2:00PM Water Cooler 2/10/2025

By Lambert Strether.

Bird Song of the Day

Brown Thrasher, Mewnans Lake SF–East Trail (Pithlachocco Trail), Alachua, Florida, United States. I wish that Macaulay Library listed sounds imitated with the mimidae. I thought this bird was a little dull at first, then it got rolling….

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In Case You Might Miss…

1. A typical day in the Trump White House, per the NY Post.
2. Elon on political economy (with handy diagram).
3. Stoller on Trump gutting the CFPB.
4. The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism.

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Politics

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

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Trump Administration

“Inside Trump’s hectic day-to-day schedule – with prez revealing the phrase that keeps going through his mind when he first wakes up” [New York Post]. “When he wakes up, the first thing that goes through his mind, he says, is ‘business. Everything’s business.'” • Oh, and DOGE now has 45 employees. I have to read that in some piece of hagiography. This is really worth reading in full; and I am sure that the contrast to the Biden White House is very great.

Assuming I can believe Chris Murphy, not a good look for Little Marco:

This is pure gaslighting. There is no working waiver process. Marco can pretend the the real Secretary of State, Elon Musk, didn't shut down USAID, but he did.

1/ My national security team looked into the functionally nonexistent "wavier process" and here's what they found: https://t.co/wCCF5nacDF

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) February 7, 2025

• The sad thing is that when I first heard this clip, I thought Rubio sounded articulate and impressive. Such a disappointment. Perhaps matters will improve later. NOTE I do like Murphy’s spectacular typo: “the wavier process” (rather like Wavy Gravy). A lot of processes these days seem “wavier.”

DOGE

Museum-grade snark:

Venezia Maestro e il dogehttps://t.co/1VCd7uxL7a

Presentation of the Ring to the Doge https://t.co/0WGm4I4fC3 pic.twitter.com/kj41PxGqUI

— Michele ⚜️ Rousseau 🦋 (@MicheleRoussea7) February 4, 2025

Elon’s views on political economy:

🎯 https://t.co/YsCX5Tz5nl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2025

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“Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government” [David Roth, The Defector]. This is Bageant- or Thompson-level snark, here, and how well deserved:

Moment by moment, Musk and his strike force of greasy Beavisoid wreckers are rats in the walls, gnawing hideously through the wiring in search of richer fare. There is public money in there somewhere, and they believe it is theirs by right. Musk and his super-class of tech freaks want to get fat on it, to rescue that money from public uses that they view as inherently inefficient and unjust—spending that is “waste, fraud, and abuse” because of the ends to which it is deployed, which are public, and because of who is deploying it, which is not them. It is important to them, as a matter of efficiency and justice, that more of that money end up with them. In more deserving hands, that public wealth will be protected from the grasping public, and can be put to the uses this cohort prefers: building bigger homes behind bigger walls, booking The Chainsmokers to play 45-minute sets at the absolute worst parties in human history, hiring Famously Combative Attorneys and buying political suction, discreetly settling their endless skein of sexual harassment lawsuits. Rich person things. Real stuff.

The reflexive belief that all public stuff is fundamentally less valid and less real for being public—that the people doing public work are lazy, weak, and mediocre, and that the work they do is inherently inefficient and wasteful—is the downstream efflorescence of the toxic reactionary sludge that has been getting dumped into the water table for generations now; it is old, dumb, and very boring.

Fun stuff at the Defector (history of the venue). I went there for Superbowl coverage, but, like the old Deadspin, it’s not “just” sports.

The responses to this tweet — those that aren’t bots — are not above average:

If Elon was actually looking for fraud, he’d be hiring forensic accountants—not a bunch of programmers.

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) February 9, 2025

UPDATE And meanwhile:

Update: DOGE members Luke Farritor and Gavin Kilger are no longer “read only” users at the CFPB. They are now listed as domain administrators in the bureau’s system, meaning they can provide or revoke access as they see fit https://t.co/5dIJyyE87Y

— Caleb Ecarma (@calebhecarma) February 10, 2025

Whatever these “greasy Beavisoid wreckers” are doing it’s not an audit, because they don’t have the qualifications for that.

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“Trump’s new CFPB chief is being sued over DOGE” [Quartz]. “The acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was hit with two lawsuits on Sunday after Russel Vought issued orders to freeze some of the consumer protection agency’s work…. The lawsuits, both filed by the National Treasury Employees Union, come after Vought on Saturday said the CFPB would not receive its scheduled quarterly transfer of funding from the Federal Reserve, instead relying on its remaining balance. He also closed the CFPB’s headquarters to staff and ordered employees to stop virtually all their work and close any pending investigations, NPR reported…. The direction to stop work is ‘unlawful,’ the union argues. The other lawsuit asked a judge to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing employee information. At least three DOGE staffers have been added to the CFPB’s staff as ‘senior advisors,’ the lawsuit states. The union said Vought instructed CFPB employees to give the DOGE team ‘access to all non-classified CFPB systems,’ which it argues could bring workers ‘irreparable harm to their privacy interests’ should their data be improperly accessed. Some union members are also concerned that the DOGE team may use their medical information to retaliate against them, according to the lawsuit.”

