[Plura-list] Probability and pandemics; Striking New Orleans garbage collectors replaced with prison labor; Factchecking virologist/conspiracist Judy Mikovits; Pandemic countermeasures from the porn industry

Sun May 10 14:56:39 EDT 2020

Today's links

* Probability and pandemics: Billions of people generate
one-in-a-billion outcomes.

* Striking New Orleans garbage collectors replaced with prison labor:
New Jim Crow, pandemic edition.

* Factchecking virologist/conspiracist Judy Mikovits: Demonstrably false
claims.

* Pandemic countermeasures from the porn industry: How to control
contagion in intimate circumstances.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🙊 Probability and pandemics

I recently tweeted a link to a Reddit thread in which a passenger on an
American Airlines jet complained that "American Airlines makes you stand
6 feet apart when boarding and still sells out flights." The post
included an image of a crowded AA flight.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ggrg40/american_airlines_makes_you_stand_6_feet_apart/

So many commenters to my tweet and on Reddit asked "Why is ANYONE flying?"

I understand the question, but to understand the answer, you need to
consider the scale of the pandemic.

Let's say you (reasonably) assume that an issue that is urgent enough to
warrant a flight arises 0.1% of the time. In America, that means 300,000
people have issues of sufficient urgency...every day.

Just keep playing with that number: 1 in a million? 30,000 people. Per day.

As it happens, we had a socially distanced farewell picnic with a friend
who is moving back to London from LA last night (two blankets, two
meters apart).

Their circumstances are incredibly complicated and also personal, so I
won't explain them here, but basically, it's a combination of a string
of really bad, rare beats and the alternative (staying here) is neither
physically safer nor psychologically healthier.

The coronavirus has affected ~7B lives. That means that seven
ONE-IN-A-BILLION problems are cropping up every day.

As a planet, we're finally doing a *ton* of testing (not so much in the
USA or UK, but...). That means that super-rare test failure modes will
crop up a lot. Like the incredibly rare cross-contamination of three
consecutive tests that deliver false positive or negatives.

Or the incredibly unlikely circumstance in which two people in close
quarters, one of whom is sick, fails to infect the other.

It's worth looking closely at these things to see what's going on there,
but their mere existence could just be the kind of odd coincidence that
crops up when you flip a coin 7 billion times every day.

Maybe they just got incredibly, amazingly, wildly lucky. Or maybe they
just had the incredible BAD luck to have a succession of false-negative
results from their tests.

It's REALLY unlikely that you'll have several false negatives, and it's
really unlikely that you could indulge an eyeball-licking kink without
transmission, but it's a big, weird world.

Flip a coin enough times and it will land heads 50 times in a row. Or
land on edge 50 times in a row. We're doing a *lot* of coin-tosses, is
what I'm saying, and so *not* seeing highly improbable outcomes is even
more improbable than the outcomes themselves.

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🙊 Striking New Orleans garbage collectors replaced with prison labor

New Orleans trash collectors don't work for the city; they work for a
temp agency called People Ready, which pays them $10.25/h and denies
them hazard pay and sick leave. On Wednesday, they went on strike.

https://paydayreport.com/prison-labor-replaces-striking-garbage-workers-in-new-orleans/

The city immediately hired a replacement work force: prisoners from
Livingston Parish, hired out through Metro Services Group, who pitch
themselves as "helping persons who had been incarcerated return to
society in a meaningful and productive way."

The prisoners earn 13% of the wage that the striking People Ready
workers made. They do not receive PPE.

"They are really trying to use those dudes to do our job, and they
paying them way less than they were paying us....trying to show the
world that people will still do our job without giving us the proper
protective equipment." -Strike leader Gregory Woods

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🙊 Factchecking virologist/conspiracist Judy Mikovits

Your racist Facebook uncle may have sent you a link to a trailer for
"Plandemic," a conspiracy movie that stars a disgraced virologist called
Judy Mikovits who makes a string of claims about her credentials and the
coronavirus.

Science Magazine evaluated those claims.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of claims that Mikovits makes about her
credentials and the science of coronavirus are provably false.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/fact-checking-judy-mikovits-controversial-virologist-attacking-anthony-fauci-viral

Some highlights:

* "Dr Judy Mikovits has been called one of the most accomplished
scientists of her generation"

"Mikovits authored 40 papers and wasn’t widely known...before she
published the 2009 Science paper.... The paper was later proven
erroneous and retracted."

* "Her 1991 doctoral thesis revolutionized the treatment of HIV/AIDS"

"Mikovits’s Ph.D. thesis, “Negative Regulation of HIV Expression in
Monocytes,” had no discernible impact on the treatment of HIV/AIDS."

* "[Her] blockbuster article in Science... sent shock waves through the
scientific community... revealed the use of animal/human fetal tissues
was unleashing plagues of chronic diseases."

"The paper ... only claimed to show a link between one condition and a
mouse retrovirus"

* "It started really when I was 25 years old, and I was part of the team
that isolated HIV from the saliva and blood of the patients from France
where [virologist Luc] Montagnier had originally isolated the virus..."

"At the time of HIV’s discovery, Mikovits was a lab technician in
Francis Ruscetti’s lab at NCI and had yet to receive her Ph.D. There is
no evidence that she was part of the team that first isolated the virus."

