2:00PM Water Cooler 11/12/2024 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Bird Song of the Day

Northern Mockingbird, Granville Schools Land Lab, Licking, Ohio, United States. “Song.”

In Case You Might Miss…

1. Deploy the Blame Cannons!
2. Boeing avoids liability for Ethiopian MCAS crash in settlement, restarts production but with layoffs.
3. Elite maleficence at ASHRAE, hospitals, and Infection Prevention and Control.
4. More money does buy more happiness.

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

Trump Transition

“Axelrod: Second Trump administration has ‘wholly different feel’” [The Hill]. “‘Say what you will about the direction he wants to take the country but this is a wholly different feel from 2016. Trump is stocking his admin with seasoned loyalists who will not guide, but rather BE guided, by HIM,’ Axelrod posted to the social platform X. ‘People wanted to shake up Washington. For better or worse, they’re [going] to get what they asked for,’ he said.” • The difficulty that administrations have is that they have to administer, and to do that, they need administrators. How many heterodox policy experts are there who actually know where the levers of power are? Commentary:

Tucker’s very public campaign to get Trump to hire heterodox people seems to be losing to Trump’s very public desire for the GOP to like him, a lot of safe picks, so far no wildcards.

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 12, 2024

2024 Post Mortem

From a Republican pollster, but AP Votecast data:

The rundown of which groups swung right & didn’t looks like an intersectional layercake of oppression. 😂

Old, white, married, educated people hold steady, young, nonwhite, single, and non-college educated people zoom right. pic.twitter.com/MU1u0RPDEj

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) November 12, 2024

So, a change election after all.

“Exit Right” [Gabriel Winant, Dissent]. “Just as in 2016, Harris supporters have fallen back on the racism and sexism of American society as an explanation for defeat. No doubt these are hulking obstacles, but they don’t suffice as omnibus explanation…. [But] these are not static phenomena. Trump mobilizes these forces; the task of his opponent is to countermobilize and defeat them. A successful campaign draws on the material of the existing society and assembles it into a portrait of the present and a vision of the future: it does not simply reflect frozen facts of public opinion and common sense but reorganizes them and ultimately produces new forms.” And: “The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters.” And finally: “The demobilization of the Democratic electorate is thus the product of the party’s contradictory character at more than one level. The accountability of the Democrats to antagonistic constituencies produces both rhetorical incoherence—what does this party stand for?—and programmatic self-cancellation. Champions of the domestic rule of law and the rules-based international order, they engaged in a spectacular series of violations of domestic and international law. Promising a new New Deal, they admonished voters to be grateful for how well they were already doing economically. Each step taken by the party’s policymakers in pursuit of one goal imposes a limit in another direction. It is by this dynamic that a decade of (appropriate) anti-Trump hysteria led first to the adoption of parts of Trump’s program by the Democrats, and then finally his reinstallation as president at new heights of public opinion favorability. Nothing better than the real thing.” • With “globalized neoliberal capitalism,” Winant focuses on ideology, not class (i.e., the Democrat base in the PMC). Still, worth reading in full.

* * *

Deploy the Blame Cannons!

Lambert here: In general, the lastest barrages of blame cannonry are better written than the previous hot take emisisons, not sure why. More to come!

