods are left behind. And then at the events, ineligible cops and politicians' spouses are showing up and getting it because exasperated health workers say it takes too much time to send them packing when they know these are people who will make a scene.

There there is the 48% problem. The flu shot is low/no cost, widely available, and well proven -- and 48% don't bother. For example sake, let's assume the 52% of people who take the flu shot are relatively easy to convince to take the COVID vaccine, but we really need 70-90% participation. We need a massive communication campaign now to convince the balance. And probably other motivations like threatening to deny school entry or delay tax refunds to anti-vaxxers.

If we want to call it a local failure, then it is a local failure nearly everywhere. Most of the states have only administered 20-40% of their stock, and while CA is far from leading, it isn't last either. Also fair to point out CA has administered more individual doses than any other state. In general, New England, Appalachia, and Big Sky country are a little above the curve, while the west, south, and Great Lakes are below. West Virginia and North Dakota are outliers that lead the nation with >60% administered. Unless Dr. Strange has taken us to a parallel universe where WV leads the world in health, I would posit that with the resources at hand the rollout is bound to go better in states with small, homogenous populations centered in relatively few geographic locations.

I was perhaps slightly hesitant in October when the vaccine seemed like a political football being launched as a hail mary. Since then I have become much more confident as I have learned about how an mRNA vaccine works. I am not a biologist or doctor, but since it cannot give you Covid and does not contain live or dead virus, it seems like the worst case is that it just doesn't work or fades over time. There are risk/benefit tradeoffs with any medical treatment, but given how deadly the virus is, I believe benefit outweighs risk, at least for me. I think acute treatment chemical drugs being used on an emergency basis without real control/variable testing are a larger risk that I would rather avoid relying on. There are also a few among us who cannot take vaccines (immune disease, organ transplant, etc.) and their safety relies on able-bodied people like me being vaccinated, a social responsibility I take seriously.

Here's what I am hearing from my friends in health care (not specific to CA, but more national in nature) - the trouble isn't necessarily that the people doing the injections are overwhelmed, it is a crisis of getting the right people at the right time to the administration location. As it turns out, there is no master list of who falls into the different priority groups, where they are, and how to contact them. And there is a moderate rate of no-shows or people who decline, leading to a chaotic footrace to get alternate recipients to a particular site before doses spoil. While I agree Newsom has spent too much time at the French Laundry, I do not think states and counties turned out to have the expertise or resources needed and the varied approaches have caused confusion, especially in border areas where people are hearing info from multiple jurisdictions. Since the chief executive was so intent on involving the military, it would have made sense to spend the last few months registering people with a federal selective service type system so they could be filtered into priority groups and then called by draft numbers to report as vaccine doses were available.

Interesting politics. Dr. Sisson only came to Yolo County in September, a few days after Placer County fired her for her strictness. So the Yolo board knew who they were hiring and it appears intentional. Disappointing to basketball fans, but it does not appear to be Gary May’s priority to change the county’s mind on this as I think the county and university historically do get along. In real terms I’m not even sure how much enforcement jurisdiction the county has on UC property.

Can confirm FL is a hot mess right now. DeSantis has made everything from social distancing to vaccine distribution up to counties to solve, so 67 uncoordinated approaches made really complicated in multi-county metro areas where the counties aren’t on speaking terms. FL has substantially more hospital beds per capita than CA and they are 91% full, but the empty beds are concentrated in the counties taking COVID more seriously. And just because the tourist economy is open doesn’t mean it’s working. The money tourists are from conventions, the Northeast, Canada, UK, and Brazil. They can’t or won’t come now, so it’s just locals using discount tickets. In the race to reopen and chase the small dollar, he’s only prolonged the big dollars staying away. There’s a lot of nuance that doesn’t make the national media, but FL is definitely not a success story in health or economic terms.