“Trump administration orders 1,700 CFPB workers to stay home” [UPI]. ” Workers at the federal government’s consumer finance watchdog in Washington were told to stay home Monday after the acting director, newly installed by President Donald Trump, ordered the agency to halt its operations. Around 1,700 staff at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received an email Sunday from Chief Operating Officer Adam Martinez informing them that the head office would be closed Monday through Friday, according to reports by The Washington Post, USA Today and CNBC…. CNBC, quoting a source with knowledge of the agency, said only a few hundreds of the roles at CFPB were mandated by law and that management had informed employees that a buyout offer made to other federal employees was available to them, on equivalent terms.” Such as they are. This after clawing back $20 billion from thieving weasels like Andreesen. Why, the idea.

“Monopoly Round-Up: On Ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (excerpt) [Matt Stoller, BIG]. Extremely important on FinTech vs. the banks, and worth reading in full. “Last week, Elon Musk and the new Trump Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought stopped all work at the commission, including enforcement of rules, litigation, as well as supervision and examination activity. They are planning to shutter the headquarters and presumably will be laying off most of the staff. By shuttering the CFPB, Trump is not just going back to a pre-financial crisis status quo, but to something actually weaker than that. There is essentially no longer any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products.” And: “We can now expect rampant fraud and cheating in banking and fintech, not just a scam here or there, but regular losses of life savings by people who followed the rules, illegal foreclosures, random seizures of the working capital of small businesses, abuse by debt collectors, and routine deception by even respected financial firms.” And: “Elon Musk’s stated goal with X is to create an ‘everything app,’ which you would use to communicate, engage with social media, pay for things, hail cabs, shop, and so forth. All the big tech monopolists want to be the ‘everything app.’ The CFPB was proposing to treat these companies with payment systems as, well, payment systems, and subject them to the same supervisory treatment that banks have. Now that’s out the window, so big tech firms have a competitive advantage over banks.” But: “[D]estroying the bureau strikes me as a long term strategic error for the banking sector and big tech. The banks were already losing to Silicon Valley, and now they are at a regulatory disadvantage to boot. More fundamentally, this shutdown breaks a basic deal. I worked in the House during the great financial crisis, and the arrangement was that the banks would accept some mild oversight via the CFPB, and in return they would get a multi-trillion dollar bailout and make excessive profits. I didn’t like that deal and encouraged the member I worked for to vote against it, but it was forced on liberals by Barack Obama. (This deal was an intra-Democratic Party arrangement; conservative Republicans were in thrall to the banks and wanted nothing but foreclosures and bailouts. And they still do.) It was an egregiously terrible choice, one that liberals couldn’t acknowledge because then they’d have to admit a whole lot of uncomfortable truths, notably that Wall Street is a malevolent force, that Obama was a malevolent leader, and that the Dodd-Frank reform bill passed in the wake of the crisis, rather than ending bailouts, was a joke. But now they will be faced with the bracing truth, that there is no good faith negotiations with dominant firms demanding coercive governing power. Either Silicon Valley bankers rule America, or the public does. But there’s no middle ground.”

Trump Administration

“OpenAI Goes MAGA” [Karen Hao, The Atlantic]. “Altman has shown an uncanny ability throughout his career to get himself out of the toughest binds by leaning on his influential network, ingratiating himself with the powerful, and fundraising extraordinary amounts of capital. It was for these reasons that Altman successfully orchestrated his return to OpenAI as CEO in late 2023, after the board briefly ousted him. And it is why so many people have expressed alarm about his leadership in recent years. This week, he was at it again, standing next to Trump during the Stargate announcement in a symbol of solidarity and praising him later on X: “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him … i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” Although OpenAI has led the pack, many AI companies have worked over the past two years to influence policy and grow without government interference. Silicon Valley has always operated like this, and many other major tech CEOs took their place next to Trump this week. But the demands of generative AI are meaningfully different from, say, those of a traditional search engine or a social-media platform: Its development requires far more crucial physical infrastructure. Generative-AI models are of a size that necessitate the build-out of data centers at unprecedented scale. This, in turn, will give Silicon Valley outsize influence over the placement of power plants and even water lines across the country.” • As contrasted with DeepSeek, as discussed in this interesting thread from Hao:

Wait a minute. You mean to say that we don’t need to blanket the earth with data centers and coal & gas plants to maybe arrive at a future where we can wave a magical AGI wand to make all of the consequences of that go away?

