SL 802

~ Laura

City folks are spreading out far and wide. What happened when they moved to a small town in Vermont?

False negative tests confuse Julia Ioffe, who feels like shit.

I think I need a pouf.

Remote learning is massively screwing over our most vulnerable students.

The buddy who crashed on Jonah’s sofa last weekend just tested positive. And Jonah just threw up. Ugh.

Of course, I care about Donald Trump’s taxes or lack thereof, but does anybody think that it will matter in November? Has anybody established that there was corruption or was it just exploitation of legal loopholes?

Published by Laura

19 thoughts on “SL 802”

  2. The feds are going to be shipping 150 million 15-minute no-lab COVID tests.

    “About 100 million tests, the President said, “will be given to states and territories to support efforts to reopen their economies and schools immediately and (as) fast as they can.”
    And 50 million tests will go “to protect the most vulnerable communities,” including nursing homes, assisted living facilities, hospice care, historically black colleges and tribal nation colleges.”

    150 million tests will go quickly, but it’s going to be very nice to get past the lab testing bottleneck. This should eventually make it possible for all states to open their schools.

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    1. If only your orange moron had done this when it was originally announced in August (or even worked to get this done earlier), rather than whining about how testing only leads to more cases, we might have more schools open now.

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    2. Jay said, “If only your orange moron had done this when it was originally announced in August (or even worked to get this done earlier), rather than whining about how testing only leads to more cases, we might have more schools open now.”

      Jay, you can’t actually manufacture and deliver 150 million lab tests in 24 hours. I’m personally really happy that it looks like they are going to be able to deliver on the August announcement.

      If the tests were available and unused, sure, dish out some blame, but as far as I understand the chronology, the feds ordered a boat-load of these tests as soon as it was available.

      Remember, the FDA only approved the rapid Abbott test in late August, and it took emergency use authorization:

      https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/covid-19-update-fda-authorizes-first-diagnostic-test-where-results-can-be-read-directly-testing-card

      I am not sure about the chronology, but I believe part of the hang-up has been that the rapid tests are less sensitive and miss some positives, so there were some concerns about that, until people started realizing that fast is much more important than accurate for purposes of surveillance testing and reopening, and that lab-testing has been creating a bottle-neck in US testing.

      Oh, and our schools are open, have been open for weeks, and are not exploding with COVID. My younger kids are in private school and are in their 7th week of class, with just one little blip when a 3rd grader got COVID and the class got quarantine. Your schools could be open, too–if K-12 education were actually a priority. And yes, my kids’ school opened with around 15% positivity in the community.

      https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/09/28/florida-schools-reopened-en-mass-feared-covid-surge-hasnt-followed/3557417001/

      “A USA TODAY analysis shows [Florida’s] positive case count among kids ages 5 to 17 declined through late September after a peak in July. Among the counties seeing surges in overall cases, it’s college-age adults – not schoolchildren – driving the trend, the analysis found.”

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      1. Jay, you can’t actually manufacture and deliver 150 million lab tests in 24 hours. I’m personally really happy that it looks like they are going to be able to deliver on the August announcement.

        The University of Illinois (one university in one state) is testing 10,000 people a day. One university, one state. The capacity existed in August or earlier if the government had had the will to make it happen rather than trying to minimize this for political gain.

        This minimization and incompetence is obvious for all to see, save the willfully ignorant.

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      2. Our suburban district opened the following week, so they’re in their 6th week of class now. Here are their current active COVID stats:

        –6 elementary schools, 2 schools with current active COVID cases, 3 active cases total across 6 elementary schools
        –2 intermediate schools, 0 schools with current active cases, 0 active cases total
        –1 middle school (over 1,000 kids plus staff), 4 total active cases
        –1 high school (over 2400 kids plus staff), 4 total active cases

        The middle school and the high school are more concerning than the last time I checked, but the elementary schools and intermediate schools (which are quite a bit smaller than the middle school and the high school) have been consistently good.

        As far as I can see from googling, there have been no all-school closures in our area since the public schools reopened 3-6 weeks ago.

        If we “follow the science,” we’ll at the very least open elementary schools for in-person instruction.

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      3. Can you tell me what “active” case means? I feel like it is a number that goes up and down and I don’t like it as a measure of epidemiology (partially because I can’t compare it to other reports, but also because we need to have numbers about the number of infections).

        How many case counts have there been in your private school (1 out of approximately how many students?)? and in your suburban school district? Does active mean current case (not one, say 2 weeks old), so this district has 11 cases over two weeks/3400+2000? students/staff? If I round up to 10,000 in the population, this would be 110/14days/100K which would be pretty terrible. But, maybe that is the total number of cases over a longer number of weeks?

