2:00PM Water Cooler 2/19/2025 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether.

Bird Song of the Day

Brown Thrasher, Cherry, Nebraska, United States. “Valentine National Wildlife Refuge – Little Hay Road Wildlife Drive. About 4.5 km east and south from the intersection with State Spur 16b. Marsh on one side, sand hills on the other. About 200 m from open water. ID’d by Sight & Sound; ID confidence 100%.” There is a nice counterpoint from the march: maybe insects, maybe frogs.

In Case You Might Miss…

1. Court filing: DOGE website claims another victim.
2. Myopia epidemic: literally!
3. Pseudo-science in machine learning.

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 Administration

Trump caves to The Blob:

JUST IN:

Trump to Zelensky:

“You should have never started the WAR” pic.twitter.com/uysZhg9Fdo

— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) February 19, 2025

Trump erases the Maidan Coup, hence Nuland, her cookies, and all the spook scheming that laid the groundwork for the war. (If I’m right, USAID will be the last axe swung at The Blob, and that was driven by (a) conservative irritable mental gestures on foreign aid and (b) programs that looked like they were designed by bleeding heart liberals or, worse, DEI. Note that in the now-forgotten USAID imbroglio, nobody who was anybody mentioned the role of USAID as a CIA cutout. And Trump just closed the door on that.

“Sweeping safety-net cuts have GOP centrists questioning Johnson’s budget” [Politico]. “Johnson’s most immediate problem comes from swing-district Republicans who believe that the steep spending cuts Johnson wants across Medicaid, food assistance and other safety-net programs for low-income Americans could cost them their seats — and Johnson his razor-thin GOP majority. ‘I don’t know where they’re going to get the cuts,’ said Rep. David Valadao, who represents a heavily Democratic district in central California, as he left the Capitol on Thursday. The House Budget Committee cleared the fiscal blueprint for the massive policy bill on a party-line vote late Thursday night, and Johnson intends to bring it to the floor when the House returns from recess later this month. But with a two-vote majority, Johnson has virtually no room for error. And opposition from members like Valadao could force him and committee chairs to go back to the drawing board.” • Who wants to bet some Democrat centrists will help out Johnson? Commentary:

Trump said in an interview last night: “Medicare, Medicaid — none of that stuff is going to be touched.”

Today he endorsed the House plan to slash billions from Medicaid. https://t.co/1pDBdEHnIE https://t.co/cE9JcY03wF

— Alice Miranda Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) February 19, 2025

“Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies” [Whitehouse.gov]. The long-awaited unitary executive, which includes the following interesting section:

We’d all been anticipating the demise of Humphrey’s Executor; but Marbury vs. Madison?

One of the occasional pieces of good news:

JUST NOW: By keeping in place the 2023 Merger Guidelines formulated under @linamkhan and AAG Kanter, @CNBC says the Trump Admin “put themselves on the side of the American worker.”

“That’s not something a lot of people on Wall Street expected.” pic.twitter.com/j47euunhPj

— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) February 19, 2025

I thought Bessent was supposed to be this low-key, stable, smart “safe pair of hands” at Treasury. Then he hands the keys to the DOGEbags. Then this:

Since the start of COVID, 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue’s Gallatin Entrance – front door of historic Main Treasury – has been closed. Today, for the first time in almost 5 years, we opened those doors. America is back! Another sign of the Golden Age!

— Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) February 19, 2025

OK, OK, who doesn’t love a little pandering? But from the Secretary of the Treasury? Here’s another one–

“Bessent: Trump “Could Win The Nobel Peace Prize” For His Plan To Rebuild Ukraine, If It Were Fairly Awarded” [RealClearPolitcs]. • This is bizarre. Did somebody leave a horse’s head in his bed?

DOGE

“DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million” [New York Times]. And the deck: “The biggest single line item on the website of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team included a big error.” That darn website! Who could have known ***cough*** it would have included a massive error? “. A loss of $8 billion in savings would represent nearly 15 percent of the total savings claimed by DOGE.” • There’s already been a massive cloud of dust raised around this:

No, no, no.
The original contract was erroneously entered into the FPDS database at $8billion. In January, somebody updated the records with the correct value of $8million. The contract was $8million either way, it just was entered wrong into the FPDS database.

