Coyote Blog

Yes, it is "systemic" not "systematic".  Oops.  I will not re-edit the post because I am past feeling the need to cover up my dumber moments.

I pretty much hate the term "systematic racism," which is a clever rebranding by the DEI folks of the Christian concept of "original sin."  Try to tell the Church that you have behaved ethically?  Doesn't matter, you still need us to remove the stain of your original sin.  Try to tell the DEI trainer you don't have a racism problem?  Doesn't matter how you act, you are part of the systematic racism.

I want to go on a brief (but typical of this blog) digression.

Years ago, probably in 2017 after the Charlottesville / proud boys kerfuffle, I had a Jewish friend express his concern about rising Right-wing antisemitism.  He and I don't really talk politics much but my sense is that -- like many Jewish voters in the Northeast -- he is a reliable Democratic vote.  I remember telling him that I really did not think the sort of knuckleheads at Charlottesville presented much of a threat.  He asked me why.

I had to think about if for a minute -- I had a gut feel my statement was true but I had not really thought about it carefully enough to understand why.  After pondering it for part of dinner I finally said that I didn't think the antisemites (and overt racists) on the Right were a threat because most of them were low-status.  They did not have the power to do anything.  It's not like they were hiring for Bank of America or on the admissions committee at Harvard.  People with any sort of status or authority on the Right did not respect or follow these people (they might shill for their votes, but politicians of all stripes pander to the most absurd fringes of their part for votes).  [Almost without thinking about it I said that if I were he, I would be more worried about antisemitism from the Left, because the folks in the BDS movement (for example) on universities are just the opposite of antisemites on the Right -- they are among the elite.  I seldom am very prescient on cultural trends, but at the time I was very involved with the issue of discrimination against Asians at Princeton, and I thought I saw some parallels with Jews.  I think we have all seen the explosion of antisemitism that has come out of the mainly Leftish elite over the last year].

When I grew up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, racism was overt.  Things began to improve remarkably in the by 1980, though I remember at that point my dad could not get the Exxon CFO into our country club because he was Jewish and there was pushback when George Forman tried to buy a house in tony River Oaks.  By 2000, a generation later, much of that crap was gone, or at least way better.  But they key change that should have made these changes sustainable was that racism was not only isolated to lower-status groups, but it became seen as a marker for being low-status.  Demonstrating racism became the reverse of virtue-signaling -- it marked one as a loser.

If there is such a thing as systematic racism, then it has to be perpetrated by people who are part of the system.  People like the proud boys are outsiders -- I guarantee they are not on any country club membership committees.  They are not determining Ivy League admissions.  They are not hiring at Goldman Sachs.

I do think the system goes wrong for blacks but it is not in any arena controlled by the proud boys.  And I  have a strong opinion on where that system failure lies:  K through 12 education, and probably even more specifically K-5 education.  We have affirmative action in the workplace for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  Before that we have affirmative action in college for blacks.  Why?  Because there do not seem to be enough prepared candidates so we give less-prepared candidates a leg up.  We keep changing the SAT test.  Why?  Because blacks historically struggle to score as well as whites and other races on the test.  We keep changing (lowering) high school graduation requirements.  Why?  Because to many black children fail to graduate with the higher standards.

All of this stuff are after-the-fact attempted work-arounds that avoid fixing the real problem:  K-12 education is totally failing black kids.  Any root cause failure analysis would get to this conclusion.  You want to say that systematic racism exists?  Well here is the place where the system is totally failing one race.  If I were more of an expert, I could probably tell you which grade it is where things go off the rails but my guess is that it is an early grade where reading and basic math are not getting taught.

If I were the biggest racist in history and wanted to come up with a Dr Evil scheme to destroy blacks in America, I could not come up with a better plan than the K-12 education system, particularly in many large cities.  So here lies systematic racism, right?

Well, here lies the systematic failure to help African-Americans towards prosperity.  But it is hard to call it racism when in most of these cities the entire school board, the city council, and the mayor are all black or mostly black.  Here is the school board in E. St Louis -- not many proud boys there.  Here it is in Chicago.  Both of these districts are lavishly funded -- East St Louis spends over $25,000 per student and has a 12:1 teacher ratio  (the national average is about $18,000 per pupil and 14:1).  The student body is 96% black and US News report that in E. St Louis  "4% of high school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 7% tested at or above that level for math."  Well no surprise that Blacks are struggling when freaking 96% of them graduate from public school systems like this without being able to read.  No affirmative action plan ever invented is going to magically create a future for adults who can't read or do math.

This is a f*cking crime, and it has nothing to do with racism or funding.  Trump can make headlines getting rid of DEI programs -- fine, they were a fix for this problem that was never going to work.  But until we seriously talk about public school education, we are not serious about fixing the systematic problems blacks face.  And the system is going to fight back hard.  Already folks in the system are telling us that the testing that shows blacks doing poorly should be eliminated.  Why?  Well they say it is to help blacks but that can't possibly be true.  Its like telling me that I am better off not getting a cancer test and finding out I have cancer.  The push to eliminate testing is a push to cover up this absolute tragedy by the insiders who are a part of it.

Anyone think there are some smart people out there with access to capital that could provide a better education privately for $25,000** a year in a school choice system?

** Postscript:  $25,000 is an average.  Typically in most school systems elementary school costs might be half the average and high school 150-200% of the average.

There is lots of regulation coming out of California of late attempting to prevent prices from rising in a temporary supply-demand mismatch (often called "Gouging").  I don't have time today to write something tailored to California but I will repost part of my economic lesson I use for a high school class that touches on price gouging.

We begin with the governor of Florida who has just signed an anti-price-gouging law.  We talk about how everyone hates price-gouging after a disaster.  What could be worse, right?

We then talk about a woman who spends most of her time at home, but rushes out to fill her gas tank right after the storm hits.  She has to wait in line for gas for 2 hours because everyone else has done the same as she, racing to the station, but she doesn't mind because she doesn't have anything else to do and feels better.  If asked if she would have topped off her tank if the price jumped to $6 from $3, she says no way.

Then we have an owner of a roofing company enter the fray.  His men are working 14 hours a day to put roofs on houses.  He is making a lot of money, and doing a lot of good as well.  Nothing is more important to people than fixing the roof before the next rain.  He may be the most important man in Florida at that moment.  But he can't keep up with demand, and worse, his guys are having to sit for 2 hours at a time to fill up their company trucks, when they should be repairing roofs.   He would gladly pay $10 a gallon if he could just keep his men on the job and not in gas stations.

