Is the Great Resignation really more about anti-immigration and the border wall?

Plus Covid testing and mail boxes.

All my drawings can be found on Instagram @Klonskyart

In a post to subscribers of the New York Times, Nobel prize winning columnist Paul Krugman wonders whether The Great Resignation gets it wrong.

He also wonders about the contradiction between employment numbers which have nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels and the tight job market.

Krugman suggests that what the pundits have missed, including himself, is the decline in immigrant workers since the election of Donald Trump. It is a decline which has continued through the pandemic and the administration of Democrat Joe Biden.

…if we want to revive U.S. economic vitality, we really should try to re-establish our nation’s historic role as a destination for ambitious immigrants. But that’s not a policy idea likely to get much traction, given the American right’s anti-immigrant hysteria.

Anyway, you should know that all of those stories about how Americans are no longer willing to work seem to have evaporated. The Great Resignation now looks like a Great Misunderstanding.

Where is our USPS mail box?

Under the rule of the head of the US Postal System, Post Master Louis DeJoy, our mail delivery (and everyone’s mail delivery we know) is just crap.

No diss to the postal carrier.

DeJoy was a Trumper who was appointed to dismantle the system and privatize it. Why Joe Biden hasn’t fired the guy is a mystery.

Biden appoints the board to the semi-governmental postal system and they have the power to get rid of DeJoy.

If your looking for that mail box you are pretty sure was on your corner and now it is gone, it is not your imagination.

DeJoy has removed nearly 30,000 mail boxes in 2021.

There is nobody to report to about my positive Covid home test result.

We are into the sixth day of isolation for Covid.

By now we are pretty close to being asymptomatic, but a home test last night shows I’m still positive for Covid.

I am thankful for all the messages of support, no-contact deliveries of chicken soup, offers to food shop and even cook us dinner.

I’ve read that the sub variant BA.2 is now the dominant form of Covid in the U.S. even as the data shows no significant uptick in positivity rates.

But I’m skeptical.

With the growth in the use of home testing, who is getting the results.

I read that they are testing the poop in the wastewater.

But that is not quite the same thing as testing people.

Chicago reports that the five zip codes with the highest positivity rates are all on the mainly white north side.

That clearly demonstrates that they’re not counting right.

I don’t live in any of those zip codes.

But I have no official to report my test results.

Can we seriously believe that positivity rates are really higher on Chicago’s north side than the city’s south and west side?