Thus, Musk did… https://t.co/KEWl8BeOXk

— Robert Graham (@ErrataRob) February 19, 2025

But the obvious point to me seems to be this: Why isn’t the DOGE website put on git, so we can track changes and who’s responsible for them? The DOGEbags are suppposed to be “supergeniuses,” per Co-President Trump, so they must have thought of this. So why didn’t they do it?

* * *

“Tens of millions of dead people aren’t getting Social Security checks, despite Trump and Musk claims” [Associated Press]. “The Trump administration is falsely claiming that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments. Over the past few days, President Donald Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said on social media and in press briefings that people who are 100, 200 and even 300 years old are improperly getting benefits — a ‘HUGE problem,’ Musk wrote, as his Department of Government Efficiency digs into federal agencies to root out waste, fraud and abuse…. Part of the confusion [deliberate obfuscation] comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type. This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.” NOTE See Water Cooler yesterday and the extremely useful comments; this is plausible, but not proven to be correct. More: “The news organization WIRED first reported on the use of COBOL programming language at the Social Security Administration. Additionally, a series of reports from the Social Security Administration’s inspector general in March 2023 and July 2024 state that the agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits. The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upward of $9 million. A July 2023 Social Security OIG report states that ‘almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.’ And, as of September 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old. Chuck Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said, ‘Two cheers for Elon Musk if he can root out and put a stop to improper payments.’ Blahous said.” • The Mercatus Center isn’t exactly a liberal hotbed, so if they say Elon’s full of it, he is. One can only wonder why the focus on Social Security; I’m with Cheese on this one. Elon is just waving some screen dumps some random DOGEbag gave him and screaming fraud. But whoever made the screen dumps didn’t understand the data, and so the screen dumps are useless (unless their sole purpose be that Elon can wave them around, not unlikely). It takes a level of effort to understand these systems — both business logic and programming — and DOGE hasn’t had the time, the skills, the headcount, or, dare I say, the inclination to do it. A useful comment from Reddit:

I know this story is hard to follow, and the non-technical may be inclined to file it under “He said, she said.” I implore you to file it under “Ghost of Kiev” because Elon lies shamelessly and constantly. It doesn’t help matters that the sort of data analysts who understand these systems tend to be careful and slow in their assessments, so Elon and his fan base run rings around them on the Twitter. Say, would any recently terminated employee at Social Security or Treasury like to throw some COBOL over the transom? We’d love to read it, and are experienced at preserving anonymity (from the foreclosure crisis).

* * *

“Elon Musk mulls giving Americans a $5,000 check based on DOGE savings” [Fortune]. “Elon Musk says he ‘will check with the President’ about an idea to issue refund checks from DOGE savings. Those checks could be as much as $5,000 per household if the department hits its $2 trillion savings goal. But there are some major hurdles that could scuttle the idea. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force claims to be slashing the federal budget, which would ease the federal deficit. But now Musk is exploring the idea of using some of that money to send rebate checks to citizens. In a post on Twitter/X Tuesday afternoon, Musk said he would escalate the idea of a ‘DOGE Dividend,’ saying ‘will check with the President.’ The post came in a reply to a suggestion by James Fishback, the CEO and cofounder of right-leaning investment firm Azoria. (The company last year launched an anti-woke ETF that excluded companies that prioritize DEI hiring.) By Fishback’s calculations, if DOGE reaches its target of $2 trillion in savings (a number that includes most of the government’s discretionary spending and which Musk himself has backtracked from in the past month), a 20% cut of that distributed to Americans would work out to $5,000 per household. The checks, he proposes, would be sent after DOGE expires next July. DOGE, on its website, has claimed to create $55 billion in savings so far. Numerous media reports, however, have shown discrepancies in that figure, such as a New York Times story pointing out one claim of an $8 billion savings was only an $8 million one. Additionally, many of the claims made by DOGE include no documentation to back up their savings boasts.” • Of course, President Musk has a ways to go: $55 billion is 2.75% of $2 trillion (it’s like DOGEbags don’t understand that government is big. Nor can they count. Of course, AI can’t count, so that DOGEbags can’t should come as no surprise). NOTE I’m sure there’s a name for this kind of con, where the proposition put to the mark is “I’ll give you $100 now if you’ll give up the rights to your pension later.”