“Kamala Fell to the Same Cabal That Destroyed University Presidents” [Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect]. “Time was you had Democrat billionaires, Republican billionaires, and opportunistic bipartisan billionaires. Republicans had the resource extraction guys and the Waltons and anyone who employed enough workers that they needed to bust unions; Democrats had Hollywood and Big Tech; both parties had joint custody of Wall Street. And the billionaires got what they wanted 99.9 percent of the time. This election was different. For all the venal raves the media bestowed upon Kamala Harris’s fundraising prowess, the whales near-universally lined up behind Trump. Of the top ten mega-donors, only the bottom two gave to Democrats; Trump’s haul from his own top ten donors—none of whom boasts the surname Koch or Thiel—amounted to about $945 million; Harris’s topped out at $254 million. (Harris ended up raising more money, thanks to Resistance giving, but Trump got to spend much less time raising it, and with Musk, he had the algorithms on his side.)” And: “At its heart, the billionaire revolt was the expression of a broader dissatisfaction with Joe Biden that was most surely rooted in the real, substantial, and (in the post–Cold War neoliberal era) unprecedented things his administration was quietly (too quietly!) doing for working people, small-business owners, and the proliferating subsistence entrepreneur class that falls somewhere in the middle. It sued Amazon for squeezing sellers to the bone while manipulating prices ever higher, Albertsons and Kroger for conspiring to gouge shoppers by littering the country with dead strip centers where supermarkets once stood, Live Nation for indenturing a generation of young musicians and turning tickets to concerts and sports events into luxury goods, Welsh Carson (the most powerful private equity firm in health care) for gouging hospital patients and suppressing the wages of anesthesiologists in multiple states, and more. It even got a court to label Google a monopolist. This stuff was extremely popular, and Democratic leaders never talked about it, likely because it pissed off the donor class—which is of course the very reason they should have been talking about nothing else.” And: “In any event, though, the billionaires weaponized toxic wokeness to make themselves seem more receptive and in touch with Normal Dudes than the Democrats, who unbeknownst to most Normal Dudes had actually been working tirelessly on behalf of the common man while Joe Biden was preoccupied wringing his hands over why Bibi was being so mean to him.” • I like this piece a lot, but I’m not sure how much I buy “working tirelessly on behalf of the common man,” since I think it proceeds from the very, very low baseline set by Obama. I would never trash the efforts of the Lina Khan and the anti-trusters; they are tireless, but the Democrat Party as a whole? The successful deep-sixing of a million disproportionately working class deaths from Covid tells the tale.

“Kamala Harris ran the Fyre Festival of campaigns” [The Spectator]. “As the finger-pointing begins, and the autopsy of the Kamala Harris campaign continues, financial details are being released on how the Harris campaign managed to blow more than $1 billion in war-chest funds — and not only lose, but get wiped off the electoral map by Donald Trump, who ended his campaign with roughly $488 million. That’s not a Dr. Evil typo: Kamala Harris not only blew a billion dollars, but actually ended up $20 million in debt. Where did the money all go? To celebrities mostly, and elaborate sets and stages. As it turns out, not all of those celebrity “activists” appeared with Kamala Harris because they believed in her or were doing their civic duty by getting engaged. They charged fees — and some were astronomical. Harris made elaborate promises to her crowds about celebrity performances. Crowds were brought in with the promise of seeing Beyoncé perform, only to leave disappointed. It was all a financial ruse, much like the infamous Fyre Festival of 2017… the Harris campaign spent upwards of six figures to build a custom set for her appearance on the Call Me Daddy podcast, which only netted about 800,000 downloads. Meanwhile, Donald Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast — and his interview has got more than 47 million views on YouTube. There were seven swing-state concerts that involved high-priced performers — Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jon Bon Jovi, Ricky Martin and more — who seemingly ended up costing the Harris campaign more than $20 million on event production alone, and reportedly even more on paying the celebrities to appear. Even Oprah Winfrey charged the campaign $1 million to show up. The campaign went so far into debt that the campaign was reportedly forced to scrap Canadian Nineties indie-pop singer Alanis Morissette to save money. The pop concert campaign strategy is said to have been the brainchild of former Obama advisors on the campaign.” • Ironic [chortles]. “Is said to have been” by whom?