Yes. This is a false trade off. Let that sink in. 16/

— Karen Hao (@_KarenHao) January 27, 2025

2024 Post Mortem

Democrats en déshabillé

“To watch Musk, Senate Democrats start whistleblower platform for workers” [WaPo]. “Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York), have set up a whistleblower complaint portal for federal workers to submit any reports of what they see as unlawful activities in their respective agencies in response to Elon Musk and his group’s efforts to downsize the federal government…. In the latest efforts, Democrats are urging federal workers to resist their advances. The new whistleblower portal is their latest effort to oppose Trump’s actions as they look to form a cohesive message against the administration…. Democrats emphasized the role of the Whistleblower Protection Act in prohibiting retaliation against federal employees who disclose evidence of possible wrongdoing. They also vowed to investigate the Trump administration’s actions through oversight requests, hearings and inquiries.”

Realignment and Legitimacy

“The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism: A Cross-City Quantitative and Historical Text Qualitative Analysis” [American Journal of Public Health]. From the Abstract: “We tested the hypothesis that deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic contributed to the rise of Fascism in Italy. To provide a “thicker” interpretation of these patterns, we applied historical text mining to the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia (Mussolini’s newspaper). Our observations were consistent with evidence from other contexts that worsening mortality rates can fuel radical politics. Unequal impacts of pandemics may contribute to political polarization. ” • Interesting….

Hmm:

I think more accurately, what’s going on is (clearly) not a populist insurgency against professional elites, but a civil war between the left (academia/media/NGO) and right (tech) flanks of the professional class: what Gouldner labeled the “intellectuals” vs the “intelligentsia.” https://t.co/LRZ2NDE8OB

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) February 8, 2025

I’m not sure I agree. The 2024 result seems to me to be — for the majority, certainly for the most dynamic factions representing the majority — a thorough-going rejection of governance in today’s America as such, and hence, a rejection of America’s governing class, the PMC, as such. I think the “tech wing” are tolerated as instruments of revenge, and no more. Higher up, in the squillionaire class, divisions may be different.

Syndemics

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

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Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

Science Is Popping

“Four lessons COVID taught us about the immune system” [Nature]. “[S]cientists are still sifting through the data to garner a better understanding of how the immune system works. Here are four lessons they’ve learnt so far. [(1)] Antibodies aren’t everything…. As the pandemic went on, however, it became clear that T cells were a crucial arm of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and to COVID-19 vaccines, says Alessandro Sette, also an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 waned in the months after vaccination, but vaccinated people continued to make T cells that recognized the virus…. [(2)] Early-warning immune alarm reaches the whole body… Innate immune responses are not as specific as antibodies and T cells. Cells can unleash these responses when they detect foreign molecules, such as the RNA genome of SARS-CoV-2… Before the pandemic, researchers thought that this warning cry did not travel far beyond the site of infection. But when tenOever and his colleagues analysed samples from hamsters and from autopsies of people who had previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2, they found signs of interferon responses throughout the body, even in organs far away from infected cells3. Later, the team learnt that this is not limited to SARS-CoV-2: the influenza virus also elicits a widespread interferon response in hamsters. tenOever hypothesizes that these global antiviral defences bolster protection in case the infection travels rapidly through the body…. [(3)] The nose knows. The pandemic underscored the importance of understanding immune responses in specific tissues, and especially in the place where infection often starts: the nose.

The moist lining of the nose is a unique immune environment that contains a different blend of antibodies and immune cells to that found in the blood. As a result, injected vaccines, which generate antibodies in the bloodstream, might not be ideal for blocking infection in the nose. ‘One of the lessons from the pandemic is location, location, location,’ says Crotty. That specificity helps to account for the uneven protection conferred by COVID-19 vaccines: they are a powerful shield against serious illness, which is caused by viral infiltration of the lungs, but offer only moderate protection against initial infection…. [(4)] Hints at the cause of post-viral illness. Not long after the pandemic began, some people began reporting symptoms that lasted for months after infection. This phenomenon, called long COVID, has proved difficult to study…. How best to treat long COVID is just one of many unanswered mysteries in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Immunologists around the world still have so many questions,’ says Crotty. ‘This virus is still around, it’s still important, and it’s still very informative to learn from‘” • That’s nice. Still, interesting article, well worth a read.

Social Norming

Survivorship bias:

* * *

Lambert here: Four tries to load CDC’s wasterwater page, and nada. Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow.

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

Wastewater
This week[1] CDC January 27	Last week[2] CDC (until next week):
★ Variants [3] CDC February 1	★ Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC February 1
Hospitalization
New York[5] New York State, data February 6:	★ National [6] CDC February 7:
Positivity
★ National[7] Walgreens February 10:	★ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic February 8:
Travelers Data
Positivity[9] CDC January 20:	Variants[10] CDC January 20
Deaths
Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC January 25:	Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC January 25:

LEGEND

1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.

