Use the Census Bureau, not the IRS, to distribute coronavirus stimulus checks

[Rewritten and republished early on 4/17/2020.]

The most recent coronavirus relief bill promised $1,200 to help American taxpayers get through the current pandemic, but it has been nearly a month and those checks have only just started to arrive.

Meanwhile, lawmakers are busy negotiating the next round of relief and have already discussed expanding the existing $350 billion fund for small business loans. With studies and common sense both suggesting Congress may also need to fund at least one more round of personal stimulus checks before this crisis is over, it’s worth reflecting on how a program like this could and should have been constructed to better serve the American people.

The most important quality of payments like these — indeed, almost the whole point — is that they need to get out the door as quickly as possible. When 49% of Americans were already living paycheck to paycheck back in February, even before millions lost their jobs in the span of a few weeks, expecting anyone to wait any longer than necessary for relief is unreasonable. The economy may well survive a few weeks in stasis, but people can’t yet; food and other basic necessities must be addressed far more quickly.

Agreement on that the importance of haste is clear from the way early proponents described the program. Here’s Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who first brought widespread attention to the possibility of a coronavirus stimulus:

The public figure who’s come the farthest on public health during this pandemic

A lot of celebrities and public figures (but I repeat myself) have recently undergone sudden attitude adjustments when it comes to coronavirus and public health.

In early March, British PM Boris Johnson was shaking hands with everybody. After he was hospitalized with the virus, Johnson released a video in which he made it clear he is finally taking the disease seriously.

Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert went from touching all the microphones to donating half a million for COVID relief efforts.

Donald Trump has gone from dismissing the coronavirus entirely to… whatever he’s doing now. It’s still not easy to pin him down, but it’s clear his thinking has evolved since last month (not to mention yesterday).

Even people who only came into the public eye by dint of their relaxed attitude towards “corona” have reconsidered that stance.

Testing basketball players first saved countless lives

The debate over whether sports ball players are overpaid, especially compared to first responders, long predates the outbreak of coronavirus. But the current pandemic has helped highlight which professionals we literally can’t live without.

So maybe it wasn’t the best PR move when, while COVID testing kits were still in extremely short supply (as opposed to just in regular short supply), entire NBA teams managed to get themselves tested. The revelation that the young, fit, and talented were able to secure tests at a time when ordinary people suffering symptoms of the disease — and even medical workers — had trouble doing the same should not have surprised anyone familiar with how this country works, but nevertheless managed to spark widespread outrage.

Personally, I’m fine with it. Of course it’s unseemly, and highlights the glaring need to increase access to affordable healthcare and decrease stark inequalities across the country. But in this case I’m convinced testing the rich and privileged early helped save lives. And as long as the President keeps threatening to reopen the economy by Easter, we’ll need to find as many sick celebrities as possible.

Eight purely selfish reasons to stay inside (even if you’re young and healthy and invincible)

So you’ve seen the statistics: Coronavirus is Russian roulette for seniors, but largely spares the young and healthy. And you’re young and healthy! So when they start shutting down work, school, bars, restaurants, March Madness, whole countries, everything, and ask people to stay inside, you aren’t inclined to listen. You’re skeptical this whole coronavirus business has anything to do with you. Heck, flights are cheaper than ever and you have a tan to work on. Even if you do get sick, you think you’re overwhelmingly likely to be fine. And, statistically speaking, you’re right!

But you should still do your best to stay away from other people. Not convinced? Here are a few reasons to get you started:

That time Treehugger jumped the shark

[Editor’s note: As should be clear from the very first sentence, the following post was originally written well over a year ago. I can offer no explanation for my delinquency in publishing it other than I have been delinquent in publishing just about everything around here.]

I wrote a post last week complaining about an extremely misleading headline over at Treehugger. But upon further reflection, I don’t know what about the #fail it discussed exercised me so. After all, I’ve been aware that Treehugger jumped the shark for quite some time.

My suspicions were aroused back in September, when I came across an unusual “Photo of the Day”. Treehugger has long periodically posted photographs culled from reader contributions. The pictures — how do I say this without sounding like a snob? — typically portray attractive subjects, but the photographer’s execution can sometimes leave quite a bit of room for improvement.

Cougars are ours and you can’t have them

Mountain Lion. Puma. Catamount. Lion of the Andes. Panther. All different names for the same thing: But unlike Death Cab for Cutie, none of those are authentically Washington. You see, out where I’m from, that critter you see above is called a cougar.

Although aware of the existence of those many alternatives, I actually went years thinking “cougar” is a relatively common term. It certainly helps that it has taken on a strong secondary connotation in pop culture. So imagine my astonishment when I took the New York Times’ Dialect Quiz about a year ago and discovered that the name is pretty much endemic to Washington:

Looks like I owe a meow culpaw

I recently came across what I instantly believed to be the worst idea for a non-profit organization I had ever encountered, and my immediate instinct was to share it with you all. It appeared in a story about an African serval — an exotic cat — spotted running along a road on Vancouver Island (somewhere it obviously didn’t belong):

Doug Nelson, a Nanaimo cat breeder, said the serval could be the same one he sold to a Sooke resident. That serval escaped in August and couldn’t be recovered for several weeks.

Seems like a perfectly plausible explanation. But the article went on:

Our differing reaction to these big news stories is all kinds of hypocritical

On slow days — the ones with no political scandals, salacious affairs, or bloody coups to report on — “human interest” stories [sometimes] come to dominate the news cycle and, in turn, my newsfeed.

Today proved that this can occasionally happen on fast days, as well.