* * *

“Why Was There a Broad Drop-Off in Democratic Turnout in 2024?” [New York Times]. “Mr. Trump won the White House not only because he turned out his supporters and persuaded skeptics, but also because many Democrats sat this election out, presumably turned off by both candidates. Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden. The nation’s most Republican-heavy counties turned out an additional 1.2 million votes for Mr. Trump this year, according to the analysis of the 47 states where the vote count is largely complete. The drop-off spanned demographics and economics. It was clear in counties with the highest job growth rates, counties with the most job losses and counties with the highest percentage of college-educated voters. Turnout was down, too, across groups that are traditionally strong for Democrats — including areas with large numbers of Black Christians and Jewish voters. The decline in key cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, made it exceptionally difficult for Ms. Harris to win the battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania.” And:

In Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize on the battleground map, . Ms. Harris won these counties, but not by the margins needed to overcome Republican-heavy areas of the state. Total turnout was down from 2020 in all five Democratic strongholds, which could partly explain how Ms. Harris received 78,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes to his total in these same counties.

Holy moley! And it’s the same story in other swing states. What a debacle.

“The common national experience that explains Trump’s 2024 gains” [Ronald Brownstein, CNN]. “But the scale of Trump’s advance this year points toward a common national experience in all regions of the country — a shared disappointment in the results generated by President Joe Biden’s administration…. But since then, [UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavrec] said, the similarly uniform shift away from Trump in 2020 — and then back toward him in 2024 — points toward voter assessments of performance, rather than big further ideological shifts, as the main driver of the results. Just as Trump, as the incumbent, suffered from a negative verdict on his performance in 2020, Harris, as the quasi-incumbent successor to Biden, suffered from a negative verdict on the president’s performance four years later.” • Throw the bums out!

“In the Race for the Presidency, GOP Turnout Declined, Democratic Turnout Collapsed” [Daily Yonder]. “Donald Trump won the popular vote and the presidency by getting nearly as many votes this year as he did in 2020, while Democratic turnout – especially in major cities – collapsed, a Daily Yonder analysis of preliminary election returns shows. Kamala Harris got 12 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020, a decline of 15%, according to a preliminary analysis of 46 states. Trump, meanwhile, lost only 1 million votes, compared to his 2020 returns, a decline of less than 2%.” • Handy chart, broken down by county type:

* * *

“Even Fox News Saw a Close 2024 Election. Then the Voting Data Came In” [Variety]. “‘At 5 p.m., the most likely outcome was a very close election,’ says Arnon Mishkin, who has directed Fox News’ decision desk for years. ‘Different people looked at the data and said this could tilt Trump and this could tilt Harris.’ Within hours, however, a different story was unspooling — and viewers of Fox News were early to hear it being told. Fox News was able to call many states earlier than many of its competitors, including a critical loss by the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania in the wee hours of the morning that largely decided the race in favor of Trump.How so? The company made a big investment in new voter technology last decade that relies less on exit polls, and more on on-the-ground data from each state.” • I ran into a similar problem in my own (not to be pompous) methodology; I didn’t prepare readers for the scope of Trump’s victory, e.g. winning all swing states. I wrote that up yesterday, but started with a metaphor about the death of Saruman, which I butchered, out of haste. I have since corrected it, and readers who were justifibly confused can read what I meant to say here (which I feel is important or I wouldn’t be harping on it).

* * *

“Judge delays Trump immunity decision in NY hush money case” [The Hill]. “A New York judge delayed a Tuesday decision on whether President-elect Trump’s conviction can withstand the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, following his election victory last week. Judge Juan Merchan agreed to freeze the case until Nov. 19, newly public court records show, enabling prosecutors to respond to Trump’s demand the case be dismissed entirely now that he is president-elect. Trump’s sentencing, which would be the first of any former president, is scheduled for Nov. 26. He was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment made to porn actor Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election to conceal an affair, which he denies. Trump’s attorneys believe his election as president compels the dismissal of his criminal prosecutions. ‘The stay, and dismissal, are necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern,’ Trump attorney Emil Bove wrote in an email to the judge.” • Maybe Trump could make a short jail stay work for him, carrying on the stellar work he did at McDonald’s and driving the garbage truck. Merchan could send him to jail for a day, to underline respect for the process blah blah blah, and Trump would enter Rikers — in an orange jumpsuit, naturally — to a cheering throng of inmates and guards, and then Merchan could put him on probation, and everybody could stand down and forget about this farrago of bad law and political prosecution.