* "There is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any RNA virus that
works.

"Many vaccines that work against RNA viruses are on the market,
including for influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies, yellow fever,
and Ebola."

* "I’m not antivaccine."

"In the PowerPoint presentation she sent to Science, she calls for an
immediate moratorium' on all vaccines"

* "[Italians are] sick with inflammatory disorders. They got... an
untested new form of influenza vaccine that had 4 different strains of
influenza, including the highly pathogenic H1N1. That vaccine was grown
in a cell line, a dog cell line. Dogs have lots of coronaviruses."

"There is no evidence that links any influenza vaccine, or a dog
coronavirus, to Italy’s COVID-19 epidemic."

* "Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus. You’re getting
sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions, and if it
happens to be SARS-CoV-2, then you’ve got a big problem."

"It’s not clear what Mikovits means by “coronavirus expressions.” There
is no evidence that wearing a mask can activate viruses and make people
sick."

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🙊 Pandemic countermeasures from the porn industry

As we look to how to re-establish daily contact with one another before
the pandemic is fully contained, there's a useful historic precedent
(and several cautions) in the measures the porn industry employs to
contain the spread of HIV/AIDS.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/08/porn-industry-model-for-reopening-amid-covid19/

Every 14 days, every porn performer gets an HIV test. A single positive
test shuts down all shoots nationwide. It's called the PASS program.

https://fscpass.com/

Performers and technicians wear gloves and other PPE where feasible, and
everything gets sterilized.

But the parallels are imperfect, as is the PASS system. HIV is much less
contagious than coronavirus (the sound technicians at a shoot would be
at greater risk of coronavirus than from an infected performer than of HIV).

And while the PASS system's 14-day window is a good anti-HIV measure, it
isn't frequent enough to contain the spread of chlamydia and or
gonorrhea, which are estimated to infect 24% of performers.

But porn does share some important parallels with public health: just as
nurses "float" from one facility to another, so do porn performers float
from one set to another.

And just as with other industries, the porn industry is relatively
mobile and will relocate when regulations are deemed to onerous (when LA
required condoms and permits, shoots moved out of the city).

(Just as self-described "utopian socialist" Elon Musk has pledged to
relocate Tesla manufacturing to a state where workers' lives are cheaper).

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🙊 This day in history

#15yrsago Microsoft calls infringers "thought thieves"
https://web.archive.org/web/20050514022130/http://bink.nu/Article3950.bink

#15yrsago Access to Knowledge Treaty first draft is live
https://web.archive.org/web/20050917090836/http://www.cptech.org/a2k/consolidatedtext-may9.pdf

#10yrsago Man doesn't know what happened at the Hustler Club, but it
wasn't worth $21K
https://loweringthebar.net/2010/05/plaintiff-has-no-recollection-of-what-transpired-in-the-private-room.html

#10yrsago Roy Lichtenstein's estate decides they don't own the rights to
everything he ripped off, after all
https://web.archive.org/web/20100615033632/http://www.elsinoremusic.net/841/

#5yrsago What did the courts just do to NSA spying?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/eff-case-analysis-appeals-court-rules-nsa-phone-records-dragnet-illegal

#5yrsago Class of 2015: most indebted in history
https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/08/congratulations-class-of-2015-youre-the-most-indebted-ever-for-now/

#1yrago Chelsea Manning's statement on the occasion of her release
https://www.aaronswartzday.org/chelsea-may10/

#1yrago The awful true story of Diana Jean Heaney, and the "hitchhike
slaying"
https://hatpinslayer.com/girl-held-mate-hunted-in-hitchhike-slaying/

#1yrago After elderly tenant was locked in his apartment by his
landlord's stupid "smart lock," tenants win right to use actual keys to
enter their homes
https://www.cnet.com/news/tenants-win-rights-to-physical-keys-over-smart-locks-from-landlords/

#1yrago Google mistakenly started handing out a reporter's cellphone
number to people searching for Facebook tech support
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmpm43/google-thought-my-phone-number-was-facebooks-and-it-ruined-my-life

#1yrago Frontier receives $283.4m/year in taxpayer money, neglects
network, rips off customers -- and Trump's FCC won't investigate
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/ajit-pai-refuses-to-investigate-frontiers-horrible-telecom-service/

#1yrago Sanders and AOC team up for an anti-loansharking bill that will
replace payday lenders with post-office banking
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/why-you-should-back-the-sanders-aoc-plan-to-cap-credit-card-interest-rates-at-15-re-launch-the-postal-savings-bank.html

#1yrago A former college admissions dean explains the mundane reverse
affirmative action that lets the rich send their kids to the front of
the line
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/1/18311548/college-admissions-secrets-myths

#1yrago Ever, an "unlimited photo storage app," secretly fed its users'
photos to a face-recognition system pitched to military customers
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/millions-people-uploaded-photos-ever-app-then-company-used-them-n1003371

#1yrago Delta targets its workers with anti-union apps that push
deceptive memes
https://twitter.com/Superman4Bernie/status/1126603436257161220

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🙊 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Friday's progress: 688 words (13685 total).

Currently reading: Facebook: The Inside Story, by Steven Levy.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 02)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/05/04/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-02/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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