So at this point we discuss "fairness".  It seems fair not to raise prices to "take advantage" of a disaster.  But is it fair to allocate gas away from the busiest and most productive whose time is most valuable to the people who are least productive and have the lowest value for their time?  We discuss how price caps shift rationing from price to queuing, and the people who get the product shift from those who most value it to those who assign the lowest value to their own time.

Finally, we discuss a guy in Georgia who has a tanker of gas he was going to send to a station in Atlanta.  They need the gas more in Florida, but they aren't paying more for it under the new price-gouging law, and so with his higher costs of driving all the way to Florida vs. Atlanta he is going to sell the gas in Atlanta.  If the price of gas in Florida were to rise to $6, he would send his truck of gas to Florida in a heartbeat.

This is the kind of discussion we have.   We will end up in a debate, with kids pointing out all kinds of things -- eg poor people who have a life or death need and might be shut out at $6.  We don't try to resolve things, but want them to understand there are unseen consequences to actions like price-gouging laws that must be considered along with the seen.  They may end up dismissing the unseen as less important than the seen, but it should not be ignored.

I know, with like 200 executive orders already in this administration, it is hard to imagine one was missing.  But if I were the victim of some sort of horrible karma and found myself as President, I was thinking about what EO I might sign (other than one repealing all the others).  This is what I came up with:

Subject:  Federal Transparency

I hereby order that all Federal agencies, from this day forward, follow the letter of the f*cking law in the Freedom of Information Act.  All requests will be processed in a timely manner as specified in the law and all redactions will be made solely based on the exceptions allowed in the law and those exceptions will be interpreted narrowly.  Redactions in any document released to the public solely to protect the reputation of an individual or agency shall be grounds for immediate termination of those involved [update:   here is a famous example]

Further, all public business will be handled through public channels and will be archived as required by law.  Anyone attempting to conduct public business through private channels that cannot be archived or FOIA'd will be subject to immediate termination.

Further, within 90 days the US military, the US state department, and all intelligence agencies are required to submit to me proposed updated guidelines and processes for marking documents as classified or secret with the goal of reducing documents with any sort of classification by 90%.  Anyone found to be over-classifying documents to protect an individual or agency's reputation will be subject to immediate termination.

If I knew more about Federal organization I would probably propose pulling FOIA officers out of their agencies and into some new group.  Maybe we pull out all the Inspector Generals as well and put them in that new group too.

Postscript

Who the heck remembers all the stuff like this to do day 1?  I can't remember that my wife told me to start the dishwasher at the next commercial.

When Trump took office in 2017, I thought there was a reasonable chance that he would pardon Hillary Clinton.  I thought this was just the sort of schoolyard trick Trump might play -- after all, what better way to tar someone as guilty when they have not even been indicted for anything**. Trump didn't do it.

But now Biden has.  And to his own family.  Wow.

In his last hours of office Biden issued pre-emptive pardons for numerous people who have not even been charged with any crime.  Sort of blanket get out of jail free cards for any federal offense they might be accused of.  The act feels unprecedented, though I remember that President Bush did something similar for Donald Rumsfeld.  But it is certainly unprecedented in its scope.  He pardoned

• General Milley (who called Trump "fascist to the core" and a "wannabe dictator")
• Much of his family, including all his siblings and their spouses.  Republican Congressional investigators believe that Biden family members funneled foreign bribe money to Biden when he was Vice-President.   Certainly their family has extraordinarily complex financial arrangements, sending money to each other through a variety of shell corporations
• The entire J6 committee, which is sort of weird as they already should have immunity through the speech and debate clause
• Anthony Fauci

The legal case most folks are looking at right now is Burdick vs United States  which says that 1) a pardon can be rejected and 2) acceptance of a pardon carries "an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it," though it is disputed whether this latter is a binding precedent.  Getting such an un-asked for blanket pardon certainly seems a mixed blessing.  Think about John Owens, his brother-in-law.  Did anyone have him on their radar before, because NOW they do.

I know some are p*ssed off that they cannot put Liz Cheney or Anthony Fauci in jail.  Personally I am relieved.  The Biden administration set some horrible precedents in prosecution of its enemies, perhaps some of the worst since Nixon.  We are at a tipping point between dialing back on this sort of banana-republic-style political retribution or going into full-on Sicilian vendetta wars.  I have had lots of people disagree with me on this, but I think we need to turn the other cheek here and find intermediate ways to enforce accountability.  Trump's revocation of the security clearances of the folks who made up a Russian conspiracy to discredit the evidence of Hunter Biden's laptop seems like a reasonable approach.

But there is a silver lining to all this that I posted on X the morning the pardons were announced -- without the looming threat of prosecution, there is no room to plead the 5th.  The most interesting person to get under oath to answer questions is going to be Fauci, of course.  I worry that we have not found the boundaries of gain-of-function research and that dangerous research is still going on and being funded by government organizations (most recently I have seen rumors that the Department of Agriculture has been funding gain of function on diseases that affect livestock).  There is so much this guy needs to be asked under oath -- Covid origins, suppression of opposing speech, the vaccine trials, coordination with the teachers unions on school recommendations, etc etc -- that the hearings could last weeks.

Biden's legacy, such that it is, could also be in some danger.  No one is going to prosecute the guy, for the same reason that Hur did not, but there are sure a lot of suspicious financial transactions running back and forth through his family and a myriad of shell companies.

**Postscript:  For those with a short memory, Clinton moved her email to a private server in an attempt avoid FOIA and in so doing probably allowed classified information to sit on a poorly secured computer in her house.  I would have said that neither of these sorts of errors or crimes would reasonably ever be prosecuted (at least at that seniority), that is until I saw FBI agents descend on Mar-a-Lago looking for poorly secured classified documents.  It should be noted that despite the fears of many folks on the Left, Trump did not prosecute Clinton.

As expected, Trump gave notice yesterday to the UN that the US is pulling out of the Paris climate accords.  This marks the second time he has done so, making participation in these accords one of the EO ping pong balls that get swatted back and forth every inauguration day.

The reason this is possible is that supporters of these accords have never submitted the agreement to the Senate for ratification, which would make the terms of the agreement more legally binding and much harder to casually reverse.  Per Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution:

[the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;

Woodrow Wilson spent a huge amount of time, most of his remaining prestige, and probably his remaining health negotiating the Versailles Treaty, but it was all for nothing in this country because the Senate did not approve the treat, which is why we were never in the League of Nations.**

My understanding is that something like the Paris Climate Accords there is actually a potentially less daunting way to adopt the accords as US law without getting a 2/3 vote in the Senate -- legislation could be crafted with rules mirroring the commitments in the Accords and then passed normally through the House and Senate.

