Ana Ulin 😻 @anaulin@social.coop

I'm seeing all these memes and jokes about cats being annoyed that their humans are home, and I don't get it. Our cats seem to be delighted to have a human to camp on top of 24x7.

"[...] the Secretary of the Interior has ordered that our reservation be disestablished and that our land be taken out of trust. Not since the [...] the mid-twentieth century has a Secretary taken action to disestablish a reservation."

https://mashpeewampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/news/2020/3/27/message-from-the-chairman-we-will-take-action-to-prevent-the-loss-of-our-land

"Congress could have addressed these and other emergencies by writing and passing spending bills without the need for so-called pay-fors. If the votes are there, the money can always be made available."

"The government can’t run out of money, but it can run out of things to buy (including labor). We are constrained by our real resources — i.e. our technical know-how and the available supply of workers, factories, machines, raw materials, and so on."

"That won’t always be the case. It always comes down to inflation risk. How much can the economy handle — in terms of higher spending — before you need the offsets?"

"No one is bothering to try to offset — i.e. “pay for” — that spending, because the goal is to get lots of money to people (and companies) without subtracting a lot away. As Rep. Ocasio-Cortez correctly points out, Congress is doing now what it could always have done."

Explanation of how it is possible to "pay for" big bills things like the stimulus package, by a former chief economist from the U.S. Senate Budget Committee (2015/16):

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/27/coronavirus-stimulus-package-spending

@Greg Thank you! I'll do what I can in these strange times.

Deleted PagerDuty and Jira apps from my phone. Sabbatical, here we come.

https://youtu.be/iTDcmDpc6JM

Today's edition of the CoVid Bay Area newsletter is nicely sober-but-positive -- in their opinion all the right things are happening (except maybe widespread testing). Read and subscribe here: https://covidbayarea.org/update/3-19-20