* * *

“USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is now trying to rehire them” [NBC News]. “Although several positions supporting [bird flu efforts] were notified of their terminations over the weekend, we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,” a USDA spokesperson said in a statement. ‘USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions, and we are continuing to hire the workforce necessary to ensure the safety and adequate supply of food to fulfill our statutory mission… The error is the latest in the Trump administration’s attempts to rapidly shrink the size of the government by conducting mass firings of federal workers — an effort that is being carried out by tech billionaire Elon Musk and the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, which is heavily staffed by people who have no experience in government.” • Plot twist: What if — hear me out — the DOGEbags weren’t really supergeniuses at all, but were brain-damaged by repeated Covid infections? And nobody around them in Silicon Valley noticed. For some reason.

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, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

Airborne Transmission

As readers know, I’ve never been a fan of UV, partly because of the ick factor, but also because I think a lot of people will stick a blue light in a socket and call it good. However, Far-UVC advocates have been plugging away, and I’m not insensible to the case they’re making:

In addition, what with wildfire smoke and H5N1 being carried along by dust in the breeze, I think my Swiss Cheese Model might need another layer of protection. Have any readers had success with Far-UVC?

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

Housing: “United States Housing Starts” [Trading Economics]. “Housing starts in the United States slumped 9.8% month-over-month to an annualized 1.366 million in January 2025, down from December’s 10-month high of 1.515 million and missing market forecasts of 1.4 million. Severe snowstorms and frigid temperatures disrupted construction activity, while any potential rebound may be constrained by rising costs from import tariffs and persistently high mortgage rates.”

Manufacturing: “This New Airbus Jet Is Bad News for Boeing” [Wall Street Journal]. “Airbus has a new jet that’s winning over some of Boeing’s best customers. It also raises the specter of more trouble ahead for the U.S. plane maker. The European company started delivering the new aircraft—the A321XLR—late last year against a backdrop of manufacturing upheaval and financial strain at its American rival. So far the XLR has racked up more than 500 orders, many from airlines looking to replace older Boeing planes. The jet’s success is one of the starkest signs yet of the diverging fortunes of the two companies, with Boeing’s troubles leading to gaps in its product lineup that are now being exploited by Airbus. It is also a warning of a bigger threat looming: While Boeing is strapped for cash, Airbus is increasingly investing in an entirely new generation of aircraft that could shape the duopoly for decades to come. American Airlines and United Airlines have chosen Airbus’s XLR to replace their aging Boeing 757 fleets. Other airlines including Australia’s Qantas have also purchased the XLR—the first time that carrier has ordered one of Airbus’s smaller, narrow-body jets. Central to the XLR’s appeal is a giant fuel tank behind the wings that means the aircraft can carry up to 220 passengers on trips as long as 11 hours. That is far longer than typical narrow-body jets, allowing airlines to open up new direct routes—including across the Atlantic—without needing to sell as many tickets as they would with a bigger, wide-body plane.” • How odd that Boeing’s financial engineers couldn’t come up with the idea of a giant fuel tank…

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 49 Fear (previous close: 48 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 42 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 19 at 3:03:28 PM ET.

Zeitgeist Watch

“The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal” [Harvard Business Review]. Remember yesterday I ran the recommendation that professionals take notes or keeo a diary? Here is the executive version: “Being a CEO can be a lonely job–there is no obvious person in whom to confide. Keeping a journal can fill that void, by giving a new leader a chance for structured reflection of recent past events and decisions, and mental rehearsal for future ones.” • Totally nothing to do with papering up one’s decision-making process (“Dear Diary, Today I signed off on the MCAS system. It seems crazy, but our engineering staff assures me it’s totally liable, I mean reliable. Also, Mom called.”)

