Monthly Archives: November 2020

Free Speech

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During last week’s Senate Commerce Committee hearings on Facebook’s, Alphabet’s, and Twitter’s seeming censorship of speech of which those entities’ MFWICS—Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey—disapprove, Senator Ed Markey (D, MA) said this:

The issue is not that these companies before us today are taking too many posts down. The issue is that they are leaving too many dangerous posts up.

This, from the Senator who also said this about the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett:

Originalism is racist. Originalism is sexist. Originalism is homophobic. Originalism is just a fancy word for discrimination.

This is the assault on freedom of speech—on our Constitution—we can expect from a Progressive-Democrat-controlled Congress and White House.

Some Employment Numbers

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…in our energy-related industries.  A letter in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section laid some out for Louisiana.

…the oil-and-gas industry supports 260,000 jobs in the state, and each industry job generates 3.4 Louisiana jobs in other sectors

That work out to an aggregation of 884,000 jobs in Louisiana alone.

The National Association of State Energy Officials estimates for 4Q2018 that the Traditional Energy sectors (a broader look at our energy industry than just oil-and-gas) employed 2.4 million Americans. Using (albeit naively) Louisiana’s multiplier of 3.4 jobs in other sectors generated by the energy industry, that works out to 8.2 million jobs. That’s 5% of our then-employed Americans.

This is what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden wants to trash with his “transition” away from hydrocarbons as the source of our nation’s energy—the source of our businesses’ and homes’ production and heating/cooling energy.

Wuhan Virus Recovery Rates

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No one really has a handle on this, especially in the US. Much is made of the lack of a standard definition of “recovery,” and for good reason.

The data are so spotty, public-health authorities say they don’t know what the true count [of recoveries from a Wuhan Virus infection] is. …
The spottiness stems from the absence of both an agreed-upon definition for a coronavirus recovery and a standardized way to track the numbers of patients, the health experts say. What constitutes recovery is so nebulous that some states don’t even track it, and those that do probably undercount the true number.

However, even were there a standard definition, we still wouldn’t have any idea of the true statistic, nor any idea of the accuracy of an estimate for a recovery statistic.

This illustrates the key:

Such measurements [numbers of recovered] might indicate how many people who tested positive for the coronavirus didn’t die, but might miss those who never displayed symptoms and didn’t undergo testing.

The only recoveries, under any definition, being counted are those from confirmed—test-identified—cases. There is no estimate of the number who have been infected, never tested, and recovered.

Those recoveries are not included in guesses of the number of recoveries.