Democrats en Déshabillé

“The model exactly predicted the most likely election map” [Nate Silver]. But that’s not the interesting part. In a footnote: “I essentially got to perform a randomized control trial on how partisans in both camps reacted to good and bad news. And there was an asymmetry. Republicans are generally happy when you agree with them partway or half the time. Admittedly, the sorts of Republicans who encounter our work are not a representative sample, probably being on the moderate side — though you can find plenty of Trump supporters in the Silver Bulletin comments section. Democrats, however — and here, I’m not referring so much to Silver Bulletin subscribers but in the broader universe online — often get angry with you when you only halfway agree with them. And I really think this difference in personality profiles tells you a little something about why Trump won: Trump was happy to take on all comers, whereas with Democrats, disagreement on any hot-button topic (say, COVID school closures or Biden’s age) will have you cast out as a heretic. That’s not a good way to build a majority, and now Democrats no longer have one.” • Democrats, as we would expect, are doubling down on this behavior: There’s a concerted effort to move high(er)-traffic accounts off Twitter onto Blue Sky, as if the world needed more Democrat embubblement than it already has. Further, for all its many faults, Elon Musk’s hell-site still has a very functional Covid-conscious community, which these trolls would end up splitting, not that such a thing would matter to them. Brunch at Blue Sky!

“The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself.” [Pete Davis, The Nation]. The deck: “The party should jettison its consultant class and move toward a local-membership model that would help to rejuvenate civic life across the country.” More: “Here’s one sketch of how we could begin to turn this around: The 4 Ms of party membership, each symbolic of a necessary mindset shift. First, Membership Cards. When you join the Labour Party in Britain, you get mailed a welcome packet, complete with a membership card and information about how to get more involved. The Democratic Party could learn from this: It should mean something to join the Democrats. … Second, Maps. There should be an accountable Democratic captain for every neighborhood in the country…. Third, Meeting Halls. Monthly meetings should be designed with utmost care. Best practices for making meetings, working groups, and annual calendars warm and engaging should be gathered and disseminated. Formal rules and procedures should not be fetishized at the expense of engaging new members. … Finally, Mutual Aid. The party should directly care for members and for the broader community. Democrats should do disaster relief, take on homeless-shelter shifts, cook food when members have a baby, welcome new immigrants to town, and host block parties throughout the year. … This is all easier dreamed than realized. Fostering a culture of membership is a long-haul project—more like the planting of acorns than the planting of sunflower seeds.” • Dude. When Labour UK becmae a membership organization, they got Jeremy Corbyn, and who wants that?

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

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 (wastewater); 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, KF, KidDoc, 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!

Airborne Transmission: H5N1

“Dependence of aerosol-borne influenza A virus infectivity on relative humidity and aerosol composition” [Frontiers in Microbiology]. They have a fancy new machine: “We describe a novel biosafety aerosol chamber equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation for bubble-bursting aerosol generation, size distribution measurement, and condensation-growth collection to minimize sampling artifacts when measuring virus infectivity in aerosol particles.” Interestingly: “Despite decades of research, there remains great difficulty in identifying and understanding the factors that control the spread of influenza epidemics, which occur each year in both hemispheres. In this study, we aimed to simulate exhalation, airborne residence, and re-inhalation of IAV-containing particles as accurately as possible. As an initial step, we specifically used purely saline aerosol particles to avoid the complexity of natural matrices. We revealed large discrepancies between aerosol-borne viruses and previous microliter droplet experiments performed with similar matrices. The discrepancies between aerosol and deposited droplet experiments need to be explained in order to obtain a reliable model for aerosol transmission.” • Thanks, droplet dogmatists.

Maskstravaganza

Smile Nazis in music:

There should be only music spreading in the air, not Covid.

