Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 11. The US passed a milestone on Tuesday: total deaths from COVID-19 passed 500 per million. This is not the hightest rate even among the small selection of countries I track here, but it will probably be the highest before long. Here’s what the trendlines look like:

We’ll pass Italy and Sweden by the end of the month, and maybe even the UK by the end of September. It all depends on how quickly we get past our second peak, something that none of the other countries had. We didn’t have to have it either, but that’s what happens when your national leadership is asleep at the wheel.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

Theodore Schleifer says that the tech community will be happy with Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate:

Cooper Teboe, a top Democratic fundraiser in Silicon Valley, said about one-third of major West Coast donors that he’s spoken to have been waiting to see who Biden would choose as vice president before deciding whether to invest tens of thousands of dollars into Democrats this cycle. Should Biden have chosen Warren, for instance, tech donors might’ve had concerns.

“She is the safest pick for the donor community,” Teboe said of Harris. “She will be the pick that the California, Silicon Valley donor community — who are worried about things like tech and repatriation and taxes and so on and so forth — she is the pick that they will be happiest with.”

Seriously? A full third of these geniuses were holding off because they first wanted to know who Biden’s VP would be? Don’t they know that veeps have no real influence on policy at all? It’s hardly a big secret.

This just confirms the general sense I’ve always gotten that Silicon Valley folks are surprisingly ignorant of even the basics of politics. It’s easy to make some snarky point about this and then move on, but it’s genuinely kind of mysterious. I suppose they so desperately wish politics didn’t exist that they just wall themselves off from it.

My mother chose today’s photo. “Pick anything you want,” I said grandly. “Anything at all.” Naturally that meant she’d end up picking a picture much like yesterday’s. But I said anything, so what could I do?

Anyway, the two rightmost peaks (Modjeska and Santiago) form Saddleback, which is sort of a looming presence throughout Orange County. That is, it’s a looming presence unless you get up close and shoot it on an exceptionally clear day, as I did here. From this angle, in fact, you rightly wonder why anyone bothered to give it a name at all. Sometime in the future I’ll take a picture that shows Saddleback the way it’s more commonly seen, and its looming-ness will become a little more obvious.

Is this true?

Millennials aren’t just the first generation set to do worse than our parents and our grandparents. If not for the (badly tattered) social safety net, we would be the most impoverished young adults since the Great Depression.

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) August 11, 2020

Pretty much, yes. This is for 30-year olds:

This shouldn’t be surprising. Many Millennials faced the full force of the Great Recession in their early 30s, and that had a big effect on their income. At the same time, the system worked the way it was intended: they also received more government assistance than other generations during this time. When you put this together, their poverty rate was about the same as Gen X and lower than either boomers or boomer parents at the same age:

My only real objection to Filipovic’s tweet is her description of the social safety net as “badly tattered.” In fact, it’s grown steadily since the 60s and is quite robust these days. Republicans seem to spend their entire careers fighting to tear it apart, but the truth is that they’ve only nibbled around the edges. We may still not be as generous to the poor as social democratic Europe—and our anti-poverty programs are egregiously splintered and inefficient—but spending is pretty high and it’s reponsible for keeping poverty at lower real levels than it was for older generations.

Generally speaking, I think it’s important to keep two things in mind at the same time. It’s true that Millennials face unusual pressures: the Great Recession, student debt, and high housing costs foremost among them. At the same time, Millennial income at age 30 has recovered from the Great Recession and is now higher than it was for boomers and Xers.

(This data precedes the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be years before we know how that affected different generations.)

Bottom line: Millennials, on net, are not as well off as previous generations: they have slightly higher incomes but noticeably higher expenses. At the same time, the difference with previous generations is smallish and they really aren’t massively impoverished. The real scandal here isn’t so much intergenerational as inter-class: Why is it that income has barely budged for everyone in the past three generations?

Answer: Because the rich have gotten nearly all the gains. That’s the common enemy, not the ordinary folks who are a decade older or younger than you.

Image of Sports/Newscom via ZUMA

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wants to crack down on loud, persistent house parties that are potential spreaders of COVID-19. How? By giving police who respond to complaints the authority to request that utilities at the property be cut off. The police union is having none of it:

“Mayor Garcetti wants to reimagine policing. He should send his civilian staff to turn off people’s electricity & cut off their water,” the League said in a tweet over the weekend in response to the mayor’s plans. “Let officers deal with the rise in shootings and killings in L.A. We need a leader and not a political contortionist.”