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      4. I read that USA Today article hopefully but was disappointing in the bottom line — the cases among school age children continued to decline after schools opened, but declined much more rapidly in schools that only started online than in ones that started in person. There are lots of confounds in that number unfortunately (including that schools that started online might have been at higher peaks, that the rates of decline might have been different to start with, and that the rates of decline might have been changing over time).

        I don’t think that we can conclude that following the science means starting K-5 in person yet, but I do think that we should be looking at the science and that some areas are not putting plans forward.

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    3. I’ll believe in the test when they actually arrive. But it would be great to have more frequent testing, and non-lab based testing might be useful in a number of venues.

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    1. The article parses out the issues that might actually be tax fraud but I wish it were a bit more tightly written. I understand these 4 (don’t understand the foreign tax concerns)

      1) the IRS audit dispute over the loss from the Atlantic city casino
      2) the consultant fees (potentially to family members, who didn’t do work or were employees)
      3) the personal deductions (hair cuts, etc.)
      4) legal fees that hid payments and or were for the campaign
      5) the family compound that was declared an investment property

      would these issues change anyone’s mind? who knows. Does the $750 change any minds? even if it was perfectly legal? I admit to looking at that number and thinking there must be zeros missing. I’m currently wondering how he rejected his salary as president? Did he claim it and then donate it back to the government? Or is there a way of just rejecting it?

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      1. Speaking for myself, I think he was mostly exploiting loopholes in the tax system. Our accountant has often mentioned similar strategies to us (my husband has a small photography business as well as his full-time job, plus we rent out our old house).

        For others…. well, people are pretty stupid these days. (I just can’t with the people who think Biden is going to fall asleep at the debate tonight. One of my relatives was freaking out thinking that Biden was looking for an excuse to cancel the debate because he is cognitively disabled. The comments about how “Biden can’t put a full sentence together” would be funny if it wasn’t so scary that these people have been so totally propagandized) So using the $750 number is designed for them. It’s a simple concept that you can repeat over and over again.

        Real tax stuff is complicated, which is why we’re in the situation we’re in.

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      2. Assuming its actually true that he is losing boatloads of money, then its mostly legal. It is remarkable to be as wealthy as he is and not pay any tax but slowly pissing it away on dumb investments can get you there.

        On the other hand, I think plenty of people will care. Especially about the small stuff. You don’t need to know anything about taxes to know that $750 is absurdly and offensively low, or that $70,000 of hair care is outrageous to deduct. Enough to matter at the margins a bit. Then again, I am a tax lawyer who hates Trump, so it’s hard for me to get inside the heads of people whose minds might be changed.

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      3. The NY Times article started a discussion in our house about when you can deduct the travel & personal appearance expenses. Say, for example, can Billy Porter deduct the chandelier hat he wore to the Emmy’s?

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      4. bj, The general rule is that such deductions are not allowed. Here’s one good case write up: https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2011/02/tax-court.html

        Lots of people try to cheat a little on this rule, and get away with it (don’t get me started on the need to increase the IRS enforcement budget) but really none of that stuff is allowed.

        The reason I say it may resonate with voters is that they know they can’t deduct their haircuts, so why should Trump?

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  4. The remote learning article was heartbreaking. And all of the work the remote learning advocates, say in our own school district are doing to try to reach those students like Shemar , isn’t going to work, either. Those students need a space to learn. In our county, where schools are still largely closed, some of them are being served in their shelters or community centers or other spaces, even while the schools are closed.

    The schools keep talking about reaching out to those families to get their voices heard, but I don’t see how that is going to happen when the very problem is that those families don’t have time.

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  5. Apparently, the local vets are not taking new patients. People moved out of the city with their pets. Carpenters are fully engaged, as are landscapers. I just heard a radio ad from a Cape Cod landscape company, advertising for employees to embark on a landscaping career with them. This is usually a quieter season for the Cape, as people head back to their homes elsewhere.

    I have heard that there is a lumber shortage.

    https://www.wcvb.com/article/real-estate-market-booming-on-cape-cod/34168250

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  6. I was just in a ZOOM meeting with a faculty member who has COVID. She says she’s not as sick as her husband. Still working so far. No idea where she got it.

    Yes, definitely a lumber shortage in the upper Midwest.

    Cheers.

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  7. bj, The general rule is that such deductions are not allowed. Here’s one good case write up: https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2011/02/tax-court.html

    Lots of people try to cheat a little on this rule, and get away with it (don’t get me started on the need to increase the IRS enforcement budget) but really none of that stuff is allowed.

    The reason I say it may resonate with voters is that they know they can’t deduct their haircuts, so why should Trump?

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