Neither of these courses were pursued by President Obama or President Biden, even when they possessed Congressional majorities.  This is likely because -- whatever their public position is on climate change -- legislators know that adopting economically expensive mandates in an international agreement that are not matched by countries like China and India (see below) is wildly unpopular.  And so the basic approach has been to negotiate and "commit" the US to these agreements by unilateral executive action, and then attempt to use the regulatory tools available to the Administration to attempt to comply. [A more cynical view is that US Presidents have done what every other world leader has done in signing these pacts-- sign them as a virtue-signaling position with no idea of how to meet the commitments and perhaps no real intention of doing so].

Update:  This is really a stunning chart.  We have returned to the same carbon intensity we had before the Civil War.

** It is also why US wine producers, at least until a new treaty with the EU was approved in 2006, could legally use the word "champagne" to describe certain types of sparkling wine.  The history on this is complicated, and goes back further, but essentially the international agreement to not allow any wine outside of the Champagne region of France to use that name was embodied into the Treaty of Versailles, which the US did not ratify.  There is an organization called the CIVC which is essentially the Champagne union that defends the champagne IP, sometimes to ridiculous ends (reminiscent of the NFL and the word "Superbowl.")  I remember they sued Apple over calling a gold/bronze iphone color "champagne".

Nearly 200 new Executive Orders?  If I do nothing else I can still blog for weeks just going through the list.  (Update:  the full list of actions is here.  The list of past EO recissions is here.)

Over a third of these are reversals of Biden EO's, which I can't really complain about.  Hopefully student loan bailouts are dead for good, for example.

Some are the usual brand of political virtue-signaling idiocy (eg the one asking all government departments to go after inflation). Everything old is new again:

Some of the EO's are a new and uniquely Trumpian brand of virtue-signaling idiocy (eg the Gulf of America).  Maybe Canada will respond by renaming Lake Superior as Lake Canada or Lake Trudeau.  I don't get quite as worked up about renaming Mt Denali back to Mt McKinley, but the justification is hilarious -- to celebrate American greatness.  By naming it McKinley?!  So was Mt Jewel a non-starter?

But the EO's that really caught my eye and I want to comment on first are the ones declaring national emergencies, presumably to give the Administration special authority to pretty much ignore every other branch of government.  I really hate this idea, but it is particularly incredible given that Trump and the Republicans (rightly) chafed for years under authoritarian actions taken by the President and various governors under the guise of a COVID emergency.  So having railed for four years against declaring a national emergency to buff up the Administration's unaccountable power, Trump is going to declare two?

The border emergency declaration is not unexpected, and though I disagree with it, at least the situation there has the virtue of being fairly unprecedented (at least in the size of the border crossing numbers).  But energy?  What the F is the national emergency in energy?  Sure there is a lot of stupidity in our energy policy and lots of things that need fixing, but there has been for decades.  Having lived through the gas lines of 1972 and 1978 and the Three Mile Island emergency and oil prices that have swung from $10 to $130 and back again over time, its hard to imagine anything in the current energy markets that could be considered an emergency (now if we were all living in Germany, I might come to a different conclusion).  (Update, here is the Energy Emergency EO)

One other bit of bipartisan hypocrisy.  For the last several years Democrats have blasted Conservative critics for carrying every challenge of a Biden law or regulation down to U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Texas, who became a pretty reliable go-to judge when a national injunction was wanted.  Where did the Republicans ever get this idea?  Perhaps from Democrats, who carried every Trump EO and regulation over to Hawaii and Judge Derrick K. Watson who would reliably enjoin all of Trump's efforts.  My guess is that Judge Watson is about to get busy again.   Maybe we should have an over-under betting pool to the first national injunction of a Trump EO.  In 2017 it was 7 days, for example, from the time Trump issued his travel ban until it was first enjoined and 9 days between the 2nd travel ban and when Watson issued his national injunction.

Well, just as I was spooling up to do some real posting for the first time in years, I started to run into problems on the server.  Turns out I am running a really old OS, the Linux version of WindowsME.  At least at my host, this update requires migration to a new server, so that will be happening.  The good news is that my new dedicated server is way cheaper than the old one.

At the age of about 60, my wife began having terrible pain in her hip.  For about a year, this greatly limited her ability to walk longer distances.  One of her great joys, exploring new places on foot, was suddenly impossible to pursue.  And then the pain got so bad  that she could barely sleep, making her life pretty miserable.  Projecting forward years or even months, at the pace things were getting worse, it is hard to imagine any sort of reasonably enjoyable life.  In any other era in the history of human beings, her life would have been effectively over.

But in her case it wasn't.  She had a relatively routine operation where the doctor cut into her leg, carved out a large part of the femur and socket joint, and replaced it with a contraption of titanium, cobalt-chromium, ceramic and plastic.   Sixty years ago this operation was unheard of, and 100 years ago many of the materials used were unknown.  But now we do it routinely.  I have a partial knee replacement that is only weeks old and walked 3 miles on it this morning.  It is unusual for me to meet anyone my age or older who doesn't have some sort of prosthesis, whether it be a joint replacement or a heart stent or a pacemaker.  What we all have in common is that a century ago our lives would likely either be literally over or at least so painful we might wish it were so.

This may seem like an odd way to restart my blogging, but before I spend the coming months and years criticizing everything and everyone, it is worth remembering that we live in the greatest time in human history.  The median human experience in all of history is miserable subsistence poverty.  At least until the recent explosion of wealth and mass escape from poverty that has characterized the last 75 years, the 95th percentile human experience was probably subsistence poverty. Everyone alive today is probably in the top 10% or even 1% of historical humans in terms of income and well-being.  This is even more so for a resident of the US, where even a person on the poverty line in the United States today, say around the 20th percentile of income, is likely in the 80-90th percentile worldwide.**

The times we live in are a miracle.  We are all richer on any reasonable metric, except absolute value of our bank accounts, than the richest men of the gilded age, say in 1870.  Years and years ago I compared a modest house in my neighborhood with the crazy huge mansion of Mark Hopkins.  I wrote:

One house has hot and cold running water, central air conditioning, electricity and flush toilets.  The other does not.  One owner has a a computer, a high speed connection to the Internet, a DVD player with a movie collection, and several television sets.  The other has none of these things.  One owner has a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a toaster oven, an iPod, an alarm clock that plays music in the morning, a coffee maker, and a decent car.  The other has none of these.  One owner has ice cubes for his lemonade, while the other has to drink his warm in the summer time.  One owner can pick up the telephone and do business with anyone in the world, while the other had to travel by train and ship for days (or weeks) to conduct business in real time.