— Adam Wong (@Engineer_Wong) November 8, 2024

Testing and Tracking: H5N1

“Bird flu infections in farmworkers are going undetected, study shows” [STAT]. “[CDC] findings, published Thursday, suggest that a small but not insignificant number of H5N1 infections are going undetected among people who work with dairy cows. Blood samples taken from 115 farm workers in Michigan and Colorado over the summer found evidence of a recent infection in eight individuals — half of whom recalled being ill around the same time the cows were sick. The other half could not recall having any symptoms.” Serological surveys. More: “In response to the new data, the CDC is now recommending that any farm workers who were exposed to infected animals be tested for H5N1, whether or not they have symptoms. Previously, the agency advised that only individuals who had been exposed and had symptoms be tested. The purpose of this expansion is to intensify case-finding efforts, so that even workers with mild or unnoticeable infections can be offered treatment and isolation. The CDC is also recommending that Tamiflu be offered to any individuals on a farm with infected animals who’ve had a high-risk exposure — like being splashed with milk from a dairy cow or participating in a culling operation on a poultry farm — without adequate personal protective equipment. The CDC’s study found that all eight people with H5N1 antibodies had reported cleaning milking parlors, and most reported milking cows. None of them reported wearing respiratory protection and fewer than half wore eye protection.”

Elite Maleficence

“ASHRAE Standard 62: tobacco industry’s influence over national ventilation standards” [Tobacco Control]. BMJ 2002 (!). From the Abstract: ” The tobacco industry has been involved in the development of ventilation standards for over 20 years. It has successfully influenced the standard and continues to attempt to change the standard from a smoke-free framework into an “accommodation” framework. The industry acts directly and through consultants and allies. The major health groups have been largely absent and the health interests have been poorly represented in standard development. While concentrated in the USA, ASHRAE standards are adopted worldwide.” • Commentary:

“Learned and Unlearned Lessons in Quality and Safety From Hospitals’ COVID-19 Burdens” (Invited Commentary) [JAMA]. “[S]till absent from the peer-reviewed literature is a discussion of the importance of hospital quality performance reporting and benchmarking in times of crisis as a mechanism to ensure safety. Hospitals in the US were effectively relieved of their obligations to provide high-quality pandemic-era care when pay-for-performance programs, rankings, and ratings . The findings of Metersky et al demonstrate that quality and safety data are needed more than ever during times of crisis. This would allow patients and payers to understand which hospitals have resilient systems in order to make informed decisions about where they choose to receive and fund health care.” Fortunately: “With hospital-specific COVID-19 admissions data from HHS coupled with patient-level Medicare or other electronic health record or claims data, it is still possible to recreate the unreported pandemic-era quality outcomes benchmarks to identify resilient hospitals, systems, and processes during surge capacity. In fact, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ FY 2025 Inpatient Prospective Payment System Proposed Rule will extend the COVID-19 admissions data to include data for all respiratory illnesses.”

IPC = Infection Prevention and Control. I apologize for the length, but it occurred to me that if any readers end up in hospital, the highlighted methods of infection provide a really good checklist:

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

Antitrust: “How Albertsons Kills Rural Grocers with Land Use Restrictions” [Matt Stoller, BIG]. “[S]upermarket executives see rural markets as particularly easy to monopolize, because there is often just one store. They even have a name, “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zones,” according to one executive on the stand. Of course that makes sense, we’d expect firms to maximize profits where they can. One might be tempted to say, well, there are some towns that can’t support more than one store. And that might be true, except that there are several examples of supermarket chains using tactics in such towns to thwart the opening of competition. How? Well, they find a way to dominate the existing plots of land and buildings suitable for such a store. In June, for instance, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who is also litigating against the merger, fined Albertsons $25,000 for imposing a land use restriction on a store it sold in 2018 in a low-income section of Bellingham, Washington. As part of the sale, the supermarket giant put a requirement on the deed that no grocery store could open there until 2038. Ferguson found this provision was a violation of the state antitrust law. These kinds of land use restrictions are likely common. A few months ago, I got an email from an economist focused on rural areas, who explained how Albertsons abuses its market power in a series of small skiing towns in rural California using a similar strategy.”