This is a minor temper tantrum and I doubt anything will come of it. More generally, though, this kind of attitude has become so widespread in the wake of attempts to reform policing that I wonder if police forces risk losing the support of people who would normally be on their side? How long will taxpayers put up with threats to stop doing their job every time police forces are asked to make even the smallest change or sacrifice? It’s childish stuff and before long it’s likely to create a backlash that does the police no good.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 10. The US is still plateauing merrily along. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

There’s nothing special to say about this picture. It’s just a scenic view near Choachí from my trip to Colombia. Perhaps it will relax you a bit in the middle of yet another day during the Trump/Plague era.

Exciting MAC action in the Before Times.Kyle Okita/CSM via ZUMA

A major college conference has canceled its fall sports:

The Mid-American Conference postponed its football season, the conference announced Saturday, becoming the first Football Bowl Subdivision league to decide not to hold games this fall because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

….“The decision is grounded in the core values of the Conference that prioritize student-athlete well-being, an area the MAC has traditionally taken a leadership role,” Commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said in a statement.

That’s a breath of fresh air, isn’t it? It’s good to see a college sports conference putting its athletes first even if it means losing—

Many MAC schools rely on the revenue generated through guarantee games — when a Power Five school pays another program to play it during the nonconference schedule. Most of these games have been canceled because all of the Power Five leagues have chosen to play one or zero nonconference games this season.

Ah, I see. Without any of these guarantee games, football suddenly becomes a money loser for MAC schools. And just as suddenly, the well-being of the players becomes paramount and the season is canceled. Got it.

UPDATE: The Big Ten has canceled its football season too. I’m sure all the other dominoes will now fall as well.

With no fans in the stands, I imagine that football is a money loser even for Power Five schools. That probably made it a lot easier to do the right thing.

Donald Trump looking pumped on his way to a million-dollar fundraiser in the Hamptons after playing at being president with his faux executive orders.Sonia Moskowitz Gordon/ZUMA

Donald Trump has issued some executive orders related to coronavirus aid, and I suppose we’re all supposed to take them seriously. But why? To paraphrase an old saying, the stuff that’s legal is unimportant and the stuff that’s important is illegal. It’s just more Trump blather designed to keep the spotlight on him.

But I suppose you want a little more than that. Fine. Here goes:

1. The first EO provides a $400 unemployment bonus. This is important, but almost certainly not legal. The money is supposed to be transferred from unspent FEMA accounts, which is a transfer that Trump probably can’t make. What’s more, Trump wants states to pick up 25 percent of the cost, and he definitely can’t do that. The Supreme Court made that clear when it struck down Obamacare’s Medicaid mandate. What’s even yet more, even if all this were legal, the money would only last five weeks.
2. The second EO defers payroll taxes from September through December. This is probably legal, but deeply trivial. The amount of money involved is small. It helps only people who are already employed. And the deferred taxes have to be paid back in a lump sum in January. It’s pointless.
3. A third EO asks federal agencies to “consider” whether evictions should be temporarily halted. This is obviously legal, but has no impact at all.
4. Finally, the fourth EO defers student loan payments through the end of the year. This is legal, and maybe even modestly important. However, like the payroll tax deferral, it will primarily help out people who are the most likely to still have jobs.

I am deeply tired of these idiotic Republican games. Because that’s all they seem to be to them: games. There are millions of Americans in deep, deep trouble because of the coronavirus, and they’re in even deeper trouble than they should be thanks to Trump’s gross mismanagement of the crisis. But none of that seems to matter to any of them. Human suffering is just another political lever to be used in service of God only knows what political aim they have at the moment.

It’s all so appalling and loathsome. I can barely stand reading about it any longer, let alone writing about it.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through August 9. You may have noticed that I didn’t post new numbers on Sunday. I normally do them the night before, but on Saturday night I was tired and it just didn’t happen. Then Sunday was crash day and I didn’t fully wake up until about 2 pm. By then it seemed kind of pointless, so I just skipped it. Today, however, we have nice, fresh numbers and Argentina is starting to look really, really bad.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.