April 30, 2022

The Musk Cult of Personality: Why do some of us worship billionaires?

Including some on this site.

Here's a few reasons:

snip

Psychologists say that many of us fantasize about being billionaires, meaning that when they root for Musk, they're really rooting for what they perceive as a version of themselves — namely, as masters of the universe, "winners" in every sense that mainstream society deems worthy. In the process, they also reveal their own deep feelings of inadequacy.

snip

And, unsurprisingly, they also checked the right demographic boxes to benefit from various forms of societal privilege. For one thing, they are almost always white. For another, they are almost always male.
...

"Basically the difference between what we would call a psychopath and people that we admire is like a surgeon or a killer, a judge, or a gangster, they may have some of the same characteristics, but are either at a different intelligence level or they're doing things that are actually unacceptable to society," Bieber explained. As Landay explained, psychopathic tendencies consist of three personality traits: boldness, "such as interpersonal dominance"; lack of empathy and a tendency toward being mean; and disinhibition, "such as impulsivity."

"Essentially, individuals with psychopathic tendencies have the potential to be much a much worse than average jerk, yet because of those very qualities, it's plausible that they might find great success in business organizations," Landay told Salon.


https://www.salon.com/2022/04/29/the-of-elon-musk-why-do-some-of-us-worship-billionaires/

April 7, 2022

Dominant strain (BA.2) hasn't shown signs of starting a surge

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/06/health/where-is-ba-2/index.html

snip

The Omicron subvariant caused as many as 3 in 4 cases of Covid-19 in the United States last week, according to the latest genomic surveillance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but so far, there are no signs of a looming surge in the US.
Even as BA.2 has become dominant, overall numbers of cases are still decreasing, says Dr. Jessica Justman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

snip

Zooming in on areas of the country that are seeing more BA.2 transmission, like New York, wastewater has been only modestly affected.
"It's still low when we look at absolute raw numbers of viral copies in wastewater," said David Larson, an associate professor of public health at Syracuse University who helped create the state's wastewater dashboard.