On a day when over 600 people died in clashes with the Egyptian military, additional details about the NSA spying program leaked, and MLB finally decided to [somewhat] extend instant reply, the two most frequently-posted items I came across on social media were, coincidentally, both about zoos.

I’ll start off with the one from China, because I’m still not entirely sure whether the Onion managed to pull a fast one on the entire world media, Chinese zoo substitutes lion for dog:

With the sun shining and kids at home for the school holidays, many families in the eastern Chinese city of Luohe decided to pay a visit to the city’s zoo this week.

But those hoping to be thrilled by the zoo’s fearsome beasts were left disappointed by a rather tamer set of substitutes.

“One family surnamed Liu took their six-year-old son to the zoo in People’s Park,” reported the local Dahe Daily newspaper.

“On the way, Mrs Liu was teaching her son all the sounds that the different animals make. But when they arrived, her son said the lion was barking like a dog.”

Turns out, that’s no lion — that’s a space station. You can read the whole article above (if you [somehow] aren’t already familiar with the story), but the main takeaway is this: people were outraged — and the Luohe Zoo became the subject of worldwide ridicule — because of a mislabeled animal in a zoo exhibit.

Meanwhile, the second story I’ve seen shared all day comes from this very hemisphere, and concerns an astonishing story of scientific discovery, Adorable new mammal species found ‘in plain sight’: a raccoon-sized critter with teddy bear looks:

The New York-Seattle rivalry: the tale of a truce violated

Flash back to 1847. The Donner party set out along the Oregon Trail to reach California, but was trapped in the Wasatch range of Utah. Its members resorted to cannibalism in order to survive the harsh winter.

Just four years later, and perhaps wary of meating [sic] the Donner party’s fate, the Denny party arrived at the future site of Seattle — sensibly, by boat. They named their landing site “New York alki” — alki being the native word for “by the by” or “someday.” And so, precisely coincident with the founding of the City of Seattle, a good-natured (and perhaps one-sided) rivalry was born.

After a century and a half, Seattle has yet to live up to its aspirational name, and in no place is the discrepancy more apparent than on the field of play. New York is home to eleven* major league sports franchises, while the Emerald City boasts only three.

*I’m counting soccer only because it gives New York a bigger lead. Go Sounders!

Seattle would be home to four, but the Sonics absconded to Oklahoma City, taking with them “the city’s first and only major men’s sports championship.”

Or so the narrative goes — a narrative that is totally wrong.

In fact, Seattle once hosted a major league hockey team, which just so happened to become the first American team to ever win the Stanley Cup in 1917. Despite its early success, that team ceased to exist after 1924, but no worries: its name lives on courtesy of — read: it was adopted by — the New York Mets.*

*OK, technically there were also New York Metropolitans in the 1800s, well before there were Seattle Metropolitans, but I’m not going to let facts get in the way of my history.

Today, Seattle still dreams of landing a team in the NHL — but if the city is successful, we’d be happy to call it the Thunderbirds. You can have “Mets.” Let’s keep this a civil, good-natured rivalry: We pretend to steal your city’s name. You steal our hockey team’s name in retribution. We’ll all bury the hatchet and drink some coffee.

And so, despite occasional outbreaks of violence in the MLB playoffs, on former industrial sites, and on Seinfeld — in case you don’t recall: Seattle, George says, is “the pesto of cities” — the peace has largely held for years.

But it’s all starting to come apart. Witness what Jimmy Fallon coaxed Mets RHP Matt Harvey into doing before he started the All-Star Game:

Bill Gates may be once again the world’s richest man, but here’s one sign his wealth is declining

I remember the first time I heard of Carlos Slim. Not the specific moment, nor where I was, or what I was doing — after all, it wasn’t 9/11* — just the feeling of shock when I learned that there was someone out there with more money than even Bill Gates.

Over time, I’ve slowly gotten used to the idea of his existence, as he and Gates (and Warren Buffett) have spent the past few years moving in and out of the top spot. As recently as the Forbes 2013 release, Slim came in first with $73 billion. But since those rankings were published, Microsoft shares are up 28% while Slim ran into some “regulatory troubles”,** and just last month, BG3 finally reclaimed his status as the world’s richest man for the first time since 2009.

Or so they say.

I’m here to take issue with this methodology. Gates is famously generous with his money, and has promised to give a large portion of his fortune to charitable causes, so it feels a little bit like cheating to count all the money in his bank account as his. More realistically, he’s a rich guy, but somewhere much farther down the list. Clearly, you just can’t trust Forbes.

So while it’s nice that the financial magazine collects all this information about people with way more money than they know what to do with, I prefer a different index of wealth: the Gates Generosity Guide. The GGG differs from Forbes in that it is based not on the size of any pile of cash, but on how much money moguls have done their best to give away.

And based on his latest effort to channel money to others, it would appear the Gates estate has fallen on tough times:

Retweet this: http://t.co/wTWMwb4wQH WHY? The Global Fund gets $1 to fight #AIDS every time it gets shared.

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) June 18, 2013

Bill Gates needs your help to raise money for fighting AIDS. As of the time of this writing, 9,696 people have RTed the message, earning The Global Fund exactly $9,696. Big money. Or, you know, what used to fall out of Gates’s mouth every time he flossed.

To gauge just how far Trey’s fallen, compare that desperate attempt to harness the crowd with the last time he got himself involved in the power of social media — or, at least, what passed for it at the time. Once was, Bill Gates spent all his time desperately trying to give money away, to the tune of hundreds of dollars per email. If you had an electronic mail account at any point between the late 90s and early 00s, you almost certainly remember what I’m talking about: