Sunday Morning Coming Down

In a world long forgotten, the last great recession, the great or not so great State of Florida, and its not so great governor hired Hunting Deutsch to head the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, the agency, that manages the state reemployment assistance program.  Reemployment Assistance (also called reemployment assistance insurance) provides temporary wage replacement benefits to qualified individuals who are out of work through no fault of their own.  This was a posting of mine from 2012. The conditions for receiving "reemployment assistance" require being available for work and actively looking for work.  99 weeks the maximum length of benefits was a long time to receive "reemployment assistance" then and it seems overly generous now.  Or maybe it's not so generous now.   Wednesday, December 5, 2012 Hunting Deutsch, executive director of the Department of Economic Opportunity resigned abruptly after disclosures that he collected unemp...

A high school classmate posted this on Facebook: Hey, I like both the anti-Trump and the pro-Trump people. Is there anyone else who doesn't hate either side? I think I understand where she is going with her comment but I'm going to break down my answer because living in the United States assumes a level of fairness which is too often forgotten, ignored, or getting lost in the tangle of equivalence, metaphors and similies.  Miami Dade County where I live has  determined that a "Living Wage" is $15.83 per hour or $633.00 for a 40 hour week or about $33,000 per year or sightly over 125% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines I've worked in the public sector for most of my personal and professional life and have tried to keep politics out of doing my job by explaining what services are available, when and if they would be available, how they would be provided, if there were eligibility criteria, and what documents were required to determine eligibility.  The Florida UI S...

Weijja Jiang, a CBS White House Correspondent got into a dust up with President Trump that left him leaving his own press conference where he declared victory as it relates to COVID 19 testing.  The CDC has provided the following guidance regarding COVID: High Priority Hospitalized patients with symptoms Healthcare facility workers, workers in congregate living settings, and first responders with symptoms Residents in long-term care facilities or other congregate living settings, including prisons and shelters, with symptoms Priority Persons with symptoms of potential COVID-19 infection, including: fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, muscle pain, new loss of taste or smell, vomiting or diarrhea, and/or sore throat. Persons without symptoms who are prioritized by health departments or clinicians, for any reason, including but not limited to: public health monitoring, sentinel surveillance, or screening of other asymptomatic individuals according ...

For years now I have paid bills through my bank without writing checks.  It was cheaper and I didn't have to buy stamps.  As this progressed I stopped getting bills from the folks I did business with.  E-mail has replaced snail mail and now you have to ask for paper statements to the irritation of banks, et al.  Now I get prescriptions by mail, from where I used to go pick them up.  UPS brings me a significant amount of the food I eat bi-weekly. I don't know if the Post Office is as close to bankruptcy as is alleged but I have noticed that there are days that I receive no mail.  Nothing, nada, and on other days it is just the food flyers from the grocery stores, or the pharmacy where I get stuff for which I used to visit the MD.  Those flyers and other inserts and stuff that used to come on Wednesday and Sunday with the newspaper.  We all know how that is going. And the preacher asks us to make plans for when we can go back to church in person...

May 1st was a beautiful day in Miami, Florida with a high in the low 80's and relatively dry. The Washington Post had some new information about COVID testing per 100,000 people which sent me down a rabbit hole. The University of Miami did some antibody testing and published the following: 6% of participants tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies, which equates to 165,000 Miami-Dade County residents. This figure directly contrasts with testing site data, which indicated that there 10,000 positive cases, suggesting that the actual number of infections is potentially 16.5 times the number of those captured through testing sites and local hospitals alone. Using statistical methods that account for the limitations of the test (sensitivity and specificity), we are 95% certain that the true amount of infection lies between 4.4% and 7.9% of the population, or between 123,000 and 221,000 residents. These results are similar but not identical to other recent, non-randomized ...

The 1970's movie Logan's Run put you on the clock, and you were supposed to be terminated at the ripe age of 30.  You could "run" and according to  Wiki summary of the movie if you escaped you could live beyond the age of 30.  Ahmaud Arbery didn't fully realize he was on the clock at age 26 as he jogged through Brunswick, Georgia. If you leave your house these days it might be a "beer run", a run to the grocery store, or a quick run to CVS for me.  A walk in the neighborhood or walking the dog is exercise and not a "run".  It could be worse.  "I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man with no feet"according to Helen Keller.  It's February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbry put on his shoes and went out for a jog...