So it turned out — surprise, surprise — that the business credit card that had literal Lorem Ipsum in their confirmation of sign up email lasted eighteen months and abruptly shut down.

Since I didn't note the email notification, I had no idea this was going on. By coincidence I didn't use the card for anything significant since the "effective immediately we are reducing your credit limit to something trivial, and then shortly thereafter turning it off" announcement until my phone bill attempted to auto pay a couple days ago, leading to me just today getting a notification that my business cell phone service was terminated unless I went to go pay the bill immediately.

Imagine my surprise when, to find out what was going on with my credit card, I attempted to log in to the PayPal credit card website, only to get the error message "No [credit card] accountfound associated with that PayPal log in." After establishing that my actual PayPal account is perfectly fine and I can log into it without a problem, I called customer service. I did not get a person, but the message mentioned if you were calling in about the program shutting down to login to the website for more information and an FAQ. That was 1) the first I found out about the fact that this wasn't just a me problem, the whole damn credit card was going away, and 2) totally on brand for the same company that truncated the street field on my mailing address to not include the actual mailbox number.

Well, I expect that'll be the last time I get a PayPal branded anything.

It turns out I was right to keep my previous old business credit card around as a backup when I got this business credit card. I wasn't sure what sort of bad thing might happen to a business credit card, and now I know. Under the principle one is none and two is one, clearly I need to go get another business credit card.

Anybody else with a business card want to make a recommendation for what business credit card I should get next? I like cash back, though it's not strictly necessary, but I don't like annual fees and won't pay them. Interest rate is kinda immaterial because I don't carry balances, but good customer support (esp for handling contested charges) and usable website are key. Would prefer not to bank with a company that invests in fossil fuels.

P.S. Apparently they fixed the website or turned it back on: I was able to log in to my cc account, redeem the last of my rewards points and pay off my remaining balance.

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This post is addressed to my fellow Massachusetts voters, though it may be of interest to other US voters and people in other countries.

This is about how you vote in the up-coming election. Specifically, this is about Question 3.

In 2016, I wrote a post, "Why You Can't Find a Therapist, No, Really", which set out the dire economics of the psychotherapy profession. It explained, in part three, how this woeful state of affairs was in an important sense because most therapists are not employees, and therefore it is illegal for therapists to collectively bargain with insurance companies. I'll just quote myself:

"Why don't you therapists go on strike for better payment from insurance companies?"

Ah, because that would be massively illegal.

Therapists, from time to time, do go on strike. In Washington state in 2014, therapists employed by Behavioral Health Resource went on strike. In California in 2013, mental health care workers at Telecare La Casa Mental Health Rehabilitation Center went on strike. And in California in 2014, therapists employed by Kaiser Permanente's Oakland Medical Center went on strike.

You know what the therapists had in common in each of cases? They were employees striking against their employers.

Remember what I said about the difference in legal protections between employers and independent contractors? One of those legal protections for employees, hard won, was the right of organizing and collective bargaining. Strikes are mostly legal, for employees.

But an independent contractor isn't an employee. They're a business, which is selling a service to another business. And when businesses band together to force a customer – in this case insurers – to pay more for something? That's called price fixing and is a flagrant, unambiguous violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

It is illegal for therapists working as contractors or in private practice to organize any sort of strike or boycott against the insurance companies that pay so little. [PDF]

Rideshare drivers – that is gig-economy drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft – are in exactly the same situation in their relationship to rideshare platforms as psychotherapists are in relationship to insurance companies: they are considered independent contractors – businesses – and as such it would be a violation of antitrust law for them to collectively bargain, both federal antitrust law and our local Massachusetts antitrust law.

There are two remedies being pursued to the plight of rideshare drivers. One, that seems to be the preferred approach of our legislature, is to force rideshare platforms to reclassify drivers as employees, with all that entails.

The other is to write an exception to antitrust law into our state laws, to make it legal for non-employee rideshare drivers to unionize, even if they are independent contractors.

