Mitch's Blog

A law firm is telling employees to switch off smart speakers and similar devices while working from home.

We don’t have any in the house. The payoff seems low in the potential risk seems high.

A Florida city sent power disconnection notices to its poorest residents during the pandemic crisis. The mayor is ducking accountability.

Rashida Tlaib proposes meeting trillion dollar coins, and then using those to send “every person in the USA a $2K prepaid credit card that would receive $1K/month until a year after the crisis’s end."

Each person – children, adults, documented, undocumented, rich, poor – would get the card and the deposits, and progressive taxation would rake it back from those who don’t need it (far more reliable than means-testing, which is a persistent failure).

How “concierge doctors” supply the “worried well” with masks, respirators and tests

One big difference I observed between my life under Canadian medicare (30 years), and UK NHS (13 years) is that in the former, there is no private option, so rich people have to advocate for everyone’s care in order to improve their own. I think the relative fortunes of the NHS and OHIP can be largely explained by this difference. Allowing the rich to opt into a private system reduces the political costs of slashing the public system.

More: Pluralistic: 22 Mar 2020

Prepperism is about being the individual savior, while solving a community or global crisis requires collective action.

Now I’ve got the 1970s Dr Pepper “Be a Pepper” jingle stuck in my head, which completely undercuts the seriousness of the point being made here.