2:00PM Water Cooler 6/4/2024 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Patient readers, I am sorry this is a more than a little light, initially; I had extended household matters to deal with. –lambert

Bird Song of the Day

Killdeer, Waterview Retention Pond & Wetlands, Fort Bend, Texas, United States. Wetlands noises!

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In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Biden’s interview with Time.

(2) Carbon dioxide, viruses, and climate.

(3) Nabokov’s Pale Fire

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Politics

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

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2024

Less than a half a year to go!

RCP Poll Averages, May 24:

A mixed bag for Team Trump, this week with some Swing States (more here) Brownian-motioning themselves back toward him, including Pennsylvania. Not, however, Michigan, to which Trump paid a visit. Of course, it goes without saying that these are all state polls, therefore bad, and most of the results are within the margin of error. If will be interesting to see whether the verdict in Judge Merchan’s court affects the polling, and if so, how.

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Biden (D): “Read the Full Transcript of President Joe Biden’s Interview With TIME” (transcript) [Time]. Starts off with a bang:

Thank you for doing this, Mr. President. We appreciate your time. Busy moment. I’ll dive right in. You’re traveling next week to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day to commemorate a turning point in America’s leadership with the free world. But the anniversary comes at a time when the US under your leadership has been unable to deter crises. First in Afghanistan, then Ukraine, Israel, and mounting tensions in the Far East. Is America still able to play the role of world power that it played in World War Two, and in the Cold War?

Biden: Yes, we’re planning even more. We are, we are the world power.

[Fap fap fap fap fap].

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Syndemics

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

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Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

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Airborne Transmission

“A new discovery about carbon dioxide is challenging decades-old ventilation doctrine” [STAT]. “No sensor can monitor how many infectious aerosols are swirling around us in real time. But carbon dioxide, or CO2, can act as a convenient proxy. People exhale it when they breathe, and in spaces that aren’t well ventilated, the gas accumulates. High CO2 concentrations can provide a warning sign that a lot of the air you’re inhaling is coming out of other people’s respiratory tracts. For decades, that’s how aerosol scientists and ventilation engineers have mostly thought about CO2 — as a sort of indicator for the health of indoor environments. But over the last three years, researchers in the U.K. working with next-generation bioaerosol technologies have discovered that CO2 is more than a useful bystander. In fact, it plays a critical role in determining how long viruses can stay alive in the air: The more CO2 there is, the more virus-friendly the air becomes. It’s a revelation that is already transforming the way scientists study airborne pathogens. But on a planet where burning fossil fuels and other industrial activities inject 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, it could also have huge implications for human health. ‘By increasing the CO2 in the air, we’re getting rid of a natural means by which viruses become inactivated,’ said Allen Haddrell, an environmental chemist at the University of Bristol Aerosol Research Center, who led the new work. ‘It’s fascinating, but it’s also horrifying.’” • Now that’s a syndemic and a half! (I posted the original of this study already, but the global implications had escaped me. Yikes!)

Maskstravaganza

Amazing how deep the propaganda and the social norming go:

I could never have imagined a time where people would be so freaked out by respiratory protection 😂.

Imagine people angered by hard hats, irate at steel toecap boots, irked by ear defenders, infuriated by gloves, enraged at goggles or incensed by overalls.

Strange times 😷 😁

— Pete 😷 #COVIDisAirborne (@PeteUK7) June 4, 2024

Immune Dysregulation

“Plane evacuated by specialist infectious diseases teams” [Metro UK]. “Passengers were removed from a flight after it was forced to land due to ‘cases of suspected infectious diseases’ today.” • This does seem to keep happening. The disease was not mentioned, and an unruly — why? — passenger was also removed from the plane.

Censorship and Propaganda

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Lambert here: Patient readers, I’m going to have to rethink this beautifully formatted table. Biobot data is gone, CDC variant data functions, ER visits are dead, CDC stopped mandatory hospital data collection, New York Times death data has stopped. (Note that the two metrics the hospital-centric CDC cared about, hospitalization and deaths, have both gone dark). Ideally I would replace hospitalization and death data, but I’m not sure how. I might also expand the wastewater section to include (yech) Verily data, H5N1 if I can get it. Suggestions and sources welcome. UPDATE I replaced the Times death data with CDC data. Amusingly, the URL doesn’t include parameters to construct the tables; one must reconstruct then manually each time. Caltrops abound.

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

LEGEND

1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.

2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”

NOTES

[1] (Biobot) Dead.

[2] (Biobot) Dead.

[3] (CDC Variants) FWIW, given that the model completely missed KP.2.

[4] (ER) This is the best I can do for now. At least data for the entire pandemic is presented.

[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Slight leveling out? (The New York city area has form; in 2020, as the home of two international airports (JFK and EWR) it was an important entry point for the virus into the country (and from thence up the Hudson River valley, as the rich sought to escape, and then around the country through air travel.)

[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). This is the best I can do for now. Note the assumption that Covid is seasonal is built into the presentation. At least data for the entire pandemic is presented.