Manufacturing: “Boeing reaches settlement to avert civil trial in 2019 Max crash” [Straits Times]. “The crash of the Ethiopian Airlines plane killed 157 people. The trial was set to begin on Nov 12 in Chicago. It originally involved six plaintiffs but until now all but one had settled, according to a source familiar with the case. The hearing on Nov 12 will take place to inform Judge Jorge Alonso of the settlement, who must approve the deal for it to be officially settled, the source said. ‘It is a damage-only trial, meaning no evidence regarding the liability of Boeing will be presented,’ the source told AFP.” • Too bad.

Manufacturing: “Boeing Got The Easy Part Done. Now Comes The Tougher, Existential Problems” [Seattle Medium]. “Boeing is America’s largest exporter, and therefore very exposed to any trade war. China is the largest global market for new aircraft purchases, with Boeing forecasting that China’s fleet of commercial jets will double in the next 20 years. The aircraft maker has been down this road before. The company’s sales to China ground to a near-halt in 2017 as trade tensions between the two countries escalated during Trump’s first term. Orders from Chinese buyers fell from 64 in 2016 to 51 in 2017 to zero in both 2018 and 2019. A similar drop could occur if a new trade war breaks out. ‘We really don’t know what Trump will do with Chinese tariffs,’ said Richard Aboulafia, managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, an industry consultant. ‘But if he slaps 60% tariffs on all Chinese goods, the quickest way for China to retaliate is to switch to (Boeing rival) Airbus for 100% of its needs.’ Boeing has seen a modest resumption of sales and deliveries to China recently, with 20 orders in 2021 and 15 in 2023. So far this year it has 53 deliveries to China, up from 35 in the four previous years combined.”

Manufacturing: “Employees across Boeing face sweeping layoffs this week” [Seattle Times]. “Boeing employees will learn Wednesday who will lose their jobs in mid-January in the round of layoffs Boeing announced last month. The cuts will be broadly spread across the company and, despite some expectations earlier, engineers and production workers won’t be exempt…. But a Boeing senior engineering manager in St. Louis said the cuts in the works target a roughly 10% reduction across the engineers supporting military programs, including the F-15 and F/A-18 jet fighters and the Navy’s P-8 submarine hunter, which is built in Renton with military systems installed in Seattle. Those engineering organizations will shrink, said the manager, who asked not to be identified to protect his job. “If the idea in Kelly’s mind is cutting overhead and programs will not be impacted, that’s not what’s happening.’…. Still, it’s clear non-front-line positions will suffer bigger losses. And white-collar staff working remotely may be particularly targeted as Ortberg tries to get the workforce connected and aligned with his new direction. A manager of a small team of about 15 people, all working remotely — and ironically focused on ways to improve efficiency in program management — told one employee to expect a 30% cut in his team. ‘If we are not holding a wrench, if we’re considered overhead, it’s about 30%,’ said the employee, who also asked not to be identified to protect his job. The reduction for ‘people working on planes might be less than 5%.’”

Manufacturing: “Boeing delivers fewest planes since 2020, warns factory restart after strike will take weeks” [CNBC]. “As the workers return, Boeing has to assess potential hazards, restate machinist duties and safety requirements, and ensure that all training qualifications are current, a spokesman said. ‘It’s much harder to turn this on than it is to turn it off,’ CEO Kelly Ortberg said during the company’s quarterly call last month. ‘So it’s absolutely critical that we do this right.’”

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 69 Greed (previous close: 67 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 47 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 12 at 1:49:44 PM ET.