I think most of you have guessed by now that the homeowner with all the wonderful products of wealth, from cars to stereo systems, lives on the right (the former home of a friend of mine in the Seattle area).  The home on the left was owned by Mark Hopkins, railroad millionaire and one of the most powerful men of his age in California.  Hopkins had a mansion with zillions of rooms and servants to cook and clean for him, but he never saw a movie, never listened to music except when it was live, never crossed the country in less than a week.  And while he could afford numerous servants around the house, Hopkins (like his business associates) tended to work 6 and 7 day weeks of 70 hours or more, in part due to the total lack of business productivity tools (telephone, computer, air travel, etc.) we take for granted.  Hopkins likely never read after dark by any light other than a flame.

If Mark Hopkins or any of his family contracted cancer, TB, polio, heart disease, or even appendicitis, they would probably die.  All the rage today is to moan about people's access to health care, but Hopkins had less access to health care than the poorest resident of East St. Louis.  Hopkins died at 64, an old man in an era where the average life span was in the early forties.  He saw at least one of his children die young, as most others of his age did.  In fact, Stanford University owes its founding to the early death (at 15) of the son of Leland Stanford, Hopkin's business partner and neighbor.  The richest men of his age had more than a ten times greater chance of seeing at least one of their kids die young than the poorest person in the US does today.

You don't even have to go back to the 19th century to find high childhood death rates.  Both my mom and dad (who were born in the 1920s and 1930s) lost a brother when they were young to disease, both whooping cough I think.  My dad contracted polio as a teen and never regained full strength in one leg.  They both talked about these things like they were so normal -- I am sure it was a tragedy for the families but a sort of normal and expected tragedy.

Most of the issues that have people convinced that everything is awful are not so daunting when viewed on a historic scale.

The environment?  The air in cities is immeasurably cleaner than when I grew up  (I remember smog so think in LA you couldn't see anything).  Water quality is better, litter has almost completely disappeared (at least compared to when I grew up).   The thing that never really gets mentioned in lovely period pieces like Bridgerton is just how bad everything smelled and how dangerous the water was. Today, we tend to be arguing over smaller and smaller concentrations of smaller and smaller risks.  There is the climate issue of course, but many of the disasters blamed on climate change are historically typical and have little to do with warming temperatures (starting with the LA fires).  We will get back to climate in due course.

Or take the issue of race.  Growing up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s, the improvements we have seen in race relations, at least until about 2000, were remarkable.  Tribalism and xenophobia are too wired into humans to purge entirely, but to a remarkable extent in the US we had limited overt racism to the low status fringe.  Another generation or two and we were well-positioned for a truly race-blind society.  [We have unfortunately lost ground on this in the last 25 years, as racism and anti-semitism seem to have re-emerged in high-status groups from a toxic mix of marxism and falling academic standards.   But I have hope]

This is not to say that life doesn't suck for many people on Earth.  Though there are billions fewer than fifty years ago, you could be one of a billion people living in less than $1 a day poverty.  You could be a woman living in virtual slavery in Iran, a mother who just wants her kids to survive in Gaza, or a Russian soldier enduring years at war in the Ukraine.  But for the vast majority of people on Earth, and for a huge proportion of the people in this county, the Earth is the best world we have ever had.  Understanding that, and the connection between our current prosperity and ideas like individual rights, capitalism, free trade and scientific inquiry will continue to be a key focus of this blog.

I am not a Pollyanna -- I see threats and worrying trends in every direction, and will be writing about them.  For example, tomorrow we trade a President with an immense set of flaws for another with an immense set of entirely different flaws.  Perhaps I am not as disappointed as some by recent trends because I have always treated politicians and the media and academia with immense skepticism, so I am less surprised by their obvious failings.  I have always expected people in power -- government, corporations, wherever -- to abuse their power and believe the trick is to wire the system in a way that they cannot do too much damage.  In preparation for blogging again, and looking back over my old writing, one consistent theme I see is a disdain for solutions that boil down to "if only we replace their people with our people."  That's a hopeless approach.  We have flip-flopped the Coke and Pepsi parties in power more times in the last 50 years than we did in 100+ years before that, and its not making things better.  If anything its escalating a tit for tat power grab as each new administration pushes the precedent frontier forward more toward Presidential authoritarian power.  This is not a secret: Trump is bragging about it.

One of my first long-form posts will be on the breakdown of the US political consensus around free speech and free trade.  Both concepts have been critical to the prosperity I write about above, but both are concepts politicians tend to shy away from (free speech allows their opposition to speak out and potentially remove them from power, while free trade limits the economic spoils they can dole out to powerful labor and business supporters).  To a large extent, US moral and intellection leadership post WWII on free speech and free trade has been critical to keeping these concepts alive around the world against the headwinds of authoritarianism.  Now, with a breakdown of support in the US for both, one wonders what future they have.  More later....

**footnote:  It is remarkably hard to get the data to do this analysis.  Everyone that collates income inequality data wants to show the US as awful so they will compare US only with the US and not with any other countries.  This chart is the closest I have found recently and actually seems to say that the US 20th percentile is about at the world 65th percentile.  But this underestimates the US position since it uses the other major trick of poverty stats -- it omits the effect of taxes and government transfer programs.  No one ever believes me when I tell them, but most poverty stats, including the US poverty line, are based on income without transfers, ie BEFORE the effect of anti-poverty programs.  The stats thus always show no progress on poverty and argue for more government anti-poverty programs while excluding the effect of existing anti-poverty programs from their data.   On a world scale US anti-poverty programs are robust, and we have (again against perceptions) one of the most progressive tax codes anywhere so with the effect of anti-poverty programs my guess is that the US 20th percentile is over the 80th percentile worldwide.  I took a shot at this analysis vs Scandinavian countries quite a while ago here.  When I have a chance, I will see if there is newer raw data available,/footnote

One of the flaws with the older version of this blog is that there was no way for folks to sign up for email digests or emails of posts.  This almost drove me to Medium or Substack but I think I have it solved here on WordPress (the key seems to be to NOT use the wordpress mail function).  There is a sign up box on the website now for the email digest.

