Another movie clip that explains America.

I wish Fauci would quit and set up his own streaming station where he does daily briefings. I'd chip in $1000. I bet he could raise as much money as he wanted.

Can you imagine if this were a hurricane (it's doing a lot more damage than any hurricane) we would be debating whether or not it's over. That's because we haven't set up our radar yet. We know how to do it. But Trump won't spend the money.

The New York Times ran a detailed piece (with some neat interactive graphics) arguing "cities need to plan for a future of fewer cars, a future in which owning an automobile, even an electric one, is neither the only way nor the best way to get around town..." It asks us to imagine a world where there's suddenly more room for two-way bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and car-free bus lanes. But also looks at our current conundrum: Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment; they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us, taking up way too much physical space to transport too few people... And cars take up space even while they're not in use. They need to be parked, which consumes yet more space on the sides of streets or in garages. Cars take up a lot of space even when they're just looking for parking... New York's drivers are essentially being given enormous tracts of land for their own pleasure and convenience. To add to the overall misery of the situation, though, even the drivers are not especially happy about the whole deal, because despite all the roadway they've been given, they're still stuck in gridlock... "The one thing we know for sure, because we understand geometry, is that if everyone drives, nobody moves," Brent Toderian, the former chief planner for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, told me. Even if you're a committed daily driver, "it's in your best interest for walking, biking and public transit to be as attractive as possible for everyone else — because that means you're going to be able to drive easier..." Instead of fighting a war on cars, Toderian told me, urbanists should fight a war on car dependency — on cities that leave residents with few choices other than cars. Alleviating car dependency can improve commutes for everyone in a city... At the moment, many of the most intractable challenges faced by America's urban centers stem from the same cause — a lack of accessible physical space. We live in a time of epidemic homelessness. There's a national housing affordability crisis caused by an extreme shortage of places to live. And now there's a contagion that thrives on indoor overcrowding. Given these threats, how can American cities continue to justify wasting such enormous tracts of land on death machines?

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Tyler Durden and his alter ego.

Today I learned that Microsoft "has been providing support for the development and building of the PHP programming language on Windows," according to Bleeping Computer. "This support includes developing security patches for PHP and creating native Windows builds." But that's going to change: Microsoft has announced that it will not offer support in 'any capacity' for PHP for Windows 8.0 when it is released... To add some clarity to Microsoft PHP Windows Lead Dale Hirt's post, PHP Release Manager Sara Golemon posted to Reddit explaining that this does not mean PHP 8.0 will not be supported in Windows. It just means that Microsoft will not be the one building and supporting it. "For some possibly missing context, Microsoft runs https://windows.php.net and produces all the official builds of PHP for Windows... This message means Microsoft aren't going to produce official builds for PHP 8 onwards. This message does NOT mean that nobody will." Microsoft has not stated why they will no longer support PHP 8.0, but it could be due to the extensive PHP support already existing in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Microsoft has been actively developing WSL, which allows users to install various Linux distributions that run directly in Windows 10. As these distributions already support PHP 7.4 and will support PHP 8.0 when released, Microsoft may see it as unnecessary to continue supporting a native PHP build in Windows.

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"Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some choice words today on Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) found on select Intel processors," reports Phoronix: In a mailing list discussion stemming from the Phoronix article this week on the compiler instructions Intel is enabling for Alder Lake (and Sapphire Rapids), Linus Torvalds chimed in. The Alder Lake instructions being flipped on in GCC right now make no mention of AVX-512 but only AVX2 and others, likely due to Intel pursuing the subset supported by both the small and large cores in this new hybrid design being pursued. The lack of seeing AVX512 for Alder Lake led Torvalds to comment: I hope AVX512 dies a painful death, and that Intel starts fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on. I hope Intel gets back to basics: gets their process working again, and concentrate more on regular code that isn't HPC or some other pointless special case. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: in the heyday of x86, when Intel was laughing all the way to the bank and killing all their competition, absolutely everybody else did better than Intel on FP loads. Intel's FP performance sucked (relatively speaking), and it matter not one iota. Because absolutely nobody cares outside of benchmarks. The same is largely true of AVX512 now - and in the future... After several more paragraphs, Torvalds reaches his conclusion. "Stop with the special-case garbage, and make all the core common stuff that everybody cares about run as well as you humanly can." Phoronix notes that Torvalds' comments came "just weeks after he switched to AMD Ryzen Threadripper for his primary development rig."

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"Microsoft's LinkedIn was sued by a New York-based iPhone user on Friday for allegedly reading and diverting users' sensitive content from Apple Inc's Universal Clipboard application," reports Reuters. According to Apple's website, Universal Clipboard allows users to copy text, images, photos, and videos on one Apple device and then paste the content onto another Apple device. According to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court by Adam Bauer, LinkedIn reads the Clipboard information without notifying the user. LinkedIn did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment. According to media reports from last week, 53 apps including TikTok and LinkedIn were reported to be reading users' Universal Clipboard content, after Apple's latest privacy feature started alerting users whenever the clipboard was accessed with a banner saying "pasted from Messages..." A LinkedIn executive had said on Twitter last week that the company released a new version of its app to end this practice... According to the complaint, LinkedIn has not only been spying on its users, it has been spying on their nearby computers and other devices, and it has been circumventing Apple's Universal Clipboard timeout.