Photo Book

“Leaving and Waving” [Deanna Dikeman]. “For 27 years, I took photographs as I waved good-bye and drove away from visiting my parents at their home in Sioux City, Iowa. I started in 1991 with a quick snapshot, and I continued taking photographs with each departure. I never set out to make this series. I just took these photographs as a way to deal with the sadness of leaving. It gradually turned into our good-bye ritual. And it seemed natural to keep the camera busy, because I had been taking pictures every day while I was there. These photographs are part of a larger body of work I call Relative Moments, which has chronicled the lives of my parents and other relatives since 1986. When I discovered the series of accumulated “leaving and waving” photographs, I found a story about family, aging, and the sorrow of saying good-bye. In 2009, there is a photograph where my father is no longer there. He passed away a few days after his 91st birthday. My mother continued to wave good-bye to me. Her face became more forlorn with my departures. In 2017, my mother had to move to assisted living. For a few months, I photographed the good-byes from her apartment door. In October of 2017 she passed away. When I left after her funeral, I took one more photograph, of the empty driveway. For the first time in my life, no one was waving back at me.”

Zeitgeist Watch

“Why Close Reading is An Essential Part of Literary Translation” [Literary Hub]. “Reading—’this fruitful miracle of communication in the bosom of solitude,’ as Proust called it in a translator’s preface— is miraculously and mysteriously neither objective nor subjective, neither purely taking something in nor purely revealing or expressing what’s inside oneself. It is a complex interplay of the self and the world, analogous to perception—we see what’s really there in the world, but we see it, and it’s there in our world, the environment we move in and care about, which is different from the environment of any other person or animal in the same physical space.” • Take that, influencers!

Class Warfare

“The ‘Happiness Plateau’ Doesn’t Exist” [Bloomberg]. “[T]he latest academic work chips away at the idea that there is a plateau, just as previous academic work chipped away at the idea of happy peasants and miserable bourgeois. Matthew Killingsworth, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, has amassed a sample of more than one million real-time reports of experienced well-being in the US (compiled by getting people to report their day-to-day well-being on their smartphones). In a 2021 paper he studied 33,000 people who provided such real-time evidence and discovered three things: that there is no evidence of a divergence between evaluative and real-time well-being; that real-time well-being rises linearly with income and, third, that the slope is just as steep above $80,000 a year as below. The idea of a happiness plateau is for the birds: Higher incomes are clearly associated with both feeling better on a day-to-day basis and being more satisfied with your life overall. What about people who earn well above $80,000? In a new paper Killingsworth compares the reported life-satisfaction of his sample of 33,000 Americans with a wide variety of incomes with the reported life-satisfaction of two groups of ultra-wealthy individuals: millionaires from around the world and members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. His conclusions are well-summarized in the title of his study: ‘Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence against Satiation.’ Truly wealthy people are significantly happier than the highest earners in the ordinary income group if you take ‘life satisfaction’ as a meaningful measure of happiness. Moreover, the happiness gap between truly wealthy people and middle-income earners is three times as large as the happiness gap between middle and low-income groups. We not only get happier as we move from the middle-income herd to the Succession crowd, but we get a lot happier. Killingsworth’s study is not perfect: There is such a shortage of evidence about the well-being of the truly wealthy that one of the studies he relies on, of the Forbes 400, dates from 1985 (the other is from 2018). But never has the phrase ‘more research is required’ sounded more attractive.” • If there were in fact a happiness plateau, would there not also tend to be a capital accumulation plateau for capitalist owners? There doesn’t seem to be.

Alert reader JM forwards this sugarpack from Spain:

JM writes: “Reading the discussion about Angus Deaton in today’s (11/11/24) Water Cooler, I thought of a photo I snapped on a recent trip to Spain. Interesting to order a coffee and find this on my sugar packet….”

News of the Wired

That’s not gonna make peer review any easier:

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 MR:

MR writes: “A photo of an ‘offering’ that I and a few friends made on September 29 as part of a birthday ritual for me. Note the cupcakes, which we eventually ate.”

Kind readers, thanks to those who instantly responded! However, my queue for plant images is still short, and that always makes me queasy. Do you have an images to send in, especially of autumn produce or winter projects? Thank you!

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