[7] (Walgreens) 4.3%; big jump. (Because there is data in “current view” tab, I think white states here have experienced “no change,” as opposed to have no data.)

[8] (Cleveland) Going up.

[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Flattening.

[10] (Travelers: Variants) KP.2 enters the chat, as does B.1.1.529.

[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.

[12] Deaths low, ED not up.

Stats Watch

Employment Situation: “United States Job Quits” [Trading Economics]. “The number of job quits in the US edged up to 3.5 million in April 2024 from an upwardly revised 3.4 million in April. The quits rate, a metric that measures voluntary job leavers as a proportion of total employment, was 2.2% for the sixth month in a row. The number of quits decreased in professional and business services (-131,000), but increased in other services (+67,000), durable goods manufacturing (+39,000), and state and local government education (+32,000).” • Attaboy PMC!

Manufacturing: “United States Factory Orders” [Trading Economics]. “New orders for US manufactured goods rose by 0.7% from the previous month to $588.2 billion in April of 2024, the same as in March, and marginally above market expectations of a 0.6% increase.”

Supply Chain: “United States LMI Logistics Managers Index” [Trading Economics]. “The Logistics Manager’s Index in the US jumped to 55.6 in May 2024, from a four-month low of 52.9 in April. With this reading, the index has now expanded in 9 of the last 10 months and for the last six months in a row. The biggest change was recorded for the transportation prices which soared to the highest level since June 2022 (57.8 vs 44.1), due to higher demand and as diesel fuel prices dropped again in the last week of May. Transportation prices are now slightly higher than transportation capacity (57.3 vs 61.4).

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Manufacturing: “Jury finds Boeing stole technology from electric airplane startup Zunum” [Seattle Times]. “A federal court jury in Seattle on Thursday ruled against Boeing in a lawsuit brought by failed electric airplane startup Zunum and awarded $81 million in damages — which the judge has the option to triple. Zunum alleged that Boeing, while ostensibly investing seed money to get the startup off the ground, stole Zunum’s technology and actively undermined its attempts to build a business. It accused Boeing of “a targeted and coordinated campaign” to gain access to its ‘business plan, market and technological analysis, and other trade secrets and proprietary information,’ then using that to develop its own hybrid-electric plane design. Zunum also accused Boeing of sabotaging its efforts to attract funding from aerospace suppliers Safran and United Technologies.” • Wowers, Boeing just can’t catch a break. I wonder if the executives who carried out this scheme earned big bonuses?

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Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 40 Fear (previous close: 51 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 54 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jun 4 at 1:31:28 PM ET. Sudden swing to fear. Biden’s interview?

Book Nook

“Don’t be terrified of Pale Fire Nabokov’s masterpiece has a complex but huge heart” [Unherd]. “When I first read [Pale Fire] I was an ignorant 24-year-old with a barely adequate undergraduate education. Because I had not majored in English (I was concerned about what kind of job I might get after graduating and an English degree did not look promising), I had not taken many literature courses. I had read very little poetry and almost no Shakespeare. I recognised the names of the poets mentioned in Pale Fire but I could not possibly register the more subtle meanings evoked by the adjacent language because I didn’t know their work in any depth or really at all. That didn’t matter. I loved Pale Fire. I could feel its intellectual power in the intense perceptual contrasts of its characters, in the descriptions of faces and objects and, for example, the swift evocation of an alternate world in John Shade’s image of himself reflected in the window glass, ‘above the grass’ with his furniture and an apple on a plate. I could feel it in the patterning I saw and sensed, viscerally, as if I was not only seeing a griffin landing before me but feeling the vibration of its wings come up through the ground into the soles of my feet.” • Me too, but my reaction was to the “meta”, the apparatus (indexes, notes, annotation, criticism) reather than to perception. But then I only 14…Zeitgeist Watch

“Emputation”:

I’m leery of generalizations about “people” (or, using our indoor words, “at the population level”), at least for cultural/socio-political matters, even though I’m guilty of using them myself; I’m sure they’r not true for everybody. Nevertheless, I think the poster has put their finger on a real phenomenon. Readers, have you experienced similar?

Class Warfare

“Poets’ Odd Jobs” [Poets.org]. “”There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either,” Robert Graves famously said. While there have certainly been numerous poets throughout history who have been “professional poets” (poets supported by patrons or sponsors in classical times or poets whose main income comes from their books, readings, etc., in more contemporary times), still larger is the number of poets who had surprising or unorthodox occupations outside of their literary careers. Read this list of famous poets and their odd or unique jobs….. At just sixteen, [Maya] Angelou made history with her first job: She was the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. When she first applied for the job, the office wouldn’t give her an application, but she protested until she got the job.” • Quite a list!

News of the Wired

I am not feeling wired today.

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Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From DG:

DG writes: “A japanese maple sapling we’re cultivating in a pot with another climbing hydrangea to the right of the crepe myrtle.”

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