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One of the best commercials ever. I love great commercials.

Poll: "Which site do you respect most for TV and movie reviews?"

BTW, I'm really crusing through Brockmire. It's depraved, fascinating, well written and acted. It has a couple of awkward moments, but Hank Azaria is a great actor. You totally get lost in the character.

"It might be the next best thing to a coronavirus vaccine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Scientists have devised a way to use the antibody-rich blood plasma of Covid-19 survivors for an upper-arm injection that they say could inoculate people against the virus for months." Using technology that's been proven effective in preventing other diseases such as hepatitis A, the injections would be administered to high-risk health care workers, nursing home patients, or even at public drive-through sites — potentially protecting millions of lives, the doctors and other experts say. The two scientists who spearheaded the proposal — an 83-year-old shingles researcher and his counterpart, an HIV gene therapy expert — have garnered widespread support from leading blood and immunology specialists, including those at the center of the nation's Covid-19 plasma research. But the idea exists only on paper. Federal officials have twice rejected requests to discuss the proposal, and pharmaceutical companies — even acknowledging the likely efficacy of the plan — have declined to design or manufacture the shots, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation... There is little disagreement that the idea holds promise; the dispute is over the timing. Federal health officials and industry groups say the development of plasma-based therapies should focus on treating people who are already sick, not on preventing infections in those who are still healthy... But scientists who question the delay argue that the immunity shots are easy to scale up and should enter clinical trials immediately. They say that until there's a vaccine, the shots offer the only plausible method for preventing potentially millions of infections at a critical moment in the pandemic. "Beyond being a lost opportunity, this is a real head-scratcher," said Dr. Michael Joyner, a Mayo Clinic researcher who leads a program sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration to capitalize on coronavirus antibodies from COVID-19 survivors. "It seems obvious." The use of so-called convalescent plasma has already become widespread. More than 28,000 patients have already received the IV treatment, and preliminary data suggest that the method is safe.

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I want a system where voters have buddies, like sponsors in a 12-step program, who they commit to voting, and they engage on Election Day and make sure they do. They escort each other to vote. We should have drills. What an incredible demonstration that would be.

There's a great scene in the movie Monster where the lead character interviews for a job in a local bank. She's had a hard life, no job history or resume . The bank officer explains:

• "When the beach party is over you don't get to say, you know what, I think now I'd like to have what everyone else has worked their entire life for. It doesn't work that way."

That's the speech the virus is giving to the Republican governors of Texas, Florida, Arizona and all the other states that are collapsing under the weight of the virus after re-opening before they did the hard work of getting the virus under control.

The predictable thing happened. The pandemic exploded.

The analogy to the main character of Monster is pretty close to perfect. The governors may have been naive, as she was, but life doesn't care about that. You have to pay the price before you get the prize.

Charlize Theron in Monster.

The plan

First there's no question the schools will not open in the fall.

We should stop discussing it. It's out of the question. What may happen is they will try to open the schools in a few of the Republican states, and close them within a few days as the rate of infection goes even higher. Cause and effect. You do something stupid and a week later the infections go up, two weeks later the hospitalizations go up and two weeks after that, the death rate goes up.

In this dimension the virus is totally predictable. Opening the schools in a month, with such a high density of infections, is suicidal on both the individual and societal level.

New Covid cases per million.

Here's the plan we would be executing now if we had competent management. I'm not inventing this, it's the protocol the protocol they used in China, Vietnam, Singapore, New York, basically everywhere, to defeat the virus. This was a known method back in March. I heard about it on the Daily podcast.

1. Nationwide lockdown until the rate of new cases is flat and near the baseline.
2. Meanwhile stand up national testing and contact tracing. Open source the data so the public can help analyze it. Also useful for teaching the kids, at home, what's going on.
3. Create a network of places to isolate new infected Americans. Hotels, convention centers, college dorms, schools.
4. Once all that has happened, great, open schools.

Florida

How bad is it out there? Leah in the Florida panhandle writes, "Any state whose residents keep coming to Florida on vacation will keep getting a taste of it. We’re having our busiest tourist season ever this summer. No masks. No social distancing. A fresh batch comes every Saturday to stay a week. Here’s Publix Watercolor, always packed."

Publix in Santa Rosa Beach, FL.

Bottom line: Until you go through the pain, then the hard work of containing the virus, it's suicidal to re-open the schools. Even if the government tells us we have to commit suicide, the people won't do it. We will learn. The disaster will explode, but we will learn.

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: Wells Fargo does not want TikTok on its employees' phones. According to The Information, the financial institution sent its employees a note, telling them to remove the app from corporate devices immediately... A Wells Fargo spokesperson confirmed the company's move to The Information, explaining that it came to the decision due to concerns about TikTok's privacy practices: "We have identified a small number of Wells Fargo employees with corporate-owned devices who had installed the TikTok application on their device. Due to concerns about TikTok's privacy and security controls and practices, and because corporate-owned devices should be used for company business only, we have directed those employees to remove the app from their devices."

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