Delta Airlines becomes the 1st major company to take a big vaccine step:

Charging employees who aren't vaccinated—by raising their health insurance premiums.

The cost to stay unvaccinated: $200 a month (starting Nov. 1).

With good economic reason…

—>
cnbc.com/2021/08/25/del…
2/ Each case of a Delta employee who is hospitalized with COVID has cost the airline an average of $50,000.

And in the last several weeks, Delta's CEO says, every Delta employee hospitalized for COVID has been unvaccinated.

Bullet points from his memo to staff below.
3/ Delta is actually taking a series of steps over weeks to put pressure on staff to vaccinate.

At this moment, 70% of Delta's 91,000 employees are vaccinated.

If you're unvaccinated:

• Must wear mask at work, starting today

• Sept 12: Must test weekly

—>
4/ Unvaccinated Delta employees' new rules, con't:

If you're unvaccinated:

• Sept 30: You lose COVID pay protection — no pay if you get COVID, unless you use your own sick & vacation time.

• Nov 1: Starting paying $200 a month in added health insurance premiums.
5/ Two additional points.

Delta is 'self-insured' for health insurance purposes — so the company and its employees pay directly for COVID hospitalizations and treatment (and all health care costs). That makes the economic burden direct and immediate.
6/ Also, the CEO of Delta took pains not to refer to the new variant as…the delta variant. He used the technical designation:

B.1.617.2.

(Side note: Some media reporting COVID costs Delta $40,000 / employee hospitalized, others $50,000. Memo appears to say $50k.)

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More from @cfishman

30 Aug
This is absolutely bonkers.

The Mississippi River is 200’ deep at New Orleans, and a half mile wide.

That’s a wall of water as tall as a skyscraper and as wide as a city block, with 2,000 miles of water behind it.

Ida stopped the flow, then briefly reversed it.
2/ When I was a Mississippi River tugboat deckhand, Rule #1 was never fall in the river. Because, we were told, half who fall in don’t emerge alive.

Actually, Rule #1 was wear your life vest at all times on deck.

Rule #2, above.
The Mississippi River has been recorded flowing backwards at least three other times:

• 2012, Hurricane Isaac, for 24 hours bear the mouth

• 2005, for Hurricane Katrina

• 1812, after a series of powerful earthquakes near New Madrid, Missouri.

bbc.com/news/science-e…
Read 4 tweets
26 Aug
Yesterday, a federal judge in Michigan did something extraordinary & important.

Yes, she penalized Trump's election attorneys for their conduct filing a lawsuit to have Michigan's 2020 election results thrown out.

But she did something bigger:

Took the suit seriously.

—>
2/ She went through every claim in the original suit, and then she went through every claim they mounted to defend themselves against charges of incompetence & bad lawyering.

And she crushed every single one — with barely restrained fury, but also with meticulous precision.
3/ One small example: Lawyers claimed they 'hadn't received' certain briefs mailed to them by lawyers for the city of Detroit.

They did receive the documents — Lin Wood tweeted mocking them.
Read 28 tweets
19 Jul
The dumbest part of our national discourse at this moment is:

Oh those crazy space billionaires!

How dumb are Bezos, Musk, Branson—spending $1 billion building rockets to fly themselves to space?

What a silly Gilded Age echo of ego, indulgence, not to mention tone-deafness.
2/ Linked below a recent example of this from @washingtonpost —but this mindless ignorance is everywhere.

You know what Branson, Bezos and Musk have done in the last 20 years?

They've each created original rocket technology that flies humans to space.
washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021…
3/ Bezos & Musk *already* do something NASA & its contractors never have:

They send rockets to space, & re-fly them. Quickly, inexpensively, reliably.

You know, like Southwest 're-uses' its Boeing 737s.

That is an incredible, thrilling breakthrough.

And vital to space travel.
Read 19 tweets
18 Jul
In Oregon, a fire larger than all of NYC is burning.

'Everything is as dry as it would be if it had the whole summer to dry out.

'Think about a grass fire & how fast fire will go through grass. Imagine that with 40-foot trees.'

That's what's happening.
washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…
2/ In the small OR towns in the path of the fire, residents say the problem isn't climate change.

'The top end of the Forest Service are a bunch of flower children. That's what the real problem is.'

Current Dir of US Forest Svc: 11 years as Deputy Director for Fire Management.
3/ Here's the bio of Vicki Christiansen.

Who filled her job as Deputy Director for Fire Management in the US Forest Service?

Another 'flower child'?

Current Deputy Director for Fire Management:

Brian Rhodes.

fs.usda.gov/about-agency/n…
Read 5 tweets
7 Jun
BREAKING (GOOD) NEWS:

US government has recovered $2 million in ransom paid—via cryptocurrency—to the ransomware hackers who froze the Colonial Pipeline last month.

'Today we turned the tables' on the hackers, said deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco.

washingtonpost.com/business/2021/…
2/ Gotta say, seems likely there's a great movie-scene story to be unwound there — US law enforcement reverse-hackers...typing furiously away on keyboards!

Key the music & scrunched facial expressions that are the only known way to make typing urgent & suspenseful.
3/ My own typing is often suspenseful, but only internally. Will there in fact be any more words? Will those words be riveting — at least more so than their typing?

…We've been led to believe that cryptocurrency makes ransomware unbeatable. Better than a suitcase of cash.
Read 6 tweets
7 Jun
What's the significance of Jeff Bezos going to space, on his own Blue Origin rocket, with his brother Mark?

Flight scheduled for Tue, July 20 — anniversary of the first Moon landing. Not a coincidence.

Bezos is the richest person in the world, and one of the most powerful.
2/ That launch of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket & capsule was guaranteed to get a lot of attention — it is the first time Blue Origin is launching people, after 15 test flights.

But now?

Jeff Bezos as passenger / crew — in flight suit — guarantees wild, worldwide publicity.
3/ This is an 11 minute flight, just to the edge of space. Three minutes of weightlessness.

It's a pop-fly trajectory — arcing up & back down.

The first US crewed flight?

—> Alan Shepard, Mercury Freedom 7, May 5, 1961

Shepard got a 15-minute ride. 5 minutes weightless.
Read 19 tweets

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