By the way, in the general implosion of Disqus several years ago we lost several years of comments.  Sorry.  Older ones are there but are lost for a period of time after about 2020.

Well, I have (mostly) sold my business and eliminated some of the conflicts that restricted my blogging for several years.  Right now, I am trying to get this old blog spooled up with some new features.  Right now I am testing the direct link to X as well as the ability to send our email summaries of posts.

I have considered substack and still have coyoteblog staked out there if need be, but there is a lot of content here I would hate to lose so I am going to try to make wordpress into what I need.

In preparation for a return to active blogging I have torn down this server to the root and reinstalled everything clean.  I am hoping the errors and problems encountered for a while will go away now.  I think it was some sort of conflict between the ssl code and multiple security plugins, all of which I have simplified.  We will see.

Since a number of folks have asked me via email: yes, I am OK and would someday like to get back to active long-form blogging (I still make a foray into twitter now and again).  However, things have been a bit crazy here.  A number of business owners over the last 2 years have approached me to buy their business and help with their retirement.  In several cases the request was humbling, as they turned down offers from other companies believing my company would best take care of their employees, customers, and partners.

The net effect of all this is that, without really intending to, my business that was perfectly large enough for me at about $13mm revenue 18 months ago will have $80mm in revenue this year.  As you can imagine, I have been busy.  It is one thing to make sure one's company is keeping its promises to employees, partners, and customers when it is small enough that the owner knows everything going on.  It has been a real learning experience, one I hope to write about in depth, learning to do this with a much larger company.  Not to mention overcoming the fear and culture clashes inherent in mergers (though it could have been harder -- not one penny of these acquisitions was justified on consolidation so we have done no layoffs or the like -- in fact we are hiring like crazy in certain functional areas).

There is always a lot of interest in buying and selling businesses.  My series from way back in 2004 still generates a lot of email.

I would dearly love to get all that I have learned since that series committed to electrons, but for now I will leave you with a new podcast from my friend Walt Lipski.  Walt helped get me into this business 20 years ago and was deeply involved in 2 of the 3 acquisitions we have made over the past months.  He has a ton of experience in middle-market business M&A and in generational transfers.  He also is a stand up guy, and probably the only investment-banking type I have seen walk away from a lucrative fee when he didn't feel good about the deal.

I always enjoy Christmas day with the family.  But no matter how good a day we have together, it can never quite duplicate the sense of wonder when one is 8 or 9 and you come down the stairs to see the Christmas tree surrounded in gifts brought by Santa.

This year, my daughter (an illustration student at Art Center in Pasadena, see her work on instagram @meliameyer) spent what must have been weeks creating 72 paper mache penguins as a surprise art installation for the family on Christmas morning.  Never since I was at a single digit age have I had so much fun waking up at Christmas.   This is what it looked like coming out of my bedroom:

Here are a few of the pictures:

If you want a pointer towards the seasonality of the COVID virus, check out the NY Times per capita case map for the US for today:   (hat tip to boriquagato@substack.com)

This looks like a weather map, not a map of Trump v. Biden voters or party affiliations or anything else.  COVID is seasonal, just like other respiratory viruses, and waxes and wanes in certain areas due to weather factors and how they affect the behavior of humans (eg how much the weather forces them indoors).  There appears to be no correlation here to mask wearing, lockdowns, quarantines, school closures, motorcycle rallies, wearing of garlic or burning of witches.

Three months ago the south was a hotspot and all these other places were moderately dormant.  The prior attempts to attribute that earlier southern hotspot to party affiliation of the governors now seems about as valid as the Boxers blaming Chinese droughts on Christian missionaries  (I like the Boxer analogy because the cornonabro's confidence that crappy paper and cloth masks will protect them from the virus reminds me of the Boxer's beliefs that special exercises and spells would make them immune to bullets).

By the way, this is cases, which was always an awful metric because of the way we do testing.  My hope is that with a milder Omicron variant, shift in infections to healthier younger people, and a lot of vaccination (which seems to reduce the seriousness of getting the disease more than it prevents infection) we will be seeing much lower death figures this year for the same number of cases.

New California rules are set to effectively end the ability of RVers to use generators to produce power in California:   https://rvmiles.com/california-generator-ban/

I am sending this to a number of folks we work with in the USFS and California State Parks.  This generator ban has a potentially high impact on public campgrounds as many public campgrounds have no electrical connections for RV's.  The danger is that with this ban, and without investment on public lands, public campgrounds will lose relevance to a lot of the recreating public.  The recent upsurge in interest by new demographics in camping in the outdoors will almost certainly be reversed.

For years -- and some of you are probably tired of hearing me on this -- I have been arguing that the #1 improvement that public campgrounds should be considering is electrification.  I fully understand that agencies like the USFS tend to have an immediate negative reaction to such proposals, fearing that it would over-develop the wilderness.  But I argue the opposite -- electrification would make campgrounds MORE rather than less natural.

The reason for that is generators.  The public does not want to be away from electricity altogether.  If nothing else, they rely on their phones for a myriad of things -- mapping, emergency communications, information about the recreation area, etc;  some have medical equipment that runs at night; and in many locations it is really uncomfortable to go without air conditioning.  But generators are noisy and an environmental mess.  It is for this reason that I have been an advocate for electrifying public campgrounds to return them to the quiet of nature without any significant changes in their viewscape (just an extra pedestal at every site).

With the potential ban on generators, the need for this sort of investment is even greater.  For all the reasons mentioned above, people simply will not come to the campgrounds in their RV without any option for electricity.  I am not sure how we would staff camp hosts for sites with no power when generators are banned.

I understand that many public agencies do not have the budget for this.  But our company has been providing private capital for exactly this sort of upgrade on public lands for years.  Most recently, we have upgraded 7 large TVA campgrounds from primitive to having power and water at every site.  In the process occupancy has risen from 40% to nearly 100% at all these campgrounds, so we get a solid return on the investment if given a long enough contract length. To do this sort of work, we don't need any guarantees or repayments systems such as those in the National Park Service.  All we need is sufficient time, generally 20 years, on the permit or contract to recoup the investment.

Many of you have permit or contract re-bids coming up in the next few years.  I encourage you to consider using this opportunity to try to attract private investment to some of the campgrounds you operate.  It does not have to be all of them -- there will always be room in the large portfolio of public campgrounds for a range of facilities from primitive to more developed.