That's what Question 3 is trying to do.

You should vote Yes on Question 3.

You should vote Yes on Question 3 because rideshare drivers should get to have a union if they want. You should vote Yes on Question 3 because Uber and Lyft shouldn't be able to evade the federal and state laws meant to empower employees to form unions just by the simple expediency of having their drivers be independent contractors and not employees.

And you should vote Yes on Question 3 for the sake of therapists, and for the profession of psychotherapy, so maybe someday therapy will be more available to those who need it.

( Read more... [2,250 words] )

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Huh. As you may have heard from the news, there's been a huge uptick reported by the CDC of whooping cough (pertussis). Okay.

When this first appeared on Google News' Top Stories main page a few days ago as it was served to me, almost all the coverage was from conservative news outlets:

2024 Oct 10: FOX9 KMSP: "Whooping cough, measles spreading at fastest rate in years"

2024 Oct 11: Fox12 Oregon (KPTV): "800+ cases of whooping cough in WA, 600+ in OR"

2024 Oct 12: NYPost (!!!): "Whooping cough infections climb to over 17,600 cases in the US"

2024 Oct 12: The Hill: "Whooping cough cases surge to record levels in US, CDC says"

Needless, I hope, to say, I don't usually get served an awful lot of hits from those news outlets.

Now, these weren't the only early reporting — Medscape and Scientific American were out in front seven days and five days ago, respectively, and NPR and Axios were out there with them three days ago, along with some other neutral (AFAIK) news outlets — but I would barely expect right wing news to cover infectious illness at all, much less a story which is substantially about people failing to get their kids childhood vaccinations, given how hard they court an anti-vax viewership.

But then there's this gobsmacking thing on, I shit you not, "Fox and Friends", just out at 2:52 p.m. today:

2024 Oct 14: Fox News: "Lower vaccination rate contributing to rise in whooping cough cases"

Wut.

Fox News senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel on who is most at risk for whooping cough and what is contributing to the rise in cases.

...Wut.

ANCHOR: The CDC reporting a more than 340% rise in whooping cough from last year, with 10 states reporting the highest rates in the country, here to discuss what's causing this uptick on this Medical Monday, Fox News senior medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegel. Dr Siegel, that seems concerning! What's causing this?

DR SIEGEL: Well, this is something really to watch out for, because a third of all children under the age of one who get this, Kayleigh, wind up hospitalized.

ANCHOR: Wow.

DR SIEGEL: It's burgeoning around the world. That's number one. There's over 24 million cases in the world. Most of it in underdeveloped areas that don't have the really excellent vaccine for this, that I'll talk about in a minute: that's number one.

Number two, coming out of the pandemic[*], kids haven't seen this before[**], so they're exposed to it and they get sick from it.

Number three, adults harbor this, and we don't even know we have it. Cause it seems like a virus.[***] It's just, for us, a regular cough, a little fever, you think it's a virus[***]. It's not productive so you don't think of a bacteria. [****] This is a bacteria. [****] And we can treat it with azithromycin, by the way, with Zithromax — if we know it's a bacteria. But little kids get it, and their airways aren't developed, and you hear thatwhoop. It's a whistle. It sounds like a whistle. [...]

The number one reason, in my opinion, that we can fight this is that our vaccination rate is down, and it's an excellent vaccine, completely safe, it's mandatory in all fifty states, but a lot of exceptions are being given — also the migrant issue[*****] — so it's down to around 90% now, which leads to a surge of this. And that can endanger very, very young children. I'm really worried about that increase to 17,000 cases. And — Kayleigh! — That's the ones we know about!

ANCHOR: Yeah!

DR SIEGEL: There's thousands and thousands more we don't know about.

ANCHOR: Dr. Siegel, I'm concerned! I read 160,000 children under five die globally each year because of whooping cough. And, you know, I have a 4-year-old, I have a 1-year-old. What do we look for? You said that whooping sound, but my kids come home sick from school every week it seems.[******]

DR SIEGEL: Well the 1-year-old is the one I would keep the most eye on because [... Discussion of pertussis symptomology elided for length...]

ANCHOR: And there's that Tdap vaccination: how long does that last, so parents know?

DR SIEGEL: So it's DTaP for kids, up to the age of seven — DTaP. And Tdap for kids over the age of seven. And I think it lasts for 3 to 5 years*******, so if you get vaccinated before kindergarten, you're in good shape. They give three or four shots early in life and I recommend, strongly, that everybody take this, because really young children are at risk, under the age one most at risk.

WUT.

Now, the video terminates prematurely, so I don't know if they are decorously not showing him being shot down by snipers and his leaking carcass hauled off the soundstage for making a global recommendation for vaccines to the most vaccine-resistant television audience there is, but, uh. Look at that. I guess Fox News and more generally right-wing news media are in favor of vaccines and against disease now? Did they finally figure out that recommending lethal courses of action to their viewership will inevitably ultimately reduce their ratings?

* We're still in the pandemic.

** Suuuure, one year olds are getting sick from whooping cough now because they didn't have a chance to get it due to lockdowns four years ago. *taps forehead* Logic.

This is your friendly reminder immunity debt is not a thing, but immune disregulation due to COVID infection is.

*** This is absolutely fascinating: apparently over in FoxLand, "virus" means "no big deal", but "bacteria" is "the real deal". I wonder how long that's been going on for — whether it pre- or post-dates Covid. Either way, could explain some things.

**** Okay, this entire segment is an absolute masterwork and core-sample of what I'm going to call conservative communication. If you just read that and winced, and mentally went "The singular of 'bacteria' is 'bacterium'; it's 'a bacterium' or 'a bacterial illness'", you just disqualified yourself as a science communicator to about half this country. Don't get me wrong: I winced too. But that use of 'bacteria' was both wrong (two ways) and brilliant (three ways). Wrong: bacteria is not a single noun (except it is now) and the fact a disease is bacterial does not make it intrinsically more severe than a viral one — wait till they find out about Marburg. Right: the word 'bacteria' is comprehensible at a lower reading level than the word "bacterium" and clearer than the expression "bacterial illness"; it leveraged this bizarre prejudice against taking viral illnesses seriously to punch a hole in the viewers' vaccine resistance (oh, it's bacteria, so it's a really serious disease and that makes the risk of vaccination reasonable in this case); and the use of "bacterium" for the singular of "bacteria" is a class shibboleth, marking the speaker as someone from the ivory tower, or at least from Blue America, and would have alienated the scientist-hostile, expert-rejecting deep Red American audience.

There's so much here about how he is communicating throughout — I mean on the level of word choice and grammar and speech production, not just on the level of rhetoric — which is just absolutely fascinating in how different it is from how people on the other side of the aisle communicate about public health. I found it fascinating to listen to, just to hear his prosody, his speech rhythm, his uses of emphasis.

And not just him: The anchor responding to his call of alarm with "I'm concerned too!" and then yes-anding is eye-opening. News anchors on the other side of the aisle do not do that. Which is one of the reasons they are so damn ineffectual.

Over the last week and a half I've been slowly warming to the hypothesis that an analogous — or maybe identical — kind of epistemological rot as has driven American medicine mad has also taken hold in American journalism. Journalism however is not generally my beat.

***** Sure, why not make it about filthy diseased foreigners bringing their diseases into our pure and healthy country. Where have I heard that before? Apparently this is how they do public health on the other side of the aisle. Maybe this is what it takes to sell it to their viewership.

****** Still in a pandemic. Still got a viral respiratory infection running rampant, especially among the unvaccinated or under-vaccinated.

******* I have no idea if this is true and given the puree of fact and falsehood served up here, I don't particularly recommend to taking this dude's word on it.

******** This is why I don't usually bother quoting Fox News as a source. I wind up having to festoon it with footnotes and factchecks.

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