“We’re in a short-sightedness epidemic – and we never saw it coming” [The Telegraph]. Literal. not metaphorical. “The global myopia rate tripled between 1990 and 2023, according to a recent study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. The World Health Organization predicts that by 2050, half of the world will need glasses and 10 per cent will be high myopic, which carries severe risks of complications and even blindness…. Ocular diseases include cataracts, glaucoma, and the two that cause the experts most concern. One is retinal detachment, which is when vitreous fluid – the jelly inside your eyeballs – begins to leak and pushes the retina away at the back, ‘a bit like a bubble in wallpaper’ as a leaflet from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London helpfully puts it…. Amid a ‘substantial’ increase in retinal detachment surgery, the hospital recently reported a sharp increase in the proportion of myopes undergoing the treatment – from less than 10 per cent in 2012 to more than 40 per cent in 2023 – with the steepest rise among younger patients. ‘If your retina detaches, you lose vision,’ explains Dr Annegret Dahlmann-Noor, the paediatric ophthalmologist who led the Moorfields study. ‘It starts in the periphery and moves towards the centre and if it gets to the point where it affects your central vision, then usually recovery is not complete. We’ve seen some teenagers and people in their early 20s present with retinal detachments. It’s a trend we can see.’ The other condition that ‘really destroys’ your vision, as she puts it, is macular degeneration. This is now the leading cause of blindness in working age people in China….” And: ‘And here there are two factors of particular concern. One is that children are not spending nearly as much time in daylight as they need to. Daylight is thought to stimulate the release of dopamine in the retina which inhibits eyeball growth. Given that we evolved as an outdoor species but now spend around 90 per cent of our lives indoors (that’s more time than the average whale spends underwater by the way) the idea that our eyes are struggling to cope with our low-light interiors isn’t so surprising. The other factor is that children are spending too long engaged in ‘near-work’ ie concentrating on things too close to their face and thus squeezing their eyeballs into the wrong shape from an early age. Since myopia develops while the eyeball is still growing, the crucial window is in childhood. Hence the standard advice for children is known as the 20/20/2 rule: for every 20 minutes of near-work, spend 20 seconds focusing on something in the distance; and most importantly, spend two hours outside each day. Also, go and get your eyes tested.” • Screens are the myopia of the people. The rich keep their children away from screens, so they, at least, will not be going blind.

Photo Book

Sadly, the ravishing black and white tones aren’t really captured on screen:

I “discovered” Kertész, IIRC, in one of those square books with white hardcovers Aperture published; I worked through most of them in a Harvard Square bookstore (now a bank, for pity’s sake. “First” something or other. Never bank at a bank called “First”).

Gallery

Alert reader Lunker Walleye writes: I don’t see the comment box today but wanted to respond to the Bonnard Nanny La Promenade painting.

It is one of four similar paintings on top of a four-panel screen. Here’s a link:

News of the Wired

“The reanimation of pseudoscience in machine learning and its ethical repercussions” [Cell]. From 2024. A must read for the AI space. This caught my eye: “A recent surge of deep learning-based studies have claimed the ability to predict unobservable latent character traits, including homosexuality, political ideology, and criminality, from photographs of human faces or other records of outward appearance, including Alam et al., Chandraprabha et al., Hashemi and Hall, Kabir et al., Kachur et al., Kosinski et al., Mindoro et al., Parde et al., Peterson et al., Mujeeb Rahman and Subashini, Reece and Danforth, Su et al., Tsuchiya et al., Verma et al., Vrskova et al., and Wang and Kosinski. In response, government and industry actors have adapted such methods into technologies deployed on the public in the form of products such as Faception, Hirevue, and Turnitin. [Ouch!], the prospects of ML have renewed scientific interest in the subject. Much like historical forays into this domain, this new wave of physiognomy, resurrected and yet not, apparently, sufficiently rebranded, has faced harsh criticism on both ethical and epistemic grounds.” • Readable, and worth reading in full.

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 anahuna:

Anahuna writes: “I thought to take this last opportunity to send a plant or two or three. While I delight in the country scenes you’ve been gracing us with, I’m confined to the urban cityscape, and I’ve included one aggressively urban sample from a fence that has since been knocked down to make way for one of the tall new steel-and-glass high-rises. All these emerge, one way or aother, from the streets near the Gowanus Canal.”

Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. Material here is Lambert’s, and does not express the views of the Naked Capitalism site. If you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for three or four days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals: