but this we cannot do

The budget resolution that passed the Senate (51/50 with VP Harris breaking the tie) authorizes the $1.9 trillion COVID spending hike sought by President Biden, but it explicitly forbids increasing the federal minimum wage (currently $7.25/hour) during the pandemic.

Because ... "It would place too large a burden on small businesses that are already struggling to survive." 

Sigh.

$7.25/hour isn't enough to keep you and your child out of poverty, according to the (outdated) federal poverty guidelines.  It's fine for an employer to pay you poverty wages, especially during a time when going to work exposes you to a deadly pandemic.

Sigh.

16 countries have higher minimum wages than the US, including our neighbor Canada.

It doesn't make a business less competitive when you impose the same cost on every business.  Business A has to pay the same minimum wage as Business B -- that's a level playing field.

US GDP is $83/hour worked, on average.  Surely more than 10% of that productivity can go to the workers.

the bar is dropping

As more data come in about the various variants of COVID that are spreading around the world, it is looking more likely that people can get reinfected with another variant of COVID after approximately six months, and that the reason to get vaccinated is not to prevent infection, but to prevent hospitalization and/or death when infected.

If your body has seen something similar to this variant of COVID before, either via vaccination or prior infection, then your immune system will do a better job of getting rid of it.  That doesn't mean you won't get sick, but it means you're far less likely to die.

This has me wondering whether my brother had COVID twice.  He and his doctor thought he had it during the summer, because of his symptoms and chest X-Ray, but then he tested positive for it in December and was feverish for days.

It's looking more and more like annual COVID shots will become a thing, and we'll never truly get rid of it.  I'm looking forward to the interesting debates we'll have after most of us are vaccinated and yet COVID is still a thing.  Whether masks will become a forever thing in urban parts of the US, and while riding mass transit and airplanes, or while attending mass gatherings.  What will the median public opinion be about prevention in February 2022?

"no plan survives contact with the enemy"

I did cut my hair!  And it's not bad, definitely better than the deranged mop I woke up with.

But I was being cautious, having never done this before.  I started with a #8 all over, then I did a #6 on the sides, then decided I had definitely improved things, so I stopped there.

I also tried to clean up the back of my neck, but I'll have T check/fix that later.

Doesn't look like a professional cut, but it's not bad, so ...

Maybe the next time I have an afternoon to myself at the house I'll try to get a bit fancier, making it tighter on the sides and blending with the top.

second night to self, but at the house :-)

I'm getting a much later start than usual.  First, T didn't leave until after 2pm -- second, I took a nap until 4:30pm -- third, I had to cut my hair --

But I'm glad I took a nap and cut my hair, the nap was wonderful :-)  Another example of how my sleep pattern is all over the place now.

So I wasn't settled and ready to warm up my butt until after 6pm.  But it's a Saturday night and I don't have to go anywhere or do anything tomorrow, except perhaps shovel snow in the afternoon.  Perhaps the nap plus some decaf will have me able to stay up past midnight :-)

Strange how I can think that "only" four hours of buttplay time might not be enough, heh.  I will allow myself to purchase one new toy for the house after this play session, if I feel I'm missing any of the toys at the condo.

Oh, I left the frozen keys at the condo!  So I'm locked without access to the keys, unless I drive downtown.  But I'm probably driving downtown again on Monday, for Maids Day.

When I got back to the house, no T and no Dax -- it was very quiet.  They were on a hike.  In the group chat T sounded grumpy at me and/or B, so I started feeling anxious.  But he got over his texting grump by the time he returned, and we had a pleasant lunch together -- I had another vegetarian meal, trying to do more veggie stuff for delivery meals.

House to Self! :-)

OCD Bug --> countries

OCD Bug is forever entranced by questions like: how many countries are there?  Why are there even countries?  Because there is no definitive answer to these kinds of abstract questions.  What is a country?  There are 194 universally "recognized" countries -- countries that all agree they are all countries, under international diplomatic agreements.  But then there are other candidates for countryhood -- countries that not all the other countries recognize as countries.

Is this 194 number going to be a relatively stable thing over time?  500 years from now there will be around 200 countries, but probably different countries from those we see today, with different territorial lines.

Occasionally I've seen on Twitter animated graphics that show the changes in country names and borders over time, across a continental scale.  How we humans organize ourselves into overlapping and hierarchical groups is always fascinating to OCD Bug.  Oh, Australia is the only country that occupies an entire continent!  And I've written before about how Europe isn't really a continent -- that anybody treats it as a continent is racist, because geographically it simply isn't -- it is part of Eurasia.  White people need their own imaginary continent, though, to feel special.  You yellow people over there live in a separate continent (Asia), because we (European) white people say so!

When I was a little kid, one of my favorite books in the house was an atlas.  I loved poring over that, looking at the borders and railroad lines (this was the early 1970s, heh) and resource symbols.  It had some historical maps showing before and after various wars.  So fascinating to an OCD kid.  While the other kids were outside playing basketball or something, I was exploring maps.

Here I sit wishing we had a more functional and comprehensive world government, looking out for the survival of our individuals, our species, our planet and the species we share it with, the universe, etc.  But we're divided into roughly 200 countries, and many of them are not democracies, so ... creating a world government would be viewed as tyrannical excess, one "country" conquering all the others.  Nationalisms ... hey, we're all humans, the same species, why can't we forget about this country bullshit and just all work together?

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Oh, weird, I went to the Wikipedia article about Africa and it has a button to show the map either with or without national borders.  If I could so easily delete national borders!  Click a virtual button with my trackpad!  Poof!  All borders are gone!

AI as an existential threat?

I don't worry about AI as an existential threat, although many smart people do, because of one essential factor --

Selection pressure doesn't exist for AI.

There's no replicate-or-die evolutionary pressure for AI like there is for us.

AI is just a tool, and it can be a dangerous tool as used by humans, but it's not gonna become some sort of autonomous threat, because that's not how/why it exists.  It's completely domesticated! more than any dog or cat, because we created it.  AI is just humans extending themselves via tools.  AI isn't some independent species that will take over or anything.

But that's OK, I probably also worry about somethings that can't happen.

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I've been listening to the audiobook version of End Times by Bryan Walsh.  Overall I think he's on the alarmist side of the scale, but he brings up a lot of important existential threats and offers solutions to many of them.

I think the next step for me, after embracing Green Communism, is looking for existential threats to our species.  Asteroids, supervolcanoes, pandemics, nukes, bioweapons, aliens, ... but AI -- nah.  I think most of the people who worry about AI are people who have never programmed a computer.  AI is the ultimate submissive -- computer programs do exactly what the programmer tells them to.  You know this if you've ever programmed a computer.  Yeah, there are bugs, things don't always go exactly as planned, but that's not because there's a consciousness inside the machine telling it to do something else.

It's because the programmers made a mistake.  That's all.

Terminator and Wargames were fun movies, but Sentient AI is like FTL or Time Travel -- it's science fiction.  Not reality.  Fantasy.