1/ .@bookingcom Sick w/ a positive covid test on the road. The hotel that I booked with the Booking.com app said they’d happily approve a refund but I needed to request it via Booking.com. Booking.com says…

There's not a huge difference between men & women on abortion views... Thankfully both are trending *rapidly* in the pro-choice direction: pewresearch.org/religion/fac…

Hospitalizations are a slightly better leading indicator of deaths and the slope of that is... worrisome. Next couple of weeks will tell us a lot more.

I'm with you with cautious optimism about severity/death. But there's a 3-4 week lag between cases and deaths and cases here started heading north (checks stats) about ~25 days ago. Overlay for illustration (blue=cases / black=death):

I was at a furniture store and they had decorative saguaro skeletons, which was news to me. I kinda want one in my next house! (Also, happy new year!)

Hard to believe that behavior change will head off climate disaster, given that most smart/concerned people don't make (m)any of the high impact lifestyle changes. (Throwing stones from a pretty glassy house here... Rooting for geo-engineering and fusion to save the day!)

Super hard to rationalize that with the piles of meta-studies referenced in this NYT article: nytimes.com/2021/08/30/healt… Also, might be my bias showing but the FLCCCP seem pretty sketchy to me after a bit of reading/googling. Still, wouldn't rule it out. We'll see soon enough!

A little French Vietnamese patio cafe that I eat at regularly in Austin has this on the menu and my diry-martini-loving companions dig it quite a bit.

My dad just send me a "society is melting down around us", article citing a 41% increase in murder rate in NYC. Yes, it's a rough year. But here's a bit of context (red dot is my guess at a 41% increase). (We went on a nice family vacation to NYC in the late 80s.)

We've got a lot of work to do, but we've made amazing progress on poverty in the US in the past decade.