2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”

NOTES

[1] (CDC) Down, nothing new at major hubs.

[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.

[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.

[4] (ED) A little uptick.

[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped, but no exponential growth either, Odd.

[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.

[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.

[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.

[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.

[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.

[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.

[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.

Stats Watch

There are no official statistics of interest today.

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Manufacturing: “Trump vows to add tariffs to aluminum and steel; Airbus, Boeing, suppliers will be impacted” [Leeham News and Analysis]. “President Donald Trump announced plans to impose a 25% tariff on imported aluminum and steel this week, including from the USA’s largest supplying countries: Canada and Mexico…. Boeing produced about 300 aluminum aircraft last year, each consuming about 30 tons in production, or 9,000 tons for 2024. For 2025, LNA estimates Boeing will produce 500 aluminum aircraft. At 30 tons per aircraft, this is 15,000 tons of high-grade aluminum alloys.”

Manufacturing: “Boeing signals more orders needed before setting up assembly line in India” [Reuters]. “Boeing signalled on Monday it would need more orders from India before it considers setting up a final civil aircraft assembly line there, potentially throwing cold water on the government’s hopes of the U.S. planemaker assembling commercial jets in the country. ‘The business case in order to have final assembly in any region has to be far larger than what the Indian market is. It requires many more airplanes than are being bought in India today,’ Boeing India and South Asia president Salil Gupte told Reuters.

‘We’ll have to see how it evolves as the markets in India and around India go. In the meantime, it is all about building stepwise capability to get up to that point,’ Gupte said in an interview on the sidelines of the Aero India show in the city of Bengaluru.”

Manufacturing: “Here’s Something You Might Have Missed About Boeing’s Big Q4 Loss” [Motley Fool]. “Boeing blamed the bulk of the quarter’s (and the year’s) losses on “previously announced impacts of the IAM work stoppage and agreement,” as well as on “costs associated with workforce reductions” that were in part brought on by the IAM strike. Now, the good news is that, with the signing of a new labor contract, this strike is now behind Boeing. But the bad news is that not all of Boeing’s losses were due to labor unrest, which is largely outside of Boeing’s control. Some were directly caused by poor business decisions on Boeing’s part. Take the company’s vaunted Boeing Defense, Space & Security business, or BDS. Boeing admitted that “charges for certain defense programs” contributed to the losses it incurred in both the quarter and the year. And indeed, while the strike cost Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes division $2.1 billion in losses last quarter, BDS suffered even more losses — $2.3 billion. BDS took charges for the company’s KC-46A refueling tanker program and for its T-7A training jet program, two programs where Boeing may have underbid to win work from the Pentagon — and is now paying the price in the form of ‘fixed price development cost pressures’ causing losses. Boeing also took charges on its VC-25B ‘Air Force One’ program, and on its MQ-25 Stingray drones program as well. And Boeing took charges on its Commercial Crew program, which refers to Boeing’s troubled Starliner space capsule that just can’t seem to reach the International Space Station without glitching one way or another.”

Tech: “Turns Out AI Is More Empathetic Than Allstate’s Insurance Reps” [Wall Street Journal]. • Showing that AIs don’t, at bottom, know how vicious and brutal the health insurance industry is. If AGI ever pans out, the obvious first use cases for a sentient slave without empathy are torture and war crimes, which is where Silicon Valley has been headed for some time in any case.

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 42 Fear (previous close: 41 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 40 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 7 at 1:51:37 PM ET.

Rapture Index: Closes down one on Food Supply. “The lack of activity has downgraded this category” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 180. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • This is a tough crowd. Surely Trump’s first month brought the Rapture closer?

Gallery

Bird flu symptoms?!

Head of a Man https://t.co/j9qHCjHmXM pic.twitter.com/pDIQIEMkJ7

— L. S. Lowry (@lowryartist) February 8, 2025

Surely not.

News of the Wired

“Earth’s inner core may have changed shape, say scientists” [BBC]. “The inner core of Earth may have changed shape in the past 20 years, according to a group of scientists. The inner core is usually thought to be shaped like a ball, but its edges may actually have deformed by 100m or more in height in places, according to Prof John Vidale who led the research…. It is possible that the changes are connected to changes in Earth’s magnetic field. ‘The magnetic field has had jerks at various times in the past few decades, and we’d like to know if that is related to what we’re seeing at the inner core boundary,’ he said. Prof Vidale urged caution about hyping the findings into ideas that the core is going to stop rotating any time soon.” • Oh.

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Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From EM:

EM writes: “How we doing? I’m after getting my hands on a greenhouse with the caveat that I don’t grow weed. This is going to be a major operation and I will keep you posted. I think I could be the most gifted gardener of my generation potentially/hopefully.” Ambition! What a great project!

Tools:

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