Over the years I have seen a number of creative ways of doing this sort of thing, and I have worked with all of your agencies for years and understand your processes and restrictions.  Please let me know if I can be of help.

I am not blogging much due to some overwhelming work circumstances in my real life.  However, I cannot believe the reaction of world leaders racing to institute the most onerous of restrictions on citizens based on the reports that a new COVID variant merely exists.

Fauci went on national TV this morning, subject to the usual adoring media attention and softball kid glove treatment, to discuss what has been labelled the Omicron variant (apparently selected because it is not the name of a Chinese leader and because it is an anagram for "moronic").  If Fauci were a real scientist he would have said something like this:

Respiratory viruses mutate all the time -- that is in fact why we have to create a new flu vaccine every year and why those vaccines often suck (because these mutations are hard to predict in advance).  We have known about the Omicron variant for like a week.  We have zero data on its transmissibility or the seriousness of its symptoms.  Since I don't believe anyone has died of it, we of course have no data on death rates, though preliminary reports form the South African virologists who first identified the variant are that most symptoms have been mild.

Our general expectation is that all respiratory viruses will mutate, and in general they mutate towards more transmissibility but less serious symptoms.  The history of COVID has seen a variety of variants, none of which have proven to be any more dangerous than the last.  Upticks recently in cases counts which have been blames on Delta are more likely just reflective of the seasonal pattern of this virus (all respiratory viruses show a seasonal pattern).

Looking back, most of the panic around the Delta variant was misplaced, as the variant appears to be --despite early overwrought fears -- no more deadly than other variants and no more or less transmissible to the vaccinated.  We shall observe Omicron over the coming weeks to see if any new responses are required as we develop actual data (rather than general fears) about the variant, but early hopes are that the virus may have mutated so much that it is less likely to send people to the hospital or to the grave.

Ha ha, as if.  What he actually said was this:

Regarding mandates, Fauci stated that lockdowns and a federal vaccination requirement should be the focus of overcoming the omicron variant.

“Everything is on the table,” responded Fauci during a separate media appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.

He added, “This is a clarion call … If you’re not vaccinated, get vaccinated. If you’re fully vaccinated, get boosted. Get the children vaccinated also. We now have time. Thank goodness that the South Africans … were completely transparent.”

Fauci also appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation to discuss critics of his expertise dealing with COVID, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz. Apart from dubbing himself the face of science, Fauci diverted the conversation to the January 6 event at the Capitol to questionably stick it to Cruz.

Because most published studies on viral transmissibility and deadliness typically base their findings on one week of anecdotal data, as well as arguments about the political activities of Senators from Texas.  That's clearly science, and all you morons that do not have a house on Martha's Vineyard just need to obey.

One of the interesting things we have seen over the last 2 years is that there are a group of largely apolitical people who are ready on a moments notice to race to the scene of a protest or riot and join in and loot.  Similarly, there are political leaders today who jump at the slightest chance to layer more restrictions on their citizens at the slightest excuse.  This was a headline several days ago, when there was absolutely no way on Earth any of these politicians knew if this new variant was dangerous or not.

Update:  Wow, the NY Times is going soft.  I received this bit of rationality and reasonableness in my Times morning brief this morning, from David Leonhardt:

The public reaction to new Covid-19 variants has followed a familiar cycle. People tend to assume the worst about two different questions — whether the variant leads to faster transmission of the Covid virus and whether it causes more severe illness among infected people.

The first of those worries came true with the Alpha and Delta variants: Alpha was more contagious than the original version of the virus, and Delta was even more contagious than Alpha. But the second of the worries has largely not been borne out: With both Alpha and Delta, the percentage of Covid cases that led to hospitalization or death held fairly steady.

This pattern isn’t surprising, scientists say. Viruses often evolve in ways that help them flourish. Becoming more contagious allows a virus to do so; becoming more severe has the potential to do the opposite, because more of a virus’s hosts can die before they infect others.

It is too soon to know whether the Omicron variant will fit the pattern. But the very early evidence suggests that it may. Unfortunately, Omicron seems likely to be more contagious than Delta, including among vaccinated people. Fortunately, the evidence so far does not indicate that Omicron is causing more severe illness...

Absent new evidence, the rational assumption is that Covid is likely to remain overwhelmingly mild among the vaccinated (unless their health is already precarious). For most vaccinated people, Covid probably presents less risk than some everyday activities.

Good!  Almost two years too late, but it is good to see at least one corner of the media dialing down the panic knob.  Unfortunately, what you do not yet see in the high-profile media is them taking the obvious step -- if they really believe this, then why aren't they calling out political leaders for their rapid over-reactions to Omicron?

I won't go into all the details (one of many articles on this incident here), but the Yale Law School administration attempted to blackmail and intimidate one of their students over a party invitation he sent out, the main complaint seeming to be the party was sponsored by a right of center legal group (Federalist Society).  The audio, if you have time, is outrageous.  It is a good thing the student recorded it, because I am not sure many people would have believed the b-movie authoritarian dialog coming from the Yale executives.

I had two reactions I don't see written very many places:

1. The law profession strikes me as a particularly confrontational profession, and with the exception of perhaps law enforcement and first responders, one in which it is almost impossible to shelter oneself from a wide variety of craziness.  So how is Yale Law possibly doing its job to train the next generation's best and brightest attorneys when they actively support the kind of mental and emotional fragility that led to the complaints?  If we take the complainers at their word, they are hiding under their bed because they got an email party invitation sponsored by a group they don't agree with.
2. Top attorneys frequently find themselves in high stakes negotiations where their opponents try to bluff and bully them.   On this dimension, the student who refused to be blackmailed by Yale appears to be the best prospective attorney of the bunch.  I would certainly hire him.

Of course, a more likely explanation for the over-reactions among a very small number of students to the email is that Progressives have discovered that feigning more extreme fragility than that of a fainting woman in a Victorian novel is a useful tool for exercising power because university authorities (and increasingly a broader range of authorities) will act as the useful idiots who can be manipulated by such claims.

After a lot of complicated debugging, of course it was something simple -- the certificate failed to renew automatically.  Hopefully all is working correctly now

Update:  Of course then I screwed something else up.  Some sort of problem with php vs. mysql versions.  Anyway, fixed now, hopefully

Who says universities don't teach anything useful?

