Law, Interpretation, Code, Checks

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Many people in government–including President Trump and several Congresspeople–have expressed dismay about the ‘stimulus’ checks sent to organizations such as Harvard University and Shake Shack.  I haven’t observed much curiosity, though, about why these checks got sent out in the first place.

Was the CARES act so written as to require money to be sent to such organization?  I haven’t read through this very large document, but here it is if anyone feels inspired to do so.

Was the language of the law so ambiguous that it was interpreted by the detailed implementers as requiring such funding, even though that was not Congressional intent?

Was it simply a matter of a coding error in a program that had to be written or modified very hastily in order to send out millions of checks?

I’m curious about the lack of curiosity re this matter.

The Triple Constraint and the Next Wave

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Following up on the second item of my Risk Register and its recommended strategy for reduction, what ought we to do as individuals or households to prepare? It occurred to me to throw some project-management techniques at the problem. Let’s begin with a drivers-and-restrainers exercise, “drivers” being reasons that support taking an action, and “restrainers” being reasons that hold you back from taking the action …

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Mutations

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Note that Greg Cochran over at West Hunter remains pessimistic about life becoming safer. Mutations are of course already occurring in C19, just from the numbers.  Most of those will be deleterious to the virus itself, or neutral.  But sheer volume produces mutations that are also diseases, some lesser, some greater.

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asocial social distancing

Chicagoboyz are social distancing as many miles as they can before it gets really hot out.

Dark Sarcasm In the Classroom

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And in other places, like New York. I must confess to snickering nastily at New Yorker’s response to Mayor OBlah-blah’s unveiling of a system to nark out your neighbors for not obeying every jot and tittle of the Wuhan Corona-crud restrictions. Said system was immediately swamped in an unstoppable rising tide of rude pictures, pictures of rude gestures, and sarcastic references to Hitler, as well as crude personal jibes regarding the Mayor himself to the point where the system was taken down entirely. Well, good for New Yorkers, I say and a very good thing that such a thing wasn’t tried in a Texas city; seriously, the receiving server would have melted down into a radioactive puddle of goo. And California skateboarders industriously clearing out their skate-park of the sand dumped into it by officious authorities and making a dirt-bike track out of the excess sand? That’s just freaking awesome. We have not forgotten how to cock a snook at overweening authority; a tradition has been passed on to a new generation…

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