The difference between mere authoritarianism and totalitarianism is often hard to explain to people, and some want to use the terms interchangeably.  But I think this distinction is particularly important today, as we see the American Progressive Left tilting over from authoritarianism to totalitarianism.  The University of Chicago is actually helping us to learn the difference.

For the long answer on this distinction, I recommend the work of Hannah Arendt.  She has done more than anyone in really defining the terms and nature of totalitarianism.  The history of her reception in this country is an interesting one.  During the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War and with the Nazi plague still fresh in everyone's mind, her work resonated with a lot of people.  But as we moved into the 60's and Marxists began gaining power in many universities, academia turned against her in large part because they didn't like how she equated Nazism and communism.  Out of favor by the 1980s in colleges that still wanted to whitewash Stalin, something interesting happened.  As the Berlin Wall fell and eastern European intellectuals began looking for a framework to describe their experience under communism, they rediscovered Hannah Arendt as someone whose work resonated with their own observations.

Anyway, shortcutting a lot of complexity, the way I describe the difference simply is that authoritarians just want compliance, while totalitarians want enthusiastic belief -- belief that is ramified down from politics to the smallest elements of daily life.

So in the current context of COVID, authoritarians don't give a crap if you believe in masks or not, they are happy if you wear them when they demand.  But totalitarians....

For the second year in a row, the University of Chicago forced students to sign a “Required COVID-19 Attestation,” a lengthy document that demands students click “I agree” to a number of statements and rules regarding COVID-19.

UChicago, which last year was named America’s “No. 1 free speech campus,” is openly defying its commitment to academic freedom because the attestation goes far beyond forced compliance to inane COVID mandates — it actually thought-polices students.

Failure to sign my university’s attestation by last Monday meant your student ID was deactivated and you were banned from all university facilities, barring you from attending class.

In order to attend class, students are forced to “agree” in writing to the assertion that “COVID-19 poses a serious public health risk.” Students like me must also “agree” to the claim that “my failure to follow the [COVID-19] requirements,” like wearing a cloth over my mouth, “may endanger myself and/or others.”

Similarly, students who receive a religious exemption from UChicago’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate are forced to sign their names below a statement reading, “I acknowledge that I may be placing myself and others at risk of serious illness should I contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.”

Authoritarians demand you wear the mask.  Totalitarians demand that you love the mask.

... I was in Manhattan on a business trip from Seattle.  Ironically, I was running an aviation-related startup and in town to try to convince my investors to fund a new round based on improvements in the commercial aviation business.   Perhaps the least important death that day was of my company.

Along with everyone in the country, we watched with horror though via direct line-of-sight from the penthouse hotel balcony of our wealthy investor.  What we did not know, but would learn over the following months, was how many friends we had that died that day, not surprising in retrospect given that my wife and I were both about a decade out of Harvard b-school and many of our college friends worked in the WTC.  Perhaps our closes friend who died was actually just in for a random training session, a dumb class he did not really even want to attend.  I have thought about that often since, and it has made me more likely to resist meetings and trips that are worthless but where there is pressure to show up (do the Germans have a word for that?)

The rest of the day we spent interacting with jittery people on the street who would literally flatten on the ground when a military jet flew low, something that happened a lot that day.  At one point a wall of humanity covered in dust made it to our part of the island, refugees who were in and around the buildings when they collapsed.  The scene that night in Manhattan was weird, like a post-apocalyptic Charlton Heston movie.  Never before or since in my lifetime has Manhattan ever been so quiet at night.  Everyone was leaving the island, and no one was being allowed to enter.  We finally found a place to eat on Broadway near Times Square, where a car would drive by maybe once every 5 minutes.

Fortunately for us we found a friend wandering around Central Park who lived out West too and had the last rent car in Manhattan.  We drove all the way across the country, though the first bit was the hardest.  Out of some weird security concern, we were told that cars were only be allowed to exit the island via one road, but they could not tell us which one it was.  We circumnavigated Manhattan getting this same response at each bridge and tunnel, until someone finally told us the only way out was up north via the GW bridge.  When we got to the Jersey side, it again looked like a zombie movie or something, with miles and miles of cars stopped coming into the city and empty roads going out.

[as a side-note to this, growing up in the 70's I was treated to any number of movies that portrayed Harlem as some kind of blighted no-go zone to be avoided by all white people -- but the Harlem of the 2001 was just another place, certainly not wildly prosperous but not necessarily to be avoided either, certainly better looking than the Robert Moses-destroyed Bronx.  I appreciated the opportunity to have my perceptions changed.  Though to be fair in the 1970's Central Park was portrayed as a no-go zone too and today is is one of my favorite urban spaced in the world].

The Ken Burns series on New York has a good add-on episode entirely dedicated to the WTC -- from conception to construction to destruction, with a high-wire crossing in the middle (if you have not seen the documentary Man on Wire about this, it is well worth the view).  I have spent time in the buildings, and I think they had a mixed legacy architecturally.  I thought the interiors sucked, with long waits for elevators and crappy views via too-small windows (the exception being Windows on the World, for a while the highest-grossing restaurant in the world and a place I was fortunate enough to experience once).  The exteriors worked for me as sculpture, and I thought they were beautiful especially from a boat on the water.

This article by Glenn Greenwald on the ACLU's response to COVID is simply remarkable.  I won't even try to excerpt it.  Suffice it to say that barely a decade ago, the ACLU actually was concerned about individual rights being trashed by coercive government pandemic responses.  Their 2008 position paper can only be called "prescient."   They warned that with a state-sponsored coercive intervention program fanned by media fear porn, "People, rather than the disease, become the enemy."  No kidding.   But the ACLU has unfortunately become an operative of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and as such has reversed its position -- even from as recently as March of 2020 -- presumably because the part in power has changed.

One other thing on a related note -- the ACLU is a long-time strong supporter of abortion rights.  As such, this position in their recent NYT editorial supporting forced vaccination seems counter-productive to their cause in the extreme: "we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others."  In the past, the absolute sanctity of one's body has been the bulwark in protecting abortion rights.  Other people's opinion on whether the fetus is a human life or not were declared irrelevant because "my body is sacred, period."  But if the body is no longer sacred if and when the government declares another human being is being harmed, how is that any different from the typical abortion opponents argument?

The previous annual installment in this series was here.

Well, the Phoenix light rail system has hit new levels of fail that even I could not have projected.  Here are the annual numbers updated for the most recent report:

Yes, I know that supporters will argue that the agency should get a "pass" due to COVID.  I am willing to do so for the bus system, but not for light rail.  Let me explain.

I have always been, perhaps unlikely for a libertarian, comfortable with some base level of public transportation.  Lack of mobility can be a huge barrier to upward mobility and I can support public transit systems in major cities as a sensible anti-poverty program.

What I oppose is the replacement of relatively inexpensive and tremendously flexible bus transit systems with light rail.  Light rail requires orders of magnitude more capital and operating cost per passenger (except perhaps in the absolute largest and densest cities, which does not include Phoenix).  Light rail is limited by time and money and necessity to only a few routes.  In almost no city outside the centers of the few largest cities (think Manhattan) has it ever been possible to develop a complete enough web for citizens to entirely give up a car.  And light rail is absolutely inflexible -- once capacity is added on one route (for literally billions of dollars) it can't be moved where busses can be shifted easily from route to route.  For example, on a days' notice we had bus routes going to the major local vaccination centers -- no way to do that with rail.

It has always seemed to me that light rail is a middle class boondoggle.  White professionals kind of like the trains whereas they won't ride busses.  The few light rail routes tend to follow middle class / professional commuting routes.  Light rail gets professionals from home to office (after which they use their car for other sorts of trips) but does little to provide mobility for the poor to the doctor, to the store, to support services, etc.  Worse, because light rail costs 10x or more per passenger than busses, the advent of light rail generally starves a transit agency of funds and causes them to cut back on busses to save money (because once the rail is laid, you can't really cut back on it).  Look at the chart above, despite years of light rail extensions, total transit ridership in Phoenix stalled after growing for over a decade.  Wealthy university students at ASU got a nice train to the downtown clubs, but the poor who depend on busses for basic mobility lost a lot of service and routes.

I will confess that I didn't anticipate a pandemic in my prior opposition to light rail, but it has been more proof of the light rail fail.  Busses that are not needed are parked, sidelining a modest capital investment.  But light rail is $2+ billion in capital investment lying dormant.  With the middle class eschewing transit during COVID, transit is returned to its core function of providing essential mobility to the poor.  But it can't do this as well as it used to because of the multi-billion dollar light rail capital albatross.

Just as Republicans were starting to successfully cast themselves as an alternative to blue state COVID totalitarianism, Republicans in Texas decide to dabble in a bit of creepy statism themselves.  I am going to stay away from the abortion issues involved (a policy that has served me well for decades on this blog), but I do want to address the enforcement mechanisms in the law.  From Zero Hedge:

One provision that makes the law unique is the fact that private citizens will be allowed to sue providers and anyone involved in "facilitating coverage", which could mean people who drive others to the abortion clinic could be found liable in court to losses of at least $10,000. The ACLU says this provision "actively encourages private citizens to act as bounty hunters".

It is good to see the ACLU weighing in on the bad aspects of this enforcement mechanism, though it is telling we have never heard a peep out of them when this same private bounty hunting enforcement mechanism has been used in numerous California laws aimed at leftish goals (eg the dysfunctional ADA lawsuit mess and sue your boss laws, both of which substitute private bounty-hunting litigation for what normally would be state regulatory enforcement actions).

At least in the California laws, the litigant had to actually be a somewhat interested party (eg disabled or an employee of the firm).  Texas has unleashed the equivalent of Cuban block captains on their citizens.

This is a terrible precedent.  Conservatives who are really passionate about abortion may not be able to see it, but I can easily imagine this applied to all sorts of awful rules.  How about lawsuits for $10,000 for any parent that drives a kid to school that is not wearing a mask?  How about a $5,000 lawsuit by any citizen against someone who idles their car too long and thus destroys the planet?   Conservatives are handing the Left a gift with this enforcement precedent and we could all be suffering under it soon.

1.  Here is the iron law of medical -- in fact all scientific -- studies in the modern world: most do not replicate.  This has always been true of studies that supposedly find some link between doing [thing we enjoy] and cancer.  This of course does not stop the media from running with initial study results based on 37 study participants as "fact."  The same is true for studies of new drugs and treatments.  Most don't pan out or are not nearly as efficacious as early studies might indicate.  We have seen that over and over during COVID.
2. The Feds insist that a drug that is know to be perfectly safe in humans still must be carefully tested in random controlled studies before it can be used for a new application.  Fine, I think they are overly cautious in application of this, but let's run with this standard for a moment.  Why, then, are NPI that have known astronomical human costs (eg lockdowns, business closures, and mask mandates) allowable without any sort of study -- allowable in fact when the existing science on their efficacy is at best ambivalent?

Update:  In case you wonder why they don't replicate

Five years or so ago I remember it was a popular social media poll question in this country to ask where one would live if they could not live in the US.  I remember that Australia and New Zealand were often near the top of the lists.  Which leads me to ask today -- would anyone, after watching the extraordinarily totalitarian response of these two countries to COVID, answer the same way today?  I certainly would not.  The country of Crocodile Dundee has morphed before our eyes into the country of some weird fascist version of piglet in the 100 acre wood.

I have wondered for a while what Australia was thinking of -- long-term -- with its COVID zero policy.  Let's say they were successful in their country eliminating COVID cases.  Now what?  They would soon be a nation of non-immunes in a world that has largely come out the other side of the pandemic.  This is particularly true now that we have a better sense that existing vaccines are more of a before-the-fact treatment to reduce the severity of the disease than they are absolute immunity to catching the thing, at least in some mild way that triggers an overly-sensitive test.

Were the Australians going to permanently wall themselves off from the rest of the Earth?  Refuse to participate in the world economy?  Because the one thing that is absolutely certain is that reservoirs of the disease would still exist -- heck, there are still small whooping cough outbreaks in the US, and a couple hundreds polio cases around the world each year.  Perhaps they were hoping the disease would morph into something less deadly, as most viruses do (most all parasites will mutate over time to spread more easily but be less likely to kill their hosts).   If this is the case, it is sure strange given that the people most in favor of extreme government interventions are the exact same people who seem unable to recognize the Delta variant as being less rather than more deadly.

Well, the sort of good news is that the Australian government has announced that it is willing to release the citizenry from its hostage status once 80% are vaccinated.  I personally was vaccinated very early on (so early that I may soon not be counted as vaccinated) and would urge most adults without any unusual medical conditions get one as well.  It is not going to stop you from testing positive at some point, but it very likely will keep you off a ventilator if you do get COVID.   If you are in Australia, I certainly would recommend it as a small price to be released from captivity.